# Higher Logic Vanilla Reviews **Vendor:** Higher Logic **Category:** [Online Community Management Software](https://www.g2.com/categories/online-community-management) **Average Rating:** 4.3/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 99 ## About Higher Logic Vanilla Higher Logic Vanilla is a customer community platform from Higher Logic, a global leader in engagement software headquartered in Arlington, Virginia. Backed by the largest community software organization—with 15+ years of experience and more than 3,000 customers worldwide—Vanilla delivers the scale, stability, and focus enterprise organizations expect, while remaining fully dedicated to driving stronger community outcomes. Vanilla brings together discussion forums, Q&A, knowledge base, ideation, gamification, and advanced moderation in one flexible platform. Organizations can manage multiple products, regions, or sub-communities within a single instance, with full control over branding and permissions. The platform integrates seamlessly across the tech stack, includes advanced analytics and dashboards, and supports workflow automation. Admin teams get intuitive no-code tools for everyday management, while developers can extend capabilities with APIs, theming, and a fully integrated development environment. Personalization, accessibility, SEO, and mobile responsiveness are built in from the start. Organizations use Vanilla to lower support costs, engage advocates, and capture product feedback. Peer-to-peer discussions and Q&A create a living knowledge base that deflects tickets. Gamification, reputation systems, and sentiment analysis surface customer champions who can drive advocacy and engagement. Structured ideation channels provide product teams with direct, actionable insights. Beyond technology, Vanilla offers program-level expertise with practitioner-led guidance, dedicated community success managers, and responsive technical support to help communities grow, scale, and deliver measurable business impact. ## Higher Logic Vanilla Pros & Cons **What users like:** - Users value the **easy attendee engagement** with straightforward setup and supportive team assistance throughout. (2 reviews) - Users appreciate the **responsive customer support** from Higher Logic Vanilla, facilitating easy engagement and setup processes. (2 reviews) - Users find Higher Logic Vanilla's **ease of use** exceptional, with straightforward setup and helpful support for successful implementation. (2 reviews) - Users value the **easy setup** of Higher Logic Vanilla, making community engagement intuitive and straightforward. (2 reviews) - Users find the **helpful support team** crucial for successful product implementation and user-friendly experience. (2 reviews) - Intuitive (2 reviews) - Automation (1 reviews) - Customization (1 reviews) - Users appreciate the **easy integrations** with various platforms like ChurnZero, enhancing their community-building efforts. (1 reviews) - Users value the **user-friendly implementation** of Higher Logic Vanilla, appreciating its customization options and ease of navigation. (1 reviews) **What users dislike:** - Users find the **knowledge base buggy** and poorly functioning search detrimental to their overall experience. (1 reviews) - Users face **email communication issues** with Higher Logic Vanilla, impacting interaction and engagement within the community. (1 reviews) - Users find the **analytics section inadequate** , noting it lacks user-friendliness and easy navigation. (1 reviews) - Users desire **improved customization** options for the homepage, feeling constrained by the existing widget structure. (1 reviews) - Users find the platform lacks **robust features** , desiring more customization and a streamlined discussion approach. (1 reviews) - Poor Customer Support (1 reviews) - Poor Navigation (1 reviews) - Search Functionality (1 reviews) - UX Issues (1 reviews) ## Higher Logic Vanilla Reviews ### 1. Fast Community Platform Creation, But Support Falls Short—Especially in Arabic **Rating:** 2.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Sreeju N. | Chief eSolution Officer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 30, 2026 **What do you like best about Higher Logic Vanilla?** It helps creating community platforms quicker **What do you dislike about Higher Logic Vanilla?** Support is not 24 by 7 , and poor Arabic Support. **What problems is Higher Logic Vanilla solving and how is that benefiting you?** It is providing a community Platform. So the concept is appealing, instead of creating custom build community, launch the platform quickly. **Official Response from bleehe@higherlogic.com Leehe:** > Thanks for sharing your feedback. We’re glad to hear that Higher Logic Vanilla helped you launch a community platform quickly and avoid the time and effort of building a custom solution from scratch. We also appreciate your comments about support. Providing responsive, helpful support is important to us, and while we’re proud of the support experience we offer, we recognize that Arabic-language support is an area where we currently have more limited bandwidth. Your feedback is valuable as we continue evaluating how to better support our global customers. ### 2. Great System! **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Human Resources | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 18, 2025 **What do you like best about Higher Logic Vanilla?** I thoroughly enjoyed the product implementation process. The team was extremely helpful and ensured that we were well prepared for success. From a front-end perspective, the platform is very user-friendly. I appreciate the automation rules and the ability to truly customize the experience for various users and across different discussion categories. **What do you dislike about Higher Logic Vanilla?** I would like to see improvements in how the homepage can be customized. While HTML is supported, you are still limited by the widget structure that is provided. Additionally, I find the analytics section could be more user-friendly and easier to navigate. I also feel that the CSMs could take a more strategic approach in partnering with users to help maximize the value of the system and demonstrate its ROI. **What problems is Higher Logic Vanilla solving and how is that benefiting you?** HLV is providing us a community/platform for our clients to network/ask questions/and get ideas on how to utilize my organization's product. **Official Response from bleehe@higherlogic.com Leehe:** > Hi there, and thank you for sharing your feedback! We're so glad to hear your implementation experience was smooth and that the platform’s usability and customization options are supporting your community goals. We also appreciate your insights on homepage flexibility, analytics usability, and strategic CSM partnership, these areas are important, and feedback like yours helps guide our improvements. If you'd like, please reach out to Georgina Donahue if you are willing to share some more technical feedback, and she'd be happy to help you - her email is: gdonahue@higherlogic.com. We're grateful that Higher Logic Vanilla is helping your clients connect, learn, and get more value from your product. ### 3. Great community tool, Terrible knowledge base **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Manufacturing | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 12, 2025 **What do you like best about Higher Logic Vanilla?** The community functions really well. Gamification and moderation is easy and it was easy to set up. The customer support is always responsive and happy to solve what I'm dealing with unless it requires engineering - then it takes a long time to fix depending on the bug. When we were building our community I was in it constantly, but now that we're established the maintenance is light. **What do you dislike about Higher Logic Vanilla?