Bloomfire Review: Platform, Pricing & Usability

Often companies do not realize that sharing of knowledge is not exactly taking place in a way that is useful for anybody, be it the employees or the clients.

This is where a web-browser-based platform like Bloomfire stepped in to completely transform the way employees and customers engage and interact with the knowledge and information shared by a company. Here, in the Bloomfire review, let’s see how it prides itself as the world’s first knowledge engagement platform.

Bloomfire: A Brief

The seed for the development of a platform like Bloomfire was planted in the Founder’s mind at the time of presenting a product where he faced a challenging situation – the need for recording and sharing information and knowledge. He then came up with a way to find and share company information in the easiest and most accessible way.

The aim of Bloomfire, a cloud-based collaboration platform, is to offer support to employees at any organization who are in search of information that is relevant to get their job done. It is a space that brings together people and the information that they are so eagerly searching for.

Bloomfire is an extremely useful web application for organizations to deliver both social collaboration and content management features through the help of a knowledge management system. Any organization making use of Bloomfire can receive all the required support for setting up, optimizing, and managing their communities. 

What is Bloomfire?

Bloomfire is a web-browser-based knowledge engagement and content management platform. This platform allows businesses to share information with their employees, customers, and clients and also supports any kind of collaboration between these parties.

The platform offers them space where they can engage with others transparently which in turn helps the company’s profitability and development. This web-browser-based platform manages to capture, archive, and expand the existing knowledge of the company by creating an open knowledge base that is easy to use and helps immensely in offering great customer support.

In addition to this, the knowledge engagement platform is also capable of recording and transferring information or knowledge. This is done by providing data that can help you achieve your tasks and goals. 

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What is Bloomfire Best Used For?

Bloomfire: Best used for
  1. Elevating Customer Service

    Providing excellent customer service is something each business and organization strives for and works toward. In all cases, contact center employees are heavily relied on for delivering great customer service. 

    • Each customer service associate is given a certain responsibility and is expected to give the best solutions to their clients. The process is all about creating an experience the customers feel good about.
    • This requires customer service associates to have access to the right tools and information that is primary and immediate to the customers.
    • Several different platforms have been used to record and store customer service information in the past, but none of them have been as efficient as Bloomfire. The associates had to struggle a lot just to find the right information they needed at the time of assisting their customers.
    • Bloomfire tries to elevate customer experience, but the platform often requires constant adjustments in the editing and viewing that can make daily operations lengthy and difficult. When something like this occurs, a platform can lose its intuitiveness and ease of use it promises to offer. 
    • It also doesn’t offer a way of downloading content or information on devices like an iPad Pro. This is where a lot of Bloomfire users have expressed a problem of not being able to use the platform or not being able to download content.
  2. Empowering Data-Driven Decision

    The insights team in an organization is always on the lookout for better ways to share knowledge with different teams.

    • Bloomfire provides people to seek and find information as easily as they find info on Google.
    • The platform tries to make searching information uncomplicated by searching within documents.
    • This also improves the process of curating research, incorporating ideas, and assisting employees to learn quickly.
    • The platform manages to do this by aligning the five guiding principles of knowledge management.
  3. Increasing Collaboration & Aligning Teams

    Bloomfire has helped many small and large-sized organizations in breaking the high internal walls that had been created among different departments and making employees feel more comfortable while collaborating. 

    • Bloomfire offered an intuitive platform and approach for allowing a verified user to create and publish content quickly.
    • The platform has the depth of information extraction that other platforms didn’t offer. This also offers better insights into knowledge engagement metrics. 
    • Team members who are a part of different teams often complained about how they were unable to share an article or a post with a different group.
    • Bloomfire doesn’t offer the ease of use or sharing the same article to different groups or teams from one place. The entire process of sharing needs to be done all over again for a new group. Customer support staff have also been confused about what groups they were posting their pieces of content to.
    • This is a feature that is better offered and managed by CloudTutorial in the form of importing files in-between categories. You can simply select the file and easily move it from one category or subcategory to another.
  4. Decreasing Onboarding Time

    The demand for accurate information is higher than ever. Inaccurate information not only leads to errors but also significantly impacts the company’s image and productivity. All other methods of recording and storing knowledge seemed to not function well enough for associates in the form of outdated information and difficulty navigating. 

