| Nathan |
08-16-2004 11:58 AM |
Most of the people here by now know that I'm the lead developer of NATS. I wanted to post my view on Monolith vs NATS here, so below you will find a few points where I personally feel one is better than the other.
I will do my best in not posting anything wrong about monolith, I know their system a little bit from talking to Fletcher in the past and from seeing their demo and reading their site, but of course they might have changed or added features that I have not known about, so if anyone knows that I posted somethign that is not true, please post and correct me.
1) Like Candyflip said already, yes Monolith has a CMS built in and it comes with it, and yes our CMS is an add-on module you have to pay for. Like John posted already, the CMS is working (we use it ourself), and is active in our Demo at natsdemo.toomuchmedia.com. We are however continuing development of it, like with all of NATS, and one of the features in development is 2257 compatibility to help you keep your documents in order.
2) Monolith uses XSLT/XML for their templates, which sounds very "advanced" but for anyone that knows nothing about XSLT it is a PAIN to change templates, and its VERY techy. Their program templates AND their CMS templates use this, so even to change or add CMS for sites its not easy to do so for someone that does not know XSLT (if anyone wants to know what it is, let me know and I'll post a little snippet of XSLT).
3) Monolith charges per site, and their lease option is even limited to 5 sites. NATSlite costs only $150 and is a max of 2 sites, NATSplus costs $350 a month (basically the same as monolith does with 3 sites) and has a max of 5 sites, NATS itself costs $650, which is not a lot more and is unlimited in number of sites.
4) As far as I was told, for more advanced changes like payout changes per reseller you need a windows application to do the changes. This might sound ok to everyone, but in case of emergencies where you do not have your notebook handy with the windows app on, you might prefer changing stuff like this in the webadmin, which you can do in NATS. I am not sure WHAT exactly you need the windows app for, but there definately are things that you can not change from the web admin.
5) Monolith offers 1 Cascade, meaning for credit card sales. This is the standard way of course that 95% of the apps out there have so you might wonder whats so special. Well, the difference in NATS is that we let you setup 65000 cascades if you ever wanted to! Why? Well, first of all, Cascading does not only make sense for credit card sales. There are other billing options you might want to cascade. Also, with our option you can setup a cascade that not only has credit card forms in it, but also lets you cascade from credit cards to checks, or from checks to credit cards, or from checks to 123bill, or similar setups. With NATS you could also setup different credit card cascades and use different ones on different sites. (many reasons why this makes sense, with which I will not bore you now, this post is getting long enough.)
6) Since Today (in beta, so all of our clients reading this, wait a day or two and it'll be on your installation unless we see problems with it), we offer cascade and cascade entry targeting. This means we can target full cascades or single billers in a cascade to specific Countries (via geoip for example). For example, if you use WTS as your check biller, you would target the check cascade to US and CA since those are the only countries they can bill. This will cause the Join via Check option to not even appear on your join form if a non-US/CA surfer goes to it. Also, you could put 123bill at the end of your cascades, as a last-resort biller, and only let the surfer get sent to there if the surfer is from the US.
7) NATS offers very detailed reporting (lens, working on that new one you suggested right now, should have it done today). This lets you see your program in every detail, from every side. It helps you to understand in full details how your program is performing and helps you deceide your next steps. We keep adding more reports when we get suggestions from our customers.
8) One of the most important thing a program needs is the flexability to be able to payout in any of the standard ways in use out there. Monolith offers per sale, click and revshare payouts. NATS offers per raw, per unique, per qualified (2nd page clicks for example), per sale, per rebill, per active member, revshare and revshare with different percentages for initial and rebills and ANY combination of those! ($10 per sale plus 60% revshare for example). On top of that, via our extended payouts & stats module, you can payout on ANY event you can DREAM of. Great for personal site programs for example paying per-ad-placed or software program paying per-download and such.
9) Monolith says they support CCBill, Epoch, iBill and NETbilling. NATS currently supports: CCBill, Epoch, iBill, Jettis (I know, no more CC, but they still do other stuff), WTS, ElectraCash, NETbilling, 123Bill and we are working on CardsGate and a few other billers.
Thats it for now. VirtuMike, as to the other programs you mentioned, I sadly know very little about TrueStats, and even less about Envisionext ASP. I would LOVE to see Envisionext ASP in more detail though. (I did see a few TrueStats programs, its looking good.) Btw, I'm a Code Wizard too ;)
Regarding MPA3, judging from the Mansion homepage, MPA3 is not released yet, or is it and they just do not tell anyone?
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