Circle Community Platform vs. Jive-x (Discontinued) vs. SoundCloud

Circle offers all the main functionalities that are needed to build a Community from scratch. It is very easy to set up even for someone like me with ZERO technical skills. I really enjoy managing the Community on Circle as it is very intuitive and smooth and doesn't require a lot of time to learn of to work around it

Jive-x is great for external communities for support deflection or customer communication and document sharing/editing. If you spend the money on the available add-ons and integrations, you could use it for customer education/learning. It's less appropriate for use as a revenue -generating tool or a lead-generating platform.

• Community Engagement, connection and communication
• Courses
• Payments
• Channels/Spaces to specific topics and conversations

Incentivized

• I write these from the perspective of the Community Manager - You can choose your level of moderation on Jive to match the policies of your organisation. From full on content pre-moderation to to completely reactive moderation, you can take your pick. We chose the latter end of the spectrum, trust your colleagues to be professional and you will be rewarded with professional content.
• The ability for users to set up their own groups very easily with out the need to revert to developers is great as this allows individuality. This allows for organic growth with out impact on the budgets of departments and teams to get their work done on Jive. The option is always there to get 'someone in to fancy it up a bit' however you will find that your own people will develop those skills themselves. Your users will also learn from each other and you should actively encourage stealing of best practice from across your organisation.
• The knowledge repository or Question and Answer features are the most value-adding for me. Having searchable history that allows your to get answers quickly so the next question can be asked is the reason why you should have a collaboration platform in the first place, Jive makes that easy.
• Single Sign On has been a excellent addition for us, if Jive does not make your colleagues lives easier then they won't use it.
• You can customize and brand Jive to reflect your company identity.

• Deeper analytics and more customization in metric views
• More accurate tracking for invite links (Not just clicks; actual joining would be useful)

Incentivized

• No QA environment. It's cloud-based so you need to purchase another instance to set up a QA environment.
• The gamification system is not as user intuitive as you'd expect. The admin spends more time setting up opportunities than they should need to.
• Jive-x was bought out by three different companies in the last 2 years. There is an uncertainty of how long it will be supported and updated.

Incentivized

For a large company the cost can quickly escalate so this must taken into account when renewing. For me, the decision to review will be taken with upgrading to the cloud version in mind as well. My power users love Jive for it versatility but it is important to note that you must be prepared to constantly train and coach the non-power users

Overall, great. Platform could be easier to navigate.

Incentivized

The end user should be able to find what they need. They don't even need to be logged in to search for content.

Incentivized

It works wonders. My only gripe would be that there are some customizations you can't make without hiring a vendor with coding experience to implement them.

Incentivized

The support has been fantastic when we have been trying to code our own apps. Jive have went above and beyond what was required to help us out. Bugs fixes are generally very good and they are upfront when they are unable to help or a 'problem' is actually in need of Professional Services

It was the easiest to set up and it was suggested by a lot of people as the best one for my needs! I have zero previous experience about building a community so I tried to listen to suggestions of ppl with more experience than myself. So far it has been a good choice

For the money, it just happens to fit best with our original use case. Now that it's been sold to Aurea, which essentially halted any support or dev for the product before selling it off to Lithium, we will have to eventually move off of it (this assumes Lithium won't hire devs for code they didn't build, and that's not a bad assumption). So, while I recommend it, it's with the caveat that it's been sold and will be evolving in the near future.

• $500 a month, instead of needing several different platforms to do the things I need, Circle does most of them.

Incentivized

• Hard to quantify the results...but I also left the company before we had built a mature instance of Jive in-house so the final results/impact were yet to be fully realized and measured.
• The use of Jive brought together multiple-departments for the first time in our 50+ year old company to truly build an "end-to-end" approach to our marketing/sales/fulfillment/customer service engine. It was truly phenomenal to watch how the internal life-cycle of a prospect-turned-customer literally transformed and unified our inter-departmental teams through the use of Jive Engage.

Incentivized