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Vanilla Forums has been widely adopted as a community platform by various organizations to cater to different needs. Users have utilized …
Overview
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.
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Pricing
Essential
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Cloud
Corporate
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Enterprise
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Cloud
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttp://vanillaforums.com/plans
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Product Details
- About
- Integrations
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- FAQs
What is Higher Logic Vanilla?
Higher Logic Vanilla aims to reinvent the traditional discussion forum, given forums are the original social media and remain a place for meaningful interaction among hundreds of millions of people.
Vanilla Forums Cloud, is a cloud based community software. Below are a few of the features of Higher Logic Vanilla:
-Themes: Customize the look and feel, beyond just header and footer.
-Gamification and reputation system: More than just badges, the reputation engine can be used to promote good content, grant member abilities, and help automate moderation.
-Made for Mobile: Detects the browser agent and applies the most appropriate theme to ensure a great user experience
-Single Sign-on: Vanilla's jsConnect SSO, SAML support and social logins make it easier for users to register. SSO can be configured to be seamless within an existing system.
-API: Vanilla has a RESTful API.
-Permissions: Control fine-grained, role-based permissions that can be assigned on a per-discussion-category basis. Assign multiple roles to individual users. Roles can be set manually, based on registration workflow, via SSO and via the API.
-Spam Prevention: Tools to keep the community forum free of spam.
-Integrations: Salesforce, WordPress, Mailchimp, Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and more.
Higher Logic Vanilla Features
- Supported: Fully customizable theme
- Supported: Gamification and reputation system
- Supported: Single Sign On (SSO)
- Supported: Granulat Permissions
- Supported: Native mobile support
Higher Logic Vanilla Screenshots
Higher Logic Vanilla Integrations
- WordPress
- Zendesk Suite
- Mailchimp
- GitHub
- Salesforce
Higher Logic Vanilla Competitors
Higher Logic Vanilla Technical Details
| Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
| Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
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.
The most common users of Higher Logic Vanilla are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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Reviews and Ratings
(13)
Community Insights
TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!
- Business Problems Solved
- Pros
- Cons
Vanilla Forums has been widely adopted as a community platform by various organizations to cater to different needs. Users have utilized it as a space to ask questions, provide support, and gather improvement requests for future product updates. With Single Sign-On integration, accessing the forum is streamlined, ensuring a seamless user experience.
One of the notable use cases of Vanilla Forums is its ability to obtain User Experience feedback on Early Visibility Programs. By setting up scoped categories exclusively for program participants, only those involved can provide their valuable input. This feature has proven effective in collecting targeted feedback and insights from the right users.
In addition, Vanilla Forums serves as a knowledge base for specific industries. For instance, StorageForum, a Vanilla-based forum, acts as a hub for SiteLink software customers and the self-storage industry. It promotes the exchange of ideas and knowledge, enabling users to share information and learn from one another.
Partnerships with Marketplace Partners are strengthened through Vanilla Forums by granting them moderator privileges on the platform. This allows vendors to actively engage with the community and contribute to discussions, deepening their partnership with the company.
The impact of Vanilla Forums goes beyond community engagement—it has been instrumental in increasing sales and customer satisfaction. By centralizing conversations and reducing the pressure on email support, new people are reached more effectively, resulting in improved customer experiences.
Within organizations, multiple departments leverage Vanilla Forums to foster community engagement and facilitate mutual assistance among users and developers. This collaborative environment encourages the sharing of tips, reporting of bugs, and support exchange.
Moreover, Vanilla Forums provides an external-facing communication and discussion medium for end-users to interact informally with the development team. It enables product announcements and news updates while allowing users to connect with each other.
Finally, Vanilla Forums offers a community feature that caters to a large user base seeking motivation, support, and the ability to share goals. It serves as a valuable tool to connect users with similar interests, fostering active participation and content contribution.
Overall, Vanilla Forums has proven to be a versatile solution for organizations seeking to foster community engagement, obtain targeted feedback, and centralize conversations.
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.
Slow API Development: Some users have expressed frustration with the slow progress of Vanilla's API development. They have mentioned that it has been a persistent concern, but they acknowledge that the recent release of V2 version has addressed most of their previous issues.
Lack of Customization Options: Several reviewers have pointed out the limitations in customization options for visual themes and forums. They find it challenging to create unique designs due to unavailable plugins like gamification and badges, which require partial development on Vanilla's servers.
Inadequate Functionality: A number of users have highlighted various shortcomings in Vanilla's functionality. They have reported difficulties with post searching, spam filtering, as well as concerns regarding user reactions and hiding posts leading to abuse and spam.
Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(1-5 of 5)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
April 15, 2018
Nothing "Vanilla" About Their Forums
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.
- 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.
- 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.
Most of all we could customize the forum to look and feel like an extension of our existing web properties. This makes the forum feel more native to the users coming from or being redirected to the forum. We also had plans of being able to create custom badges we could grant users which was a limitation to many of the platforms we look at at the time.
Since we are a software and cloud company, working with a product we could customize and automate via the API was another big factor. Today we have automated flows for reviewing and accepting improvement requests and then pulling them into our ticketing system and updating the deployment status of those requests one we push our updates to our users.
Most importantly, Vanilla came forward with a reasonable cost to match our existing CSS and make a template that was easy for us to maintain as we grew.
Since we are a software and cloud company, working with a product we could customize and automate via the API was another big factor. Today we have automated flows for reviewing and accepting improvement requests and then pulling them into our ticketing system and updating the deployment status of those requests one we push our updates to our users.
Most importantly, Vanilla came forward with a reasonable cost to match our existing CSS and make a template that was easy for us to maintain as we grew.
July 28, 2017
Vanilla (Cloud-Hosted) Review
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.
- Simplicity
- Speed
- Classic Forum
- Add-ons could be expanded
- More SEO options
- 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
It's certainly pricey for the cloud option, but it was easy to setup and we've had zero crucial issues since.
July 27, 2017
Vanilla Forums are anything but Vanilla
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.
- 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.
- 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 phpbb
July 27, 2017
Adventures of a Forum Newbie—Vanilla helped us focus and get our forum off the ground
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.
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.
- 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.
10
Marketing Director, President, Tech support, Sales Director, Web Guru, COO, Development
3
People who can communicate effectively through writing, people who are good at research, people who see commonalities and can spot trends.
- Q&A
- Tech support
- Event reminders
- Posting Q&A from webinars
- Taking monthly polls and then linking to our newsletter
- Unsure at this time.
July 25, 2017
Vanilla Forums not so Vanilla
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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.
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- It has had a tremendous amount of positive ROI for our organization.
- Customers are now able to help each other. As our software is very customizable it can be very difficult to maintain the knowledge of each individual configuration.