--- description: Review of Higher Logic Vanilla Software: system overview, features, price and cost information. Get free demos and compare to similar programs. image: https://gdm-localsites-assets-gfprod.imgix.net/images/software_advice/og_logo-55146305bbe7b450bea05c18e9be9c9a.png title: Higher Logic Vanilla | Reviews, Pricing & Demos - SoftwareAdvice AU --- Breadcrumb: [Home](/) > [Knowledge Management Systems](/directory/1884/knowledge-management/software) > [Higher Logic Vanilla](/software/159952/vanilla) # Higher Logic Vanilla Canonical: https://www.softwareadvice.com.au/software/159952/vanilla Page: 1 / 4\ Next: [Next page](https://www.softwareadvice.com.au/software/159952/vanilla?page=2) > Vanilla is a cloud-based community management solution for consumer goods, financial services, gaming, media and publishing and technology. The solution helps organizations engage members, create discussion forums and gather ideas through crowdsourcing. Vanilla’s forums module enables users to start and moderate discussions. The module allows members to tag other members, add photos and videos to the discussion, create profiles, enable real-time edits and send private messages. Members can also create their online avatars using different icons. The solution’s gamification functionality enables users to earn ranks, badges and followers. Also, the functionality enables users to remove spam and abusive content from the discussion on the basis of user reactions. The platform can be integrated with third-party software such as WordPress, Zendesk, GitHub, Salesforce, MailChimp and HootSuite. Vanilla integrates with social-networking platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. > > Verdict: Rated **4.4/5** by 63 users. Top-rated for **Likelihood to recommend**. ----- ## Quick Stats & Ratings | Metric | Rating | Detail | | **Overall** | **4.4/5** | 63 Reviews | | Ease of Use | 4.3/5 | Based on overall reviews | | Customer Support | 4.8/5 | Based on overall reviews | | Value for Money | 4.5/5 | Based on overall reviews | | Features | 4.2/5 | Based on overall reviews | | Recommendation percentage | 90% | (9/10 Likelihood to recommend) | ## About the vendor - **Company**: Higher Logic - **Location**: Arlington, US - **Founded**: 2007 ## Commercial Context - **Starting Price**: USD 24,000.00 - **Pricing model**: Flat Rate (Free version available) - **Pricing Details**: Not sure what plan to take? Speak to our team so we can find the plan that fits your needs. Contact us to learn more. - **Target Audience**: Self Employed, 2–10, 11–50, 51–200, 201–500, 501–1,000, 1,001–5,000, 5,001–10,000, 10,000+ - **Deployment & Platforms**: Cloud, SaaS, Web-based - **Supported Languages**: Arabic, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Traditional Chinese, Turkish, Ukrainian - **Available Countries**: Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, United Kingdom, United States ## Features - @mentions - API - Access Controls/Permissions - Activity Dashboard - Activity Tracking - Activity/News Feed - Alerts/Notifications - Approval Workflow - Archiving & Retention - Brainstorming - Calendar Management - Catalog Management - Categorisation/Grouping - Chat/Messaging - Collaboration Tools - Commenting/Notes - Communication Management - Configurable Workflow - Contact Database - Content Library ## Integrations (8 total) - GitHub - Hootsuite - Mailchimp - Productboard - Salesforce Sales Cloud - WordPress - Zapier - Zendesk Suite ## Support Options - Email/Help Desk - FAQs/Forum - Knowledge Base - Phone Support ## Category - [Knowledge Management Systems](https://www.softwareadvice.com.au/directory/1884/knowledge-management/software) ## Related Categories - [Knowledge Management Systems](https://www.softwareadvice.com.au/directory/1884/knowledge-management/software) - [Content Marketing Software](https://www.softwareadvice.com.au/directory/1839/content/software) - [Nonprofit Software](https://www.softwareadvice.com.au/directory/4280/nonprofit/software) - [Membership Management Software](https://www.softwareadvice.com.au/directory/4395/membership-management/software) - [Idea Management Software](https://www.softwareadvice.com.au/directory/4500/idea-management/software) ## Alternatives 1. [Bitrix24](https://www.softwareadvice.com.au/software/128326/bitrix24) — 4.2/5 (986 reviews) 2. [MangoApps](https://www.softwareadvice.com.au/software/140647/mangoapps) — 4.4/5 (150 reviews) 3. [monday.com](https://www.softwareadvice.com.au/software/131008/monday-com) — 4.6/5 (5730 reviews) 4. [Bettermode](https://www.softwareadvice.com.au/software/145606/tribe) — 4.7/5 (94 reviews) 5. [eXo Platform](https://www.softwareadvice.com.au/software/134830/exo-platform) — 4.6/5 (120 reviews) ## Reviews ### "Very robust and customizable for different needs." — 4.0/5 > **Alicia** | *31 May 2018* | Recommendation rating: 8.0/10 > > **Pros**: They are always open to hearing customer feedback and making necessary updates to their product with it. Our Customer Success Manager was always available to help us with both our strategy and any tech issues or questions. > > **Cons**: Some of the themes are a bit outdated and could use some more modern UX/UI. It also lacks integrations with CRM tools like