Customer Engagement Reimagined: Leading Alternatives to Gainsight Digital Hub

Building an online community has oodles of benefits like boosting collaboration, sharing knowledge and expertise, and promoting products and services. This increases engagement, customer loyalty, and sales. 

But success is largely underpinned by choosing the right platform. No pressure!

You might have heard of Gainsight Digital Hub (formerly inSided) – it's one of the popular community building platforms. When you are evaluating any solution, it's always there recommended to evaluate different options. Luckily there are several excellent Gainsight Digital Hub alternatives to choose from.

So whether it comes down to cost, customization options, or features built specifically for your niche, in this blog, we’ve got you covered. We’ll share the top seven alternatives to Gainsight Digital Hub – diving into the pros and cons, features, use cases, and pricing for each tool. 

Let’s get into our picks for the top Gainsight Digital Hub alternatives to level-up your online community in 2023.👇 

What is Gainsight Digital Hub and why look for alternatives

Before we get into Gainsight Digital Hub alternatives, let’s explore what Gainsight Digital Hub is and why you might look for an alternative. 

At its core, Gainsight Digital Hub is an online community platform that enables brands to create and manage their own customer communities. With Gainsight Digital Hub, businesses can engage with their members, provide them with support, and foster a sense of community around their brand.

While Gainsight Digital Hub is a popular choice for many businesses, there are capabilities that Gainsight Digital Hub doesn’t do as well as competitors. For one, Gainsight Digital Hub may not be the best fit for your specific niche community needs. Or, maybe you’re looking for a platform that offers more advanced features or better pricing options.

Whatever your reasons for seeking alternatives, there are other platforms available that offer similar or better functionality to Gainsight Digital Hub. To help you choose, we'll take a closer look at some of the best Gainsight Digital Hub alternatives and what they have to offer. 

But first, let’s look at the key criteria when choosing an Gainsight Digital Hub alternative.

Criteria for choosing an Gainsight Digital Hub alternative

When choosing the best alternative to Gainsight Digital Hub for your digital community, there are a few key criteria to keep in mind. Here are some factors to consider:

#1: Community management features

Firstly, you'll want to make sure that your chosen alternative offers robust community management features. This includes features like user management, registration and authentication options (e.g., SSO), moderation tools, gamification tools, and analytics.

#2: Integration capabilities

Another important factor to consider is how well the platform integrates with your existing tech stack. Look for alternatives that offer integrations with your favorite customer success management, customer feedback, and CRM tools, as well as other software your team may use.

#3: Customization options

Likewise, depending on your needs, you may want an alternative that offers plenty of customization options. This could include the ability to create custom themes and professional-looking templates or to add your own branding and logos to the community platform.

#4: Scalability

Similarly, if you're planning on growing your community over time, it's important to choose an alternative that can scale with your needs. Look for platforms that offer flexible plans and can easily scale to handle large volumes of users and community content.

#5: User-friendliness

Above all, it goes without saying, the platform has to be intuitive and easy to use. Or, members just won’t want to engage with it. So, when you’re having trials and demos, see how responsive the design is. Things like drag-and-drop and ready-made templates are ideal for this.

With this information in mind, you’ll be better placed to choose the right online community platform. So let’s now explore the top seven Gainsight Digital Hub alternatives to choose from. 

Top 7 Gainsight Digital Hub alternatives

If you are on the fence between Gainsight Digital Hub or another tool on the market, these Gainsight Digital Hub alternatives could be the perfect community platform solution for your business. Here are the top seven Gainsight Digital Hub alternatives – starting with our own. 

1. Bettermode

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Bettermode is an all-in-one community platform that offers unique features that your community will love, including forums, ideation, Q&A, knowledge base, and more. Both flexible and highly customizable, Bettermode can be tailored to fit all of your community-building needs and provide consistent customer experiences. 

Key features

• User-friendly pre-made and professional looking templates for most of the common use cases.
• Powerful Design Studio to fully customize your community forum with unique layouts.
• Integration with tools such as Salesforce, Zendesk, JIRA, HubSpot, FullStory to help community managers integrate the community into existing tech stack
• Extensive options to embed the community into websites and products -- admins can select different layouts, Webview or IFrame.
• Multilingual capabilities with support for languages such as French, Spanish, Italian, etc. 
• Gamification tools to engage your audience and provide rewarding experiences. 

Best for: Mid-size to enterprise businesses that want to engage and educate customers through an all-in-one customized community.  

