TrustRadius: an HG Insights company

Save this comparison

Save this comparison

Add Product

Recommended Comparisons

    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Khoros Communities

    Score8.2 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

    Microsoft Teams

    Score8.3 out of 10
    N/AMicrosoft Teams combines video conferencing software with team collaboration tools. The communications platform allows MS Office users to conduct conference calls and share files via SharePoint, and join or initiate a group chat.

    $4.80

    per month per user

    Pricing
    Khoros CommunitiesMicrosoft Teams
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    Microsoft Teams Essentials
    $4.80
    per month per user
    Microsoft Teams Enterprise
    $5.25
    per month (paid yearly) per user
    Microsoft Teams Enterprise
    $5.25
    per month per user
    Microsoft 365 Business Basic
    $7.20
    per month per user
    Microsoft 365 Business Standard
    $15
    per month per user
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Khoros CommunitiesMicrosoft Teams
    Free Trial
    NoYes
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoYes
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    YesNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional DetailsPricing is variable based on the needs of the customer.Discounts are available for non profit organizations.
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    Khoros CommunitiesMicrosoft Teams
    Considered Both Products
    Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
    Chose Khoros Communities
    I evaluated several different community platforms when Jive-x was being discontinued and ultimately chose Khoros as it had much more customization options compared to the other platforms out there. It also seemed to be the most robust and powerful, had the most features, and …
    Incentivized
    Chose Khoros Communities
    N/A
    Incentivized
    Chose Khoros Communities
    I am not qualified to offer comparisons quite yet. My exposure to date to these companies has been brief.
    Incentivized
    Microsoft
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    95%
    Would buy again
    70 Answers
    90%
    Would buy again
    255 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    98%
    Delivers good value for the price
    48 Answers
    95%
    Delivers good value for the price
    225 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    86%
    Happy with the feature set
    64 Answers
    90%
    Happy with the feature set
    255 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    89%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    31 Answers
    92%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    144 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    81%
    Implementation went as expected
    38 Answers
    93%
    Implementation went as expected
    174 Answers
    Features
    Khoros CommunitiesMicrosoft Teams
    Project Management
    Comparison of Project Management features of Khoros Communities and Microsoft Teams
    Feature
    Khoros Communities
    -
    Ratings
    Microsoft Teams
    8.2
    241 Ratings
    6% above category average
    Task Management00 Ratings8.1179 Ratings
    Gantt Charts00 Ratings8.196 Ratings
    Scheduling00 Ratings8.3208 Ratings
    Workflow Automation00 Ratings8.4126 Ratings
    Mobile Access00 Ratings8.2229 Ratings
    Search00 Ratings7.6212 Ratings
    Visual planning tools00 Ratings8.4143 Ratings
    Communication
    Comparison of Communication features of Khoros Communities and Microsoft Teams
    Feature
    Khoros Communities
    -
    Ratings
    Microsoft Teams
    8.0
    251 Ratings
    0% above category average
    Chat00 Ratings9.0250 Ratings
    Notifications00 Ratings8.4249 Ratings
    Discussions00 Ratings8.7235 Ratings
    Surveys00 Ratings8.2146 Ratings
    Internal knowledgebase00 Ratings8.6157 Ratings
    Integrates with GoToMeeting00 Ratings6.547 Ratings
    Integrates with Gmail and Google Hangouts00 Ratings5.743 Ratings
    Integrates with Outlook00 Ratings9.1155 Ratings
    File Sharing & Management
    Comparison of File Sharing & Management features of Khoros Communities and Microsoft Teams
    Feature
    Khoros Communities
    -
    Ratings
    Microsoft Teams
    8.2
    236 Ratings
    2% above category average
    Versioning00 Ratings8.6168 Ratings
    Video files00 Ratings8.4202 Ratings
    Audio files00 Ratings8.8200 Ratings
    Document collaboration00 Ratings8.9216 Ratings
    Access control00 Ratings8.6198 Ratings
    Advanced security features00 Ratings8.5158 Ratings
    Integrates with Google Drive00 Ratings5.353 Ratings
    Device sync00 Ratings8.6172 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    Khoros CommunitiesMicrosoft Teams
    Small Businesses
    Higher Logic Thrive
    Score8.9 out of 10
    Flock
    Score9.5 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    Higher Logic Vanilla
    Score5.5 out of 10
    Troop Messenger
    Score9.8 out of 10
    Enterprises
    Verint Community
    Score10 out of 10
    Cisco Business Edition 7000 (discontinued)
    Score9 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Khoros CommunitiesMicrosoft Teams
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.4
    (95 ratings)
    8.6
    (329 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    4.2
    (8 ratings)
    9.0
    (12 ratings)
    Usability
    8.0
    (3 ratings)
    8.7
    (114 ratings)
    Availability
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    Performance
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    Support Rating
    5.0
    (5 ratings)
    8.0
    (114 ratings)
    In-Person Training
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Online Training
    4.5
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    8.0
    (2 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    Contract Terms and Pricing Model
    -
    (0 ratings)
    6.3
    (7 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    9.0
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    8.6
    (86 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    Professional Services
    -
    (0 ratings)
    7.0
    (7 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Khoros CommunitiesMicrosoft Teams
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    It's amazing as a daily driver for team communication, and document search/store. Also, if you're doing a lot of LONG meetings and have trouble remembering details, the AI summarization is amazing and convenient. It just works. I'm not saying I always do this, of course, but if I need to 'skim' instead of really digging into every detail from a meeting, the AI-generated summary is generally good enough that I can get away with it.
    Read full review
    Pros
    Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
    • Increase in suggestions from our clients to know what we should improve.
    • Reduce technical support costs and incredibly increase sales.
    • It helps to interact with customers and we receive positive and negative reviews and based on their comments we can make changes that increase sales.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    • All in one communication for Teams.
    • High quality and reliable both audio and video meetings.
    • Well organized and clear instant chat.
    • Excellent security features.
    • Beautiful integration with 3rd party tools and systems.
    • Perfect compatibility with windows ,android and iOS.
    • Allow meetings recordings for later us or sharing with teams that missed the live.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cons
    Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
    • 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
