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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

    UserTesting

    Score8.1 out of 10
    N/AUserTesting helps UX researchers, designers, product teams, and marketers gather actionable insights through research, testing, and feedback. With a network of real people ready to share their perspectives, UserTesting enables organizations to make customer-first decisions at scale.N/A
    Pricing
    Khoros CommunitiesUserTesting
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Khoros CommunitiesUserTesting
    Free Trial
    NoYes
    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 CommunitiesUserTesting
    Considered Both Products
    Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
    No answer on this topic
    UserTesting
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    95%
    Would buy again
    70 Answers
    95%
    Would buy again
    128 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    98%
    Delivers good value for the price
    48 Answers
    92%
    Delivers good value for the price
    94 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    86%
    Happy with the feature set
    64 Answers
    92%
    Happy with the feature set
    126 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    89%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    31 Answers
    95%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    82 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    81%
    Implementation went as expected
    38 Answers
    97%
    Implementation went as expected
    90 Answers
    Best Alternatives
    Khoros CommunitiesUserTesting
    Small Businesses
    Higher Logic Thrive
    Score8.9 out of 10
    No answers on this topic
    Medium-sized Companies
    Higher Logic Vanilla
    Score5.5 out of 10
    Dovetail
    Score8.6 out of 10
    Enterprises
    Verint Community
    Score10 out of 10
    Optimal
    Score8.5 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Khoros CommunitiesUserTesting
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.4
    (95 ratings)
    8.5
    (196 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    4.2
    (8 ratings)
    8.4
    (8 ratings)
    Usability
    8.0
    (3 ratings)
    8.6
    (174 ratings)
    Availability
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    Performance
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    Support Rating
    5.0
    (5 ratings)
    8.3
    (173 ratings)
    In-Person Training
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Online Training
    4.5
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    8.0
    (2 ratings)
    4.6
    (4 ratings)
    Configurability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    7.3
    (1 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    9.0
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    8.6
    (86 ratings)
    7.3
    (1 ratings)
    Vendor post-sale
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    Vendor pre-sale
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Khoros CommunitiesUserTesting
    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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    UserTesting
    UserTesting has been great for moderated customer interviews/usability testing as well as for unmoderated testing of messaging, imagery, prototypes and live experiences. I would say that the scope of what you want needs to be limited, as the participants are only paid so much and tests are supposed to not exceed a certain amount of time. For customer interviews, I think it can be difficult to onboard customers to UserTesting if they have never used it before. If I set up interviews, I don't even have them use the UserTesting scheduling tool, I actually set up all the interviews with the customers myself through the tool (being mindful of time zones!). When we run the meeting, they really don't even know UserTesting is involved. Might be nice for UserTesting to allow the upload/connecting to of a Zoom interview and let it do the transcription/analysis from there.
    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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    UserTesting
    • Product Manager who follows up on your UserTesting usage and gives advice/support when you need it.
    • UserTesting University is a great platform to learn how to use UT and general information about research.
    • UserTesting can find participants quickly, so you won't need to wait long before you can start the analysis.
    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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    UserTesting
    • Sometimes there are restrictions around types of research that can be used for moderated user-testing with our own users.
    • For tests on relatively small areas of a website or app, the AI analysis seems rather overblown, like it's trying too hard to come up with something insightful when the test is actually about something quite small (e.g. structure of a mobile app menu).
    • It's difficult to invite our own users to unmoderated user-testing because they wouldn't know how the UserTesting interface works - this is particularly an issue for mobile research.
    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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    UserTesting
    I'm very happy with my experience of the product and the level of service and learning resources they provide. If the service becomes more expensive than it currently is then we might not be able to justify additional cost - but this is theoretical. I would recommend UserTesting and would ideally renew our contract.
    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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    UserTesting
    It's very good, I have used other tools in the past and this is by far the most intuitive and user friendly. Testament to this is the ease with which other non researchers who have been onboarded to the tool with our additional seat have found it easy to use
    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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    UserTesting
    Never encountered any problems
    Incentivized
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    Performance
    Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
    No answers on this topic
    UserTesting
    Perfectly fine. Never had any problems.
    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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    UserTesting
    I have contacted UserTesting's customer service online, by email, or by phone a few times, and each time, I have encountered the same professionalism and expertise. Even in person during a work event, they were there, and it was the same experience.
    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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    UserTesting
    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.
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    UserTesting
    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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    UserTesting
    From a technical perspective, the implementation was extremely smooth. Most of the change management / implementation hurdles were clearing use of the tool through our various security, legal, and information privacy teams. Once these concerns were addressed (UserTesting.com was very helpful in providing all the needed documentation), the implementation process was very simple and we were able to get going right away.
    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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    UserTesting
    The quality of the participants: they usually have good feedback and act like "professional" users. Which is good when we want a few insights in a short amount of time. Also, the interface is good. I miss having more features, like a good transcription tool like we have in Condens
    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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    UserTesting
    The package we have limits the number of people who can set up tests. This prevents us from scaling the use of the platform.
    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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    UserTesting
    • Content is key to the sign up journey and UserTesting helps me improve that.
    • UserTesting has helped me improve the Cashier on our site, making it easier for users to deposit money.
    • UserTesting is helping me iterate all our content decisions, helping us improve the UX across all platforms.
    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.

    UserTesting Screenshots

    Screenshot of UserTesting's several solutions for gathering rich customer experience narratives.Screenshot of Interactive Path Flows
Built on recent research in data mining, the Interactive Path Flow aggregates interaction data across multiple participant sessions to visualize the customer journey, surface unexpected behaviors, and locate key moments in the customer journey.Screenshot of Keyword Mapping
Similar keywords are automatically grouped based on overall sentiment (positive, negative, or neutral) to identify themes. Highlight reels associated with each keyword are grouped together, to discover the why behind each sentiment.Screenshot of Video capture and live streaming
Digital and real-world customer experiences are recorded on desktop and mobile devices or live streamed for in-platform viewing.Screenshot of Audience targeting
Audiences are specified by screening contributors from UserTesting’s global network of contributors or connecting to any preferred network.