Vanilla Forums vs Discourse
Is Vanilla Forums Better than Discourse? (2023 edition)
You’ve heard of these two platforms for community building, but is Vanilla Forums better than Discourse? Let’s find out.
Vanilla Forums vs Discourse: The judgement criteria
Can you build YOUR brand?
Vanilla Forums is quite open to personalization and gives creators a free reign over the aesthetics of their forum. You can include brand assets like your logo and tagline, along with brand colors. If you’ve got blogs and discussion boards, you can embed them in the platform. It also encourages collaboration by providing features that let you create small groups.
Discourse has relatively simple features for brand building. You’ll be able to add your logo to the platform, but that’s where the scope for brand promotion ends. You can use various plugins to add features like chat integration and subscriptions. There are a few options to build your own community calendar too. Unfortunately, none of these features are natively supported.How do you manage the community?
Vanilla Forums gives you access to a variety of moderation tools you can use to manage your community. Through the platform, you can delete, move and merge all the discussions in your community. Member-driven moderation is accounted for through content flagging. To promote interaction, you can encourage interaction between members, message them in private and send notifications as well. In case you encounter any spamming or bad behavior, you’ll be able to respond quickly by banning the user from your forum.
Discourse heavily relies on a “trust system”. The gist of it is that loyal members will have more access to community moderation tools. The longer they stay in your community, the more power they’ll get. The platform also provides other features like spam blocking and flagging. You can also start a reward system where you assign badges and points based on member participation.Does the mobile experience match up?
The only way to access Vanilla Forums is through a web browser on your phone or laptop. They haven’t built a dedicated app on Google Play Store or the Apple store. However, you can still use a third-party app to keep your forum going on mobile as well.
Discourse provides you with an app that’s compatible with both iOS and Android devices. The application is quite minimalistic, providing user-friendly features for easy navigation. But you won’t find a lot of elements to play with, which makes it difficult to build engagement among your community members.
In-depth comparison (with our own tool)
Enjoy a detailed comparison table about features and pricing
3 key differences that make Graphy Community the perfect Vanilla Forums and Discourse alternative
Finally, a platform to replace them all
If you think about teaching online as a serious business, you'll find yourself tying together multiple tools (alongside Thinkific).
This is hassle-some, both for you as well as your students. With Graphy Community Platform, do it all in one place.
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Engaged students lead to more $$$
Lectures alone (be it pre-recorded or live) will lead to your students dropping off faster than you can imagine.
Lectures + Social Engagement is what will keep your students hooked. Graphy Community Platform lets you add a college-like social experience to your online academy.
The result : 5x retention + 50% more likely to spend on other offerings by you.
Zero learning curve
Vanilla Forums & Discourse forces a new user experience upon you and your users. This leads to the need for (most difficult of all) a new behavior. It’s VERY hard to change people’s behavior.
You want to avoid that at all costs. It should a last resort. Which is why at Graphy Community Platform, we (shamelessly) copied the user experience of the most widely-used apps.
Folks at these companies love the
Graphy Community Platform experience
White labeled mobile & web app
Schedule and host live classes
Split members into cohorts
In-depth analytics
Points system & rewards
Group Chat
Direct messaging
Audio chatrooms
With Graphy Community, you get...
The difference is in our DNA
We're content creators, teachers AND community builders.
And, we know how everything ties together to make a business.
We've been teaching online since 2018. We ran one of the world's largest educational communities from 2019-2021 and scaled to $500,000 revenue by selling cohort-based courses. We kept hopping from one software to another because the experience of actually using all available software is bad.
This led us to build Graphy Community Platform - an all-in-one platform to run your courses, cohorts, webinars, events, voice chat rooms, etc. - on mobile & web (100% white-labeled).
Your branded online community on any device.
Book a demo and see how easy it is to get started.
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