The Knowledge

Lithium $60,000-$100,000 / yr plus estimated $100,000 setup cost

Lithium is a robust enterprise solution offering a range of social listening and online community solutions. While expensive and complex, Lithium has a proven track record and well established market reputation. With a strong analytics component and ongoing research and development, Lithium is a good option for large enterprises that have a large budget and complex or extensive requirements.

Salesforce $80,000 - $200,000 /yr

Salesforce Community Cloud is a modulated enterprise platform which integrates with other Salesforce products to create an entire networked business solution. Excellent for organisations with large budgets that require individual customer relationship management or that need to tie their community activity back to sales goals.

Jive-x $50,000 - $100,000 for SaaS plus estimated $15,000 setup cost

Jive-x is a complex but powerful external community platform with built-in gamification, CRM and marketing automation functionality. Focusing on customer conversion, Jive-x would be a good solution for large sales-based enterprises.

Telligent (aka Zimbra) Pricing not available.

Telligent (or Zimbra) is both an enterprise and open source solution, depending on the licensing option that you choose. Customisable and extensible to integrate with other business workflows. Zimbra focuses heavily on analytics and email, and would be suitable for medium to large organisations.