Has anybody used Mag+ to Publish your mag?

Mag+ is awesome and saves us a ton, especially in the hosting department.

Because you can host yourself, we link to our own server and pay nothing to them to keep our app up and running.  When you take away that cost and solely have the license fee it makes a big difference month over month.

As far as design goes, everything DPS does so does Mag+.

These guys really seem to know what they’re doing – I picked up on Mag+ easily after using their online tutorials and asking questions directly to my rep there. They are very approachable and happy to help.

Truthfully, there are no drawbacks and no hidden costs, which makes me happy (and management even happier).

Hope this helps you out!

I guess for ease of use, Adobe DPS wins hands-down.

The totaly flexibility and sheer number of features makes Adobe the easiest and most felxible option.

Thinking for the future, if you were to want to do more, expand and make your magazine truly amazing you would have to choose Adobe.

After an inital sales call with MAG+ recently, I found that even implmenting a simple slideshow wasn't possible and that you'd have to create it in HTML.

Such a basic feature is quite fundimental.  Strange.

Research both option, and get advice on people who use both.

If you want something flexible, feature rich and something that allows you to make great magazines choose, Adobe.

Like the other top 50 magazines on Newsstand who use Adobe.

Message me if you want more info, tutorials or advice.

I looked at both very closely and Mag+ still came out on top at the end of the day. In addition if "mykaye2012" is offering tutorials and/or advice, then i'm guessing you work for Adobe...which seems to make your answer extremely biased.

I don't work for Adobe, but I'm relativly new to all this.

But in the short amount of time I have learnt a lot.

I couldn't provide in-depth knowledge, but I can really try my best.

Mag+ is a cheap option, but in terms of being future proof and feature rich, I wouldn't say they come anywhere near as close.

I mean, what is Mag+ is still a very new company, you only have to see there examples of work to see how amerature they are.

joekidd191919 if you want to see a link to what I've made, send me a private message.

Keep it civil people.

Bob

Mag+ is actually right on Adobe's tail as far as numbers of apps go...

And feature rich is not a solid argument - Mag+ releases 3 or 4 updates a year to continuously improve their software.

And to the note of "feature rich" - Pop Sci (a Mag+ client) was on the iPad Steve Jobs held up when it came out in 2010....

@joekidd191919 no problem at all, just figure I'd share my personal and company's experience - hope everything works out!

I contacted Mag+ and they said they don't have a slideshow feature, I think this Is such a basic feature, it's crazy!

If you want to save money and loose features, take a trial with Mag+ that way you can see their features.

Good luck, and I won't say I told you so! ;)

Hi joekidd191919,

This is Paige from Mag+.  Glad to be being discussed here and always happy to see lively debate in this space.  I just wanted to clarify one point: We do support slideshows.  As mentioned, they are not done through the overlay creator panel (as that is specific to DPS of course) but in HTML.  We have an online HTML-wizard called the Feature Builder.  If you're interested, here is a link with more info on adding HTML elements: http://www.magplus.com/video/tutorial-adding-html-elements-to-mag/.

We are looking at adding the slideshow capability directly in InDesign in our next release.  Happy to answer any other questions.

Adobe and Mag+ both put out a great product, it's just a matter of finding the right fit for your company.  Best of luck!

Paige

If you're thinking about just doing a plain, PDF-based magazine with no interactivity whatsoever, then you're wasting your time. Readers are demanding more than just a PDF replica these days. And I'm sorry to Paige from Mag+, but using the same software you use to design the magazine in is much more effecient than using a 3rd party software that you need to code in order to make things happen with interactively.

How in the world is using Mag+ going to save you money?

Can Mag+ make your app available to every single iOS, Android and Amazon device released within the past 2 years for $495 a month?

If not, then it's not saving you money and you should go with Adobe DPS Professional Edition.

Because according to their pricing scheme on MagPlus' website, it's $399/month for one device. So if I want my app on the Kindle fire AND the iPad AND iPhone, it's $399 + $199, it looks like it's $598 a month.

Oh and if I want to launch a second app, it's an additional $598 a month, bringing my total to $1196 a month. With DPS Professional edition, I can publish as many apps for my own company as I wish to. If I want one app, I can publish one app. If I want 100 apps, I can publish 100 apps. All of a sudden I think of an idea for a magazine - BOOM - published on DPS sold on Newsstand to see how it sells.

