Khoros Communities vs. Higher Logic Vanilla

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Khoros Communities
Score 8.5 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
Higher Logic Vanilla
Score 6.0 out of 10
N/A
Higher Logic Vanilla is a customizable and themable forum software. It can be used for support communities, Q&A Communities and more. There are numerous integrations, including SSO, and connectors to popular software such as Mailchimp, WordPress, Zendesk and Salesforce.N/A
Pricing
Khoros CommunitiesHigher Logic Vanilla
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Essential
Contact sales team
Corporate
Contact sales team
Enterprise
Contact sales team
Enterprise Plus
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Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Khoros CommunitiesHigher Logic Vanilla
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesYes
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 CommunitiesHigher Logic Vanilla
Considered Both Products
Khoros Communities
Chose Khoros Communities
A lot of small and key features which are not available on other platforms
Chose Khoros Communities
Khoros was the best use for our needs and other solutions were always missing at least one or more features that were crucial for our use case and the workaround proposed by other platforms weren't simply enough. Most of them have their strong side and it is hard to say, which …
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 …
Chose Khoros Communities
  • Khoros had a clear migration path for Jive users.
  • Khoros is a platform that can scale.
  • Khoros allows us to spread and share knowledge while allowing us to continue to build trust and credibility with all our loyal fans.
Higher Logic Vanilla
Chose Higher Logic Vanilla
Most of all we could customize the forum to look and feel like an extension of our existing web properties. This makes the forum feel more native to the users coming from or being redirected to the forum. We also had plans of being able to create custom badges we could grant …
Chose Higher Logic Vanilla
From a footprint standpoint, Vanilla has less technical bloat than vbulletin or InVision, and it outdoes Lithium as far as features and service go. The bloat of other services and ability to use new ways of engaging communities such as through Reactions are part of the reason …
Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
Khoros CommunitiesHigher Logic Vanilla
Small Businesses
PowerDMS by NEOGOV
PowerDMS by NEOGOV
Score 8.2 out of 10
PowerDMS by NEOGOV
PowerDMS by NEOGOV
Score 8.2 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
PowerDMS by NEOGOV
PowerDMS by NEOGOV
Score 8.2 out of 10
PowerDMS by NEOGOV
PowerDMS by NEOGOV
Score 8.2 out of 10
Enterprises
Salesforce Experience Cloud
Salesforce Experience Cloud
Score 8.5 out of 10
Khoros Communities
Khoros Communities
Score 8.5 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Khoros CommunitiesHigher Logic Vanilla
Likelihood to Recommend
8.6
(95 ratings)
9.0
(10 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
5.7
(7 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Usability
5.0
(3 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Availability
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
5.1
(5 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
In-Person Training
9.1
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Online Training
4.5
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
8.5
(86 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Khoros CommunitiesHigher Logic Vanilla
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.
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Higher Logic
For companies that want to customize almost anything and make the forum look like your site, Vanilla Forums is the one for you. Customization and automation of the data via the API with other systems is more than possible and they serve to be great as a hosting provider, dealing with all the upgrades, deployments and maintenance and threat management well. I would say they might be less turn key for a small application but the fact they have an open source community, the ability to find help and information can lower the barrier of entry for most.
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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.
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Higher Logic
  • Gamification: The ability to incentivise community members to get involved with ranks and badges is one of the main reasons that we purchased the tool.
  • Support: The Vanilla support team are incredible, often responding to issues very late at night and proactively fixing issues as soon as they occur.
  • Customisation: Vanilla can be completely styled with css allowing us to match it to the branding of the rest of our website.
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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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Higher Logic
  • There are some features I wish Vanilla would implement that could improve ease of use in our specific community, but some of the ideas we have are not necessarily something that would benefit all of the forums that Vanilla works with.
  • In the past, we've had issues with releases breaking some of our specific site features they built for us, but this has improved drastically recently.
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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
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Higher Logic
No answers on this topic
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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Higher Logic
It is very intuitive and simple to operate. Our customers immediately came up with the curve and began contributing content.
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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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Higher Logic
No answers on this topic
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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Higher Logic
They did an amazing job transferring our content from GetSatisfaction. We had almost 100% success in the transfer of 8 years worth of content.
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In-Person Training
Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
I think it is engaging and has good instructors.
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Higher Logic
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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Higher Logic
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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Higher Logic
No answers on this topic
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.
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Higher Logic
From a footprint standpoint, Vanilla has less technical bloat than vbulletin or InVision, and it outdoes Lithium as far as features and service go. The bloat of other services and ability to use new ways of engaging communities such as through Reactions are part of the reason Vanilla was selected. However, the features are better on a couple more seasoned platforms and more equipped to deal with issues and technical problems.
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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
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Higher Logic
No answers on this topic
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.
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Higher Logic
  • Increased uptime and overall speed in the forum (compared to our previous phpbb solution)
  • Increased usage by users which resulted in a higher pages/session in a short amount of time
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ScreenShots

Khoros Communities Screenshots

Screenshot of page design templates. These allow for on-the-fly customization and updates without a development team.Screenshot of page overview under the Designer tab. Easily organize content and make changes to page layout to improve the experience for community members.Screenshot of a conversation in the community. Engagement features allow users to collaborate, trouble-shoot and self-serve.Screenshot of Agent Assist in Khoros. This feature allows community moderators to reply to conversations faster and with better responses.Screenshot of the Analytics dashboard. Monitor key metrics to determine how members are interacting in the community.

Higher Logic Vanilla Screenshots

Screenshot of Looks great on any device, including desktop, tablet or mobile device.Screenshot of We offer over 60 plugins that can add functionality to your community.Screenshot of Many different themes to choose from, which you can further customize as you like.Screenshot of You have full access to edit HTML and CSS of your theme, to make any changes you need.