Crowded is a Powerful Beautiful Community Platform with Excellent Support

With the Alliance Aces Community http://allianceaces.com, we are creating a place for Alliance professionals to come together, share their ideas and best practices. There is interest by some members to bring over other Alliances communities into the AAC private group/spaces because, as one wrote: "The facilities and functions of the Alliance Aces Community are far superior to anything that I could create using my website or Facebook’s Workplace." We tried all the other platforms Salesforce, Higher Logic, Lithium, Zendesk, InSided, ... Crowded was heads and shoulders above the others from a look and feel and functions perspective. They are also a pleasure to work with. They have a more hands-on implementation service of weekly community development sessions to teach you how to be successful with your community aka ensure you are successful. I also like that their pricing is straight forward.

Pros

Here are some topics that made us choose and enjoy Crowded: - Medium-like beautiful clean UI/UX - Enterprise-ready platform: fully supports the needs of even large organizations in both service and support. - Private Groups - Eventing aka great integration of community and face to face meetings - Badges to highlight and create reputation for your community members. - Map integration - Great implementation service - Modular architecture with many modules to choose from - Happy customers

Cons

Moderation and flagging of posts not fully developed yet. They are working on it and promised to have it out in the next months. In general, they are very responsive to feature requests. For example, they developed a video wall and a course module in part because of our requirements.

Nice visuals, continuous updates & valuable coaching

A great community website which fully supports our organizational goals.

Pros

There are a lot of possibilities and various page types for the content we want to show on our platform. On top of that, there are continuous technical updates, the software is continously improving. Next to that, the weekly community coaching calls are very valuable for us. During these sessions, Crowded offers new updates, helps us implementing our ideas to the platform and supports the development and engagement of our community. Their knowledge on community management is very useful in this.

Cons

Direct messaging between members indeed! Beside that, the updates we would like to see, are not always possible to implement (p.e. ways to structure a lot of information). On the other hand, Crowded sometimes offers very useful updates we didn't think of before.

Awesome platform for starting communities!

I love the fact that the Crowded team is small in numbers. This makes it really personal. and personally I like that a lot! I also love their commitment. They have a clear vision of where they want to go, and are not afraid to decline a feature request if it doesn't match their vision. Keep up the good work!

Pros

Easy to use. The fact that the design is fully customizable makes it work for every brand. Plus, the SEO, is really good! So your branding is recognizable, ánd you are easy to find "on-the-line".

Cons

That replies on topics aren't really visible in the timeline. There is no chronological overview for regular users (yet). For admins there is though!

Great service from a fantastic team!

Crowded has been an excellent complementary service to our facebook community. Working with the team is always a pleasure. A lot of knowledge on both the technical side of things as well as on actual "community" issues and questions!

Pros

Great product: working with Crowded never caused a headache of any kind. It's a clear package out of the box with many features, great usability and fantastic customer support

Cons

No real cons. Since every community is different, some features may be missing or needing some tweaks, but the team is very open to suggestions.

Easy-to-use, personal help and a lot of functionalities.

We were able to build a community with more that 1500+ members. The website (crowded product) helpt us share content with the community, sell tickets for our events and strengthen our position.

Pros

Crowded-platforms make it easy for users to to share information, connect with like-minded enthusiasts and over time, create a community. Very easy and understandable design and admin (just like the social channels we all use!). Everybody is able to use Crowded products. Also integration with other useful tools.

Cons

Not really anything that I didn't like at all. Maybe the fact that there were no options for direct messages between community members!

Usefull support

Quick answers, sharp thinking, good service.

Pros

We needed a community to connect with our inhabitants and spread information about energysaving. Crowded helped us to draw a good scheme and offers continued support to help us to further expand en implement new possibilities.

Cons

Can't think of anything. It's ok like it is!

Great use! We used it as our hackathon platform.

Pros

Especially the customer service is great and it is easy to use for people who can not code. If you want a community platform, but don't have the resources to do it all by yourself, this would definitely be something to consider.

Cons

Some elements still need to be made. If they don't have it, they will need to customize it. But, overall the platform does not have a lot of cons.