Percolate, now part of Seismic vs. Ion, by Rock Content

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Percolate, now part of Seismic
Score 8.0 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Percolate was a content marketing platform designed to help large brands create content and manage marketing campaigns. The product's capabilities have been integrated into the Seismic platform's digital marketing capabilities, and Percolate is no longer available for sale standalone.N/A
Ion, by Rock Content
Score 8.0 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Ion is an enterprise-grade content experience platform that empowers modern marketers and designers to create no-code interactive content experiences integrated with their CRM or marketing automation tools. Ion helps enterprises to build brand awareness and increase conversions and lead generation enriching their contact database with declared, high intent data. Ion helps brands launch quizzes, ROI calculators, assessments, interactive infographics, and other interactive formats in…N/A
Pricing
Percolate, now part of SeismicIon, by Rock Content
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Managed Services + SaaS
Custom
per year
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Percolate, now part of SeismicIon, by Rock Content
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeRequired$5,500 per customer
Additional Detailsion’s Build Anything SaaS platform provides organizations with an entirely new and agile interactive content marketing capability. It enables non-technical marketers and designers to create, test and measure an unlimited number of all types of interactive content marketing experiences. It includes unlimited seats, experiences, tests, customization, phone and email support, analytics and more.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Percolate, now part of SeismicIon, by Rock Content
Considered Both Products
Percolate, now part of Seismic
Chose Percolate, now part of Seismic
Percolate is the only software I used so far, which allowed me to create marketing campaigns.
Chose Percolate, now part of Seismic
Percolate and Falcon have many similarities and provide many of the same features, however Percolate felt a bit more robust than Falcon, although it does come with a higher price tag to match. Both platforms are excellent for content approval workflows, content scheduling, and …
Chose Percolate, now part of Seismic
Social publishing tools are very good, better than competitors. Percolate is constantly adding new features and functionality and can manage the workload and storage that Domo can’t.
Chose Percolate, now part of Seismic
Everything is better than Percolate. It is better than the free version of HootSuite.
Chose Percolate, now part of Seismic
Percolate provided a more robust portfolio of offerings in the social space. We felt that although Percolate was not the cheapest, that it provides the most value to our social strategy and has been instrumental in getting us to the place we are now.
Chose Percolate, now part of Seismic
Percolate has much more functionality than Social Studio. Social Studio is really only meant to be used as a social publishing platform. Percolate does social publishing much better, has a great file management system, has a calendar for more than just social, and has the …
Chose Percolate, now part of Seismic
The free version of Hootsuite does not support the approval process so that did not work for our organization. Percolate was much more user friendly than Spredfast, has a more streamlined calendar view, and has more reporting features for data analysis. The approval workflow …
Chose Percolate, now part of Seismic
I was trained on Percolate from the time I started my position.
Chose Percolate, now part of Seismic
Three major areas separate Percolate from the competition in my POV:
  • They view themselves as truly, an all-in-one SaaS model. Other large, enterprise platforms, like Sprinklr, have the old a la carte approach to their platforms. Everything is extra. Every new addition or …
Chose Percolate, now part of Seismic
I have used tools like HootSuite and trello to manage social media and different tasks and activities respectively. Trello is a great tool to keep track of your projects and campaigns. Unfortunately, Percolate is not that sophisticated. Percolate is slow compared to trello and …
Chose Percolate, now part of Seismic
Percolate is more robust and user-friendly than other tools we've used. The collaborative feature in particular was very attractive, and made it stand out for us against products like Sprout Social. The photo editing tool is also very useful and superior to tools that are …
Chose Percolate, now part of Seismic
The main features that attracted us to Percolate were the editorial calendar and the multimedia database. Additionally, the ability to take content beyond the usual social channels and interface with Wordpress AND bring in (paid) third party content made the purchase choice …
Ion, by Rock Content
Chose Ion, by Rock Content
I haven't had a lot of experience with templated CMS systems and was not involved in the original selection, though I was part of the renewal discussions. Most of the templates I've used have been html and created in house on an as-needed bases.
Chose Ion, by Rock Content
I wasn't involved with that process.
Chose Ion, by Rock Content
When I chose ion, my alternative was to have developers build what I was envisioning. Just two tools I wanted were going to cost me $50k to build. With ion I was able to create those, plus dozens of other tools.

