TrustRadius Insights for Higher Logic Vanilla are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Pros
Great API: Many users have praised the platform's API, stating that it is excellent for badging different user types and accessing private EVP programs. Several reviewers have found this feature to be highly useful in customizing their community experience.
Wonderful customer service: The platform's customer service team has received numerous accolades from users. Reviewers have mentioned that the team goes above and beyond to provide support, ranging from simple tweaks to advanced integrations via the API. This level of assistance has greatly impressed many customers.
Customization options: Users appreciate the wide range of customization options available on Vanilla Forums. They find it helpful to have add-on packages for discussions, questions, polls, and idea voting, as well as seamless integration with tools like Zendesk. The ability to tailor their community to fit their specific needs has been a major advantage for reviewers.
We use it as our support community for our customers. We have an extremely active community of participants who contribute content regularly. It allows our customers to support each other and connect with other users. It is a great tool for us.
Pros
They did an amazing job with transitioning our content from our old provider.
They have a great method for voting on the quality of posts.
Very good gamification capabilities.
We are really pleased with how it handles trolls.
Cons
I would like to see a bit more visual customization capabilities.
We will be looking into integration with WordPress and my impression is that they do not have a strong integration.
Likelihood to Recommend
It is an amazing tool for a customer forum. We, and our customers, are very pleased with the tool.
We 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.
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.
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
We 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.
Pros
Simplicity
Speed
Classic Forum
Cons
Add-ons could be expanded
More SEO options
Likelihood to Recommend
If you need a normal front-facing forum experience, it's excellent. Pricey if you go with the cloud option, but excellent.
We use Vanilla Forums to provide a community feature to our members. We have a large community of 100 million plus users, but not all access our forums. Without Vanilla, we would be using outdated software to provide forum access to our members.
Vanilla forums allow us to have a place to interact directly with our members. It also allows them to share their success and health and fitness goals with one another. This ability to share motivates users who may be new or struggling to reach their goals and to find new friends.
Pros
They provide excellent customer service to us on a weekly basis. If we have questions or find something that we'd like improved or even something new we'd like to add to our program, we have a dedicated person we can reach out to who helps us facilitate that change.
We're fond of their add-ons. We use many of them in our community. Some keep our members engaged on a day to day basis. We really like reactions, the keyword blocker, the civil tongue filter, and a few customized add-ons that Vanilla added specifically for our community.
They send us notifications for all upcoming releases, and update their software frequently.
Cons
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.
Likelihood to Recommend
If you need a basic forum or need Vanilla to help you customize it, they are really good at that! They would work for anyone with a small or large community, as you can customize so many things to make it your own. They have a really nice dashboard so you can customize and add whatever add-ons you want. Vanilla Forums works really well for us in that we are a user-policed forum with staff and volunteer moderators to handle incoming reports.
Our 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.
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.
Our 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.
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.
Likelihood to Recommend
Because the Search feature is really precise, Vanilla Forums seems very well-suited for knowledge-based communities where you need to find something specific quickly.
Vanilla Forums is being used to run our community forums in which users and developers can help each other out with problems and share tips. Multiple departments in our organisation have an interest in community engagement.
Pros
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.
Cons
Analytics: This is currently a little lacking. It would be great to be able to see user participation by category for example.
User management: This page often requires refreshing in the browser after changes have been made. It is not the most intuitive system although does the job.
Roles and permissions: Better explanations of what each setting does would help a new admin such as myself.
Likelihood to Recommend
Vanilla Forums is well suited for growing communities that wish to expand without having to change software. Existing larger communities may find the user management part of the tool lacking, although this could be from my lack of experience.
Vanilla 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.
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.
Likelihood to Recommend
Well suited and well priced, a great option with all the bells and whistles as some of the enterprise grade solutions.
We are currently using Vanilla Forums as a tool for a community for our customers. With Vanilla Forums it has allowed us to create a blog spot where our customers can engage each other and share information regarding our product, services, and customizations that are available.
The Vanilla Forum known as the Cireson Community has been implemented across all organizations.
