ION Pricing, Features, Reviews and Alternatives

Easy to deploy and get acquainted with. Integrates well with our developing company process. Feature implementation, changes and fixes are extremely fast.

Some functions are not super intuitive, but are still maturing. Not a major con but a function of a developing software platform.

The traceability, work instruction, and issue ticket modules work together well and provide the needed functionality. The Ion team is highly responsive and actively adding features. They provide real time support on both bugs and usability concerns. The technician facing interface is highly functional. Setting up and scaling the software instance is easy. The First Resonance team makes export control compliance easy.

The GUI can be very clunky on older modules. Minor program errors are not uncommon while working in the tool. Data entry from our PDM system is very manual and time consuming. The lack of strong mobile support is a significant opportunity for the software, but a frustrating omission at the moment.

Ion has great features for developing work instructions fast. It is very easy and intuitive to use. I like the data field collection option that Ion gives you which helps better track the data inputs that need to be captured when executing processes. I also think the nested step functionality is great and helps organize the work instruction a lot better in addition to the dependencies functionality.

I feel that some of the data field validations are not fully developed. Min/Max values can be mistakenly entered and in result the operators using the work instruction may not be able to capture process data correctly. There are often bugs when new tools are released and although these are usually corrected pretty quickly it slows down the operators when performing work. Editing functionality when creating work instructions could use a lot of improvement.

The interface is simple and the software is generally pretty easy to navigate. Creating items and procedures is smooth and I can generate work orders with no problem. The First Resonance team is responsive and updates are dropped frequently, so issues that I might have one week may get resolved the next. Always nice to wake up to new functionalities and have an evolving UI.

The filtering is not great. Creating items or work orders is easy enough, but going back and finding work that was done previously is not an easy task. At the moment, this generally consists of scrolling through long lists. The search bar also is a little inflexible and queries have to be precisely defined, otherwise, it's back to scrolling through a long, long list. It's also not apparent what's going on in the backend of Ion and it's easy to mess up links among different items that are linked (i.e. it is pretty fragile).

ION is super easy to set up! You can get running with it within a few days and immediately make an impact on your production workflow. Having your work instructions directly in the software and not in some other system is a huge benefit. The ability to track the as-built BOM and collect data during the execution of runs is extremely valuable.

There are some edge cases and bugs that still need to be sorted out. There are some features that are lacking like in app reports, but there are good workarounds until they get a chance to implement it. Consumption of material for 3D printing applications needs to be improved.