TrustRadius Insights for Higher Logic Vanilla are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Pros
Great API: Many users have praised the platform's API, stating that it is excellent for badging different user types and accessing private EVP programs. Several reviewers have found this feature to be highly useful in customizing their community experience.
Wonderful customer service: The platform's customer service team has received numerous accolades from users. Reviewers have mentioned that the team goes above and beyond to provide support, ranging from simple tweaks to advanced integrations via the API. This level of assistance has greatly impressed many customers.
Customization options: Users appreciate the wide range of customization options available on Vanilla Forums. They find it helpful to have add-on packages for discussions, questions, polls, and idea voting, as well as seamless integration with tools like Zendesk. The ability to tailor their community to fit their specific needs has been a major advantage for reviewers.
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Higher Logic Vanilla Reviews
5 Reviews
InformationComputer Software4Computer Games1
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We use Vanilla Forums as our community platform for allowing our community to ask questions in various categories across our product. We also use it for community support of our free and educational users as well as monitoring and gathering improvement requests for future product updates. The forum is integrated into our service through Single Sign On (SSO) and provides a streamlined way to gain access to our community. We also are able to use it to get User Experience (UX) feedback on Early Visibility Programs (EVP) with scoped categories where only users who are part of these programs can provide input.
Pros
It has a great API and we utilize this for badging our FREE, PRO and EDU users as well as providing access to our private EVP programs
They have wonderful customer service that works with us in a number of ways from simple tweaks to even our most advanced integrations via the API.
Customization options for discussions, questions, polls and even idea voting..
Large number of add on packages for out of the box integration with tools like Zendesk which we use extensively.
Analytics backend - Ability to really understand what content is getting the most attention and how effective our community is answering questions.
Cons
Customization of analytic data by rank (Typically we would like to filter our data by our user's account types to see who out of our entire community is using the community.
The API development has been slow but they have recently pushed out their new V2 but prior to V2, there were some inefficiencies in doing some automated user management.
Most of my previous issues were addressed since we started with them.
Likelihood to Recommend
For companies that want to customize almost anything and make the forum look like your site, Vanilla Forums is the one for you. Customization and automation of the data via the API with other systems is more than possible and they serve to be great as a hosting provider, dealing with all the upgrades, deployments and maintenance and threat management well.
I would say they might be less turn key for a small application but the fact they have an open source community, the ability to find help and information can lower the barrier of entry for most.
Our company uses Vanilla as our primary community platform for several of our games. Users can find like minded players, gameplay tips and tricks, and troubleshooting assistance.
Pros
They provide excellent and timely assistance when setting up and configuring a community.
Their team is very helpful, friendly, and professional.
The platform itself is robust and is reasonably performant. it includes gamification features to encourage community participation.
Cons
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.
Our forum, called StorageForum, is designed as a place for the open exchange of information relating to SiteLink software customers and members of the self-storage industry. The goal of the forum is for active participants as well as casual visitors to benefit from the forum’s free exchange of ideas, expansive knowledge base, and entertainment value. In addition, we dedicated a large section of the forum to our Marketplace Partners (vendors) and gave them moderator privileges as an added value to their partnership with us.
In addition to StorageForum being a knowledge base for the self-storage and SiteLink communities, we hope the forum will increase sales as it reaches new people and also increase current customer satisfaction.
Pros
The Add-ons and Badges features in the Dashboard are very user-friendly. The interface is visually well-organized is super-easy to understand — I never have that "I'm really not sure what this is about" feeling when implementing these options. Confidence is key!
Vanilla Forum software is brand new to me so I've had lots of questions, especially in the beginning. But Tech Support has been extremely helpful and prompt! Shauna always provides thorough explanations, along with screencaps, whenever I'm stuck.
Users really appreciate the notifications options—they're very specific as to emails or popups, with dozens of scenarios to specify especially for moderators. This reduces frustration (like getting too many emails) and worrying (wondering) if someone responded, etc. It's very customizable.
Cons
I'd really like to see an option to list discussions in order of views—most to least. Right now the "Best Of..." feature is awesome but relies completely on Reactions alone.
Seeing the view count reduce to "1" every once in while is a little disturbing, especially for us as a small community just starting out. I know this is a side effect of resetting the cache, but maybe Vanilla could find a way to keep the views intact.
I'd like to be able to apply more than one Rank to a user. This is fairly specific to our community, but I'd like to recognize the expertise of some users and Ranks would be perfect. Using Roles for this has been cumbersome.
Likelihood to Recommend
Because the Search feature is really precise, Vanilla Forums seems very well-suited for knowledge-based communities where you need to find something specific quickly.
Vanilla Forums is being used to run our community forums in which users and developers can help each other out with problems and share tips. Multiple departments in our organisation have an interest in community engagement.
Pros
Gamification: The ability to incentivise community members to get involved with ranks and badges is one of the main reasons that we purchased the tool.
Support: The Vanilla support team are incredible, often responding to issues very late at night and proactively fixing issues as soon as they occur.
Customisation: Vanilla can be completely styled with css allowing us to match it to the branding of the rest of our website.
Cons
Analytics: This is currently a little lacking. It would be great to be able to see user participation by category for example.
User management: This page often requires refreshing in the browser after changes have been made. It is not the most intuitive system although does the job.
Roles and permissions: Better explanations of what each setting does would help a new admin such as myself.
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
Vanilla Forums is used across our organization, both as a support ticket deflection as well as an idea engine for software ideas and enhancements. It addresses the need to have support answer the same questions and through gamification encourages other users to help other customers out.
Pros
Ideation - giving the users the ability for what they want to see in our products is extremely helpful for designing our roadmap.
Easy to customize - Having the ability to freely customize the look and feel was one of the key reasons for choosing Vanilla Forums. Other alternatives appeared to have high engagement costs with any change.
Dedicated Success Manager - Having professional services and a customer success manager helps ensure we are using the platform correctly, and get fast support to any question or issue we may be having.
Q&A - The ability to mark questions as answers has had huge impact on ticket deflection.
Cons
Improved API - though I believe this is currently in development.
Likelihood to Recommend
Well suited and well priced, a great option with all the bells and whistles as some of the enterprise grade solutions.
