Discord vs. Higher Logic Vanilla

Personally, Discord is a great tool to create online communities for your company or product, especially when our target audience is young. I would not consider it appropriate to use this tool for people over a certain age, nor would it be suitable for companies of considerable size.

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

• Discord allows easy setup of servers for specific groups.
• Discord allows one-on-one private messaging as well as group communication.
• Discord is easy to install and setup for any age group.

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

• Recovery when servers are down.
• Better Nitro Deals.
• Better bot enabling for going live - Slow sometimes or doesn't work in certain discords.

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

I can't really say much on this. It's extremely easy to use, it's very logical and intuitive, and very easy to install and set-up. Even the settings menus make sense even to nonliterate IT people.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

I would give it a 10 rating because it absolutely deserves it. Discord has made things like keeping in touch extremely easy for people. Anywhere from gamers, businessmen and even family calls are all a part of this fantastic application. The ease of access of being able to jump in a room with your friends and talk to them is amazing

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

Discord has better features and it gets updated constantly with new features. It gets popular everyday and the number of people using Discord gets increased. Discord has a better interface that is easy to use, it doesn't make you confused. Better voice and video quality. The most important part is the communities, there are thousands of different communities.

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

• Discord has been such a bonus to our productivity. Instead of sending meeting links and starting lengthy email threads, we were able to quickly hop on a call with other people and get things done!
• Some colleagues had to change their PCs as Discord was messing up their system due to the heavy system load.

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