--- title: "Higher Logic Vanilla Reviews, Pros and Cons - 2026 Software Advice" description: "Reviews of Higher Logic Vanilla. Learn how real users rate this software's ease-of-use, functionality, overall quality and customer support. Talk to our advisors to see if Higher Logic Vanilla is a good fit for you!" source_url: "https://www.softwareadvice.com/marketing/vanilla-profile/reviews/" page_type: "reviews" language: "en" --- 1 million+ businesses helped. Get advice Get Free Advice [Home](https://www.softwareadvice.com/) / [Content Marketing Software](https://www.softwareadvice.com/marketing/content-comparison/) / [Higher Logic Vanilla](https://www.softwareadvice.com/marketing/vanilla-profile/) / Higher Logic Vanilla Reviews Software Advice offers objective insights based on verified user reviews and independent product and market research. When our advisors match you to a software provider, we may earn a referral fee. [Overview](https://www.softwareadvice.com/marketing/vanilla-profile/) Reviews [Alternatives](https://www.softwareadvice.com/marketing/vanilla-profile/alternatives/) # Higher Logic Vanilla User Reviews ## Reviews summary - Overall rating: 4.4/5 - Total reviews: 63 ### Secondary ratings - Ease of use: 4.3/5 - Customer support: 4.8/5 - Value for money: 4.5/5 - Functionality: 4.2/5 ### Rating distribution - 5 stars: 33 reviews (52%) - 4 stars: 23 reviews (37%) - 3 stars: 7 reviews (11%) - 2 stars: 0 reviews (0%) - 1 star: 0 reviews (0%) ### Most mentioned pros - We are also using the SSO feature that allows users to jump from our main platform (Contentsquare) to the community. - It helps us along with the custom theme to maintain a coherent experience for our users coming from our main platform. - One thing that makes the community so engaging is the gamification that is put in place by Vanilla and that can be adapted to our needs. ### Most mentioned cons - Our administrator says that you cannot schedule posts, but I am not sure if that is the case anymore. ## Higher Logic Vanilla customer reviews Showing reviews 1-25 of 63 (page 1). ### Very robust and customizable for different needs. - Overall rating: 4/5 - Reviewer: Alicia T. - Verified reviewer: Yes - Company size: 501-1000 employees - Product usage: Used weekly for less than 2 years - Reviewed: May 2018 - Review source details: This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered 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: 4/5 - Value for money: 5/5 - Customer support: 5/5 - Functionality: 4/5 #### 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. --- ### Experience has been largely positive, though we have encountered some technical challenges. - Overall rating: 4/5 - Reviewer: Verified Reviewer - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Publishing - Company size: 1001-5000 employees - Product usage: Used daily for less than 12 months - Reviewed: June 2018 - Review source details: This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered 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: 4/5 - Value for money: 3/5 - Customer support: 5/5 - Functionality: 5/5 #### 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. --- ### The support has been great, the implementation process was easy and simple. - Overall rating: 3/5 - Reviewer: Julian P. - Product usage: Used daily for less than 6 months - Reviewed: April 2018 - Review source details: This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 3/5 - Value for money: 4/5 - Customer support: 4/5 - Functionality: 3/5 #### 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) --- ### Simplicity at it's best - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Verified Reviewer - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Computer Software - Company size: 1001-5000 employees - Product usage: Used weekly for less than 2 years - Reviewed: July 2022 - Review source details: This reviewer was invited by us to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you. 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: 5/5 - Value for money: 5/5 - Functionality: 4/5 #### 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. --- ### A cute online community solution with amazing flexibility and scale - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Sreekumar J. - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Information Services - Company size: 2-10 employees - Product usage: Used daily for less than 2 years - Reviewed: July 2018 - Review source details: This reviewer was invited by us to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 5/5 - Value for money: 5/5 - Customer support: 5/5 - Functionality: 5/5 #### 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. --- ### Great balance of features and ease of use. - Overall rating: 4/5 - Reviewer: Verified Reviewer - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Computer Games - Company size: 11-50 employees - Product usage: Used daily for more than 2 years - Reviewed: May 2018 - Review source details: This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 5/5 - Value for money: 4/5 - Customer support: 5/5 - Functionality: 4/5 #### 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. --- ### Good forum software with great customer service - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Jacob C. - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Financial Services - Company size: 201-500 employees - Product usage: Used unspecified for less than 2 years - Reviewed: December 2015 - Review source details: This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered 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: 5/5 - Value for money: 4/5 - Customer support: 5/5 #### 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. --- ### Good platform with a great customer experience - Overall rating: 4/5 - Reviewer: Verified Reviewer - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Consumer Electronics - Company size: 201-500 employees - Product usage: Used daily for less than 2 years - Reviewed: June 2018 - Review source details: This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 4/5 - Value for money: 5/5 - Customer support: 5/5 - Functionality: 4/5 #### 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. --- ### We have had a really good experience working with Vanilla. Our account manager has been invaluable. - Overall rating: 4/5 - Reviewer: Sheena T. - Verified reviewer: Yes - Product usage: Used daily for less