** The knowledge base is terribly buggy and has been for year now with little improvement. It's not their primary focus and you can tell. The search is also not very friendly and works pretty poorly for our users. I would swap it with a home grown solution or a Grazitti built search if I had the budget. **What problems is Higher Logic Vanilla solving and how is that benefiting you?** We needed a community forum for our users to ask questions and get answers from each other to foster self-service. We also needed a knowledge base that could foster self-service as well for our product. The knowledge base has been most helpful because our users don't want to engage in the forums, but technically it's the poorer built feature. I wish our users wanted to engage in the forums because there are so many features and tools that we just don't use that would make it really powerful if we had an active community. **Official Response from bleehe@higherlogic.com Leehe:** > Thank you for sharing such thoughtful feedback, we’re glad to hear your community setup went smoothly, that moderation and gamification have been easy to manage, and that our support team has been helpful along the way. We also appreciate your candid insights about the knowledge base and search experience; improving these areas is a priority, and feedback like yours helps us continue to refine the product. We're grateful that Vanilla is supporting your self-service goals, even as we work to enhance the features that matter most to you and your users. Thank you again for your honesty and for being a valued partner. ### 4. High Logic Vanilla has been a great way for our customers to connect. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 09, 2025 **What do you like best about Higher Logic Vanilla?** It is easy for our customers to engage with. Setup is straightforward and supported throughout the process by their team. **What do you dislike about Higher Logic Vanilla?** Nothing that I don't like, the platform is easy to use and great for our customers. **What problems is Higher Logic Vanilla solving and how is that benefiting you?** We needed a way for our customers to engage with eachother, share ideas and build stronger connections. **Official Response from bleehe@higherlogic.com Leehe:** > Thank you for taking the time to share your feedback, we’re so glad to hear that Higher Logic Vanilla has made it easy for your customers to connect, share ideas, and build stronger relationships. It’s great to know the setup process felt smooth and well-supported by our team. We truly appreciate your positive comments about the platform’s usability and the value it brings to your community. Thanks again for being a valued partner! ### 5. Comprehensive Community Hosting Solution with a Solid Backend **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Vidya Raman S. | Technical Writing Specialist, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 30, 2024 **What do you like best about Higher Logic Vanilla?** Vanilla offers a wide range of out-of-the-box configuration options that can be easily set up by non-technical users. It also integrates seamlessly with various popular CRM applications. The Customer Support team is excellent and responds quickly to inquiries. **What do you dislike about Higher Logic Vanilla?** The main drawback is the limited theming and CSS options, particularly for the Knowledge component. Significant customization and development effort are required to enhance the site's visual appeal. Additionally, the editor is missing basic formatting features, such as inserting tables and resizing images. **What problems is Higher Logic Vanilla solving and how is that benefiting you?** Higher Logic Vanilla addresses the need for customer self-service and engagement by providing a centralized platform where users can access information, seek support, and connect with others. This platform empowers customers to find answers on their own through forums, FAQs, and knowledge bases, which reduces the workload on customer support teams. Additionally, it promotes customer engagement by facilitating discussions and community interactions ### 6. An easy-to-use community platform with just enough bells and whistles that can grow **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Maureen R. | Customer Marketing Manager, Computer Software, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 08, 2024 **What do you like best about Higher Logic Vanilla?** The platform was easy to navigate, with good out of the box reporting that integrated with ChurnZero (our customer success platform) out of the box. I was able to build a beautiful community without taking too much training. **What do you dislike about Higher Logic Vanilla?** It's definitely not the most robust community platform on the market, but it has just what we need for a team who is managing community in addition to other jobs. I wish there was more out of the box customization options when it comes to design and more of a 'news feed' approach to discussions where people can like and comment on posts without having to go TO the post beforehand. **What problems is Higher Logic Vanilla solving and how is that benefiting you?** It's giving our customers a space to build their own networks, share best practices, answer questions, etc. We also use is at a marketing tool to share announcements, events, and other department initiatives. ### 7. Great tool as the community platform to connect clients **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Oliver l. | Aspiring Software Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 02, 2024 **What do you like best about Higher Logic Vanilla?** The feature of discussions and Q&As is very helpful. **What do you dislike about Higher Logic Vanilla?** Get the quicker speed on feature rolling out. **What problems is Higher Logic Vanilla solving and how is that benefiting you?** to manage and build the proactive community with clients ### 8. Horrific experience with product and team **Rating:** 0.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Tommy M. | CEO, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 06, 2022 **What do you like best about Higher Logic Vanilla?** Vanilla Forums billed itself as an all-in-one community and content marketing platform. That is what I wanted, but unfortunately, their promises were false. **What do you dislike about Higher Logic Vanilla?** Vanilla Forums has zero functionality out of the box. You need hours upon hours of developer time to set up an instance and can't get ahold of anyone on the customer success or service team. Not to mention, they have no communication to customers, no billing system, and just automated invoices that all go to spam. They will put you into collections as a business if you miss a payment without warning. To repeat - they will put you into collections without warning. Definitely stay away from this service for any SaaS products. Once more for the folks in the back, they will put you into collections without warning. **What problems is Higher Logic Vanilla solving and how is that benefiting you?** It solved nothing, and we received no benefit. ### 9. Great platform for Communities in Associations. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 11, 2023 **What do you like best about Higher Logic Vanilla?** Higher Logic is a great way to share ideas and to have engagement. We have used the Higher Logic Online Community which provides discussion boards for members to engage. **What do you dislike about Higher Logic Vanilla?** I wish Higher Logic has a Google drive concept where members can update in real time. **What problems is Higher Logic Vanilla solving and how is that benefiting you?** Engagement. ### 10. Strong customer support platform with excellent customer support **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Consumer Electronics | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 23, 2022 **What do you like best about Higher Logic Vanilla?