The majority of graphic designers don't know coding languages, even HTML, so they're not going to know how to add a slideshow to an issue.

I am not trying to push Mag+ either - but from my experience, working with Mag+ has been great.  The customer support and saving money outweigh all of these arguments in my opinion.  Didn't get in here to debate - just giving some honest feedback

Hope it helps

Please don't make the mistake of thinking of cost per download as a network expense that you can save by hosting your own files. The download fee is simply the method chosen to account for use. When we set out to build the pricing model for DPS we chose to account for a useage basis rather than trying to build out lots of monthly tiered pricing models. The method used to set the variable pricing in place was downloads. Those of you familiar with Site Catalyst know that that product is charged on an API call basis. Same model.

The pricing model that resonated with the majority of customers is one where they paid a monthly subscription charge and then variable pricing based on their use of services such as distribution, notifications, analytics, folio producer, social sharing, web viewer and others with an option to pay down the download charge based on volume purchases.

While you may be able to purchase a "cheaper" solution by using a competitors product just make sure you're actually accounting for all the costs. You don't host and deliver files for free, you don't get analytic data for free,  you don't get collaboration and other things for free. Any functionality not provided by the vendor is either built out by the publisher (you do pay to deliver content and staff to manage the hosting, you do pay for analytics either by giving others access to your data or by time and money used to generate reports and instrument code, you do pay one way or the other for notification services).

We realize competition exists and we welcome it as we think that DPS stands up to any competitors product offering, particularly when you look at the depth and breadth of what we provide as a complete end to end solution.

Mag+ is an excellent option: its platform is in constant improvement, their support team is great and costs are lower than DPS if you expect to have thousands of downloads and you host on your own server.

Also, hosting on your own server is a mayor advantage for countries outside US: you can user a webserver geographically closer to your audience location and significally improve their download times.

Regarding ease to use, Mag+ has many features including slideshows, video inserts and 360º pictures that can be done without a single line of HTML.

We specialize on Mag+ creative digital productions but we have also worked with Adobe DPS.

Hope it helps.

We have compared and reviewed both DPS and Mag+ as well and we agree with @FocusGroup - price is comparable at first, but when you start expanding and growing the number of apps as well as number of platforms where you want to distribute, Mag+ is not the cheapest way to go. We have also looked at other alternatives and they all become pretty pricey quickly.

One of our apps has approx 5 years of issues and our app network and reach continue to expand. DPS has flexibility to grow and expand your apps...

You know, it's not just Mag+. It's also Maz Digital, DPS, Mag+, Pixelmags... most if not all of the white label digital publishishing options out there are all the same. A few ui differences, but really, it's all the same. Not to say that any of them are bad, because they're not, each of the companies work very hard to give the user and publisher a great system, but the analytics suck unless you're willing to shell out thousands of dollars per month, the files are so massive to download that it can take hours, and sometimes if you zoom in, the text is jagged and unrefined vs clear and smooth. Magazines are also looking at advertising in the tablet editions the same way they've been doing it since the early 20th century, even though techonology has allowed for so many different options. But does Adobe allow you to do it? No. Mag+? No. Magzter, Zinio, Pixelmags... everyone is still stuck in the 20th century when developing tablet editions. Very bothersome that there aren't any real 21st century type solutions out there.

John J Metzger wrote:

 

Please don't make the mistake of thinking of cost per download as a network expense that you can save by hosting your own files. The download fee is simply the method chosen to account for use.

 

We realize competition exists and we welcome it as we think that DPS stands up to any competitors product offering, particularly when you look at the depth and breadth of what we provide as a complete end to end solution.

Your end-to-end, charge-per-download solution is currently a complete non-starter for non-profits and anyone else distributing a free publication. When will you have a solution for those customers?

Hi Joekidd

I wanted to know how did you worked out on this matter?

We are actually facing the same question, about pricing and to know if Mag+ solution works as good or better than DPS. But we want to create several other internal apps.

Your thoughts would be very helpful.

Hi Minia - DPS is one of the various digital publishing options Focus uses for our digital publishing solutions. We are able to offer DPS Enterprise level solutions to any publisher out there who is interested in working with us for a flat monthly fee. This does not apply to anyone who has existing DPS licenses.

Hi

I am already a DPS client.

Thanks

Anyone already used the both solution and can compare?