The Magazine Manager vs Issuu: Which is a better fit?

Felicia: My name is Felicia, and I am an Editorial Director in health and wellness media, and I give The Magazine Manager a five out of five. When we were making the decision to go with The Magazine Manager, our company was going through a reorganization. We had just had new owners, and we were looking for a solution that offered a complete CRM program, and one that was targeted for publishing, and all the needs for publishing. We, basically, had an in-house system previously. We were looking at other CRMs like Salesforce, and we wanted something that was a little bit more specific for the needs and invoicing needs of publishing. Some of the reasons why we ended up choosing The Magazine Manager to be the essential solution for our CRM needs included the fact that there were a lot of features that were targeted for the needs of publishers, for publishing a magazine, for invoicing for newsletters, for being able to customize what we needed to do to communicate with our customers, our vendors, with people. We could also use it as a database for our contributors, for our writers. We could also customize some of the functionality that we needed and build our invoices within the program that actually represented the products that we have to sell. When we were onboarding The Magazine Manager, one of the things that we found extremely helpful was the customer service. We could set up individual appointments and training sessions with our representatives, something that was included in our package. There were also regular webinars that kept us updated on special features, and that's something we definitely found helpful in the onboarding process. Also, there are a lot of things that we found to be very intuitive about using it in terms of adding new contacts, adding new information, setting up our invoices. This was all something that the dropdown menus made really easy to use in Magazine Manager, both for our onboarding and for our ongoing use. One of the things to consider when looking at The Magazine Manager is that they're constantly updating the software for the kinds of things that are relevant in publishing in today's world. And it's relevant for all kinds of publishing, whether you're looking at web, or digital, or print, or any combination thereof. And when considering Magazine Manager, definitely look at them as a resource. They have a group of people that really understand the needs of publishers. And one of the things that I found extremely helpful when using The Magazine Manager, and I would recommend that you take advantage of this, are their webinars, are their seminars, are their training sessions that, remember, is not just a software platform. It's really a group of people who are committed to your success.

Dianne L.: Hi. I'm Dianne, and I'm the editor and publisher. And I give Issuu a five-star review. For more reviews like this, click below. Before Issuu, I had a problem with being able to put all of my magazines in one place for my advertisers to access, to show the value of what they were going to be advertising in. I really didn't have anything like that before Issuu. And I was really pleased to find Issuu because it allowed me to document and archive and send links to my potential advertisers so they could see the quality of the magazine. The reason I really like Issuu is because it's very easy to use. And I had to upload a magazine every two months, and I was able to do it in no time at all and then send copies, links to the magazine out to my readers and my advertisers to show them that the ads were coming out in their magazine. So it was really easy to use. I was really happy about that. When I started using it, like I said, it was extremely easy to use. And I was really happy about the way my users could use it as well. They could click on it. They could go to different pictures. They could expand the pictures, the page if they wanted. And it was just really simple. And it was like, I can't remember how I found it, but I may have just been Googling around and stumbled on it and I was like, "Oh, this could really work for me." And so I tried it. And like I said, it was just really simple to use and simple to upload the magazine and very simple link that I could send to everybody, and it really worked. And I've got 13 years of issues on there right now. I would recommend using this resource for anybody who's doing a community magazine, even a big national magazine, but especially for smaller magazines because it really allows you to archive your material. And it allows you to use it to approach advertisers, because as you know, magazines stay alive because of advertisers. So a simple link will send the advertiser to your issue page, and all of your magazines are there for them to look at and to browse through and to check out. So I really recommend it, especially for smaller, more local magazines. So yeah, it's an amazing resource and I've really appreciated having it.