Livefyre (discontinued) vs. LocaliQ

I was strictly the implementor of Livefyre (for my company only). That task alone was at least 3 weeks worth of work. From a user standpoint, Livefyre is a good product which is why this review is strictly about how difficult it was to implement. Therefore, if a colleague was to ask me if I recommend Livefyre, it's not a straight answer. Questions like, 'how fast do you need it?', 'how centralized is your user database?', 'do you want social login?', all come into question and were details that made my job not easy (hence, my review of 5/10 for suggesting it to others). Once implemented, Livefyre is a great product (notice my overall review is higher), but based on my experience with implementation, it certainly requires a senior developer's dedicated time and patience to set up exactly as desired. For smaller companies with small/simple user bases and websites, the process may be more straightforward, but from my experience, it wasn't out-of-the-box at all.

The forms of online marketing continues to grow and LocaliQ's associates have the relevant skills to keep up with this and recommend what is suited for our business. Geo fencing is another area that makes a lot of sense as people use their phones more and more for accessing the web. Through LocaliQ we can pinpoint physicial places where we can market to a group that matches our target audience.

Incentivized

• It provides and allows comments and comment management that is fast, seamless and shareable.
• Having used disquss, WordPress comments and many others I like Livefyre better for its seamless integration and transparency
• It is really nice that they have a range of services from free to enterprise with increasing functionality and benefits.

• ThriveHive is a smaller marketing team dedicated to helping small to medium sized businesses perfect their marketing messages. ThriveHive is particularity good at understanding how Google, and other search engines work, and have been instrumental in helping my company to grow and evolve.
• With ThriveHive, you get a dedicated coach who is matched to your type of business. This experience with similar businesses gives your coach a better understanding of your business and the challenges your company faces.
• My coach is very good at responding to my needs within 1 to 2 business days. Email contacts are fluent and as often as I need, to discuss ideas or questions. I can only speak of my relationship with my coach, and I am very pleased.
• I feel that ThriveHive makes every effort to take excellent care of their clients, and makes you feel like you are their most important customer. I definitely believe that this is one of ThriveHives' greatest assets.

Incentivized

• Implementation was not easy. Although flexible, I personally wrote at least 1,400 lines of code to get this implemented over a few week's time.
• The social login aspect is cool, but again, hard to implement. They did not write any of those modules, although they could have. This required senior-level developmental skills and a knowledge of how social media is interfaced with programmatically. Lots of questions arose from this and it was difficult to implement with virtually no help from Livefyre, other than to provide the hooks into their system for when users were validated. I had to write at least 2 separate login/redirection scripts to accomplish this flow.
• CSS tweaking was tricky. We could override lots of common CSS classes, but to get things just the way we wanted it, I ended up writing LOTS of jQuery listeners and functions to transform the output into exactly what we wanted. This was a surprise since the software was sold to us as being 'fully customizable'.
• Documentation was sufficient, but not great. Getting the flow of the callbacks that are fired wasn't clear at first, and sometimes did not work as expected.
• It should be noted that, after this review was published, Livefyre contacted me stating they now have better documentation and process for implementation (for version V3, specifically) and urged me to revise this review. However, I can only write of my experience with V2, and it WAS difficult to implement over 3 weeks of dedicated time. Another developer on my team implemented version V3 and his evaluation is very similar to mine, claiming much difficulty with the CSS customization.

• LocaliQ could improve how it tracks and reports on customer journeys across those channels to provide a clearer view of ROI.
• The pricing structure is not fully transparent, making it hard to understand the true costs associated with campaigns. Breaking down the fees associated with LocaliQ would make budgeting easier.
• LocaliQ is able to provide basic ad creative, but there tends to be a disconnect between our brand voice and what is expected with creative. It would be nice to be able to get all design work within LocaliQ rather than have to use and outside designer all the time.

Incentivized

We feel we have a real partnership with Livefyre and we both make each other better. Their customer service has been phenomenal even during a time of rapid growth.

It's really easy to implement that app but should improve some analytics.

Incentivized

Overall usability pretty good. If we would have gotten better return on our advertising dollar I would have continued with them - their dashboard was very easy to use and the recaps they provided were helpful. They try to put data in bite-sized pieces for the client that are understandable (unlike google's reporting page itself which can be a bit difficult to understand at times). Their team was friendly, semi-responsive, and provided explanations when requested

Incentivized

From purchasing to implementation, the customer service/support was really perfect!

Incentivized

We felt Livefyre was more innovative and better at SEO. It felt like we were working with a partner for the long haul who was interested in our business and how to improve it.

I have investigated national services like American Eagle and also small market locally owned business like Red Shoes. Each year, I look into at least one other service provider to evaluate our service value. So far, no other company has come close to providing an all around service

Incentivized

There is always the challenge with practices that have multiple locations, trying to target a geographical zone that is sometimes to wide. But we have successfully navigated this issue when needed to target those who need the most added volume.

Incentivized

• The heavy work is already done given that we take the time to implement.
• Very useful insights and AI powered delivery.

Incentivized

• It's hard to quantify but I know I've had at least 5 to 10 new clients in the last 6 months come from efforts related to my website
• Not having to work on my website myself also helped free up my time, I don't need to worry!
• Customer service is good, the team doesn't wait till there is a problem, they schedule check ins regularly

Incentivized