Livefyre (discontinued) vs. Smash Balloon

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.

• It's pretty flexible. There were only a few things we found that were too specific to our environment and could not be easily done.
• The out-of-the-box GUI design was decent. It was also configurable with limited custom CSS, anticipating the need for each company to customize the look and feel to suit their own needs.
• Basic interface is good, providing the necessary data points like total comment count. Visual effects are good too, with fade-in effects for new comments.
• They also provide back-end APIs to gather information about the "hottest" threads. We used this to construct our own "Hot Topics" section that could link users to the related article so they could comment themselves.
• Good support, even after implementation. They were always available by phone and even through realtime IM chats direct to their developers, skipping awkward non-technical middlemen.

• Obviously we all want it all free! So make it all free and woohoo!
• A complaint about the price point leaps is that they are pretty steep, goes from free to pricey real fast.
• The comment management tools although easy and fast are a bit limited.

We are planning to continue using Livefyre comments on several of our blog properties due to its simplicity, transparency and speed of operation. We are actively researching it's more advanced features for some other platforms that need higher end results. Keep up the good work Livefyre.

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

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

I used Disqus about 5-6 years ago, but I've wanted to try the Livefyre app, and it was really quite a good experience for me.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized