While all-in-one marketing tools offer great value, their name is a misnomer. As you’ll find when you examine the tools closely, they all have missing features and capabilities, or rely on integration with other vendors’ tools to provide specific capabilities like e-mail marketing, analytics, or CRM. So all-in-one marketing tools do not themselves provide every capability in one package.
That said, they do serve as a central, integrated platform for managing all of these functions.
Optify and Raven Tools are good examples of products that offer real value, provide useful functionality in specific areas, but also have missing pieces and capabilities. Each provides particular capabilities via integration with third-party tools, but each is limited in the number of tools they support for a particular function.
As you can see from the user reviews, users generally are pleased with each of these products because of specific capabilities. For Raven, its reporting capability tends to be valued most. For Optify, users tend to like its SEO and keyword tracking capabilities.
Both Optify and Raven are focused on Web marketing via SEO, link tracking, social media monitoring, and analytics. Optify has built-in analytics plus connections to Google analytics, while Raven relies solely on integration with Google analytics.
Optify and Raven both provide social media management, albeit with different levels of depth and emphasis. Optify focuses most heavily on Twitter, while Raven provides wider social media tracking and monitoring across more venues.
Both Optify and Raven provide e-mail marketing capability via integration with third-party tools, Optify with ExactTarget and Raven with MailChimp and CampaignMonitor.
As our reviewer notes, Optify is a “still-evolving” system, lacking a built-in content management system (CMS), email marketing, and customer relationship-management (CRM) system. For CRM, Optify relies heavily on its integration with Salesforce.com, while integration with Microsoft Dynamics is promised in the future.
One glaring hole in Raven’s repertoire is lead management and CRM, which some users might consider essential to an all-in-one marketing tool. Others would be satisfied to simply supplement this capability via a tool like Salesforce.com. Raven considers itself a Web marketing optimization tool and does not even address the lack of lead management and CRM capability on its features list and does not offer a third-party integration solution.
Optify, on the other hand, provides a rich built-in lead management capability that is supplemented by deep integration with Salesforce.com. Optify also has a relatively open and robust API for integration with third-party tools, while Raven lacks its own API.
Content management is an area in which Raven has an advantage. Raven has a built-in content manager that enables the management of copywriting, blogging, and posting to different venues, while Optify lacks a built-in content management system.
Optify overall is the richer and more full-featured tool in some key areas, but also the pricier one. Optify’s pricing ranges from $99 per month for one user, to $499 per month for 10 users, to $3,000 per month for 50 users, with limits on keywords tracked, search engines monitored, and support options for the first two plans.
Raven’s pricing is lower at $99 per month for two users, with extra users $19 each, and $249 per month for eight users, with extra users $14 each.
Raven offers less support than Optify, but users say they find its setup and use very easy. Each offers a free trial, Raven for 30 days and Optify for 14 days.
Bottom Line: Optify and Raven Tools are both strong SEO management tools that offer varying levels of support, or lack of support, for other areas, such as lead management, content management, and CRM. Both these tools offer free trials so you can gauge which provides the best features and capabilities for the areas you require or value most, and at what price point.