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    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

    Oracle Service

    Score8.2 out of 10
    N/AOracle Service is the help desk and customer experience management platform from Oracle. The technology was developed and supported by RightNow Technologies as RightNow CX for cloud-based call center automation, until that company's acquisition by Oracle in 2011 for about $1.5 billion.N/A
    Pricing
    Khoros CommunitiesOracle Service
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Khoros CommunitiesOracle Service
    Free Trial
    NoNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    YesNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional DetailsPricing is variable based on the needs of the customer.—
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    Khoros CommunitiesOracle Service
    Considered Both Products
    Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
    No answer on this topic
    Oracle
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    95%
    Would buy again
    70 Answers
    82%
    Would buy again
    9 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    98%
    Delivers good value for the price
    48 Answers
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    9 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    86%
    Happy with the feature set
    64 Answers
    73%
    Happy with the feature set
    8 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    89%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    31 Answers
    78%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    7 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    81%
    Implementation went as expected
    38 Answers
    80%
    Implementation went as expected
    8 Answers
    Features
    Khoros CommunitiesOracle Service
    Incident and problem management
    Comparison of Incident and problem management features of Khoros Communities and Oracle Service
    Feature
    Khoros Communities
    -
    Ratings
    Oracle Service
    7.7
    78 Ratings
    6% below category average
    Organize and prioritize service tickets00 Ratings8.073 Ratings
    Expert directory00 Ratings7.053 Ratings
    Subscription-based notifications00 Ratings7.057 Ratings
    ITSM collaboration and documentation00 Ratings8.050 Ratings
    Ticket creation and submission00 Ratings8.074 Ratings
    Ticket response00 Ratings8.074 Ratings
    Self Help Community
    Comparison of Self Help Community features of Khoros Communities and Oracle Service
    Feature
    Khoros Communities
    -
    Ratings
    Oracle Service
    7.0
    74 Ratings
    13% below category average
    External knowledge base00 Ratings6.065 Ratings
    Internal knowledge base00 Ratings8.074 Ratings
    Multi-Channel Help
    Comparison of Multi-Channel Help features of Khoros Communities and Oracle Service
    Feature
    Khoros Communities
    -
    Ratings
    Oracle Service
    8.0
    76 Ratings
    0% below category average
    Customer portal00 Ratings8.069 Ratings
    IVR00 Ratings8.035 Ratings
    Social integration00 Ratings8.046 Ratings
    Email support00 Ratings8.074 Ratings
    Help Desk CRM integration00 Ratings8.054 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    Khoros CommunitiesOracle Service
    Small Businesses
    Higher Logic Thrive
    Score8.9 out of 10
    Help Scout
    Score9.3 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    Higher Logic Vanilla
    Score5.5 out of 10
    LiveAgent
    Score8.8 out of 10
    Enterprises
    Verint Community
    Score10 out of 10
    Front
    Score9.2 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Khoros CommunitiesOracle Service
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.4
    (95 ratings)
    9.0
    (89 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    4.2
    (8 ratings)
    10.0
    (9 ratings)
    Usability
    8.0
    (3 ratings)
    6.0
    (5 ratings)
    Availability
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    Performance
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    Support Rating
    5.0
    (5 ratings)
    8.7
    (6 ratings)
    In-Person Training
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    Online Training
    4.5
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    8.0
    (2 ratings)
    9.0
    (4 ratings)
    Configurability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    9.0
    (2 ratings)
    5.0
    (11 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    8.6
    (86 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Khoros CommunitiesOracle Service
    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
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    Oracle
    Oracle Right (Oracle Service Cloud) was an important evolution in the group's ombudsman channel management processes. We brought the Oracle Service Cloud to digitize the processes for capturing and managing the group's ombudsman channel, no longer operating manually (MS Excel).

