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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Drupal

    Score7.1 out of 10
    N/ADrupal is a free, open-source content management system written in PHP that competes primarily with Joomla and Plone. The standard release of Drupal, known as Drupal core, contains basic features such as account and menu management, RSS feeds, page layout customization, and system administration.N/A

    Khoros Communities

    Score8.2 out of 10
    Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
    Khoros Communities is a fully-featured community platform, built for self-service support, education and collaboration. Organizations can host a vibrant space where customers can find answers, develop expertise, share experiences, and connect with their brand.N/A
    Pricing
    DrupalKhoros Communities
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    DrupalKhoros Communities
    Free Trial
    NoNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoYes
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details—Pricing is variable based on the needs of the customer.
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    DrupalKhoros Communities
    Considered Both Products
    Open Source
    No answer on this topic
    Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    76%
    Would buy again
    13 Answers
    95%
    Would buy again
    70 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    88%
    Delivers good value for the price
    14 Answers
    98%
    Delivers good value for the price
    48 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    76%
    Happy with the feature set
    13 Answers
    86%
    Happy with the feature set
    64 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    92%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    12 Answers
    89%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    31 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    87%
    Implementation went as expected
    13 Answers
    81%
    Implementation went as expected
    38 Answers
    Features
    DrupalKhoros Communities
    Security
    Comparison of Security features of Drupal and Khoros Communities
    Feature
    Drupal
    8.3
    74 Ratings
    1% above category average
    Khoros Communities
    -
    Ratings
    Role-based user permissions8.374 Ratings00 Ratings
    Platform & Infrastructure
    Comparison of Platform & Infrastructure features of Drupal and Khoros Communities
    Feature
    Drupal
    7.8
    69 Ratings
    0% below category average
    Khoros Communities
    -
    Ratings
    API7.364 Ratings00 Ratings
    Internationalization / multi-language8.260 Ratings00 Ratings
    Web Content Creation
    Comparison of Web Content Creation features of Drupal and Khoros Communities
    Feature
    Drupal
    6.5
    78 Ratings
    19% below category average
    Khoros Communities
    -
    Ratings
    WYSIWYG editor6.371 Ratings00 Ratings
    Code quality / cleanliness8.275 Ratings00 Ratings
    Admin section7.078 Ratings00 Ratings
    Page templates5.677 Ratings00 Ratings
    Library of website themes5.568 Ratings00 Ratings
    Mobile optimization / responsive design6.572 Ratings00 Ratings
    Publishing workflow6.776 Ratings00 Ratings
    Form generator6.672 Ratings00 Ratings
    Web Content Management
    Comparison of Web Content Management features of Drupal and Khoros Communities
    Feature
    Drupal
    6.6
    77 Ratings
    13% below category average
    Khoros Communities
    -
    Ratings
    Content taxonomy6.971 Ratings00 Ratings
    SEO support6.472 Ratings00 Ratings
    Bulk management6.467 Ratings00 Ratings
    Availability / breadth of extensions6.670 Ratings00 Ratings
    Community / comment management6.869 Ratings00 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    DrupalKhoros Communities
    Small Businesses
    Umbraco CMS
    Score7 out of 10
    Higher Logic Thrive
    Score8.9 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    Square Online
    Score7.7 out of 10
    Higher Logic Vanilla
    Score5.5 out of 10
    Enterprises
    RWS Tridion Sites
    Score9 out of 10
    Verint Community
    Score10 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    DrupalKhoros Communities
    Likelihood to Recommend
    6.8
    (87 ratings)
    8.4
    (95 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    1.0
    (19 ratings)
    4.2
    (8 ratings)
    Usability
    6.9
    (20 ratings)
    8.0
    (3 ratings)
    Availability
    9.7
    (3 ratings)
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    Performance
    8.9
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Support Rating
    1.0
    (5 ratings)
    5.0
    (5 ratings)
    In-Person Training
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    Online Training
    6.0
    (2 ratings)
    4.5
    (2 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    5.1
    (4 ratings)
    8.0
    (2 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    9.0
    (2 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    8.0
    (2 ratings)
    8.6
    (86 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    DrupalKhoros Communities
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Open Source