** Vanilla's support is incredibly helpful - they know the product well, are honest about the status of bugs/issues/feature requests, and their response rate is very impressive! They also have a good integration with Zapier and are continuing to add more (as well as other features requested by users) **What do you dislike about Higher Logic Vanilla?** Each community platform has its strengths and weaknesses. Vanilla could benefit from having some more email tools to encourage community engagement/adoption (ex. regular newsletter, ability to add we miss you emails, more welcome emails, etc.). It would also be helpful if they had more of a WYSYWIG editor and ability to change pages without CSS/JS required. I would also love to see a more robust events system. **What problems is Higher Logic Vanilla solving and how is that benefiting you?** Vanilla offers a strong community platform. We have used this to connect with customers and potential customers about our product as well as topical content related to the product. It's been great to have our community as the home base for connecting with our company. ### 11. Reliable forum software with the tools you need to grow your community **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 23, 2022 **What do you like best about Higher Logic Vanilla?** The ability to create categories and groups - the structure of how you can create them is very versatile which will meet many different use cases. It is also easy for the end user to understand how the structure is set up and find what they are looking for and how to participate. **What do you dislike about Higher Logic Vanilla?** There is not a built in digest functionality - where you can send a recap of the posts from the prior day. This would be helpful in getting users to come back to community and engage them in discussions - I hope this is something they add in the future as it impacts community engagement greatly! **What problems is Higher Logic Vanilla solving and how is that benefiting you?** Manage support forums with ease. Decent data reporting in terms of average response time and number of questions - this allows me to report on the success of the forum from a ticket deflection perspective. Additionally, allows us to collect feedback from our users. ### 12. Very comprehensive platform to grow in to **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Leanne M. | Events and Community Manager, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 25, 2022 **What do you like best about Higher Logic Vanilla?** I like that there is a lot of flexibility in design and setup so we can really make the platform work for us now and into the future. We reviewed a lot of competitors before settling on Vanilla/Higher Logic and we ultimately ended up going with this platform because it met all of our needs including excellent content distribution and moderation features, detailed reporting and much more. **What do you dislike about Higher Logic Vanilla?** It can be a little tricky to completely personalise the product without technical knowledge/assistance and sometimes it can be a little slow to hear back from someone in the team if there is a challenge (particularly with billing) **Recommendations to others considering Higher Logic Vanilla:** Don't just think about what you need now, but also into the future and you'll see that you can really grow into and with this platform. **What problems is Higher Logic Vanilla solving and how is that benefiting you?** It's helping us to better connect with our customers. We can now share and discuss exclusive content with them, hear their challenges, and even support onboarding for customers and employees all in one place. ### 13. Vanilla by Higher Logic the Epitome of What Customer Community SaaS Should Be **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Nichole D. | Director of Customer Operations, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 25, 2022 **What do you like best about Higher Logic Vanilla?** There are a lot of amazing things about Vanilla by Higher Logic. I used to work for a competitor for nearly seven years, so I have first-hand knowledge of not just what I expect in the mechanics of a platform and how it's deployed, but the kind of programmatic support needed as well. When I was looking for a community platform for my company, I looked at the above, plus the value for the price, as well as the kind of culture they have that would turn this into a partnership. Across the board, Vanilla has been the most outstanding community partnerI could have asked for. For an incredibly reasonable price, we obtained a platform that allowed us complete flexibility on look and feel, what gaming mechanics we wanted to offer to our users, as well as a ton of Moderation controls that takes some of the taxing work off of those that do the moderation. In addition, the number of plug-ins it's compatible with is astounding. As for programmatic, the amount of training materials, the initial support from my assigned CSM, as well as ongoing continuing education and networking opportunities have been numerous. If you're a first-time Community Manager, there's no better partner than Vanilla to hold your hand every step of the way. Finally, their culture is geared towards supporting humans. Since beginning my work with them in 2019, I've made numerous friendships within both Vanilla and Higher Logic, which is testament to the amazing people they employ. **What do you dislike about Higher Logic Vanilla?** There's really not much to dislike. If you are looking for a vendor that offers a great platform, program guidance, and an in-depth education on communities, then they are the vendor for you. **What problems is Higher Logic Vanilla solving and how is that benefiting you?** Our use case is a self-service support community that allows our customers to access a whole range of materials from articles on troubleshooting, to important product updates, to industry news and events, customer stories, and best practices. Our goal was to reduce support tickets, as well as time to resolve. We have achieved that with Vanilla's Community platform. ### 14. Bringing our passionate community together, online **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** David P. | Community Manager, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 24, 2022 **What do you like best about Higher Logic Vanilla?** Vanilla makes managing our community online simple and easy. Everything we need is available in an instance and our passionate community of travel professionals can support each other more efficiently online. On the rare occasion I can't sort or resolve something myself, their support team is on-hand to help and it's always thorough and friendly. The platform connects our global community in a way they've never had before which is fantastic. **What do you dislike about Higher Logic Vanilla?** There are some instances where I feel I should be able to do myself, like allowing additional file types for attachments in posts, I can't and have to reach out to the support team for help. I can understand to a certain degree why this is the case but it's long-winded and slows things down. There could also be better communication; my CSM left their role and told me the day they were leaving, I'm still waiting for a new CSM to be appointed to our account. **Recommendations to others considering Higher Logic Vanilla:** Fully review analytics offering, this was our only challenge. **What problems is Higher Logic Vanilla solving and how is that benefiting you?** We're now better at connecting a global community in a way that works for them. We're seeing better peer-to-peer support which is allowing our in-house support teams to focus on more detailed problems that can't be solved by this kind of peer-led support which means our teams are more efficient. ### 15. Internal teams are struggling to find value in the product. **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Meghan B. | Community Manager, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 25, 2022 **What do you like best about Higher Logic Vanilla?