For SaaS products, Gainsight's product experience software enables companies to track every step of their user's journey and fully understand how they're interacting with a product over time.
$0
100 or less MAUs (Monthly Active Users)
Khoros Communities
Score 8.3 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Lithium Community is a fully-featured community platform and is focused on the needs of marketers. Lithium most often competes with Jive Team Collaboration and Get Satisfaction.
N/A
Pricing
Gainsight PX
Khoros Communities
Editions & Modules
Starter (Free)
$0
100 or less MAUs (Monthly Active Users)
Starter
Starting at $400/M
500+ MAUs (Monthly Active Users)
Growth
Custom
Per MAUs (Monthly Active Users) and more
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Gainsight PX
Khoros Communities
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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Pricing is variable based on the needs of the customer.
Gainsight PX is well suited for companies that are looking to measure customer engagement, usage, and adoption of their products and services. It is also well suited for companies that are looking to gain insights into customer behavior and preferences. Gainsight PX can be used to track customer journeys and measure customer satisfaction.
On the other hand, Gainsight PX is less appropriate for companies that are looking to measure sales performance or customer lifetime value. It is also not well suited for companies that are looking to measure customer retention or customer churn.
Khoros Communities is my go-to when I'm part of a big company with lots of customers who want to help each other. It's awesome for talking about products, giving ideas to make them better, and getting help when I need it. If my team is spread out or we're working from home, Khoros Communities is handy for sharing updates and working together. It's also a good tool for events, helping with planning and discussing what happened. But if my group is small or not very active, or if I just need a simple place to chat without too many extras, Khoros Communities might be more than I need. Plus, I've got to be ready to keep an eye on things to keep the community positive, and it works best when I have a plan to grow and keep the community lively.
Backfilling data. Many tools do not have the ability to be tracking elements once they are available and then pull it in and have historical views. You're not starting from scratch once you identify something.
Educational Engagements. There are a ton of options for in-app messaging and its very customizable and easy to set up.
Product Mapper. Organizing and shifting structure is easy to change. Setting multiple rules on a feature and confirming what you tagged is easy to do.
Walk through functionality is weaker than other providers. If you ask a user to do something on screen, and that action reloads the page, the tour closes. This shortcoming is the primary cause for us using another walkthrough tool.
There is no global CSS styling for PX modals. When I make a new CSS refinement, it's limited to that one engagement only. Everytime I have a new message to deliver, I know picking a correct tour type, finding a good starting place in existing CSS and content, working over the CSS to handle new content will all take more time that it takes in other tools with universal styling controls.
The page reload tour cancelation also affects surveys. Want to send a CES survey after a user clicks a button that causes a URL change? You can't. Indirectly, you can load the survey if the user has clicked the button < 1 day ago, and is on URL X. If the URL is the same before and after the button click, even this work around wont work.
Not sure how effective PX is on mobile, the functionality did not exist while we were building our mobile app, and we've yet to add it in.
Would be nice if it could integrate our knowledge base, but only one KB vendor was supported (not our Freshdesk) last I looked
Self Service, Low and No Code. The Community Managers should be able to some UI Tasks by self with doing any code updates.
Salesforce Integration: The basic Integration should also include the basic level of business requirement. (Contacts and Accounts Mapping)
Slack Connector Update: There is no update on this connector till the time its launch. The other team has lot of options to push the notification in multiple slack channels. And unfortunately Khoros does not. This creates a lot work for Community team to bring internal teams to the community to respond or acknowledge an post.
More Integrations: Since now the Khoros communities does not comes up with the integrations with basic support tools like JIRA, Confluence, Github etc.
Search Improvisation: Apart from last search update there is no updates we see in this feature. The team should think of Putting Some AI based Search into the community which helps the Community managers to manage the content accordingly
Some update on AI and Gen AI: Khoros communities did not shared any thoughts about their plans for putting these technology in community
On a scale of 1 to 10, I'd give Khoros Communities a solid 8. The system is extremely easy to use, enabling our team and community members to navigate and interact with the platform with ease. The wide range of features offered by Khoros Communities has greatly enriched our online interactions and improved the efficiency of our customer service. The technical support team has also been extremely helpful, could be quicker sometimes for answering our questions but they efficiently resolving any problems we have encountered. The platform is perfectly scalable, capable of handling our growing user base without any performance problems. What's more, Khoros Communities offers excellent integration capabilities with our other software tools, making our operations smoother and more efficient
Like every backend, it can always be improved upon. The excellent thing is that Khoros have a hugely active customer support community as well as a fantastic case management system to triage support issues and requests. So regardless of your level of knowledge or familiarity, you're well supported out of the box.
