Adobe Social vs. Khoros Communities

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Adobe Social
Score 6.3 out of 10
N/A
Adobe Social, incorporates technology from Context Optional and Efficient Frontier. Adobe acquired Facebook advertising-management platform Efficient Frontier in November. Six months earlier, Efficient Frontier had acquired Facebook page-management platform Context Optional. Adobe Social is an enterprise social platform competing with Buddy Media and Involver, enabling things like automated content marketing and social sweepstakes and competitions. Customers tend to be medium to large…N/A
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
Adobe SocialKhoros Communities
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Adobe SocialKhoros Communities
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsPricing is variable based on the needs of the customer.
More Pricing Information
Features
Adobe SocialKhoros Communities
Listening/monitoring
Comparison of Listening/monitoring features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Social
7.4
9 Ratings
3% below category average
Khoros Communities
-
Ratings
Boolean keyword searches7.58 Ratings00 Ratings
Filtering out noise/spam7.57 Ratings00 Ratings
Sentiment analysis7.58 Ratings00 Ratings
Broad channel coverage7.09 Ratings00 Ratings
Publishing
Comparison of Publishing features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Social
7.4
9 Ratings
7% below category average
Khoros Communities
-
Ratings
Content planning and scheduling7.09 Ratings00 Ratings
Audience targeting7.58 Ratings00 Ratings
Content optimization7.59 Ratings00 Ratings
Workflow management7.59 Ratings00 Ratings
Engagement
Comparison of Engagement features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Social
7.7
8 Ratings
5% below category average
Khoros Communities
-
Ratings
Automated routing and prioritization7.58 Ratings00 Ratings
Customer interaction histories8.08 Ratings00 Ratings
Bulk actions7.58 Ratings00 Ratings
Marketing
Comparison of Marketing features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Social
8.0
8 Ratings
4% above category average
Khoros Communities
-
Ratings
Lead generation8.07 Ratings00 Ratings
Content marketing8.08 Ratings00 Ratings
Paid media management8.07 Ratings00 Ratings
Campaigns and promotions8.08 Ratings00 Ratings
Channel coverage/integration
Comparison of Channel coverage/integration features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Social
7.9
9 Ratings
7% below category average
Khoros Communities
-
Ratings
Twitter8.08 Ratings00 Ratings
Facebook8.09 Ratings00 Ratings
LinkedIn7.57 Ratings00 Ratings
Google+7.09 Ratings00 Ratings
Instagram8.57 Ratings00 Ratings
Pinterest8.04 Ratings00 Ratings
YouTube8.07 Ratings00 Ratings
Reporting/analytics
Comparison of Reporting/analytics features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Social
7.8
9 Ratings
1% below category average
Khoros Communities
-
Ratings
Campaign success analytics8.09 Ratings00 Ratings
Real-time tracking7.58 Ratings00 Ratings
Competitor analysis8.08 Ratings00 Ratings
Account management
Comparison of Account management features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Social
7.3
8 Ratings
11% below category average
Khoros Communities
-
Ratings
Role-based user permissions & privileges7.58 Ratings00 Ratings
Mobile access7.07 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Adobe SocialKhoros Communities
Small Businesses
Publer
Publer
Score 9.8 out of 10
PowerDMS by NEOGOV
PowerDMS by NEOGOV
Score 9.6 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Social Suite by Reputation.com
Social Suite by Reputation.com
Score 9.3 out of 10
PowerDMS by NEOGOV
PowerDMS by NEOGOV
Score 9.6 out of 10
Enterprises
Social Suite by Reputation.com
Social Suite by Reputation.com
Score 9.3 out of 10
Salesforce Experience Cloud
Salesforce Experience Cloud
Score 8.4 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Adobe SocialKhoros Communities
Likelihood to Recommend
7.5
(16 ratings)
8.4
(97 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
5.4
(11 ratings)
5.7
(7 ratings)
Usability
8.5
(4 ratings)
5.0
(3 ratings)
Availability
7.0
(1 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Performance
5.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.0
(3 ratings)
5.4
(5 ratings)
In-Person Training
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
Online Training
6.0
(1 ratings)
4.5
(2 ratings)
Implementation Rating
5.0
(1 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
8.3
(88 ratings)
User Testimonials
Adobe SocialKhoros Communities
Likelihood to Recommend
Adobe
I used Adobe Social when I use to have my own business on social media. After many months I was having no success in finding the correct clients for my products. Using Adobe Social I was able to market and discover different ways of searching for the correct clients and later on helped my business grow.
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Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
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.
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Pros
Adobe
  • Adobe Social lacks strengths, as I believe Adobe themselves have acknowledged, given their decision not to continue support or development. But if I need to list three strengths, the first would be it can publish to some social media platforms with a success rate of over 50%. If that's a strength.
  • It has workflow processes, but they are over-complicated and poorly designed.
  • It has some basic analytics, but Adobe consultants usually recommend referring to Adobe Analytics instead. Which is great if you actually use Adobe Analytics.
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Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
  • Increase in suggestions from our clients to know what we should improve.
