Zendesk Guide - Best Community Platform if you are on a low budget and want high ROI.
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We got a Community Developed in Zendesk Guide, they need our help in redesigning and restructuring the components and layouts of the Community pages. They also demanded some custom pages to be developed in the Zendesk Community platform with Message Listing with some filters based on Labels, and categories and we have made the pages accordingly.
Pros
- They give us ability to control the whole frontend of the Communities by giving us access to manipulate HTML (in HBS file), CSS and JS
- They give handlebars templating engine in backend which helps us to show various listing rendered through server side without having need to implement client side rendering of the listing and features.
- They provide us dynamic content fields, which can be useful for mapping categories or storing category and topic IDs so we don't need to hard code IDs in Sandbox and Production separately.
Cons
- It would be great if we get better backend handlebar features to manipulate data in the backend itself rather than manipulating content through javascript in the frontend.
- I don't find many Context Objects in Zendesk, we need to make API calls for getting small things however it's much better in its competitors like Khoros which provide plenty of context objects used in their backend.
- I haven't seen many Integration options in Zendesk Guide communities however other community platforms offer many backend written functions to be used for Third Party Integrations.
Likelihood to Recommend
It is less expensive as compared to other community platforms like Khoros so it is a great platform based on its Price and the features it provides. It is simple to use and a new developer can also easily work on it if it has the Frontend Engineer experience in the past.