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    • The webinars feature has some missing functionally such as the ability for all users to use the Q&A feature (only those with a Microsoft Teams account can use it now), the ability to upload documents for attendees to easily access and download, and the ability for presenters and organizers to easily chat amongst themselves throughout the webinar.
    • The "Channels" organization hierarchy could be more clear. If you have several channels set up, it can get clunky and hard to find the specific channel you are looking for.
    • The MS Planner tool lacks functionality and organization. You cannot assign more than one person to a task and it's confusing when you try to share tasks with people - it would be nice if they were automatically added to someone's calendar.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
    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
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    Microsoft Teams is included with our Office 365 subscription and we have no intention of migrating off of Office 365 and Microsoft products. Since Microsoft Teams is included for free with our Office 365 subscription, and since we enjoy all the features, benefits, and functionality, there is no question that our team will continue to use the product
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Usability
    Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
    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.
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    If you have the full Microsoft Office suite, it works really well because it's integrated well within its ecosystem, but if not, it can be annoying because it tries to open a shared file in the web versions of the file equivalents. The web version is also a bit slow, and the login is very difficult to handle if you have multiple Microsoft or Outlook accounts.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Reliability and Availability
    Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
    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.
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    Rare, but outages do happen
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Performance
    Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
    No answers on this topic
    Microsoft
    Sometimes about once a week I get a message that says "Sorry, there seems to be something wrong". But it goes away in a few minutes.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Support Rating
    Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
    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.
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    The overall support provided by Microsoft for Microsoft Teams has been quite good but there is still some room for improvements. Microsoft needs to proactively work on fixing the open bugs in order to provide a seamless experience to the users. But over the service and experience provided by the Microsoft team have been quite satisfactory.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    In-Person Training
    Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
    I think it is engaging and has good instructors.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    No answers on this topic
    Online Training
    Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
    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.
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation Rating
    Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
    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).
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    I find everything I need for my day-to-day work.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Alternatives Considered
    Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    Microsoft Teams offers a much more integrated experience between their chat and video call function compared to Google Chat and Slack. Both other tools are much better for internal communications are they have simpler UI without other features. Whereas Microsoft Teams can be used for more critical conversations, particularly between external companies, and has been very useful in sales conversations which is what we chose it for when speaking to companies that work exclusively through Microsoft.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Contract Terms and Pricing Model
    Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
    No answers on this topic
    Microsoft
    Honestly, this tool is worth every penny. Yes, it's not free and you pay for the quality of services and the license. But the ROI and the benefits are all there. Also, the renewal, negotiation, and contract terms are all very well explained by our Microsoft account manager, and she's a charm.
    Read full review
    Scalability
    Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
    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
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    It does not appear to have a limit to how many teams and employees we can have using it
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Professional Services
    Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
    No answers on this topic
    Microsoft
    I used Skype for Business to take calls, hold conferences, and provide remote assistance to users. Microsoft Teams, on the other hand, is superior to Skype for Business in my opinion. My job entails a lot of screen sharing.
    Read full review
    Return on Investment
    Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
    • 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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    • Personally, I would say that by using Microsoft Teams, it upped my collaboration with my colleagues by around 50% or around more than half of what I usually did prior to using it.
    • I had 100% show rate and attendance on all of my meetings in the past 6 months.
    • If I may add, I also have been chattier & collaborative towards my colleagues in past 3 months particularly the month of December when we had huge traffic at work. I would estimate this behavior to have been increased by around 60% than what I usually incur during normal operating days.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots

    Khoros Communities Screenshots

    Screenshot of the Khoros Communities solution, and some of its tools available to build an enterprise-class online community and scale member engagement.Screenshot of discussions, which can be enabled to connect product experts and brand-enthusiasts through peer-to-peer discussions. Both newbies and experienced users can read, post, and easily respond in forums.Screenshot of where community members can submit, vote on, and discuss ideas to improve products, and share insights, all while driving engagement, and building brand loyalty. Idea boards deliver value for product managers, marketers and customers.Screenshot of events, that provide a platform to schedule, announce, inform, and discuss everything from the smallest group gathering to the largest user conference. These community-hosted activities harness the enthusiasm generated by interactions between members, company, and brand ambassadors and foster deeper connections with audiences. Users can integrate Zoom meetings and webinars within the community, or host live-stream video outside the community with URL links to any video hosting platform like YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook or others.Screenshot of where to design a brand-approved community without custom code. It includes expert-created templates and a drag-and-drop interface to customize page layouts, navigation, and brand themes.Screenshot of some of the dashboards, reports, and benchmark data used to track visitors, usage, trending topics, interaction preferences, and agent responsiveness.