Community Platforms

Top Rated Community Platforms include: Higher Logic, Communifire by Axero Solutions, Lithium Online Communities, Salesforce Community Cloud, and Get Satisfaction.
Other Community Platforms on the TrustMap include: Vanilla Forums and Jive-x.
A complete list of Community Platforms is available here.

TrustMaps are two-dimensional charts that compare products based on satisfaction ratings and research frequency by prospective buyers. Products must have 9 or more ratings to appear on this TrustMap, and those above the median line are considered Top Rated.

Community Platforms Overview

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

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.

135 Ratings

20 Ratings

Higher Logic is a private community platform that empowers members, customers, support and product teams to create and manage meaningful, engaging online communities.

21 Ratings

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.

10 Ratings

Vanilla Forums is 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 Ratings

GetSatisfaction is primarily a customer engagement community platform. As such, it competes directly with Lithium and Jive. The platform also has a support function since it allows users to ask each other questions and also connect to a customer support agent. The product was acquired by Sprinkl...

9 Ratings

Axero's Communifire is an Enterprise Social and Collaboration platform. Used internally, it connects employees, key customers and partners to pursue shared goals. Used to build an online community, it puts the emphasis on working together, not just meeting socially. The platform, designed to enc...

10 Ratings

Igloo Software is a social business software company that builds online communities for businesses of any size. It is a suite of content management, collaboration and knowledge sharing tools within one secure social networking platform. Online communities drive groups, teams and organizations to ...

23 Ratings

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.

4 Ratings

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 clients acr...

4 Ratings

Intranet Connections is an instantly searchable, easy-to-use software platform that aims to boost productivity, collaboration and information sharing within the workplace. The company started in 1999 and how grown to connect over 100,000 users. The product offers a central location for employee...

5 Ratings

Ginger is a group discussion app for facilitating team communication and productivity. Some key features include: Threaded Discussions, File Sharing and Voting.

3 Ratings

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

1 Ratings

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.

3 Ratings

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

1 Ratings

In addition to being an intranet solution, OnSemble is also an employee collaboration and engagement platform that allows users to build an intranet without any programming. The vendor’s value proposition is that OnSemble empowers over 55,000+ people and organizations with increased productivity...