Vanilla Forums

Founded in December 2009, Vanilla began as an open-source community platform. Today, the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) Vanilla Forums platform helps thousands of companies provide a robust community experience to millions of users worldwide.

Vanilla is designed with the user in mind and the company claims Vanilla Forums is like no other forum platform on the market today. In addition to the standard discussions empowered by other forum solutions, Vanilla allows users to:

• Post questions and polls.
• Automatically embed rich content such as Youtube, Vimeo or SoundCloud.
• Embed social media posts, which are recognized and formatted correctly when cut-and-pasted into a post.

Another innovative feature is ‘@’ messaging, allowing you to append an ‘@’ symbol in front of a user’s name, notifying the user(s) so they can join the conversation. With avatars and robust profiles, your users can customize the appearance and amount of personal information shared with others.  With multiple pricing tiers based on number of administrative seats and monthly pageviews, Vanilla Forums is extremely flexible and can be customized with as much or as little functionality required.

Other notable features include:

• Themes: Completely customize the look and feel, far beyond just the header and footer.
• Gamification and reputation system: More than just badges, the reputation engine can be used to promote good content, grant member abilities, and help automate moderation.
• Made for Mobile: Vanilla detects the browser agent and applies the most appropriate theme to ensure a great user experience.
• Single Sign-on: Vanilla’s jsConnect SSO, SAML support and social logins make it easy for users to register. SSO can be configured to be seamless with your existing system.
• API: Vanilla has an easy to use RESTful API that you can use to deeply integrate Vanilla with your website.
• Permissions: Control fine-grained, role-based permissions that can be assigned on a per-discussion-category basis. Assign multiple roles to individual users. Roles can be set manually, based on registration workflow, via SSO and via the API.
• Spam Prevention: Powerful tools to keep your community forum free of spam.

Not sure if Vanilla Forums is the right community management solution for your business? Use our Product Selection Tool to find the best business software solution or call, click, or email to speak with an unbiased Technology Advisor today for a no-cost, no-obligation consultation on your unique needs.