Higher Logic

Star Rating

Higher Logic’s concept is simple: people come together to learn and collaborate. It’s a solid baseline and an advantage for any organization – engagement will turn into feedback, brand advocacy and retention. A member or customer experience is enhanced by the platforms that put a focus on engagement and community.

View Profile Submit Review

Overview

Platform Name Higher Logic

Description Higher Logic’s concept is simple: people come together to learn and collaborate. It’s a solid baseline and an advantage for any organization – engagement will turn into feedback, brand advocacy and retention. A member or customer experience is enhanced by the platforms that put a focus on engagement and community.

Web Site https://www.higherlogic.com

Founded 2007

Rating

4.0 out of 5 (10 Reviews)

Pros

Excellent support
Product under continual development
Excellent feature set, including automation logic

Cons

Steep learning curve for the non-tech savvy
No customised reporting

Submit Review

Pricing

Minimum Price 9000.00

Pricing Tiers

$9,000 - $150,000 per year (based on users)

License Type 1 Year

Free Self Hosting No

Free Trial No free trial

Discount Negotiated

Paid Modules

Content manager: $250 - $1,500 per month each
Mentor match: $250 - $1,500 per month each
Volunteer manager: $250 - $1,500 per month each
Event manager: $250 - $1,500 per month each
All other modules (Community app, Activity Sync, Component Manager, Expert Directory, Document Manager, Learning Management, Project Manager, Nested Communities, Surveys, Community Management Services: $250 - $1,500 per month each

Implementation Charges

Community Implementation (typically includes integration with CRM/Database): $5k to $30k
Data Migration: $10k to $15k
Library of design templates free. Third-party partners offer custom design packages.: $10k to $30k

Support Charges None

Additional Charges None

Details

Open Source / Enterprise Enterprise

Security None

Support Support package

Hosting SAAS (Single Tenant)

Analytics

Canned Reports
Customizable Reports
Supports Google Analytics
Download CSV detail data
API for integration/selective exports

Customization Low

Integration API’s available + pre-built integrations with other systems

Add Ons / Extensions

Gamification

Registration

SSO (native or 3rd party)

Notable Clients

Features

Analytics / Reporting toolsAutomated community tour for newcomersAutomation rulesBloggingCase ManagementDirectoriesDiscussions / Activity FeedDocument CollaborationDocument PreviewsDocument SharingDocument UploadsEvents Calendar with RegistrationGroups (Public, Private, Secret)Knowledge BaseMention by @name

Mentor / volunteer matchingMicrositesMobile AppModeration toolsPermissions configurable by rolePersonalizationPollsPrivate Messaging / NotificationsQuestions (with ability to mark questions correct)Ratings and reviewsResponsive designSEO friendly linksSpam control toolsTask Management

Customer Reviews of Higher Logic

Reviews Summary

Rating

4.0 out of 5

Pros*

user intuitive
customisable
The site is stable and does what it is supposed to do.
Any potential pros are mitigated by the fact that our experience lacks promised sales features and the unexpected downtime and numerous bugs of the community platform.
Great customer service

Cons*

some basic functionality missing
HL has been on a buying spree so they are spread thin. The result is that support is often slow - and more often than not - they will refer customers to the Higher Logic Users Group (HUG) Community for answers. In other words, they recommend you get answers from the Community and not from the staff. That is incredibly frustrating.
They also no longer do any custom work which is frustrating when you want to have changes made to things like email formats, site UI, CSS and the like. But, if you can write JS and CSS you can make some of the changes yourself. But if you're not, then good luck getting answers.
Sales promises not delivered on.
Technical support, while fixing identified problems, has repeatedly broken other parts of the site.

* Taken from our most recent reviews

Latest Reviews

Very user intuitive

Great platform that can be managed by business users as it is very user intuitive and technical expertise is not required to extract reports or customise widgets. However some basic functionality miss... Read Full Review

January 5, 2022 | Anonymous

Nothing fancy but the workhorse gets the job done

It is stable and it gets the job done in terms of providing an online space. Read Full Review

February 25, 2019 | Anonymous

Broken Trust

July 27, 2017 | Anonymous

Read All Reviews Submit Review

Back to All Platforms

Submit Review

Thanks for Your Review

Thanks !

Your review of vBulletin has been sent to FeverBee for approval. Once approved it will appear on the platform.

Every review, including yours, helps provide more valuable information for everyone in the community space to make more informed decisions Thank you for making this happen.

Kind Regards,

Richard Millington
www.FeverBee.com

All Customer Reviews

Very user intuitive

January 5, 2022 | Anonymous

Pros

user intuitive
customisable

Cons

some basic functionality missing

Nothing fancy but the workhorse gets the job done

February 25, 2019 | Anonymous

It is stable and it gets the job done in terms of providing an online space.

