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A good platform - but overdue a *refresh* and needs a better new user/new community startup guide.
April 25, 2022

A good platform - but overdue a *refresh* and needs a better new user/new community startup guide.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Khoros Communities (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)

Khoros helps us keep our 'community' together. All in one platform, we have blogs, knowledge bases, idea hubs, private groups and forums all in one place. Being able to utilise user engagement metrics from across these sections of the community using a single user profile enables engaging content and user recognition and rewards.
  • Roles.
  • Groups.
  • Content.
  • Support - turn around time for support cases is often lacking.
  • Admin control - there are a lot of things that seem like they should be able to be self-serviced in the admin panel, but require Khoros support to be able to achieve or are simply not able to be done.
  • It feels like too many features end up being declined and then pushed down the professional services route. Good ideas should be developed and pushed to all users.
  • Community growth +
  • Learning/certification support -
  • Company to end user support -
  • End user to end user support +
Khoros platform-based communities can very easily and rapidly grow in line with their community size. Better support could be given/provided to new customers to ensure their community development is in line with best practice.

Communities can and do grow using methods within the Khoros platform that at later points can hinder growth rather than support it.

e.g. Utilising custom content fields to update the production environment rather than building pages and quilts in studio and then pushing to prod and only adding 'posts' to the page in prod.

Further training for community admins to look out for these pitfalls would be worthwhile.
Our experience with professional services was not ideal (the experience was from before I joined - however the feedback was that during our SSO integration) the setup failed and the support engineer fell asleep on the call and the connection was broken for hours) so whenever additional support has been needed since then we have utilised third parties.
Content management for blogs helps pre-schedule posts.
  • New feature ideas
  • Access to learning and training resources (e.g. product coaching)
I have personally used the new features idea hub and suggested lots of ideas which have been given good positive feedback.
And I have personally utilised the learning and training features - Especially enjoy and benefitted from the one to one learning/walkthroughs.

Badging is excellent, the ability to add badges by rank or role/metrics is useful. However - user profile/fields should be entirely admin controllable in order for data to be pulled into the user profile from other sources. Our learning system should be able to update our IDP, which should in turn be able to update a user profile field and add a badge based off that. Currently we have to mimic this by creating a role, and assigning the user the role, or raise a support ticket with Khoros to achieve this. Not helpful.
WordPress, Guild, tribe - all have pros and cons vs Khoros. The primary concern of Khoros vs other platforms is cost. For the price difference, Khoros *should* be a no-brainer choice. No one should ever consider using any platform other than Khoros... so why do people consider other platforms?

Do you think Khoros Communities delivers good value for the price?

No

Are you happy with Khoros Communities's feature set?

Yes

Did Khoros Communities live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Khoros Communities go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Khoros Communities again?

Yes

Khoros is well suited to:
  • Business to customer/end user support and engagement.
  • Teams with technical resources to support bespoke development and content creation.

Khoros is probably not well suited to:
  • Volunteer communities.
  • Small communities.
  • Communities run by small teams.
  • Teams without technical resource or budget to utilise professional services.