Vanilla Forums

Vanilla Forums

By: Vanilla

Vanilla Forums is community forum software for personal use, small businesses and enterprises. Vanilla open source community platform is suitable for individuals and small businesses. It is available for free, can be hosted on any hosting platform, and supports full customization. Vanilla for business is a premium cloud-based forum application that features several inbuilt tools to allow building high quality community websites with full support and professional services.

From: Canada
Based on 66 Votes
Top Vanilla Forums Alternatives
  • Plush
  • Discourse
  • Disciple
  • ProBoards
  • bbPress
  • Codementor
  • Phorum
  • MemberHub
  • Flarum
  • Discuz!
  • Hivebrite
  • CX Network
  • UBB Forum
  • ZetaBoards
  • Muut
Show More Show Less

Top Vanilla Forums Alternatives and Overview

1

Plush

Plush is the most polished, user-friendly forum experience ever, featuring real-time discussions, beautiful design, an integrated blog, member directory, private messaging, paid subscriptions and a world-class mobile experience.

By: Plush Content Ltd From UK
2

Discourse

Discourse is a free open source forum builder application that allows users to create community websites and host or embed them online.

By: Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, Inc.
Based on 18 Votes
3

Disciple

Disciple is a community-building platform that allows users to build different cohorts of people focussed around specific topics.

By: Disciple
Based on 11 Votes
4

ProBoards

ProBoards is a message board service that is available for free and remotely hosted.

By: ProBoards
Based on 15 Votes
5

bbPress

bbPress by WordPress is forum software that lets website owners embed a basic question-answer, community support and discussion platform to their websites.

6

Codementor

Codementor is a solution that enables freelance programmers to help other developers, business owners, developers, in programming guidance.

By: Codementor
Based on 2 Votes
7

Phorum

It is designed to fit the needs of different websites without compromising performance and security...

By: phorum.org
8

MemberHub

It can be used in schools to monitor and hold progress reports of children and...

By: MemberHub
Based on 7 Votes
9

Flarum

The CMS is available in downloadable form and can be easily installed on any web...

By: Flarum.org
10

Discuz!

By: Tencent
Based on 1 Vote
11

Hivebrite

With the accessibility features of Hivebrite, you can stay in touch with your members, irrespective...

By: Hivebrite
Based on 26 Votes
12

CX Network

The company's primary mission remains to bring customer service delivery closer to the customer's expectation...

By: CX Network
Based on 1 Vote
13

UBB Forum

The forum interface is easy enough for community members to share their ideas and feedbacks...

By: Social Strata, Inc. From USA
14

ZetaBoards

Build a brand new community of like-minded individuals or migrate your existing community to ZetaBoards...

By: Zathyus Networks, Inc.
Based on 1 Vote
15

Muut

It creates forums and commentaries for a website to carry out a discussion...

By: Muut, Inc.
Based on 2 Votes

Vanilla Forums Review and Overview

Vanilla Forums is a forum creation and management platform geared toward a business audience. It is famous for its extremely powerful solutions involving the creation of forums exclusively serving a community of customers. Using its robust features, companies can solve the issues of their customers or let other customers handle the problems. It also has a lot of advanced security features that make communications compliant.

A dedicated community of customers and fans is always a blessing for companies. However, these companies should also have an appropriate solution to provide excellent support for their community. An excellent example of such a medium is a forum, which is not only cheap in its setup and maintenance but can also cater to a large community easily. Vanilla Forums is a platform that can be used to create and maintain high-performance forums, easily keeping in mind all the potential security and redundancy issues that may arise and having the means to thwart them as well.

Vanilla Forums is a community engagement software that provides an easy-to-use interface and tight integration. All industry verticals seem to evolve rapidly with modern business technologies, thereby requiring specific software rather than the standard MVP of CRM vendors. Vanilla's robust platform is powering leading companies to become more customer-centric by building brand loyalty, customer feedback, self-service support, and lead conversions. The software has enabled companies to register a 500% increase in ROI, an almost 15% rise in superuser participation, and nearly 30% reduction in support tickets.

