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)
Higher Logic Vanilla
Score 6.0 out of 10
N/A
Higher Logic Vanilla is a customizable and themable forum software. It can be used for support communities, Q&A Communities and more. There are numerous integrations, including SSO, and connectors to popular software such as Mailchimp, WordPress, Zendesk and Salesforce.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
