Lithium Community is a fully-featured community platform and is focused on the needs of marketers. Lithium most often competes with Jive Team Collaboration and Get Satisfaction.
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UserZoom
Score 7.9 out of 10
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Pricing
Khoros Communities
UserZoom
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Khoros Communities
UserZoom
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
Pricing is variable based on the needs of the customer.
I describe Khoros as the salesforce of community software in that it's customizable and enterprise, however it can be a beast to use. There isn't any standout in the community field (in my opinion) so if you're looking for an enterprise community software, it'll serve you well. I do think it's important to realize you can't manage this without the proper buy in from your company when it comes to development of the site. You shouldn't be using Khoros if you only have a front end community manager. If you're going all in on community and need a solution that will scale as you grow, consider Khoros amongst your vendors and see how you like it. It's worth checking out.
UserZoom is well suited for usability testing, I found specifically around test websites and marketing materials. I was able to invite others to participate and watch as well as screen share so that it was an interactive session. Other tools I have used have been a little better with the video output and transcripts of each session so that we could capture notes quickly, but overall it was a good tool to use to test.
Quantitative testing can be done on the cheap compared to other quant tools or vendors... once you buy the license, you only pay for additional recruiting and you are managing the project, so there isn't the high cost of having other vendors doing the project management or running a survey etc.
Farily robust means of tracking and recording data. I also relied heavily on the excel spreadsheet of all the raw data, which you can have UZ customize for you to get what you need.
Great support system from the UserZoom team - they have researchers who can help with coding and also provide research support for a very good price.
Also they have tree testing, card sorting, survey capabilities (in addition to usability testing)... and mobile testing. and they seem to be continously be developing the tool to support additional methods.
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
Compared with some other tools, because their video conferencing platform is web-based (vs. using Zoom, which has a desktop app), I find the connection buffers a lot and it's kind of annoying
Their screening tool on the UserZoom side (not Go) is clunky. Just let me select May, Must, or Should not for criteria rather than the weird interface design they have now.
Logic panel is a little confusing, sometimes I do a double-take, sometimes it's wonky and resets itself. It's just not as easy to use as it could be.
They haven't integrated UserZoom and UserZoom Go (formerly Validately)
It's expensive!
We signed up for a high sample size license with unlimited tests, but we're finding their panel doesn't fill as fast as their biggest competitor, UserTesting. We've struggled to fill n=100 sample tests with fairly general criteria.
A lot of their licenses only allow limited concurrent studies, whereas UserTesting had unlimited tests that you could launch at a time. It's slowed us down.
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
I'm actually trying to get a license for my current job at my current company (recently moved to a new company). I gave it this rating because I am about to go to our executive to ask that we purchase it! I know that there will be value because we are forecasting a high volume of research next year
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.
Overall, it was fairly easy to use. Especially if you are familiar with this type of product. We were able to use it for testing pretty much right after we got it (same day) and didn't have many issues figuring out how to invite, test, and share which was great.
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.
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.
From my experience, the UserZoom team has really done a great job answering the limited questions we have given them thus far. I think the platform is popular enough that many of my questions have been answered by their help pages - or other online content with helpful tips and tricks. I think the community has done a nice job of providing end-user tutorials for those who are new to the platform.
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.
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).
The company was already using this platform when I was hired, so it's what I had to work with. In a previous role, I did explore Khoros Communities as a platform and it was one I really wanted to use, but it's a very expensive platform so I wasn't able to move forward with it. Back to my current role, again, this is who we already had a contract with.
Client selected it due to how they used it, pricing, and what it could do for them. It's about the same as these other tools but UsabilityHub let's you run multiple types of task in one test, and UserTesting still has a bigger panel I think
Khoros platform-based communities can very easily and rapidly grow in line with their community size. Better support could be given/provided to new customers to ensure their community development is in line with best practice. Communities can and do grow using methods within the Khoros platform that at later points can hinder growth rather than support it. e.g. Utilising custom content fields to update the production environment rather than building pages and quilts in studio and then pushing to prod and only adding 'posts' to the page in prod. Further training for community admins to look out for these pitfalls would be worthwhile.
Making informed decisions: repeat testing before launching the app/website to reduce errors in the future
Guarantee customers' satisfaction: ensure the errors are reduced to the minimum so that the purchase process is smooth and there will be no need to reach out to our customer support team