Pros

The site is stable and does what it is supposed to do.

Cons

HL has been on a buying spree so they are spread thin. The result is that support is often slow - and more often than not - they will refer customers to the Higher Logic Users Group (HUG) Community for answers. In other words, they recommend you get answers from the Community and not from the staff. That is incredibly frustrating.
They also no longer do any custom work which is frustrating when you want to have changes made to things like email formats, site UI, CSS and the like. But, if you can write JS and CSS you can make some of the changes yourself. But if you're not, then good luck getting answers.

Broken Trust

July 27, 2017 | Anonymous

Higher Logic runs an impressive marketing and sales operation. Don't be fooled!

Before you buy this solution, ask to demo the product with a test site that you can use for a month on your own. Test out the backend and the user experience extensively. Unless things have changed, you won't be able to do this kind of demo. Why? In my personal opinion, the product is so difficult to set up and takes so much work to configure into a workable product that they won't let you have a hands-on experience with the product before you buy.

Many of the sales claims that were made to our organization have not been realized. The functionality of the core platform and add-ons have been lacking critical features that we were counting on Higher Logic to provide.

In fixing problems, their tech support has broken other parts of the site. It is quite frustrating to realize that filing cases with their customer service team means that you might find something else broken on your community platform.

If you are considering signing a contract with Higher Logic, please first post in the Feverbee community. I'd like to talk with you before you move in that direction.

Pros

Any potential pros are mitigated by the fact that our experience lacks promised sales features and the unexpected downtime and numerous bugs of the community platform.

Cons

Sales promises not delivered on.
Technical support, while fixing identified problems, has repeatedly broken other parts of the site.

Very helpful staff

March 15, 2017 | Julie Ciaramella

My organization has been using Higher Logic for about a year and a half. While the platform takes a little bit of time to figure out, Higher Logic's staff has been with us every step of the way. They've been extraordinarily helpful, even after our community management contract with them expired.

Pros

Great customer service
Responsive support team
Good trainings and webinars

Cons

Back-end of the community site isn't user-friendly

Long time Higher Logic User

March 14, 2017 | Anonymous

We have used Higher Logic for several years now and are quite happy with the platform and the support.

Pros

Intuitive
Quick response time for support
Helpful training

Cons

While the company has been a customer for several years, the main user recently left the company. So far, we have been happy with the assistance.

A true partner in community engagement

March 14, 2017 | Anonymous

Their technology is continuously expanding its capabilities, while its customer service is top notch. A valuable tool for a global membership base that is always on the go—creating deep networks and facilitating global knowledge sharing.

Pros

Their community manager service allows you to maximize all of the functionality that meets the needs of your user-base, with a strategic focus and quality engagement.
The optional add-on modules allows you to grow your community beyond an open forum when the time is right and based on your unique set of needs.

Cons

I love the system and the service from HL. Not a con, but something users need to be prepared for is for a community to thrive it will take time and resources whether they are internal or from a consultant or higher logic.

Great Innovation & Customer Support

March 14, 2017 | Anonymous

I love working on the Higher Logic platform, because the staff CARES DEEPLY about fostering client and user engagement and it shows. Their customer service is extremely responsive, they are constantly putting on free education sessions for clients, and they have a client group to recommend upgrades and direction.

They work with every AMS I know of in order to manage user data to customize a public to members only experience. The interface is very easy to understand and user friendly. Their CMS is incredibly powerful and able to utilize the community features to pull in dynamic content.

Pros

Excellent customer service
Focus on innovation
Willing to work with clients to meet their financial requirements
Very powerful CMS that works with the Community Platform
Responsive Design/Bootstrap
Content/Discussion tagging
Moderation tools for full and self moderation
Direct messaging
Subscription options
Gamificiation tools (award ribbons and badges)
Automation Rule (send email, add ribbon, add to a community, etc. based on criteria)
Library, blog, directory, and event modules come with package
Volunteer, advanced emailing, advanced AMS data syncing are all add-on modules

Cons

Embrace fail first a little bit too much (often release new features that clients and users get to test and report bugs and fixes)
No instant messaging (yet)
Event add-on registration is a bit too simple for most companies
No way to stop/moderate a user from sending direct messages

Excellent System for Our Candidates and Great Company to Work With

March 14, 2017 | Zach Gelnett

We currently use Higher Logic to give our certification candidates a platform to connect. We also use the Higher Logic community manager to manage the community for us.

It's been such a great experience we've begun looking into using the other features of Higher Logic (Volunteer management, mentors/mentees, etc).

There is some initial setup that needs to be performed, but it's straight forward and Higher Logic provides the required support throughout the process.

