Getty Images Enterprise Solutions vs. Higher Logic Vanilla

Working in the medical field it can be difficult to find specialized imagery without shooting it yourself in-house however Getty has a pretty vast library. They've also done a nice job staying up with 'mask' imagery during the current COVID pandemic which my organization had a very high demand for. You will also find the photography to be more diverse than competitors and their search engine's suggestions are usually pretty spot on.

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

• Variety of images
• Excellent suggestions and search tool
• Sharable light boards
• Comp images of higher quality and don't contain annoying watermarks

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 price point is typically not workable for smaller orgs
• Video/Music assets are not as strong as the photography library
• Vector-based assets are often built in strange ways that aren't always easy to manipulate

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

I could probably rattle after a dozen 'stock' photo companies that tout claims such as '$1 downloads, etc.' but don't bite on them, their libraries are extremely limited and you'll end up seeing photos you've used all over the place. For example, we once used a woman for a magazine cover who I also saw on a Southwest flyer, a Home Depot ad and on a poster at my kid's school all within a few months. It waters down your brand.

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

• Saved on the expense of buying our own photography equipment
• saved time of conducting in-house photo sessions
• Cloud storage of all your download save on local IT costs

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