Circle Community Platform vs. Higher Logic Vanilla

If you want to create a community based teaching or communication this would be a great platform. If you also want to sell courses or content, this would be a great place to do that. Giving a group of people a place to come together and learn from each other. I wouldn't recommend this for a person who isn't interested in creating a community, if you want to just sell courses, you can use other software for that

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

• User friendly
• Nice layout
• Good functionalities

• 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

• Video Space or Channel like YouTube
• Giving more options for embed
• Allowing documents and pdfs to open on mobile app in app versus needing to be downloaded on mobile first before viewing

Incentivized

• 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

Overall, great. Platform could be easier to navigate.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

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 was the easiest to set up and it was suggested by a lot of people as the best one for my needs! I have zero previous experience about building a community so I tried to listen to suggestions of ppl with more experience than myself. So far it has been a good choice

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

• Increased the siz our most engaged audience
• Increased our overall engagement with our audience - way more two way dialogue than traditional email marketing can do
• Increased attendance at our webinars and paid classes

Incentivized

• 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