I've hardly ever seen downtime in any of their production communities. There's the occasional reboot needed for config reasons or if patches are applied, but these take place after customer approval and typically last only a few minutes.
I have not had to contact support frequently but when I have I used the chat and my questions were answered immediately. I've also used their knowledge center, help documentation and training videos which are all very thorough. The support we've received from our Customer Success Manager has been helpful as well.
They are responsive and proactive. They are really on top of things. They send personal emails to check in on you. It feels like they really know you. You only get emails from 3-4 people at Khoros – they must be customer assigned.
It was out of the box training - pre-recorded/ not live. There was nothing for more advanced topics like APIs. They do have a good knowledge base and community that you can access and folks in there are responsive. I would however like more advanced training options.
We were up against a hard stop with Jive’s contract ending and Khoros connected us with a deployment partner to do accelerated deployment using a template approach. It could have happened in 2 weeks. We did not end up going that way since we wanted more customization. Lithium handled technical stuff like migration, but a lot of the process is self-deployment. It’s one of the ways they teach use of the system is having the user self-implement.
Overall, the implementation was super easy to do. Doing single sign-on (SSO) was the only hard part. The implementation ended up taking nine weeks total, but in hindsight, we could have done in it six. Most of the implementation time was spent in course work, which consisted of on-demand training - approximately 7-8 hours that you are required for you to do, before they turn on the system. During this nine week period, about 50% of my time was spent on implementation.
We had a deployment manager who we were able to email 1-1. I leaned on him heavily. He was great at all hours, for example, they would call back at 7pm PST. They were very responsive.
Content migration strategy is important to consider. Moving from an existing community you need to strategically choose how your layout will be. Two different systems will have two different ways to format communities. For example, Jive has communities with sub-communities, whereas Khoros has community, category, and boards.
Contact migration is also an important consideration. You need to think through how you are going to move contacts from your old community to a new one. For example, are you going to create new logins and passwords? We were hoping to use the integration with Salesforce.com to be a portal, but ended up using an in-house solution that works well to maintain same the same logins. The next related question is are you going to be able to keep them connected to all the posts in your old community? We migrated old posts. If you have a tech-savvy team, you can do a self-migration. Khoros has a migration services team that we utilized. It cost us $10k to move content and posts were kept tied to the user.
The next consideration is your launch/promotion plan. Khoros helped us out and gave us a lot of examples. They shared pre-launch email dates, follow-up emails, FAQ pages (e.g. to explain why switching, why better).
Heap has a great value proposition and very nice user experience. But it lacks the clear funnel analysis that Gainsight PX provides. Plus Heap also does not have integration with a lot of CRMs and Customer data platforms. Also, Additionally if you go in the market to find Heap implementors or SI vendors, you won't find any.
Large companies and organizations with complex community needs are well served by Khoros communities. The platform's advanced analytics and reporting features helps organizations seeking deeper insights. The gamification is the best way to boost user engagement, Khoros Communities has a rich feature set. Also with customization options offered by Khoros Communities, companies can develop a unique and customized community experience.
I think I would give Khoros an overall 7, while there were things we really liked about it. I also saw things that just did not work well for us. We like using iG but it was not the friendliest in using it on that platform. Sometimes the software would glitch or lag which is not helpful during high critical moments
Allow us to integrate actual product usage with Salesforce.
Too much developer time went into it, especially when the premise was that this was mostly going to be handled by the Product team. This was mostly because the Gainsight PX event editor doesn't support more complex querying on events.
We are able to see what our different cohorts of customers are doing within the community, and we are able to create content and programs based on the engagement we get from these different groups.
We have been able to start an Idea Exchange space where our customers can share, vote, and comment on features they would like to see in our products. It quickly became a very popular place within the Community.
With the discussion forums, we are able to use the Accepted Solutions functions to help deflect tickets and Support interactions working on a 1-to-many scale.
