A social media management service that aims to reduce stress.

Loomly offers a really nice, simple service with clear tiers that are good value compared to some of its rivals. While some features, like custom branding, are reserved only for the top tiers, everything else is there. One of the big pluses is that all major social platforms are supported on all tiers.

Pros

• +Lots of features
• +Many features available on all plans
• +Lovely UI
• +Lots of online support documents

Cons

• -Custom branding reserved only for top tier
• -Some rivals cater more to power user

Loomly is one of the newer and snappier entries into TechRadar Pro’s list of the best social media management tools, and with good reason. Built for the social media era, Loomly tries to make life simple for its users – which could soon include you.

We’ve already thoroughly tested the likes of Hootsuite, HubSpot, and Circleboom, and while these might be more familiar names in the social media space, Loomly is definitely worth checking out.

Loomly themselves tout huge time savings of 30 hours per week for average users, who can make use of the built-in 300 or more content ideas, which can be especially helpful for smaller organizations with fewer people to bounce ideas off.

Sign up for Loomly

There’s a reason that the likes of Dior, Honda, BMW, The Salvation Army, Thomas Cook, and many more use Loomly’s services to manage their brand posts across every major social media channel, and some smaller ones too.

Given the world we live in has become dominated by social media platforms, making sure your business can stay ahead of the pack is vitally important. Just having a company blog no longer cuts it in 2024, sadly, as users discover services via social media and everyone is competing for attention.

In this review, we’re going to cover a lot of ground and make sure you can make an informed decision about whether Loomly is your pick for best social media manager in 2024. Let’s dive in.

We’ve also featured the best small business software of 2024

PLANS AND PRICING

First, the good stuff: pricing. If you’re a small business, or even a one-person operation, then cost is going to be very, very important and might weigh more on the decision than the respective features.

Loomly is priced very competitively and splits its service into four very easy to understand tiers: Basic, Standard, Advanced, and Premium. We’ll go through each.

Basic: as the name suggests, this is the lowest level tier that Loomly offers, with support for 10 accounts, two users, and access to interactions, analytics, a hashtag manager, post previews, and more, for $32 per month.

Standard: billed as the most popular option, a Standard subscription gives you everything in Basic plus 20 accounts, six users, advanced analytics, content exports, and Slack and Teams integration, for $60 per month.

Advanced: for larger clients, this tier supports up to 35 accounts and 14 users, plus the ability to set custom roles, create custom workflows, and enjoy scheduled reports, all for $131 per month.

Premium: finally, for the biggest companies, Loomly offers a tier that can handle everything, including up to 50 accounts, 30 users, and the ability to add custom branding, plus everything else in the other three plans, for $277 per month.

All of these subscription tiers include a discount when paying annually, which might be something your organisation wants to do anyway – a nice little addition.

Loomly also offers an Enterprise tier that comes upon request, and includes tailored support via an account manager and the ability to scale up beyond even the heights of Premium, while getting a nice little discount.

FEATURES

With pricing out of the way, let’s get into the actual features that Loomly has on offer. As standard, Loomly supports all of the major social networks – Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Google, Snap, and so on – and that applies to all of the tiers, not just the more expensive ones, which is a nice touch.

All users can also access the ability to schedule unlimited posts, publish directly, manage hashtags, use link shorteners, and store unlimited assets on the platform. Compared to some of its rivals, that’s a decent list.

Loomly also lets every user access an approval workflow (which is very handy given the downsides to posting things before they’re ready) and the ability to set user roles. All but Basic get Slack and Teams integrations, too.

In terms of actual content creation, Loomly offers users Basic through Premium access to post previews, Google Drive, Canva, a post inspiration tool, the ability to reply to interactions, and an analytics dashboard.

Finally, Loomly’s iOS and Android apps are available to all and really help with jotting down ideas on the go or making tweaks while you’re out and about. Some rivals reserve the apps for higher tiers, so this is also a nice thought.

If you thought this section went on for a little it’s because, well, Loomly is very generous with the “basic” features on its service, making this ideal for any organization that doesn’t want to spend too much while being able to do a lot.

We’ve also featured best Business plan software of 2024

Digging a little bit deeper, let’s take a look at some of the more advanced features that Loomly offers. While the company is generous, there are some features your business might want to take advantage of that require a higher plan.

Starting off with an obvious one, Loomly lets Standard tiers and upwards access its advanced analytics, which does go into a lot more detail, as well as the ability to export results. Advanced and Premium users can also schedule reports.

