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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

None that I can think of, to be honest - there is nothing to dislike. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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 Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Easy to use and and navigate. Pretty intuitive if you've used similar site building tools before Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Support is a little lacking. Sometimes hard to reach. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The platform is easy to manage and support is great. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Handling CSS changes could be a little easier to implement Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.