Best Community Platforms

What are Community Platforms?

Community Platforms enable businesses to create and manage online spaces for customer engagement, support, and collaboration. These solutions are designed to foster meaningful interactions and provide valuable feedback from the community.

To learn more, read our Community Platforms Buyer's Guide (Updated: January 2025).

The top 5 Community Platform solutions are Salesforce Community Cloud, Zendesk, Sprinklr, Lithium and Pypestream, as ranked by PeerSpot users in December 2024. Salesforce Community Cloud received the highest rating of 9.0 among the leaders. Zendesk is the most popular solution in terms of searches by peers, and Sprinklr holds the largest mind share of 29.4%.

Community Platforms offer tailored features for enhancing user experience, monitoring discussions, and integrating other business tools. A well-implemented platform can lead to a stronger brand presence, improved customer loyalty, and insightful data collection. They include moderation tools, analytics, and many customization options to fit specific needs. Community Platforms are suitable for varying industries, allowing companies to build a customer-centric approach. Real users often highlight the flexibility, ease of use, and extensive integration capabilities of these solutions.

What are key features of Community Platforms?

User Management: Manage user access and permissions effectively.
Customizable Design: Tailor the look and feel of the community to match your brand.
Analytics: Track user engagement and gather valuable insights.
Integration: Seamlessly connect with CRM, email marketing, and other tools.
Moderation Tools: Maintain a safe and productive environment with content moderation features.

What benefits can users expect from Community Platforms?

Enhanced Engagement: Promote active participation and interaction among users.
Improved Customer Support: Facilitate peer-to-peer support and faster response times.
Data Collection: Gain insights into customer needs and preferences.
Brand Loyalty: Strengthen connections and build trust with your audience.
Resource Efficiency: Reduce support costs by leveraging community-driven solutions.

In the technology sector, Community Platforms are used to support user groups, provide product feedback, and enhance customer support. Retail industries may implement these platforms to engage with customers, address inquiries, and promote user-generated content. Educational institutions use them for student interactions and collaborative projects.

Building a thriving community is helpful for organizations aiming to enhance customer relations, gather valuable feedback, and foster a sense of belonging among users.

Buyer's Guide

Community Platforms

January 2025

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Helped 831,265 peers since 2012

Community Platforms solutions mindshare

As of January 2025, in the Community Platforms category, the mindshare of Sprinklr is 29.4%, up from 11.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Salesforce Community Cloud is 20.6%, down from 33.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Zendesk is 26.5%, up from 12.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Community Platforms

Top Community Platforms products

Rankings through

#1 Ranked

Salesforce Community Cloud

Salesforce Community Cloud, a social platform, that connects and collaborate with customers, partners, and employees. Build a community for everyone critical to your business ecosystem, from agencies, vendors, and suppliers, to patients, job applicants, and even retail locations. Community Cloud employs Salesforce's Chatter social CRM platform for chat and screensharing, allowing users to exchange data and images in real time throughout an ongoing conversation. The platform supports customer relationship management (CRM) and provides channels for customers to find information and communicate with other customers. The console also includes a "Buy" button to enable e-commerce.

9.0

Rating

Reviews

306

Words/ Review

1,604

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Zendesk

Zendesk Support is intuitive, and it's built with support agents in mind. Everything they need lives in a single, dynamic help desk interface so it's easy to be productive and manage customer interactions.

7.7

Rating

Reviews

431

Words/ Review

3,608

Total Views

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831,265 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Sprinklr

Sprinklr is an established customer experience platform (CMX) used by many well-known business giants to advertise, market, and research. Sprinklr understands the needs of customers for a unified experience and provides them with modern research, modern care, modern marketing and advertising, and social engagement and sales, helping companies improve their reach as well as their ROI.

