Community

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Vanilla Forums vs Discourse: A Feature-by-Feature Breakdown

Dive into a comprehensive comparison of Vanilla Forums and Discourse. This analysis examines key aspects including customization options, moderation tools, and pricing structures. Whether you're building a support community or a discussion forum, discover which platform aligns best with your organization's goals and user engagement strategies.

Written by

Kerry Leech

Last updated

November 1, 2024

BettermodeHQ

Table of contents

OLD VERSION: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IXO_Fqa2OUL7HIHUR0eHMt8DJZa6AhPkqB1J4jJNMak/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.37ms1m529vh8

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Vanilla Forums vs. Discourse: The Ultimate Comparison

Compare Vanilla Forums vs. Discourse — and learn why Bettermode is an even better alternative to help you build a fully customizable community forum.

Vanilla forums vs Discourse: Which one is better?

If you're interested in building community and keeping all the discussions in one centralized place, it probably occurred to you to create your own customer forum.

When researching tools to help you do so, you probably came across Vanilla Forums and Discourse, that are both popular platforms for customer engagement.

However, they're very different when it comes to ease of use, customization and integrations. That's why we created a detailed Vanilla Forums vs. Discourse comparison where we compare their key features, benefits and limitations.

Keep reading till the end to discover an even better all-in-one community engagement platform that can help you replace multiple tools and centralize all customer interactions.

What is Vanilla Forums?

Vanilla Forums — also known as Higher Logic Vanilla — is a cloud-based open-source community forum platform that gives you the ability to create interactive online community forums.

*Higher Logic Vanilla platform interface*

Higher Logic Vanilla key features

Higher Logic Vanilla's key focus area is engagement management with user generated content, and help desk management with social media.

Some people say it is more like an evolution of vBulletin (totally different code base, but PHP-based).

Higher Logic Vanilla pros and cons

To get a clearer picture, let's look at the pros and cons.

Pros:

Robust moderation tools to ensure discussions are clean.
Built-in gamification engine — although some users say that they would welcome more options.
While there is a bit of a learning curve, it doesn't require in-depth technical knowledge to set-up.
You can access some analytics and reporting insight.

Cons:

Enterprise cloud pricing is costly.
Customer support doesn't include live chat.
No searchable member directory.
No native mobile app.
Limited embedding options.
Limited personalization and customization options.

Comparison to Bettermode

While Higher Logic Vanilla is well-known and has some strong features, Bettermode is popular with community builders for its professionally-made templates, powerful design studio, and modular apps.

You can select from our professionally designed templates or create your own based on your specific needs.

Our easy-to-use design studio makes designing eye-catching spaces and content simple. You can drag and drop your way to stunning community forums — and save time without cutting quality.

Turn every space into a unique customer experience using dynamic content Blocks. Simply select, arrange, and configure the Blocks to create distinct communities.

*Bettermode's Block-based Design Studio*

With Bettermode, everything you need is configurable and you can access granular analytics.

To see how Bettermode and Higher Logic Vanilla directly compare, you can see a quick comparison here

What is Discourse?

Discourse is an online community platform that has been around since 2013 and is completely open-source.

Built using Ruby-on-Rails, its functionality includes support for threading, categorization and tagging of discussion forums, configurable access control, live updates, plugins, and real-time notifications.

It positions itself as a free tool where you can have civilized discussions with other community members.

*Community powered by Discourse platform*

Discourse key features

As one of the top free alternatives to Facbook groups, Discourse's key focus area is engagement management and user generated content, and community building similar to a social media platform.

Discourse also has a user trust system that aims to make moderating the forum easier, with member-driven moderation.

Discourse pros and cons

With that in mind, let's look at the pros and cons of Discourse's open-source forum software.

Pros

Easy to administer and moderate discussions with community members.
Insight into metrics and health of the community.
Ability to define groups and have private categories.