    If you want to set up a basic Not For Profit (NFP) Membership system and content base, Word Press is easier than Drupal. However, if you have specific needs that require a fair bit of customisation then Drupal is the best CRM available. If the webmaster is confident with PHP and SQL, Drupal allows a lot of creativity.
    Incentivized
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    Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
    Khoros Communities is my go-to when I'm part of a big company with lots of customers who want to help each other. It's awesome for talking about products, giving ideas to make them better, and getting help when I need it. If my team is spread out or we're working from home, Khoros Communities is handy for sharing updates and working together. It's also a good tool for events, helping with planning and discussing what happened. But if my group is small or not very active, or if I just need a simple place to chat without too many extras, Khoros Communities might be more than I need. Plus, I've got to be ready to keep an eye on things to keep the community positive, and it works best when I have a plan to grow and keep the community lively.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Pros
    Open Source
    • Drag and drop functionality is easy to use
    • Easy to switch between straight text and HTML content
    • Ability to easily have multiple environments so that pages can be built in b/c-stage before they are approved and published
    • Solid user experience where it's clear how to navigate the platform
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
    • Increase in suggestions from our clients to know what we should improve.
    • Reduce technical support costs and incredibly increase sales.
    • It helps to interact with customers and we receive positive and negative reviews and based on their comments we can make changes that increase sales.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cons
    Open Source
    • This is not an easy CMS to work with if you don't have a good understanding of website development. It isn't "plug-and-play" like Wordpress or Shopify.
    • Over time, doing major updates to the system can be taxing, especially if you aren't well-versed enough in doing system updates in line with your "child" theme and code.
    • The CMS can become somewhat cumbersome with server resources if not carefully optimized while you build and customize it to your liking.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
    • Self Service, Low and No Code. The Community Managers should be able to some UI Tasks by self with doing any code updates.
    • Salesforce Integration: The basic Integration should also include the basic level of business requirement. (Contacts and Accounts Mapping)
    • Slack Connector Update: There is no update on this connector till the time its launch. The other team has lot of options to push the notification in multiple slack channels. And unfortunately Khoros does not. This creates a lot work for Community team to bring internal teams to the community to respond or acknowledge an post.
    • More Integrations: Since now the Khoros communities does not comes up with the integrations with basic support tools like JIRA, Confluence, Github etc.
    • Search Improvisation: Apart from last search update there is no updates we see in this feature. The team should think of Putting Some AI based Search into the community which helps the Community managers to manage the content accordingly
    • Some update on AI and Gen AI: Khoros communities did not shared any thoughts about their plans for putting these technology in community
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    Open Source
    The time and money invested into this platform were too great to discontinue it at this point. I'm sure it will be in use for a while. We have also spent time training many employees how to use it. All of these things add up to quite an investment in the product. Lastly, it basically fulfills what we need our intranet site to do.
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    Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
    On a scale of 1 to 10, I'd give Khoros Communities a solid 8. The system is extremely easy to use, enabling our team and community members to navigate and interact with the platform with ease. The wide range of features offered by Khoros Communities has greatly enriched our online interactions and improved the efficiency of our customer service. The technical support team has also been extremely helpful, could be quicker sometimes for answering our questions but they efficiently resolving any problems we have encountered. The platform is perfectly scalable, capable of handling our growing user base without any performance problems. What's more, Khoros Communities offers excellent integration capabilities with our other software tools, making our operations smoother and more efficient
    Incentivized
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    Usability
    Open Source
    As a team, we found Drupal to be highly customizable and flexible, allowing our development team to go to great lengths to develop desired functionalities. It can be used as a solution for all types of web projects. It comes with a robust admin interface that provides greater flexibility once the user gets acquainted with the system.
