Discourse is a community management and moderation product.
$20
per month
Higher Logic Thrive
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Higher Logic Thrive is a private community platform that empowers members, customers, support and product teams to create and manage meaningful, engaging online communities. The solution is designed to keep users coming back. They can find support, best practices, peer-to-peer connections, resources, events, and networking, all in one destination.
N/A
Raklet Community & Membership Management Software
Score 9.0 out of 10
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)
Raklet enables communities to meet, network and grow. Community management platform that helps users build brand engagement and opportunities, fully branded to match company colors. Users can: - Organize and enrich member database with Raklet CRM - Build custom forms and pages - Communicate via the app, text or email - Collect payments online (product & ticket sales, membership, donations, ...) - Simplify event management - Advance reporting - Create a…
[Discourse is by] far the best online forum platform in the industry. It may be a little pricey for people looking for a cheap option for their hobby forum, but for any type of business that relies on a forum, the pricing is more than fair.
Higher Logic works very well for our business purposes. We can very easily create new communities when we need to (and this is often!). Our association isn't as concerned with driving engagement, but the tools Higher Logic provides allows us to take a closer look at the engagement level of our committee members when needed
Raklet Membership Management Software is most suitable for membership-based organizations like ourselves. If you want to create different membership plans and restrict some of the content for your paid members, Raklet can definitely be helpful. Also, our members were never this engaged before we decided on the solution. The membership management is off the hook; we can see all the activities of our members, and we don't need to manually correct their information, as they are able to update themselves. But if you want to sell physical goods to your members, you would need to use another marketing base besides Raklet Membership Management Software. We were able to go through, as we restricted some pages only to our paid members.
User Privileges : Teams, Trust Levels, Moderation, Private and Public Threads make it possible to have as much transparency, privacy or power decentralization as one wishes.
Gamification: Badges and Achievements can be customized for User Activity and frequent readers and writers.
Mailing List mode: Users can choose to use forum threads without the User Interface by subscribing via mailing list mode.
Higher Logic product managers are probably some of the best in the industry. They know their products and aren't pushy in trying to sell them to you. Don't get me wrong, they do try to sell you a product, but they understand that not everyone who is tasked with learning more is also a decision maker. That doesn't stop them from being professional and thorough in their demonstrations or explanation of fees.
Their technical support is top notch. Not only do they work to resolve issues, they also work with you to help you with non-issues. Our initial redesign was done by an agency that worked with HL directly to set up the new site. When I was tasked with a mini-redesign this year, HL technical support offered me a lot of insight on how to best do this using just my skills and HL.
They offer training on their platforms to ensure your success as an administrator. There is no cost and you can either go to their onsite two days "boot camp" or you can access a plethora of training videos and webinars through their online users' community.
Reporting is copious but you cannot build your own reports so you may have lots of information in several different reports and have to pick and choose across several to combine manually. Exporting functionality is there but there are some reports that are only a screen shot and you cannot export them.
They are a great company that offer great products - primarily their community. As they continue to grow and expand their offerings, I believe they will increase the number of products that offer and in turn grow their client base. We use their community, activity synch, and volunteer manager currently.
The software is not that simple to use when you have to get volunteers involved in the content assembly process. The content management system that is native to Higher Logic could improve to make the task of training volunteers far easier. Given its simplicity, it is hard for the system to rival more developed websites that use advanced CMS software.
Higher Logic's support is sub-par at best. It can be difficult to get in contact with anyone from the support team, and when you do, it seems as if they don't want to talk to you and don't even have the answers to your questions. Within the past few months, we've contacted them twice and both times have been very disappointing. The first time was to let them know there was an inconsistency between the analytics report and the heat map. They basically said that they already knew about the problem but didn't have any set plans to fix it because they were working on other "more important" things. The second time was for a conference call to go over some additional features that we wanted to implement. And the lady we spoke with seemed very disgusted to have to speak with us and then rushed us off the phone because she had another call.
Vanilla's mobile functionality was downright awful and it felt like it was stuck in the 2000s. While they have similar features, Discourse blows them away in almost every department. We don't regret switching at all.
We are just in the early stages of looking into HubSpot Service Hub to determine if it will be a viable replacement for Higher Logic Community. We have other uses for the ServiceHub so there is an appeal to have it be a "one stop shop" for us. The big question however is how it will stack up to Higher Logic for the online communities. Candidly, while Higher Logic may be tough to beat in this area, it is something we will be looking closely at in the next 12 months.
We also evaluated those products before moving on with Raklet Membership Management Software. I would say the main problem is that these products are well-pronounced among membership management softwares. For this reason, first, their interfaces looked outdated and boring, and we would like to have a better landing page to promote our readers to visit our website. Secondly, they are not as flexible as we like them to be. Most of the other solutions offered one-for-all; we didn't feel like using them because we wanted something special and customized.
Community Members are eager to jump into the discussion.
Conversations can be tracked easier without the risk of being lost in a sea of messages as people tend to construct their posts more carefully than on any workspace messenger.
It's open source and configurable with many other add-ons to help integration with other services.
