Curious about community platforms used by other companies

We have a few hundred customers and we manage our community through Slack. The community is limited to existing Ada customers so you won't be able to see it, but if you're in this community then you're definitely familiar wth Slack as a community platform :)

Great question . I think it depends on the community and who is helping. I think I saw you yesterday!

Here's the last one I worked on https://community.thoughtindustries.com/. They're using Gainsight Communities (InSided).

4 of my community consulting clients are Slack (and one is on Circle and one has Tightknit too).

The only one I can publicly name is Common Room.

We use Discourse (which is free) - it isn’t very robust so we are looking to move to a new platform. Doing a demo with Gainsight Communities tomorrow so I’ll report back! It looks great.

If I were looking for a Community platform today, I’d start with:

• Slack (free) and Tightknit (paid)
• Discourse
• Khoros
• Bettermode

We use Telligent by Verint. I would not recommend it unless you are a whiz developer.

We use Discourse, but I'm likely moving us to Gainsight, Higher Logic Vanilla, or Khoros in the next year.

Why the switch off Discourse, ?

It's too developer-intensive and doesn't offer enough of the engagement tools we want (this is according to the current community manager; I haven't validated her concerns yet)

Hi ! I have migrated and built several communities to all the major enterprise platforms - Vanilla, Gainsight, Khoros, etc. Along the lines of UX the out of the box is somewhat similar. I would caution because some communities have a high level of design investment while others may be strictly out of the box (that is not taking into account integrations as well). If you can share a few specifics of what is causing you to pause and reconsider your current community, I am sure I could drum up a few examples.

Thanks everyone! I am with Adobe, so we have a very large user base and we support 15+ communities by product. We are on Khoros but it is limiting and we have been having challenges for a while. We are also interested in AI capabilities. I want to improve our UI, UX and innovate. I am curious to see if Gainsight stacks up against Khoros, also recently learned that Sprinklr is doing Community now?

I did some intensive demoing after the Influitive acquisition and my shortlist included Vanilla and Gainsight.

Hi Lots of our clients have had good feedback on Vanilla!

I’d add Gradual as a contender, too. It has forums but you can also host events and files on it.

I was just on Jerry Li's podcast - he's the ceo of gradual and happy to make an intro.

Would also avoid Gainsight Insided especially if you need something to support a complex micro community stack that Adobe has

Kevin, do you think Gradual is in a place where it has the stability and infrastructure for larger enterprise communities? Since they're a smaller/newer company that's been my concern there

IMO it's not quite there yet but the alternatives from an ENT standpoint are also not great either. To Allison's point, lots of additional customization required for platforms like Khoro are a massive pain. Not to mention the integrations. I'll see you in 2035 when it's all complete 🫠

true story. I ended up with Gainsight and Vanilla on my shortlist the last time I was looking. I really liked Gainsights vision and their connection to the rest of their systems, but Vanilla seemed the best suited for things like sub-communities, translations, etc.

Happy to tell you about our experience with Insided so far....

That’s why I think Discourse is a solid option because it’s pretty flexible and has a high degree of flexibility (with relative ease).

Asana and Pinterest (Business Community) are on Discourse and customized well, imho.

glad we've got a chat on the books next week 🙂

FWIW I use discord for a collector community I run for comic con 🙂

- One thought that came to mind - Are you hosting content creation like blog/knowledge articles? I ask because this tends to be a big difference with Khoros especially the “classic” version. It’s not something available in any of the other platforms. For example, Gainsight you can create that content but is via the admin backend (which requires an admin seat) instead of front end with no approval workflows. It’s those sneaky day to day things you get accustomed to that start to become key differences from the admin side.

As for multi-community hosting, I would recommend exploring Gainsight’s actual community - they are multi-product now (it’s a new feature that was just released). Another Gainsight example would be Gong. That community leverages custom pages (another newer Gainsight feature) - https://visioneers.gong.io. I would love to hear more about your experiences as mine have been more positive than with Khoros. They are a top contender in my current platform eval and one of the sites we explored was Freshworks.

As shared - Vanilla is also a contender for most looking at the enterprise level and would share Smartsheets-. https://community.smartsheet.com .

Transparently, I am at the end of a platform eval process right now. It’s frustrating because no one platform is hitting the mark and many are going through some multi year transformations or are brand new/not pressure tested which make my tech teams very weary. I would also say that none are truly thinking about the complexities large enterprises like yours are facing with the scale of your community efforts. Not helpful now but when I win the lotto, I plan to build that actual dream platform - it’s very long overdue. 😉

Do you know anyone from the Hubspot team? I believe they are on Khoros and recently went through some reflection themselves. I feel there are some good parallels. Happy to help make a connection happen if that would be helpful.

Keep us updated on where you land - always exciting when you get to step back, pause, and plot what is next.

I thought HubSpot was on Bettermode, 👀

We just launched Community at BILL and after evaluating a number of platforms implemented Bettermode. Been happy so far but we are just getting started.

I don’t think so, Joel. Evan & team have talked many times about Khoros and haven’t heard of them migrating yet.

When I evaluated Vanilla, I talked to customers & didn’t get great feedback about their support at all. But that was 3 years ago & I’m getting ready to do another review of several platforms to make sure. I am going to get asked for a cost comparison to justify the spend against other vendors.

I didn’t like the permissions setup on Insided the last time I used it, as it was so rigid & limited. I will be curious to see if that has changed.

We are on Khoros and have not moved to Aurora yet. Not sure if it will solve headaches for making changes, but it won’t solve the cost issues my CFO is going to continue to push back on.

I thought they used it already, as their logo is on their site — maybe I’m mistaken (or they don’t update their logos) 🤷

Apologies for any confusion!

well, it could be that Black at Inbound uses them for their community...they were changing to something else. i haven't seen Shana around to ask her.

Thanks everyone, very interesting to read!

#question

Hi all, on the topic of Community Platforms, anyone using Sprinklr? Or has anyone evaluated them? We are looking at them (Adobe), got a demo today and were quite impressed however they have not come up at all in any of my conversations with other Community leaders, orgs, etc. so I am a little confused!

I don’t know anyone on it outside of Sprinklr, fwiw… 🫠

More commonly used I would say are: Khoros, Discourse, Higher Logic Vanilla, and Slack + Tightknit (or a combo of these, I know many that have a platform and Slack)

Thanks yeah this is all what I have seen to date from folks but seeing the demo today, we were really impressed as it basically does all the things we want Khoros to do and is MUCH easier to build than Khoros.

Just realized I posted this in a thread, reposting on the main page :)

Even compared to Khoros’ Aurora platform?

Just curious, since I’ve never seen Sprinklr’s platform.

I've never seen anyone using them at all.