7.5

Rating

Reviews

531

Words/ Review

912

Total Views

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Lithium

Lithium is an integrated platform for social media management, sets for marketing and customer service, that combines Social Publishing that manages entire social strategy with a single tool and boost engagement by publishing the right content at the right time, driven by Klout data and Social Response feature that responds to inquiries on social networks in seconds and provide private and trusted customer care in real-time, regardless of channel.

132

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Pypestream

Pypestream is a customer engagement solution founded to help enterprises establish a trusted direct to consumer relationship. We provide a two-way persistent connection via private messaging with AI-backed conversational experiences, or “pypes”. Pypestream digitally transforms and automates customer service, marketing & promotions, and business to employee engagements across a variety of industries.

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Pypestream vs Salesforce Community Cloud

Falcon.io

Falcon.io provides a platform for social media marketing and customer experience management. It features tools for social media listening, engagement, publishing, measuring and customer data management. Using it marketers and companies can deliver more personalized brand experiences, across touchpoints, based on enriched customer profiles. The platform is complemented by comprehensive support and consultancy services.

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Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Community Platforms solutions are best for your needs.

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831,265 professionals have used our research since 2012.

SocialEngine

SocialEngine empowers online communities with customizable features. It supports plugins, themes, and extensive member management, enhancing user engagement. Users appreciate easy setup and feature-rich options. However, improvements could be made in technical support and minor customization issues for a smoother community management experience.

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Answerbase

Answerbase is a user-friendly knowledge management platform for online self-service customer support and e-commerce. It allows users to ask questions, receive quality answers, and browse helpful content and articles to effectively meet the information demands of your customers about your products and services. Each system comes with easy-to-use administration and moderation tools to customize, manage and grow an engaging platform that saves your business time and resources by reducing duplicate inquiries. Advanced features like moderation, user group management (giving users the appropriate content access and functional permissions), actionable content insights, collaboration notes, answer drafting and private question management give administrators the tools they need to effectively manage all of your content, users and access.Businesses have the ability to enable or disable community Q&A capabilities, giving you the ability to effectively leverage the expertise of your customers, product evangelists, and other industry experts. Allow select experts and thought leaders to answer questions, maintain a profile, vote on the quality of answers and be recognized for their contributions on leader boards with reputation points, badges and highlighted areas of expertise.Answerbase’s white-labeled platform allows you to easily customize the look and feel of your site. Simply add your logo and select a color scheme for your site for a quick setup, or use the advanced tools to add your own header, footer, CSS, and more, for full control over your platform's design and navigation. Widget builders and API’s empower you to accomplish even the most sophisticated integrations or even build your own Answerbase-powered Q&A applications.Answerbase Enterprise allows for 100% custom adaptations and developments to take whatever ideas, new functionalities or integration requirements you may have and make them a reality. Our knowledgeable team will manage setup, integration, and provide web-based education and training to make sure your team has all the tools and information they need to successfully manage and grow your site.

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Aurigo Engage

Maximize project success with Aurigo Engage: your secure, online solution for community engagement and feedback collection across construction, environmental, and community impact projects. Reach more of your constituents using social media and take advantage of AI-based analysis to spot trends early and cut processing time. Aurigo Engage gives everyone in your community an equitable opportunity to participate in the process. Digitize your community engagement and unlock the power of connectivity.

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IBM Security App Exchange

IBM Security App Exchange is an on-line repository for sharing software enhancements to IBM Security products developed by clients, Business Partners, systems integrators and even IBM employees. It's a next step in helping clients build more collaborative security defenses begun with the recent introduction of the IBM X-Force Exchange platform. While X-Force Exchange provides aggregated threat intelligence and a platform for peer collaboration to add human context to machine-generated intelligence, the App Exchange provides a platform to share professionally developed tools and technologies, but also encourages rapid innovation through crowdsourcing of client contributions.

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Arena Community

Arena Community addresses collaboration needs with valuable features including real-time chat and event management. Users appreciate its customization options but note room for improvement in analytics and mobile app performance.

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