Dissing the competition

I'm not normally one to point this out, but I couldn't help but read this website and be amazed at how much disinformation there is in it:

http://summitevergreen.com/l/alternative-to-amember/

I'd like to comment publicly on their editorial. I don't see how they can justify the comments that they are making and for me it is entirely untrue.

Quite apart from the commentary, my understanding of their product is that it is for delivering courses, not simply managing membership. It would seem they are comparing apples to oranges.

I'm not a massively experienced user of amember, but run a number of sites that rely on aMember for user management. Each site is linked up to Moodle, and courses are run through that. All of the clients we have are very enthusiastic about how aMember works out of the box, and whilst we have also built a few bespoke pieces of functionality specifically for Moodle integration which we think makes it even easier to use, there is nowhere near as steep a learning curve as the summitevergreen site would have you believe.

I even have a client who was using a competing product costing ten times more than amember, who now cannot believe he was using it for so long before switching.

Talking of pricing - the basic summitevergreen product is $99 per month. Apparently, they claim aMember is going to cost you up to £1800 per year, which is ludicrous. Their 'premium' product is $499 per month (really) and only allows 5000 users, in 10 online courses. How is this cheaper than aMember linked to Moodle - which has the ability for an unlimited number of courses and unlimited number of users? The cost of aMember is $180. Total. Add on a few decent plugins and maybe a little bit of bespoke development and you are still nowhere near half the cost of the summitevergreen product.

Support from CGI has always been superb, speedy and accurate in what they do. We've paid for a number of customisations and these have worked brilliantly. It's the sort of service many companies could learn from.

Sorry for the rant - amember, and the team from CGI behind it, have transformed my business, simplified my work streams and given my company a competitive edge in a very densely populated marketplace. My staff love using it, my clients love the capabilities it brings and whilst there is always a desire for ever more features, it has to be said it is a fine product right 'out of the box'. You'll need to look very very hard to find anything close to it, in my opinion, and I don't actually believe you'll find anything better. You may find something that does similar things in a different way, but it won't be better.

Totally agree. This piece you pointed out is a marketing piece of trash. This is just a single person or groups trying to make themselves relevant.

I have been using Amember for over a dozen years, great people, great product! Amazing reason for my success.

BTW- most of that article is false.