Khoros Communities vs. Whatfix

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.

Incentivized

For the area of independent learning of topics in a system, Whatfix is best suited, as it offers many possibilities due to the different offers of the presentation. We are developing this with the support of the personnel development department and it is showing the first positive results and it is showing the first positive results in our sales units.

• Collaboration with other Khoros customers to understand what works and doesn't work within other communities.
• Support documentation makes it easy to find information when looking for technical resources.
• Our account team is always in communication with us to ensure we are aware of roadmap updates.

Incentivized

• Whatfix is a vendor that listens to their client, understands their business challenges, and works with them to achieve their goals.
• Feature enhancements are released every quarter, often with significant functionality improvements.
• The support and engineering teams are outstanding - responsive, helpful and nothing is ever too much trouble. Literally, second-to-none!

• I feel that the professional services engagements need to be better. There is a lot of miscommunication, and a lack of clear outcomes, goals, and timelines. It can take weeks to get meetings on the books and a team assembled to start getting work done.
• Documentation on their website, at times, is outdated or incorrect. Sometimes the product doesn't even work as described in some of their documentation
• The admin console could use a nice fresh UI overhaul. While it's functional, it would be nice to see a more modern UI for the area where most community managers are spending a decent amount of time

Incentivized

• How no-code the experience with Whatfix is really depends on your application. As one of our applications relies on nested iframes, not everything worked out-of-the-box and we had to spend time on debugging and doing advanced customizations. Though the support team at Whatfix has been very helpful in solving these matters, it still made it difficult for us to delegate the work to coworkers with less technical experience.
• Prone to bugs. While no platform is perfect, we unfortunately had some cases where bugs broke popups and guides for our users.
• Look & feel customization can be restrictive and inconsistent. Depending on what kind of content you create, you have more or less options to customize the look and feel of the content. E.g. popups have a dozen of pre-configured templates and the possibility to edit the style based on HTML, CSS, and Javascript (JSX), whereas Task Lists have less options to be configured. Though I was informed that Whatfix will improve this in the near feature.

Community has worked well for over the year. However, there have been a lot more technical and feature issues we have been seeing in last year or so. Also customer support has not been very quick to address issues. SO there are things that can definitely be improved on Khoros end

Incentivized

Whatfix are an absolutely stellar vendor in every way. As with all technology tools and platforms, it's important to evaluate the marketplace to see what else is on offer. It would have to be something exceptional for us to seriously consider discontinuing our relationship with Whatfix

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.

While they've made a lot of improvements in the last year, there are still challenges with walkthroughs and how beacons can be created. They are aware of these limitations and are actively soliciting customer feedback to help them remedy these shortcomings.

Incentivized

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.

Sometimes there is a delay to showcase all whatfix elements

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.

Support is very proactive and quick at solving/investigating any issue that might come up. They are very knowledgeable about their own tool and coding as well, and therefore, they quickly understand the goal you try to achieve - even doing custom code when necessary (or fixing your custom code). Even as COVID hit, Whatfix still managed to supply the same high standard of support.

I think it is engaging and has good instructors.

Incentivized

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.

While helpful, the feedback from our employee was, that [they felt] the training was very high-level - sometimes confusing. It would be great to have some kind of sandbox environment for new users to train certain scenarios.

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).

Although Whatfix make the process relatively straightforward (they will provide Group Policy Scripts to install a Google Chrome extension specific to your organisation) its important to ensure your network deployment teams (if you have more than one) understand their role and what they need to do to test deployment once they undertaken the work.

WordPress, Guild, tribe - all have pros and cons vs Khoros. The primary concern of Khoros vs other platforms is cost. For the price difference, Khoros *should* be a no-brainer choice. No one should ever consider using any platform other than Khoros... so why do people consider other platforms?

Incentivized

There is no comparison - Whatfix is the clear winner with us from the very beginning. As Whatfix continues to grow and innovate their product, engage with it's customers on a level beyond any I have every seen. They work as Partners with us, their teams from bottom to top are incredible - Customer Service, Collaboration Teams, Innovation, Sales, Success Mangers and everyone I missed are incredible. One team in particular I want to call out for there outstanding service, care and innovation to help us launch one of our systems is the Professional Services Team. Ganish, Joel, and everyone else who has been on our calls and worked behind the scenes to hit our incredible tight deadline in August - KUDOs for a job well done, You ROCK, THANK YOU words cannot describe how great you guys have been with us on this project, but on all of them. Whatfix's team definitely understands, the customer is first, they align with our values and we will continue to grow with them

Incentivized

The platform is incredibly scalable and provides the flexibility to use it out-of-the-box or customize it to whatever extent is needed. It has very powerful APIs and is built in modular way that allows pages, components and other elements to be constructed easily.

Incentivized

• When we switched from Yammer to here, it really increased visibility of the community to the general public, the media, and in search results.
• It's created dynamic relationships and shortened the gap between Microsoft employees, MVPs, and other users.
• It's been a great place for software products to gather feedback from users, and for users to feel they have the inside track.

Incentivized

• The hope is that it will make claiming expenses easier for employees which would allow them get on with their jobs and also take a number of basic queries away from the administrative team. Actual numbers are yet to be determined.