Khoros (formerly lithium) was a gold standard.
Recently - I’m struggling with the product and support.
Anyone else care to share their thoughts on a migration from Khoros Communities to Gainsights <community product name> (is it Customer Communities?) in say... the past 6-12-18 months?
What was your goal?
What did you like?
What did you miss?
Other thoughts?
Hello,
-Sam
I’ve used Khoros before and loved the user interface. However the data access was shocking in my opinion. It may have got better over the last couple of years though. I last used it about 3 years ago.
At the time we moved to Salesforce Community, largely to bring everything together, link closer to support (which was using Salesforce) and to generally improve data access. Lithium/Khoros is one big data silo.
However, you were after a comparison with Gainsight. So…..
What was your goal?
I have changed roles and am now using Gainsight. There was no choice to change here.
What did you like?
In Khoros I liked the UI. Possibly one of the best user experiences I have seen “out of the box”.
Gainsight’s UI is comparable, but requires more coding to make significant changes. It is just Javascript and HTML (so not too hard), but keep that in mind. Having said that, Gainsight allows no coders to come up with a pretty nice looking “standard” setup which is easy to modify within the constraints of the functionality they provide for this.
I LOVE the data access and the APIs. Not perfect yet, but it is getting significantly better. There is also database access going through a beta phase. This completely removes the need to use Google Analytics if you know your way around a DB.
What did you miss?
I miss little things. Arguably because I got used to working in a Lithium/Khoros way. An example? You cannot easily search for users as a user in Gainsight. You will need to find a post that the user has written or book mark the user’s profile. You can’t just do a search and return users. Although, with the DB access, this wouldn’t take much to manually build in.
Other thoughts?
With regard to a migration, you will need a good ETL product/team. Getting the data out of Khoros (all in XML from memory...if it is still the same) will take a fair amount of work. I believe the data is also stored in HTML format. You will need to do a fair amount of work with checking the HTML elements that you can use. This might not be a problem, but for Khoros to Salesforce it was a nightmare. I had to dynamically alter HTML within posts during the migration. Essentially, I guess I am saying that the migration may be quite substantial, so I would recommend having a play around with some Gainsight Community sites to see what you think.
Appreciate the well rounded answers
Without trying to bandwagon but I too have been through a migration into a Salesforce community (not from Khoros) and ETL was also a nightmare.
Much appreciated.
+4
Hi
I honestly really enjoyed working with Khoros (then Lithium) back in the glory days. It was an amazing platform and they were the absolute thought leaders at the time. Back when I was leading the programs at Sonos, the two main reasons I decided to transition to Gainsight (then inSided) were: 1) I wanted a better and closer partnership, as that was something Khoros increasingly didn’t do so well and I felt strongly that this was a strength of inSided 2) I wanted to be a Community Manager rather than a Product Manager managing multiple full-time developers in my team, which was needed for Khoros - with inSided I could do pretty much everything, including customizing the front-end, with little to no coding.
We did a large migration to get onto inSided. It was complex but it worked out well. Since then, Gainsight has done 70+ migrations from many vendors, a lot of them from Khoros. So it’s now a well-oiled machine.
I really don't want this post to be a sales pitch, as that’s not what this community is for, so I won’t go into everything that Gainsight CC can do now that it couldn’t do back when I was a customer. Maybe other folks will chime-in. :) What I will briefly say is that some of the things that make CC unique nowadays is the focus on B2B SaaS and key B2B tech-stack integrations with Zendesk, Salesforce, Zapier, etc... And of course, the intuitiveness and low/no-code approach that I mentioned already.
+2
We swapped from Khoros two years ago. I haven´t regret.
What was your goal?
To get platform...
What did you like?
As said, I havent regret. I made comprehensive benchmarking, between inSided / Vanilla / Khoros. Vanilla has the best message editor in the market but from the admin perspective it is like a Khoros = requires constant development.
What did you miss?
Khoros has comprehensive analytics and reports. There are also bunch of handy small features (which I cannot list here) and you can customise everything. Same time it is hard because you have to customise everything, to have the community to start with. Insided/Gainsight works pretty well just out of the box, huge difference.
Khoros has also active customer community, much active than this Gamechanger (we use only community platform and here is no much discussions around it)
Other thoughts?
I know that Khoros is renewing their platform. I dont know is it ready by now and what´s it like. Hopefully they will build better platform for their customers. If you have endless resources you can use Khoros as well.
And just like
Khoros culture changed during the years, they made huge changes to the personnel and good people left. Or they were kicked out.
Edit: Migration went pretty good. For some reason Vanilla said that they can download the data dump for us, inSided said that they cant do it. We had a very old community, it was migrated to Khoros back in the days so that might be the reason that inSided had to work several times to get old content restored properly. It took several iterations and all the content was not restored ok.
Such thoughtful answers, really appreciate the insights.
Changing community (any) platform(s) has it’s struggles across the board.
The light touch
Hello
I am moving a company now to Gainsight from Khoros and have liked the experience so far. (a couple weeks in) We are creating a brand new community so it will be a little different than most migrations that include content. We are just moving users. Gainsight allows a lot of changes to occur by a nondev individual which is refreshing. Backend isnt windows xp like Khoros but does come with some learning curves. I still struggle on some tasks but just a few weeks in which can be frustrating knowing something so well prior.
Gainsight has great CS / Imp help with knowledgable individuals willing to help us succeed. Happy to discuss more if you are interested!
+1 to
I consider Gainsight CC to be significantly better than Khoros/Lithium at virtually anything from partnership to tooling.
The only thing Gainsights Communities doesn’t have at the moment, that I truly miss, is in page notifications, this would really help with the ‘dopamine hit → further engagement” aspect of community management. The analytical portion you can deal with through BI tooling, but to be honest, the platform analytics are perfectly fine from a day to day management perspective. (And if you want to nerd your way through some excel gymnastics, you can always download a bunch of CSV files and have a go.)
I have a feeling that Gainsight are becoming masters of migrating Khoros communities, so you should not have any worries about that. :)
+2
The only thing Gainsights Communities doesn’t have at the moment, that I truly miss, is in page notifications, this would really help with the ‘dopamine hit → further engagement” aspect of community management.
Oh yes, notifications. “Luckily” they will bring the notification center for us 😎 Hopefully soon!
+1
+2
😎
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