Higher Logic Thrive is a private community platform that empowers members, customers, support and product teams to create and manage meaningful, engaging online communities. The solution is designed to keep users coming back. They can find support, best practices, peer-to-peer connections, resources, events, and networking, all in one destination.
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WordPress
Score 8.6 out of 10
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Wordpress is an open-source publishing platform popular with bloggers, and a content management system, known for its simplicity and modifiability. Websites may host their own blogging communities, controlling and moderating content from a single dashboard.
$3
per month 6 GB storage
Pricing
Higher Logic Thrive
WordPress
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Personal
$4
per month 6 GB storage
Premium
$8
per month 13 GB storage
Business
$25
per month 50 GB storage
Commerce
$45
per month 50 GB storage
Enterprise
Contact for pricing
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Higher Logic Thrive
WordPress
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
Required
No setup fee
Additional Details
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Pricing for Business and Commerce plans vary on number of GB.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Higher Logic Thrive
WordPress
Considered Both Products
Higher Logic Thrive
Verified User
Director
Chose Higher Logic Thrive
Higher Logic had an integration with iMIS, which was the CRM of choice at the time. It also interfaced well with our server infrastructure and technology for single sign-on development. Overall, the features of Higher Logic were more comprehensive than those of its competitor, …
Higher Logic works very well for our business purposes. We can very easily create new communities when we need to (and this is often!). Our association isn't as concerned with driving engagement, but the tools Higher Logic provides allows us to take a closer look at the engagement level of our committee members when needed
Wordpress is a great solution for a website of nearly any type. It may not be as suitable if a fully custom solution or app is needed, and it does have some limitations when it comes to connecting it to external products (especially if the product doesn't have any support from a native system), and it does require a lot of testing. Multiple plugins in one install are common but also increase the risk of conflicts, and when those do occur, it can be exceptionally time-consuming and tedious to identify what is causing the issue. As third parties create many plugins, you're also at risk with each potential security breach, which needs to be kept in mind. I would be cautious to use WordPress to store any sort of sensitive PPI. That said, it's a wonderful, easily customizable solution for many, many different types of websites and can allow even inexperienced client users with low-tech knowledge to update basics.
Higher Logic product managers are probably some of the best in the industry. They know their products and aren't pushy in trying to sell them to you. Don't get me wrong, they do try to sell you a product, but they understand that not everyone who is tasked with learning more is also a decision maker. That doesn't stop them from being professional and thorough in their demonstrations or explanation of fees.
Their technical support is top notch. Not only do they work to resolve issues, they also work with you to help you with non-issues. Our initial redesign was done by an agency that worked with HL directly to set up the new site. When I was tasked with a mini-redesign this year, HL technical support offered me a lot of insight on how to best do this using just my skills and HL.
They offer training on their platforms to ensure your success as an administrator. There is no cost and you can either go to their onsite two days "boot camp" or you can access a plethora of training videos and webinars through their online users' community.
Reporting is copious but you cannot build your own reports so you may have lots of information in several different reports and have to pick and choose across several to combine manually. Exporting functionality is there but there are some reports that are only a screen shot and you cannot export them.
WordPress breaks often so you need to have someone who understands how to troubleshoot, which can take time and money.
Some plugins are easier to customize than others, for example, some don't require any coding knowledge while others do. This can limit your project if you are not a coder.
WordPress can be easily hacked, so you also need someone who can ensure your sites are secure.
They are a great company that offer great products - primarily their community. As they continue to grow and expand their offerings, I believe they will increase the number of products that offer and in turn grow their client base. We use their community, activity synch, and volunteer manager currently.
The complications we have and the lack of support. Every plugin has a differente team of support in charge and make one plugin work with the other one always affects the website performance. It's a thousand times better to have only one provider with all functionalities included unless you are an expert web developer or have a team dedicated to it
The software is not that simple to use when you have to get volunteers involved in the content assembly process. The content management system that is native to Higher Logic could improve to make the task of training volunteers far easier. Given its simplicity, it is hard for the system to rival more developed websites that use advanced CMS software.