The business problem that this address is access to information. With such a large customer base it is difficult to be aware of each situation our customers are using our product. With the advent of the community, this has given us a centralized point of access to share with everyone.
Pros
Gamifying - Vanilla forums have allowed us to institute a ranking system where users are rewarded for participation. With this feature, users can gain recognition and prizes.
Ease of use. Vanilla forums is very easy to use and manage.
Customer service from Vanilla forums is fast and responsive. Knowing that you can receive feedback on an issue is great.
Interaction between users. Supporting upwards of 1200 customers can be a difficult task. The community allows us to manage customer interaction and make the community aware of serious issues before they become a problem.
Cons
Copy and pasting would be a great improvement. To add picture to a forum post requires that you save the picture to a file and add it to the posting. This can be extremely time consuming.
The ability to discard a post before actually posting it. Right now if I start a post I have to post it, then delete it if I want it removed.
Likelihood to Recommend
For the purpose of what we are using it for, it's very suitable. [It has a]Nice UI, and a great technical team that helps with any issues, and the site has been running without issue.
This product is well suited for someone who wants a forum or blog community without too much effort on their part.
Vanilla is being used by the whole organization as an external-facing communication and discussion medium for our end-users. Customers use the forum to discuss the product, report bugs, and interact with our development team in an informal setting. The forum is also used to make announcements and provide news about the product.
Pros
Vanilla has an easy setup and administration interface. The GUI is easy to use and features drag and drop functionality for some items like category rearrangement.
Vanilla has both on-prem and cloud hosting options, and provides a dedicated CSR with development resources. Customizations are possible such as styling, banners, and look and feel tweaks to default visual wrappers.
Vanilla has a decent add-on collection, including antispam, warning system, swear word filter, and more.
Cons
Vanilla's service as it relates to cloud hosting could use some improvement. Communication tends to fall off and is sometimes not as prompt as it could be. CSR to development team interaction and access needs to be more transparent as customers are not typically given direct access to a technical resource that might understand software issues better.
Some of Vanilla's functionality leaves a lot to be desired, especially as it relates to larger or different types of communities. Some features were clearly not built with worst-case scenario abuse in mind, such as the ability for users to React to posts with clickable buttons (or even to hide posts they feel are Spam or Trolling, easily exploitable by disgruntled users), or the inability to have a limit on how far users can quote or tag one another (resulting in long, unwieldy chains of conversation), or the spam filter's tendency to have a high number of false positives and inability to deal with foreign language spam. Even basic post searching is devoid of any meaningful advanced algorithm, leading to a lot of results that are irrelevant or just not intuitive to end users.
These are just some of the things Vanilla is ill-equipped to deal with for communities of larger size.
Vanilla's development team needs to be more responsive and understanding of concerns and criticism regarding software features on their platform. Inadequacies pointed out in the way their software works are often met with an inaccurate passing of the buck towards customers ("teaching users not to abuse the Spam or Troll buttons is a Community Management issue") or with delayed promises of fixes (more robust signature filtering and control is just one example). The software has clear flaws and inabilities to deal with certain abuse scenarios from end-users that it needs to be able to address and not just pass off to customers to better manage communities. Software features need to be better developed with these worst-case scenarios in mind.
Delivery of some product features or layouts needs to improve. In some cases, asked-for designs have been lacking basic features (such as obvious buttons or features for ease of use) or have outright been delivered as broken (improper floating of graphical assets leading to distortion of the layout, bad sizing on fonts, words, or other text-based elements, or errors for certain testing scenarios for posting).
Likelihood to Recommend
Vanilla is best suited to small, intimate communities that have the ability to police themselves effectively and which have the luxury of being able to not have to deal with the critical mass of larger communities on the internet. The feature set is well-suited to informal non-professional settings for small to medium communities. However it is ill-suited to dealing with enterprise level or business environments, or with communities with hundreds of thousands of members where abuse is more easily rampant. The only way it has been feasible at that level is to gut the product features or simplify layout or design so that it can't be used with ill intent by troublemaking users, which sort of defeats the purpose of using the platform.
Combined with the less-than-stellar customer service and communication, this makes a recommendation not likely from my perspective.