Pros:

• Easy-to-use interface including content categorization, easy navigation, and tags. 
• Flexible customization allows you to customize and change every part of your community in real-time. 
• Powerful analytics to track community health and measure the impact on your business. 
• Rich ecosystem of app integrations to easily integrate your favorite tools with your community.

Cons:

• Does not offer white-label mobile app.

Pricing: Bettermode’s all-in-one customer community platform offers a free trial and pricing start from $599 per month. 

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2. Vanilla Forums

Vanilla Forums – also known as Higher Logic Vanilla – is a community software that offers a range of features, including forums and Q&A. Designed to help businesses build and manage online communities, it offers a range of customization options.

Key features:  

• Good moderation tools to ensure discussions are clean. 
• Built-in gamification engine.
• User-generated and exclusive content features. 

Best for: Vanilla Forums' key focus area is engagement management with user-generated content. 

Pros:

• Easy to set-up without in-depth technical knowledge.
• Includes basic analytics and reporting insights. 

Cons:

• Limited customization and personalization. 
• Limited embedding options. 

Pricing: Higher Logic Vanilla doesn’t disclose pricing on its website.

3. Discourse

Discourse is an open-source community platform built using Ruby-on-Rails, that offers a range of features, including forums, Q&A, and polls. It is designed to help businesses build and manage virtual communities and offers support for threading, categorization, and more. 

Key features:

• Categorization and tagging of discussion forums.
• Configurable access control.
• Powerful moderation capabilities

Best for: Discourse is best for those looking for member-driven moderation forums. 

Pros:

• Easy to manage and moderate discussions with members – with its member-driven moderation features.
• Basic insight into key metrics and the customer health and overall community experience. 
• Ability to define groups and set-up private categories. 

Cons:

• Discourse requires some sysadmin skills to host, and can be complex to set-up.
• Data export can be clunky.
• There’s a lack of integrations. 
• Customization requires engineering resources.

Pricing: Discourse offers a free trial. And after that, you’re looking at a starting package of $50 per month ($25 per month for early-bird pricing).

4. Khoros (formerly Lithium)

Khoros – formally Lithium – is a cloud-based community platform that offers a range of features, including forums, blogs, and social media integration. It makes managing customer interactions across multiple digital channels much easier so you can quickly respond to customer inquiries and feedback with personalized customer support. 

Key features:

• Extensive customization options
• Built-in analytics and game mechanics.
• SSO supported.

Best for: Enterprise businesses who need advanced customer case management support. 

Pros:

• Good customization options.
• Numerous integrations are available via APIs. 
• Good data and reporting options – although you will need a BI tool to actually use the data.
• Opportunities to influence future development through beta programs.

Cons:

• An expensive solution in both technology and services.
• Users report limited platform development since the recent acquisition. 
• Their focus on developing new paid modules or features has resulted in a lack of development on existing basic features. 

Pricing: Khoros has several pricing plans to choose from starting from $1,00,000 a year – some users report it is the most expensive licensing cost they have ever seen. 

5. Salesforce Experience Cloud

Part of the larger Salesforce ecosystem, Salesforce Experience Cloud syncs with its sales, marketing and customer service applications. If you’re an existing Salesforce customer, this makes it easier to manage the entire customer journey.

Key features:

• Easy-to-use plugins to customize your page.
• Advanced security with secure access to reports including PDF, Word, and Excel.
• Pre-built templates are easy to navigate as an end-user. 

Best for: Software companies who already invest in Salesforce and want a basic add-on community solution or internal intranet.

Pros:

• Easy to connect with your internal database – especially if you already use Salesforce for your CRM.
• Flexible security and sharing settings. 
• Excellent customer support to encourage product adoption.  

Cons:

• There is a bit of a learning curve and it takes a lot of practice to learn the main features. 
• Some users say they’d like more settings for reports. 
• It’s expensive and the initial configuration can be quite overwhelming for inexperienced users due to the large number of customization options, which can take weeks to implement. 

Pricing: The most basic package starts at $5 per community member per month.

6. Mobilize

As the name suggests, Mobilize is a mobile-first community platform that offers a range of features, including forums, live chat, and polls. It is designed to help businesses build and manage mobile-first virtual communities and offers a range of features.

Key features:

• Flexible moderation controls. 
• Personalized onboarding options.
• Smart segmentations. 

Best for: Not profits and associations that are looking for an alternative to Facebook. 

Pros:

• Great customer service. 
• Easy to set-up and configure. 
• Constantly adding new features. 

