Slack vs. Higher Logic Vanilla

I think Slack works really well in office settings, or even for any group of people who need an easy way to communicate with each other through organized channels. It may not be the best for those who intend to use it as a social media type app, it is more geared towards business use.

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

• Automated Notifications: Integrated tools like Jira, Trello, and Google Drive to receive automated notifications and updates directly in Slack, improving visibility and efficiency within the team
• Message Encryption: Slack encrypts the messages in transit and at rest, ensuring the security and privacy of sensitive information and making our IT team's life much easier.
• Reminder Bots: We used Slackbot to set reminders, automate follow-up actions, and provided information based on user queries.
• SurveyMonkey Integration: Integrated our Slack with SurveyMonkey to distribute surveys and collect feedback from team members, streamlining the feedback-gathering process which was a huge support to our HR and Admin team.

• 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

• The only thing I can think of is that it is easy to create too many channels. This has more to do with the team using Slack and less to do with Slack itself. maybe some direction on Slack's part on how best to utilize channels would be helpful.

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

As useful as Slack has become within our company, I feel fairly confident we will continue to use Slack as a communication tool. They continue to improve their software and add value to its use within our office. Customer service delivers, which is an absolute must. Looking forward to how they improve.

Incentivized

As long as you use the basic chat features and nothing more, it really is super easy to understand and use. Once you want to take advantage of some of the more advanced features and capabilities, that's when things get complicated. Anyone who has use SMS or a chat program before will be able to figure out the basics though, so rolling this out should be relatively straightforward and not required exhaustive training. Teaching chat etiquette is something else though.

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

Incentivized

I've never had to contact support for Slack which is a great testament to its ease and use. Adding people outside of the organization takes a little getting used to, but ultimately allows for greater collaboration between FTE and contractors. There is no clear alternative to this software, so it's the best we can do for now.

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

It always helps if you communicate to everyone in the organization how important it is to drop whatever other chat tools they are using and jump quickly to Slack. They will all fall in love with it.

Incentivized

Slack is the superior offering for what we do and who we communicate with. The other programs offer basic features, but Slack continues to innovate and is business-first, which is very helpful for our small team. The feature set and integrations are better in Slack than other offerings we have evaluated

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

• We have a story when one guy mentioned in a our site group with tag @here about his wedding, he didnt know that @here works only for people who are online, so most of the people missed the message, slack is not the best place to update about the important things
• Slack helps to solve and be updated if you have an internal problems and you want to know how the solving goes

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