Vanilla Forums

Vanilla Forums

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.

Top Vanilla Forums Alternatives

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UBB Forum

UBB Forum is a hosted, business-class forum application suitable for businesses of all sizes.

2

CMNTY

Discover CMNTY, the all-in-one forum software designed for online community engagement and mixed-method market research.

3

esoTalk

esoTalk is free, open-source forum software for the development of lightweight and simple community websites.

4

Honeycommb

Honeycommb is a unique online application that helps consumers to realize their idea of the perfect social platform for their businesses.

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Phorum

Phorum is free, open-source PHP and MyQL based forum software that can easily integrate itself with any website or platform that meets its basic requirements.

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Simple Machines Forum (SMF)

Offering a robust platform for online communities, Simple Machines Forum (SMF) combines user-friendly design with powerful features.

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Plush

All with absolutely no technical knowledge required and no plugins to install...

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IPS Community Suite

IPS suit allows website owners to easily create discussion platforms for their websites, including question&...

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Kunena

It is easy to work with and can be easily integrated with any Joomla based...

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Burning Board

The administrative control panel is well-structured and powerful enough to allow owners to manage and...

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.

Top Vanilla Forums Features

  • Centralized FAQs and resources
  • Integrated learning management system
  • Community gamification features
  • Proactive customer success programs
  • Scalable for any organization
  • Community-first platform focus
  • Customizable user experience
  • Real-time product updates
  • Peer-to-peer best practices sharing
  • Self-service support options
  • Event hosting capabilities
  • Customer feedback collection tools
  • Robust analytics and reporting
  • Seamless third-party integrations
  • Engaging design and interface
  • Accessible onboarding documents
  • Idea submission for roadmap
  • Community builder collaboration space
  • Enhanced customer engagement strategies
  • Dedicated community support experts