ONCE Campfire vs. Slack vs. Higher Logic Vanilla

Slack is great for tracking commits to new coding projects. You can take parts of code that still need to be implemented later and easily search through the history of comments if there is something that goes wrong with a code commitment. It can be difficult for people that only like Teams to adjust to a new platform if you are using both to communicate.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Huddles Run smoothly without any interferences.
• Smooth individual calls quick and easy without any interruptions.
• seamless notifications across multiple devices
• The ability to easily tag a team member to urgently attend to a specific escalation.
• Slack being user friendly and able to integrate easily with other platforms and apps.
• How to easily open up different channels for different escalations and needs.
• a safe direct messaging option.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Would love a better integration with GitHub. For example, notifications when your PR is updated, when review is requested, @-mention in comments, etc.
• Improved "Later" tab, for example the ability to create to-do lists or making the "Later" tab into a more powerful to-do list (annotate items with notes)
• More powerful integrations, e.g. Google Calendar could render a calendar view within Slack, rather than sending the daily schedule

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

To be more transparent, I give 10 because Slack serves our collaboration needs. It provide us a good platform for team communication relaying important update within the company, it has even mobile app where you can install in your phone to monitor any updates within that team that needs your immediate attention and intervention.

Incentivized

My rating was 7. Its intuitive interface and user-friendly features like channels, threads, and integrations make it excellent for team communication and onboarding. However, its usability is held back by the resource-intensive desktop app and cluttered feeling in large workspaces. The mobile app's performance and unreliable notifications have also been noted as weaknesses.

It is very intuitive and simple to operate. Our customers immediately came up with the curve and began contributing content.

Incentivized

Yes, the app works 24/7. I don't even recall having any period that we could not use since the implementation. Even the maintenance periods are barely noticeable and our work is not impacted by it when it happens.

Incentivized

Slack is a soft app, we don't have many issues with it. I recall one or two people complaining about something during our usage period, but I didn't have a bad experience. When the app is slow, usually the problem is with my computer or my internet. The app works just fine.

Incentivized

Whenever I've had to troubleshoot an issue with Slack (which, to be honest, has not happened very often), their online documentation has been easy to locate, easy to understand, and effective in resolving my issue. Slack's ever-growing popularity also means that there's a large community of practice out there that can be depended upon.

Incentivized

They did an amazing job transferring our content from GetSatisfaction. We had almost 100% success in the transfer of 8 years worth of content.

Incentivized

I was not part of the implementation team, but I recall being 100% happy and excited to learn and use a new tool. I'm still am to be honest.

Incentivized

I like Slack better than ClickUp, because I would spend 30-60 minutes a day updating my ClickUp tasks. The way ClickUp was used was very micromanaging. I billed by the hour, so I was willing to put in the time to alert the boss what tasks I was working on.

One of my jobs used Hive - I mostly just ran it in the background in case anyone messaged me. I did not use it often.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Slack has been incredibly helpful in connecting various tech apps and ecosystems, creating a more streamlined and responsive process.
• Slack has made it significantly easier to communicate with our team members across multiple time zones, creating a more engaging environment for our all-remote team.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized