CommUnity by Personify vs. TestFlight

You can tell from the CEO and all staff that this is a very competent company that wants you to succeed with integrity. There is a strong
support and services team that works collaboratively with us to make
sure we are always getting what we need. They provide
24x7 emergency support, online ticket support, email support, a client
community, and the ability to call and talk to the same account manager or
community consultant every time (I even have Mariano's skype and he replies on weekends!). They recently launched a client community - so they are now even practicing what they preach. Our questions in the client community are always answered quickly.

TestFlight has been particularly useful for us when we wanted to test different aspects of our apps with large groups. The ease of use made it possible for non-technical students to participate in the tests. This also allowed us to get feedback from those groups of people that we would not have been able to reach or would have had difficulty reaching with other test environments.

Incentivized

• Design of your community through the admin panel is very easy to pick up. Drag and drop functionality on the site admin allows you to make quick changes to your community on the fly. Easy to modify the look and feel of the site and keep pace with the changing needs of our membership.
• The platform is updated on an ongoing basis with new exciting functionality added with each release.
• The mobile version of the platform is very easy to use and looks great on all devices and operating systems.
• Feedback on enhancements to the platform are taken very seriously and often suggestions from customers end up on the roadmap for the platform for future enhancements.

• It's from apple, so obviously reliable
• easy and convenient for iOS apps
• sharing through link or email and staying secure is a key feature
• as UI/UX person, helps a lot to gather feedback on actual beta app

Incentivized

• Not much to say in this section. Anything that the product doesn't currently do is quickly identified and prioritized appropriately on their road map.
• Chat room functionality doesn't exist yet, but has been placed on roadmap.
• Instant messaging between users doesn't exist yet, but is roadmapped.
• We're unable to run a couple of specific reports, based on what's available in the reporting tool. There's a workaround that our community administrator can perform that is a little more time consuming.

• It can be challenging to go back to older builds
• Auto-update can sometimes result in abrupt and unexpected changes
• It's not always clear when new builds are available

Incentivized

Small World Labs has been a great partner in relaunching our community. They have had great ideas of new ways to use our community to better service our members. They are very knowledgeable in the world of online communities and are forward thinking about new functions to enhance the user experience.

There are a multitude of options to configure the exact user experience you want and what you want to emphasize.

Uptime has never been an issue.

Speed is not an issue.

The people at Small World Labs are very accessible. I can email, open a ticket, or call and they are there. I'd also point out that senior management is quite available too. We frequently have talks about potential strategies and new things we might be doing, which is great. I think the whole organization genuinely likes what they do and likes helping us succeed.

In-person training is more ad-hoc based on if they are traveling to you or you are going to visit them. I imagine that if I paid for in-person training that it would be set up as well, but I've just used the standard training that comes with the initial set up and ongoing support.

Online training is through online webinar & how-to posts and videos in the client community.

We had staff turnover at our own organization during the implementation. We were able to get the community up and live in a good timeframe even though that happened and we had to switch some people around for managing the project on our side.

We evaluated a few different community platform vendors over the course of a couple of months. I believe we also evaluated Jive, Lithium, KickApps, and Powered.

I have used other stores and other test software, such as the Google Play console to work with Android applications. However, I have seen that TestFLight is much more agile in the way it organizes users to be able to do the tests and the information is much more concise and directly what needs to be done. In the Google Play console there are too many sections with too much information.

Incentivized

• Our community has had more than 100,000 interactions within the first 7 months of launching - and the product has been stable.
• Small World Labs even contributes to the conversations in the community by participating with our community members and moderating, when necessary.
• Our community experiences a high level of knowledge sharing (one of our goals), and is resulting in more informed and creative volunteers.

• We dont follow this data so far
• I can say the positive impact does when we get early access to a tool and we can do the strategy from there
• We have some time spent in that and not all the new tools from the apps are great, so it can be negative sometimes

Incentivized