Community Platforms and Solutions

TrustRadius Top Rated for 2023

Top Rated Products

(1-3 of 3)

1
Influitive

AdvocateHub helps B2B marketers capture customer enthusiasm and use it to drive marketing and sales efforts. With AdvocateHub, B2B marketers build an advocate community and invite customers into it to complete “challenges” like referrals, reference calls or product reviews. As they…

2
Khoros Communities

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.

3
Verint Community

Verint Community (Telligent) is a community and collaboration software platform developed by Telligent Systems and was first released in 2004. Telligent's focus was on offering a platform that can be integrated and extended, but this requires technical expertise. Verint acquired…

All Products

(1-25 of 200)

1
Influitive

AdvocateHub helps B2B marketers capture customer enthusiasm and use it to drive marketing and sales efforts. With AdvocateHub, B2B marketers build an advocate community and invite customers into it to complete “challenges” like referrals, reference calls or product reviews. As they…

2
PowerDMS by NEOGOV

PowerDMS by NEOGOV is a software platform designed to recruit, train, equip, and protect employees across their careers, used for policy management, community engagement, and staff scheduling.

3
Khoros Communities

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.

Explore recently added products

4
Salesforce Experience Cloud

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement (formerly Salesforce Experience Cloud or Salesforce Community Cloud) is an online forum powered by Salesforce that enables businesses to connect with their employees, customers, partner organizations, and prospects. Designed to help facilitate…

5
Verint Community

Verint Community (Telligent) is a community and collaboration software platform developed by Telligent Systems and was first released in 2004. Telligent's focus was on offering a platform that can be integrated and extended, but this requires technical expertise. Verint acquired…

6
UUKI

A community platform for creators to build meaningful relationships with content, discussions and events under a brand. UUKI enables users to: -Give an audience a destination to interact with each other, engage in discussion with rich text and media. -Create beautiful event…

7
Higher Logic Thrive

Higher Logic Thrive is a private community platform that empowers members, customers, support and product teams to create and manage meaningful, engaging online communities. The solution is designed to keep users coming back. They can find support, best practices, peer-to-peer connections,…

8
Discord

Discord is an app designed to connect users with communities over voice, video, and text chat, via Discord servers, a gaming and game industry oriented app for growing communities around video games and allowing developers to communicate with their customer base; the app may yet…

9
Thinkific

Thinkific headquartered in Vancouver provides their system for online course and content creators to distribute their lessons to unlimited students, featuring content schedule distribution, some marketing features, certifications, as well as quizzes and surveys.

10
Higher Logic Vanilla

Higher Logic Vanilla is a customizable and themable forum software. It can be used for support communities, Q&A Communities and more. There are numerous integrations, including SSO, and connectors to popular software such as Mailchimp, WordPress, Zendesk and Salesforce.

11
Bettermode

Tribe is a community platform that integrates social touchpoints across the user journey. It helps brands and creators to build online communities with complete customization capability and data ownership to drive customer engagement, improve retention rate, collect feedback, and…

12
Igloo

Igloo Software is a social business software company that builds digital workplaces and intranet solutions to support online communities and businesses of any size. It is a suite of content management, collaboration and knowledge sharing tools within one secure social networking…

13
Centercode

Centercode Connect is a hosted software platform that provides all of the tools needed to run a beta program: recruiting, NDA management, product distribution, surveys, bug reports, forums, reporting, and more.

14
ServiceNow Customer Service Management

Built on the Now Platform, ServiceNow offers their Customer Service Management solution through the Standard and Professional Customer Service Management bundles. Both include agent workspace, knowledge management, survey and assessment module, and the community module, oriented…

15
SchoolMessenger

SchoolMessenger, a West Corporation solution managed by West Education, the company's education unit, is a school community software featuring secure email, social media monitoring, school website, and mobile app.

16
Nconnect

Nconnect (formerly OnSemble Intranet) is an mployee intranet that keeps everyone connected, a digital workplace to make employees feel valued. It is designed to keep remote teams engaged, and acts as the culture champion for the organization.

17
Jive-x (Discontinued)

Jive-x (formerly Jive Engage) is Jive's external facing community platform for prospects and customers. It is a leading product in the space and most often competes with Lithium Community and Telligent Community.

18
CommUnity by Personify

Small World Labs Community is a hosted collaboration and social networking platform with easy drag & drop modification capabilities. Small World Labs offers implementation and community engagement services, plus an open API for integration with other systems. Small World Labs has…

19
Discourse

Discourse is an open-source community management and moderation product.

20
Raklet Community & Membership Management Software

Raklet enables communities to meet, network and grow. Community management platform that helps users build brand engagement and opportunities, fully branded to match company colors. Users can: - Organize and enrich member database with Raklet CRM - Build custom forms and pages…

21
Hivebrite

Hivebrite is an all-in-one community management and engagement platform designed for professional networks, education/corporate alumni, and nonprofits.

