G2 Crowd Rates Best Social Collaboration Tools

We looked at G2 Crowd in November and I offered the opinion this was the kind of site I’d always wanted to build. It’s a sort of Yelp for business software where ratings and reviews of users told the story, rather than some analyst’s recommendation.

Today, G2 Crowd issued its first real rankings, this one on the best social collaboration tools. Salesforce Chatter, Lync, VMWare Socialcast and Podio each qualified as a “Leader,” meaning ti has a high customer satisfaction score and a substantial market presence. “High Performers” with good customer satisfaction ratings but smaller market presences included Wrike, Slack, Flowdock, Central Desktop and Confluence. Looking at the plotted chart, it’s clear that Salesforce’s Chatter stands out among this set.

Yammer, Jabber, Jive and IBM Connections were in the “Contender” category, meaning they had a strong market presence, but lacked in customer satisfaction scores. Bitrix24 was the only tool measured that was low in both customer satisfaction and market presence, according to the ratings and reviews on G2 Crowd.

So is this useful information? Certainly. But keep in mind that there are many other social collaboration tools not even rated. G2 Crowd only uses companies than have a minimum number of reviews (10, I think). So if your favorite tool isn’t there, perhaps you should go submit a review and encourage others to do so.

For instance, I have a client — Red e App — that is an outstanding internal collaboration tool, but is intended to be mobile-first and address a very specific market need. So comparing it to Chatter, for instance, is unfair since they address two very different problems. But it should be on the list, even if it’s not ideally labeled as an internal collaboration platform. (Yes, I’ve pointed out to the client we need to get some reviewers to head G2 Crowd’s way.)

And, as a bit of forthcoming to add to the disclosure, I’d guess Red e App would rank well in the customer service rankings but not as well in the market presence factors. I’d probably guess it would be around the same plot as Slack in the High Performers category. At least for now.

The point is that G2 Crowd is only as useful as the volume of its reviews. So the more we all add, the more useful this site becomes.

The premium content you can subscribe to on G2 Crowd features more than just the Social Collaboration Grid. If you’re in the market for a toolset — in social or beyond — it’s probably wise to give G2 Crowd a look see.