Exporting content, such as analytics, lists, calendars, and posts, is also not something the Basic tier can manage, meaning you’ll need to go for Standard or above if those workflows sound important.

Custom branding, something big organizations will surely want, is limited to only the most expensive Premium plan. Users can utilize a branded subdomain, custom favicon, and a custom logo as part of this feature set.

To close out this section, Loomly also offers access to over five million royalty-free images and videos, plus daily post inspiration to get the ideas flowing.

We’ve also featured the best business laptops in 2024

ANALYTICS AND REPORTING

Given that keeping track is one of, if not the main reason to use social media management platforms, this section might be the most important, depending on your organization, of course.

Loomly tracks a lot. Post-performance can be measured in real time across every single major social network, labels are available to help measure campaigns, and users can schedule analytics reports at regular intervals to help keep things under control.

The main aim is to help users get a better understanding of what’s working and, importantly, what’s not: not every post will be a smash hit, but over time you’ll be able to build up a knowledge of what works.

Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and X (or Twitter) all get the detailed analytics treatment, with granular insights into how posts are performing, and the ability to create new posts to “mimic” those. Having everything in one place makes life so much easier, too.

Finally, Loomly offers loom.ly domains for its clients, helping you get additional data on who is opening your links, when, where, and why. It’s a neat little addition.

USER INTERFACE

For our money, Loomly has one of the best UIs out there when it comes to social media managers: everything is in the right place and easy to use, even advanced features and settings.

The company recently redesigned many of its core features to make everything that much smoother based on customer feedback and it’s made a huge difference.

A great example is the rebuilt Post Builder, which, as you can imagine, is one of the main places you’ll be hanging out in the app. Loomly worked on reducing the number of steps to create content, such as by introducing collapsable post ideas, the ability to close content, and new ways to label different pieces of work.

Loomly’s ultimate goal is actually to automate much of your workflow – part of the reason there is a focus on mimicking older posts – and that bleeds into how you spend time actually using the app. Unlike some rivals, Loomly almost wants you to spend less time on there, or at least doing boring tasks.

As the company says of its website: organize away the chaos. By making Loomly your creative and organization hub for all things social media, life becomes a bit simpler.

We’ve also featured best website builder for small business of 2024

SUPPORT

As you might expect, support is handled very well, from the most basic to specific customer-by-customer help. Loomly publishes a blog, YouTube tutorials, and much more to answer many of the most basic questions.

On top of these, Loomly also publishes webinars and hosts specific courses to help users make the most of its powerful software. That’s the thing, ultimately: Loomly wants users to get the absolute best bang for their buck.

We found the Help Center to be super useful for answering some early questions, and in fact it helped point us towards some things we didn’t immediately know about before, which in turn helped improve our workflows.

As mentioned above, big enterprise clients are assigned a specific account manager to help them out in whatever way is necessary.

THE COMPETITION

As we said above, TechRadar has spent many hours assessing the best social media management tools and found that SEMrush actually ranks the highest because it also includes an SEO management platform, plus the usual features, making it an ideal one-stop shop for everything your business needs online.

Hootsuite works the best for tracking analytics, although there is an over-arching focus on Twitter (or X), while Sprout Social ranks the highest for actually creating and posting content to the platforms.

Buffer offers great post tracking tools, on top of a great all-round platform, and Hubspot is amazing for automating workflows. Meanwhile, Circleboom has an OpenAI integration that can suggest posts, which is very high tech.

Basically, Loomly has a lot of competition! But don’t let that dissuade you: if anything, the abundance of quality social media managers means that your organization is the winner, being able to choose exactly the software that fits the specific need of the business.

We’ve also featured best content marketing tool of 2024

FINAL VERDICT

The bit you’ve all been waiting for. Loomly offers a great all-round package of social media manager tools in one place, designed with the current landscape in mind and offering generous benefits across all of its tiers.

While some of its rivals might be more powerful in absolute terms (more features, and so on), what Loomly offers is a really friendly UI that takes only a moment to understand, underpinned by a powerful suite of tools that aids with every step of the process, from post creating to scheduling and managing your colleagues.

Campaign tracking is up there with the best, too, with the focus being on Loomly’s calendar feature, which helps you and your coworkers be on the same page.

Working in social media can sometimes feel repetitive, and so automation is key to fighting that and at least remove some of the most tedious parts of setting up posts.

