Common Room vs. Higher Logic Vanilla

For the price, I think Common Room does an okay job of ABM tracking and account identification. Similar software is 2x the price. So it can be a great place to start and figure out your needs before diving into something more complicated

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

• Data aggregation
• Signal capture
• Marketing campaign engagement

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

• Setting up different saved search plays to find our ICP
• More help within the customer success team so help us set up prospecting plays
• "keyword" searches

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 hard to learn to use. Names of features are really unclear. I needed way more training in order to get value out of the platform, especially for actually executing on the tools and data

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

I chose to go with Common Room because of the depth of reporting and data that it gives a seller about their accounts. While it doesn't have some of the out of the box marketing functionality, the goal of these types of customer intelligence platforms is to give sellers a leg up, so seller information is more important that out of the box marketing info

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

• Has brought in many more outbound booked meetings
• Didn't really work for tracking the inbound process
• Tracked to the location and minute where people were viewing your website

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