** I enjoy working with Adrian Speyer- CommuniTea hour events help me feel that someone can provide immediate suggestions/support to what is happening. **What do you dislike about Higher Logic Vanilla?** The platform needs digests. I find that we can't keep users engaged if notifications don't deploy to them outside of the Community. **What problems is Higher Logic Vanilla solving and how is that benefiting you?** Giving our users a place to talk to one another. ### 16. Higher Logic offers a solid product with responsive support and flexible development options. **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jimerson A. | Director of Technical Operations, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 23, 2022 **What do you like best about Higher Logic Vanilla?** I like how how it is simple to use but also offers extensive options under the hood for nearly unlimited customization. **What do you dislike about Higher Logic Vanilla?** I think the largest pill to swallow is cost, but you really do get what you pay for. **What problems is Higher Logic Vanilla solving and how is that benefiting you?** We were able to rollout a modern forum that provides ongoing member engagement, building real community! ### 17. Fully-featured forum functionality (and at a reasonable cost) **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Gordon S. | Director of Community, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 13, 2021 **What do you like best about Higher Logic Vanilla?** Vanilla is a fully-featured forum platform with virtually all the customization options you want in a forum with the ability to customize the Forum look and feel, categories, member settings, moderation options, email settings, multiple forum instances, APIs, badging, and more. And Vanilla offers these options at a reasonable cost. Virtually anything you want to do terms of customization is probably possible with Vanilla. **What do you dislike about Higher Logic Vanilla?** While we're happy with Vanilla overall, we have run into three areas where we'd love to see improvement: - The lack of an email digest option (we'd love it if the system could generate a once a day email listing top and new discussions). - The moderation options are a little bit buggy (sometimes we'd like to take action behind the scenes which isn't always possible). - Now that Higher Logic has bought Vanilla, we'd love to see Vanilla integrate with Higher Logic's best in class ability to segment users and create unique experiences for them. **What problems is Higher Logic Vanilla solving and how is that benefiting you?** It's enabling us to create an online community for our top members, which we leverage to enable self-support, to get detailed feedback about our service, and to communicate proactively with these members. ### 18. Great Customer Service **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Kanyin O. | Sr solution architect, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 04, 2022 **What do you like best about Higher Logic Vanilla?** the CS rep who worked with us from design to implementation was spectacular. she was very organized and receptive to our needs. **What do you dislike about Higher Logic Vanilla?** I wish the Vanilla platform had some more features **What problems is Higher Logic Vanilla solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are creating a closer connection with our customers and we are getting to hear their voice ### 19. Great Plaftform for Online Community Forums **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Rahul D. | Software Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 28, 2022 **What do you like best about Higher Logic Vanilla?** Support community for the customers, where every person can connect and find the solutions. **What do you dislike about Higher Logic Vanilla?** More help features should be provided for the users. **Recommendations to others considering Higher Logic Vanilla:** The best portal for Customer Support. **What problems is Higher Logic Vanilla solving and how is that benefiting you?** To communicate with community members. If anyone has a query they post it and someone provides the best solutions for it. That's the cool feature I like. ### 20. Great people in a company lacking scalability and professional delivery sometimes **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Games | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 19, 2021 **What do you like best about Higher Logic Vanilla?** The people and the approachability! You always get a response from Vanilla nd they are truly approachable and not a company that moves away from a relationship with their clients once they're settled in. **What do you dislike about Higher Logic Vanilla?** Vanilla struggled to deliver in a professional and high quality manner in a project that was key for us this year. There was a lack of project ownership, of guidance and of delivery and that hindered our Community goals for 2021. **What problems is Higher Logic Vanilla solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are trying to build community forums that can host thousands and thousands of players. Vanilla has been communicative and their CSM has always been responsive, even if at times the platform didn't deliver what we expected. ### 21. Amazing support, seamless design, intuitive UI **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 24, 2022 **What do you like best about Higher Logic Vanilla?** What I like best about Vanilla is how simple the UI is to use. It's seamless to set up, monitor, and run a community (which I haven't found the same with other community platforms). Support is wicked fast every time I come across an issue. **What do you dislike about Higher Logic Vanilla?** Since Vanilla is newer, there are certain things I'd like to see in the product that just aren't there yet. Totally understandable, that's all I can complain about. **Recommendations to others considering Higher Logic Vanilla:** You won't find a better platform for community. **What problems is Higher Logic Vanilla solving and how is that benefiting you?** Giving our customers a platform to collaborate, find answers to their questions, and be rewarded for being a crucial member of our community. Most of our advocates started on our community forums. ### 22. Vanilla Online Community by Higher Logic is a great asset for our company **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** jeremy m. | Sr. Manager Digital Journey & CX Experience, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 24, 2022 **What do you like best about Higher Logic Vanilla?** The platform itself and the options included are more than what we can ask for when compared to other competitors; their support team is incredibly supportive and hands-on. **What do you dislike about Higher Logic Vanilla?** None that I can think of, to be honest - there is nothing to dislike. **Recommendations to others considering Higher Logic Vanilla:** Vanilla Online Community by Higher Logic is a no-brainer if you're looking for a robust community platform to support your business and customers. **What problems is Higher Logic Vanilla solving and how is that benefiting you?** P2P support reduced OPEX, and huge returns on ROI. ### 23. Market leading platform that is constantly evolving **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 28, 2022 **What do you like best about Higher Logic Vanilla?** My most significant admiration for Vanilla is their constant drive toward improvement and innovation. They don't sit still and are always evolving their offering which has been a breath of fresh air for us. **What do you dislike about Higher Logic Vanilla?