Love this company
Love this company. Loved the REIGN product. They were there the entire time helping me set things up; and when things went wrong? They were quick to take action and help find a solution.
Forum · Free OSS / $689+/mo cloud
Reign vs Vanilla Forums.
Vanilla is the alternative to Discourse for forum-only sites. Reign wins for sites that need community + LMS + commerce together.
Honest take.
R
Reign wins
The forum plus everything a forum was never meant to do: member profiles, an activity feed, groups, badges and ranks, with courses, events or a directory available later without changing platform. One user record carries all of it. Running on WordPress hosting you probably already pay for, the marginal cost of the community is close to nothing.
V
Vanilla Forums wins
A mature, well-understood forum with an open-source core, so self-hosting it already gives you ownership. Years of refinement in the areas that matter at scale: threading, moderation, spam handling and performance on very large discussion tables. If a forum is genuinely all you need, there is no urgent reason to move away from something working.
What your members will notice.
Forum regulars notice their history is intact, or they notice it is not, and there is no middle ground. Get the import right and the reaction is quiet approval. What they gain is a profile, a feed and badges that reflect what they have actually contributed over the years. The password reset is the one friction, and for a long-running forum it is worth a pinned announcement a week ahead rather than a surprise email.
6 comparisons.
| Feature | Reign | Vanilla Forums |
|---|---|---|
| Primary use case | Multi-shape community | Forum-only |
| Pricing (cloud) | $99 + hosting | $689+/month |
| LMS integration | Native | External only |
| Marketplace | Native | Not designed for it |
| Source code | Yours, on your server | Open-source core, paid cloud |
| Profiles, feed and groups | BuddyNext, installs free | Forum profiles only |
3 of our own plugins, and every one installs free.
Vanilla stops at the forum. Jetonomy handles that, and BuddyNext adds the profiles, feed and groups a forum-only product leaves out.
Jetonomy
Forums and Q&A
Spaces, threaded discussions, Q&A with accepted answers, voting.
Free to install, Pro from $69/yr
BuddyNext
Community engine
Member profiles, activity feed, groups, messages, notifications.
Free to install, Pro from $149/yr
WB Gamification
Points and badges
Points, badges, and ranks earned from real member activity.
Free to install
You buy the Reign theme once. These are ours and they install free, so the theme stays the only purchase until one part of your community earns enough to need its Pro plan.
What you are actually choosing.
Vanilla is a mature forum with an open-source core and a paid cloud offering, and if a forum is all you need it does the job well. The choice here is about scope rather than quality. A forum gives you threads and it stops there: no real member profiles, no activity feed, no courses, no events, no directory. Jetonomy covers the forum properly, with spaces, threaded discussion, Q&A and accepted answers, and BuddyNext adds the profiles, feed and groups that a forum-only product was never built to provide. Both install free.
What it costs over three years.
Vanilla's open-source core is free to licence and costs you a server and the time to run it. Their cloud plans start around $689 a month, which is roughly $25,000 across three years. Reign is $99 a year or $249 once and runs on ordinary WordPress hosting you may already pay for, with Jetonomy, BuddyNext and WB Gamification free. If you are self-hosting Vanilla happily, the money argument is weak and the scope argument is the real one.
What moving actually involves.
Vanilla has a documented export and a conventional forum data model, so categories, discussions and comments map onto Jetonomy spaces, posts and replies without heroics. Users are the usual snag, since password hashes do not carry across and everyone resets once. The part worth real attention is URLs: forum threads accumulate search rankings over years, so map every old thread URL to its new post and serve 301s. That single step decides whether the move costs you traffic.
When to stay on Vanilla Forums.
Stay on Vanilla if the forum is the whole product, it is running well and your team is comfortable operating it. It is a solid piece of software and there is no prize for switching away from something that works. The reason to move is having outgrown a forum, where the next thing you need is courses, events or a member directory and adding them to Vanilla means running a second platform beside it.
How the pieces fit together.
Everything runs on one WordPress install, which is the part that changes how the site feels to use. One login, one member table, one set of roles. A member who joins the community is already the same person when they enrol on a course, RSVP to an event or post in the forum, because there is no integration between products, only plugins reading the same database. Against Vanilla the forum itself is a fair fight, so the difference is what surrounds it. Jetonomy covers spaces, threads, Q&A and accepted answers. BuddyNext adds the member profiles, activity feed and groups that a forum-only product does not have, and WB Gamification turns participation into points, badges and ranks. The same user record carries a member's forum history, their profile and anything you add later.
The first week.
You already know forum administration, so spend the first week on structure and redirects rather than learning software. Install the theme, BuddyNext and Jetonomy, recreate your category tree as spaces, then run the import into staging and check a sample of threads for formatting and attachments. Build the redirect map as part of the import rather than afterwards, because reconstructing it later from memory is where forums lose their rankings.
Questions people ask before moving.
- Is Vanilla not open source already?
- The core is, and that is worth stating plainly. If ownership is your only concern, self-hosted Vanilla already gives it to you. The argument for moving is scope: you have a forum and nothing else, so the day you need courses or events you are maintaining two systems.
- Can I import Vanilla discussions?
- Yes. Vanilla's export is documented and its data model is conventional, so categories become Jetonomy spaces, discussions become posts and comments become replies. Budget the time for users and redirects rather than for the content itself, which is the straightforward part.
- Will I keep my search rankings?
- Only with redirects. Old forum threads are usually the most valuable pages a community owns, because they have ranked for years. Map each thread URL to its new post and serve a 301. Do that and rankings transfer with a short dip; skip it and you start from nothing.
- What do I gain over a forum?
- Member profiles, an activity feed and groups from BuddyNext, badges and ranks from WB Gamification, and the option to add courses, events, a job board or a directory later without changing platform. All on one login and one database, which is the part that matters.
- Does Jetonomy handle large forums?
- It is built for it, with the usual caveat that scale is a hosting question as much as a software one. Indexing, object caching and a host sized for the traffic matter more than the plugin once you pass a few hundred thousand posts. