Gainsight Customer Communities vs. Higher Logic Vanilla

A great scenario that we use the community for is product adoption. That's one of the things we use it for. So sending our new customers as part of their onboarding flow to the community to learn from others and see the resources that are available and know that there's a place for them to ask questions and get their questions answered. That's probably one of our primary use cases and scenarios that it works straight in. I can't really think of something that it wouldn't work good for. That's a tough one to think of on the spot.

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

• They provide a ton of materials on best practices in setting up and using their platform
• They provide materials on how to provide an exceptional customer experience, with podcasts, webinars, and blogs.
• They support their community and walk the talk, so to speak in engaging their customers with each other.

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

• The REST API could use some work with missing capabilities.
• Speed; production instance can sometimes be noticeably slow, especially on the back-end.
• Polls; the polling data is not easily accessible. It can be found in the data lake but that is not necessarily simple to access for some.

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

Gainsight CC is very versatile and easy to update in the areas they provide for customization. There are still some limitations that surprise us, but I really we are pleased with the ability to make changes on the fly. Overall we are able to accomplish what we desire to accomplish, and appreciate how user friendly it is

Incentivized

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

Gainsight CC was a clear winner for us. Khoros was second, but we eliminated it from consideration due to cost and how hard it is to implement. Verint is a great platform, but lacks integrations. Circle is more of a small community platform and better suited to communities of practice.

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

• We are actually doing some work to prove return on investment for investing in Gainsight Customer Communities right now, and it's proving to be exponentially higher than we initially estimated. I'm not sure the exact numbers off the top of my head, but we're having a monumental impact compared to what we projected in terms of monthly recurring revenue and customer churn.

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