** The platform is really intuitive, and you can get up and running quickly with out-of-the-box functionality. When it comes to deeper customisation there is a need for dev resources which is a tad limiting **Recommendations to others considering Higher Logic Vanilla:** Don't hesitate to take the leap with Vanilla for your online community needs. You won't be disappointed. **What problems is Higher Logic Vanilla solving and how is that benefiting you?** Our Vanilla Community allows us to provide a digital self-service support channel that has garnered a user base of 28,000 registered members. We've been able to utilise the community platform to service a range of needs including support, mass communication along with building brand advocacy. ### 24. Responsive, Helpful, and Proactive Customer Support **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 18, 2021 **What do you like best about Higher Logic Vanilla?** The fast turnaround from Customer Support as well as the proactive communication from our CSM. We also love how our Vanilla Online Community forum has really engaged our customers not only with us - but also between each other with knowledge and experience sharing. **What do you dislike about Higher Logic Vanilla?** Sometimes, the WYSIWYG editor is a bit lacking in terms of content control. Additionally, the Admin Dashboard UI can be difficult to navigate and find certain items. **What problems is Higher Logic Vanilla solving and how is that benefiting you?** We utilize the community forum for an array of things - from non-urgent questions and issues that can be quickly addressed (thus assisting our Support team with our ticket queue), to creating an active community of product users that want to share their knowledge and experience, to receiving creative Feature Request ideas. ### 25. A greater starter platform for your Community needs! **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 16, 2021 **What do you like best about Higher Logic Vanilla?** 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. **What do you dislike about Higher Logic Vanilla?** 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. **What problems is Higher Logic Vanilla solving and how is that benefiting you?** Vanilla provides a space for users to connect with others and collaborate on best practices or complex problems. ### 26. Easy to use with great KB and resources **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Sarah K. | Events & Community, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 19, 2021 **What do you like best about Higher Logic Vanilla?** 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! **What do you dislike about Higher Logic Vanilla?** 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. **Recommendations to others considering Higher Logic Vanilla:** Stay as much OOB as possible. **What problems is Higher Logic Vanilla solving and how is that benefiting you?** Vanilla provides a space for our global users to connect with each other anytime, and help answer each other's questions. ### 27. Good place to start a Community **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 20, 2021 **What do you like best about Higher Logic Vanilla?** Easy to use and and navigate. Pretty intuitive if you've used similar site building tools before **What do you dislike about Higher Logic Vanilla?** Support is a little lacking. Sometimes hard to reach. **Recommendations to others considering Higher Logic Vanilla:** Try it out. If you have questions make sure you ask th probably have an answer or can give guidance on where to get the answer **What problems is Higher Logic Vanilla solving and how is that benefiting you?** Gives clients a place for ideation and to get support quicker than the previous methods of e-mail or text ### 28. Great Community Platform **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** William H. | Support Specialist, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 19, 2021 **What do you like best about Higher Logic Vanilla?** The platform is easy to manage and support is great. **What do you dislike about Higher Logic Vanilla?** Handling CSS changes could be a little easier to implement **What problems is Higher Logic Vanilla solving and how is that benefiting you?** Our Vanilla Lounge is great for letting the community help out each other ### 29. Quick to get set up and very flexible product **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 02, 2021 **What do you like best about Higher Logic Vanilla?** 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. **What do you dislike about Higher Logic Vanilla?** 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. **What problems is Higher Logic Vanilla solving and how is that benefiting you?** Our community is very segmented and requires heavy moderation. Vanilla helps us completely segment our community while being able to manage them all in one place for the ease of our moderators. ### 30. Vanilla - A great choice for your new community! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Kara A. | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 14, 2020 **What do you like best about Higher Logic Vanilla?** 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. **What do you dislike about Higher Logic Vanilla?** 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. **What problems is Higher Logic Vanilla solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are providing an online community to our audience for the very first time. We've realized very quickly that there is a great appetite for best practice sharing and the opportunity to connect with others in new ways. With Vanilla's platform, we are able to offer many options for our audience to converse in public forums, provide feedback and collaborate in social groups, as well as have a little fun competing for the top spot on the leaderboard! ### 31. Easy-to-implement user community **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jeff G. | VP of Product, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 24, 2020 **What do you like best about Higher Logic Vanilla?** 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. **What do you dislike about Higher Logic Vanilla?** 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. **What problems is Higher Logic Vanilla solving and how is that benefiting you?** Catalytic has a thriving user community as a result of our implementation of Vanilla. This supports a self-service model for customer support, in which customers are able to instantly search previously answered questions. Additionally, customers are able to inform our product roadmap by submitting feature requests and voting on one another's ideas. ### 32. Outdated forum software that checks many boxes (poorly) **Rating:** 1.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Higher Education | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 16, 2020 **What do you like best about Higher Logic Vanilla?** 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.) **What do you dislike about Higher Logic Vanilla?** 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. **What problems is Higher Logic Vanilla solving and how is that benefiting you?** We have a large community and Vanilla Forums do allow people to interact with each other, answer questions and generally be a productive community. ### 33. Love the features Vanilla has to offer! **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Internet | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 25, 2020 **What do you like best about Higher Logic Vanilla?** 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. **What do you dislike about Higher Logic Vanilla?