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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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.) Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There isn’t anything that I really dislike about the platform. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

- 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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

- 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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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 Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.