Centercode vs. Higher Logic Vanilla

It's not perfect but it definitely does its job and what its purpose for. The fact that we were able to access this globally and produce a great product after performing massive bera testing gave that "dev" feels eventhough we aren't. Seeing the cross comment add collaboration made it more intuitive because we were able to narrow down on the specifics of what we were actually testing

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

• One stop destination for managing all aspects of testing, including community, recruiting, feedback (bugs, suggestions, surveys).
• Easy way to communicate with testers and collect their feedback
• Customizability, I can customize the platform to address differences between products.

• 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

• Tag and attribute searching for forms, messages, and surveys
• Report graphics with large datasets
• More of a focus on B2B beta testing and not solely business to customer

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

Makes beta enjoyable.

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

Incentivized

Tony is amazing. I look forward to our interactions.

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

Centercode is better than Google Forms and Sheets for our use case of a long ongoing beta with participants rotating in and out 10000x times better. However, it might be a little too complex for what we needed. We may have been better off with something in the middle--a little more lightweight and cheaper.

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

• A project and beta testing that could've taken > 6 months or even years was cut down to a month and few weeks only
• Overall accessibility, ease of use, and security were right on the money
• Collaboration tools and features allowing everyone to innovate and spark great ideas and share it

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