** There isn’t anything that I really dislike about the platform. **Recommendations to others considering Higher Logic Vanilla:** I would definitely recommend Vanilla Community to others and would say that they are very up to date with their software and product offerings. They are very transparent about what they can and can't offer, as well as sharing upcoming things on their product roadmap. **What problems is Higher Logic Vanilla solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are able to reach hundreds of sellers that we work with on a daily basis, and share important information with them. Some of the benefits I have realized are the ability to create private groups, and also the private and group messaging. I think our users have found the new community very useful and are able to connect with others, as well as use it as a daily reference for any questions they might have. ### 34. Learning what can be accomplished with the platform **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jeffrey M. | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 21, 2020 **What do you like best about Higher Logic Vanilla?** 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. **What do you dislike about Higher Logic Vanilla?** 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. **Recommendations to others considering Higher Logic Vanilla:** Think about what you want to accomplish with your community. Once you have a plan of action, work with your account manager to bring that to fruition. **What problems is Higher Logic Vanilla solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are using Vanilla to be an ongoing feedback loop with our users. The biggest component is ideation for our product managers to know what our users want. ### 35. Vanilla and Community **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Katharine R. | Community Manager, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 28, 2020 **What do you like best about Higher Logic Vanilla?** - 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. **What do you dislike about Higher Logic Vanilla?** - 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. **Recommendations to others considering Higher Logic Vanilla:** If you would like to set up a forum, but don't know how to or where to start, I'd recommend Vanilla for you. Their team will be able to guide you through set-up and get you up-and-running. If you have more advanced skills for site design, they have plenty of documentation and information to get your forum to where you need it to be. **What problems is Higher Logic Vanilla solving and how is that benefiting you?** - We don't have a CMS option on our website, so we are able to use the forums for posting News, Announcements and Patch Notes. Vanilla gives us the ability to communicate to our community across all social channels by using it as a hub for information. ### 36. Affordable Plug and Play Solution **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Alan B. | Founder, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 21, 2020 **What do you like best about Higher Logic Vanilla?** 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. **What do you dislike about Higher Logic Vanilla?** 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 **What problems is Higher Logic Vanilla solving and how is that benefiting you?** I wanted my newsletter subscribers to be able to communicate in an effective and organized manner, and this has been achieved ### 37. Freedom to customize CSS **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 21, 2020 **What do you like best about Higher Logic Vanilla?** 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. **What do you dislike about Higher Logic Vanilla?** 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. **What problems is Higher Logic Vanilla solving and how is that benefiting you?** We opted for an easy way to have customers/members feedback and interaction within our member areas of our sites. ### 38. So easy to use - perfect for what I needed **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Trevor B. | VP of Marketing, Computer Software, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 20, 2018 **What do you like best about Higher Logic Vanilla?** 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. **What do you dislike about Higher Logic Vanilla?** 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. **What problems is Higher Logic Vanilla solving and how is that benefiting you?** We have just launched and it's going great so far, but we essentially wanted to provide a way for our customers to share best practices, network, and have closer access to our support and customer success teams. Instead of answering questions in silos, it's now available for all customers to see and learn from - the live KB that we needed. We have internal SMEs adding articles of tech tips and commonly asked questions to help boost the usefulness and activity out of the gates. ### 39. A world-class online community solution with amazing flexibility and scale **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Sreekumar J. | Designated Partner, Information Services, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 09, 2018 **What do you like best about Higher Logic Vanilla?** 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. **What do you dislike about Higher Logic Vanilla?** 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. **Recommendations to others considering Higher Logic Vanilla:** I recommend Vanilla forums to anybody who wish to begin an online community. Vanilla is simple, stable, and having excellent add-ons compatibility and this is going to exceed your expectations. **What problems is Higher Logic Vanilla solving and how is that benefiting you?** For our startup in online solution space, we were looking at a stable and easy to manage community solution. We were keen on pursuing an application which we can rely on and at the same time, less time consuming one for forum administration and management. We found vanilla as the perfect solution to meet our requirements. ### 40. Vanilla Forums **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Geraldine V. | Associate Director of Outreach and Communications, Research, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 07, 2017 **What do you like best about Higher Logic Vanilla?** 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. **What do you dislike about Higher Logic Vanilla?** 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. **What problems is Higher Logic Vanilla solving and how is that benefiting you?** We use Vanilla Forums as our main channel for providing technical and scientific support to the users of our genomic analysis software package and related cloud services. The forums enable us to communicate knowledge and collect feedback and issue reports from our users in an efficient manner. Over the past 5 years, we've grown our userbase from a few thousand to >55K registered users. Our users often express that they come to us based on the reputation of the software and stay with us because they're so happy with the support we provide, and the Forums are an integral part of that. ### 41. Vanilla Forums Put Our Community into Overdrive (and the 21st Century) **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Patrick M. | Founder, Sports, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 04, 2017 **What do you like best about Higher Logic Vanilla?** 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? **What do you dislike about Higher Logic Vanilla?** So far, there's nothing to complain about. One year in and still going strong. **Recommendations to others considering Higher Logic Vanilla:** Definitely worth giving them a call and seeing what they can do with your existing community. **What problems is Higher Logic Vanilla solving and how is that benefiting you?** A robust, up-to-date online space for my community members to interact and share knowledge and stories with one another. ### 42. Best Kept Community Secret **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Emilia D. | Founder, Managing Partner, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 30, 2017 **What do you like best about Higher Logic Vanilla?** 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. **What do you dislike about Higher Logic Vanilla?