Cons

Discourse is oriented to developers and requires some sysadmin skills to host, and is a more complex deployment compared to other forum software.
Migrating from another community platform can be a challenge.
You won't get any frills, but the learning curve is low, and you can start setting up your forum fairly quickly.
Some Discourse users say data export is a bit clunky and there's a lack of integrations, add-ons, and plugins.

If you're looking for a community platform with more features and integrations, check out these 10 best Discourse alternatives.

Comparison to Bettermode

But, if you don't have time for a steep learning curve and want more forum solutions with advanced features, Bettermode is a brilliant alternative to consider. Bettermode's all-in-one platform enables discussions, ideation, Q&A's, events, groups, and more — all in one place.

Bettermode is well known for its customizable templates, which enable you to effortlessly build your community. Just check out this G2 rating.

Templates available with Bettermode Platform

In fact, you can visually customize and change every part of your community in real-time.

And if data and insights are your thing, you will love the analytics you can get to track community health and measure the impact on your business.

Apart from templates and customization, Bettermode features a rich ecosystem of apps and integration through its App Store. This makes it completely easy for you to integrate your favorite tools with your community.

If you want to explore more tools similar to Discourse, check out the seven best Q&A platforms to deliver great customer service.

What is Bettermode?

In short, Bettermode is the best all-in-one community engagement platform for community-led growth.

*Bettermode is an all-in-one customer engagement platform*

Think about it, while community forums have helped shape the internet, they are now feeling a bit dated. At Bettermode, we are trying to change that.

Bettermode is best for: Businesses of all sizes that want to engage and educate customers through an all-in-one easily customized community, whether they want to create small groups of users or large online communities

Key features:

Our online community platform comes with plenty of user-friendly pre-made templates that you can use to create a professional customer forum. Unlike some other community software, our set-up process is very quick and you can build a professionally-looking online community in a few minutes.

Here are some of the most popular templates:

Our community website builder comes with a powerful Design Studio that allows you to fully customize the community and forum look and feel with unique layouts.

You can:

Choose from a variety of customizable themes, including dark themes
Use the colors and fonts you want
Add your logo and other brand assets
Add various elements such as custom fields, Q&A sections and chat integration

But that's not all. Bettermode now has Section Blocks that make editing even easier and more granular. You can customize elements like margins, padding and columns to create a responsive design that automatically adjusts to different screen sizes and devices.

As already mentioned, one of the biggest issues with both Discourse and Vanilla Forums is the lack of third-party app integrations or not having enough with them.

With Bettermode, that will no longer be a problem, as you can easily integrate your customer community platform with Slack, Zapier, Zendesk, Google Analytics, Mailchimp, Amplitude, FullStory, Intercome and other social media platforms you might be using.

You can also add custom integrations quickly and easily using our API.

Here are some other features to check out:

Ability to build multilingual communities with support for languages such as French, Spanish, Italian, etc.
Spaces with built-in posting permission settings help you categorize content and structure your community.
Featured answer function lets you highlight the best answers in the community.
Gamification tools such as badges and leaderboard engage your audience and provide rewarding experiences.
With smart suggestions, previously asked questions are showcased when a customer asks a question.
Built-in SEO features like meta tags and schema markups help optimize your community content.
Community moderation tools, such as automation rules, keyword block list, AI spam detector, real-time alerts, and other moderation features to help you keep your community safe and clean.
Admin dashboard with rich analytics help you identify trending posts given the number of replies, views, and reactions.
Embed tools let you embed your forum into your existing website or app and login through your social network.

In summary, with Bettermode you can create communities with ease without compromising on quality.

Click here to learn how a customer support forum can benefit your business.

Vanilla Forums vs. Discourse vs. Bettermode: The verdict

There are a lot of factors to consider when choosing the right platform, both in terms of the ease-of-use and customization options.

Fundamentally, the right platform for you is one that eliminates as many manual processes as possible, saving you precious time and effort.

Instead of spending hours learning a new tool or stitching together multiple software tools — you can use Bettermode to get started in minutes.