    • Bloomfire offers customization options so that clients are provided with answers easily by first making it easy to use for the customer support team.
    • It also offered an opportunity for companies to create communities on the platform so that any updates or new information is shared easily with the particular community.
    • Keeping associates informed and engaged is also often a task for organizations. Policies and regulations are updated every once in a while and these need to be referred to with ease.
    • Bloomfire has a built-in reporting feature that can offer insights into how a community interacts with content while at the same time keeping them accountable for being in touch with the information source.

    Even after diverting all the company information in one place and any specific information is allowed to be searched, there is no ease of search that offers. When your navigation becomes difficult, no matter how much information you try to provide, it will not reach your users.

    • The user interface and the search feature of Bloomfire are still something that lags, and typical users have only been more confused due to it. Bloomfire aimed at providing faster solutions with improved onboarding time.
    • But after cutting downtime in onboarding, users and employees often end up wasting their time going through the confusing navigation of the platform. This brings them back to square one. 
  5. Can Help With Training and Technical Support

    Bloomfire is used to help employees who are under training. This is done through assignments, ways to connect and share their best practices. Bloomfire has helped in laying the groundwork for training employees in many small and large corporations. 

    • This platform allows them to connect with financial advisors who are located across the country. It helps them stay connected and feel a sense of community.
    • The advisors and training staff can upload videos about how to perform certain tasks or showcase certain skills. There is also a way to get feedback from the coaches. The time in the training classrooms becomes more effective with the help of this education management system.
    • It is a platform that makes training and technical and customer support easier, but it proves to be a slightly costly option when compared to other platforms that can do the same thing at a much lower price.
    • There are many free apps and platforms as well that companies are already using for training and technical support purposes internally, so having to pay such a high cost for a feature like this becomes difficult to justify to the higher management.
  6. Centralize Knowledge

    With employees and clients all working and communicating from different parts of the world, organizations need a platform that can be used to share information efficiently and centralize the knowledge management system while keeping it secure. If this is not done, it can severely affect the service delivery and the level of care that organizations try so hard to achieve. 

    • Even after being a good knowledge management solution, Bloomfire has issues where customer support is often unable to find an older article or post which becomes very difficult to access certain information.
    • Many times a verified user felt that a certain alphabetical or chronological order would have made things easier to look for. 
    • Bloomfire is a good platform in such a situation because it gives people a place to collaborate, find useful resources, and ask formal questions that are important for their job. But how easily a verified user can go through the knowledge source is also extremely important, and this is something it misses. 
  7. Offers Knowledge to Workers

    Each organization has a published knowledge base of procedures, manuals, and policies to help out the associates and workers in doing their jobs safely and with efficiency.

    • Often, field workers, in this case, do not have enough access or ease of use of these manuals and procedures that are usually in word documents, pdfs, and excel files. 
    • A field is a place where a lot of technical and critical knowledge is being used, and it needs to be accessed quickly.
    • Bloomfire has been utilized by companies to provide training to their staff and ensure that they follow all the safety measures while being on the field.
    • Being a knowledge base for all workers, be it in the office or the field, Bloomfire still struggles with offering its users ease of navigation through the app.
    • Many users have faced this issue where they found the search and navigation to be quite challenging. The user also felt that having a web interface for desktop browsers would have been much more suitable and made things easier for them. 

Bloomfire: Product Details

According to Capterra, Bloomfire was founded in 2010 and is located in the United States. It is a cloud-based collaboration platform that helps with insights and sharing of knowledge.

Bloomfire Logo

Bloomfire

Best for: Any company that wants to collaborate and share knowledge meaningfully.

Rating: 4.3/5

Specifications:

  • This platform helps leading organizations and corporations in centralizing and regulating all the important knowledge from across the organization.
  • The content management and social collaboration features of Bloomfire help enterprise employees connect and search for the information they require to do their jobs.
  • In addition to this, Bloomfire helps in finding and following internal experts, browsing useful content, creating and posting content, and asking questions and seeking answers for them.
  • Bloomfire is a platform that can support various kinds of content types like video, PowerPoint Presentations, PDF files, screengrabs, and images and documents.
  • Moreover, the platform is seamless to use on mobile devices. It can be used by companies both large and small ranging from real estate to IT, healthcare, and education.
  • Organizations can customize Bloomfire according to their brand requirements, create categories, and sub-categories.
  • Teams and clients can receive support for setting up and maintaining their communities.
  • Bloomfire supports devices that are web-based, desktop, iOS, and Android and can be used for small and medium businesses and enterprises that have an employee strength of 201-500 employees.
  • Support technicians for Bloomfire are available through phone and online as well.
  • Bloomfire offers integrations to Box, Office 360, Sharepoint, Dropbox, and Salesforce.