** I haven't experienced anything that I don't like yet. **Recommendations to others considering Higher Logic Vanilla:** -They don't have a mobile app but I hear it is in the works! The web version works well though. -Make sure you have your resources to go because it is an easy set-up. -Take their online training and webinars. Very helpful for launching! **What problems is Higher Logic Vanilla solving and how is that benefiting you?** I started our WalkMe user groups on the phone and in LinkedIn groups. I quickly realized a needed a more robust platform to scale a fast growing community online and to segment the customer experiences by platform. Today we are excited to have a community for Workday®, Salesforce®, External, General & for Product testing. It has been a great experience to work with such a professional and available team. We have also been able to create the customer experience we want without investing in heavy professional services that many competitors nearly require. This product is easy to use for the admins and for customers. Thank you, Vanilla! ### 43. Vanilla - is it a tasty experience? **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Paul C. | Online Community Executive, Accounting, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 25, 2017 **What do you like best about Higher Logic Vanilla?** 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. **What do you dislike about Higher Logic Vanilla?** 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. **Recommendations to others considering Higher Logic Vanilla:** If you're looking for a clean, easy to navigate and customise platform Vanilla is a great option. You can get a free trial too so why not give it a try? **What problems is Higher Logic Vanilla solving and how is that benefiting you?** Our community seek and possess a lot of technical knowledge and our students sometimes require deep understand of the topics they are revising for. The forum is a great place professionals and students can come to help each other and transcend their experiences to each other to help with their business or career development. ### 44. A solid platform with lots of customisation **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** James B. | Online Community Manager, Accounting, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 25, 2017 **What do you like best about Higher Logic Vanilla?** 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. **What do you dislike about Higher Logic Vanilla?** 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. **What problems is Higher Logic Vanilla solving and how is that benefiting you?** We're connecting our customers and building a peer support network that offers a better level of support than we could provide on our own. We work within a very technical industry and by using the expertise of our long-term customers we are building a longer relationship with our newest and progressing customers. ### 45. ZTEUSA Z-Community Admin retrospective.. **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Brett L. | Community Administrator, Consumer Electronics, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 19, 2017 **What do you like best about Higher Logic Vanilla?** If I had to say what I like the best it would have to be where I spend about 80% of my time in. That would be the admin Dashboard. It is a fully functional and fluid space for any community administrator. **What do you dislike about Higher Logic Vanilla?** Being honest, there are a few things that we have to have custom work done that were available on our previous platform, but when we ask for the work it is done quickly and professionally. **Recommendations to others considering Higher Logic Vanilla:** If switching to Vanilla it would be a great opportunity to come up with a new theme for your community. There are endless opportunities available to you. Think about what you want Vanilla to do for you and tell them up front. They will work with you for most any solution you need. **What problems is Higher Logic Vanilla solving and how is that benefiting you?** We started a community last year on a different platform. We were out of touch with our customers and had no way to communicate with them. Our platform at the time got us in the door with our customers, and thru their feedback we realized that we needed a community with more flexibility and personal service. We realized that solution thru Vanilla. ### 46. Great flexibility **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Christy C. | Customer Support Manager, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 16, 2017 **What do you like best about Higher Logic Vanilla?** I love that I have an awesome CSM who really cares about my forum doing well (shout out to Val). They look into any ideas I might have, no mater how crazy. I love that you can really make it your own. There is so much flexibility in terms of design and plug-ins. We have a Zendesk plug-in that allows us to pull tough questions into tickets to provide our users with privacy and faster service. **What do you dislike about Higher Logic Vanilla?** If you don't know CSS, it can be a little hard. Luckily there are free CSS classes on a lot of different coding websites. Having a developer or a designer that can help you out would be awesome for this solution. **Recommendations to others considering Higher Logic Vanilla:** Keep doing things like making apps to integrate with Hootsuite. Make getting CSS help easier. **What problems is Higher Logic Vanilla solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are using it as a channel to help our users find quick answers on questions that might have already been answered on the forum. We love having a place where users can interact and talk about tips and tricks while getting answers for our more commonly asked questions. ### 47. Good relationship, young product **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Brittany H. | Advocate Marketing Specialist, Marketing and Advertising, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 16, 2017 **What do you like best about Higher Logic Vanilla?** - Easy design - Plugin features - Our CSM **What do you dislike about Higher Logic Vanilla?** - Underdeveloped analytics - Very DIY (not a lot of help setting up or customizing) **What problems is Higher Logic Vanilla solving and how is that benefiting you?** Hootsuite manages multiple online customer engagement programs that consistently adapt with the evolution of social marketing and customer support .Vanilla helps us engage with our ambassadors, customers, and users online on an easy to use platform. Specifically, I use it for our ambassador program - our ambassadors are able to connect with each other internationally through our platform. It's been great to have a close relationship with the company, and we've done some custom work with the team. Vanilla is still growing as a company, and it reflects in the product. However, if I'm looking for functionality which doesn't exist, our CSM will go out of their way to try to find me a work-around. Nothing comes without a few pain points. One of my biggest challenges was the on-boarding process. It was all very do-it-yourself and they didn't have any straightforward set up guides. We even offered to pay for a contact to set it up according to our specifications, but they didn't have the capacity to do so. This product definitely requires a basic knowledge of HTML/CSS if you want to dive into customization. Overall, we're pretty happy with the product and our contacts. A big benefit for us is having a few instances and champions within our company. It's been interesting to see different use cases, and this shared knowledge has benefitted our community immensely. ### 48. Reliable and easy-to-use **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Kelli P. | Virtual Assistant, Internet, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 16, 2017 **What do you like best about Higher Logic Vanilla?