Zealous

Pros: Zealous has no competitors for our uses--accepting, managing submissions, shortlisting and judging for our Writer's Award. In terms of flexibility, price and accommodating us, they win hands down. Duosoma can't accommodate our data collection needs and Submittable is far too expensive. We've had around 5,000 service users submit through it and very rarely hear about people having any problems with it or complaints.

Cons: We do find loading submitted documents is slower than we'd like. The white-on-black design is sometimes hard on the eyes. The other portal we've considered offers the option of fee-free submissions, with no subscription fee, charging us only a percentage of donations made (which would beat Zealous on price). However, there's a basic question format they can't accommodate, so we're sticking with Zealous!

Overall: We receive nothing but fast, excellent support from Zealous with whatever we need, and for our uses in collecting competition submissions it's definitely the best option for us. Highly recommended.

Pros: Support was available whenever needed although the site is very intuitive to use.

There is flexibility in how you set up each opportunity and what you want to be automated, or not.

The data remains ours and was easy to access.

The judges found it easy to use and the ability to set up category tags and then filter saved a lot of time with final judging, allowing similar photos to be viewed together.

We had very little negative feedback on the user experience, which is no mean feat for an international competition with a mix of ages and abilities.

It was affordable for what we needed, as a charity this is really important.

Cons: As we moved from a previous platform it will take time to build a new audience.

There was a server issue on judging day but this has now been resolved so I'm reassured can't happen again. I was impressed with the support and communication when it did go wrong though, things can always be resolved whilst there are open lines of communication.

As an already established competition there are certain features we would like but I couldn't find any platform that offered all we needed and Zealous did provide some work arounds.

The set-up took a while but this is because it's new to us and we have lots of intricacies in the stages of our competition but now we have done it, it's great that we will be able to copy the existing set up for next time.

Overall: A very positive experience particularly from the back-end of the system, which was a vast improvement, but also seemed to be easy to use for the entrants too but with enough safeguards to ensure legitimate entries.

The support available was really great.

Pros: The judges found the selection process really straight forward and lots of the work was automated (like sending emails out to candidates that were not progressing on), that was really helpful. Our Account Manager Diana was brilliant and spent lots of time with us on teams and email answering all our questions.

Cons: Sometimes the site could be a bit slow.

Overall: Really positive - the competition went well and we are definitely considering using Zealous again in the future.

Pros: -very simple to use either uploading applications, scoring and judging
-great communication from the get go
-very reasonably priced
-easy to contact team with any issues
-comprehensive FAQ and website guide
-great working system

Cons: -small amount of lagging due to number of submissions
-when uploading multiple submissions through one account, it autofills with the previous answers. Not ideal when manually submitting answers from multiple applicants

Overall: Perfect experience. We were down to the wire with finding a judging platform and other companies were asking start prices of thousands of pounds. Zealous is upfront about their pricing and I could easily arrange a discovery call with the wonderful team, be shown a demo which I could access myself and have any of my questions answered before purchasing a membership. Memberships are very reasonably priced which is something we needed as a social enterprise. We were assigned an account manager who was able to answer my questions via email and phone. A huge thank you to Diana who helped us through manually submitting almost 100 applications in 2 days!
Judging was a simple and easy process for our judges and the option to send reminders to score is great, as well as being able to see scoring in real time, use multiple scoring criteria and manually push applications through rounds.
Overall this has been a fantastic experience and we will be recommending Zealous to colleagues and peers as well as using it again for our next judging needs.

Pros: - Ease of use
- Time saved over competitor products
- Excellent support via email, live chat and video call
- Value for money

Cons: None, any issues we had were swiftly overcome by the support team.

Overall: I would say using Zealous for our art competition takes a lot of the hassle out of all administration. The Zealous team really care about their customers and the support has been excellent. The recent updates to the judging stage of the platform process makes it easy to onboard our judges and gives them more time to spend looking at submissions.

We plan to stick with Zealous into the future and use them for all our awards/prizes.

Pros: - easy to navigate
- easy to edit
- easy to share
- got good feedback from my coworkers that it was easy for them to submit and judge
- exceptional customer service - you get a live person (with a delightful British accent)
- extremely competitive pricing
- you can easily download all the submission data

Cons: - I understand why it's this way, but I wish you could opt. out of collecting some of peoples' contact information when they submit; it wasn't relevant for our purposes
- it was hard to tell what category the submissions were for in the public view for voting

Overall: I am in the United States and I ran across Zealous in an internet search for contest management software. My firm wanted to hold a competition for our design projects and individuals within the company. They wanted everyone to be able to make submissions and they wanted everyone to be able to vote. Zealous was one of very few programs that allow for public voting. Their support staff is incredibly helpful and attentive. They walked me through every step of the process. Their product is also priced considerably lower than anything comparable. I would absolutely recommend this company and their product.

Pros: The submission and judging features are designed to be quick, friendly and easy to use for artists, judges and administrators.
Zealous support team is easy to reach and very helpful.

Cons: Nothing to share or report as the experience was very pleasant.

Overall: We have been using Zealous since 2018 and are very satisfied!
Really nice, easy to use & efficient platform to promote & share your open calls, collect and sort high numbers of applications. Highly recommended!