Higher Logic Vanilla Pros and Cons

- Easy sign-up for the community. There's nothing worse than having to fill in long forms to register for a forum, but Vanilla has multiple registration options, but also a simple default form.

- Great Customer Support team - The team respond fairly promptly and give reassuring advice and information that you can use.

- Dedicated Account Manager - The Account Managers are prompt in responding and have great attitudes. They are great people to work with, and they return result for resolving issues and answering questions.

- Customizable themes - No one wants an identical theme to every other forum out there, but with the multiple Add-on options and customizable settings, you can apply your brand to any default template with ease. This saves you time and money on going down the bespoke route if resources are tight. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

- Default themes haven't been tested fully on all browsers and devices. Some CSS doesn't apply on Safari iOS, which makes the layout look very bland. With some additional testing and some code additions, I think this could be resolved.

- Some editing functionality isn't in logical places for Admins. You can find what you need in the back-end but there are the odd couple of settings that aren't where you would expect them to be.

- Posts can't be Scheduled - A great and basic feature for vanilla would be the ability to schedule posts. This is a function many other forums have by default and it lets you get-ahead on the week if you can set up a post in advance. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There is a lot to like about Vanilla Forums, but what I like most is that it is so easy to post. Recent upgrades make it have the feel of other social media, with posting urls that allows share images and a short summary. It's easy to upload files, images and text too. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I have had a little challenge onboarding new users - this may be due to my lack of awareness of information that would make it easier Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like the fact that we were able to customize a lot with CSS most of the interface to fit our needs.

Also, since vanilla forums is based on a markup language, we were able also to add some extra coding and conditional statements to fine tuning what was required. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Due to some restrains of the markup language and the logic, we had to split our CSS between two different areas: the template itself and the CSS file on the other side. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I love that within days of starting my free trial, I had a nicely branded solution (that I was able to setup with the self-service configuration options) that I was able to test out internally to colleagues to make sure it checked all the boxes we needed. Vanilla team is very responsive and provided best practice articles, webinars, suggestions, etc. when I ran into some doubters about how a community could be successful for our business. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I wish I had more control over the content of the email alerts that get sent out. They are short and sweet but it would be nice to add my own touch in some cases. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It is pretty simple for Administration. We took a few hours to create and organize our online community. Building it up is easy.

I found the solution, extremely flexible - a handful of options,and business rules.

The design is cool and UX is perfect.

The large pool of add-ons and themes are definitely advantages for customers.

Coming to forum specific features, there are plenty of cool features like social login, polls, media management, ranking system, gamification, and the newly added business app integration. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

So far, our experience with Vanilla is perfect and hence no dislike. If get more deep in to functionalities, probably analytics portion is something which require further improvement. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Vanilla Forums constitute a very flexible solution that we're able to customize and adapt as our userbase grows and as the scope of our product line expands. It has scaled really well so far and we expect to take advantage of some more advanced integrations (including potentially zendesk) moving forward. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The analytics features that are included in the dashboard UI are rather underwhelming, we end up writing API queries to get the info we really care about. It would be nice if more of that was built in. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

As a decade old company with forums even older that that (!) the Team at Vanilla was able to port over our collective knowledge into a platform that is mobile-friendly, intuitive and fun to use. We have seen our time-on-site increase as well as overall engagement.

The addition of gamification (badges) and the ability to easily embed photos, videos and GIFs has made the user experience something that folks rave about. And the fact we could leave our old, outdated software behind (good riddance!) enables us to focus on Customer Success vs Tech Support.

Finally, the turnaround time for support questions and modifications (included or paid) via Vanilla is both transparent and quick. I've never had to wait more than a month for a feature, and my support rep replies in less than 24 hours ever time.

What's not to like? Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

So far, there's nothing to complain about. One year in and still going strong. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Excellent Sales to Customer experience. What the salesperson sold is what we received and more. The customer success manager knows his product and if he doesn't know the answer, he gets it to you asap. He is also very proactive in managing the customer relationship.

I am surprised that not more people know about this community vendor. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I haven't experienced anything that I don't like yet. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Two things strike me as the most important since I've used Vanilla forums.

#1 The layout. Having the search function at the top where it's easy to see for new and existing users is especially useful for us as a lot of our community will come to the forums to find something technical out about accountancy. Having the search function right there helps them find what they need without any fuss. Since using Vanilla we've seen a massive increase in people using the search function which is great. As well as search, everything you really need is all on the front page. You can see active threads and you get notifications for any favourites you've added, making tracking important topics and moderating a breeze.

2. Customer service. Every time we've had a query about the forum we've been able to get it sorted very quickly and efficiently in a professional manner. Brendan is great! Thank you. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The 'best of' section is kind of redundant and a bit confusing. It displays tons of dated and unrelated content and as I understand it there's no way of removing this as it's part of Vanilla. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The platform we use has two subforums and a variety of roles for our different customer types. We need a forum that can allow a variety of different access and permissions on specific threads. We also needed a tool that lets contributors keep a level of anonymity but also allows us to identify the authority of each user so that their comments and discussions can be trusted by our community. Within this complex framework, Vanilla excels at giving us the control we need that has grown an authoritative forum that offers real value to our customers. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Although the website is responsive and can be customised to any level you need, it's missing a dedicated mobile app that allows for push notifications which can alert users to activity on the forum immediately without having to check their e-mails. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.