Igloo vs. CommUnity by Personify

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

You can tell from the CEO and all staff that this is a very competent company that wants you to succeed with integrity. There is a strong
support and services team that works collaboratively with us to make
sure we are always getting what we need. They provide
24x7 emergency support, online ticket support, email support, a client
community, and the ability to call and talk to the same account manager or
community consultant every time (I even have Mariano's skype and he replies on weekends!). They recently launched a client community - so they are now even practicing what they preach. Our questions in the client community are always answered quickly.

• 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

• Design of your community through the admin panel is very easy to pick up. Drag and drop functionality on the site admin allows you to make quick changes to your community on the fly. Easy to modify the look and feel of the site and keep pace with the changing needs of our membership.
• The platform is updated on an ongoing basis with new exciting functionality added with each release.
• The mobile version of the platform is very easy to use and looks great on all devices and operating systems.
• Feedback on enhancements to the platform are taken very seriously and often suggestions from customers end up on the roadmap for the platform for future enhancements.

• 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

• Not much to say in this section. Anything that the product doesn't currently do is quickly identified and prioritized appropriately on their road map.
• Chat room functionality doesn't exist yet, but has been placed on roadmap.
• Instant messaging between users doesn't exist yet, but is roadmapped.
• We're unable to run a couple of specific reports, based on what's available in the reporting tool. There's a workaround that our community administrator can perform that is a little more time consuming.

Small World Labs has been a great partner in relaunching our community. They have had great ideas of new ways to use our community to better service our members. They are very knowledgeable in the world of online communities and are forward thinking about new functions to enhance the user experience.

There are a multitude of options to configure the exact user experience you want and what you want to emphasize.

Uptime has never been an issue.

Speed is not an issue.

The people at Small World Labs are very accessible. I can email, open a ticket, or call and they are there. I'd also point out that senior management is quite available too. We frequently have talks about potential strategies and new things we might be doing, which is great. I think the whole organization genuinely likes what they do and likes helping us succeed.

In-person training is more ad-hoc based on if they are traveling to you or you are going to visit them. I imagine that if I paid for in-person training that it would be set up as well, but I've just used the standard training that comes with the initial set up and ongoing support.

Online training is through online webinar & how-to posts and videos in the client community.

We had staff turnover at our own organization during the implementation. We were able to get the community up and live in a good timeframe even though that happened and we had to switch some people around for managing the project on our side.

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

We evaluated a few different community platform vendors over the course of a couple of months. I believe we also evaluated Jive, Lithium, KickApps, and Powered.

• 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

• Our community has had more than 100,000 interactions within the first 7 months of launching - and the product has been stable.
• Small World Labs even contributes to the conversations in the community by participating with our community members and moderating, when necessary.
• Our community experiences a high level of knowledge sharing (one of our goals), and is resulting in more informed and creative volunteers.