Spotify for Podcasters, formerly Anchor, is a podcasting platform, enabling the user to create, distribute, and monetize a podcast. It is available via a free plan. It features built-in uploading, recording, and editing tools so the can easily create and publish episodes.
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Higher Logic Vanilla
Score 4.0 out of 10
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Higher Logic Vanilla is a customizable and themable forum software. It can be used for support communities, Q&A Communities and more. There are numerous integrations, including SSO, and connectors to popular software such as Mailchimp, WordPress, Zendesk and Salesforce.
Anchor is a great podcast app for folks just starting out with podcasting or who want some of the technical things to be streamlined and simplified. With the built-in audience of Spotify subscribers, it's also easy to get started with a listening audience. There are easy ways to connect to other Podcast platforms and easy ways to integrate ads if that's something you want to do as a podcaster.
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.
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.
Monetization features are currently present in only a limited number of countries, I look forward to the various monetization features like pre-roll and mid-roll ads to be made available soon in my country India.
Add more platforms to its distribution services such as Amazon Music and similar ones so that we would not be required to submit the RSS Feed to platforms manually.
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.
It's intuitive from the moment you log in until you publish. The only reason I'm not giving it a 10 is because some sections aren't translated into Spanish, and while it's not a problem for me, it's something that could be improved. Furthermore, the design is very clean and doesn't feel overwhelming with options. Everything is where it should be, and the process for publishing episodes is clear. Es intuitivo desde el momento que entras hasta que publicas. Si no le pongo un 10 es porque hay ciertas secciones que no aparecen traducidas al español, y aunque no me supone un problema, es algo mejorable. Además, el diseño es muy limpio y no da sensación de "saturación" de opciones. Todo está donde debe estar y el proceso para publicar los episodios es claro.
Anchor is less expensive and, in my opinion, much easier to use than SoundCloud for podcasting. Anchor makes syndication easy, and their recording and editing interfaces are clean and intuitive. SoundCloud seemed somewhat cumbersome to use, and I didn't care for its UI. Honestly, they seem better suited for other use cases.
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.
