
About Higher Logic Vanilla
Vanilla offers a one-stop-shop solution that combines the power of customer communities, Q&A, knowledge base and ideation. With us, you can build an engaged customer community around your brand, your product or your publication. We believe that your community should uniquely reflect your brand and culture too while also rewarding your members for positive participation.
Vanilla's gamification and moderation features work seamlessly to increase participation and discourage abusive behaviour.
Vanilla also allows you to create a fully customized community forum:
- Customized look and feel
- Integrated into your website using widgets, plugins and APIs
- Custom roles and permissions
- Dozens of powerful addons
Pricing starting from:
N/A
- Free Version
- Free Trial
- Subscription
Top 5 alternatives to Higher Logic Vanilla
Key benefits of Higher Logic Vanilla
Devices
Business size
Markets
Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, France, United Kingdom, Ireland, India, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, United States and 9 others
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 and 21 others
Pricing starting from:
N/A
- Free Version
- Free Trial
- Subscription
Top 5 alternatives to Higher Logic Vanilla
Images





Features
Total features of Higher Logic Vanilla: 74
Alternatives
Salesforce Experience Cloud

Higher Logic Thrive

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Reviews
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- Industry: Design
- Used Daily for 2+ years
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Review Source
Overall rating
- Value for Money
- Ease of Use
- Customer Support
- Likelihood to recommend 10.0 /10
An excellent base forum platform for online communities
Reviewed on 2018/03/07
It has made it easy for us to create beautiful, effective forums with awesome community management...
It has made it easy for us to create beautiful, effective forums with awesome community management features to boot.
Pros
Our agency helps other companies manage and build online communities so we've encountered a lot of community platforms. Vanilla is by far our favourite though, for a few reasons. First, it's incredibly customisable. The theming architecture in particular is incredible and allows us to create beautiful forums that integrate with seamlessly with our branding. Second, it's actively developed and open source. You can watch its development openly, suggest ideas for features, etc. Third, it has a killer API which allows you to make cool app integrations, software extensions, etc. Finally, the company's support is incredibles. The support team and customer success managers are amazing at answering questions and will help you implement all kinds of awesome ideas. Vanilla rocks!
Cons
Most of my issues are with super technical details nested "Smarty" tags in Pockets would be nice to have, I wish "reactions" and other gamification features were available in the open source product, etc. Overall though those are nitpicky things the base platform itself is awesome even without them.

- Industry: Computer Games
- Company size: 11-50 Employees
- Used Daily for 1+ year
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Review Source
Overall rating
- Value for Money
- Ease of Use
- Customer Support
- Likelihood to recommend 10.0 /10
Vanilla is an excellent, easy to use but versatile forum software system
Reviewed on 2018/06/01
Incredibly quick set up which was absolutely vital with the development speed of our company. We've...
Incredibly quick set up which was absolutely vital with the development speed of our company. We've been able to set up our new forum and get it fully customised within a very shot space of time.
Pros
Vanilla software is incredibly easy to use but with lots of customisation available. It also features a variety of handy plugins to expand your forum capability further including the 'Mark as Troll' plugin which is hands down the best feature of any forum I have used. Managing categories and forum groups is a straightforward task and the features can easily be explained to new staff members so they can get up and running with the software without any lengthy training period.
Cons
The only flaw I have experienced with Vanilla is in countering spam farms (Not bots). There is no option to enforce a captcha for posts which would help in some circumstances. However, Vanilla makes cleaning up spam very quick and easy and you can use user roles and forum settings to limit the impact spam can have on the forums, switching it from a problem to a mild inconvenience.
- Used Daily for 1-5 months
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Review Source
Overall rating
- Value for Money
- Ease of Use
- Customer Support
- Likelihood to recommend 8.0 /10
The support has been great, the implementation process was easy and simple.
Reviewed on 2018/04/23
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)

- Industry: Computer Software
- Company size: 1 001-5 000 Employees
- Used Daily for 6-12 months
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Review Source
Overall rating
- Value for Money
- Ease of Use
- Customer Support
- Likelihood to recommend 9.0 /10
Flexible platform that allowed us to quickly get a customized Community up and running
Reviewed on 2018/04/24
Pros
Vanilla has allowed us to customize almost every aspect of the Community experience: content organization, moderation, additions of new spaces when the need arises, gamification - all of these components can be built out and tweaked by a team without coding experience. The ability for our developers to own and push changes to the code allows the next level of customization we needed to get our community off the ground.
Cons
The analytics is one place that is lacking a bit. Their advanced analytics dashboard gives insights into some useful metrics but doesn't allow any form of filtering (except for the date) or examining side by side comparisons of different user groups / content sets. The analytics API gives a bit more useful information but it still takes a bit of work to really answer some of the more complicated aspects of the value the community is providing to the organization. Additionally, their documentation is significantly lacking - once you know how to do something in the platform, you find that it can probably do what you are looking for but many times you have to rely on your CSM to help get you that information (which they are normally great at!)
- Industry: Publishing
- Company size: 1 001-5 000 Employees
- Used Daily for 6-12 months
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Review Source
Overall rating
- Value for Money
- Ease of Use
- Customer Support
- Likelihood to recommend 8.0 /10
Experience has been largely positive, though we have encountered some technical challenges.
Reviewed on 2018/06/01
We replaced user forums successfully and configured them to easily. Overall users were pleased and...
We replaced user forums successfully and configured them to easily. Overall users were pleased and felt it was an upgrade on the previous forums.
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.
Higher Logic Vanilla FAQs
Below are some frequently asked questions for Higher Logic Vanilla.Q. What type of pricing plans does Higher Logic Vanilla offer?
Higher Logic Vanilla offers the following pricing plans:
- Starting from:
- Pricing model: Free Version, Subscription
- Free Trial: Not Available
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.
Q. Who are the typical users of Higher Logic Vanilla?
Higher Logic Vanilla has the following typical customers:
Self Employed, 2-10, 11-50, 51-200, 201-500, 501-1 000, 1 001-5 000
Q. What languages does Higher Logic Vanilla support?
Higher Logic Vanilla supports the following 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
Q. Does Higher Logic Vanilla support mobile devices?
Higher Logic Vanilla supports the following devices:
Q. What other apps does Higher Logic Vanilla integrate with?
Higher Logic Vanilla integrates with the following applications:
GitHub, Hootsuite, Mailchimp, Productboard, Salesforce Sales Cloud, WordPress, Zapier, Zendesk
Q. What level of support does Higher Logic Vanilla offer?
Higher Logic Vanilla offers the following support options:
Email/Help Desk, FAQs/Forum, Knowledge Base, Phone Support
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