Early on when I started using ion, another division had just …
Chose Ion, by Rock Content
Incredible customer support is one of the reasons for opting towards ion interactive. They have been very useful and helping in every way possible.
Chose Ion, by Rock Content
SnapApp was a decent platform, but it was a bit limited in what we could do with it and it was challenging from an Eloqua-integration perspective regarding accessing our customers' answers.

One of the things that drew us to Ion versus SnapApp was the advanced metrics and …
Chose Ion, by Rock Content
I was not the decision maker to choose this over Uberflip, but the UI is much more appealing to me. It's incredibly easy to use, clean, and from a backend standpoint, it requires little to no tech savvy'ness. Our team has really enjoyed using it and has required no training …
Chose Ion, by Rock Content
Compared to Adobe's products, I prefer ion. However, Optimizely is slightly more intuitive to use than ion, but the value comes in big savings over Optimizely's prices.
Chose Ion, by Rock Content
The primary reason is flexibility and customer service!
Chose Ion, by Rock Content
ion is in a different league than other well-known landing page providers. They deal with many large organizations and their landing pages feel more professional than competitors. The key piece in my decision to move forward with them was their customer support and tool …
Chose Ion, by Rock Content
Again, functionality and customer service beat them all.
Chose Ion, by Rock Content
There are obviously other platforms out there that do more or less in different capacities. Platforms like Marketo are more user-friendly in places and have more marketing automation functionality, but fewer features and functionality for landing page creation. Whereas …
Chose Ion, by Rock Content
The ion interactive just offers so many more options for customization. You can make the pages you create truly beautiful. Act-on has worked well for simple, straightforward pages and emails, but it ultimately just cannot accomplish the same results as ion without the use of an …
Chose Ion, by Rock Content
The closest tool I can compare ion to is WordPress. To me, ion is easier to use, with more interactive features.
Chose Ion, by Rock Content
Honestly, we did not evaluate competitors--we had an influential new member of our marketing team come in with previous experience using Ion from another company, and after checking it out/evaluating it, we did their sandbox demo and found it to be very usable...and what we …
Chose Ion, by Rock Content
I prefer ION because of the granularity of visitor data that I have access to and am able to analyze / optimize off of.
Chose Ion, by Rock Content
Both ion and Drupal are essential in our business but they're used in completely different methods. Our Drupal pages are live and searchable on Google. Our landing pages are not indexed because we [like] to pinpoint traffic sources to them. We can turn a traffic source on and …
Chose Ion, by Rock Content
The ion platform is easy to use and quick to create websites. Using ion allows us to not need developer resources to create the websites. It is cost effective. The decision to use ion was made prior to my arrival at the company.
Chose Ion, by Rock Content
ion is a comparable product to Wordpress in some aspects of user experience and versatility. We've integrated elements of ion with Salesforce, which has given certain groups more flexibility in their day-to-day tasks. There are pros and cons when comparing Ion to Drupal, and …
Chose Ion, by Rock Content
There are endless ways to make your content interactive and personalized in Ion Interactive. My organization switched from another content creation tool to Ion and although the learning curve is quite high, we've all been enjoying the experience and execution on Ion more than …
Chose Ion, by Rock Content
I've used squarespace, which is perfect to build my portfolio site. But ion is an ideal place to build templates with strict styleguides for our marketing team to use.
Features
Percolate, now part of SeismicIon, by Rock Content
Content Creation
Comparison of Content Creation features of Product A and Product B
Percolate, now part of Seismic
8.6
Ratings
7% above category average
Ion, by Rock Content
7.5
Ratings
7% below category average
Ideation8.60 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Approval workflows8.60 Ratings00 Ratings
Content collaboration8.10 Ratings5.00 Ratings
Content calendar8.50 Ratings00 Ratings
Network for content licensing/production9.30 Ratings00 Ratings
Content Publishing
Comparison of Content Publishing features of Product A and Product B
Percolate, now part of Seismic
8.4
Ratings
4% above category average
Ion, by Rock Content
8.7
Ratings
7% above category average
Content hub7.60 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Content distribution8.60 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Content promotion9.00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Content automation8.50 Ratings6.00 Ratings
Forms / Gated content00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Embedded CTAs00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Content Reporting & Analytics
Comparison of Content Reporting & Analytics features of Product A and Product B
Percolate, now part of Seismic
9.4
Ratings
18% above category average
Ion, by Rock Content
8.5
Ratings
8% above category average
Closed-loop tracking and reporting9.10 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Content performance analytics10.00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Campaign optimization dashboard9.10 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Audience profiling and targeting00 Ratings6.00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Percolate, now part of SeismicIon, by Rock Content
Small Businesses
CoSchedule Marketing Suite
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Score 10.0 out of 10
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Score 10.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
CoSchedule Marketing Suite
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Score 10.0 out of 10
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Score 10.0 out of 10
Enterprises
Vyond
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Score 8.7 out of 10
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Score 8.7 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Percolate, now part of SeismicIon, by Rock Content
Likelihood to Recommend
8.5
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
10.0
(0 ratings)
7.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
7.4
(0 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
9.0
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Percolate, now part of SeismicIon, by Rock Content
Likelihood to Recommend
Very useful for the management, planning, and programming of all social networks, as well as marketing campaigns. One of the best tools to make life easier for community managers and automate daily tasks such as content publishing. It is my favorite for managing my clients' networks.
Read full review
