Bettermode vs. Higher Logic Vanilla

During COVID-19 Tribe [Community Platform] allowed non-profit organizations to utilize the premium features for free which was a great benefit. It has helped us utilize our community in order to answer questions rather than having an abundance of support tickets. Tribe [Community Platform] needs to increase spam filters and bot accounts however, as many of the community's are overrun with them. I manually remove these accounts each week.

Incentivized

Vanilla Forums is well suited for growing communities that wish to expand without having to change software. Existing larger communities may find the user management part of the tool lacking, although this could be from my lack of experience.

Incentivized

• Straightforward setup and configuration
• Embeddable widgets to add community experience directly inside the site
• Cost effective compared to other products based on the available features
• Dedicated and super responsive account managers
• Relatively easy integration using the API

• They provide excellent customer service to us on a weekly basis. If we have questions or find something that we'd like improved or even something new we'd like to add to our program, we have a dedicated person we can reach out to who helps us facilitate that change.
• We're fond of their add-ons. We use many of them in our community. Some keep our members engaged on a day to day basis. We really like reactions, the keyword blocker, the civil tongue filter, and a few customized add-ons that Vanilla added specifically for our community.
• They send us notifications for all upcoming releases, and update their software frequently.

Incentivized

• Terrible user experience (especially on mobile), way too overclutered
• Restricted to Tribe's default layout
• You have to pay $85/m - $249/m to get access to apps, support and remove Tribe logo
• Looks pretty old and works rather slowly

• Creating visual themes can be difficult. Although there is an open source version of the software, some of the plugins (gamification, badges) are not available for download, so any visual theme that includes them will need to be at least partially developed on their servers, vs doing the whole thing offline and then uploading it all at once. This can be time consuming as each code change has to be checking in to Github and then imported into their server cluster.

Incentivized

Tribe Community Platform is inspired by modern social networks. The team behind Tribe Community Platform has carefully studied the user behavior on online networks to add the best practices to their platform.

It is very intuitive and simple to operate. Our customers immediately came up with the curve and began contributing content.

Incentivized

It is fast, easy to configure, and does what it promises. Also, the pricing based on monthly active users is great in comparison to other solution who simply charge based on the registered users.

The Support and Success team have been highly responsive, in general, most of the queries get answered within a day (sometimes even a few hours). They helped us immensely with brainstorming and suggesting the best practices to set up the community for success during our onboarding period. Some of our suggestions to add certain features were well-accepted and the product team worked on them to solve the issues.

They did an amazing job transferring our content from GetSatisfaction. We had almost 100% success in the transfer of 8 years worth of content.

Incentivized

It's easy to use and also many of my colleagues recommend Tribe Community Platform which can help us to engage with more of our audience easily.

Most of all we could customize the forum to look and feel like an extension of our existing web properties. This makes the forum feel more native to the users coming from or being redirected to the forum. We also had plans of being able to create custom badges we could grant users which was a limitation to many of the platforms we look at at the time. Since we are a software and cloud company, working with a product we could customize and automate via the API was another big factor. Today we have automated flows for reviewing and accepting improvement requests and then pulling them into our ticketing system and updating the deployment status of those requests one we push our updates to our users. Most importantly, Vanilla came forward with a reasonable cost to match our existing CSS and make a template that was easy for us to maintain as we grew.

Incentivized

• Better search presence via user-generated content.
• Powerful customer engagement.
• Self-service (deflecting support tickets).
• Feedback collection.

• Increased uptime and overall speed in the forum (compared to our previous phpbb solution)
• Increased usage by users which resulted in a higher pages/session in a short amount of time

Incentivized