Extremely easy to use and train users. It took very little time to get everyone trained and onboarded to start using WordPress. Anytime we had any issues, we were able to find an article or video to help out or we were able to contact support. The menu options are well laid out so it is easy to find what you are looking for.
Anyone can visit WordPress.org and download a fully functional copy of WordPress free of charge. Additionally, WordPress is offered to users as open-source software, which means that anyone can customize the code to create new applications and make these available to other WordPress users.
Mostly, any performance issues have to do with using too many plugins and these can sometimes slow down the overall performance of your site. It is very tempting to start adding lots of plugins to your WordPress site, however, as there are thousands of great plugins to choose from and so many of them help you do amazing things on your site. If you begin to notice performance issues with your WordPress site (e.g. pages being slow to load), there are ways to optimize the performance of your site, but this requires learning the process. WordPress users can learn how to optimize their WordPress sites by downloading the WPTrainMe WordPress training plugin (WPTrainMe.com) and going through the detailed step-by-step WordPress optimization tutorials.
Higher Logic's support is sub-par at best. It can be difficult to get in contact with anyone from the support team, and when you do, it seems as if they don't want to talk to you and don't even have the answers to your questions. Within the past few months, we've contacted them twice and both times have been very disappointing. The first time was to let them know there was an inconsistency between the analytics report and the heat map. They basically said that they already knew about the problem but didn't have any set plans to fix it because they were working on other "more important" things. The second time was for a conference call to go over some additional features that we wanted to implement. And the lady we spoke with seemed very disgusted to have to speak with us and then rushed us off the phone because she had another call.
I give this rating, which I believe to be a great rating for a community based support system that's surrounding it. Most platforms and products have their own, and as WordPress does have their own team that help here and there, a lot of it's handled by community involvement with dedicated users who are experts with the system who love to help people.
Varies by the person providing training. High marks as it's incredibly easy to find experienced individuals in your community to provide training on any aspect of WordPress from content marketing, SEO, plugin development, theme design, etc. Less than 10 though as the training is community based and expectations for a session you find may fall short.
WordPress is not a great solution if you have: 1) A larger site with performance / availability requirements. 2) Multiple types of content you want to share - each with its own underlying data structure. 3) Multiple sites you need to manage. For very small sites where these needs are not paramount, WordPress is a decent solution
We are just in the early stages of looking into HubSpot Service Hub to determine if it will be a viable replacement for Higher Logic Community. We have other uses for the ServiceHub so there is an appeal to have it be a "one stop shop" for us. The big question however is how it will stack up to Higher Logic for the online communities. Candidly, while Higher Logic may be tough to beat in this area, it is something we will be looking closely at in the next 12 months.
WordPress isn't as pretty or easy to use as certain competitors like Jimdo, Squarespace or HubSpot, but it makes up for it with its affordability, familiarity and the ability to find quality outside help easily. The same can't be said for certain competitors, as you might need to find an expert and it could get costly.
WordPress is completely scalable. You can get started immediately with a very simple "out-of-the box" WordPress installation and then add whatever functionality you need as and when you need it, and continue expanding. Often we will create various WordPress sites on the same domain to handle different aspects of our strategy (e.g. one site for the sales pages, product information and/or a marketing blog, another for delivering products securely through a private membership site, and another for running an affiliate program or other application), and then ties all of these sites together using a common theme and links on each of the site's menus. Additionally, WordPress offers a multisite function that allows organizations and institutions to manage networks of sites managed by separate individual site owners, but centrally administered by the parent organization. You can also expand WordPress into a social networking or community site, forums, etc. The same scalability applies to web design. You can start with a simple design and then scale things up to display sites with amazing visual features, including animations and video effects, sliding images and animated product image galleries, elements that appear and fade from visitor browsers, etc. The scaling possibilities of WordPress are truly endless.
