Discourse is a community management and moderation product.
$20
per month
Pexels
Score 8.1 out of 10
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Pexels, headquartered in Berlin, offers stock photos and video under the Creative Commons Zero license, from a global network of creators.
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Higher Logic Vanilla
Score 4.0 out of 10
N/A
Higher Logic Vanilla is a customizable and themable forum software. It can be used for support communities, Q&A Communities and more. There are numerous integrations, including SSO, and connectors to popular software such as Mailchimp, WordPress, Zendesk and Salesforce.
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.
[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.
1. Small businesses with small or non-existent budgets still need assets to create content 2. Individual content makers or freelancers who need stock assets 3. Corporate eLearning wants to modernize and replace all old-fashioned, outdated, brightly lit studio photos with more realistic and relevant imagery that will resonate with modern audiences and learners.
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.
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.
High-resolution images – Pexels is full of images that are high enough in resolution to look beautiful on their own, but also high quality enough to be combined with other images without distracting pixelization
Stock videos – other free stock sites are often limited to just images, but Pexels has a wide range of videos available as well, which we use to plus up decks
Good search functions – while not as robust as some paid sites, Pexels' search functions make it pretty easy to track down what you need
Licensing – it's very straightforward to know what you can and can't do with a Pexels photo, which protects my company and our clients
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.
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.
Pexels is extremely easy to use. Because it integrates with Canva, it makes our workflow smoother. This also saves us a significant amount of time running our business. The interface is also clean and easy to understand and follow, leading to an increase in productivity and much greater efficiency. Overall, this saves us time and money
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.
Pexels has a few unique features that stand out, the most important being a 1-click download from the search results. No need to navigate to another page to find a "download" button. This reduces the time required to find and download an appropriate image. The search results load fast, with lazy loading, so there's no annoying pagination at the bottom. I often travel as I work, and at times my internet connection can be slow or unstable. This kind of feature may seem minor to some users, but when on a slower connection, it makes a big difference. If a search term is too broad, it can recommend related keywords to search for - this helps to find the right image faster.
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.
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.
Social media campaigns created with photos from Pexels achieves 40% higher engagement vs others.
Thanks to faster and easier content sourcing provided by Pexels, our campaign generation period has dropped to an average of 4 hours, instead of 2 days.
Their stock images adorn our offices.... and it's a much lore cheerful space for that reason. Staff are happier, and stay in the office longer.
