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Bettermode vs. Khoros Communities vs. Higher Logic Vanilla

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Bettermode

    Score9.2 out of 10
    N/ATribe 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 improve lifetime value.

    $599

    per month

    Khoros Communities

    Score8.2 out of 10
    Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
    Khoros Communities is a fully-featured community platform, built for self-service support, education and collaboration. Organizations can host a vibrant space where customers can find answers, develop expertise, share experiences, and connect with their brand.N/A

    Higher Logic Vanilla

    Score5.5 out of 10
    N/AHigher 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.N/A
    Pricing
    BettermodeKhoros CommunitiesHigher Logic Vanilla
    Editions & Modules
    Advanced
    $599.00
    per month
    Enterprise
    Contact us
    No answers on this topic
    Essential
    Contact sales team
    Corporate
    Contact sales team
    Enterprise
    Contact sales team
    Enterprise Plus
    Contact sales team
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    BettermodeKhoros CommunitiesHigher Logic Vanilla
    Free Trial
    YesNoYes
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNoYes
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    YesYesYes
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details—Pricing is variable based on the needs of the customer.—
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    BettermodeKhoros CommunitiesHigher Logic Vanilla
    Considered Multiple Products
    Bettermode Inc
    Chose Bettermode
    Tribe has a modern design and better customizability. In terms of cost, it is much efficient to scale as your community grows.
    Incentivized
    Chose Bettermode
    Khoros Communities & Discourse blow Tribe so out of the water.
    Incentivized
    Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
    Chose Khoros Communities
    Khoros was the best use for our needs and other solutions were always missing at least one or more features that were crucial for our use case and the workaround proposed by other platforms weren't simply enough. Most of them have their strong side and it is hard to say, which …
    Incentivized
    Chose Khoros Communities
    I evaluated several different community platforms when Jive-x was being discontinued and ultimately chose Khoros as it had much more customization options compared to the other platforms out there. It also seemed to be the most robust and powerful, had the most features, and …
    Incentivized
    Chose Khoros Communities
    Khoros was a better solution and we had a better commercial proposal.
    Incentivized
    Chose Khoros Communities
    WordPress, Guild, tribe - all have pros and cons vs Khoros. The primary concern of Khoros vs other platforms is cost. For the price difference, Khoros *should* be a no-brainer choice. No one should ever consider using any platform other than Khoros... so why do people consider …
    Incentivized
    Chose Khoros Communities
    A lot of small and key features which are not available on other platforms
    Incentivized
    Chose Khoros Communities
    • Khoros had a clear migration path for Jive users.
    • Khoros is a platform that can scale.
    • Khoros allows us to spread and share knowledge while allowing us to continue to build trust and credibility with all our loyal fans.
    Incentivized
    Higher Logic
    Chose Higher Logic Vanilla
    Most of all we could customize the forum to look and feel like an extension of our existing web properties. This makes the forum feel more native to the users coming from or being redirected to the forum. We also had plans of being able to create custom badges we could grant …
    Incentivized
    Chose Higher Logic Vanilla
    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 …
    Incentivized
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    71%
    Would buy again
    5 Answers
    95%
    Would buy again
    70 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Delivers good value for the price
    86%
    Delivers good value for the price
    6 Answers
    98%
    Delivers good value for the price
    48 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Happy with the feature set
    86%
    Happy with the feature set
    6 Answers
    86%
    Happy with the feature set
    64 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    86%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    6 Answers
    89%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    31 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation went as expected
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    7 Answers
    81%
    Implementation went as expected
    38 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Best Alternatives
    BettermodeKhoros CommunitiesHigher Logic Vanilla
    Small Businesses
    Higher Logic Thrive
    Score8.9 out of 10
    Higher Logic Thrive
    Score8.9 out of 10
    Higher Logic Thrive
    Score8.9 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    Higher Logic Vanilla
    Score5.5 out of 10
    Higher Logic Vanilla
    Score5.5 out of 10
    Khoros Communities
    Score8.2 out of 10
    Enterprises
    Verint Community
    Score10 out of 10
    Verint Community
    Score10 out of 10
    Verint Community
    Score10 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    BettermodeKhoros CommunitiesHigher Logic Vanilla
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.0
    (8 ratings)
    8.4
    (95 ratings)
    9.0
    (10 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    -
    (0 ratings)
    4.2
    (8 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    Usability
    9.1
    (3 ratings)
    8.0
    (3 ratings)
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    Availability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Performance
    9.1
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Support Rating
    8.8
    (4 ratings)
    5.0
    (5 ratings)
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    In-Person Training
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Online Training
    -
    (0 ratings)
    4.5
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.0
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    9.1
    (2 ratings)
    9.0
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.6
    (86 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    BettermodeKhoros CommunitiesHigher Logic Vanilla
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Bettermode Inc
    During COVID-19 Tribe [Community Platform] allowed non-profit organizations to utilize the premium features for free which was a great benefit. It has helped us utilize our community in order to answer questions rather than having an abundance of support tickets. Tribe [Community Platform] needs to increase spam filters and bot accounts however, as many of the community's are overrun with them. I manually remove these accounts each week.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Higher Logic
    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
    Read full review
    Pros
    Bettermode Inc
    • Straightforward setup and configuration
    • Embeddable widgets to add community experience directly inside the site
    • Cost effective compared to other products based on the available features
    • Dedicated and super responsive account managers
    • Relatively easy integration using the API
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Higher Logic
    • 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
    Read full review
    Cons
    Bettermode Inc
    • Terrible user experience (especially on mobile), way too overclutered
    • Restricted to Tribe's default layout
    • You have to pay $85/m - $249/m to get access to apps, support and remove Tribe logo
    • Looks pretty old and works rather slowly
    Read full review
    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
    Read full review
    Higher Logic
    • 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
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    Bettermode Inc
    No answers on this topic
    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
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Higher Logic
    No answers on this topic
    Usability
    Bettermode Inc
    Tribe Community Platform is inspired by modern social networks. The team behind Tribe Community Platform has carefully studied the user behavior on online networks to add the best practices to their platform.
    Read full review
    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.
    Read full review
    Higher Logic
    It is very intuitive and simple to operate. Our customers immediately came up with the curve and began contributing content.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Reliability and Availability
    Bettermode Inc
    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.
    Read full review
    Higher Logic
    No answers on this topic
    Performance
    Bettermode Inc
    It is fast, easy to configure, and does what it promises. Also, the pricing based on monthly active users is great in comparison to other solution who simply charge based on the registered users.
    Read full review
    Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
    No answers on this topic
    Higher Logic
    No answers on this topic
    Support Rating
    Bettermode Inc
    The Support and Success team have been highly responsive, in general, most of the queries get answered within a day (sometimes even a few hours). They helped us immensely with brainstorming and suggesting the best practices to set up the community for success during our onboarding period. Some of our suggestions to add certain features were well-accepted and the product team worked on them to solve the issues.
    Read full review
    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.
    Read full review
    Higher Logic
    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
    Read full review
    In-Person Training
    Bettermode Inc
    No answers on this topic
    Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
    I think it is engaging and has good instructors.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Higher Logic
    No answers on this topic
    Online Training
    Bettermode Inc
    No answers on this topic
    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.
    Read full review
    Higher Logic
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation Rating
    Bettermode Inc
    No answers on this topic
    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).
    Read full review
    Higher Logic
    No answers on this topic
    Alternatives Considered
    Bettermode Inc
    It's easy to use and also many of my colleagues recommend Tribe Community Platform which can help us to engage with more of our audience easily.
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Higher Logic
    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
    Read full review
    Scalability
    Bettermode Inc
    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
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Higher Logic
    No answers on this topic
    Return on Investment
    Bettermode Inc
    • Better search presence via user-generated content.
    • Powerful customer engagement.
    • Self-service (deflecting support tickets).
    • Feedback collection.
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Higher Logic
    • 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
    Read full review
    ScreenShots

