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.
We use it as our support community for our customers. We have an extremely active community of participants who contribute content regularly. It allows our customers to support each other and connect with other users. It is a great tool for us.
Pros
They did an amazing job with transitioning our content from our old provider.
They have a great method for voting on the quality of posts.
Very good gamification capabilities.
We are really pleased with how it handles trolls.
Cons
I would like to see a bit more visual customization capabilities.
We will be looking into integration with WordPress and my impression is that they do not have a strong integration.
Likelihood to Recommend
It is an amazing tool for a customer forum. We, and our customers, are very pleased with the tool.
VU
Verified User
Executive in Sales (Consumer Electronics company, 11-50 employees)
We use Vanilla Forums to provide a community feature to our members. We have a large community of 100 million plus users, but not all access our forums. Without Vanilla, we would be using outdated software to provide forum access to our members.
Vanilla forums allow us to have a place to interact directly with our members. It also allows them to share their success and health and fitness goals with one another. This ability to share motivates users who may be new or struggling to reach their goals and to find new friends.
Pros
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.
Cons
There are some features I wish Vanilla would implement that could improve ease of use in our specific community, but some of the ideas we have are not necessarily something that would benefit all of the forums that Vanilla works with.
In the past, we've had issues with releases breaking some of our specific site features they built for us, but this has improved drastically recently.
Likelihood to Recommend
If you need a basic forum or need Vanilla to help you customize it, they are really good at that! They would work for anyone with a small or large community, as you can customize so many things to make it your own. They have a really nice dashboard so you can customize and add whatever add-ons you want. Vanilla Forums works really well for us in that we are a user-policed forum with staff and volunteer moderators to handle incoming reports.
VU
Verified User
Employee in Customer Service (Sporting Goods company, 10,001+ employees)
