Today almost everyone has heard of Groupon, the site that many people describe as an “inbox adventure” because it offers a different kind of discount every day. Its success is so massive that it’s conducting an IPO. This success has also moved into the realm of the Groupon clone script that takes the daily deals Groupon has become famous for offering in different directions. While Groupon offers a massive number of deals every day, it can’t get them all. Since the script for offering such deals isn’t patented, other sites have sprung up with the purpose of providing daily deals to their subscribers.

Two of the great titans of individual daily deal group buying software are Couponic and Agriya. Both contain both numerous features and great benefits for those who wish to build a coupon site. If you want to help other people get great deals and promote businesses, either option is some great source code. However, while both are great examples of the group buying script, there are some advantages to using Couponic over Agriya.

Agriya: The Features

Agriya has become a very popular script copying the success of Groupon. If you’re considering using Agriya in your site, you will benefit from:

History

There are more than 1,500 daily deal websites that operate under numerous labels. Through these websites, Agriya allows tens of thousands of coupons to be distributed to the subscriber networks every day. Agriya is a proven product that will serve you well if you choose to use it.

An Army of developers

With almost 200 developers, designers and coders of various types, Agriya is a Groupon clone script that allows an enormous amount of support available. If you decide to use this script, your site can be customized to an extraordinary extent. Whether you’re after something that’s close to Groupon or an entirely different vision, Agriya can make it work.

Widespread Capabilities

With Agriya group buying software, you can publish deals on your site that work around the world. If you want to post a deal that works in Athens, Rome and Atlanta at once, do it! It’s easy, and it expands your reach to everywhere a deal will be honored. Of course, Agriya isn’t the only Groupon clone script that allows you to spread great deals all over the world.

Couponic: The Features

Buglessness

It’s hard to be positive about a negative situation because bugs are so common in any kind of script. However, the extensive development of Couponic has actually resulted in a script that’s as close to perfection as humanly possible.

Slideshow

Couponic allows you to add an unlimited number of pics and videos to any deal’s description. As the old saying goes, a picture’s worth a thousand words. Add on the Internet meme of “no pics, didn’t happen” and you understand how adding just a few more great images can dramatically change a deal’s popularity with customers.

Ease of Use

You don’t have to do a lot of arithmetic with Couponic. Using this group buying script, you can simply input price and value, and the discount percentage gets calculated automatically across the board. Another way Couponic makes building a Groupon clone site easier for you is that it allows you to input a custom coupon price. If you want to add in a given percent discount, you can make a given product or service 40%, 50%, or whatever percent off even if you’re only charging a dollar or so for the coupon itself.

On top of the ease you’ll experience when you choose Couponic, your customers will also find your site easier to work with for their own custom experience. You can post the sub-deals that let a customer buy a deal in several different forms. Couponic is a group buying script that makes customizing your site simple and eases every customer’s experience.

Experience

Couponic is a relative newcomer to the group buying script world, and as such it has had to fight its way to prominence. But since its release in August of 2010, Couponic has grown to power more than 1,000 group buying websites. When an upstart is hungry to succeed, nothing can stop its rise to prominence.

Modularity

No matter how good a script may be when it’s “stock,” there’s always room for improvement. So when you want to make more than just a Groupon clone site, the fact that you can add modules such as the Discussions Module makes Couponic-powered websites even more powerful.

As an early example, the Discussions Module allows you to create a new bulletin board topic for each deal you post. From there, your email subscribers can follow any topic they choose and its ensuing discussion. You can even configure Discussions to not show a topic or post until you’ve approved it, to keep the discussion moving along in a positive manner.

Pricing Breakdown

Couponic

With Couponic, installing the database and the script itself is free. Additionally, the first year of updates is free. Every year thereafter is $75, which makes sense considering how frequently Couponic is tweaked and expanded for additional features. Also, the first three months of support is free, and the cost of any support goes to $35 per month thereafter.

So if you’re penciling out your five-year plan for a Groupon clone website, $615 will purchase you all the support and updates you want during that time.

