Higher Logic Thrive is a private community platform that empowers members, customers, support and product teams to create and manage meaningful, engaging online communities. The solution is designed to keep users coming back. They can find support, best practices, peer-to-peer connections, resources, events, and networking, all in one destination.
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Higher Logic Vanilla
Score 6.0 out of 10
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Higher Logic Vanilla is a customizable and themable forum software. It can be used for support communities, Q&A Communities and more. There are numerous integrations, including SSO, and connectors to popular software such as Mailchimp, WordPress, Zendesk and Salesforce.
Higher Logic works very well for our business purposes. We can very easily create new communities when we need to (and this is often!). Our association isn't as concerned with driving engagement, but the tools Higher Logic provides allows us to take a closer look at the engagement level of our committee members when needed
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.
Ability to access Higher Logic through all platforms. Our members can access the Higher Logic community anywhere or using their preferred method of device.
Continually updating software from user feedback. Higher Logic is continually updating their software product using their customers' suggestions. Not only do their updates reflect their users suggestions but it is done quickly, sometimes within hours.
Customer support response time and intelligent employees. Higher Logic's support is fantastic. We have always received quick responses and Higher Logic's employees are intelligent and go above and beyond to resolve your support case.
Higher Logic's own user community is very active and also provides great support and interesting ideas. The community members, themselves are creative thinkers so there are many avenues available to overcome obstacles, solve problems, or just get good ideas. Higher Logic employees are also very active on the user community website daily interacting with Higher Logic users in a positive and creative way.
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.
Customer Service: Maybe we're just unlucky, but we've had very sub-par customer service when dealing with Higher Logic. They've been hard to get in touch with, difficult to schedule meetings with, and when we finally did have a meeting with a representative, she seemed very disgusted to have to be talking with us--and then rushed us off of the call because she had another call immediately afterward (we understand things like this happen, but it was just even more discouraging after an already poor experience).
Down Time: The platform seems to be down more often than I'd like it to be. They often have scheduled downtime for system maintenance at off-hours, and this is totally fine. But somewhat often, it seems to be down in the middle of the day when I try to login to create or schedule an email. And it takes a little while (sometimes even several hours) for it to come back up. This is very disappointing when you're trying to get something done (especially when it's time-sensitive) and have to wait around to do it because the system is down.
Inconsistent Data: When the analytics and data are correct, it's great! But we've noticed this isn't always the case. There are several different places on the platform that report data, and sometimes they don't match up. Or the percentage data and the raw data numbers don't equal each other and are totally different, so clearly, at least one is incorrect, but how do we know which one it is? Additionally, the numbers on the heatmap are sometimes way different than the numbers in the general data report. We brought this to their attention and they said they were aware of the problem but we're working on other more important things at the moment and would maybe get around to fixing it later (this goes back to the previously mentioned poor customer service). As of a few weeks ago, I thought it was indeed finally fixed, but then again last week we noticed it was back to being inconsistent.
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.
They are a great company that offer great products - primarily their community. As they continue to grow and expand their offerings, I believe they will increase the number of products that offer and in turn grow their client base. We use their community, activity synch, and volunteer manager currently.
The software is not that simple to use when you have to get volunteers involved in the content assembly process. The content management system that is native to Higher Logic could improve to make the task of training volunteers far easier. Given its simplicity, it is hard for the system to rival more developed websites that use advanced CMS software.
Support has always been very good from Higher Logic. Easy to submit a help desk ticket and easy to get answers when appropriate. The customer service level of Higher Logic is of great quality and their staff takes the time to address the issues at hand as quickly as possible.
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.
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.
We have been able to expand our "community based" and "practice based" online communities to 15 with plans to expand more soon
These communities offer an opportunity for members to engage in discussion, hear from experts, and build valuable connections with peers. It's not revenue generating but it something we couldn't do before implementing this tool.
We have seen a substantial increase in our DEI efforts by creating groups and events specific to divers communities.