    Oracle Service Cloud (Right Now) brought about an important evolution in the management processes of the group's ombudsman channel, where activities that were performed manually, repetitively and with risk of errors, are now operated by the Right Now platform itself, whether by API, or by automation of the tool.
    Incentivized
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    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
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    Oracle
    • We can access the best-in-class features for cross-channel contact center management amd field service management.
    • It provides a great way to mobilize agents and boost collaboration within the office which in turn improves the overall customer experience.
    • Automation of back of the office repetitive tasks leading to a faster way of addressing customer concerns.
    Incentivized
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    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
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    Oracle
    • Oracle Service Cloud needs a better built in integration with Oracle Social Cloud or it needs to build in more Social network capabilities.
    • SMS is handle via a third party application but could be built in as part of the product.
    • The knowledge foundation product needs a better way to handle multiple languages. Currently you have to purchase an additional interface for each language. You can purchase the more expensive Knowledge Advance which does have a better language feature.
    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
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    Oracle
    Although RightNow is extremely flexible, the flexibility comes with a price. It is often not intuitive which settings you need to change (and under which menus these setting are buried) to enable the system to do what you want. Also, sometimes the system can do things you need, but you don't initially realize it. When RightNow sells a system to a new customer, I think it should come with X hours of consulting time with a RightNow expert. The customer should be able to consult with this expert over the next year to get advice concerning how to configure the system to achieve desired needs. Often RightNow Support would just answer "no" when I asked if I could do something, but then I would find another way to achieve my goals after talking with other companies using RightNow.
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    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.
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    Oracle
    The learning curve is fairly steep; but for something that has this much capability, it's nearly impossible to make it "easy". The layout and organization are at least reasonably intuitive. The hardest part-- the "weakest link"-- is the portal development (where you can build help centers and other end-user pages.) The capabilities there are significant, but the learning curve for that part is especially steep and it takes a fair amount of expertise to be able to update it.
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    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
    Oracle
    We have never had issues with downtime or it not being available. Upgrades and maintenance also happens in weekends or at night.
    Incentivized
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    Performance
    Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
    No answers on this topic
    Oracle
    We use a lot of tabs and fields on our incident workspace, which should slow the system down, but it's still quite fast, and we continue to optimize whatever is possible.
    Incentivized
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    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.
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    Oracle
    Technicians seem to be assessed based solely on how quickly they close the issues. I've had to reopen requests multiple times because they didn't actually solve my problem. Also, when the issue has even a moderate amount of complexity, the technicians often instruct me to "open another SR" to handle the other issue. I'm the customer, I shouldn't have to follow their processes, they should handle that for me. But even when I create the new SR, it seems like their right hand isn't talking to their left - they aren't reading back to the previous issue for context. So I get bounced around a lot, and I have to tell them how to do their job
    Incentivized
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    In-Person Training
    Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
    I think it is engaging and has good instructors.
    Incentivized
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    Oracle
    Most of our training was given while doing user acceptance testing, and getting the system approved by the market. When ever we were in doubt, our implementer helped us along. Later on we started exploring by our selves.
    Incentivized
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    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
    Oracle
    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).
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    Oracle
    Work with a RightNow expert during the implementation. Explain features that would you like to have. Often, somebody who really knows the system can show you what you need to do to achieve the desired results. Where a RightNow support engineer or a consultant might say "the system can't do that," a RightNow application engineer will listen to what you need, and often come up with an alternate path to achieve it
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    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
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    Oracle
    TCS' customers who also selected Oracle Service Cloud over Salesforce Service Cloud and GE's ServiceMax in the Mfg. vertical in which I work, did so because of the robust ability of Oracle Service Cloud and its APIs to integrate with other value-add solutions for manufacturers such as IoT applications, Big Data Analytics, and Field Service applications.
    Incentivized
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    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
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    Oracle
    We have never had any down time, slowness or anything. Any error or instability that has occurrred has so far has been caused by user errors.
    Incentivized
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    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
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    Oracle
    • Since its, it has significantly reduced our training time of new agents. What used to take 6 weeks in the class room, went to 4 weeks.
    • Service Cloud allows us to easily gather data to report to the other departments quickly.
    Incentivized
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    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.

    Oracle Service Screenshots

    Screenshot of A pixel-perfect Customer Portal organizes self-service content in a way that makes sense to your customers.Screenshot of Customers can search, email, chat, and call your business from their mobile devices for immediate resolution.Screenshot of Bring omnichannel interactions together into an intuitive, unified agent desktop.Screenshot of A fully integrated knowledge solution is the backbone of all seamless and consistent service experiences.Screenshot of Tailor customer experiences with contextualized and personalized service using dynamic interviews.Screenshot of Predictive forecasting tools increase field service operational efficiencies to ensure timely job completion.