    Bettermode Screenshots

    Screenshot of Software companies can connect customers, promote self-service, and engage customers to drive customer success.Screenshot of Customers can share product ideas, discuss, and get product updates.Screenshot of Supports customer education and product adoption.Screenshot of Responsive design to offer the same community experience across devices.Screenshot of Spaces are designed to categorize content and bring members closer.

    Khoros Communities Screenshots

    Screenshot of the Khoros Communities solution, and some of its tools available to build an enterprise-class online community and scale member engagement.Screenshot of discussions, which can be enabled to connect product experts and brand-enthusiasts through peer-to-peer discussions. Both newbies and experienced users can read, post, and easily respond in forums.Screenshot of where community members can submit, vote on, and discuss ideas to improve products, and share insights, all while driving engagement, and building brand loyalty. Idea boards deliver value for product managers, marketers and customers.Screenshot of events, that provide a platform to schedule, announce, inform, and discuss everything from the smallest group gathering to the largest user conference. These community-hosted activities harness the enthusiasm generated by interactions between members, company, and brand ambassadors and foster deeper connections with audiences. Users can integrate Zoom meetings and webinars within the community, or host live-stream video outside the community with URL links to any video hosting platform like YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook or others.Screenshot of where to design a brand-approved community without custom code. It includes expert-created templates and a drag-and-drop interface to customize page layouts, navigation, and brand themes.Screenshot of some of the dashboards, reports, and benchmark data used to track visitors, usage, trending topics, interaction preferences, and agent responsiveness.

    Higher Logic Vanilla Screenshots

    Screenshot of Looks great on any device, including desktop, tablet or mobile device.Screenshot of We offer over 60 plugins that can add functionality to your community.Screenshot of Many different themes to choose from, which you can further customize as you like.Screenshot of You have full access to edit HTML and CSS of your theme, to make any changes you need.