Higher Logic Vanilla 2026: Benefits, Features & Pricing

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Overview
Pricing and Plans
Features
Integrations
User Reviews

Overview

Higher Logic Vanilla

4.4

(63)

Pricing

Starting at $24,000.00 per year

About Higher Logic Vanilla

Vanilla is a cloud-based community management solution for consumer goods, financial services, gaming, media and publishing and technology. The solution helps organizations engage members, create discussion forums and gather ideas through crowdsourcing.

Vanilla’s forums module enables users to start and moderate discussions. The module allows members to tag other members, add photos and videos to the discussion, create profiles, enable real-time edits and send private messages. Members can also create their online avatars using different icons.

The solution’s gamification functionality enables users to earn ranks, badges and followers. Also, the functionality enables users to remove spam and abusive content from the discussion on the basis of user reactions.

The platform can be integrated with third-party software such as WordPress, Zendesk, GitHub, Salesforce, MailChimp and HootSuite. Vanilla integrates with social-networking platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Higher Logic Vanilla Screenshots

Higher Logic Vanilla Pricing and Plans

Starting price: $24,000.00 per year

Free Trial

Free Version

Basic

$24,000.00

flat rate, per year

No plan information available

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Higher Logic Vanilla Features

Popular features found in Content Marketing
Audience Targeting
Campaign Management
Content Library
Customizable Branding
Customizable Templates
Editorial Calendar
Publish Scheduling
Reporting & Statistics
SEO Management
Social Media Integration
Workflow Management
More features of Higher Logic Vanilla
Access Controls/Permissions
Activity Dashboard
Activity/News Feed
Activity Tracking
Alerts/Notifications
API
Approval Workflow
Archiving & Retention
Brainstorming
Calendar Management
Catalog Management
Categorization/Grouping
Chat/Messaging
Collaboration Tools
Commenting/Notes
Communication Management
Configurable Workflow
Contact Database
Content Management
Crowdsourcing
Customer Engagement
Customizable Fields
Customizable Reports
Data Import/Export
Data Security
Data Visualization
Decision Support
Discussions/Forums
Document Management
Document Storage
Drag & Drop
Email Management
Email Reminders
Engagement Tracking
Event Calendar
Event Management
Feedback Management
Filtering
Full Text Search
Gamification
Group Management
Idea Ranking
Ideation
Knowledge Base Management
Member Directory
Membership Management
@mentions
Mind Maps
Mobile Access
Moderation
Multi-Language
Onboarding
Personalization
Polls/Voting
Real-Time Analytics
Real-Time Data
Real-Time Notifications
Real-Time Updates
Search/Filter
Self Service Portal
Single Sign On
SSL Security
Status Tracking
Surveys & Feedback
Tagging
Text Editing
Third-Party Integrations
User Management
Widgets

Higher Logic Vanilla Integrations

Zapier

Mailchimp

Hootsuite

Salesforce Sales Cloud

WordPress

Zendesk Suite

See all 8 integrations

Higher Logic Vanilla User Reviews

Overall Rating

4.4

Ratings Breakdown

52%

37%

11%

Secondary Ratings

Ease of Use

4.3

Value for money

4.5

Customer support

4.8

Functionality

4.2

Alicia T.

Verified reviewer

501-1000 employees

Used weekly for less than 2 years

Review source

Reviewed May 2018

Very robust and customizable for different needs.

I used it to manage three different Forums; our customer community, feedback/product ideas forum, and private ambassador forum (for customer advocates).

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

They are always open to hearing customer feedback and making necessary updates to their product with it. Our Customer Success Manager was always available to help us with both our strategy and any tech issues or questions.

Cons:

Some of the themes are a bit outdated and could use some more modern UX/UI. It also lacks integrations with CRM tools like Salesforce, but at least integrates with things like Zendesk, Hootsuite, etc.

Verified

Reviewer

Publishing

1001-5000 employees

Used daily for less than 12 months

Review source

Reviewed June 2018

Experience has been largely positive, though we have encountered some technical challenges.

We replaced user forums successfully and configured them to easily. Overall users were pleased and felt it was an upgrade on the previous forums.

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

The product is fully featured and relatively straightforward to configure and set up. Integration with SSO has been very easy and appears to work well and there are a number of plug-ins available which enable further customisation. Our forum moderators and the majority of users have found it simple and pleasant to use. Account management has been very good and fairly responsive to issues.

Cons:

As a managed service there are a few hidden costs (migrations in particular). Some of the technology seems a little outdated and a bit inflexible - changing simple headings etc should be fairly straightforward but is in fact a manual task by the account manager, who has to root about in the code for the relevant strings. Also, the migration from staging to live is manual and open to user error. Image compression (or the lack of) has been a big issue for us as our sites are very visual and performance has suffered. I am hoping that some of the infrastructure changes they are making will improve this though.

Julian P.

Used daily for less than 6 months

Review source

Reviewed April 2018

The support has been great, the implementation process was easy and simple.

