The community platform space has matured a lot in the past few years, and a number of teams running long-standing platforms like Khoros are taking the opportunity to re-evaluate. It’s a reasonable instinct: there are a ton of enterprise-grade alternatives to Khoros nowadays that offer use cases like onboarding, peer support, advocacy, and customer-led growth.
According to Gartner’s 2026 Market Guide for B2B Customer Community Platforms, client inquiries related to customer communities jumped 33% between April 2025 and March 2026 compared to the prior year. B2B buyers increasingly rely on peer knowledge and trust when making purchasing decisions, and community has become one of the primary channels for building both.
The list below are Khoros alternatives to consider, with Gainsight first and the remaining options alphabetically listed.
What to Look for in a Khoros Alternative
Before evaluating vendors, it helps to define what your community actually needs to do. The core use cases for enterprise B2B communities cluster around a few areas: onboarding and product adoption, self-service support and ticket deflection, peer networking and events, customer advocacy, and ideation and product feedback. Which of those use cases are most important to your business? Choosing a vendor is a lot easier when you can narrow down on which vendor is best fit for your individual use case.
Beyond use cases, Gartner identifies five capability categories worth evaluating in any platform: self-service and collaboration tools, community architecture, member engagement features like gamification, integrations with your existing tech stack, and administration and analytics.
AI is increasingly a baseline expectation, not a differentiator. Look for platforms with AI-powered search, automated moderation, content summarization, and a credible roadmap toward agentic capabilities.
The 10 Best Khoros Alternatives for Enterprise Communities
Gainsight Customer Communities
Gainsight Customer Communities is a comprehensive, enterprise-grade platform that centralizes peer-to-peer support, knowledge sharing, ideation, and events. It is designed for upper midmarket to enterprise B2B organizations and is frequently deployed across customer success, support, customer marketing, and product teams. Gainsight’s broader portfolio means community data can be connected to customer health signals and product usage insights, giving cross-functional teams a more complete view of the customer. On the AI front, Gainsight currently offers a Community MCP Server, AI-powered moderation, AI translations, and vibe coding for community customization, with broader agentic capabilities on the roadmap.
Best for: Enterprises that want community tightly integrated with customer success workflows, account health data, and customer education, particularly organizations that want to tightly link their Academy education programs and community programs already using Skilljar for their customer academy. Learn more in our community.
Not Ideal for: Organizations looking for a lightweight, quick-to-deploy community with minimal configuration requirements.
Worth noting: Gainsight makes new features general availability based on feature readiness rather than a calendar to innovate as fast as possible. If you’re used to a schedule of releases, this is something to be aware of.
Bettermode
Bettermode is a fully customizable, community platform designed to embed directly into products, websites, and applications. Its modern social-style UX supports feeds, reactions, badges, leaderboards, events, polls, and private messaging, alongside advanced federated search and a flexible CMS. AI capabilities have expanded beyond spam detection to include AI-generated answers, enhanced search, and automated moderation.
Best for: Companies that are just starting their community motion, need to stand up a basic community quickly, and are working without existing community infrastructure or a large implementation budget.
Not Ideal for: Large enterprises with complex implementation requirements, deep integration needs, or established community infrastructure.
Worth noting: Bettermode is a newer entrant relative to some competitors. Teams with very complex enterprise requirements may want to validate depth of customer support and implementation services before committing.
Bevy
Bevy is an enterprise community platform, and they focus heavily on events and user groups. It is built to support distributed, chapter-based community models at scale. In July 2025, Bevy acquired Intros AI and launched an AI-powered Engagement Hub that adds agents for gamification, content creation, and moderation to the platform.
Best for: Enterprises that want to build and manage field or chapter-based community events such as user groups, regional meetups, and developer chapters. Particularly strong for developer-facing brands running distributed, volunteer-led community programs at scale.
Not Ideal for: Organizations where events are a secondary priority and peer discussion, knowledge sharing, or self-service support are the primary community use cases.
Worth noting: Bevy’s heritage is in events. If events isn’t a big part of your community strategy, you will be better served by other full community hub platforms.
