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 improve lifetime value.
$599
per month
Higher Logic Vanilla
Score 6.0 out of 10
N/A
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