What It Does

Vanilla Forums intends to change the interaction method between customers and companies. Their community building platforms allow customers and companies to join hands in collaboration and communication. Moreover, the corporate communities will not only help customers achieve their objectives but also develop brand loyalty and recognition. The goal is to construct a customer community, which doubles as a strategic asset for the entire ecosystem. Such communities can not only perceive product delivery as a combined effort but also deliver system transparency and mutual trust.

A forum platform that allows companies to get the best out of their community

There are several features that are absolutely essential for a forum platform, and Vanilla Forums provides them and more. Customers deserve a great forum to get their problems solved quickly and genuinely, and that is made possible with the platform's versatile discussion handling features. With the help of Vanilla Forum's multiple post types, customers and companies can post polls to gather other's opinions and feedbacks, traditional question type posts, and of course, announcements and similar posts. The administrators also have much control over what types of posts are allowed on the forum through a secure dashboard.

Custom forums that exude brand aesthetics

Gone are the days when drab, mechanical-looking forums were the norm. With Vanilla Forum, companies can design highly-unique and practical customer experiences at half the cost and difficulty. This control is allowed through the CSS-based theme and style customization options that the forum platform provides. Using CSS, everything starting from the visuals, the font, the alignment, and even the placement of the different elements can be easily modified. Companies may also select from one of the several available CSS-based templates as a starting theme to apply on their forums, and build upon them using custom CSS code.

Modern Forums

Vanilla Forums provides a rewarding and straightforward user experience in tandem with current business requirements. The platform allows customers to view, vote, and submit ideas to fuel innovation and boost engagement. The forum remains open to customers for asking, accepting, and answering questions. The software contains a library for community content, which is available for new creation or repurpose. Besides a seamless developer-friendly interface, Vanilla is entirely customizable and mobile-ready.

Promoting self-help through forums

Companies may also create custom knowledge bases to enable customers to either work out some of the more frequent problems quickly by themselves or to apply some preliminary steps to mitigate the issue. These posts may be of various types and are always available for instant access by the visitors and members of the forum.

Meeting Business Objectives

Vanilla Forums aims to help you to meet your business objectives in a faster, smoother, and more efficient manner. Their dedicated team focuses on implementing, launching, and growing your community. Their tailored onboarding activity trains you around the essentials of community management. Moreover, the cloud-based platform provides a secure and reliable platform for users.

Company Information

Company Name: Vanilla

Company Address: 388 Saint-Jacques Suite 800, Montreal, QC, Canada

Founded in: 2009

Top Features

Forum
  • Forum Categories
  • Private Messaging
  • Questions & Answers
  • Polls Creation
  • Private Community
  • Social Groups
  • Advanced Searching
  • Vanillicon & Gravatar
  • Advanced Editor
  • Button Bar
  • Quotes & Signatures
  • Tagging & Uploading Files
  • Stop Auto Draft
  • SItemap & Embed Forum
  • Emotify & Vanilla POP
  • Checking Online Members
  • Counting Posts
  • Managing Multi-forums
  • Forum Monetization
Design
  • Controlling HTML & CSS
  • Mobile Theme
  • Home Page Customization
  • Index Photos
  • Multi Lingual Supported
Analytics
  • Basic Statistics
  • Integrate Google Analytics
  • Advanced Analytics
  • Analyze Topic & Sentiment
Moderation
  • Moderation Queue
  • Abusing Flags
  • Pre Moderation
  • Warnings & Reporting
  • Editing & Deleting Logs
  • Split & Merge Discussions
  • Sinking & Spoofing
  • Custom Roles
  • Civil Tongue
Spam Management
  • Stopping Forum Spam
  • Akismet Spam Blocker
  • Flood Controlling
  • Ranking Abilities
Registration
  • jsConnect SSO
  • SAML SSO
  • Facebook Connect
  • Google+ Sign-in
  • Twitter Login
  • Linkedin Sign-in
  • Open ID
Integration
  • Salesforce Integration
  • Zendesk Integration
  • Social Media Integration
  • Wordpress Comments & SSO
  • MailChimp Integration
  • Wish List Integration
Developer
  • Access API
  • Integrate GitHub
  • Staging Environment
  • Developer Environment
  • Pulling Themes
  • Syntax Prettify
Security
  • SSL Certificate
  • Data Encryption
  • Audit Log
  • Auto-sign Out