Discourse vs. Verint Community

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

If you need a community platform that's very versatile and has a relatively low entry-cost to get started, Verint is a good pick. If you need a solution that is guaranteed to work seamlessly and have no hiccups or issues overall, it is not well suited. Although it is a SAAS solution, some of the aspects of the platform do not make it seem so.

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

• Forums - organizing forum questions and identifying answered
• Various layouts of blogs, divided by groups to enable different or similar layouts throughout the site. Ability to enable all to view the same or have particular groups of blogs to stand out and have it's own look and feel
• ability to customize widgets to the needs of your use case

• 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

• Verint Community can work on improving the language part of their business which would help in interacting with customers in non English countries more easily
• User interface is very dated, it required very high customizations from our side in order to be using it as functional. Hoping for UI part to be more focused on their upcoming updates.
• Features such as chatting and group chatting could be introduced in a similar way to other big social media companies
• They could build a mobile application as well other than the website for much better collaboration and ease of use.

Incentivized

I am not part of this decision making process, but I did provide positive feedback to the decision making board.

Incentivized

If you are an experienced online community professional, Verint offers the flexibility you need. You do need to have a lot of expertise if you want to build a solid user experience because there isn't a template out-of-the-box that is just ready to go for various use cases. It will take awhile to fully understand the capabilities of Verint Community.

While the support portal (cases) is helpful, I've been even more impressed by their own support community. I always get quick, thoughtful, and interesting answers to my questions from support personnel, in-house developers, other users, and even the VP/GM himself! They have a really wonderful thing going there.

all customizations should be under warranty so that you get the right level of support from the 3rd party

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

I believe Verint Community stacks up very against previous solutions I have worked with. For an externally facing community, I think Jive-X was the best in class for many years, and Verint matches up very well from a features and configuration perspective. The other key point for me, is that Verint Community is also similar to Jive in that it has an extremely strong customer community of experienced community professionals. Verint does a great job of engaging with us about future plans, roadmaps, events, etc. I think this is a very under-rated benefit of a community platform, and Verint's is exceptional.

Incentivized

Highly scalable system with the ability to expand to an increasing number of users and communities

• 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

• At times, troubleshooting in the software tickets takes too long. However, we have worked with that team to share our specific examples and have seen some improvement in this area, yet there is not always good response with documentation to reference later should an issue arise again. The ticket team could do better to point us to resources that will help.