Vanilla Forums vs Discourse: The ultimate comparison

	Templates	Customization	Built-in CMS	User rating (Capterra)
Vanilla Forums	No, there are only templates	Limited	No	4.4
Discourse	There are no pre-built templates, but you can create your own	Limited	No	3
Bettermode	Yes, there are 20 prebuilt templates	Great	Yes	4.8

Vanilla Forums vs. Discourse: How to choose the right community forum platform

Most community forum platforms offer the same basic functionality. But looking beyond the essentials, here are the six key functionalities ‘must-haves' when choosing the best forum software for yourself:

#1: Effective topic organization: Does the platform support multiple levels of nested subcategories and offers tools to help you manage these categories such as community calendar, tags, and similar features?
#2: Ability to differentiate certain content: Does it allow you to pin certain information to the top, to prevent important content from getting lost in a sea of posts? Or showcase the best answers or most helpful topics? Is content management easy?
#3: Notifications and follow features: Does the platform allow people to follow certain threads or conversations and receive a notification for new replies?
#4: Advanced search: Does the platform provide advanced search functionality including tags and keywords to quickly direct customers to relevant posts?
#5: Built-in SEO: Does the platform provide built-in SEO functionality so that people outside your community can benefit and you can keep growing your community?
#6: The right integrations: Does the platform integrate with other support tools you are using, such as your CRM, help desk software, chatbot, live chat, and other APIs?

Bettermode provides all of these more advanced features and much more for the best user experience.

📖 For more on how to choose the right community building platform, take a look at our 15-point checklist

See the benefits of building your community with Bettermode

When it comes to choosing the right discussion platform both Vanilla Forums and Discourse are pretty much on a par when it comes to features. Discourse has created forum software that focuses on your community, gaining the power to moderate itself.

While Vanilla Forums gives creators of the community the tools to manage its members. If you're just looking for a no-frills, easy-to-use community forum platform, they are both a viable option.

Main differences between Vanilla Forums vs. Discourse:

Discourse looks better and has a more reactive interface than Vanilla Forum, with decent admin controls — but has a steep learning curve and requires some technical know-how
Vanilla Forums has robust moderation tools and provides analytics insight — but discussions are not easy to search and it lacks personalization options.
The good news is — Bettermode simplifies and solves these issues with a super easy-to-use and highly secure platform packed with features and customizations.

Essentially, if you want to set-up a modern and brand-led customer community, you should use Bettermode for a more polished brand experience.

Features our customers love include:

Easy-to-use interface with a well thought-out community structure including content categorization, easy navigation, and tags
20 ready-to-use templates for creating different types of online communities and forums
Frictionless and secure member authentication with Single Sign On (SSO) and social login options.
Professional and easy-to-use customization options, including beautiful typography, color palettes, and the right plug-ins to reflect your unique brand.

The best bit? All of these can be done quickly and easily through our easy-to-use drag and drop content Blocks, and wealth of customizations — and regular upgrades.

If you are ready to get started, you can use one of Bettermode's ready-made templates to get up and running quickly. Try it now for free!

Looking for more?

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

Still have unanswered questions? Take a look at the most commonly asked questions about Vanilla Forums vs. Discourse below.

This article was originally published on April 12th, 2023, and was updated on October 28th, 2024.

FAQs

What does Vanilla Forums do?

Vanilla Forums is a tool that allows you to create forums and online communities. It facilitates discussions, engagement and sharing user-generated content. Vanilla Forums can be used for different purposes but its most popular use case is creating help centers.

What are the categories in Vanilla Forums?

Vanilla Forums have five categories:

Community and Events
Marketing and Communications
Website Design
Mentoring and Volunteering
Component Management

What is Discourse good for?

Discourse is good for creating free forums and discussion boards, so it can be a great option for companies and individuals with a limited budget. It's mostly used by developers and tech teams though as it has a bit of a learning curve and it takes some knowledge to set everything up.