Discourse vs. Higher Logic Vanilla vs. Website Toolbox

[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

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

Website Toolbox is a huge improvement over self-hosted forums. It attempts to host forums that failed over the effort required to keep these free of spam.

• 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

• 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

• Fights spam.
• Prevent fake accounts.
• Keep forums clean by requiring post approval.

• 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

• 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

• Customization of JavaScript/CSS.
• Billing notifications.

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

Support is rarely needed. When needed, they are friendly and fast to understand and address the problem.

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

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

• 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

• 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

• It has improved our self-service customer support.