Great for showcasing content from expert communities

We use zapnito for a variety of purposes, but mainly for online community blogs for our editors, authors and invited contributors. It has given us a platform for community discussion around our journals, with little development time needed from us, helping to raise our visibility and strengthen our relationship with the research community. I would highly recommend them.

Pros

The site looks beautiful and is a great way of displaying content. The site can be customised a lot, especially if you work with their designer on options for the homepage. Images and videos in particular do really well. It's also very easy to use, so much so that we don't really provide any training for our journal authors, who write for the site, which saves us a great deal of time.

Cons

There is some work to be done on using zapnito for online engagement, as commenting is fine but underused, so we're excited to see the new Conversations function, which is now in beta.

Better than Mighty Networks

Totally professional outfit. Since we switched to them our community has grown x3 in monetary value.

Pros

We did the big switch from Mighty Networks to Zapnito over a year ago and have never regretted it. The site is totally designed for community and knowledge management. Very quick to spin up and to customise to our needs. The onboarding team were very attentive to our needs and the senior guys still stay involved when we need them.

Cons

It is a specialised product so some of the consumer-led features that you might expect (like a personalised activity feed) are not available.

Really helpful staff but could be more user friendly

Good. We use this for blogging, videos and directories. It meets our needs.

Pros

The team are a really helpful and provide lots of support to resolve issues. The videos and guides are great. They also respond quickly and explain things well.

Cons

We use this software for clients to blog and post. Unless they are tech savvy, most are confused and need lots of support from me to get going. In the CMS, things are often not in a logical place. It's fine once you know, but it makes it less user friendly and easy to navigate.

A great product with fantastic service from the whole team. Some aspects can be difficult

Really lovely people who are always extremely happy to help out. The software does a really good job for our community, there are just a few things that mean a job takes 40 minutes instead of 5 which is a pain considering how busy everyone is at the moment.

Pros

It was really easy to get to grips with Zapnito when I first started at simplycommunicate. The platform is very intuitive and also versatile, it was great to host the simplysummit on the platform last year. It's also great having so much good information on the zapnito support pages. I've found that extremely useful of late and it's helped to speed up the tasks that need doing on our site.

Cons

There are certain features that seem very convoluted, with either too many steps or no steps at all so workarounds are required. I mentioned previously not being able to download/upload members into certain groups. Having to do it one by one is time consuming and also makes auditing the members in certain groups very difficult. I know you have this feature with members in rooms so could it not be transferred across?

Unique approach combined with great customer support

Our customer engagement on a community-style platform through a homegrown solution needed work - the ability to help users to connect with one another, but keep a specific focus on content and conversation groups meant our needs were quite varied. Ultimately, we want to drive customer engagement and usage to demonstrate value for a membership service - we won't know for some time yet whether we've yet hit the heights we're aspiring to. Still, throughout the planning and rollout phases, Zapnito have been impeccable in their problem-solving ability and tailoring their approach to us. The platform is set up to meet our needs, we've been able to customise to what we need in about 95% of instances where we've wanted to, and we've received positive feedback from users as we've rolled this out.

Pros

I'm most interested in two things: First, the potential to let contributors become content creators and for them to position themselves as experts - this is extremely well set up to do that. Second, I like the adaptability of the platform - it's intuitive to set up, but we've been able to take a different approach to many of the other examples of platform users that we've come across, which has helped adapt to our needs.

Cons

It would be good to have more white-label functions: if we didn't like the names of 'rooms' for example, we might want to change that. That said, there's not yet been many instances where Zapnito haven't been able to either adjust to what we needed, or put it on their roadmap for development.