Looking for CrowdRiff alternatives? That's understandable. With it's high price tag, you might want to separate out some of its core features and get only what you really need.
In this post, we're exploring some of CrowdRiff's core features and showing how they measure up to Curator.io, which is a social media aggregator that lets you show off your own social media posts as well as user-generated content.
And with a free plan and paid plans that start at $25 a month, Curator.io is a CrowdRiff competitor worth exploring.
TLDR: Curator.io is the perfect choice if you're looking for a simple-to-use social media aggregator, while CrowdRiff is the right choice if you need a robust, enterprise-ready digital asset management system with UGC management and social aggregation features.
| Curator.io | CrowdRiff | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Pro plans start at $25 per month | Pro plans start at $5,000 per year |
| Core features | Social media aggregator | Digital asset management system, user generated content management, social media aggregation |
| Free plan available | Yes | No |
| Branding on Free Plan | No visible branding (small link at bottom of feed) | No free plan available |
| Branding on Paid Plans | None | None |
| Additional Users & Moderators | Available on all paid plans (starting at $25) | Available on all paid plans (starting at $5,000 per year) |
| Add Custom Posts to Feed | Available on all paid plans (starting at $25) | Available on all paid plans (starting at $5,000 per year) |
What to look for in a CrowdRiff alternative
While we can't say exactly what you should look for in a CrowdRiff competitor, we can define CrowdRiff's core features so you know if you actually need them or not.
- Digital asset management - Large brands and enterprises use DAMs to tag and store their brand's content so they can easily find and re-use it later. For example, a photoshoot of a yoga pant wouldn't just be put in the right cloud-storage file folder, it would also have tags for the line, season, material, model demographics, etc. so any marketing or product employee could find and re-use that photo whenever desired.
- User generated content management - With UGC management, brand marketers can discover what photos customers are uploading of their product, store their favorite ones to the platform, tag them, and easily find them for marketing use later. A UGC platform might also include features for asking customers for approval for the content and tracking that approval.
- Social media aggregator - A social media aggregator lets you pull content from different sources into one engaging feed. Brands often put these on their websites or other digital content. You can pull together your own content and customers' content, curate it, and publish it anywhere you can paste HTML code.
You may or may not need all of these features.
If you're looking for a way to easily share social media content, than an aggregator is all that's required. Most small and medium sized businesses don't require a digital asset management system, or they simply use cloud storage like Box, Dropbox, or Google Drive to store photos, which employees can look through to repurpose into marketing content.
Curator.io vs. CrowdRiff
Now let's explore a CrowdRiff alternative that is very easy to set up and that offers affordable plans.
We're taking a look at how to use each tool, the pros and cons of each, and the pricing.
TLDR: Curator.io is the perfect choice if you're looking for a simple-to-use social media aggregator, while CrowdRiffis the right choice if you need a robust, enterprise-ready digital asset management system with UGC management and social aggregation features.
CrowdRiff setup
As a digital asset management system, CrowdRiff needs to be filled up with content to provide value.
You can upload your own assets or pull them in from your social media accounts.
To get the most of the digital asset management system, you'll want to tag the photos that you upload with as many keywords as you can think of. These keywords might include the style, colors, location, people, or products used.
Another feature that CrowdRiff offers is the ability to analyze the engagement rate for social media posts. This can help marketers know which organic posts to re-use in paid advertising campaigns.
With CrowdRiff, you can aggregate social media posts into a seamless feed. Here's an example of content that's being pulled from multiple social media sources:
To create your own, you add your social media sources, choose which images you want to include, and then copy the HTML code into your site wherever you want it (a section of your home page, a blog post, a side bar, etc).
Here's an example of a CrowdRiff social media aggregator inside of a blog post. When you click on any of the images, they take you to the original Instagram post.
CrowdRiff does include social media aggregation, but the other feature sets make the price point a large barrier to entry for most businesses.
CrowdRiff pros & cons
Pros:
- Includes robust features for managing digital assets
- Offers social media aggregation
Cons:
- The feature set is likely to be too complex for all businesses except very large brands
- The annual subscription fee is too high for most SMBs
CrowdRiff pro plans
CrowdRiff's paid plans include social tracking to discover UGC, photo meta data enrichment for the DAM, and multiple web galaries and social media aggregators. Depending on the number of users and galaries needed, the pricing typically ranges between $5k and $12k per year, but can go higher. For these reasons, this product really is geared toward enterprise companies, not small and medium sized businesses.
Curator.io setup
Now let's take a look at how you setup a feed using social media aggregator Curator.io.
All plans (including the free plan) give you 15+ social media sources to choose from with the most popular being Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube.
After you pick your source, you need to add the details. In this example, we're using an Instagram business account to pull images from.
After you add the source (or sources), it's time to curate the images. You can delete anything that you don't want to show up.
There are different ways to automate the curation:
- Everything is automatically approved
- Everything requires manual approval
- Automated rules (such as approve any post without profanity)
In your aggregated feed, you can also upload custom posts. Maybe you want to make an announcement about an upcoming virtual event, promote a product, or try to get more downloads for an ebook.
You can create and upload any image you want.
It's also very easy to change the look of your feed. You can remove captions if you don't want them showing up by choosing the Grid style.
In addtion to pre-set styles, there are custom color and size modifications you can make to your feed as well.
The Grid style gives a really clean and simple look.
Here's how it looks when uploaded into a blog post:
Setting up a feed to put in your website takes less than 5 minutes, and if you don't need a lot of sources, it's totally free.
What's also great about Curator.io is that their branding is almost non-existent. There's just a tiny link at the very bottom of the feed that says Curator.io, and that's it!
Curator.io pros & cons
Pros:
- Simple to use and setup
- Free plan and affordable paid plans for SMBs
- Can be used to portray your own content as well as UGC
Cons:
- Doesn't have digital asset management features (if you need them)
Curator.io pro plans
Curator.io's paid plans start at $25 per month. With a paid plan, you get a higher number of aggregator feeds to share on your site as well as more sources and feed views. With higher tier paid plans, you get additional users, user management, and API access.
Curator.io vs. CrowdRiff pricing comparison
Because the feature sets are different but with plenty of overlap, we can't make an exact pricing comparison. What we can say is this: if you don't need digital asset management and you simply want to curate and share your social media content as well as user generated content, than Curator.io is a clear winner.
At a difference of $275 per year versus $5,000 per year, the main reason to choose CrowdRiff would be if you really need a robust DAM system to tag your photos in order to share them with thousands of other employees. Otherwise, most companies do just fine using cloud storage solutions like Box and Google Drive, and so the only feature they need is the social media aggregator to share content in a beautiful, curated feed.
TLDR: Curator.io is the perfect choice if you're looking for a simple-to-use social media aggregator, while CrowdRiff is the right choice if you need a robust, enterprise-ready digital asset management system with UGC management and social aggregation features.