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Engage with Community
Vanilla offers a one-stop-shop solution that combines the power of customer communities, Q&A, knowledge base and ideation. With us, you can build an engaged customer community around your brand, your product or your publication. We believe that your community should uniquely reflect your brand and culture too while also rewarding your members for positive participation.
Typical customers
Platforms supported
Support options
Training options
Value for money
4.5
/5
63
Starting from
No pricing info
Value for money contenders
Functionality
4.2
/5
63
Total features
74
6 categories
Functionality contenders
Overall Rating
4.4
/5
63
Positive reviews
33
23
7
0
0
Overall rating contenders
Chris V.
Verified reviewer
Design,
Used daily for 2+ years
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It has made it easy for us to create beautiful, effective forums with awesome community management features to boot.
Our agency helps other companies manage and build online communities so we've encountered a lot of community platforms. Vanilla is by far our favourite though, for a few reasons. First, it's incredibly customisable. The theming architecture in particular is incredible and allows us to create beautiful forums that integrate with seamlessly with our branding. Second, it's actively developed and open source. You can watch its development openly, suggest ideas for features, etc. Third, it has a killer API which allows you to make cool app integrations, software extensions, etc. Finally, the company's support is incredibles. The support team and customer success managers are amazing at answering questions and will help you implement all kinds of awesome ideas. Vanilla rocks!
Most of my issues are with super technical details nested "Smarty" tags in Pockets would be nice to have, I wish "reactions" and other gamification features were available in the open source product, etc. Overall though those are nitpicky things the base platform itself is awesome even without them.
Paul C.
Verified reviewer
Computer Games, 11-50 employees
Used daily for 1-2 years
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Incredibly quick set up which was absolutely vital with the development speed of our company. We've been able to set up our new forum and get it fully customised within a very shot space of time.
Vanilla software is incredibly easy to use but with lots of customisation available. It also features a variety of handy plugins to expand your forum capability further including the 'Mark as Troll' plugin which is hands down the best feature of any forum I have used. Managing categories and forum groups is a straightforward task and the features can easily be explained to new staff members so they can get up and running with the software without any lengthy training period.
The only flaw I have experienced with Vanilla is in countering spam farms (Not bots). There is no option to enforce a captcha for posts which would help in some circumstances. However, Vanilla makes cleaning up spam very quick and easy and you can use user roles and forum settings to limit the impact spam can have on the forums, switching it from a problem to a mild inconvenience.
Anonymous Reviewer
Verified reviewer
Computer Software, 1,001-5,000 employees
Used weekly for 1-2 years
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We moved to Higher Logic Vanilla from our previous vendor not too long ago and the experience has been positive so far. The community, blog, forums, and discussion boards work as expected and the administration team seems to be happier than before.
It's a simple and user-friendly online community software that can easily meet your business needs if you are looking to bring your customers into one place and allow them to collaborate. Gives the ability to build multiple forums, user groups, and discussion boards for different product lines. The best part is that it's a very easily configurable system to create various sections/categories, and membership settings to build a beautiful customer community for collaboration purposes. The application is very responsive and comes with good documentation.
There is not much to like least about this software. Our administrator says that you cannot schedule posts, but I am not sure if that is the case anymore.
Julian P.
Used daily for less than 6 months
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- The product is easy to use from a user perspective. - Requests are taken seriously and if it's something they can't currently do but recognize it's a good idea, they will add them to their Road Map. - Great comms from the person assiting the project, very responsive and on top of things
- It's hard to make changes sometimes. The HTML isn't accessible to forum owners so you'd have to write an entire section to make changes to anything other than the landing page. CSS is great to customize theming, but things have odd names so it's not as straightforward as it could be to make changes using it. - It could be clearer what VF will and won't help with from the very first moment - There...
Tyler K.
Verified reviewer
Computer Software, 1,001-5,000 employees
Used daily for 6-12 months
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Vanilla has allowed us to customize almost every aspect of the Community experience: content organization, moderation, additions of new spaces when the need arises, gamification - all of these components can be built out and tweaked by a team without coding experience. The ability for our developers to own and push changes to the code allows the next level of customization we needed to get our community off the ground.
The analytics is one place that is lacking a bit. Their advanced analytics dashboard gives insights into some useful metrics but doesn't allow any form of filtering (except for the date) or examining side by side comparisons of different user groups / content sets. The analytics API gives a bit more useful information but it still takes a bit of work to really answer some of the more complicated aspects of the value the community is providing to the organization. Additionally, their documentation is significantly lacking - once you know how to do something in the platform, you find that it can probably do what you are looking for but many times you have to rely on your CSM to help get you that information (which they are normally great at!)
Q. What type of pricing plans does Higher Logic Vanilla offer?
Higher Logic Vanilla has the following pricing plans:
Pricing model: Free, Subscription
Q. Who are the typical users of Higher Logic Vanilla?
Higher Logic Vanilla has the following typical customers:
Freelancers, Large Enterprises, Mid Size Business, Small Business
Q. What languages does Higher Logic Vanilla support?
Higher Logic Vanilla supports the following languages:
Arabic, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian (Bokmal), Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian
Q. Does Higher Logic Vanilla offer an API?
Yes, Higher Logic Vanilla has an API available for use.
Q. What other apps does Higher Logic Vanilla integrate with?
Higher Logic Vanilla integrates with the following applications:
GitHub, Zapier, WordPress, Salesforce Sales Cloud, Mailchimp, Hootsuite, Productboard, Zendesk
Q. What level of support does Higher Logic Vanilla offer?
Higher Logic Vanilla offers the following support options:
Email/Help Desk, Phone Support, Knowledge Base, FAQs/Forum