So in keeping with our review of Microsoft Outlook Plug-In solutions we decided to setup a little experiment to compare one of the brightest stars in the industry Xobni and another product we had looked at once before Lookeen. The heart of both products is Outlook productivity through Search. So we setup 3 test sets where we had emails, attachments, contacts, appointments, and tasks. We did not try multiple .pst files maybe we will try that experiment at a later date. The results were interesting, but not surprising both products index your email folders keeping track of what you receive and send so expectations were that both would perform equally well. Both products presented basically the same information and the speed was almost identical, so this required us to look at more subjective matters such as aesthetics and personal opinions. We stayed away from price but the two products are only separated by about $10.
Xobni - Their integrated model with Outlook and fashionable user interface won them a lot of points among the staff here. They had nice features such as analytics and well organized information window that quickly displayed contact information, conversations, and files exchanged. On the downside they did miss one email in our tests that Lookeen caught and the integration does take up a bit of room in an already busy Outlook window.
Lookeen - The product seems to find the emails, appointments, and tasks as fast as Xobni and the results are displayed in a separate window that can easily be displayed alongside Outlook or on a second monitor(even better). This product is not as pretty as Xobni and it is missing some nice features most notably the analytics but if you are just looking for search capability it is a good product.
At the end of the day we have mixed reviews internally but the majority of people are using Xobni free version currently with a few looking to upgrade to pro. Lookeen hasn’t disappeared but with pricing being similar most people went with Xobni at least for now.