than 12 months - Reviewed: June 2018 - Review source details: This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 4/5 - Value for money: 4/5 - Customer support: 5/5 - Functionality: 4/5 #### 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. --- ### Easily one of the best forum platforms - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Lee O. - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Accounting - Company size: Self-Employed - Product usage: Used daily for less than 2 years - Reviewed: March 2018 - Review source details: This reviewer was invited by us to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 5/5 - Value for money: 5/5 - Customer support: 5/5 - Functionality: 5/5 #### 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. --- ### Outstanding community software and service - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Erin H. - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Internet - Company size: 2-10 employees - Product usage: Used daily for more than 2 years - Reviewed: February 2020 - Review source details: This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered We've been working with Vanilla Forums since 2014 and have had a wonderful experience. Their team is responsive and the software has helped us grow our community considerably. We also appreciate Vanilla Forums' knowledge base and resources for community managers. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 5/5 - Value for money: 5/5 - Customer support: 5/5 - Functionality: 5/5 #### Pros We love Vanilla Forums' user-friendly features and our community does too. #### Cons We don't have any cons and have been very happy with this software. #### Reasons for switching to Higher Logic Vanilla Our custom-built platform was full of bugs and was not going to grow with our business. Vanilla Forums' software not only gives us peace of mind, but it also gives us access to exciting new features to help us be more successful. --- ### Simple, but effective. - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Garrett G. - Industry: Entertainment - Company size: 11-50 employees - Product usage: Used daily for more than 2 years - Reviewed: February 2018 - Review source details: This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered Allows our users to engage and communicate in a fashion that was similar to previously used software, while simultaneously being a significantly more stable and less stressful product. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 4/5 - Value for money: 5/5 - Customer support: 3/5 - Functionality: 5/5 #### Pros Vanilla provides simple forum software, but they still possessed the know-how to incorporate features needed by our community. Staff is friendly and quick to handle major problems and crises that occur. #### Cons Over the years, staff has been slower to fix bugs, with some minor ones persisting for years at this point. Communication could be better. --- ### Learning More About What We Can Do - Overall rating: 4/5 - Reviewer: Jeffrey M. - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Accounting - Company size: 51-200 employees - Product usage: Used daily for less than 2 years - Reviewed: January 2020 - Review source details: This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 4/5 - Value for money: 4/5 - Customer support: 5/5 - Functionality: 5/5 #### Pros The system is designed to be ready to go out of the box. This allowed us to stand up V.1 while working towards a more robust interface and functional site for our users. #### Cons It would have been nice if I could figure out what the site is capable of without having to talk with my account manager. I enjoy our conversations but Vanilla should provide more "what you can do" on their site. --- ### My experience with Vanilla has been very positive in large part because of Valerie Robitaille - Overall rating: 4/5 - Reviewer: David A. - Verified reviewer: Yes - Product usage: Used weekly for less than 12 months - Reviewed: May 2018 - Review source details: This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 4/5 - Value for money: 4/5 - Customer support: 5/5 - Functionality: 5/5 #### Pros Very comprehensive with very few bugs from my perspective. The theme choices look clean and professional. Edits and changes to the content published work the first time. #### Cons Poor documentation on "how to's" The settings choices are vast and it isn't always intuitive on how changes made to settings will impact my site. Some desired look and feel or site behavior modifications becomes a hunt and peck exercise within the settings menu. --- ### Vanilla Review - Overall rating: 4/5 - Reviewer: Hayley C. - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Internet - Company size: 51-200 employees - Product usage: Used daily for less than 6 months - Reviewed: August 2020 - Review source details: This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered We started out a little rough with Vanilla, and it taking a very long time to implement the software, but now that we have it up and running it has been a great experience and a great partnership. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 3/5 - Value for money: 4/5 - Customer support: 3/5 - Functionality: 4/5 #### Pros Love the features it has to offer to our sellers using the Community. #### Cons The time it took to implement this was a really long, drawn out process and the communication wasn't always the best. #### Reasons for choosing Higher Logic Vanilla Pricing and products #### Reasons for switching to Higher Logic Vanilla Contract ended --- ### Easy to implement user community - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Jeff G. - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Information Technology and Services - Company size: 51-200 employees - Product usage: Used daily for less than 12 months - Reviewed: August 2020 - Review source details: This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered Catalytic has a thriving user community as a result of our implementation of Vanilla. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 5/5 - Customer support: 5/5 - Functionality: 5/5 #### Pros 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. #### Cons 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. --- ### Overall a positive experience that I would certainly suggest to my colleagues. - Overall rating: 3/5 - Reviewer: Luke B. - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Information Technology and Services - Company size: 2-10 employees - Product usage: Used daily for less than 12 months - Reviewed: May 2018 - Review source details: This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered One designated area for all member needs. