Gainsight Digital Hub vs. Higher Logic Vanilla

Overall we have been happy with the functionality and ease of use of the inSided platform. Our ability to offer resources in an easy-to-navigate format through the knowledge base is friendlier and more effective than what we used in our previous KB. We are able to engage more with our customers as they offer ideas through the inSided platform. This will become more effective as our customer base grows.

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

• Community
• Integrations
• Ideation

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 timing for sometimes for customer support could be improved.
• Connecting with a customer success representative could be a little speedier.
• Changing the names of groups could be easier! I figured it out, but it wasn't as clear or easy as I think it could be.

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

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

InSided tool was in our budget and provided us with more features. Other tools were way more expensive. The circle was great and cheaper and we worked with them before but InSided provided us with more features and integrations. Salesforce was almost triple the price so we have decided to go with InSided.

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

• Increased awareness inside the company
• Make users more engaged

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