Community Platforms and Solutions
Community Platforms and Solutions Overview
Top Rated Community Products
These products won a Top Rated award for having excellent customer satisfaction ratings. The list is based purely on reviews; there is no paid placement, and analyst opinions do not influence the rankings. Read more about the Top Rated criteria.
Videos for Community Platforms and Solutions
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.
Community Products
(1-25 of 102) Sorted by Most Reviews
The list of products below is based purely on reviews (sorted from most to least). There is no paid placement and analyst opinions do not influence their rankings. Here is our Promise to Buyers to ensure information on our site is reliable, useful, and worthy of your trust.
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…
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.
The Salesforce Experience Cloud (formerly 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 communication and information sharing,…
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…
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,…
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…
Key Features
- Chat (16)98%9.8
- Notifications (15)91%9.1
- Discussions (16)90%9.0
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…
Thinkific headquartered in Vancouver provides their learning management 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.…
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.
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…
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…
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.
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…
Key Features
- Ticket creation and submission (7)88%8.8
- Organize and prioritize service tickets (7)77%7.7
- Ticket response (7)66%6.6
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.
The vendor presents OnSemble as more than an employee intranet that keeps everyone connected – but as a digital workplace that makes employees feel valued. OnSemble is designed to keep remote teams engaged, and acts as the culture champion for the organization. With no programming…
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.
Social Media Link headquartered in New York offers Vesta, a brand and customer advocacy solution built on the company's EngageTech platform.
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…
Hivebrite is an all-in-one community management and engagement platform designed for professional networks, education/corporate alumni, and nonprofits.
inSided is an enterprise-level community platform that integrates with a variety of business functions. The inSided platform is cloud-based and gives users a complete set of applications to build, integrate, and manage branded customer communities across digital touch points and…
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…
Website Toolbox is described by the vendor as the easiest way to create a community forum in the cloud. No coding, software, or servers required. They further state that their platform is fully customizable, has single sign on, can be embedded into a website with robust security…
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…
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…
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.
Community Platforms and Solutions Best Of Awards
The following Community Platforms offer award-winning customer relationships, feature sets, and value for price. Learn more about our Summer Best Of Awards methodology here.
Related Categories
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a Community Platform?
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