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 3/5 - Value for money: 4/5 - Customer support: 5/5 - Functionality: 3/5 #### Pros The customer service support has been stellar. Overall flexibility and design control is positive. #### Cons I would like to see continual improvement of sign-up features. Our members are slow to sign-up and having an easier way to force add individuals would be great. --- ### A review from a long time user. - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Verified Reviewer - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Electrical/ Electronic Manufacturing - Product usage: Used unspecified for less than 2 years - Reviewed: December 2015 - Review source details: This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered I work as a moderator for a large gaming-related community. We use Vanilla forum software as the backbone for everything we do, and the difference between it and our previous software is striking. It's reliable, easy to use, and Vanilla support has been very easy to work with #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 5/5 - Value for money: 4/5 - Customer support: 5/5 #### Pros The communication with Vanilla has been above and beyond what I expected. Any issues we might have are addressed quickly and well. #### Cons There are some minor feature issues. The poll software isn't as comprehensive as I'd like --- ### You Get What You Pay For - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Michael W. - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Airlines/ Aviation - Company size: 201-500 employees - Product usage: Used unspecified for less than 2 years - Reviewed: December 2015 - Review source details: This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered Having outgrown free forum software, a paid solution was searched for. Vanilla provided an easy transition into something more robust and secure with the support to back it during the transitional period. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 4/5 - Value for money: 5/5 - Customer support: 5/5 #### Pros Great customer support and ease of use. #### Cons Search feature can require extra work to find what you're looking for. Results often buried in nested conversations. --- ### So far, everything is going smoothy. - Overall rating: 4/5 - Reviewer: Charlie H. - Industry: Information Technology and Services - Company size: 2-10 employees - Product usage: Used daily for less than 6 months - Reviewed: June 2018 - Review source details: This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered A good support from their team even if we are based in a different country. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 5/5 - Value for money: 4/5 - Customer support: 5/5 - Functionality: 4/5 #### Pros Its interface is very easy to understand. It can support a big community like ours. What I also like most about Vanilla Forums is its feature which help us improve our user activity. #### Cons The analytics part. I can be more detailed. More highlight to significant numbers would also be helpful like difference in mobile and desktop users, segment for newly registered users and such. --- ### Customer service very accommodating post launch and pre launch - Overall rating: 4/5 - Reviewer: Blair W. - Product usage: Used weekly for less than 6 months - Reviewed: April 2018 - Review source details: This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 4/5 - Value for money: 5/5 - Customer support: 5/5 - Functionality: 4/5 #### Pros Mirrors the functionality of your typical social media platform. Ease of posting mobile photos. The "gamification" feature. #### Cons It seemed there were a lot of add-on features that I thought would be standard. It was difficult from an admin perspective to determine what features were standard when trying to learn the system. --- ### For building a strong and engaging community, Vanilla has THE platform! - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: John M. - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Computer Software - Company size: 501-1000 employees - Product usage: Used daily for less than 2 years - Reviewed: October 2020 - Review source details: This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered My experience with Vanilla is amazing! As market leaders in our field, we do want to provide the best Community experience for our users. We therefore are very demanding customers and always try to push Vanilla's platform to it's maximum! #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 4/5 - Value for money: 5/5 - Customer support: 5/5 - Functionality: 4/5 #### Pros In addition to the most basic features (discussions, comments...) that work perfectly, here are a few things that I love about Vanilla Forums: We have been able to personalize our community platform with our own designed theme. We are also using the SSO feature that allows users to jump from our main platform (Contentsquare) to the community. It helps us along with the custom theme to maintain a coherent experience for our users coming from our main platform. My CSM, [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN] is always very reactive and helped me carefully plan a "way-to-success" community roadmap to attain my business objectives. She always collects the feedback that I have and pushes it to the Vanilla Product team. It is very nice to feel that our use of Vanilla's platform impacts the actual product vision. One thing that makes the community so engaging is the gamification that is put in place by Vanilla and that can be adapted to our needs. By distributing badges, we reward our top users and most engaged people and makes the platform a little more fun! The support team is super reactive as well, whenever there is an issue. #### Cons There are several pain points that I encounter however on Vanilla Forums. The group feature has not been working well although a many improvements have been made in the past year. As groups are an important part of my adoption strategy in community building, I have been struggling to make the most of what we could expect from such a feature. Also, Vanilla Forums sometimes have some technical