Aplos vs Backstop: Which is a better fit?

Don M.: Hi, my name is Don. I'm the pastor in a small-town church. My rating for Aplos would be a four. For more reviews like this, click below. We use Aplos on a day-to-day basis for the financial accounting of the church, but also for membership database and for donations tracking. What I like most about Aplos is that it's easy to use. We were in a situation where, when I arrived at the church, they were still on a paper ledger, had never used a computer at all, had a lot of fear of using a computer. So, when we made that transition, there was some fear, but once they got into it, they found it was easy to use. The only thing I dislike about Aplos is that there's not a hard file backup on our local computers, that it's all cloud-based, which these days is normal, but I'm a little old school. I kind of like to have a hard copy, at least on a drive somewhere of the data.

Kenneth L.: Hello, my name is Ken. I'm a senior product manager. Backstop, I'm going to give a four out of five. For more reviews like this, please click below. Before we had Backstop, we were using Excel, we were using share folders in analog and exchange. We were using Access Database. It was a hybrid of technologies, but none of that worked really well. The reason why we chose Backstop, we want some CRM that just works, and we would need to be able to have some document management and also the contact management, and most important, the relationship management, so we can see the progression of the buyer's journey and all the user engagement behaviors. And Backstop does it wonderfully. How we started to bring Backstop on board, we engaged with the professional services team. And it's a top notch of consultants that we're working with. They took our requirements, they took our data, Excel, attachments, PDFs, and all those kind of documents that we had on the numerous share drives and stuff like that. And they were able to put some metadata around and did the mass import for us. And then nothing went as planned, but we did a couple iterations and we were able to get all the information in pretty much in bulk. And I say the first run, we were able to get about 80%, 85%, which was very good. And the next round was some scrubbing, some massage to get it exact shape that we wanted. In terms of recommendations and suggestions if you're thinking about deploying it, I think the, again, the professional services team top notch. Really recommend them. Also, I think some planning ahead is just really imperative. The information, there's so many ways to get into Backstop because it's so flexible, but the more shape that you're thinking about how you want it to get it out and how you want to do reporting on, those pre-planning is really key in terms of getting a successful implementation. And highly recommend you spend some time doing the pre-planning. After the implementation, the knowledge management team from Backstop is, again, really wonderful to work with. Once you build the product, you're end users, they still need to get comfortable with it. And you can schedule one-on-one knowledge management sessions with the team, and then they will just give you the hand-holding. Highly recommend it.