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

- The product is easy to use from a user perspective. - Requests are taken seriously and if it's something they can't currently do but recognize it's a good idea, they will add them to their Road Map. - Great comms from the person assiting the project, very responsive and on top of things

Cons:

- It's hard to make changes sometimes. The HTML isn't accessible to forum owners so you'd have to write an entire section to make changes to anything other than the landing page. CSS is great to customize theming, but things have odd names so it's not as straightforward as it could be to make changes using it. - It could be clearer what VF will and won't help with from the very first moment - There are features missing, such as Tagging being in analytics - No self-service option for simple things such as pulling the user list, this will make admin experience way better - Services offered should better structured in the package sell, I.e: For some features requests, there were additional charges. This services should be somehow included in the terms of the service to enhance the admin experience - It was unclear what changes would happen with a recent update, it's been left down to the forum owner to find the weird behaviors (such as filters not working correctly)

Verified

Reviewer

Computer Software

1001-5000 employees

Used weekly for less than 2 years

Review source

Reviewed July 2022

Simplicity at it's best

We moved to Higher Logic Vanilla from our previous vendor not too long ago and the experience has been positive so far. The community, blog, forums, and discussion boards work as expected and the administration team seems to be happier than before.

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Functionality

Pros:

It's a simple and user-friendly online community software that can easily meet your business needs if you are looking to bring your customers into one place and allow them to collaborate. Gives the ability to build multiple forums, user groups, and discussion boards for different product lines. The best part is that it's a very easily configurable system to create various sections/categories, and membership settings to build a beautiful customer community for collaboration purposes. The application is very responsive and comes with good documentation.

Cons:

There is not much to like least about this software. Our administrator says that you cannot schedule posts, but I am not sure if that is the case anymore.

Sreekumar J.

Verified reviewer

Information Services

2-10 employees

Used daily for less than 2 years

Review source

Reviewed July 2018

A cute online community solution with amazing flexibility and scale

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

For our startup in online solution space, I was looking at a stable and easy to manage community solution and I found vanilla as the perfect solution to meet our requirements. 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. I recommend Vanilla forums to anybody who wish to launch an online community. Vanilla is simple, stable, and having excellent add-ons compatibility and this is going to exceed your expectations.

Cons:

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.

Verified

Reviewer

Computer Games

11-50 employees

Used daily for more than 2 years

Review source

Reviewed May 2018

Great balance of features and ease of use.

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

The ease of using it both as an administrator and a user. The control panel is very clear, and while some other forum software has far more features, most of those features are bloat that most forums never need. I currently have five active sets of forums with Vanilla, after having used everything from Invision to Drupal, and Vanilla remains my favorite.

Cons:

Nothing in particular stands out.

Jacob C.

Verified reviewer

Financial Services

201-500 employees

Used unspecified for less than 2 years

Review source

Reviewed December 2015

Good forum software with great customer service

I'm a moderator on a community that switched to Vanilla three years ago from a heavily hacked-together vBulletin. I was initially ambivalent about the switch - even though our old software had become hopelessly inadequate to our needs, it was super-tailored to the needs of our community - but Vanilla won me over, primarily on the strength of their support staff, who are not only pleasant and helpful, but are engaged in the community in a real way. As participants in our forum, they've come to know our needs as well as we do, and not only have all our old favorite features come back in newer, spiffier implementations, in a couple instances they have added entirely new features that addressed needs I didn't even know I had but now couldn't live without.

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Pros:

It's a slick, modern forum implementation that is heavily customizable (as a cursory flick through the diverse kinds of communities running the software can illustrate) with some features I really welcome in 2015, particularly the Minion, which automates a lot of tasks that used to require babysitting by moderators or community managers. This was something Vanilla provided us because they saw the kinds of things we were dealing with and they anticipated the need - that's service I appreciate.

Cons:

The customer service is excellent and the team is eager to help find software solutions to community problems, but it can take a while for requested fixes to make their way through the pipeline.

Verified

Reviewer

Consumer Electronics

201-500 employees

Used daily for less than 2 years

Review source

Reviewed June 2018

Good platform with a great customer experience

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

Backend is very flexible and easy to customize. Support is the best in the business and cannot be beat. Anytime we need something Vanilla is there to help us out and take on any task we ask of them.

Cons:

There are some like to have features that are on most other platforms that have not been implemented yet with Vanilla, but their team has said most of our suggestions are already in the works.

Sheena T.

Verified reviewer

Used daily for less than 12 months

Review source

Reviewed June 2018

We have had a really good experience working with Vanilla. Our account manager has been invaluable.

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

It's pretty straightforward to use, but once you're comfortable with the basics there is a lot of room to customize the tool to fit your needs. We needed a solution with a robust API and Vanilla has done a really great job on that front. Our account manager has been easy to work with and very responsive. She's knowledgeable in many aspects and not afraid to connect me with her team members if they have a deeper understanding to share. I'd recommend Vanilla for managing a support community.

Cons:

Some functionalities are a little unwieldy and certain workflows are cumbersome to maintain when we're seeing a lot of volume. When moderating our Community as a team, we sometimes stumble over each other and do the same work twice because it's difficult to tell where your team members are working in the community when.

Lee O.

Verified reviewer

Accounting

Self-Employed

Used daily for less than 2 years

Review source

Reviewed March 2018

Easily one of the best forum platforms

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

-Lost of modern functions including the ability to like posts and @mentions. -Open source -You can self-host it for free of charge or go for a paid version that provides support -Very flexible: Can even be customised to display web pages -Gamification: reward users for participating by earn badges and new abilities

Cons:

The ability to add images is a little cumbersome. I wish it could be done with 1 click! But other than that, there is little to complain about.

Showing 1 - 10 of 63 Reviews

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