Bloomfire is a knowledge sharing and insights platform which works by capturing, archiving, and growing the knowledge that already exists within or about the organization, across a variety of departments. The knowledge sharing tool enables employees to find the company information they need, when they need it, with a simple search. A centralized repository of current information means data and answers are at everyone’s fingertips. Easy access to the insights provide employees with the tools they need to drive growth and innovation.
Users can post company announcements, policies and procedures, and other documentation in one centralized, searchable place – so everyone’s moving in the same direction. Bloomfire encourages employees to share content and what they know across the organization or with a specific group to increase the company’s collective intelligence. The platform uses multiple levels of categorization, allowing users to browse for information by author, group, or categories established by the organization.
Users can upload and manage all types of content from the desktop or just about any mobile device. Bloomfire indexes every word within documents, making them easily searchable, and even transcribes words said in videos, making the videos and the words said in them searchable. Analytics tell users how the team is interacting with content — and how each piece of content is performing. The platform enables everyone to provide input into the research — through comments, reactions, and even suggestions for future research.
Pros
Clean, easy to user interface. Enough features to still be powerful and handle lots of information, posts, questions, and media.
Cons
At some point the cost model drastically changed from unlimited to number of users and for our company, the cost was prohibitive from expanding or growing. For other platforms that are not just a standalone knowledge base, but instead include one as a part of their services there is much more value for similar features.
Hi Paul, Thank you for taking the time to leave such a thoughtful review to your experience with Bloomfire. We are glad that you have enjoyed your overall experience with Bloomfire and would love to help your company continue your success with knowledge sharing and job efficiency. We take all feedback very seriously here at Bloomfire and take all things into consideration. Again, thank you for your feedback and hopefully we will talk with you soon!
I need to preface this: I do not use bloomfire often. My co-workers use it far more, I simply provide support when they have an issue. The cause for the title of this review is this: for what little I use of it I see the company makes an effort to add features that the community asks for and while there are things about bloomfire I am not fond of I recognize that they will work that out in time. Also I do not see the cost breakdown for how much our license costs the company so I am not really qualified to give credit to "Value for Money".
Finding information through bloomfire is quick and efficient. The posting features are simultaneously robust and incomplete. You can make series of posts to group together work on broad swaths of content on a topic, you can add and remove contributors to give accurate credit. Users can ask and answer questions in a moderated environment. All wonderful.
You cannot bulk change contributors (When a member of your staff leaves the company you have to manually edit each of their posts to move the content to new users before deleting the account so information is not lost and even then any answers they have posted will be lost once the account is removed).
When crafting a post all text and formatting will shift significantly when publishing ( goes from single line spacing to double or more line spacing, also all of the margins get a 1 to 2 inch shift depending on the size of your monitor, and formatting options are limited). Copy/pasting content from Word or gDocs generally requires a fair amount of re-formatting the content as the editor will either not retain any formatting or will interpret it in a odd way.
Pros
The platforms capacity for moderated knowledge sharing. Search tools work well and there are a number of different ways users can upload content
Cons
Lack of functionality in text formatting tools. Lack of ability to bulk modify posts (recategorize, add/remove users, etc).
Chris, glad to hear finding information through Bloomfire is quick and efficient. We are releasing an update to our post editor that should resolve your formatting issues. We are also releasing a feature that will allow you to bulk change contributors. We are always looking at ways to enhance Bloomfire and appreciate your feedback!
It is a nice platform. Sometimes it is hard to follow. Update changes are a little too extreme sometimes where it is hard to catch back up to the content you are seeking, especially for those who only enter it periodically. Keep the updates to a minimum, and don't change just for the sake of change to refresh. Keep the controls simple and in the same place. Eliminate the need for a new learning curve every time something changes.
The product is good, and the information is still there, but the searching and viewing gets more and more difficult with too frequent of changes you don't quickly recognize... and I am in it everyday! Maybe offer a classic view, along with your updated views when you feel the need, like Salesforce did. Change for the sake of change is not a positive thing for every day users. The updates are too frequent and clumsy.
Pros
The search tool, and how it brings up all related material to peruse.
Cons
Constant little adjustments in the editing and viewing field confuses daily operations. It loses it intuitiveness and speed and ease of use.
Like most software, there is room for improvement but this definitely gets the job done and features a sleek, clean look that all can easily enjoy and navigate.
Pros
Easy to navigate and clean look
Cons
The search ability and lacking ability to post to different communities from one spot - having to repost the same content across several communities with different categories and tags is cumbersome. I'd like to post from one place with different selections for each community rather than 3 different posts.
Hey Melissa, Thank you for taking the time to review your experience with Bloomfire.. In regards to your feedback, inside our ¿Beta¿ post editor, you can post across different communities and add community specific categories. We¿d love to show you through this process to help alleviate some of the post difficulties that you are coming across. Please contact us at [email protected] and we¿d be happy to setup some time to speak with you!
We support our entire sales staff using Bloomfire with up to date product materials, case studies and great colaboration with our people in the field. We use bloomfire's api to dole out our manuals, technical data, images and more to our iOS and Adroid apps as well as all of our web sites. We put a document in one place (Bloomfire) and then serve it out to all others making BF our system of record!
Pros
Its ease of use for posting and sharing content. Its searchablility of content and the clean way it delivers the results.
Cons
The cost. It is very hard to justify to upper management that does not see the value based on the same values the dev team does. We constantly have to push back against management who wants to move towards a cheaper knowledge base system.
Contact Bloomfire for detailed pricing information.
Below are some frequently asked questions for Bloomfire.
Bloomfire offers the following pricing plans:
Starting from: $575/month
Pricing model: Subscription
Free Trial: Available
Contact Bloomfire for detailed pricing information.
Bloomfire offers the following features:
Bloomfire has the following typical customers:
Large Enterprises, Mid Size Business, Non Profit, Small Business
Bloomfire supports the following languages:
English
Bloomfire has the following pricing plans:
Subscription
We do not have any information about what devices Bloomfire supports
Bloomfire integrates with the following applications:
Box, Dropbox, G Suite, Google Drive, Salesforce App Cloud, Salesforce Sales Cloud, Slack, Zendesk, Zendesk
Bloomfire offers the following support options:
FAQs, Forum, Knowledge Base, Online Support, Phone Support, Video Tutorials
As one of Bloomfire's early customers we saw a lot of potential with this platform. I was in charge of conducting a report comparing some of the available products to satisfy our need for a customer-facing knowledge base. It had to be relevant, easy to use, and fast. We had a lot of undocumented information that our customers needed with no way to provide it. Some of our most important criteria included having an API and SSO (we were going to have our users log in from our customer portal site), an easy editor, fast and powerful search, user management, reporting, and so on. Bloomfire came out on top. Fast forward a few months into using it and we were well on our way generating content, marketing the tool, and getting comfortable with the platform. I was probably the main contributor to a lot of the content, so the almost daily use of the tool caused me to find areas of improvement. I worked a bit with the Bloomfire development team with a list and I'm happy to say that today, nearly every one of my suggestions have been implemented in some way. This demonstrates the company's willingness and capabilities to adapt to their customer's needs. Their team has always been helpful and communicative and would love to see continual improvements in the future.