UUKI vs. Higher Logic Vanilla

If you're looking for an affordable alternative to platforms like Circle, UUKI could be a perfect fit. It offers similar functionality for a much more affordable price. No member limit, no storage limits, while still being able to white label your own community. However, be aware that it's still in development. There are certainly some bugs to be fixed and a few updates required to truly compete with the others.

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

• Spaces, where we set the topis for people to engage in an organized manner
• Easy to use, it has everything you need, no fluff, very intuitive
• Great Support, the development team behind really listens to their users, and nurture their own community

• 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

• Some tweaks on UI/UX to make it more polished
• I would appreciate a better roadmap (instead of a trello board)
• Allowing translating the string to change the language style to meet the community's style (like Ay mate! for Pirate of the Caribbean fan's community)

• 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

No reason not to continue using UUKI and expand upon it.

Incentivized

Anyone can use it, and having HTML knowledge is not necessary.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

They provide almost constant support if needed. Their team considers all feedback and implements solutions when needed.

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

UUKI is extremely easy to implement but requires a brief period of time to understand where all of its controls are. (not a real issue)

Incentivized

UUKI is moving a lot faster than other platforms. Plus the fact that they are building with the community makes it easier to learn from others who have implemented it for their respective use cases. We selected it because of the value proposition and its affordability which make it a failsafe investment. Plus the founders have experience in building products which is always assuring

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

• I like the fact that Ankur and his team really listen to their early users. They just keep on improving UUKI and it's really not that hard to transfer your community from FB to UUKI. There are just so many features and it keeps on improving.
• UUKI really helps you build your community. You can transfer your audience from Facebook that has a lot of restrictions to your own exclusive community

• 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