If there is something common in most Bloomfire reviews, it is the cost that is a bit problematic. But Bloomfire offers a free trial to users for up to 2 weeks for each of its plans. This free trial helps you know whether a platform is of good use and can be utilized for the purposes you need it for.


Bloomfire: Features

Bloomfire Features
  1. Knowledge Sharing

    Bloomfire aims to make your company’s information available and make content accessible from anywhere. This way, it allows your teams to be aligned, informed, and constantly engaged. It does this by eradicating information hierarchies while allowing everyone to access the same information. The department, location, or role doesn’t matter here.

    • With the help of this feature, you can get all the information you need much faster, so you can invest the same time in other tasks.
    • Expertise and tacit knowledge are preserved and all the important information is not just limited to one person.
    • For a company, Bloomfire can be the single source of truth and knowledge, this makes it easy for users to find what they are looking for.
    • Users can have a personalized feed and follow authors, pages, search terms, posts, etc. There are a bunch of curation tools for identifying duplicate content and scheduling content reviews. 
  2. Customer Insights

    A company can use Bloomfire as a searchable, easily accessible research library. It increases ROI by making it easy for employees to find something with a simple keyword search.

    • When you focus on research, you can make better decisions and witness growth. 
    • The insights team report is the best source for researching topics and questions and eliminating any duplicate research being done.
    • Users can not only search their primary research but also have access to third-party sources. 
    • Your research portals can also be expanded by making your vendors submit their reports in one place for you to review and publish.
    • Bloom fire’s technology allows all employees to find insights into content engagement that they require to make better decisions, no matter where they are placed. 
  3. Customer Support

    Bloomfire can be that one easy-to-access place for a company looking to make their agents more capable of resolving issues accurately.

    • Your team can search for answers to typical customer questions more quickly with the help of user-friendly features and search functionality.
    • The customer support team of this system can get up to speed and easily set up remote learning opportunities with all the useful assets like training manuals or materials, playbooks, and FAQs.
    • This platform can also be a self-service knowledge source for users and reduce the number of tickets for the employees. 
    • Bloomfire features a seamless use of knowledge sources for version control, scheduling review reminders to make sure only trustworthy and up-to-date knowledge reaches people.
    • You can update the source of knowledge as and when your customer base increases, making it a delightful experience for all your customers.

    Overall, Bloomfire helps teams to achieve their goals more efficiently and effectively using AI research & suggestion. 


Bloomfire: Pros and Cons

Bloomfire Pros and Cons
Pros Cons
Empower everyone:
  • Bloomfire empowers everyone in the company by allowing them to contribute and access the knowledge source.
  • When employees and teams are empowered, they become more efficient and the quality of the work also improves.
Challenging navigation:
  • Users often find the navigation feature to be quite challenging.
  • The navigation is designed as a one-size-fits-all system and that is not very convenient.
  • It would be much preferable to have a web interface for desktop browsers.
Creating posts:
  • The way you can create, share, and schedule posts and articles are extremely easy.
  • Creating posts becomes a fun way of content sharing for the users.
Difficult to find an older post:
  • Finding an older article, post, or source becomes much more difficult. There is no proper listing of the articles, be it in chronological order or alphabetical order.
  • Users often feel that having a certain order and being able to find and choose in what order they want to view your articles or posts will offer ease of use to them.
Community features:
  • Community features such as commenting and liking are really important to make the users feel like they belong to a community.
  • User reviews are filled with praise for the community feature of the platform.
Requiring clunky HTML tools:
  • Some of the additional features require you to take the help of some clunky HTML tools to start making use of them.
  • It proves to be quite inconvenient for the developers as well as the users of the platform.
Easy to use:
  • Adding more ease of use to the search functionality simplifies day-to-day activities or operations.
  • All the information made available on the platform is easy to use and easy to update for all the users.
  • With the ease of use, people can get a lot of things done making it a value for money option.
Reduced size of the article:
  • With the recent product updates to the user interface, the size of the article is reduced to ⅓ of the page, which makes it difficult to read any tables of embedded documents.
  • A decent screen size for the articles will make it easier to refer to the article while also being able to make sense of any other additional documents attached to it.
Not able to share posts from one place:
  • Bloomfire cannot also be able to share posts to different communities from the same spot.
  • Instead, it requires customer support reps to post the same content all over again if they want to share content with different communities, using different categories and tags each time.
Not good value for money:
  • Value for money is one of the most important points that a company looks for when they start to use a platform or computer software.
  • The cost model of the platform changed drastically after a point. It changed from unlimited to a limited number of users.