Salesforce, but at least integrates with things like Zendesk, Hootsuite, etc. > > I used it to manage three different Forums; our customer community, feedback/product ideas forum, and private ambassador forum (for customer advocates). ----- ### "Experience has been largely positive, though we have encountered some technical challenges." — 4.0/5 > **Verified Reviewer** | *1 June 2018* | Publishing | Recommendation rating: 8.0/10 > > **Pros**: The product is fully featured and relatively straightforward to configure and set up. Integration with SSO has been very easy and appears to work well and there are a number of plug-ins available which enable further customisation. Our forum moderators and the majority of users have found it simple and pleasant to use. Account management has been very good and fairly responsive to issues. > > **Cons**: As a managed service there are a few hidden costs (migrations in particular). Some of the technology seems a little outdated and a bit inflexible - changing simple headings etc should be fairly straightforward but is in fact a manual task by the account manager, who has to root about in the code for the relevant strings. Also, the migration from staging to live is manual and open to user error. Image compression (or the lack of) has been a big issue for us as our sites are very visual and performance has suffered. I am hoping that some of the infrastructure changes they are making will improve this though. > > We replaced user forums successfully and configured them to easily. Overall users were pleased and felt it was an upgrade on the previous forums. ----- ### "The support has been great, the implementation process was easy and simple." — 3.0/5 > **Julian** | *23 April 2018* | Recommendation rating: 8.0/10 > > **Pros**: - The product is easy to use from a user perspective. - Requests are taken seriously and if it's something they can't currently do but recognize it's a good idea, they will add them to their Road Map. - Great comms from the person assiting the project, very responsive and on top of things > > **Cons**: - It's hard to make changes sometimes. The HTML isn't accessible to forum owners so you'd have to write an entire section to make changes to anything other than the landing page. CSS is great to customize theming, but things have odd names so it's not as straightforward as it could be to make changes using it. - It could be clearer what VF will and won't help with from the very first moment - There are features missing, such as Tagging being in analytics - No self-service option for simple things such as pulling the user list, this will make admin experience way better - Services offered should better structured in the package sell, I.e: For some features requests, there were additional charges. This services should be somehow included in the terms of the service to enhance the admin experience - It was unclear what changes would happen with a recent update, it's been left down to the forum owner to find the weird behaviors (such as filters not working correctly) ----- ### "Simplicity at it's best" — 5.0/5 > **Verified Reviewer** | *23 July 2022* | Computer Software | Recommendation rating: 9.0/10 > > **Pros**: It's a simple and user-friendly online community software that can easily meet your business needs if you are looking to bring your customers into one place and allow them to collaborate. Gives the ability to build multiple forums, user groups, and discussion boards for different product lines. The best part is that it's a very easily configurable system to create various sections/categories, and membership settings to build a beautiful customer community for collaboration purposes. The application is very responsive and comes with good documentation. > > **Cons**: There is not much to like least about this software. Our administrator says that you cannot schedule posts, but I am not sure if that is the case anymore. > > We moved to Higher Logic Vanilla from our previous vendor not too long ago and the experience has been positive so far. The community, blog, forums, and discussion boards work as expected and the administration team seems to be happier than before. ----- ### "A cute online community solution with amazing flexibility and scale" — 5.0/5 > **Sreekumar** | *9 July 2018* | Information Services | Recommendation rating: 10.0/10 > > **Pros**: For our startup in online solution space, I was looking at a stable and easy to manage community solution and I found vanilla as the perfect solution to meet our requirements. 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. I recommend Vanilla forums to anybody who wish to launch an online community. Vanilla is simple, stable, and having excellent add-ons compatibility and this is going to exceed your expectations. > > **Cons**: 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. ----- Page: 1 / 4\ Next: [Next page](https://www.softwareadvice.com.au/software/159952/vanilla?page=2) ## Links - [View on SoftwareAdvice](https://www.softwareadvice.com.au/software/159952/vanilla) ## This page is available in the following languages | Locale | URL | | de | | | en | | | en-AU | | | en-GB | | | en-IE | | | en-NZ | | | fr | | ----- ## Structured Data