Higher Logic, a review on why it took no logic to implement their products
April 05, 2018
Higher Logic, a review on why it took no logic to implement their products
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Higher Logic
We started using Higher Logic (HL) for our online community about 6 years ago. When I came on board, we were integrating the HL community with another CMS platform hosting our website. It wasn't the best relationship, so when we redesigned our website we also switched to HL for our website CMS and hosting. These are the basis of our communication with and between our membership, so a reliable platform for both was necessary.
- Higher Logic product managers are probably some of the best in the industry. They know their products and aren't pushy in trying to sell them to you. Don't get me wrong, they do try to sell you a product, but they understand that not everyone who is tasked with learning more is also a decision maker. That doesn't stop them from being professional and thorough in their demonstrations or explanation of fees.
- Their technical support is top notch. Not only do they work to resolve issues, they also work with you to help you with non-issues. Our initial redesign was done by an agency that worked with HL directly to set up the new site. When I was tasked with a mini-redesign this year, HL technical support offered me a lot of insight on how to best do this using just my skills and HL.
- They offer training on their platforms to ensure your success as an administrator. There is no cost and you can either go to their onsite two days "boot camp" or you can access a plethora of training videos and webinars through their online users' community.
- They work with our AMS, but the version of our AMS isn't supported for all of their products which prevents me from using some of the products they offer that would make our organization's processes much easier to manage than they are today.
- Since they are a SaaS organization, each of their products is designed to work together. This is great. What isn't great is that they don't offer any kind of bundle pricing or combined billing. So each product is billed at its own rate, individually each year. This makes it hard for smaller and non-profit organizations to utilize a large number of their products because the cost can be steep in the long run and it's a billing nightmare since you might not get the invoices for all of the services at the same time (or in our case they might not be sent to the same person(s) for each invoice).
- Our community usage is up since the integration of our community and websites on the same platform. A lot less crashing, which means a lot more happy members. Happy members renew their membership.
- Sitefinity
Sitefinity was a previous CMS that I worked with. It was probably the clunkiest CMS I've ever had the pleasure of disliking. The backend of the CMS was constantly crashing and "losing" uploaded documents and images. It was also slower than most CMSs from my experience. Higher Logic is much easier to navigate, doesn't crash regularly, or lose uploaded items. It's also faster. Sure that can be impacted by all sorts of factors, but Sitefinity was constantly operating at slower speeds compared to HL. Only thing Sitefinity did "better" was how they allowed you to organize and manage your uploaded documents and images. HL's library is fine. It can just be a little temperamental at times.