Higher Logic Vanilla Pros and Cons

Vanilla is highly intuitive to learn and use from an admin perspective. We are constantly onboarding new employees to our community, and Vanilla makes it easy to learn how to navigate/manage the community.

One of my favorite aspects of Vanilla is the pockets feature. Pockets allow us to place code on any part of the site, making it extremely easy to customize the appearance and experience to exactly what we want. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Vanilla is lacking on a few features that their competitors do well. Automation rules are a huge miss with Vanilla, as they do not currently exist. Automation rules would help small community teams build scalability into some of their processes. Vanilla can often be slow to action small feature requests that would solve gaps in the product. An example of this would be that they are missing the Rich Content Editor option in the Product Ideas status updates. Without this, we can't link out to different posts or support articles that would be helpful to users. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Reasonably easy to set up and administer. My CSM is great, and their KP and resources available are very helpful. They just came out with a new template, allowing for easier customization, so excited to try that! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I wish we could customize the look and feel a bit more. Analytics/reporting could be a lot more in-depth. I wish we could send emails (notifications and newsletters) through the forum. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Easy to use and and navigate. Pretty intuitive if you've used similar site building tools before Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Support is a little lacking. Sometimes hard to reach. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The platform is easy to manage and support is great. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Handling CSS changes could be a little easier to implement Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The thing that makes Vanilla stand out is its dedicated customer success team. Mila guided us through the whole onboarding experience and on-going maintenance of the forum. From the very first day, Vanilla's forum became a hit with our community. The product is very flexible, which was important given how distinct our community is. It made a huge difference to have Mila help us navigate those options so we could easily and quickly take advantage of the flexibility the platform offers. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There are many options in the settings, so it's not always clear how to use them all. This is why we were extra grateful to have a dedicated member of Vanilla help us learn to use them. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

My favorite thing about the Vanilla platform is its simplicity and intuitiveness. It was my top choice after the first demo I did, after seeing the admin view. It is uncluttered and logical. The member-facing community is customizable by choosing a theme or doing some custom CSS work. We did both, and based our design off another Vanilla customer's community we admired. We also have subcommunities built into our agreement, allowing incredible flexibility for future growth with new audiences.

We did not have a prior community, so it was important to have confidence in a platform that would get us "up and running" in the right direction. Vanilla has been a great partner thus far. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Vanilla has been very responsive to feedback and feature requests. The three things I'm most looking forward to are the development of a Member Directory (to more easily see who else is in the community), the refinement of search results, and improved analytics. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The available templates make it very quick and easy to stand up a user community that includes announcements, questions and ideas. The support is fantastic. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The API is pretty robust, but we do find some actions that we would like to perform automatically to not be possible via the API. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Vanilla is a perfectly functional forum software system that offers a comprehensive list of features. The core and some plugins are open-source. There are also several tiers of paid hosting. It uses PHP and MySQL, which means it's relatively easy to find developers who can improve the software. It almost certainly has the features you are looking for.

(I am being offered a $5 Amazon gift card for this review.) Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Unfortunately, Vanilla's features are often less than ideal. It uses a fairly typical model for developing enterprise software: fill in the feature checkboxes. Having been involved in several software evaluation exercises over the years, I've seen the pattern repeated. It starts by collecting a list of desired features. Then someone researches the options and puts them in a spreadsheet. Each option is evaluated on whether it includes each of the desired features. Next the prices are included for each option. Finally the options are evaluated on the list of features and the cost.

The trick is some software implements features better than others. To take an example from Vanilla: ignoring another user. This is an important feature because people don't always get along. Sometimes you just need to turn off the noise. This is a plugin in Vanilla and the code is available open source. (Many useful plugins are not open source. You need to pay for Vanilla to host your forums if you need them.) If the plugin is installed, users can ignore each other. But it's not immediately clear to users how to do that since the option is somewhat hidden. Once you find the option, you'll see that posts from the person you ignore are greyed out. That's good. But critically you can still see who replied and getting the post back requires nothing more than clicking the greyed out post. Other interactions are not blocked. It's pretty much the bare minimum functionality needed to claim the ignore feature exists.

We use Vanilla's hosting service and I think it's probably fine if you don't have any particular need to change the way the forums work. It's serviceable. But if you need to make changes, the situation becomes far more complicated. Making changes requires submitting a PR to Vanilla so that it can be reviewed before deploying to the site. This is a reasonable requirement since it's there servers, but the PR process can be slow. Self-hosting is possible, but not all features are available unless you pay for Vanilla hosting. Consider your options carefully before committing to Vanilla Forums. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Vanilla has so many great features on their platform. It is also very user friendly, and they did a great job customizing it to meet our brand. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There isn’t anything that I really dislike about the platform. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I really like the "out of the box" functionality of the platform. It allowed us to stand it up with a V.1 while we work on building a more robust interface and functionality for our users. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We didn't know what all could be accomplished with the platform from basic site interactions. To really understand what we could do, I had to speak with our account manager. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.