Khoros Communities vs. Salesforce Experience Cloud

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Khoros Communities
Score 8.3 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
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.N/A
Salesforce Experience Cloud
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement (formerly Salesforce Experience Cloud or Salesforce Community Cloud) is an online forum powered by Salesforce that enables businesses to connect with their employees, customers, partner organizations, and prospects. Designed to help facilitate communication and information sharing, customers can ask questions and request help, administrators can integrate data from third-party apps, and employees can collaborate across projects and…N/A
Pricing
Khoros CommunitiesSalesforce Experience Cloud
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Khoros CommunitiesSalesforce Experience Cloud
Free Trial
NoNo
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 CommunitiesSalesforce Experience Cloud
Considered Both Products
Khoros Communities
Chose Khoros Communities
Overall the Khoros community is a very mature and well known platform. It is a great tool to strengthen the connection between a brand and its users. It also provides numerous features and tools to the community managers, which allow them to shape the platform to their specific …
Chose Khoros Communities
Khoros Communities was always one of our frontrunners during the selection process. Some communities had more integrations or better UI/UX for admins on the backend. Ultimately we went with Khoros because it integrated better with some 3rd party tools we already use and it had …
Chose Khoros Communities
Experience Cloud is (was) a community in name only. Trying to club Chatter and Knowledge together in a web frontend was near impossible to make work for any of the most essential community functions; analytics was impossible, changes were extremely slow/burdensome as they are …
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.
Chose Khoros Communities
Khoros's features are more robust, interface is more user-friendly and analytics are better. It's the clear leader in the space right now.
Chose Khoros Communities
Khoros is much more established and feature-rich than Salesforce's Community offering. E.g., gamification is implemented well in Khoros (except for Missions and Journeys) whereas Salesforce's offering is rudimentary.
Jive is mainly used for internal communities, whereas Khoros …
Salesforce Experience Cloud