Bloomfire: Pricing Overview

As per the website of Bloomfire, the pricing option is based on a user per month subscription model. It means that a user needs to pay a monthly fee for using their platform.

Bloomfire offers a variety of packages and options to meet the needs of different organizations, so you can choose the package that best fits your specific needs and budget. Therefore, it’s best to reach out to Bloomfire directly for a customized quote.

To explore more about plans and pricing models, it is advisable to fill out the contact form on their website.
To know more about the pricing of Bloom fire’s plans, you can schedule a call with their experts or the sales team directly.


Is There a Better Alternative?

After going through the pros and cons of Bloomfire based on the reviews, you must be wondering if there are any better alternatives to this software. Yes, it is, CloudTutorial. Our aim in this blog is to do software reviews on both CloudTutorial and Bloomfire. It will help users decide which software is right for them.    

bloomfire-alternatives

Why CloudTutorial?

CloudTutorial is an easy-to-use knowledge management platform that enables users to find the information they need. Reduce your Customer support tickets by 80% and get value for money. Below listed are some of its advanced functions:

  • The Quick, smart AI search function
  • Unlimited article categories
  • Seo-friendly knowledge base templates 
  • Share information with customers and employees with ease 
  • A company can use the platform to create a user-friendly FAQ site and offer quick solutions to their customers with the best search results. It also lets you customize your help center based on customer feedback and the type of industry. 
  • With the help of CloudTutorial knowledge management, customers can get precise answers to all their questions without having to sit through long calls or read lengthy emails.
  • It is essential to know what users are looking for in your platform to offer them the best user experience.
  • Having an AI-powered FAQ section in the app will decrease the number of emails. It will save you time and energy while letting you focus on more pressing matters.
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Compared to Bloomfire pricing plans, CloudTutorial provides more options for users to choose from and purchase. You avail of the benefit of a 14-day FREE trial and then opt for the plan that best suits your needs.

  • With the Starter Plan of $19 per month, get private or internal KB, remove CloudTutorial branding, custom domain, and SSL on a custom domain.
  • The Growth Plan provides custom redirects for $49 per month.
  • While the Enterprise Plan renders custom roles or permissions along with the said benefits at $99 per month.
  • Compared to Bloomfire that offers similar services, the CloudTutorial platform offers more value and serves the same company size that Bloomfire does. CloudTutorial possesses the similar pros I love in Bloomfire, for a better value for money.
  • A platform like Bloomfire would only be useful if you have a large corporation with a long list of members, but a platform like CloudTutorial can be useful for a team as small as 5 members to an organization that extends up to 51-200 employees.
  • It serves a large variety of organizations ranging from marketing and advertising, financial services, management consulting, information technology, etc. 
FAQs
Bloomfire, a cloud-based platform, aims to assist the company’s employees to find the required information to do their tasks by collaborating with their teammates. It offers social collaboration and content management features in web applications.
Guru, CouldTutorial, Zendesk Guide, and Market Logic are some of the usual alternatives for Bloomfire.
Bloomfire is a great tool to manage organization-wide knowledge. It helps centralize significant documents in your corporate wiki so that it becomes easier for every employee to find what they need. It is extremely simple and user-friendly and has almost no learning curve to engage with it.

Conclusion

Here, from the Bloomfire review, it can be seen that its crucial features are helpful for different-sized organizations. Along with the pros, it also has a bunch of cons that cannot be dismissed. With a detailed software review of both CloudTutorial and Bloomfire, it can be observed that you can create unlimited articles with the help of CloudTutorial’s SEO-friendly knowledge base templates and share in a blink!

Ready To Try Our Knowledge Base Software?
Go with CloudTutorial or waste 100’s of $$$ on clunky tools with features that you don’t even use