TrustRadius
Vanilla Forums is 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.https://media.trustradius.com/product-logos/XM/47/MOQ1OT7X25O7.pngVanilla ForumsNothing "Vanilla" About Their Forums2018-04-15T20:18:19.418ZWe use Vanilla Forums as our community platform for allowing our community to ask questions in various categories across our product. We also use it for community support of our free and educational users as well as monitoring and gathering improvement requests for future product updates. The forum is integrated into our service through Single Sign On (SSO) and provides a streamlined way to gain access to our community. We also are able to use it to get User Experience (UX) feedback on Early Visibility Programs (EVP) with scoped categories where only users who are part of these programs can provide input.,It has a great API and we utilize this for badging our FREE, PRO and EDU users as well as providing access to our private EVP programs
They have wonderful customer service that works with us in a number of ways from simple tweaks to even our most advanced integrations via the API.
Customization options for discussions, questions, polls and even idea voting..
Large number of add on packages for out of the box integration with tools like Zendesk which we use extensively.
Analytics backend - Ability to really understand what content is getting the most attention and how effective our community is answering questions.,Customization of analytic data by rank (Typically we would like to filter our data by our user's account types to see who out of our entire community is using the community.
The API development has been slow but they have recently pushed out their new V2 but prior to V2, there were some inefficiencies in doing some automated user management.
Most of my previous issues were addressed since we started with them.,10,Being able to offer support for our FREE and EDU users whom do not pay for use of our service has been a very large impact by not having to staff support for those users. The community is able to see new questions, answer and get feedback from the asker if their issue was answered.
We also use this as a barometer of issues and common themes that might come in across our global user base. Having our entire company able to read, comment and pull support tickets for further investigation has become a critical part of tapping into our user network.
Being able to use this for support, community and improvement voting has also simplified our process to not have specialized tools for each and we are able to do this all in one tool, everyone knows and does not need a large amount of on-boarding for.,Get Satisfaction, Zendesk, Discourse, Jive and Lithium Online Communities,Zendesk, JIRA Software, AWS Lambda, CloudAppLou GalloVanilla (Cloud-Hosted) Review2017-07-28T19:19:01.316ZWe use Vanilla as our front-facing forum. Users discuss concepts, hands, videos, and more. This allows us to centralize the conversation, take pressure off of email support, and give a better experience to our users.,Simplicity
Speed
Classic Forum,Add-ons could be expanded
More SEO options,8,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,,WordPressJames SweeneyVanilla Forums are anything but Vanilla2017-07-27T20:21:03.559ZOur company uses Vanilla as our primary community platform for several of our games. Users can find like minded players, gameplay tips and tricks, and troubleshooting assistance.,They provide excellent and timely assistance when setting up and configuring a community.
Their team is very helpful, friendly, and professional.
The platform itself is robust and is reasonably performant. it includes gamification features to encourage community participation.,Creating visual themes can be difficult. Although there is an open source version of the software, some of the plugins (gamification, badges) are not available for download, so any visual theme that includes them will need to be at least partially developed on their servers, vs doing the whole thing offline and then uploading it all at once. This can be time consuming as each code change has to be checking in to Github and then imported into their server cluster.,8,Our previous community forums were built on vBulletin and were self hosted. They required regular security updates and multiple web servers. By switching to a cloud hosted Vanilla instance, we were able to save money on web servers and freed up valuable IT resources for other projects.,vBulletin and phpbbNathan HamarAdventures of a Forum Newbie—Vanilla helped us focus and get our forum off the ground2017-07-27T16:46:06.106ZOur forum, called StorageForum, is designed as a place for the open exchange of information relating to SiteLink software customers and members of the self-storage industry. The goal of the forum is for active participants as well as casual visitors to benefit from the forum’s free exchange of ideas, expansive knowledge base, and entertainment value. In addition, we dedicated a large section of the forum to our Marketplace Partners (vendors) and gave them moderator privileges as an added value to their partnership with us.
In addition to StorageForum being a knowledge base for the self-storage and SiteLink communities, we hope the forum will increase sales as it reaches new people and also increase current customer satisfaction.,The Add-ons and Badges features in the Dashboard are very user-friendly. The interface is visually well-organized is super-easy to understand — I never have that "I'm really not sure what this is about" feeling when implementing these options. Confidence is key!
Vanilla Forum software is brand new to me so I've had lots of questions, especially in the beginning. But Tech Support has been extremely helpful and prompt! Shauna always provides thorough explanations, along with screencaps, whenever I'm stuck.
Users really appreciate the notifications options—they're very specific as to emails or popups, with dozens of scenarios to specify especially for moderators. This reduces frustration (like getting too many emails) and worrying (wondering) if someone responded, etc. It's very customizable.,I'd really like to see an option to list discussions in order of views—most to least. Right now the "Best Of..." feature is awesome but relies completely on Reactions alone.
Seeing the view count reduce to "1" every once in while is a little disturbing, especially for us as a small community just starting out. I know this is a side effect of resetting the cache, but maybe Vanilla could find a way to keep the views intact.
I'd like to be able to apply more than one Rank to a user. This is fairly specific to our community, but I'd like to recognize the expertise of some users and Ranks would be perfect. Using Roles for this has been cumbersome.,10,Our forum is fairly new (2 months!) but what I can say is that our user count is increasing at a steady rate (after the initial bump) and our page views are steady as well.,Adobe Acrobat DC, Google Drive, Adobe Photoshop,10,3,Q&A
Tech support
Event reminders,Posting Q&A from webinars
Taking monthly polls and then linking to our newsletter,Unsure at this time.,10Sue CreaserA winning choice2017-07-26T21:05:19.739ZVanilla Forums is used across our organization, both as a support ticket deflection as well as an idea engine for software ideas and enhancements. It addresses the need to have support answer the same questions and through gamification encourages other users to help other customers out.,Ideation - giving the users the ability for what they want to see in our products is extremely helpful for designing our roadmap.
Easy to customize - Having the ability to freely customize the look and feel was one of the key reasons for choosing Vanilla Forums. Other alternatives appeared to have high engagement costs with any change.
Dedicated Success Manager - Having professional services and a customer success manager helps ensure we are using the platform correctly, and get fast support to any question or issue we may be having.
Q&A - The ability to mark questions as answers has had huge impact on ticket deflection.,Improved API - though I believe this is currently in development.,9,Quicker Support Times
Identified our customer advocates
Improved development cycles focusing more on what customers wantJoe Burrows
Unspecified
Vanilla Forums
10 Ratings
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