As if all of that wasn’t enough, there’s even a 15-day free trial on most plans.

So, to summarise, we recommend Loomly to a forward-looking business that wants the absolute best of social media management with all of the modern twists.

The post Loomly Review appeared first on Review Products.

Apple’s desktop strategy has taken an interesting turn this year. Not only has the company finally updated the Mac Pro, which was its last Intel-based computer, but there’s also a new version of the Mac Mini with a more powerful processor. This means there are more choices than ever, with new options at the ultra-high end as well as the mainstream-pro level. In between those sits the updated second-gen Mac Studio, with your choice of M2 Max and M2 Ultra processors.

We had thought this device might replace the Mac Pro or serve as the default option for content creators, but there’s more to it than that. In this review, we’ll check out what’s new with the 2023 Mac Studio and help you decide whether it’s the perfect middle ground, or whether any of its siblings would better suit your needs.

Mac Studio price in India

The Mac Studio is sold without a monitor, keyboard or mouse – all you get in the box is the unit itself, a power cable, and some documentation. Prices start at Rs. 2,09,900 for the base variant with an M2 Max SoC (12-core CPU, 30-core GPU), 32GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD. A slightly more powerful M2 Max with 38 GPU cores instead of 30 will cost Rs. 20,000 more.

In typical Apple fashion, nothing can be upgraded post-purchase, and configuration options are extremely expensive. For example, you’d have to pay a shocking Rs. 40,000 more to step up to 64GB of RAM and Rs. 20,000 more to double your storage to 1TB. The SSD is actually removable, according to teardowns, but you can’t swap or upgrade it yourself due to software-level locks.

Options with the M2 Ultra SoC, which we’ll talk about later in this review, start at Rs. 4,19,900, which means you’re in a whole different class – this isn’t just a simple spec bump. This version of the Mac Studio will have 64GB RAM minimum, and a 1TB SSD. There are two versions of this SoC as well, with 16 extra GPU cores on the higher-end one raising the price by Rs. 1,00,000. You can step up to 128GB or 192GB of RAM (for an eye-watering Rs. 80,000 and Rs. 1,60,000 more respectively) plus up to 8TB of storage (another Rs. 2,20,000). That means the top-end spec goes for Rs. 8,99,900 – and that’s before adding any software.

Apple’s Studio Display would be well suited to the Mac Studio, and if you want to know whether it’s worth the Rs. 1,59,900 base price, check out my impressions of it in my recent Mac mini review. I also used Apple’s Magic Keyboard With Touch ID and Number Pad, Magic Mouse, and Magic Trackpad during this review. Those are priced at Rs. 19,500, Rs. 9,500 and Rs. 14,500 respectively – so that’s well over Rs. 10,00,000 right there.

Mac Studio (M2 Max, 2023) design

The most obvious way to describe the Mac Studio is to say it looks like a taller Mac mini. It’s a simple, effective design that belies the amount of power inside. The Mac Studio is exactly as wide and deep, but over twice as tall, making it much less easy to tuck away than the mini. Stackable Mac mini accessories such as hubs should look right at home. It’s made of the same silver aluminum and has the same body texture. The Apple logo on the top is also larger, and the base a little more raised. This device is clearly meant to sit on your desk. I’m most thrilled to see ports on the front; something I’ve complained about with multiple generations of desktop Macs.

There’s very little else to say about design – the power LED on the front is surprisingly large. The back is where all the rest of the ports are, and you’ll also see a large air vent. In India, the AC power cord you get in the box unfortunately has a 16A power plug, and I’ve noted the inconvenience of this before, especially when power consumption shouldn’t be anywhere near that high. If you’re using a Mac Studio with a Studio Display, you’ll need two of these uncommon outlets at your desk. At least the power supply is built in, and you don’t have to deal with an external brick.

The M2 Max-based version weighs 2.7kg while the M2 Ultra-based version is a surprising 3.62kg, probably due to a needing a more robust cooling system. Both are still portable enough to be carried around if you need to work on location often. In fact, the box it comes in has a cloth handle so you can do just that. Plenty of companies also sell rack-mount adapters so you can slot one or more of these units into a standard equipment cage.

