Raklet Community & Membership Management Software vs. Higher Logic Vanilla

Raklet Membership Management Software is most suitable for membership-based organizations like ourselves. If you want to create different membership plans and restrict some of the content for your paid members, Raklet can definitely be helpful. Also, our members were never this engaged before we decided on the solution. The membership management is off the hook; we can see all the activities of our members, and we don't need to manually correct their information, as they are able to update themselves. But if you want to sell physical goods to your members, you would need to use another marketing base besides Raklet Membership Management Software. We were able to go through, as we restricted some pages only to our paid members.

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

• Membership management
• Great customer service
• Value for money is off the chain
• All the necessary features are included

• 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

• An online store would be nice
• Separate section for newsletter subscriptions
• More payment getaway options

• 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

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

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

We also evaluated those products before moving on with Raklet Membership Management Software. I would say the main problem is that these products are well-pronounced among membership management softwares. For this reason, first, their interfaces looked outdated and boring, and we would like to have a better landing page to promote our readers to visit our website. Secondly, they are not as flexible as we like them to be. Most of the other solutions offered one-for-all; we didn't feel like using them because we wanted something special and customized.

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

• Increased efficiency
• Affordable CRM solution
• Promote people to subscribe at our pages

• 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