Monetate vs. Piano Activation

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Monetate
Score 6.3 out of 10
N/A
Monetate (formerly Kibo Personalization, powered by Monetate and Certona) is an ecommerce personalization software for consumer-facing brands. Monetate enables brands to create individualized experiences for site visitors, with the goal of improving engagement and business performance. Founded in 2008, Monetate services Adidas, Lufthansa, Office Depot, Reebok, Wolseley, and other companies.N/A
Piano Activation
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
Piano Composer, from Piano Software in New York, allows users to design, test, deploy, and manage audience experiences based on scenarios, rules, triggers, and conditions, all without IT. It presents out of the box loyalty and engagement solutions, and allows users to engage customer segments on the content they find most interesting and valuable - based on page attributes, metadata, or URL conditions.N/A
Pricing
MonetatePiano Activation
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
MonetatePiano Activation
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
MonetatePiano Activation
Considered Both Products
Monetate
Chose Monetate
It was what the company used before I started.
Chose Monetate
Easier to use, more flexible, and better vendor support
Chose Monetate
Not as advanced, and possibly not as bespoke in configuration. However as a designer these had a much more user friendly interface and easier to learn/master.
Chose Monetate
Increased options to run multi-variant tests in more complex scenarios allow more autonomy for merchandisers to set more complex recommendation strategies.
Chose Monetate
At the time of selection, it was the best tool to fit our business needs. The day-to-day users were able to create some experiences on their own and did not require much oversight. We also had developer support built into our contract along with internal developer support so …
Chose Monetate
The key differentiator at the time was that Monetate provided strategic resources that the other solutions did not around roadmap planning, development, and QA.
Chose Monetate
The platform evolves as the industry evolves which means it is able to grow with your brand. Upgrades are automatic which means you won't go through hard work in order to use the latest capabilities.
Chose Monetate
Certona offered better pricing, a stronger data-based experience and algorithm-derived solution, and a better account management experience (based on customer feedback). Although the interface/portal for some of the other competitors was a little more user-friendly, we …
Chose Monetate
Monetate is more flexible than Adobe with a much better UI for testing and targeting. It is more cost effective than Certona, and gets higher average order lift than MyBuys for product recommendations.
Chose Monetate
The feature set of Monetate was more robust than Optimizely and analytics were more reliable. Pricing and feature set were pretty close to Maximizer, but the interface in Monetate was more intuitive.
Chose Monetate
N/A
This is my first time using a tool like this so I cannot compare however I don't see any need to try anything else. The team is helpful, the tool works and they resolve any concerns or issues when they do come up.
Chose Monetate
The simplicity, performance, reliability, cost and customer service of Monetate are all superior to Adobe in my opinion.
Chose Monetate
N/A
Chose Monetate
Monetate's user interface is more user friendly.
Chose Monetate
We did look at some competitors and found that Monetate allowed use to build more of the actions ourselves. The builders that Monetate offer are very easy to follow and understand and you don't need to be an expert coder nor do you have to rely on the vendor to build all …
Chose Monetate
Flexibility in building campaigns, interface and support services.
Chose Monetate
Monetate is the first tool of its kind that I have used.
Chose Monetate
I haven't had a chance to use any other tool similar to Monetate
Chose Monetate
I've not used any alternatives and I don't think I would ever need to now.
Piano Activation
Chose Piano Activation
Optimizely is a great platform for A/B testing with multiple variants and across a range of devices, browsers etc. What makes Piano Composer different is that you can add tests within your flows - specifying exactly where and why you want things to happen, whilst still building …
Best Alternatives
MonetatePiano Activation
Small Businesses
Bloomreach - The Agentic Platform for Personalization
Bloomreach - The Agentic Platform for Personalization
Score 8.6 out of 10
Ortto
Ortto
Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Dynamic Yield
Dynamic Yield
Score 8.3 out of 10
Quadient Inspire
Quadient Inspire
Score 8.6 out of 10
Enterprises
Dynamic Yield
Dynamic Yield
Score 8.3 out of 10
Quadient Inspire
Quadient Inspire
Score 8.6 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
MonetatePiano Activation
Likelihood to Recommend
5.5
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.2
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
6.4
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Availability
10.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
10.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
In-Person Training
10.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
9.1
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
5.8
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
MonetatePiano Activation
Likelihood to Recommend
Monetate is a fully functional space to generate multiple marketing campaigns for your company on the web, many of the functions found in this program are a contribution to manage your content correctly and give it the space you are looking for, we We recommend it one hundred percent. We feel very comfortable with everything we have been able to achieve thanks to this program.
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Piano Composer is well suited to news publishers in particular currently, but in theory this tool could be used by any organisation that relies on a paywall or advertising to generate revenue. Their increasingly powerful segmentation tool would also be very useful to many companies, as you can target particular users very easily or rely on their algorithms to do it for you and learn to optimise over time. I also think that if you have a sales pipeline/funnel that you want to nurture users through, Piano Composer can help you to do that.
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Pros
  • Audience segmentation is relatively painless. They provide a robust way to granularly target visitors by device type, location, weather, demographics, etc.
  • Our CSM has been very engaged and detailed in supporting our partnership. She provides very prompt responses and clearly works hard to push the Kibo team when possible.
  • The User Interface to develop new actions is not terrible.
  • Supports Single Sign On, which is the preferred method of managing users at my organization.
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  • Very easy to use interface
  • Powerful algorithms to improve targeting
  • Great engagement with clients about improvements and future roadmaps
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Cons
  • The learning curve is a little steep, especially if you're unfamiliar with HTML/CSS. The tool is so powerful but can be overwhelming at first. The intro instructional videos/content is helpful but it doesn't cover everything. We needed to partner with an optimization company to better understand the tool and get started.
  • Setting up an experiment for the first time isn't simple when you're a marketer who is inexperienced with any sort of web development or even just HTML/CSS. While you can easily select the area you want to create a test with, you don't have a way to easily manipulate that section without the use of HTML/CSS.
  • The first optimization company Monetate recommended us to was horrible - it really was awful working with them. We had dedicated (paid for!) hours that got wasted after the company wasted our time in each meeting (when we did have one - they often needed to reschedule) and they barely knew what our company even did despite multiple meetings. Those hours, despite the awful experience, were never fulfilled, never reimbursed, never carried over to the new (and far better) company. This left a bad taste in my mouth. While I really like this product and it does everything we need, this awful experience and lack of ownership on their end was highly disappointing. We are moving forward though - and happy with our results.
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  • Acquires companies often and integration of these sometimes cause bugs and outages
  • Can be slow to load sometimes
  • Any custom work you need done by their developers takes far too long
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Likelihood to Renew
I had never worked within a company that had a tool like this. It made my life as a designer and a creative manager much easier with it's easy to use interface and limitless possibilities in terms of creative. I would highly recommend taking Monetate for a test drive, you will not be disappointed.
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Usability
Part of what I love about Monetate is how intuitive the tool is. Very very easy to use - based on the basics - Who/What/When/Where concept. Anyone can jump right in and start using the tool. And very easy to copy campaigns and tweak to continue to build experiences. We recently added Monetate on mobile and similar experience - easy to jump back and forth between platforms. Also love the analytics dashboard...easily quantifiable and easy to get tidbits that are digestible for others not as familiar with tool.
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No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Monetate support team meets with use weekly, answers emails daily and promptly. They are proactive about getting answers for us when we need it and offering suggestions based on observations they have or learnings they want to share from other partners. Monetate's support is top notch.
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No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
Monetate installs easily and sets up personalization with just a few clicks. We never used the recommendation engine but the multivariant testing was great.
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No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
At the time of selection, it was the best tool to fit our business needs. The day-to-day users were able to create some experiences on their own and did not require much oversight. We also had developer support built into our contract along with internal developer support so most experiences were achievable. We believed it was as good and in some ways better than the other comparable tools on the market.
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Optimizely is a great platform for A/B testing with multiple variants and across a range of devices, browsers etc. What makes Piano Composer different is that you can add tests within your flows - specifying exactly where and why you want things to happen, whilst still building the rest of your experiences around this. The other huge benefit to Piano Composer is that it contains their Customer Segmentation engine and processing this data with their proprietary algorithms, so it is taking everything it knows about your users and including this in the segmentation process, which I think it much more powerful.
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Return on Investment
  • We've had great results with our tests! We've seen a solid ROI on most, and we've been able to identify areas we shouldn't be investing resources into.
  • Our teams have really pulled together to come up with ideas and test them. Putting a monetary amount on new features has helped the company understand the value of web dev, CX/UX, and marketing campaigns.
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  • Increased digital subscriptions substantially
  • Enables quick and easy testing, which saves lots of time
  • Is quite expensive as a tool overall, so you need to balance the benefits to the number of users you have
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ScreenShots