Calyx Point vs Maxwell: Which is a better fit?

Lauren: My name is Lauren. I am the Production Manager at Mortgage Café NorthWest. We are a small, just five-person brokerage out of the Portland, Oregon area, and I would rate Calyx probably a two out of five. Prior to using Calyx Point, we were using Encompass. We did like certain things about it, but it definitely was just really too big for the size of our company. Most companies, past coworkers that we know had an entire either department or person dedicated to maintaining Encompass, and we didn't have that kind of manpower to devote to it. That was a lot of the reason why we moved to Calyx Point was it was still familiar to a lot of our team. They'd worked on it previously at other companies and so it was just familiar and comfortable to navigate. And it was much more scalable to the size of our company, a lot more customer service friendly in being able to adapt things and customize things based on our company size. We chose Calyx Point mainly because it was familiar to a lot of our team, it was something we'd used before, but also we wanted online applications and some integration with CRM software, and they were able to accommodate both of those requests. It was also just very cost friendly and affordable for our team, so those were our main pros that led us to move into Calyx. So onboarding with Calyx was a little bit more labor-intensive than we expected. It was a pretty big commitment. There was a lot of time involved in getting up and going, just getting everything programmed and all the settings the way that we wanted, getting all the defaults and disclosures populating, and just all those pieces. It was a commitment. It was a bit labor-intensive and we hadn't quite braced for the amount of time we needed to transition, but we did really appreciate the amount of things we were able to customize to our company, the amount of things that we were able to really adapt and have some say over. So I think our recommendation for comparing different loan origination systems and choosing what one is best for you is seeing what your team is already familiar with, what they're comfortable with, what they already know, so that you're not just slowing down daily operations, really evaluating how much resources you have to dedicate to setting it up and to maintaining it. Encompass required a lot of maintenance and somebody very tech-savvy to be able to navigate all of that. Calyx was easier to adapt and customize, a lot less work to maintain, but it was some work on the front end to get it all set up. We've since decided to move to a web-based platform that's much more adaptable and user-friendly. Calyx has been in the industry forever and they're one of the big players, but they have not been quick to adapt to changes in the industry, so I would recommend evaluating really what you need. And if you need something that's able to move and adapt with you, or if being able to do it the old-school way is your highest priority, Calyx is a good fit, and of course choosing the option that's most cost-effective for you is really going to come into play as well, and Calyx is nicely priced that way and accessible for small companies.