instabilities - but they are resolved very quickly. Last but not least, Vanilla isn't as flexible as we initially thought it would be. For any changes in the structure of the community, we have to use Vanilla's professional services. --- ### Best Forum Software - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Patrick D. - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Writing and Editing - Company size: Self-Employed - Product usage: Used daily for more than 2 years - Reviewed: March 2020 - Review source details: This reviewer was invited by us to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you. I have nothing but good things and great times with Vanilla. Back in the day over 10 years ago i used Vanilla to learn more about integrating forums into my site and others and these guys were the #1 software to use. They didn't have everything they do now but i learned so much about forum, and Q&A based website software just using it. Today i became a PRO because of using the Vanilla software and i especially use it now for Gaming Websites where community interaction is a major part of the site. The software can also be tailored towards whatever your site is about. It has so many features that can be used for personal and business solutions. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 5/5 - Value for money: 5/5 - Customer support: 5/5 - Functionality: 5/5 #### Pros I been integrating Vanilla forums into my site for years. I use Vanilla Forums as a Q & A for a lot of people that need help forums on their site so people can ask questions and get answers to anything related to their content and services and it works beaut full. You can also create your own custom Q & A so if someone is on your website and needs help the answers to their Question are already there and by chance they are not they can always ask. With the notification feature the admins get real time feedback as well as its members. The forums feature, the highlight of the software allows you to build a better community around your product and service to all everyone to be connected and have discussions on a beautiful and simple layout. #### Cons I miss the free version ..those were the times but the paid version puts together more enhance tools and added features that you always wished was around. They took all the feedback over the years all the features and fully went over them again and revamped it all. When you use Vanilla now its like a whole new brand of company with everything you need to put a community together on your website. #### Reasons for switching to Higher Logic Vanilla I will always love phpBB but today doing what i do on community base sites that need a lot of social interactions phpBB just couldn't handle my needs as a free based software forum. phpBB has a lot of great features but its basic and today in order to keep people engaged and going you need more power and features to do that. --- ### An excellent base forum platform for online communities - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Chris V. - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Design - Product usage: Used daily for more than 2 years - Reviewed: March 2018 - Review source details: This reviewer was invited by us to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you. It has made it easy for us to create beautiful, effective forums with awesome community management features to boot. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 4/5 - Value for money: 5/5 - Customer support: 5/5 - Functionality: 5/5 #### Pros Our agency helps other companies manage and build online communities so we've encountered a lot of community platforms. Vanilla is by far our favourite though, for a few reasons. First, it's incredibly customisable. The theming architecture in particular is incredible and allows us to create beautiful forums that integrate with seamlessly with our branding. Second, it's actively developed and open source. You can watch its development openly, suggest ideas for features, etc. Third, it has a killer API which allows you to make cool app integrations, software extensions, etc. Finally, the company's support is incredibles. The support team and customer success managers are amazing at answering questions and will help you implement all kinds of awesome ideas. Vanilla rocks! #### Cons Most of my issues are with super technical details nested "Smarty" tags in Pockets would be nice to have, I wish "reactions" and other gamification features were available in the open source product, etc. Overall though those are nitpicky things the base platform itself is awesome even without them. --- ### Flexible platform that allowed us to quickly get a customized Community up and running - Overall rating: 4/5 - Reviewer: Tyler K. - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Computer Software - Company size: 1001-5000 employees - Product usage: Used daily for less than 12 months - Reviewed: April 2018 - Review source details: This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 4/5 - Value for money: 5/5 - Customer support: 5/5 - Functionality: 4/5 #### Pros Vanilla has allowed us to customize almost every aspect of the Community experience: content organization, moderation, additions of new spaces when the need arises, gamification - all of these components can be built out and tweaked by a team without coding experience. The ability for our developers to own and push changes to the code allows the next level of customization we needed to get our community off the ground. #### Cons The analytics is one place that is lacking a bit. Their advanced analytics dashboard gives insights into some useful metrics but doesn't allow any form of filtering (except for the date) or examining side by side comparisons of different user groups / content sets. The analytics API gives a bit more useful information but it still takes a bit of work to really answer some of the more complicated aspects of the value the community is providing to the organization. Additionally, their documentation is significantly lacking - once you know how to do something in the platform, you find that it can probably do what you are looking for but many times you have to rely on your CSM to help get you that information (which they are normally great at!) ## More reviews [Next reviews](https://www.softwareadvice.com/marketing/vanilla-profile/reviews/?page=2) --- Higher Logic Vanilla Reviews, Pros and Cons - 2026 Software Advice