    Incentivized
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    Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
    Like every backend, it can always be improved upon. The excellent thing is that Khoros have a hugely active customer support community as well as a fantastic case management system to triage support issues and requests. So regardless of your level of knowledge or familiarity, you're well supported out of the box.
    Read full review
    Reliability and Availability
    Open Source
    Drupal itself does not tend to have bugs that cause sporadic outages. When deployed on a well-configured LAMP stack, deployment and maintenance problems are minimal, and in general no exotic tuning or configuration is required. For highest uptime, putting a caching proxy like Varnish in front of Drupal (or a CDN that supports dynamic applications).
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    Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
    I've hardly ever seen downtime in any of their production communities. There's the occasional reboot needed for config reasons or if patches are applied, but these take place after customer approval and typically last only a few minutes.
    Read full review
    Performance
    Open Source
    Drupal page loads can be slow, as a great many database calls may be required to generate a page. It is highly recommended to use caching systems, both built-in and external to lessen such database loads and improve performance. I haven't had any problems with behind-the-scenes integrations with external systems.
    Incentivized
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    Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
    No answers on this topic
    Support Rating
    Open Source
    As noted earlier, the support of the community can be rather variable, with some modules attracting more attraction and action in their issue queues, but overall, the development community for Drupal is second to none. It probably the single greatest aspect of being involved in this open-source project.
    Incentivized
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    Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
    They are responsive and proactive. They are really on top of things. They send personal emails to check in on you. It feels like they really know you. You only get emails from 3-4 people at Khoros – they must be customer assigned.
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    In-Person Training
    Open Source
    I was part of the team that conducted the training. Our training was fine, but we could have been better informed on Drupal before we started providing it. If we did not have answers to tough questions, we had more technical staff we could consult with. We did provide hands-on practice time for the learners, which I would always recommend. That is where the best learning occurred.
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    Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
    I think it is engaging and has good instructors.
    Incentivized
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    Online Training
    Open Source
    The on-line training was not as ideal as the face-to-face training. It was done remotely and only allowed for the trainers to present information to the learners and demonstrate the platform online. There was not a good way to allow for the learners to practice, ask questions and have them answered all in the same session.
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    Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
    It was out of the box training - pre-recorded/ not live. There was nothing for more advanced topics like APIs. They do have a good knowledge base and community that you can access and folks in there are responsive. I would however like more advanced training options.
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    Implementation Rating
    Open Source
    Plan ahead as much you can. You really need to know how to build what you want with the modules available to you, or that you might need to code yourself, in order to make the best use of Drupal. I recommend you analyze the most technically difficult workflows and other aspects of your implementation, and try building some test versions of those first. Get feedback from stakeholders early and often, because you can easily find yourself in a situation where your implementation does 90% of what you want, but, due to something you didn't plan for, foresee, or know about, there's no feasible way to get past the last 10%
    Incentivized
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    Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
    We were up against a hard stop with Jive’s contract ending and Khoros connected us with a deployment partner to do accelerated deployment using a template approach. It could have happened in 2 weeks. We did not end up going that way since we wanted more customization. Lithium handled technical stuff like migration, but a lot of the process is self-deployment. It’s one of the ways they teach use of the system is having the user self-implement.