No answer on this topic

Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Khoros CommunitiesSalesforce Experience Cloud
Security
Comparison of Security features of Product A and Product B
Khoros Communities
-
Ratings
Salesforce Experience Cloud
10.0
1 Ratings
22% above category average
Role-based user permissions00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Platform & Infrastructure
Comparison of Platform & Infrastructure features of Product A and Product B
Khoros Communities
-
Ratings
Salesforce Experience Cloud
10.0
1 Ratings
21% above category average
API00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Internationalization / multi-language00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Web Content Creation
Comparison of Web Content Creation features of Product A and Product B
Khoros Communities
-
Ratings
Salesforce Experience Cloud
9.3
1 Ratings
20% above category average
WYSIWYG editor00 Ratings8.01 Ratings
Code quality / cleanliness00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Admin section00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Page templates00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Library of website themes00 Ratings8.01 Ratings
Mobile optimization / responsive design00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Publishing workflow00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Form generator00 Ratings8.01 Ratings
Web Content Management
Comparison of Web Content Management features of Product A and Product B
Khoros Communities
-
Ratings
Salesforce Experience Cloud
8.6
1 Ratings
19% above category average
Content taxonomy00 Ratings9.01 Ratings
SEO support00 Ratings8.01 Ratings
Bulk management00 Ratings8.01 Ratings
Availability / breadth of extensions00 Ratings8.01 Ratings
Community / comment management00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Results and Analysis
Comparison of Results and Analysis features of Product A and Product B
Khoros Communities
-
Ratings
Salesforce Experience Cloud
8.0
1 Ratings
10% below category average
Conversion tracking00 Ratings8.01 Ratings
Test reporting00 Ratings8.01 Ratings
Funnel Analysis00 Ratings8.01 Ratings
User Segmentation00 Ratings8.01 Ratings
Digital Experience Platform
Comparison of Digital Experience Platform features of Product A and Product B
Khoros Communities
-
Ratings
Salesforce Experience Cloud
10.0
1 Ratings
3% above category average
Campaign management00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Cloud enablement00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Content aggregation00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Content classification00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Multi-channel content personalization00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Customer data analytics00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
DXP Third-Party Integrations00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Multi-website management00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Digital asset management00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Editorial workflows and task management00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Khoros CommunitiesSalesforce Experience Cloud
Small Businesses
PowerDMS by NEOGOV
PowerDMS by NEOGOV
Score 9.6 out of 10
Progress Sitefinity
Progress Sitefinity
Score 7.7 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
PowerDMS by NEOGOV
PowerDMS by NEOGOV
Score 9.6 out of 10
Tridion
Tridion
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
Discord
Discord
Score 8.5 out of 10
Tridion
Tridion
Score 9.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Khoros CommunitiesSalesforce Experience Cloud
Likelihood to Recommend
8.4
(97 ratings)
9.9
(52 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
5.7
(7 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
5.0
(3 ratings)
9.4
(4 ratings)
Availability
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(5 ratings)
Support Rating
5.4
(5 ratings)
7.7
(17 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)
9.4
(4 ratings)
Product Scalability
8.3
(88 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Khoros CommunitiesSalesforce Experience Cloud
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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Salesforce
Salesforce Experience Cloud is well-suited for organizations that have clients who periodically or routinely need to access historical data or documents. The product also offers an exceptionally effective tool to engage with customers around support/service issues and the entire Case management functionality built into the Salesforce platform. The product might be less well-suited in environments where there is exceptionally high staff turnover within customer accounts, or where there is a substantial lack of very basic computer skills.
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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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Salesforce
  • Complete integration with the Salesforce ecosystem. Data displayed in your Community portal reflects records from a Sales Cloud organization
  • Highly customizable. A Community Cloud portal can be totally customized both visually and with different funcionalities with little to no coding skills required
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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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Salesforce
  • The documentation for implementing Experience Cloud can be a bit confusing as their rebranding hasn't made it's way into all articles, resulting in different terminology being used to refer to the same thing
  • Some things are not as intuitive regarding their customizability, so there's a bit of a learning curve (i.e. Lightning apps can't be used to customize layouts in Experience Cloud)
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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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Salesforce
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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Salesforce
Usability is pretty streamlined, especially if you're familiar with other Salesforce products, but even if not, take it from me, as I just entered the technological space about two years ago, that this product is pretty simple to learn. You don't have to jump in with your head underwater. Small wins and learnings along the way are what foster long-term understandings and enable your evolution alongside the product. I definitely recommend Salesforce Trailhead along with it
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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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Salesforce
No answers on this topic
Performance
Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
No answers on this topic
Salesforce
It's delivered on our original requirements and we've found ways to grow its usage. We continue to build on our original success and we can report our data out to leadership to show a true return on investment which is great for growing support and expanding uses for the system.
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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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Salesforce
We have weekly calls with our Salesforce reps. They bring new ideas to the table and help with taxonomy builds. They have also answered many questions and connected us to the right people for us to grow our knowledge and utilization of the platform. They are a good partner overall in comparison.
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In-Person Training
Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
I think it is engaging and has good instructors.
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Salesforce
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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Salesforce
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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Salesforce
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.
Read full review
Salesforce
I have used Datatel/Colleague/Recruiter before. There were issues because only one person at the institution was able to have the student's record open at a time. This was problematic when collaboration between departments was necessary especially in the case of admissions, financial aid, and registration. We also had to do our work and then log out before asking a questions of another department. Sometimes simultaneous use was necessary. However, this was years ago and they may have since updated the program.
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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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Salesforce
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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Salesforce
  • Improved online admission application completion rates from mid-60%s to mid-80%s.
  • Positive user experience from start-to-finish to leverage one data system for all prospective student data
  • Fewer data integrations transforming and loading sensitive student data by leveraging Salesforce Community Cloud to access already existing data
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ScreenShots

Khoros Communities Screenshots

Screenshot of Community helped generate a 4.2/5 customer satisfaction rating for Consorsbank.Screenshot of Samsung saw support savings up 255% YOY and growing. Their community drives 60% of SEO traffic.Screenshot of Microsoft has seen $2M+ in SEO value and $145M case deflection savings since adopting community.Screenshot of Sony Europe generates $4M in value and 7M searches per monthScreenshot of Syndicate community content throughout digital channels to better engage your audience.Screenshot of On-demand, peer-generated questions and answers to increase prospect and customer engagement.