For SaaS products, Gainsight's product experience software enables companies to track every step of their user's journey and fully understand how they're interacting with a product over time.
$0
100 or less MAUs (Monthly Active Users)
Khoros Communities
Score 8.5 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
Gainsight PX
Khoros Communities
Editions & Modules
Starter (Free)
$0
100 or less MAUs (Monthly Active Users)
Starter
Starting at $400/M
500+ MAUs (Monthly Active Users)
Growth
Custom
Per MAUs (Monthly Active Users) and more
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Gainsight PX
Khoros Communities
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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Pricing is variable based on the needs of the customer.
It’s a robust tool that allows you to easily map and track key features and actions within your products. It also allows for in app communications to help guide the user through the path you want them to follow. The ability to connect with Gainsight CS also allows you to leverage that data to drive actions for the account team, incorporate it in health scoring, and use it to trigger digital programs. You do need a well thought out strategy for management of the platform, the data and how you will use it.
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.
Gainsight PX provides powerful segmentation capabilities to help marketers target the right customers with the right message. Through its segmentation capabilities, Gainsight PX enables marketers to create custom segments based on user behavior, demographics, and other criteria to ensure that the right message is delivered to the right customer.
Gainsight PX offers robust analytics capabilities to help marketers gain insights into customer behavior and engagement. Through its analytics capabilities, Gainsight PX enables marketers to track user engagement, identify customer trends, and gain insights into customer behavior.
Gainsight PX provides an intuitive user interface to help marketers quickly and easily create and manage campaigns. Through its user interface, Gainsight PX enables marketers to create and manage campaigns with ease, allowing them to quickly launch campaigns and track their progress.
Dashboards. There is no way to provide notes to others which would be very beneficial in consuming data across a team. Lacking functionality - no resizing, no organization options, run into bugs when using it frequently, overall hard to design a layout that is easy to follow.
No way to identify what features/elements are being used but aren't tagged. This would be a huge value add.
Retention Analyzer. Default view doesnt allow for filtering and includes test data. In our case this doesnt allow for a true comparison between two segments.
Segments. You can't use segments in areas you should be able to. I shouldnt have to recreate a segment as a saved filter.
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
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
It is a good product, but like with every product, there is room for improvement or even just things I, as a user, would prefer, such as the ability to click on a company and have it go to Salesforce instead of Insight. It can also be difficult to find certain reports.
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.
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.
I have not had to contact support frequently but when I have I used the chat and my questions were answered immediately. I've also used their knowledge center, help documentation and training videos which are all very thorough. The support we've received from our Customer Success Manager has been helpful as well.
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.
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.
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).
Heap has a great value proposition and very nice user experience. But it lacks the clear funnel analysis that Gainsight PX provides. Plus Heap also does not have integration with a lot of CRMs and Customer data platforms. Also, Additionally if you go in the market to find Heap implementors or SI vendors, you won't find any.
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.
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
Allow us to integrate actual product usage with Salesforce.
Too much developer time went into it, especially when the premise was that this was mostly going to be handled by the Product team. This was mostly because the Gainsight PX event editor doesn't support more complex querying on events.
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.
