Discourse vs. Higher Logic Vanilla

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Discourse
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
Discourse is an open-source community management and moderation product.N/A
Higher Logic Vanilla
Score 6.0 out of 10
N/A
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.N/A
Pricing
DiscourseHigher Logic Vanilla
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Essential
Contact sales team
Corporate
Contact sales team
Enterprise
Contact sales team
Enterprise Plus
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Offerings
Pricing Offerings
DiscourseHigher Logic Vanilla
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
DiscourseHigher Logic Vanilla
Considered Both Products
Discourse
Chose Discourse
Vanilla's mobile functionality was downright awful and it felt like it was stuck in the 2000s. While they have similar features, Discourse blows them away in almost every department. We don't regret switching at all.
Higher Logic Vanilla

No answer on this topic

Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
DiscourseHigher Logic Vanilla
Small Businesses
PowerDMS by NEOGOV
PowerDMS by NEOGOV
Score 9.6 out of 10
PowerDMS by NEOGOV
PowerDMS by NEOGOV
Score 9.6 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
PowerDMS by NEOGOV
PowerDMS by NEOGOV
Score 9.6 out of 10
PowerDMS by NEOGOV
PowerDMS by NEOGOV
Score 9.6 out of 10
Enterprises
Discord
Discord
Score 8.5 out of 10
Salesforce Experience Cloud
Salesforce Experience Cloud
Score 8.4 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
DiscourseHigher Logic Vanilla
Likelihood to Recommend
8.9
(3 ratings)
9.0
(10 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
DiscourseHigher Logic Vanilla
Likelihood to Recommend
Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, Inc.
[Discourse is by] far the best online forum platform in the industry. It may be a little pricey for people looking for a cheap option for their hobby forum, but for any type of business that relies on a forum, the pricing is more than fair.
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Higher Logic
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.
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Pros
Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, Inc.
  • User Privileges : Teams, Trust Levels, Moderation, Private and Public Threads make it possible to have as much transparency, privacy or power decentralization as one wishes.
  • Gamification: Badges and Achievements can be customized for User Activity and frequent readers and writers.
  • Mailing List mode: Users can choose to use forum threads without the User Interface by subscribing via mailing list mode.
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Higher Logic
  • 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.
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Cons
Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, Inc.
  • Some configuration UIs are difficult to follow
  • Not well-suited for managing workflows (grant management as an example)
  • Bulk operations across multiple threads either impossible or difficult to figure out
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Higher Logic
  • 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.
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Usability
Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, Inc.
No answers on this topic
Higher Logic
It is very intuitive and simple to operate. Our customers immediately came up with the curve and began contributing content.
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Support Rating
Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, Inc.
No answers on this topic
Higher Logic
They did an amazing job transferring our content from GetSatisfaction. We had almost 100% success in the transfer of 8 years worth of content.
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Alternatives Considered
Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, Inc.
Vanilla's mobile functionality was downright awful and it felt like it was stuck in the 2000s. While they have similar features, Discourse blows them away in almost every department. We don't regret switching at all.
Read full review
Higher Logic
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.
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Return on Investment
Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, Inc.
  • Community Members are eager to jump into the discussion.
  • Conversations can be tracked easier without the risk of being lost in a sea of messages as people tend to construct their posts more carefully than on any workspace messenger.
  • It's open source and configurable with many other add-ons to help integration with other services.
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Higher Logic
  • 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
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ScreenShots

Higher Logic Vanilla Screenshots

Screenshot of Looks great on any device, including desktop, tablet or mobile device.Screenshot of We offer over 60 plugins that can add functionality to your community.Screenshot of Many different themes to choose from, which you can further customize as you like.Screenshot of You have full access to edit HTML and CSS of your theme, to make any changes you need.