Discourse vs. Gainsight Customer Communities

Discourse is perfect for communities and basically the best forum software out there. Wherever a forum would make sense, Discourse is probably the best solution. Having said that, small corporations with little external outreach have limited advantages with Discourse, since it's designed to facilitate discussions which happen at a slower pace while startups and small corporations will probably want to move faster with software like Slack.

Incentivized

A great scenario that we use the community for is product adoption. That's one of the things we use it for. So sending our new customers as part of their onboarding flow to the community to learn from others and see the resources that are available and know that there's a place for them to ask questions and get their questions answered. That's probably one of our primary use cases and scenarios that it works straight in. I can't really think of something that it wouldn't work good for. That's a tough one to think of on the spot.

Incentivized

• It is a super-easy way for members to have online discussions
• Very easy to administer and moderate discussions
• The pricing is fair and the support is top-notch

Incentivized

• They provide a ton of materials on best practices in setting up and using their platform
• They provide materials on how to provide an exceptional customer experience, with podcasts, webinars, and blogs.
• They support their community and walk the talk, so to speak in engaging their customers with each other.

Incentivized

• Unsure of how to use tags, since they are all lowercase and it feels a bit messy for a user-centric experience.
• Private Messages can be seen by Administrators, something which might not be clear to everybody.
• Mailing List Mode is very powerful but it's a bit tiresome to set-up consistently compared to the experience of the Graphical User Interface.

Incentivized

• Analytics; too much trapped behind APIs
• Permissions; tends to be all or nothing
• Text editor (outdated) + flat topics (give us threaded!)

I'd give it a nine because there are some aspects of it that we've had to, we've tried to find workarounds for, but there was no alternative but to involve engineering support and rely on custom development to make it work how we needed to

Incentivized

Vanilla's mobile functionality was downright awful and it felt like it was stuck in the 2000s. While they have similar features, Discourse blows them away in almost every department. We don't regret switching at all.

Incentivized

Gainsight was the best combination of features, service, and price. HL/Vanilla ultimately did not impress, and Khoros was more effort than our small team could manage

Incentivized

• It allowed us to stand up multiple community discussion forums for various project
• It caused some difficulty when navigating our grant application process
• It allowed us to track public interest in different discussions

Incentivized

• We've had a ton of positive direct customer feedback with regards to the Communities; a lot of them are very happy with the implementation and features it provides.
• We have lots of customer interactions with both our colleagues as well as other customers and that has shown to lower support outreach in cases where customers normally would have opened support tickets.

Incentivized