Circle
Circle is a modern, all-in-one community platform that brings together discussions, courses, events, memberships, and branded mobile apps in a single interface. It launched a significant platform update in 2025 that added gamification, AI agents, and automation workflows. Circle has built a reputation for ease of use and a polished member experience.
Best for: Creators, coaches, and membership businesses that want an elegant, easy-to-deploy community targeted at consumers with integrated course and monetization tools.
Not Ideal for: Enterprise B2B organizations requiring deep CRM integrations, enterprise-grade security controls, or the kind of scalable customer success workflows that large Khoros deployments typically depend on.
Worth noting: Circle’s core customer base and product heritage is firmly in the consumer creator economy rather than enterprise B2B. Organizations migrating from Khoros will likely find it lacks the depth of enterprise controls, CRM integrations, and customer success workflows that large B2B deployments require. Teams with complex subcommunity structures, SSO requirements, or dedicated implementation needs should evaluate carefully before committing.
Discourse
Discourse offers an open-source community platform that can serve as a white-labeled extension of a company’s digital presence. Its architecture prioritizes developer control, data sovereignty, and extensibility. Discourse is self-hostable for organizations that require it, and offers AI translation for user-generated content as well as an AI bot to assist with custom queries.
Best for: Developer and highly technical communities and organizations that prioritize data ownership, open-source flexibility, and developer-driven customization. Developer Relations teams are a strong fit for Discourse.
Not Ideal for: Teams without internal engineering resources, or organizations that need a managed, out-of-the-box experience with minimal technical overhead.
Worth noting: Discourse’s strength is also its constraint. It’s the most code-friendly community platform, but teams without strong internal engineering resources may find configuration and ongoing customization overkill.
Gradual
Gradual is an all-in-one community platform that unifies events, content, discussions, and member networking in a single branded environment. It positions itself as a modular solution that allows organizations to start with one use case and expand over time. The platform is SOC 2 certified.
Best for: Smaller or earlier-stage organizations that want a flexible, easy-to-launch community hub combining events and content in one place.
Not Ideal for: Enterprise organizations with large existing communities, complex compliance requirements, or a need for proven vendor stability at scale.
Worth noting: Gradual is an early-stage company that has raised a modest amount of seed funding to date. For enterprise teams coming off Khoros, the maturity of the platform, depth of enterprise integrations, and long-term vendor stability are worth scrutinizing carefully. Organizations with large existing communities, complex compliance requirements, or significant customization needs may find the platform’s enterprise readiness has not yet caught up to its ambitions.
Higher Logic Vanilla
Higher Logic Vanilla is a standalone community platform that has been focused exclusively on community for nearly 20 years. What is worth understanding before evaluating Vanilla is that their primary focus is on their Thrive product, their association-focused platform. The majority of their engineering resources and strategic investments are split across both Thrive and Vanilla. Recent AI additions include AI search, AI-generated discussion summaries, and AI-suggested answers. For Khoros migrants, Vanilla requires third-party tools or custom API work to replicate native integrations for CS health scores, product usage, and customer education platforms.
Best for: Companies with a mid-to-large customer base that need a proven standalone community platform and do not require deep integration with a CS, PX, or CE platform.
Not ideal for: Global organizations that require true multilingual support, or teams that need community data natively connected to customer health, product analytics, or a customer education platform without custom integration work.
Worth noting: Higher Logic’s multilingual support relies on subcommunities as a workaround rather than native multilingual architecture, which creates challenges for enterprise teams operating across multiple regions and languages.
Salesforce Experience Cloud
Salesforce Experience Cloud is included in the broader Salesforce platform, making it appear to be a low-cost option for existing customers. In practice, it has seen minimal product investment since ~2018, and building or maintaining a community on it requires ongoing developer resources for even routine updates. For teams coming off Khoros and looking for a modern, actively developed community solution, Experience Cloud is unlikely to fill that gap.
Best for: Enterprises already deeply invested in the Salesforce ecosystem that want a basic community presence and have access to dedicated developer resources to build and maintain it.