    Overall, the implementation was super easy to do. Doing single sign-on (SSO) was the only hard part. The implementation ended up taking nine weeks total, but in hindsight, we could have done in it six. Most of the implementation time was spent in course work, which consisted of on-demand training - approximately 7-8 hours that you are required for you to do, before they turn on the system. During this nine week period, about 50% of my time was spent on implementation.

    We had a deployment manager who we were able to email 1-1. I leaned on him heavily. He was great at all hours, for example, they would call back at 7pm PST. They were very responsive.

    Content migration strategy is important to consider. Moving from an existing community you need to strategically choose how your layout will be. Two different systems will have two different ways to format communities. For example, Jive has communities with sub-communities, whereas Khoros has community, category, and boards.

    Contact migration is also an important consideration. You need to think through how you are going to move contacts from your old community to a new one. For example, are you going to create new logins and passwords? We were hoping to use the integration with Salesforce.com to be a portal, but ended up using an in-house solution that works well to maintain same the same logins. The next related question is are you going to be able to keep them connected to all the posts in your old community? We migrated old posts. If you have a tech-savvy team, you can do a self-migration. Khoros has a migration services team that we utilized. It cost us $10k to move content and posts were kept tied to the user.

    The next consideration is your launch/promotion plan. Khoros helped us out and gave us a lot of examples. They shared pre-launch email dates, follow-up emails, FAQ pages (e.g. to explain why switching, why better).
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    Alternatives Considered
    Open Source
    Drupal can be more complex to learn, but it offers a much wider range of applications. Drupal’s front and backend can be customized from design to functionality to allow for a wide range of uses. If someone wants to create something more complex than a simple site or blog, Drupal can be an amazing asset to have at hand.
    Incentivized
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    Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
    Large companies and organizations with complex community needs are well served by Khoros communities. The platform's advanced analytics and reporting features helps organizations seeking deeper insights. The gamification is the best way to boost user engagement, Khoros Communities has a rich feature set. Also with customization options offered by Khoros Communities, companies can develop a unique and customized community experience.
    Incentivized
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    Scalability
    Open Source
    Drupal is well known to be scalable, although it requires solid knowledge of MySQL best practices, caching mechanisms, and other server-level best practices. I have never personally dealt with an especially large site, so I can speak well to the issues associated with Drupal scaling.
    Incentivized
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    Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
    I think I would give Khoros an overall 7, while there were things we really liked about it. I also saw things that just did not work well for us. We like using iG but it was not the friendliest in using it on that platform. Sometimes the software would glitch or lag which is not helpful during high critical moments
    Incentivized
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    Return on Investment
    Open Source
    • Given the endless possibilities that Drupal can have, we tend to have great support going on when we get a website launched
    • It has become much much faster and easier for us to launch a new project due to reusability
    • Configuration management in Drupal helps greatly with CI/CD, saves us costs
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    Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
    • We are able to see what our different cohorts of customers are doing within the community, and we are able to create content and programs based on the engagement we get from these different groups.
    • We have been able to start an Idea Exchange space where our customers can share, vote, and comment on features they would like to see in our products. It quickly became a very popular place within the Community.
    • With the discussion forums, we are able to use the Accepted Solutions functions to help deflect tickets and Support interactions working on a 1-to-many scale.
    Incentivized
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    ScreenShots

    Khoros Communities Screenshots

    Screenshot of the Khoros Communities solution, and some of its tools available to build an enterprise-class online community and scale member engagement.Screenshot of discussions, which can be enabled to connect product experts and brand-enthusiasts through peer-to-peer discussions. Both newbies and experienced users can read, post, and easily respond in forums.Screenshot of where community members can submit, vote on, and discuss ideas to improve products, and share insights, all while driving engagement, and building brand loyalty. Idea boards deliver value for product managers, marketers and customers.Screenshot of events, that provide a platform to schedule, announce, inform, and discuss everything from the smallest group gathering to the largest user conference. These community-hosted activities harness the enthusiasm generated by interactions between members, company, and brand ambassadors and foster deeper connections with audiences. Users can integrate Zoom meetings and webinars within the community, or host live-stream video outside the community with URL links to any video hosting platform like YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook or others.Screenshot of where to design a brand-approved community without custom code. It includes expert-created templates and a drag-and-drop interface to customize page layouts, navigation, and brand themes.Screenshot of some of the dashboards, reports, and benchmark data used to track visitors, usage, trending topics, interaction preferences, and agent responsiveness.