Mac Studio (M2 Max, 2023) specifications and software

I received an M2 Max-powered Mac Studio for this review, with the 30-core GPU, 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD, which would be priced at Rs. 2,29,900 in India. The M2 Max is superior to the M2 and M2 Pro (which is where the Mac mini tops out), but fits below the M2 Ultra and even the M1 Ultra. The entire M2 family is fabricated on a 5nm process.

Apple says the M2 Max is made up of 67 billion transistors. It features the same 12-core CPU block and 16-core ‘Neural Engine’ AI accelerator as the M2 Pro but GPU resources jump up to 30 or 38 cores and RAM support goes up to 96GB. You also get double the video encoding resources in hardware, including acceleration for Apple’s own ProRES format, compared to the M2 Pro. That’s a large part of how the Mac Studio is positioned above the Mac mini – these differences won’t matter much for everyday photo and video editing but will certainly come into play when editing or recolouring multiple 4K or higher-res video streams, processing 3D models and visual effects, and even training machine learning models.

The Mac Studio will update to the latest version of macOS on first boot Apple

Compared to a previous-gen Mac Studio with the M1 Max SoC, Apple says this model with the M2 Max can render motion graphics in Adobe AfterEffects up to 50 percent faster, or build Xcode projects 25 percent faster.

If you’re splurging on a higher-end Mac Studio, you’ll get the M2 Ultra SoC which is Apple’s current top-end in-house processor and essentially doubles everything about the M2 Max – in fact, it’s two M2 Max dies joined together with a custom high-speed interconnect. That’s around 134 billion transistors, according to Apple, and means you get 24 CPU cores and either 60 or 76 GPU cores, plus twice the Neural Engine capacity, memory bandwidth, and media encoding resources.

A 2023 Mac Studio with an M2 Max SoC can drive up to four 6K displays plus another at 4K 60Hz, or two 4K displays plus one 8K at 60Hz. If that wasn’t enough, the M2 Ultra-powered variants can handle up to eight 4K, six 6K or three 8K 60Hz displays – and you can use that headroom for higher refresh rates on fewer displays, and play with different permutations thereof.

On the rear panel, you get four Thunderbolt 4 (40Gbps) Type-C ports, two USB 3.1 Gen2 (10Gbps) Type-A ports, 10Gb Ethernet, HDMI, and a 3.5mm combo audio socket. There’s also the three-pin AC mains inlet and a power button. It’s nice to see legacy USB Type-A ports, but connectivity on the front is even better. On M2 Max-powered units these two Type-C ports work at USB 3.1 Gen2 (10Gbps) speed but the M2 Ultra can drive more Thunderbolt 4 ports so you get all that bandwidth. The card slot supports SDXC cards but not the newer SDExpress format.

Like the Mac mini, there’s a built-in speaker which is decent enough for notifications but you wouldn’t want to use it for music. If you’re connected to a Studio Display which has its own speakers, or any other external ones, this speaker will be bypassed. As for wireless communications, there’s Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3.

MacOS is of course preloaded and you’ll need an iCloud account to set up any current-day Mac. You get all of the preloaded apps including Safari, Apple Music, Apple TV, Books, FaceTime, iMovie, GarageBand, Mail, Pages, Numbers, Keynote, and Maps. There is of course the company’s own App Store, and all the iCloud ecosystem tie-ins such as Find My. If you also use an iPhone, iPad and/or AirPods with the same Apple account, you’ll be able to sync content across them easily.

Mac Studio (M2 Max, 2023) specifications and software

When you first power up the Mac Studio, you’re guided through a fairly lengthy setup process. You’ll have to sign in or create a new Apple ID, and you can import data from iCloud or another Apple device automatically. A few security features are enabled by default – your SSD is encrypted, the version of macOS you have installed is verified to be unmodified, booting from other media isn’t possible. Your SSD is also encrypted by default. These are the first signs that the Mac Studio is intended to be used in a production environment. My Apple accessories were detected automatically and I was able to enroll my fingerprint seamlessly. On first boot, I was offered upgrades to macOS Ventura 13.5 and the Apple Studio Display firmware 16.4.

There’s really nothing to be said about everyday performance – it’s perfectly fine. If you want to know more about using macOS and Apple’s monitor and accessories, check out our Mac mini review. In short, everything’s very expensive but you won’t get the same experience and some features such as Touch ID with third-party products. One little note is that as much as I like having USB Type-C ports on the front, you’ll need to hold the Mac Studio down with one hand when plugging in or unplugging devices with your other hand, since it isn’t very heavy.