  • Reduce technical support costs and incredibly increase sales.
  • It helps to interact with customers and we receive positive and negative reviews and based on their comments we can make changes that increase sales.
Read full review
Cons
Adobe
  • It would be great if Adobe scheduled video uploads for Twitter.
  • A time change in a social post automatically puts the post back to Level 1 of approvals. It can be a big hassle to have to start the process over for such a small change.
  • Adobe uses a different algorithm to measure engagement our company does. It would be great to upload your own algorithm into Adobe.
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Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
  • 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
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Likelihood to Renew
Adobe
I wasn't in charge of making the actual management decision, but I would absolutely renew Adobe Social. As I mentioned, it provides strong and in-depth analytics and listening tools. The reports that it generates are very thorough and easy to read. I loved the platform and would recommend it to anyone
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Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
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
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Usability
Adobe
The reason why I give this rating is that the overall platform is simple to use. You don't need to be tech-savvy or have a vast understanding of how to work a marketing tool. It is very simple to use compared to different platforms and you learn a lot of different ways to build your business.
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Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
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.
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Reliability and Availability
Adobe
No answers on this topic
Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
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.
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Support Rating
Adobe
The reason why I give this a 9 out of 10 in terms of support is because of the mobile app functionality. I have had many issues in terms of logging in and also loading pages. The app overall is easy to use but at what cost? Other than that it is great and I still enjoy Adobe Social.
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Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
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.
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In-Person Training
Adobe
No answers on this topic
Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
I think it is engaging and has good instructors.
Read full review
Online Training
Adobe
Training was long and a little confusing. While a number of features carried over, they were still covered in this elongated training. It would have been nice to have training tailored to experience level with the product.
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Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
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.
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Implementation Rating
Adobe
The implementation was done during our POC. We had a very mixed experience here, and have had some issues arise since based on the way the tool was implemented. An Adobe employee went ahead and made a change to our account that was unauthorized (helpful for our implementation) which caused issues in on boarding another team who needed the same change, but could not get it done without costly Adobe certification
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Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
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).
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Alternatives Considered
Adobe
Hootsuite Enterprise is superior in many ways, but the biggest factor is probably that it is constantly evolving and adding new features, working directly with social media companies ahead of new releases. Adobe seems to have stopped developing their product.
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Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
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.
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Scalability
Adobe
No answers on this topic
Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
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
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Return on Investment
Adobe
  • Although we chose Adobe Social believing it could provide ROI metrics we could not get elsewhere, that turned out not to be the case. Site Catalyst can give us everything we need without Adobe Social
  • Adobe Social did not create greater efficiencies and speed up our activity within social media. In fact, it has done the oppposite. It is very cumbersome with little clear benefit.
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Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
  • 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.
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ScreenShots

Khoros Communities Screenshots

Screenshot of Community helped generate a 4.2/5 customer satisfaction rating for Consorsbank.Screenshot of Samsung saw support savings up 255% YOY and growing. Their community drives 60% of SEO traffic.Screenshot of Microsoft has seen $2M+ in SEO value and $145M case deflection savings since adopting community.Screenshot of Sony Europe generates $4M in value and 7M searches per monthScreenshot of Syndicate community content throughout digital channels to better engage your audience.Screenshot of On-demand, peer-generated questions and answers to increase prospect and customer engagement.