I don't give 9 ratings easily. Anyone wanting greater user engagement would benefit from ion interactive. I can slap together a simple interactive tool for a social post easily. I also have a plan selector with complex logic built in that would have cost me $50k to build without ion. Now I'm able to duplicate it and make adjustments to use it for various other applications. We've created a couple dozen fun interactive tools for social posts and now we simply re-purpose them easily to create new ones frequently. I just created a new page for our website that we'll want to be fluid; so the site developers suggested we simply embed an ion tool to give us real-time flexibility. Marketers in other divisions are jealous when they see all the fun stuff we're doing--they're gradually becoming ion converts
Read full review
Pros
  • You can schedule all the planning done for each social network, with the date and time you want to publish, without any inconvenience.
  • It has many templates of campaigns and content for social networks, which facilitates the work and the workload of designers and community managers.
  • The management of the marketing campaign is very efficient, as it monitors the progress, performance, and progress of the campaign also presents a complete statistical report that helps to improve the plans and strategies used.
Read full review
  • I love that ion interactive autosaves. So many of these platforms leave me terrified of disconnection or closing my laptop.
  • This WYSIWYG actually works. I've yet to have a translation or code glitch.
  • Fast load times are a huge bonus, as well as mobile-optimized display.
Read full review
Cons
  • Data is a mess. So unreliable. Takes so much time to create a concrete report.
  • There is no ability to export anything. No calendar PDFs, no data Excel sheets, nothing.
  • No paid management functionality.
  • Hated their listening tool abilities relative to other tools I've used.
Read full review
  • no revert option/revision history if you make a bad mistake
  • some simple styles that should be just there for you have to be made through custom CSS
  • some of their template options have some pretty bad designs and are not usable beyond a basic functionality level/have to be completely reskinned
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
As we have grown to implement Percolate with more and more people within our company, we have also run into more features we'd like to see in the app. The Percolate team has been extremely understanding about these requests, and even visited our offices to sit and listen to exactly what we are looking for. Assuming these new features make it into production with them, we'll definitely stay with Percolate for the long term
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Because unless I find something better to replace it with, we're probably going to renew our contract. Ideally, Ion interactive can update Liveball so it's easier to use, more functionality that includes forms and javascript options currently not in place
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Usability
No answers on this topic
Usability is straightforward, with extensive documentation and tutorials provided to ensure landing pages are built to specifications and can be optimized for performance. Built-in platform funnels give insight into customer dropoff, success/failures, and conversions (at a glance). Setting up a landing page can be done quickly and easily, with numerous integrations (CRMs like SalesForce, for instance) supported
Read full review
Performance
No answers on this topic
Sometimes the editor can be a little slow.
Read full review
Support Rating
No answers on this topic
The ION support team is amazing. There has not been a single issue they they could not solve for me. If there is a feature or request that they do not have, they have even, on occasion, created custom scripts for our team. *Update 6/5/17 - ION has continued to delight on multiple occasions. I appreciate their attention to detail and ability to solve whatever issue I have. After 3+ years of use and support, ION still has my full endorsement.
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Online Training
No answers on this topic
They offer a great amount of online training, videos, articles, etc. There is usually an answer available if you run into an issue. I would recommend taking advantage of the online training they offer. I wish I would have done it sooner.
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Implementation Rating
Rarely has a company shown this much support during implementation. This almost got to the point where it was too much hand holding. Sometimes, social teams just want the keys to the car so they can drive it themselves instead of waiting on someone to drive along with them...
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There were a lot of things we learned about the tool once we really got in and got our hands dirty. Being hands-on was essential for our team to be able to utilize ION in the most effective manner.
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Alternatives Considered
Three major areas separate Percolate from the competition in my POV:
  • They view themselves as truly, an all-in-one SaaS model. Other large, enterprise platforms, like Sprinklr, have the old a la carte approach to their platforms. Everything is extra. Every new addition or component comes at a cost and does not automatically update your license. Percolate has a different approach. If it is an update and it is good for the platform, you should get it. Therefore, they update the tool OFTEN and always evolving the functionality.
  • Which leads to my next point, Percolate wants to build the best-in-class social content management tool, period. Therefore, they are not chasing ways to upcharge you with new functions and modules. They focus on their core product and make it better and better.
  • Lastly, the pricing is simple and easy to understand. The cost is the cost.. no hidden details. Good luck getting that transparency with platforms like Sprinklr or Radian6.
Read full review
I haven't had a lot of experience with templated CMS systems and was not involved in the original selection, though I was part of the renewal discussions. Most of the templates I've used have been html and created in house on an as-needed bases
Read full review
Scalability
No answers on this topic
Separate client portfolios enable scalability, however, some elements are still grouped for all accounts so it's difficult to scale for an ad agency with multiple clients. Would prefer totally separate sections of the platform for all clients with each element housed separately.
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Return on Investment
  • Percolate has made it much easier to communicate between teams and has provided a return on investment in that area in particular.
  • Percolate also helps save time because you are able to schedule social media posts across channels easily.
  • It has also been an easy way to work with remote team members, which is very helpful.
Read full review
  • So far the impact has been positive, but as we are new to the platform that opinion is based on relatively few interactive assets.
  • There hasn't been any negative reactions or impact from Ion as of yet, but as I said before it's still early for us in terms of usage (less than a year).
  • We do really appreciate the level of complexity and customization available in the platform.
Read full review
ScreenShots