** The thing I like best about Vanilla Forums is how easy it is to use for my customers. It is easy to find various topics and threads with the different menus available on each page. We've used other forum platforms that constantly crashed and this one has been very stable. **What do you dislike about Higher Logic Vanilla?** There are only minor things I dislike. Our members are all writers. Many of them copy from Word to paste content into the forum and run up against the character count limit. This is an easy workaround using a text editor program, but it would be even easier if Vanilla had a "Paste a Plain Text" option. Again, this is really minor. **Recommendations to others considering Higher Logic Vanilla:** Ask as many questions have you have. The sales team and the support team are very helpful. **What problems is Higher Logic Vanilla solving and how is that benefiting you?** Vanilla Forums has given us a place for our members to connect. It's given us the ability to host different levels of membership without anyone feeling like they're missing out on anything. Whenever we've had a problem or needed help, Laura and the Vanilla Support Team has been there to help within hours (sometimes minutes). They are a dream to work with. ### 49. Vanilla Forums makes it easier for us to manage our communities **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Mark G. | Technical Producer, Computer Games, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 10, 2017 **What do you like best about Higher Logic Vanilla?** How quickly we can create new forums as we publish new games. The support team at Vanilla Forums is very responsive and willing to work with us to **What do you dislike about Higher Logic Vanilla?** No big complaints. It would be nice if our web developers could run instances of Vanilla locally so they could create themes faster. **Recommendations to others considering Higher Logic Vanilla:** Vanilla forums makes it easy for administrators to build and deploy new forums and for community managers to moderate their communities. The software is very flexible and easy to integrate with existing account management systems. **What problems is Higher Logic Vanilla solving and how is that benefiting you?** We used to maintain forums that we built in-house and that were tightly coupled with our internal account management system. Once we started publishing a lot of new games, we needed a modern forum solution that would allow us to create new gaming communities very quickly. Our time to deploy forums decreased from several months to under 1 week. ### 50. Vanilla Forums – An Unwavering Commitment to Customer Success **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** John F. | Chief Operating Officer, Management Consulting, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 26, 2017 **What do you like best about Higher Logic Vanilla?** Vanilla’s team went above and beyond to ensure the success of the pilot program that we conducted. The platform is intuitive and easy to use; it offered us a high degree of flexibility so that we could take a phased approach to rolling out new features and functionality. After signing our agreement, we were immediately introduced to Vanilla’s support and implementation team, who provided constructive feedback and shared innovative ideas for driving engagement on a weekly basis. **What do you dislike about Higher Logic Vanilla?** Overall, Vanilla has a strong product. However, we were disappointed to learn that you can't actually host a "live chat" in a discussion because comments don't load automatically in real-time...in order to see a new comment on a post you have to refresh your browser. **What problems is Higher Logic Vanilla solving and how is that benefiting you?** To ensure the success of your online community, it is imperative that you obtain buy-in from key stakeholders. I recommend that you assemble a comprehensive business case, and obtain support from the C-suite, before moving forward. Your business case should include key milestones, goals/objectives, metrics, etc. Key performance indicators should be tracked on an ongoing basis and share with all stakeholders. ## Higher Logic Vanilla Discussions - [Can Vanilla be integrated with the rest of my website so I do not need a separate login for the forums?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/can-vanilla-be-integrated-with-the-rest-of-my-website-so-i-do-not-need-a-separate-login-for-the-forums-08788a1c-e0ee-485a-9d0e-bb1aef5fa28b) - 1 comment, 2 upvotes - [Can I run a Vanilla forum in an embedded frame?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/can-i-run-a-vanilla-forum-in-an-embedded-frame-c9684c8b-9886-47d4-ab67-5e16849addd7) - 1 comment, 1 upvote - [How much can I customize a Vanilla Forum?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/customization) - 1 comment, 1 upvote - [Are Vanilla Forums mobile friendly?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/mobile-use) - 1 comment, 1 upvote - [Does Vanilla allow me to make my forum private?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/forum-privatization) - 1 comment, 1 upvote - [View Higher Logic Vanilla pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/higher-logic-vanilla/reviews?section=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-06-11+16%3A00%3A18+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=9fe662fe-c423-4137-b5c7-357979454f7a&secure%5Btoken%5D=513682176ec78795d087dc8d48939dfa3168d315c8122a0a0d402fb88df89761&format=llm_user) ## Higher Logic Vanilla Integrations - [Agentforce Sales (formerly Salesforce Sales Cloud)](https://www.g2.com/products/agentforce-sales-formerly-salesforce-sales-cloud/reviews) - [ChurnZero](https://www.g2.com/products/churnzero/reviews) - [CleanSpeak](https://www.g2.com/products/cleanspeak/reviews) - [GitHub](https://www.g2.com/products/github/reviews) - [HubSpot Marketing Hub](https://www.g2.com/products/hubspot-marketing-hub/reviews) - [Intuit Mailchimp Email Marketing](https://www.g2.com/products/intuit-mailchimp-email-marketing/reviews) - [Jira](https://www.g2.com/products/jira/reviews) - [Productboard](https://www.g2.com/products/productboard/reviews) - [WordPress.com](https://www.g2.com/products/wordpress-com/reviews) - [Zapier](https://www.g2.com/products/zapier/reviews) - [Zendesk for Customer Service](https://www.g2.com/products/zendesk-for-customer-service/reviews) - [Zoom Rooms](https://www.g2.com/products/zoom-rooms/reviews) ## Higher Logic Vanilla Features **Community Building** - Member Profiles - Email & Notifications - Member Discovery - Member Referrals - Community Spaces - Paid Memberships - Multimedia Sharing - Courses **Self-Service Experience** - Knowledge Base - Searchable Articles - Community Forums - Mobile Optimization - Personalization **Community Improvement** - Gamification - Polls & Questions - Automation Rules **Self-Service Platform** - Branding - Automation - Artificial Intelligence - Integrations **Customer Analytics** - Community Insights - Community Engagement Analytics - Downloadable Reports - ROI Tracking **Agentic AI - Customer Self-Service** - Autonomous Task Execution - Multi-step Planning - Cross-system Integration - Adaptive Learning - Natural Language Interaction - Proactive Assistance - Decision Making **Community Management** - Community Feeds & Discussions - Live Streaming - Chat & Messaging - Events Management - Admin Roles & Permissions **Agentic AI - Online Community Management** - Autonomous Task Execution - Multi-step Planning - Cross-system Integration - Natural Language Interaction - Proactive Assistance - Decision Making ## Top Higher Logic Vanilla Alternatives - [Influitive](https://www.g2.com/products/jigsaw-interactive-influitive/reviews) - 4.4/5.0 (388 reviews) - [Gainsight Customer Communities](https://www.g2.com/products/gainsight-customer-communities/reviews) - 4.4/5.0 (266 reviews) - [Hivebrite](https://www.g2.com/products/hivebrite/reviews) - 4.4/5.0 (215 reviews)