community-software
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Julie Kaplan Makes Marketing Legible to the Rest of the Room
Her method is deceptively plain: listen before prescribing, find the first useful win, and give every marketing dollar a story the whole company can understand.
Khaled Alhaj Is Turning the Front Desk Into Software
From a hotel finance desk to Y Combinator, Khaled Alhaj has spent his twenties making the small frictions of communal living visible - then turning them into a product.
Freddie Peyerl Put a Screen on a Chairlift - Then Built a Business Around Better Timing
A scientist-turned-founder saw a captive audience on the ride to Winter Park. The more interesting idea was not the screen - it was learning where information becomes useful.
Everyone Is Quietly Building A Members-Only Internet
The creators and brands who spent a decade renting attention on other people's feeds are now buying software to build private homes instead. Skool, Patreon, Podia and a stack of quieter forum companies are all fighting to be the front door.
Everybody Wants To Own Your Crowd
Uscreen, Bevy, Almabase, Personify, Zendesk and Gradual are all selling the same promise - a place to gather your people - and quietly disagreeing about who those people actually belong to.
Nobody Owns A Community They Just Rent The Room
Gravyty, Podia, Khoros, Bevy, Personify and a crowd of rivals all sell the same promise - that your audience is an asset you control. The platforms making that promise keep getting bought, merged and switched off.
Your Community Platform Is Either A Home Or A Listening Post
Open Social and CMNTY are both Dutch, both say they build community, and both are right - one hands you a network you own, the other turns a crowd's opinions into research data. Here is why the same word points at two very different businesses.
You Don't Own the Community You Built
Skool, Circle, Discourse, Gainsight, Salesforce and Gravyty are all selling the same thing - a place for your people to gather. The difference is who keeps the keys.
Everyone wants a community. Almost nobody owns theirs
Six platforms - from open-source Discourse to enterprise Khoros and Salesforce - are quietly fighting over the same thing: the conversations your customers have about you. Building that crowd turns out to be the easy part. Owning it is where it gets expensive.
The Quiet Land Grab to Own Your Community
Zendesk, Khoros, Thinkific, Disciple and a pack of rivals are betting that organizations will pay to own the audiences they once rented from Facebook. Here is how the community software scramble is shaking out.
Raklet
The Techstars-backed platform betting that a rowing club, a national trade association, and a paid newsletter all need the same thing: one place to hold their members, their money, and their events.
The Land Grab for Communities Social Media Left Behind
Almabase, Hivebrite, Gravyty, Zapnito, Threado, Khoros and a pack of forum-software veterans are all selling one promise - a place your people gather that you actually own. The market got crowded, then it started eating itself.
The Land Grab for Communities the Algorithm Can't Touch
Zapnito, Almabase, Disciple, XenForo, Gainsight and CMNTY are quietly selling brands a way to own their audience instead of renting it from a feed. Here is how one market splits into six very different bets.
Four Ways to Build an Online Community That Actually Sticks
Personify, ToucanTech, Discourse and Forumbee all promise to gather your people in one place - but they pick very different people. Here is how the community-software field splits, and how to read it before you sign anything.
Forumbee Turns Repeat Support Tickets Into a Public Answer
The San Francisco community software company has spent more than a decade on a quiet bet: the best help desk is a crowd of customers answering each other in the open.
vBulletin
The World's Leading Community Software - vBulletin has been powering online forums for more than two decades, and it is still shipping.
Higher Logic
Engagement is changing. Make every connection count.
Forumbee
Build a thriving online community and knowledge base to engage users, deflect tickets, and accelerate product adoption.
CMNTY Corporation
CMNTY spent years turning the messy work of listening to customers into one research room. Now, under MarketResponse, its mix of communities, live conversations and analysis shows why the best insight tools do more than count answers.
Circle
Build a home for your community, events, and courses - all under your own brand.
AnswerHub
The enterprise Q&A platform that let Epic Games, Unity, and IBM build their own Stack Overflows - born from DZone's developer empire, now part of IgniteTech's software portfolio.