Percolate, now part of Seismic Screenshots

Screenshot of Percolate's integrated marketing calendarScreenshot of Percolate's integrated marketing calendar

Ion, by Rock Content Screenshots

Screenshot of ion empowers your other marketing technologies to deliver higher fidelity, data-driven scoring, targeting, segmentation and personalization.Screenshot of The types of interactive experiences the ion platform can create is near-endless. These are the most common types used by our customers: Assessments, Calculators, eBooks, Interactive Infographics, Interactive White Papers, Landing Pages, Lookbooks, Quizzes, Resource Library, Solution Finder.Screenshot of See what our customers are saying about our platform and services!Screenshot of Starting at $2,000 per month, you get an unlimited, scalable interactive content platform with our full feature set. Including: Unlimited experiences, unlimited use of Quick Starts, Unlimited Seats/Users, Unlimited A/B/n Testing, Unlimited Sell-Side Experiences, Unlimited Phone, email & chat support, unlimited analytics... PLUS a FREE custom-branded theme that can be applied to all of your experiences.Screenshot of You have the option to start from a template or entirely from scratch. Our Quick Start template library includes more than 100 fully tested, responsive and flexible interactive experiences you can brand, customize and launch.Screenshot of ion is the only interactive content platform that provides the scalable foundation to grow from one interactive experience to one thousand interactive experiences. With ion, interactive content development complexity, long timelines, high costs and maintenance problems are replaced with freedom and agility.