Vito Peleg announced that WP Feedback is now Atarim. Why the name? Well, the literal meaning of “Atarim” is “Websites” in Hebrew – which is Vito’s native language. Vito goes on to explain the rebrand, “A literal name (Like WP FeedBack) signals to people what you are straight out of the gate, but it’s limiting if the vision expands beyond its initial scope.”

Part of the change is going fully SaaS. Where data and functionality were previously all stored at the WordPress site level, the new platform offloads data and services to the cloud. This also provides for opportunities beyond the WordPress market, I had a chance to speak with Vito about that and a few other topics.

Questions and Answers

Robert: Is this WordPress only?

Vito: Yes, we’re proud to be supporting the WordPRess ecosystem of freelancers and agencies and our deep integration to the site allows us to do magical stuff like the auto-login to all the sites, 1 click push to the media folder, backend collaboration, and Guest Mode (allowing the clients to stay logged out while still getting all the notifications based on a set WordPress user).

That being said, this transition is helping us prepare for opening things up to ALL platforms in the upcoming year, while the core power and focus is around WordPress.

Robert: Has the pricing changed?

Vito: Yes, the pricing we had was for a basic WordPress plugin – which is where we started, kind of like a WooComerce addon, but now, 150+ features later and the transition to the centralized Agency Management Dashboard, we’re allowing our users to drop 7 different SaaS tools for a more consolidated experience of managing the agency as a whole – for the owners, the team and the clients.

Note: Pricing has actually dramatically changed. As we saw with Elementor, there is a push for price anchoring and greater average revenue per user (ARPU). The lowest pricing tier with Atarim is greater than the highest tier with WP Feedback (or virtually the same if you pay annually). We aren’t comparing apple to apples since features have changed, but I think it’s important to pay attention to where the market is going.

Robert: Do you see Atarim integrating with Page Builders or Theme Shops to having even greater access to feedback and the agency dashboard?

Vito: The Client Interface Plugin (as we now call it) is already compatible with every page builder and theme that is out there, the point and click visual feedback system is the right way to go when you’re building a visual product like a website, so that won’t change – based on user’s needs we expanded waaaay further, with project management features, time tracking, team collaborations and more, allowing agencies to be data-driven through our KPIs and agency benchmarks, instead of guessing their bottom line, which unfortunately is the norm in the industry until now.

Robert: Are there thoughts on how this can be integrated with Gutenberg to expose elements of the dashboard within the admin or even front end of a site?

Vito: As soon as Gutenberg came out we made sure we’re nice and compatible with its features, both on the front and back. We’re seeing SEO agencies/ copywriters and marketing folks collaborating with digital agencies through the visual collaboration tool seamlessly – like what you’d expect from adding notes within Google Docs, only that it works with our vision of consolidating the work around the website, inside the website 🙂

Robert: Is this English only?

Vito: We have 10+ languages for the Client Interface Plugin, understanding that clients need to see things in their own language to not freak out. We rely on our users to contribute and translate and are offering the option to keep expanding the languages for users that want the collaboration tool to work in their own native language, since I’m from an RTL county myself, the Client Interface Plugin is also supporting RTL 🙂 The Agency Dashboard is in English only.

Robert: Are their ways hosting companies can integrate with Atarim?

Vito: We have awesome relations with most of the big hosting companies that are out there and we make sure we align with their needs when it comes to security, caching layers and stuff like that. But to use it for their own use, maybe, I’ve seen some interesting use cases out there – our focus is on serving web agencies and freelancers.

Robert: How do you compare Atarim with The Hub by GoDaddy Pro?

Vito: GoDaddy Pro is an awesome tool for dealing with the technical aspects of the managing websites, the new transition to The Hub feels like a natural progression for them with the need for dealing with billing and some task lists that need to be done – There are definitely a few small overlaps but while GoDaddy Pro focuses on keeping sites up to date and secure, we focus on collaboration between the agency teams and their clients, removing bottlenecks within the workflow that usually arise from miscommunications and the fact that most agencies use between 7-15 different tools to get organized, all patched together, which creates huge inefficiencies.

Speculation

I’m guessing Vito hasn’t fully vetted The Hub, since I think Atarim is actually competing more head-to-head than he realizes. Both firms are trying to “own” the web designers and developers from start to finish. It’s a good strategy if you have the products and solutions.

It will be interesting to see how other SaaS/SaaS-like providers will try and capture the end-to-end agency/management/customer market. Hosting providers are leading the charge but with a good enough solution, bundling hosting will be the “easy part.”