Answerbase vs. Higher Logic Vanilla

We implemented a Q&A board since we felt this would be the best way to create high quality content for our team when discussing the next sales strategy process. Really aids customers who have purchased a product from our company to navigate any problems they experience as they can seamlessly check the community question board Increases networking opportunities

Incentivized

For companies that want to customize almost anything and make the forum look like your site, Vanilla Forums is the one for you. Customization and automation of the data via the API with other systems is more than possible and they serve to be great as a hosting provider, dealing with all the upgrades, deployments and maintenance and threat management well. I would say they might be less turn key for a small application but the fact they have an open source community, the ability to find help and information can lower the barrier of entry for most.

Incentivized

• Increases your team to collaborate with each other as you are available to post questions that more people can answer to express and opinion or idea
• Browse existing community pages to see if your question has been answered
• Allows you to share relevant documents with specific staff
• Excellent customer service support team that are always on hand to help

Incentivized

• Gamification: The ability to incentivise community members to get involved with ranks and badges is one of the main reasons that we purchased the tool.
• Support: The Vanilla support team are incredible, often responding to issues very late at night and proactively fixing issues as soon as they occur.
• Customisation: Vanilla can be completely styled with css allowing us to match it to the branding of the rest of our website.

Incentivized

• Onboarding checklist would be a great addition as setting up can be complicated

Incentivized

• There are some features I wish Vanilla would implement that could improve ease of use in our specific community, but some of the ideas we have are not necessarily something that would benefit all of the forums that Vanilla works with.
• In the past, we've had issues with releases breaking some of our specific site features they built for us, but this has improved drastically recently.

Incentivized

It is very intuitive and simple to operate. Our customers immediately came up with the curve and began contributing content.

Incentivized

They did an amazing job transferring our content from GetSatisfaction. We had almost 100% success in the transfer of 8 years worth of content.

Incentivized

Just from a personal viewpoint, I feel that the ease of use with Answerbase is amazing and with first class customer service support team, that could not be more friendlier and helpful. The decision was easy and they designed specific requirements that met our needs. It has really complemented our workforce and saved time.

Incentivized

From a footprint standpoint, Vanilla has less technical bloat than vbulletin or InVision, and it outdoes Lithium as far as features and service go. The bloat of other services and ability to use new ways of engaging communities such as through Reactions are part of the reason Vanilla was selected. However, the features are better on a couple more seasoned platforms and more equipped to deal with issues and technical problems.

Incentivized

• Increased collaboration in the workplace
• Saved time on staff asking the same questions
• Provides customers a 'live' community to liaise with

Incentivized

• Increased uptime and overall speed in the forum (compared to our previous phpbb solution)
• Increased usage by users which resulted in a higher pages/session in a short amount of time

Incentivized