Cons:

• No desktop app. There are web and iOS versions, but some users report that they prefer working with desktop apps. 
• Navigation seems to be an issue for many users. 
• Lack of admin features to control member accounts and adjust member notification settings. 

Pricing: Mobilize offers a free plan for up to 5 users and 5 events, plus three paid plans ranging from $100 a month to $2000 a month.

7. Hivebrite

Hivebrite is deemed an all-in-one community platform that aims to make it easier for non-profits to build and manage virtual communities. Like the other alternatives, it provides a range of features like forums, Q&A, and events to make it easier for members to connect. But, you can customize it beyond this so that it suits your community-building needs.

Key features:

• Membership management capabilities.
• Fundraising management. 
• Social media management. 

Best for: Designed to serve education, alumni & nonprofit sectors for online membership management. 

Pros:

• Centralized platform connects email campaigns, social media, websites, and others in one place. 
• Fully customizable and branded.
• A “turn on/turn off” feature allows nonprofits to only use the tools they need at no additional cost.

Cons:

• Can be difficult to set-up and an IT professional may need to help you. 
• There are limited third-party integrations. 

Pricing: Hivebrite is available to trial for free. If you like what you see, you can then choose from several different pricing plans with more features available as you upgrade. Prices start from $5,000 per year but you’ll need to get in touch with their sales team to hear more.

Why Bettermode is the best Gainsight Digital Hub alternative overall

Most of the tools have their own strengths and weaknesses, but Bettermode is often considered a pioneer of online community-building platforms.⚡

 In fact, when comparing Gainsight Digital Hub alternatives, Bettermode stands out as the top choice for several reasons:

1. Main strength is it's highly customizable: Allowing you to tailor your community to your specific needs. This means you can create a unique brand experience that truly sets you apart from your competitors without using any custom coding.
2. Apps and integrations: Apart from the built-in apps in Bettermode App Store, you can create your custom apps based on your needs to take the community to the next level. Learn more about developer platform.
3. Robust embedding options: Bettermode makes it easy to embed the entire community, specific Spaces, and even individual posts into your apps and websites. Learn more about different layout options for embedding.
4. Engagement features: Bettermode is built to keep members active and engaged. That’s why features like badges and rewards, as well as social sharing tools (that make it easy to share content), come as standard. 
5. Robust data analytics and reporting: With Bettermode, tracking the performance of your community is a breeze. This means you can quickly and easily make data-driven decisions to improve your community, boost engagement, and work towards your goals. 

We’re perhaps a little biased, but we genuinely believe that Bettermode is the top choice if you’re looking for a highly customizable, engaging, and data-driven online community platform.

Narrowing down your shortlist of online community platforms

Hopefully, you found this helpful in saving you the time of comparing the top online community platform options. As you can see, there are unique differences in the features and benefits which may be better suited to your members. So, the best place to start is to really delve into what members need – and your brand’s goals – and then match that back to the solutions.

• Looking for the best all-rounder? Bettermode is the one.
• Want a mobile-first platform for non-profits? Mobilize might be best for you. 
• Need an inexpensive solution? Discourse could be your answer.

Of course, budget will play a key part as there are major differences in the pricing of these solutions. Luckily, most tend to offer tiered pricing so you can start with the foundations and upgrade as your community grows.

Looking for more? 

📖 Check out our resources and expand your community engagement skills:

• Selecting a community platform? Consider this 15-point checklist
• Key trends for community-led brands
• Engagement and growth secrets for brand communities

Still have unanswered questions? Take a look at the most commonly asked questions about Gainsight Digital Hub alternatives below.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the alternative to Gainsight Digital Hub?

We have created a list of the top Gainsight Digital Hub alternatives that offer better or similar features and functionality to Gainsight Digital Hub, including: Bettermode, Vanilla Forums (Higher Logic), Discourse, Khoros, Salesforce Experience Cloud, Mobilize, and Hivebrite. 

What is the free alternative to Gainsight Digital Hub? 

Most robust online community platforms will include a tiered pricing plan. But there are alternatives which are considerably less expensive than Gainsight Digital Hub. For example, Bettermode is a modern and fully customizable community platform designed to help brands build thriving communities. You can get started with a free trial.

How do I choose an online community platform?

Online community platforms need to be easy to use so that members can navigate around the platform and engage with others with ease. Plus it needs to have key customer engagement features that allow them to build and engage in forums, Q&A, polls and more. So, think about what your members are likely to need in a community before testing and then choosing the best online community platform.