Igloo Software is a social business software company that builds digital workplaces and intranet solutions to support online communities and businesses of any size. It is a suite of content management, collaboration and knowledge sharing tools within one secure social networking platform. Online communities drive groups, teams and organizations to improve employee productivity, foster relationships and increase collaboration with customers, partners and suppliers.
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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.
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Pricing
Igloo
Higher Logic Vanilla
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Essential
Contact sales team
Corporate
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Enterprise
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Enterprise Plus
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Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Igloo
Higher Logic Vanilla
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
Igloo is free to use for up to 10 users.
Paid accounts begin $12 per user per month.
We also offer volume discounts for enterprise-wide intranets and external users. Contact us for details.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
