Discourse vs. Igloo

[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.

Incentivized

Igloo is a well-suited option for teams/companies that want to build an employee intranet with some other interesting features, like file storage and sharing, internal communications, and resource and knowledge management. All of these features may help your workers increase productivity significantly by centralizing everything in one robust and reliable platform. However, it can be less appropriate if costs are a problem for you, due to the pricing. So, if you will not be using several features and just want an intranet for you company, you may want to go with another solution.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Notifications: Igloo can push email updates to users.
• Organization: Igloo allows for you to create pages, sub pages, and many layer deep sections. You can also organize the layout of your pages.
• Versioning: it's super easy to reserve and edit documents for offline use. And you can see who last edited a document and when.
• Offline access: there's a desktop version you can use very easily. It's really good for dropping a bunch of files at once.

Incentivized

• Some configuration UIs are difficult to follow
• Not well-suited for managing workflows (grant management as an example)
• Bulk operations across multiple threads either impossible or difficult to figure out

Incentivized

• Their UI is not used-friendly. Their use of Igloo-specific terminology made it difficult to understand how each function of the site worked. They would repeatedly say, for example, "a ___ is really a ___" vs. just calling it what the function actually is.
• Implementation was a far cry from their sales support. After basically nickel-and-diming you for everything, they - very poorly - cap your use of their implementation support team.
• Overall, Igloo didn't work for our organization because they do multiple things decently vs a few things excellently. The experience with Igloo was unremarkable.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Easy to use, cost-effective, and benefit in organizational culture development and information sharing across various employees and from higher management. Great customer support and continuous development to make the software better for users. It allows better collaboration with a little bit of fun too and requires less resources to handle.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Helps with employee retention - especially in a virtual environment.
• Costs less than a separate wiki system for storing key information.

Incentivized