Higher Logic Vanilla vs. Vuforia Chalk

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

Best suited for: - Team of remote support is a great visual way to address technical issues; Especially when talking about production environments. - Team of Project developers, a great tool to do tests remotely when multiple people from the customer need to connect, Vuforia Chalk support group calls and differentiates each person based on the color of annotations. Less suited for: - IT teams, which its support is mainly focused on SW issues.

Incentivized

• 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

• Remote support for technical issues in the factory environment.
• Remote support for Factory Acceptance Tests, when traveling is not possible.
• Remote support for issues in the industry, when traveling is not possible.

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

• Web-version used to be a bit limited, in terms of users and features. Is on the roadmap to improve in future versions
• No subscription version limited to 3 minutes calls.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

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

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

• 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

• Savings in mobility (traveling) when performing determined Factory Acceptance Tests.
• Customers like the possibility of engaging in Augmented Reality Solutions.
• Remote support is faster and easier, with a visual tool to see and do annotations in the screen.

Incentivized