SilkStart Pricing, Features, Reviews & Comparison of Alternatives

Pros
Ease of use, many tutorials and FAQ to help problem solve, easy access to support with quick response time.

Cons
The cost was a little higher than that of others we compared.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
Starting with the website, we found the available templates yielded clean and contemporary page designs that helped communicate professionalism to members. Integration of a dynamic member directory into the website gives small members an opportunity to showcase themselves and realize a mini website as part of the perks of joining the organization. With SilkStart, this was easy to do - even for people with limited experience on website publishing. SilkStart also streamlined the membership acquisition process by making it faster and easier for new members to join and for the organization to receive payment. A process that used to take days was reduced to minutes. Collecting member fees is usually a headache for organizations and can require significant resources to follow up with members to collect payment. With SilkStart, members receive reminders of their renewal and, if they do not pay on time, SilkStart can continue to send reminders and serve as a virtual collection agency. Many organizations hold events - either as their primary raison d'etre or as fundraisers. With SilkStart, we were easily able to set up events, ticket pricing tiers and create and send messages to promote them. For my client, integration with their QuickBooks system was important. SilkStart delivered.

Cons
It would have been nice to have a dashboard for administrators, to give them a quick overview of the organizations member status and activities. A member acquisition funnel (like a sales funnel) would be helpful, but is not currently available.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 9/10

Pros
Modules cover all the aspects of the business we need. The lay-out of the back-end is very clear and it is easy to understand how to navigation among the modules. When we had a problem with communications, they understood and developed a comprehensive group email program that is light years ahead of what it was when launched. They are good at explaining timelines, sprints and priorities.

Cons
Communications module still needs a lot of work. The templates are very glitchy, image library is difficult to use and cannot manage the images in any order. There's no easy way to send an event notice without creating it in group email module and building from scratch. The bandwidth of the developers, while improved, still seems limited and I'm not really sure where their priorities lie relative to our business functions and requirements.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 7/10

Pros
Cost effective, fresh templates. various design options with the use of the many widgets available.

Cons
Not really a con, but the SilkStart is targeting a segment of the not-for-profit market.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 9/10

Pros
Our organization is thrilled with our new website backed by SilkStart’s robust platform. With this website, we get the best of both worlds: an award-winning website that projects a modern online image, without having to spend the effort to put it together. From the beginning, our site has been easy to use and we can make our own updates with no technical skills required. The features they develop are exactly what we need. SilkStart gets organizations. Truly. End of story. If we do run into any snags, Silkstart’s topflight customer service is super responsive. Silkstart takes care of us by providing a highly customizable event calendar to suits our needs as event organizers, but also provides a seamless one-stop registration, payment, and feedback experience to out without changing pages. Thank you SilkStart for making managing 700 members so easy.

Cons
That their software is proprietary. While we've never had a problem with this company, before we came to Silkstart we were left high-and-dry when our web builder went out of business. We were so impressed with Silkstart that we were willing to try again, but we are cognizant that we would have to start from scratch if the same thing happened to them.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10