CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

In very general terms:
 

• MPower has a broader feature set than CiviCRM (they also have financials
• MPower is Microsoft based, CiviCRM is LAMP... that means MPower is mostly on-premis; CiviCRM via web browser from anywhere
• MPower doesn't really have any community around it... it is a vendor that open sourced their proprietary system. They seem like good guys, but they haven't seemed to have made real progress in building a community around the software. CiviCRM  has a vibrant community.
• I suspect either is a good choice, but the software serves very different purposes and has different strengths and weaknesses... as always match the software to your requirements.

lobo,

My name is Leo D'Angelo.  I've been lurking here for a while.  I am the CTO of MPower.  I would be happy to provide additional information about MPower's feature set.  Honestly I'm just coming up to speed on some of CiviCRM's features.  MPower was created to address the needs of media ministries.  Specifically MPower provides a pretty robust set of features for managing constituents and giving, additionally it provides support for media (tracking ROI on media spending) as well as inventory support.  There are a few ways an individual can become more familiar with our product:

1) check out the list of features here: http://www.mpoweropen.com/features.shtml
2) watch the screencasts here: http://www.mpoweropen.com/demo.shtml
3) register to access our online 'sandbox' here: http://www.mpoweropen.com/sandboxform.html
4) download and install the product (I would play with the sandbox first) here: http://www.mpoweropen.com/demo.shtml

Also at our recent user conference I did presentations on two new products that mpower will be releasing shortly:

1) A new reporting solution that can be used with civicrm: http://www.mpoweropen.com/orange/reporting.shtml (for powerpoint presentation) and http://www.mpoweropen.com/orange/videos.shtml (for video)
2) A new SAS solution for people and gifts: http://www.mpoweropen.com/orange/saas.shtml (for powerpoint presentation) and http://www.mpoweropen.com/orange/videos.shtml (for video)

All of MPower's software is available under the GPL v 2.0 so the source for our new reporting solution as well as new SAS solution will be available shortly (november timeframe).

I hope this information is useful.

Leo D'Angelo
CTO
MPower

lobo,

Thanks for the feedback.

I fixed the link to the 'sand box' above.  I fat fingered the cut/paste.

I'll see if I can have pdf versions of the presentations posted up on the site as well.

There are two reasons that we ask for people to register to access the sandbox:

1) MPower is not a web based application it's a window's application.  We setup an environment that people can remote desktop into to play around with MPower.  Currently we can support a limited number of connections to the server at a time.  By having people register we have much better control of platform availability.
2) MPower is a very sophisticated application.  By registering we will contact you and give you a 'walk through' of core feature functionality.  By doing this we hope to provide a better initial experience with the software.

-LeoD