Khoros is the platform I get asked about more than any other, and the one that has caused the most upheaval in our space over the last few years. So let me give you an honest review of where it stands in 2026, and whether you should stay or go.
This one is different from every other platform I review. The product is strong. In some areas it is still the best on the market. And I would still tell most teams on it to leave as soon as they reasonably can.
One thing you should know going in: Khoros has sent me legal threats over my past commentary about them. So I am going to be careful, frame this as my opinion, and stick to what I can stand behind. Two things are true at once. The product is good, and I would leave. The gap between those two things is the whole story.
How Khoros got here
For most of the last fifteen years, Khoros was the premium community platform in our space. If you were a big brand running a big support community, you were probably on Khoros, or on Lithium before it. It earned that. The feature set was deep, and it ran at a scale almost nobody else could touch. A lot of us still carry that version of Khoros around in our heads.
The product still deserves a fair amount of that respect. The company around it, in my view, no longer does.
Khoros came out of Lithium, one of the original enterprise community platforms, which merged with Spredfast in 2019 and rebranded as Khoros. In my experience, that merger started a rough stretch. The attention drifted toward social media management, the community product did not move forward the way it should have, and the cost and service charges came up again and again as a real source of frustration. Then in May 2025, Khoros was acquired by IgniteTech. That is the moment everything else here hangs on.
What Khoros still does well
Before the rest, the product deserves its due, because the scorecard is genuinely good. On discussions and Q&A it scores an 8: deep threaded forums, a proper question-and-answer format with accepted answers, and strong enterprise admin tools. Moderation is an 8, with a mature suite, AI models for spam and abuse, and support for dozens of languages. Analytics is an 8, with deep Adobe and Google Analytics integration. Gamification, ideation, and content all sit at 7. The one real hole is events, which I score a 1.
Two things stand out. The first is scale. Khoros has run some of the largest brand communities on the planet, with enormous traffic, deep permissioning, and complex multi-board structures, for years and reliably. The second is gamification and reputation. Lithium, and then Khoros, with Michael Wu, Joe Cothrel and the team, wrote the playbook for it. A lot of platforms are still copying the model.
So none of what follows is that the product is bad. On its own terms, it is strong. The problem is that you do not buy a community platform on its own terms.
You are not buying a product, you are buying a company
You buy the company behind the platform, and you commit to it for three to five years. Over that window you are not betting on the feature list, you are betting on the vendor: will they support you, keep the lights on, invest in the product, and treat you fairly when something goes wrong. That is where, in my opinion, Khoros has become a bad bet.
Khoros is owned by IgniteTech, part of ESW Capital, which has bought well over a hundred software companies. As best I can tell, the model is consistent: acquire enterprise software with customers locked into longer contracts, cut costs hard, and run it for cash. This is not only my read. IgniteTech’s own CEO has spoken about laying off close to 80% of the company after staff resisted an AI-first mandate.
Within weeks of the acquisition, almost the entire Khoros team was let go. That matters, because the feature set I just praised was built and maintained by people, and much of the work is now done by contractors with far less knowledge of community or the clients. In my experience, that kind of gap shows up slowly, then all at once, usually at the worst possible moment.
All-in on AI, and the Aurora question
What has replaced those people, in the messaging at least, is AI. In April 2026, Khoros launched Aurora AI, described not as an upgrade but as a brand-new, AI-native platform, with a suite of tools the parent company rolls out across its acquisitions. I am not anti-AI; we do a lot of work helping clients get AI ready. The open question is whether this is AI that helps a team do more, or AI positioned to replace the team. Judge it on what it actually does in your community, not on the launch copy.
If you are a current customer, pay close attention here. You are probably on the older platform, Khoros Communities Classic. Khoros is offering free migrations from Classic to Aurora through the end of 2026. Aurora may turn out to be good, but it is a relatively new platform, it does not have anywhere near the feature set of Classic, and any migration is a real risk. As far as I can tell, there is no published end-of-life date for Classic. You would be migrating either way, so if you are going to take on the cost and risk, at least look at what else is out there before defaulting to Aurora.
What customers are telling me
I get messages almost every week from Khoros customers describing real pain, and most of the ones I have spoken to are actively planning to leave. The first theme is support: account managers and commercial teams going quiet for weeks, issues left unanswered, and how hard it is to get anyone on the phone. The second is reliability: outages and platform issues, with some clients left running their own analysis to work out what went wrong. I cannot independently verify every incident, so take it as what customers report, but I am hearing it from enough of them that, in my opinion, it is a trend rather than bad luck.
Then there is getting your data out. From what I have heard, a full, usable export of your content, members, and structure can be more of a fight than it should be, and some customers say they have been charged for additional exports. And there are the invoices: large, unexpected overage bills, sometimes into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. It has become a common story that bot traffic has surged on a community and the customer is then charged for it, with customers telling me they believe much of that billed traffic is bots and automated crawlers, not the human visitors their contracts were written around.
The verdict: should you stay on Khoros?
This is why I score platforms on nine capabilities but tell you to weigh a tenth thing that is not on the sheet: the vendor. Khoros still scores like a top-tier platform, and on product it nearly is. But the scorecard measures what the software can do, not whether the company behind it will still be supporting you fairly in three years. On that question, in my opinion, Khoros is now one of the riskiest choices in the market.
My answer is no. If you are on Khoros today, start planning your exit now, not in a panic, but deliberately. The worst position to be in is deciding to leave the day a surprise invoice lands or your support stops responding, because that is when you have no room to negotiate and no time. Almost everyone I know on the platform is already looking, and many have moved.
Where to go instead
The right alternative depends on what your community is for. If product feedback or Gainsight CRM integration is the point, look at Gainsight. For a general-purpose enterprise community built around Q&A and knowledge, Higher Logic Vanilla is one of the strongest all-rounders. For a daily, social, members-hanging-out community, look at Higher Logic Thrive or Bettermode. Discourse is where a lot of Khoros communities are already migrating and is hard to beat on discussion depth. And if you are built around events or want a vendor investing heavily in AI, look at Bevy.
Map your must-have capabilities first, then test these against your list, not against a demo. If you do move, do it properly: get your data out early, and test that you can export your content, members, and the SEO value tied to your URLs cleanly.
You can see the full nine-capability scorecard and platform comparison at feverbee.com/communityplatforms. And if you want help getting off Khoros or choosing what comes next, you will find me at feverbee.com or richard@feverbee.com.