The 2023 Mac Studio is available with either the M2 Max or M2 Ultra SoC Apple

Things only really start to feel different when running benchmarks. Starting with Geekbench 6, I got scores of 2,664 in the single-core CPU test, 14,508 in the multi-core test, and 74,465 in the GPU OpenCL test. For reference, the Mac mini (M2 Pro, 2023) scored a completely unsurprising 2,654 and 14,208 in the CPU-based scores but its GPU score was significantly lower at 49,686. Cinebench R23’s render test posted single-core and all-cores scores of 1,660 and 14,539 respectively, which are again at par with what the Mac mini managed.

SSD performance, as measured by AmorphousDiskMark, indicated sequential read and write speeds of 6,497.12MBps and 7,044MBps, which is also on par with what the Mac mini was capable of. As you can see, depending on your workload, you might be perfectly fine with Apple’s much less expensive desktop. In such cases, you’ll have to spend far more on the M2 Ultra SoC to get to the next performance tier.

We start to see the M2 Max-based Mac Studio set itself apart when it comes to content creation and more holistic tests. The browser-based WebXprt benchmark managed 255 points, Basemark Web test showed a score of 2,285.41, and Jetstream 2 posted 320.501. The LuxMark render test posted a score of 39,217 for the standard LuxBall scene, and IndigoBench’s Bedroom and Supercar scene tests managed 1.679 and 3.848 Megasamples per second respectively. Blender’s popular Barcelona Pavilion Demo took 7 minutes, 2 seconds to render and the Classroom scene took 5 minutes, 50 seconds.

Using Final Cut Pro to transcode a 23.8GB ProRES 4K file shot with an iPhone 13 Pro to H.254 1080p took approximately 37 seconds, and keeping the resolution at 4K, that only rose to approximately 1 minute, 48 seconds.

Coming to graphics performance, GFXBench’s Aztec Ruins and Car Chase test runs both maxed out at 60fps, likely due to being constrained by the Studio Display. The same tests set to render off-screen at 4K pushed out a whopping 144.934fps and 589.78fps respectively, which is considerably higher than what the Mac mini managed. Unigine’s Valley benchmark posted 114.6fps at 1920×1080 using the Ultra quality preset with AA set to 4X. AAA games are still relatively rare on the Mac platform, but the trusty Rise of the Tomb Raider averaged 111fps at 1920×1080, 75fps at 2560×1440, and 38fps at 4K, all using the High quality preset.

The Mac Studio’s cooling system was barely audible. At no point during testing did I even notice fan noise. The top of the unit only got slightly warm.

Verdict

All of our performance testing and observations apply to the M2 Max-based Mac Studio. This SoC is notably faster than the M2 Pro in some areas but not all and you should really examine your workload and future requirements carefully before spending your money on the Mac Studio vs the Mac mini. You should really consider the M2 Ultra version of the Mac Studio a completely different product. Its performance and price puts it in another class altogether, and the target market is also different. This machine will likely suffice for anyone who has heavy creative production work.

That relegates the brand new Mac Pro to an extremely niche audience – it’s only for those who need expansion cards for specific workflow environments such as a fibre-based network interface, more NVMe storage, and low-latency audio/video interfaces. The Mac Studio offers none of this expandability (aside from what you can do with external Thunderbolt devices), but that should be fine for a lot of creative workers.

The Mac Studio is great at handling content creation workloads Apple

Considering how powerful the Mac Studio is, it’s quite remarkable how Apple managed to keep it this small. The tradeoff is upgradability – absolutely nothing about the Mac Studio’s internal components can be upgraded or even swapped out. Apple’s RAM and storage configuration options at the time of purchase are infuriatingly overpriced, but there’s nothing anyone can do about that.

Video editors, 3D artists and software developers who deal with a lot of high-resolution content seem to be the primary target audience for the Mac Studio. It’s potentially good value for money, but you should really study all the options available to you within Apple’s current catalogue before deciding to buy it.

Price: Rs. 2,09,900 (as reviewed)

Pros:

• Very good performance
• Compact and quiet
• Ports on the front

Cons:

• RAM and storage not upgradeable
• Expensive configuration options

Ratings (out of 5):

• Design: 4
• Performance: 4.5
• Software: 4.5
• Value for Money: 3.5
• Overall: 4

The post Apple Mac Studio (M2 Max, 2023) Review: The Middle-Ground Mac for Content Creators appeared first on Review Products.