Discourse vs. Igloo

Discourse is perfect for communities and basically the best forum software out there. Wherever a forum would make sense, Discourse is probably the best solution. Having said that, small corporations with little external outreach have limited advantages with Discourse, since it's designed to facilitate discussions which happen at a slower pace while startups and small corporations will probably want to move faster with software like Slack.

Incentivized

Igloo is really great for giving your organization access to the latest version of documents and templates. It's also great for organizing and versioning shared resources. It can also be customized for your organization in terms of sections, page layout, color scheme, branding, etc. It's not so great for search or for offline use. Overall I'd highly recommend it.

Incentivized

• It is a super-easy way for members to have online discussions
• Very easy to administer and moderate discussions
• The pricing is fair and the support is top-notch

Incentivized

• Igloo gives you great customization abilities and really fits the need for small communication bursts to important company-wide announcements — when their UI was not getting in the way.
• Igloo offers a lot of "bells and whistles" if you need them. But it was hard for these small, nonessential elements to not get in the way of the overall purpose of its use.
• Their sales team was spectacular. But their implementation team was hit or miss. Only one or two people I was able to connect with were both knowledgeable and quickly responsive.

Incentivized

• Unsure of how to use tags, since they are all lowercase and it feels a bit messy for a user-centric experience.
• Private Messages can be seen by Administrators, something which might not be clear to everybody.
• Mailing List Mode is very powerful but it's a bit tiresome to set-up consistently compared to the experience of the Graphical User Interface.

Incentivized

• Pricing can lead to high costs.
• Users without CSS knowledge may have a hard time to customize themes. Maybe more graphical options to change layouts would be nice.
• NO SSO and LDAP authentication methods available in the basic version.
• Languages support in the basic version.

Incentivized

Vanilla's mobile functionality was downright awful and it felt like it was stuck in the 2000s. While they have similar features, Discourse blows them away in almost every department. We don't regret switching at all.

Incentivized

Igloo stacks up by keeping simple. You can find all functionalities in a very easy way due to the good UI and UX that is provided. Basically, all that you need to improve communication and collaboration in your team/company is available. Also, there are a lot of integration possibilities that can enhance your experience with Igloo.

Incentivized

• It allowed us to stand up multiple community discussion forums for various project
• It caused some difficulty when navigating our grant application process
• It allowed us to track public interest in different discussions

Incentivized

• Established a standard communication platform for the organization
• Aided in culture development where employees are able engage and be a part of the right channels
• Information/Data sharing/Personalization of content
• Creation of content
• Transparency of communication across all levels
• Integrations with other tools like Microsoft 365 or Slack

Incentivized