As our partnership with Atarim, a visual collaboration tool to get feedback from your clients while managing their websites from the MainWP Dashboard, has been going a few weeks I thought it would be a great time to get your honest feedback so that we both can make it more useful to you.
Please share your thoughts below.
I think at $16 a month per seat, (one for the developer and one for the designer) with an additional $1.60 per active website per month seems to be targeted toward agencies that have a huge client base and not intended towards the independent developers that manage a dozen or more clients. There are more affordable products like Atarim to collaborate with clients like ProjectHuddle .
Hi @kwsim, we are an agency and we prefer to use UserBack. I don’t see the need for a visual collaboration tool on live sites! Clients only update content and if they want a new design, they contact us directly and our designers are taking it from there…
I love the concept. But as a small agency none of the current plans are useful for me. I usually have one or two active projects at the same time and all the active websites do not require any feedback.
The pricing though would require me to account for all active websites which is ridiculous. Therefore, the extension makes no sense as long as it is on a pay per site base. The pricing simply is not practical.
I could either switch on a daily base the few active sites that could be commented on so or switch to a free alternative without the integration (which is the route currently)
As much as I would love to use it makes no sense at all at the current state of pricing. 
sorry.
I’m strictly management and maintenance focused and have no use for such a service. I’m hiding it the next time I am in my MainWP dashboard. I’d prefer to be able to remove it completely.
I’ve started using Atarim free to test it out and am finding it quite useful, but the plan required to connect to MainWP is not practical for me which I think echoes some other people’s sentiments.
UserBack is my preference too, connected to ClickUp. I’ve added the widget snippet via WPCodeBox to run only for specific roles on the front and back end. Easy, and my clients also like leaving video feedback, which has helped me solve issues much quicker.
I still think it needs other plans or something to make it really an improvement for the workflow of a freelancer (maintenance + support) with many sites to use it more as a support system. Right now it’s focused on agencies with a team, project management and a relatively small number of sites.
If I want to use some premium functionality I’m forced to buy the most expensive package, because of the number of sites.
I’ve mentioned this in the FB groups already, but they keep moving around the question. I can only hope that changes.
Thanks! I love the solution with WPCodeBox and roles. We didn’t think of that. Definitely going to test it out for some on-going projects on live site. Great!
It’s really not something I would ever consider needing.
Let me start by saying thank you to everyone who has so far taken the time to respond!
When I started this thread, I was looking for feedback on actionable things we can do from the MainWP side to improve the Extension, but it seems most responses are focused on pricing and your individual use case. Those are two things we can’t fix in the Extension but let’s go ahead and address them.
First, let’s tackle pricing Atarim is geared toward folks running active businesses so they can pass on the investment.
Still, from the reviews and case studies I’m seeing, even for solopreneurs, if you’re feeling like a lot of your day is spent on admin and back and forth with clients, they can eliminate that which is worth a lot of money and worth more than $35 per month.
When it comes to what are “Active Websites,” these are websites that are currently in the works or for those ongoing clients that are on Care Plans.
You can manage these and archive sites of your clients that are not fully active to free up some slots without losing all the business communications.
Here’s a quick video that shows how to do it with one click:
Jumping into the use case, Atarim is a professional tool, and the prices should make sense to those who run a growing operation or those who want to take their process to the next level.
For others, you can use the free plan with MainWP integrated, just not as deeply as what both our premium users can get.
Finally, this Extension may not be for you, and with over 40 Extensions included in the Pro plans, I assume many Extensions don’t have a use case for everyone. If it’s not for you, I understand, and you can easily hide it by following the steps in this KB article.
I hope that helps everyone to see my thoughts on those two subjects.
I do see the purpose of Atarim, but not for my use case. Hopefully there’s another tool that’s more focused on support for maintenance clients.
I actually started playing around with Atarim (free) prior to the integration. I was very excited to see the integration, since I like MainWP, but I am struggling to actually find a good way to test it. That is, I’m a consultant with only a dozen or so active clients, and only one or two are in a position where I think they would benefit from Atarim.
On the one hand, several of my clients have been around for a long time and we have an excellent working relationship already. Changing the way we interact would seem like a distraction, and while it might make sense in the long run, it’s hard to approach them to just “try this out” and see how well it works.
On the other hand, some of my clients struggle to communicate what they need, and things like the contextual notes and screen shots seem like they could be very useful. However, for the same reason that the clients struggle now, I think they would struggle with learning to use a new system as well. These are clients who know they need to be online, but they do not have the computer skills (let alone web skills) to easily navigate a new system.
To address the integration itself, well I don’t know if this is a MainWP issue or an Atarim issue, but several times connected sites have popped up in my Atarim dashboard that are duplicates or completely blank sites. I don’t know why this is happening, but in the case of duplicates it gets confusing very quickly because I have to figure out which is the version with active comments and/or which my clients actually connect to when they use Atarim. Secondly, it seems like MainWP automatically connects sites in Atarim assuming there Atarim WordPress plugin is not installed. I haven’t quite understood the benefit of the Atarim plugin, since Atarim will work just fine without it. I guess it’s a matter of seeing the comments from the admin login of the WordPress site, although that may or may not actually be desirable depending on the client…
So, TLDR, I’m still on the fence about the whole thing. It seems like it could be a great tool, but I’m still trying to figure out how to use it effectively. Not to mention there are some bugs I’d like to see sorted out.
@kgourlay, thanks for your feedback. Regarding this quoted part, would you mind opening a support ticket so we can dig into it more?
Thanks again
Please make it an extension we have to install - not an unrequested tool we have to UNINTSTALL.
I have to go through a bunch of hoops to add all kinds of terrific functionality, however you’ve given me an extra headache by forcing me to UNINSTALL this tool - which is useless unless I pay for it.
I’m a fan of Atarim and hope to use it again someday, but the blatant grab for more revenue on a tool that I’m already paying for is leaving a bad taste in my mouth. Make it an extension we have to add - like all the rest of the paid extensions - and I’ll be fine with your attempt to increase revenue.
Force it on me and I’m a little less likely to recommend MainWP when they have those long lists of your competitors and people are jumping in with their favorite.
That is a very good point @intcultcom! I didn’t notice it until you mentioned it…
It is installed by default and when you click on it and connect directly to Atarim, that is not good. @dennis you are making your tools privacy compliance and this addition MUST be an option that we install not a built-in one especially when we don’t want to use this product at all and we will never. Please make it optional and not mandatory. Thanks.
We’re early LTD users from when it was WP feedback.
We’ve just never got it going right, it’s always been really buggy for us and so we don’t use it.
I’d love the ability to turn it off altogether or enable it only on certain sites.
Even if it improves and we start using it again, we’ll never use it for all sites, just the ones in developement.
If you don’t have Atarim for MainWP extension enabled, you simply have to hide the column from the Manage Sites table to completely remove it from MainWP Dashboard.
Without the extension, that button simply serves as a hyperlink to Atarim.
Hi, I don’t agree with that. Why do you force it on us? We never ask to have this functionality built-in the core of MainWP. Please give us the option to remove it completely.
It’s not forced on you, @bojan shows you how to turn it off in the post directly above yours.