What do you dislike about Alertus Unified Mass Notification System?
We were very impressed and excited by the demos and had high hopes. Unfortunately, those hopes were dashed by bugs, issues and overall lack of functionality with their integrations and software. The interface is not overly intuitive, and it's difficult having confidence in your alert setup as you need to create 3-4 different pieces (desktop profile, alert service, alert profile and preset alert) and make sure they are all connected to make the alert work which requires you to jump between half a dozen pages or tabs to keep track of where you are.
The fire and overhead paging integrations are extremely outdated, we have pretty much given up on those pieces. Cisco integration is hit or miss. There is no good way to dynamically edit targets when sending an alert for some integrations without actually going back into the settings and adjusting or creating a whole new alert profile; which is not great for an emergency situation.
Their back end and interface need a large overhaul as it seems dated, bloated and very inefficient. Through all our IT systems, Alertus takes almost the longest to boot and requires a lot of work to upgrade. Most systems now are far more agile and efficient. It would be nice to see Alertus get with current times and deliver a lighter-weight solution.
We had a call with their Dev who was nothing but argumentative to our feedback. Even asking about the simple ability to even do IF, THEN, ELSE type conditionals was met with resistance. And because you can't do conditionals, you need to create a separate alert if you want anything different.
For example: a weather alert for multiple locations would have essentially the same wording, so using conditionals, you'd expect to have a single alert for a tornado for 5 locations in 5 different counties, but you can't. You need to create a separate alert for each location and assign the county code. With other systems you are able to say IF (county 1, then alert group A); ELSE IF (county 2, then alert group B), etc. but with Alertus you have to create and maintain a whole new alert for each one, which means if you'd ever need to update the wording or adjust the alert, you have to go into 5 different alerts to do so.
Their new text service, AlertAware is not great. For as simple as it is, the interface is buggy and clunky. For example, turning dark mode encloses the openings of characters like 'e' and the page seems to refresh randomly. Sending an alert doesn't flow well, not sure why they needed to paginate sending an alert that could easily fit on a single window.
Overall, if you needs are simple, they are a good choice. If you want to go all in, expect to take months and need almost a full FTE to create and maintain everything. Otherwise, continue looking on. We are hoping to find a new solution when our contract is up. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
