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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

    Thinkific

    Score8.8 out of 10
    N/AThinkific Plus is a scalable learning platform that’s designed to be easy to use for teams and customers. Thinkific Plus offers enterprise-grade features that scale with the needs of enterprises, and the service includes a people seriously dedicated to helping users to reach their goals.N/A
    Pricing
    Khoros CommunitiesThinkific
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Khoros CommunitiesThinkific
    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 CommunitiesThinkific
    Considered Both Products
    Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
    No answer on this topic
    Thinkific
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    95%
    Would buy again
    70 Answers
    88%
    Would buy again
    46 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    98%
    Delivers good value for the price
    48 Answers
    89%
    Delivers good value for the price
    40 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    86%
    Happy with the feature set
    64 Answers
    94%
    Happy with the feature set
    49 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    89%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    31 Answers
    87%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    39 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    81%
    Implementation went as expected
    38 Answers
    85%
    Implementation went as expected
    40 Answers
    Best Alternatives
    Khoros CommunitiesThinkific
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    Higher Logic Thrive
    Score8.9 out of 10
    iSpring Suite
    Score7.7 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    Higher Logic Vanilla
    Score5.5 out of 10
    Articulate 360
    Score9.2 out of 10
    Enterprises
    Verint Community
    Score10 out of 10
    Articulate 360
    Score9.2 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Khoros CommunitiesThinkific
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.4
    (95 ratings)
    9.2
    (54 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    4.2
    (8 ratings)
    8.6
    (8 ratings)
    Usability
    8.0
    (3 ratings)
    8.7
    (44 ratings)
    Availability
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    5.5
    (2 ratings)
    Performance
    -
    (0 ratings)
    5.5
    (2 ratings)
    Support Rating
    5.0
    (5 ratings)
    8.9
    (10 ratings)
    In-Person Training
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Online Training
    4.5
    (2 ratings)
    6.4
    (1 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    8.0
    (2 ratings)
    6.6
    (3 ratings)
    Configurability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    3.6
    (1 ratings)
    Contract Terms and Pricing Model
    -
    (0 ratings)
    4.5
    (1 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    9.0
    (2 ratings)
    6.4
    (1 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    8.6
    (86 ratings)
    6.4
    (2 ratings)
    Vendor post-sale
    -
    (0 ratings)
    4.5
    (2 ratings)
    Vendor pre-sale
    -
    (0 ratings)
    5.5
    (2 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Khoros CommunitiesThinkific
    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
    Thinkific
    I think Thinkific is very well suited if you want more control and not a ton of competition. It is very well suited if you want to create courses because it does an amazing job with providing course outline examples for you to stay organized and so forth. The only thing I would say where the courses might be less appropriate is if someone is expecting it to be like an udemy where people can see a ton of different course creators all in one place with course recommendations. Thinkific is not that type of platform and I LOVE that. On Thinkific, it almost feels like our site is our own ya know. I tried out other platforms and it just felt like you were competing with so many other people and could see other courses. Felt like being on a platter served with others. Thinkific just feels more unique in the sense it feels like when people come to your page, they are only seeing your page.
    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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    Thinkific
    • Enables course creators to deliver high quality courses very fast
    • Offers unlimited hosting for videos included in the subscription price
    • Provides an easy to use administration interface that's powerful and accessible
    • Easy to scale subscription tiers on B2C plans, cost effective highly scaleable B2B plans (Thinkific Plus) ideal for companies who want to start a customer education program
    • Amazing support and account management team - great mindset and people in the teams.
    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
    Thinkific
    • auto formatting of some course building content, does not format well on phone vs desktop
    • filter by group functionality for website based content, it's mostly filter by enrollments
    • the plug and play web building is convenient but really we need a UX/UI designer to build a super good looking website. Plug and play builder works but doesnt look SUPER sharp if done by someone with no dev skills or coding ability
    Incentivized
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    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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    Thinkific
    I'm very likely to renewal as long as Thinkific stays focused on helping small businesses like myself to stay in the know of new and more effective ways to use digital learning tools to help our students get better success. I will also stay with Thinkific if they do not intend to hike up the prices and keep the different price plans suit all businesses regardless of the size.
    Incentivized
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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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    Thinkific
    Under Site Builder, when trying to add a new section, so many templates appear; however, preview is not shown, which makes it super difficult and time consuming to identify a template that suits the purpose. Customization of certification designs is a bit difficult too. There are limitations to the type of quiz questions I can create - for example, there's no option to have fill in the blank questions.
    Incentivized
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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.
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    Thinkific
    I've never had any issues with accessing Thinkific but I can see when it has been a problem for others. When I get updates on when they are doing maintenance to their platform I tend to make sure that is not the day I plan to be working on my school so as not to get frustrated
    Incentivized
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    Performance
    Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
    No answers on this topic
    Thinkific
    When it comes to the performance of Thinkific for me I find that it's good but could be better. I tend to think that the larger the files and videos you upload on your courses may add to the impact of it's uploading (not sure if that's actually true or not). But overall the performance of Thinkific via my tablet and desktop is very good when I have a fast speed broadband speed
    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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    Thinkific
    I rate Thinkific a ten because of its excellent customer service, ease of use, high-quality product, fair price with excellent ROI, and because they keep making improvements. Using Thinkific solved the problems of piecing together our course with various WordPress plugins, iframes, and payment processing software. It's easy to create a course website for people who can't write code.
    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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    Thinkific
    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
    Thinkific
    It was good and easy to understand
    Incentivized
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    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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    Thinkific
    I highly recommend utilizing the bulk importer for video content early on, as it saves a massive amount of time during the initial setup phase. Another insight is to set up your custom domain and email integrations (like Mailchimp or HubSpot) at the very beginning of the implementation
    Incentivized
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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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    Thinkific
    ClickFunnels is great for funnels, but as of now, it does not do well with e-learning. Maybe they'll change that in ClickFunnels 2.0. But for now, I use Thinkific because I need a place where the students can come into their own dashboard, find all the courses they have purchased on a single place and be able to track their progress.
    Incentivized
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    Contract Terms and Pricing Model
    Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
    No answers on this topic
    Thinkific
    Great use easy and simple
    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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    Thinkific
    The opportunities to scale your online course business with Thinkific is endless. They provide a great range of plans with features, integrations and support to suit the needs of any business as different levels. The key here is knowing where to start with the budget you have and then knowing when it's time to scale up and the tools and resources it will require.
    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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    Thinkific
    • No email marketing makes it more difficult to collect leads.
    • Price can be a barrier at time for small businesses who don't have revenue.
    • Easy to use and helps with my business needs vs platforms like Squarespace.
    • Community building through workshops and webinars Thinkific host.
    • Access to educational resources and mobile app.
    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.