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Higher Logic Vanilla

Score5.5 out of 10

15 Reviews and Ratings

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What is Higher Logic Vanilla?

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.

Categories & Use Cases

Media

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

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Reviews

What users are saying about Higher Logic Vanilla.
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Nothing "Vanilla" About Their Forums

Incentivized
Lou GalloView profile
Team Member in Engineering at Onshape Inc. (51-200 employees employees)

Pros

  • 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.

Cons

  • 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.

Return on Investment

  • 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.

Alternatives Considered

Get Satisfaction, Zendesk, Discourse, Jive and Lithium Online Communities

Other Software Used

Zendesk, JIRA Software, AWS Lambda, CloudApp

Vanilla (Cloud-Hosted) Review

Incentivized
James SweeneyView profile
CEO in Corporate at Red Chip Poker (1-10 employees employees)

Pros

  • Simplicity
  • Speed
  • Classic Forum

Cons

  • Add-ons could be expanded
  • More SEO options

Return on Investment

  • 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

Other Software Used

WordPress

Vanilla Forums are anything but Vanilla

Incentivized
Nathan HamarView profile
Senior Web Developer in Information Technology at Glu Mobile (501-1000 employees employees)

Pros

  • 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.

Cons

  • 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.

Return on Investment

  • 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.

Alternatives Considered

vBulletin and phpbb

Adventures of a Forum Newbie—Vanilla helped us focus and get our forum off the ground

Incentivized
Sue CreaserView profile
Copywriter in Marketing at SiteLink (51-200 employees employees)

Pros

  • 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.

Cons

  • 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.

Return on Investment

  • 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.

Other Software Used

Adobe Acrobat DC, Google Drive, Adobe Photoshop

A winning choice

Incentivized
Joe BurrowsView profile
DevOps Engineer in Information Technology at Cireson - Your System Center Experts (51-200 employees employees)

Pros

  • 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.

Cons

  • Improved API - though I believe this is currently in development.

Return on Investment

  • Quicker Support Times
  • Identified our customer advocates
  • Improved development cycles focusing more on what customers want

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