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.
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Verint Community
Score 9.2 out of 10
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Verint Community (Telligent) is a community and collaboration software platform developed by Telligent Systems and was first released in 2004. Telligent's focus was on offering a platform that can be integrated and extended, but this requires technical expertise. Verint acquired Telligent in 2015.
Verint is easier to use, but we are able to grow our community without limitations. Pricing model is more competitive than the larger platform providers and the professional services and Support services are excellent.
Both Higher Logic and Khoros came in with very few benefits compared to Verint with a much higher price point, and potential for additional expenses. With Verint, we added some initial implementation services but were able to plainly see and understand any future financial …
There are many different enterprise ready community platforms on the market, and each one has its own superpowers. The greatest strength Verint has to offer is the complete control a community leader has over the design of the community to build their vision with few …
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.
It is very well-suited to peer-to-peer benchmarking as information can be organized and retained far better than email lists. News digests and robust subscription options make it easy for members to get the right amount of notifications. It appears less able to integrate interesting community content into other enterprise products like SharePoint / MS365 than some competitors like ServiceNow
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.
Customization/flexibility - The platform can be truly made "yours." How far to take this can depend on what skillsets or budget you have available for customizations, but customers have an opportunity to provide an unparalleled experience for members. Almost every aspect of the site experience can be configured which seems to be a unique offering.
Customer service - They have a very active community filled with fellow community managers and developers who are eager to support one another. The Verint staff is extremely engaged, always offering to help, accessible and transparent when sharing insights, and generally pleasant and supportive! The ideas for improvements that I've received from the Verint team or fellow customers have been invaluable.
Affordable - In our vendor selection process, Verint came in among the lowest in price AND highest in value.
Flexible hosting environment - Choose if you want them to host and manage the back end, or if you want to host yourself. Not having to worry about server maintenance is a huge weight off the customer's shoulders, and you don't have to decide whether to sacrifice hosting for flexibility.
Integrations - The platform API is robust and well documented, so you can integrate the site any way you want into your existing systems if you have the proper knowledge.
Transparent roadmap and ideation process - The Verint team really listens to their customers and implements improvements to the platform based on customer input. They readily share what's coming soon and keep realistic expectations on what will (or won't) be done and when.
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.
Verint Community can work on improving the language part of their business which would help in interacting with customers in non English countries more easily
User interface is very dated, it required very high customizations from our side in order to be using it as functional. Hoping for UI part to be more focused on their upcoming updates.
Features such as chatting and group chatting could be introduced in a similar way to other big social media companies
They could build a mobile application as well other than the website for much better collaboration and ease of use.
If you are an experienced online community professional, Verint offers the flexibility you need. You do need to have a lot of expertise if you want to build a solid user experience because there isn't a template out-of-the-box that is just ready to go for various use cases. It will take awhile to fully understand the capabilities of Verint Community.
While the support portal (cases) is helpful, I've been even more impressed by their own support community. I always get quick, thoughtful, and interesting answers to my questions from support personnel, in-house developers, other users, and even the VP/GM himself! They have a really wonderful thing going there.
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.
Verint Community was a lot more customisable than the other platforms we looked at, it was also one of the few that could be self-hosted (for us, we chose to deploy it in our own Azure environment).
It has helped in growing and helping our eCommerce reach. Our company is in personal computers, mobiles and other electronics space which has a huge share of marketing which depends on word of mouth. As users engage more in the community and learn about the different devices we sell as well, they engage and let other members also know, including their friend circle, which in turn converts into business for us.
We are having huge issues with the language part of the community as our company is selling in almost every country in the world and the lack of proper language support in the community makes our platform difficult to grow in other countries. If they bring out new updates to resolve the issue of language, then surely this platform would do wonders.
We were able to host giveaways in our gaming and education communities which helped users pour a lot of interest into learning about the product and also spreading more awareness about it as well which has been very useful.