Not Ideal for: Organizations that want a community team to own and manage their platform without developer dependency, or teams looking for a vendor that is actively investing in community as a core product.
Worth noting: Even for existing Salesforce customers, meaningful community experiences require significant custom development work. It is also worth noting that community is not a strategic priority for Salesforce as a business. With Slack as their primary collaboration and engagement surface, Experience Cloud has seen almost no meaningful product innovation in recent years, and there is little indication that is changing.
ServiceNow Communities
ServiceNow Communities is delivered through the ServiceNow Platform and packaged as a component within ServiceNow Customer Service Management. It supports branded communities for customers, partners, and employees, with forums, activity feeds, event hosting, gamification, AI-powered moderation, and personalized content recommendations. The roadmap focuses on agentic AI, deeper ServiceNow product integration, and mobile optimization.
Best for: Enterprises already running ServiceNow for customer service management that want community as a native extension of that environment.
Not Ideal for: Organizations outside the ServiceNow ecosystem, or those looking for a standalone community platform with a strong independent customer reference base.
Worth noting: Like Salesforce, this product is most compelling for existing platform customers. ServiceNow has not published customer references for the Communities product, which makes independent validation harder during evaluation.
Verint Community
Verint Community is available as an application on Verint’s Open Platform or as an on-premises deployment, which makes it one of the few options on this list for organizations with strict data residency or on-premise requirements. It provides social and self-service features including blogs, forums, wikis, articles, and multimedia resource galleries, with open APIs and built-in tools for theme, widget, automation, and email customization.
Best for: Enterprises that require on-premise deployment or have strict data residency requirements, and organizations already using Verint’s broader engagement suite.
Not Ideal for: Organizations that require a modern, cloud-first deployment or do not have specific on-premises or data residency requirements that justify the tradeoff.
Worth noting: The Thoma Bravo acquisition is recent. As with any private equity transition, teams evaluating Verint should ask direct questions about product investment priorities and roadmap continuity.
How to Evaluate Your Options
No single platform is right for every organization. The right starting point is a clear articulation of your primary use case, your existing tech stack, and whether you need a standalone community platform or something that fits within a broader suite.
A few questions worth asking every vendor during evaluation:
- What does the implementation timeline and cost look like beyond the license?
- What AI capabilities are available today versus on the roadmap?
- And for teams migrating from Khoros specifically, what does the data migration process look like and what support is provided?
The market is active, well-resourced, and competitive. Khoros teams that take this moment to evaluate deliberately are likely to find a platform that fits their needs more precisely.
Frequently Asked Questions About Khoros Alternatives
What are the best Khoros alternatives for enterprise B2B communities?
The strongest Khoros alternatives for enterprise B2B communities includes Gainsight Customer Communities, among others. The right choice depends on your primary use case, existing tech stack, and whether you need a standalone platform or one that integrates into a broader suite like Salesforce or ServiceNow.
Why are companies looking for Khoros alternatives in 2026?
IgniteTech acquired Khoros in May 2025, and a number of experienced community professionals associated with the platform have since moved on, prompting enterprise teams to evaluate their options. This has led many organizations to assess which community platform best serves their current and future needs.
What features should an enterprise B2B community platform include?
Enterprise community platforms should support self-service and peer collaboration, member engagement tools like gamification and events, and robust integrations with CRM, customer success, and support systems. AI capabilities including intelligent search, automated moderation, and content summarization are increasingly considered baseline requirements rather than differentiators.
Is Gainsight Customer Communities a good replacement for Khoros?
Gainsight Customer Communities is one of the most frequently chosen destinations for teams migrating off Khoros, with over 25 completed migrations to date. It offers enterprise-grade scale, native integrations with customer success and education platforms, and an actively invested product roadmap, which addresses many of the concerns that have prompted Khoros customers to evaluate alternatives.
How long does it take to migrate from Khoros to Gainsight Customer Communities?
Migration timelines vary depending on the size and complexity of the community, but Gainsight has a structured migration playbook covering data extraction, URL mapping, and redirects. Adobe, one of the largest software communities in the world, completed their migration on a timeline that even their own team described as faster than they thought possible given the scale involved.