22
Gainsight Digital Hub

Gainsight Digital Hub is a centralized destination that brings customers, resources, and products together. The hub helps users to engage, retain, and delight customers by unifying customer resources, leveraging dynamic search and AI capabilities, building an influential user community,…

23
Answerbase

Answerbase is a knowledge management platform for customer support and e-commerce, allowing users to ask questions, receive quality answers, and browse content and articles to meet their demand for information about your products and services. Each system comes with administration…

24
Schoolbox

Because learners thrive in a connected community.Schoolbox is an integrated, all-in-one learning management system (LMS), community portal, and engagement platform for K-12 schools.Schoolbox is designed to present a robust solution that connects the entire school community, and drives…

25
PeopleOne

PeopleOne is a digital workspace software solution that aims to boost employee productivity. As a mobile centric intranet solution for O365 users, it integrates all an employee's digital tools into a single place. With it, the vendor says teams are empowered to do their best work…

Videos for Community Platforms and Solutions

The Community Software Ecosystem
04:21
Discover the five types of online community software in under five minutes. We cover: social networks, instant messaging platforms, forums, event tools, and wildcards
Be SMART With Your Brand's Buyer Experience. (Using Khoros, Gainsight, Genesys, or Sprinklr)
05:43
In this video, we're going to be discussing the importance of buyer experience and how you can optimize it using Sprinklr, Gainsight, Genesys, or Khoros.

Community Platforms and Solutions TrustMap

TrustMaps are two-dimensional charts that compare products based on trScore and research frequency by prospective buyers. Products must have 10 or more ratings to appear on this TrustMap.

Learn More About Community Platforms and Solutions

What are Community Platforms?

Community Platforms manage the process of creating and maintaining a space for productive discussion among community members. Members can share their thoughts, ideas, and concerns. This process is sometimes referred to as "community engagement."

Key Use Cases for Community Platforms

  • Support community for self-help and peer or expert advice
  • Ideation
  • Private social networking
  • Gauge customer satisfaction
  • Identify customer advocates
  • Increase customer/employee engagement
  • Distribute community news and updates
  • Generate content with programs like community blogging

Mature communities deliver business value in a variety of ways. They increase engagement, address support issues and pain points, measure satisfaction, and build stronger relationships. Platforms may support external communities, internal communities, or both. These benefits apply to both customer and employee communities.

There are different types of community platforms, including open source options for community managers who want to develop their own platform. Some SMB-focused community platforms focus on one aspect of community, like Q&A, ideation, or link sharing. Enterprise-grade community platforms are more feature-rich. They might include complex, hierarchal capabilities like multi-tiered advocacy programs with moderator permissions.

Factors to Consider When Selecting a Community Platform Solution

It is important to consider whether membership will be explicit and exclusive so that the community is open to registered members only.

In order to determine how employees or customers are likely to engage with a community platform, some community managers set up a free community platform or private social network group to run a testing phase.

Community Platforms vs. Help Desk Software, CMS, and Collaboration Tools

Community management tools have some overlap with help desk software, which often includes community features like Q&A for self-help. Some community platforms integrate with help desk systems.

There is also overlap with content management systems (CMS), especially in heavily moderated external communities, where posts/articles by advocates and experts might be promoted and shared elsewhere.

Some community platforms, especially for internal communities, may overlap with collaboration tools as well. Collaboration tools tend to be more focused on one-on-one interactions between users, and on getting projects done (via file sharing, etc.). Community interactions are more often one-to-many and focused on help, general engagement, feedback, and ideation.

Gamification

Gamification is a strategy in which points, rules, and competition are used to increase engagement. Some community platforms use game dynamics to incentivize and reward member participation.

Community Moderation

Moderation is a system for controlling potential abuse of the community platform. Moderation is important because fear of defamation is one of the biggest obstacles to creating an external community. For some companies promoting the voice of the customer feels risky.

There are two approaches to moderation: curating users (like restricting membership or blocking/reporting certain members) or curating content.

Most community platforms allow administrators to act as moderators. Some have more advanced hierarchical systems for moderation. These allow administrators to grant certain members moderator permissions.

Content curation includes restricting content access, removing content, editing content, or responding to content. This is often a top-down reaction to member contributions. It can also involve broader community participation such as voting on, rating and reporting content.

Pricing Information

There are many providers of collaboration software spanning a wide range of capabilities from very inexpensive products designed for small teams, to highly sophisticated enterprise products. Enterprise-level systems cost in the region of $100 per user per month, with price breaks for high numbers of users.

Related Categories

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Community Platform?

Community Platforms combine a suite of services enabling the creation, management, and utilization of spaces for sharing between connected users. A common example would be a brand's presentation of a forum composed of administrators and end-users discussing a product or topic. These spaces can be a one-stop portal for receiving or providing information, advice, or additional assistance. Organizations administering these platforms can leverage the maintenance of these spaces to relate with consumers, foster positive sentiment, respond to inquiries, and gather data on engagement.

Who uses Community Platform software?

As the Community Platform category of software represents how software rises to meet the needs of online customer management, it reveals the composition of organizations and individuals that are responding to the demands around those key use cases.

Typically these tools are used by:

  • Community managers
  • Customer support
  • Marketers


Why use Community Platform Software?

More and larger concentrations of people have formed networks that pervade the internet, and brands have responded by formulating a way to participate in those same communication dynamics, meeting customers where they are. An effective community platform can enable a direct line to interactions and contributions with consumers that may improve product awareness, generate additional content, promote mastery, and encourage loyalty. They also facilitate data intelligence on common requests and user behaviors.