In this blog, we've detailed out features of a couple of top forum-based platforms to create your community on! Check it out here 👇
Forum Based Platforms - Asynchronous Communication
1) Discourse
Offers quick loading, neat threaded conversations, so you don't have to click/toggle from the current page
Instant notifications when someone tags/quotes/mentions you. Also provide email notifications.
Mobile Apps available for iOS and Android
While sharing links - they auto expand
Single sign-on available
Community moderation enabled
Built in Akismet spam protection and heuristics including new user sandboxing, user flag blocking, and standard nofollow.
Social login
Use the Summarize button to condense long topics to just the most interesting and popular posts.
Encourage positive community behaviors through the included set of badges, or add your own custom badges.
Reply via email when you can't access the community
Comprehensive API and 100% open source
Two-factor authentication
Communities using Discourse : Figma, Asana, Udacity, Patreon, etc
Watch this video to learn more about Discourse communities
2) Insided
One central platform for engagement amongst users in different categories, user-groups. Promote events, news and back it with advanced gamification.
Give customers easy access to all relevant knowledge, updates and best practices by offering highly contextual content right inside your product.
Involve members in product development by stimulating product ideation, prioritization, beta testing and product discussions.
Keep customers informed and updated about new developments.
Allow users to mark best answers and rate how helpful content really is. Then pin, update or remove content so users can always find what they need
Raise the quality of your self-service support by letting your user community answer the questions your team can’t handle themselves
Learn what users are looking for and fill any knowledge gaps. Use search insights to see which help content is missing
Create dialogs amongst users to share experiences and provide valuable feedback to each other as well as to you
All your content is completely optimized for Google, so users will find the answers to their questions as soon as they search online
Get the right content to your users faster with smart search suggestions and articles organized into categories and sections
Best of both worlds: Users see both company help materials and community generated content in the in-product widget
Use integrations to further sort and organize feedback on business metrics like and revenue and engagement.
Easy single sign on and social authentication — let non logged-in users engage too
User-friendly dashboards display metrics that track community health, monitor content generation, and give insights on member growth and retention.
APIs and webhooks integrate smoothly with third parties
Communities using Insided : Thinkwise, Mixpanel, Bizzabo
Here's a short product tour!
3) Vanilla Forums by Higher Logic
Build a community that is easy-to-use, looks great and is tightly integrated into your tech stack.
Allow customers to submit, view and vote on ideas that drive product innovation.
Create a self-service Help Center within your community for all your help docs and user guides.
In addition to standard discussions, Vanilla allows users to post questions and polls. Like most of Vanilla’s features, these discussion types can be turned on or off in the Admin Dashboard.
Members can format posts with html, markdown, or bbcode. Images can be dragged and dropped and videos are automatically embedded. Tweets, Vines and Pins are automatically recognized when pasted into a comment.
Members can mention each other in discussions by adding an ‘@’ before a username. Mentioned users are notified so they can quickly jump into the discussion.
Create multiple knowledge bases for your multiple products, languages or business units. Vanilla Knowledge supports localization to over 25 languages.
Best answers to a question are displayed at the top of the discussion list and can be themed to stand out making it easy for others to quickly find the solution they are looking for.
Members are rewarded for answering questions with reputation points and badges starting with a ‘First Answer’ badge and subsequent badges for crossing answer thresholds.
Reactions enable peer-based moderation. If a comment gets too many negative reactions it will be greyed out and put into a moderation queue.
Moderators get full in-line controls to affect single or multiple items. They get all of the standard controls like close, sticky, split, merge, delete, etc.
Connect Vanilla to over 2000+ of your favourite Apps without any developer expertise.
Useful for creating a sub-community for a language or product line. Unlike categories, Sub-Communities can have their own home page, locale and announcement messages.
Get insights into community health and member engagement with community specific analytics.
Communities using Vanilla Forums : Twilio, TeamViewer, Mural
Here's a product demo:
4) Circle
With direct integrations to tools like Memberstack and Memberspace, Circle can fit seamlessly into the rest of your membership stack.
Add a community to your course, help your students connect with each other, and improve student-outcomes. Integrate with Teachable, Kajabi, and other course platforms.
Add a community to your course, help your students connect with each other, and improve student-outcomes. Integrate with Teachable, Kajabi, and other course platforms.
Provide a space for your students, parents, and teachers to gather for your microschool pod. Share resources, discuss schoolwork, and stay organized.
Choose your own brand colors, add a custom domain, and own 100% of your member data.
Integrate your community right into your website, product, online course, or membership experience. Automate flows across your creator stack with our integrations.
Communities using Circle : Teachable, Makerpad, Forte Labs
Here's a product review of Circle
5) Tribe
Move the community to your domain and engage members under your brand.
Hyper-intuitive options to customize and change every part of your community in real time.
Track community users via Google Analytics. Record community activities as Google Analytics events.
Add custom scripts and functionality to the public pages of your community with the custom code app.
Crowdsource the best answer. Members can ask questions, post answers, upvote, and accept the right solution.
Facilitate interactive thread-based communication between members and drive rich conversations.
Spaces as flexible containers to build a robust community structure.
Granular controls to keep the community or sections of the community private.
Reliable search built right into the core of the community experience.
Communities using Tribe : Pipedrive, Convertkit, Klaus, IBM
Here's a video on how you can create your community using Tribe:
6) Disciple Media
Manage content and members with an easy-to-use community management console.
Segment and manage audiences with public and private Groups and Feeds.
Store and share content with a hassle-free and easy-to-use Content Library.
The open API enables you to extend the existing Disciple functionality and automate community management through Disciple’s API.
Customize your community platform with your logos, fonts and colours.
Build a thriving community and boost engagement with: targeted and personalized Push Notifications, Direct Messaging, Likes, Comments, Threads, Polls and high-resolution Livestreams.
Promote your events with embedded links and track attendance with an RSVP feature.
Store all of your content assets (videos, images, PDFs, blogs) in folders and share them with your community.
Members can @mention each other to inspire conversation.
Stream to your entire community or to specific groups with much higher video quality than on Zoom and Facebook.
Communities using Disciple Media - The Rolling Stones, Sonam Kapoor
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