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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

    VerticalResponse

    Score10 out of 10
    N/AVerticalResponse is an email campaign management software and services platform from Deluxe. In addition to providing email marketing tools, VerticalResponse offers fully managed email marketing services from campaign launch and management to reporting and analysis.

    $9

    per month

    Pricing
    Khoros CommunitiesVerticalResponse
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    Basic
    $11.00
    per month
    Pro
    $16.00
    per month
    Pro Plus
    $196.00
    per month
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Khoros CommunitiesVerticalResponse
    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 CommunitiesVerticalResponse
    Considered Both Products
    Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
    No answer on this topic
    VerticalResponse
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    95%
    Would buy again
    70 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Delivers good value for the price
    98%
    Delivers good value for the price
    48 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Happy with the feature set
    86%
    Happy with the feature set
    64 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    89%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    31 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation went as expected
    81%
    Implementation went as expected
    38 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Features
    Khoros CommunitiesVerticalResponse
    Email & Online Marketing
    Comparison of Email & Online Marketing features of Khoros Communities and VerticalResponse
    Feature
    Khoros Communities
    -
    Ratings
    VerticalResponse
    9.9
    8 Ratings
    21% above category average
    WYSIWYG email editor00 Ratings10.07 Ratings
    Dynamic content00 Ratings10.05 Ratings
    Ability to test dynamic content00 Ratings10.04 Ratings
    Landing pages00 Ratings10.04 Ratings
    A/B testing00 Ratings10.05 Ratings
    Mobile optimization00 Ratings10.05 Ratings
    Email deliverability reporting00 Ratings10.08 Ratings
    List management00 Ratings10.08 Ratings
    Triggered drip sequences00 Ratings9.02 Ratings
    Reporting & Analytics
    Comparison of Reporting & Analytics features of Khoros Communities and VerticalResponse
    Feature
    Khoros Communities
    -
    Ratings
    VerticalResponse
    10.0
    9 Ratings
    27% above category average
    Dashboards00 Ratings10.09 Ratings
    Standard reports00 Ratings10.09 Ratings
    Custom reports00 Ratings10.06 Ratings
    Pre-Send Testing
    Comparison of Pre-Send Testing features of Khoros Communities and VerticalResponse
    Feature
    Khoros Communities
    -
    Ratings
    VerticalResponse
    10.0
    1 Ratings
    20% above category average
    URL Validation00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
    Link Tracking00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
    Image Validation00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
    Inbox Display00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
    Email Accessibility Tools00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
    Spelling and Grammar Check00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
    Spam Testing00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
    Email Previews00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    Khoros CommunitiesVerticalResponse
    Small Businesses
    Higher Logic Thrive
    Score8.9 out of 10
    Mad Mimi
    Score10 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    Higher Logic Vanilla
    Score5.5 out of 10
    Campaign Monitor by Marigold
    Score9 out of 10
    Enterprises
    Verint Community
    Score10 out of 10
    Emma by Marigold
    Score8.5 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Khoros CommunitiesVerticalResponse
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.4
    (95 ratings)
    10.0
    (28 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    4.2
    (8 ratings)
    8.6
    (19 ratings)
    Usability
    8.0
    (3 ratings)
    9.0
    (5 ratings)
    Availability
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    Performance
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    Support Rating
    5.0
    (5 ratings)
    8.0
    (4 ratings)
    In-Person Training
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Online Training
    4.5
    (2 ratings)
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    8.0
    (2 ratings)
    10.0
    (4 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    9.0
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    8.6
    (86 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Khoros CommunitiesVerticalResponse
    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
    VerticalResponse
    For businesses requiring advanced email marketing features like sophisticated automation, in-depth analytics, and extensive customization, VerticalResponse might fall short due to its limited featuresVerticalResponse is ideal for small businesses or freelancers who need a simple, straightforward email marketing tool. Its ease of use and basic features make it suitable for those without extensive technical expertise in email marketing
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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
    Read full review
    VerticalResponse
    • I love the ease of list builder because we often times have a lot of data to import. It would be simply impossible without this tool, considering the amount of customer data we have for any one given email.
    • We really enjoy the ease of use of the HTML wizard as well. It helps even a novice be able to make a beautiful and attention grabbing email.
    • The dashboard is functional and easy to find when you need with a quick search.
    Incentivized
    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
    VerticalResponse
    • The type face is small. Not sure if this is to avoid overwhelming the reader, but I could see this being an issue with vision-impaired people or people who don't see small print well.
    • Sometimes I find it takes multiple clicks to make one simple change. I wish there was a search field at the top of the screen that allowed me to jump directly to a client's entry to update it there.
    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
    Read full review
    VerticalResponse
    Product is easy for both technical and non-technical people to use. A cost effective solution for sending out large number of messages. We can manage unsubscribes by individual accounts, so we can have multiple multiple accounts combined to maximize our buying power on credits. Effective API for sending/receiving data makes tool a valuable asset.
    Read full review
    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.
    Read full review
    VerticalResponse
    I truly love this product. We are moving to an all-in-one system next year and my greatest fear in doing so is how much I will miss this platform. Although we are excited for things ahead, I will always keep Vertical Response in my back pocket incase I don't love the new platform as much
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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
    VerticalResponse
    Never had an issue with uptime
    Read full review
    Performance
    Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
    No answers on this topic
    VerticalResponse
    No issues
    Read full review
    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.
    Read full review
    VerticalResponse
    At Vertical Response the help desk associates are courteous, knowledgeable and helpful. You can tell they enjoy what they do. And clearly, they are well trained because most times, the first point of contact is able to resolve any issue you may have. There have been very few times where an associate has needed to get back to me or escalate me to a supervisor
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    In-Person Training
    Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
    I think it is engaging and has good instructors.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    VerticalResponse
    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
    VerticalResponse
    Basic functions and online help...we used what was needed, at the time, and will continue to explore other online trainings as our functional needs expand
    Read full review
    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).
    Read full review
    VerticalResponse
    Salesforce integration never worked right. We had to abandon.
    Read full review
    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
    Read full review
    VerticalResponse
    In addition to using Vertical Response personally I also manage email marketing for clients that already use Mailchimp, Robly and Constant Contact. While most of these platforms all offer similar features I choose Vertical Response first if the client does not have a platform in place. Typically I am also teaching the client how to use this tool and the Vertical Response visual interface is very easy for me to teach a client how to navigate and create their own campaigns.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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
    Read full review
    VerticalResponse
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    VerticalResponse
    • We were able to blast out promotions our company was having to customers which created an increase in business.
    • By blasting out any service issues, it keeps our customers informed so that they are not wondering what is going on.
    • Allows us to store unsubscribed emails so that we are not constantly pestering people who do not want to be emailed.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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.