Likelihood to Recommend If you're looking for an affordable alternative to platforms like Circle, UUKI could be a perfect fit. It offers similar functionality for a much more affordable price. No member limit, no storage limits, while still being able to white label your own community. However, be aware that it's still in development. There are certainly some bugs to be fixed and a few updates required to truly compete with the others.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Pros Spaces, where we set the topis for people to engage in an organized manner Easy to use, it has everything you need, no fluff, very intuitive Great Support, the development team behind really listens to their users, and nurture their own community Read full review 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. Read full review Cons Some tweaks on UI/UX to make it more polished I would appreciate a better roadmap (instead of a trello board) Allowing translating the string to change the language style to meet the community's style (like Ay mate! for Pirate of the Caribbean fan's community) Read full review 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. Read full review Likelihood to Renew No reason not to continue using UUKI and expand upon it.
Read full review Usability Anyone can use it, and having HTML knowledge is not necessary.
Read full review It is very intuitive and simple to operate. Our customers immediately came up with the curve and began contributing content.
Read full review Support Rating They provide almost constant support if needed. Their team considers all feedback and implements solutions when needed.
Read full review They did an amazing job transferring our content from GetSatisfaction. We had almost 100% success in the transfer of 8 years worth of content.
Read full review Implementation Rating UUKI is extremely easy to implement but requires a brief period of time to understand where all of its controls are. (not a real issue)
Read full review Alternatives Considered UUKI is moving a lot faster than other platforms. Plus the fact that they are building with the community makes it easier to learn from others who have implemented it for their respective use cases. We selected it because of the value proposition and its affordability which make it a failsafe investment. Plus the founders have experience in building products which is always assuring
Read full review 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.
Read full review Return on Investment I like the fact that Ankur and his team really listen to their early users. They just keep on improving UUKI and it's really not that hard to transfer your community from FB to UUKI. There are just so many features and it keeps on improving. UUKI really helps you build your community. You can transfer your audience from Facebook that has a lot of restrictions to your own exclusive community Read full review 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 Read full review ScreenShots Higher Logic Vanilla Screenshots