Additional features tend to be inexpensive for Couponic, too. A lot of features come standard, but additional features such as the SMS gateway that lets you text message deals to people’s phones costs only $35 or so. The mobile app for an individual user costs $700, while a merchant app costs $500 to buy and implement. On top of everything else, updating your site’s look can be done from the panel by any reasonably capable admin for whatever he or she charges.

Agriya

While Agriy’a script installation is free, setting up a server to handle it costs $200 USD. Fortunately, Agriya offers free lifetime updates, which is great. Unfortunately, the last update was in November of 2011, and no further updates are expected to happen. The first three months of support on Agriya’s code is free, but each additional three months are $450.

So for your five-year plan, you can count on spending $8,750, not counting having your own custom look implemented, if support continues to be the same price. Keep in mind that you may or may not ever receive another update on Agriya.

Additional features can be costly with Agriya. For example, an SMS gateway that will text deals to people’s phones runs almost $1,000 extra. Having a custom design developed and implemented by Agriya’s designers tends to run $750. Mobile apps for a user tend to cost $1,500, while a merchant app runs $1,000.

Community: Helping Each Other

Community is a vital part of everything online these days. When your site works well, you want people to be able to share it efficiently. And if anything ever goes wrong with your site, you want support from the community to be handled as close to you as possible. If someone has to chase down help for your website on a distant forum, they may not be inclined to come back.

Agriya has been used for some impressive sites. For example, TipToken has been featured by both the BBC and the Evening Standard newspaper, which accidentally provided a powerful test of Agriya’s capabilities. Immediately after being profiled on two forms of national media, TipToken got positively swamped with traffic as everybody went to check it out.

In the same vein, Couponic powers an equally large number of sites that are just as successful. Every country seems to have a Couponic-driven Groupon clone website, such as Brazil’s dedo no gatilho, ong Kong’s Baby Bamboo and the all-American Milk a Deal. Of course, the most successful and well-known site powered by Couponic is HugeDailyDeal, which saved Buffalo customers nearly $2 million before it was bought by CrowdSavings.com.

Agriya has a very large user base. However, this user base has no organized community that’s supported by Agriya’s developers. Fortunately, plenty of websites have sprung up to help Agriya users whose budgets can’t reconcile with the support price.

By contrast, Couponic has a robust community. Sporting over 1,200 users, their forum as of January 2012 consists of more than 12,000 posts on all manner of Couponic-related topics. If you have a question, it’s probably already been answered. If not, there are tons of friendly and knowledgeable people who will be happy to help you out.

What the People Say

Any time you read something online, it’s important to remember the old saying that 96% of statistics are made up on the spot. However, what the people say online tends to be true since they don’t have anything to be afraid of. Here are a few nuggets about both the Agriya and Couponic group buying script.

Agriya

Alistair Milne says of Agriya,

“…the evidence suggests our software is amongst the best-selling & therefore has been installed on literally 1000′s of different Web sites globally. This allows us to get significant feedback from customers and improve the product over time. No software developer can get a product right without real-world testing. Secondly, we are now getting a large amount of organic traffic from Google along the lines of ‘Agriya groupon script’ etc. – obviously caused by people talking about us! Thirdly, we are not trying to sell the cheapest product and yet it is still highly popular & successful. Like other brands in other industries, we are able to sell at a premium price for a premium product.

Agriya and/or its customers have been mentioned in the media regularly, such as on the BBC and in the New York Times.”

Couponic

On Sitepoint.com, a user named Kent reports,

“I would recommend Couponic (www.uniprogy.com)

I reviewed more than ten Groupon clones out there, and found that many of them are copying each other. For example Woupon is identical to www.alstrasoft.com/groupon_clone.htm. Some companies actually have no technical resources to support their own product. They simply copy from others and sell.

Couponic is in continual development. They are using a creditable framework for easier extension in future. And they offer a lot of features that are not available at this price point.

Highly recommended!”

Conclusion

Both Couponic and Agriya are excellent group buying software. Either one will allow you to create an excellent Groupon clone site and distribute great deals all over the world. However, you have to keep an eye on your pocketbook when you’re starting any kind of business. In most every case, Couponic is a more feature-packed and easily updated product that just costs less. While it may sound biased, Couponic is the better deal of the two.