Pros

The system integrates with our AMS/CRM tool (netFORUM) and provides not only SSO but also activity writebacks to netFORUM.
Our community manager has done an excellent job moderating the forum and working with our staff as necessary to answer questions posted in the forum. Thanks, in large part, to our community manager it's been a great experience as everything seems to just work, and work well.
Beyond the functionality, the largest pro of the tool is the response we've seen. Large numbers of individuals posting not only questions but answers and having online discussions related to the certification. Users not only asking and answering questions, but even offering encouragement and advice.

Cons

There's nothing I can think of that would be considered a con.

Feature Rich Platform

March 9, 2017 | Anonymous

Higher Logic has a ton of features that allow for a community site to be configured for a wide variety of use cases. The customer support is very friendly and responsive. At the same time, the platform does sometimes surprise with bugs. Also, the complexity of accomplishing different tasks on the administrative side makes for a steep learning curve.

Pros

Full feature set
Responsive customer support
Active customer community
Post by email feature
Automation rules feature
Mobile app available

Cons

Buggy
Complex

Highly functional but could use some UX design updates

March 8, 2017 | Anonymous

Overall, I really enjoy using Higher Logic as our community platform. While I have some critiques, we rarely get any serious complaints from our users.

I wasn't the community manager when we first set our community up, so I can't talk too much about that process. My review mostly focuses on the functionality and ease of use now that it's up and running.

I hovered between three and four stars because, ultimately, the design is a bit clunky. My favorite community platforms are those that inexperienced users can hop into and figure out after about an hour. While Higher Logic has a lot of great things going for it, it's not always the easiest to navigate through if you aren't a regular community participant.

Pros

First and foremost I love working with the Higher Logic people. Their customer service is impeccable, and I always feel like my questions, ideas, and concerns matter. This might be one of the most important things for any platform to do well. Even if I have issues with the software itself, when the support is there to readily help me through, I am much more invested in continuing with that software. I've listed more cons than pros but this first pro cancels out at least 3 (maybe more!) cons.
Another great thing about Higher Logic is that they are extremely sensitive to client requests for improvements. When someone asks for a new report in their analytics suite, it usually takes them less than two weeks to make it happen. When they roll out updates and clients critique those updates, they revise the update. This is another great thing that alleviates any frustration because I'm hopeful that my issues listed below will be resolved eventually.
They offer free two-day training for their clients (which I attended). The training is AMAZING and I left so much more knowledgeable and comfortable with the software.
If you don't have a ton of design or coding experience, you can still make your community site complement your company's/organization's branding. However, if you have a design team on staff, you can really do any sort of customization you want. It's great to have that flexibility.
Once I went through their training, the backend side of things is so easy to navigate through. Most likely, I could've figured it out for myself, but it might've taken me a month since I'm not that experienced working within large CMS and AMS systems. Whereas with the training, I got it in about 2 hours.

Cons

It's very text-based, so new users come face-to-face with huge blocks of text on a regular basis with very few visual aids to guide them or point them in the right direction. I know this is probably the most difficult balance to strike in communities, and I *do* see them making adjustments here and there. I'm interested to see how this evolves over time.
There's no tagging function, which I don't understand. Those personal pings and notifications could be a game changer in engagement rates.
There's also no notification system if a discussion you've participated in gets new replies. In another HL community (not one where I'm a CM), I've logged on two or three times before realizing a conversation I'd participated in had a new response directed toward me.
They also have very rudimentary subscribe options. It's not a "participate in a discussion to subscribe to a discussion" system. It's a "subscribe to everything or nothing" system, which I find utterly frustrating. Our users do too.
My last critique is that it's not intuitive about if a user has read a thread or not in order to take them to the right spot in the thread. It always defaults to the end, which again is frustrating, because users have to scroll to the top of any thread they click on (time consuming for long ones).
If you make back-end changes, they don't have a preview function so you have to save it and hope you didn't mess up. Since I'm not a developer, it makes me nervous when I'm adding bits of code, adjusting our pages' navigation, or changing settings. So far, there haven't been any huge mess-ups but a preview function could save people a lot of stress and potential heartache.
Their analytics suite is EXTREMELY difficult to figure out (this is something I only managed to do because of the free two-day training I attended), and even so, it doesn't track conversions and behavior flow (except for automation rules set up through the platform). My caveat here is they've recently partnered with Kavi and are working on an update.

Higher Logic

Overview

Pricing

Details

Notable Clients

Features

Customer Reviews of Higher Logic

Reviews Summary

Latest Reviews

Submit Review

Thanks for Your Review

All Customer Reviews

Very user intuitive

Nothing fancy but the workhorse gets the job done

Broken Trust

Very helpful staff

Long time Higher Logic User

A true partner in community engagement

Great Innovation & Customer Support

Excellent System for Our Candidates and Great Company to Work With

Feature Rich Platform

Highly functional but could use some UX design updates

Subscribe for regular insights