Discord vs. Higher Logic Vanilla

Discord is completely suited for any tech server needs - and a million times better than Facebook. It's still lLess suited for non-tech but for sure it's getting better and with some support from Discord that could be fixed easily (just don't dumb-it down or take away features please). I have it open all day, on a separate monitor if I'm not using that one for something else. It'd be great - and maybe I've missed this - if there was a way to have an overview of messages posted in various channels. Despite using it for years now, I've never dug deeply into notifications, so maybe it's possible already. But it should be highly customisable - ie, put all messages from chosen slow servers in the feed, but only highlights from busy ones, and no messages from certain servers etc , so it remains manageable.

Incentivized

Vanilla Forums is well suited for growing communities that wish to expand without having to change software. Existing larger communities may find the user management part of the tool lacking, although this could be from my lack of experience.

Incentivized

• One to many Communications to ensure that we can quickly get messages out when we have to.
• Quick polling of questions and issues
• The ability to gate channels so we can focus on folks that we know are stakeholders gives them an added feeling of belonging and that they have a say in the direction of projects.

Incentivized

• They provide excellent customer service to us on a weekly basis. If we have questions or find something that we'd like improved or even something new we'd like to add to our program, we have a dedicated person we can reach out to who helps us facilitate that change.
• We're fond of their add-ons. We use many of them in our community. Some keep our members engaged on a day to day basis. We really like reactions, the keyword blocker, the civil tongue filter, and a few customized add-ons that Vanilla added specifically for our community.
• They send us notifications for all upcoming releases, and update their software frequently.

Incentivized

• Adding friends for DMing is a little confusing.
• Joining new servers can have some roadblocks.
• Notification setup can be difficult, some individuals were only notified if tagged.
• Archiving a channel without losing everything.
• Having to upload images before sharing instead of accessing everything in my own library.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

Because it is easy to use, its fun, it has everything you need to comunicate, voice, text, screen sharing, images, emojis, gifs, stickers, and even personalized ones. It also has comunication through integrations like games and music, that i think that brings people together. It is also great for keeping records of the conversations at work

Incentivized

It is very intuitive and simple to operate. Our customers immediately came up with the curve and began contributing content.

Incentivized

There is plenty of online documentation and knowledge base articles. As well as having an open API to be able to tie it into other products makes it a really viable solution for any business. I have never had to contact support, any questions which I have need answered can be found in the documentation,

Incentivized

They did an amazing job transferring our content from GetSatisfaction. We had almost 100% success in the transfer of 8 years worth of content.

Incentivized

The vast array of free features on Discord right out of the box makes it a stand-out in pricing from other chat platform options. Discord works phenomenally if you want a chat platform that is free, quick to set up, and very flexible in the ways you can start using it. It doesn't require a complex set of logins for different servers (such as Slack) or logins that are inconveniently tied to other products (like Microsoft). If you prefer to view full conversations all in one place without them "splintering" off into branches that are missed, such as is the case with Slack, Discord works great for this. If you feel seeing everything is too overwhelming or "busy", Discord may not be right for you. Discord is great for lean organizations or startup companies, but will likely not feel "professional enough" for larger, traditional "corporate" enterprises.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Very feature dense on a free-level.
• Easy to build a good sense of discourse and community.
• Generally a more casual vibe than similar platforms.
• Channels with a large number of users can be overly hectic to the point of diminishing returns.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized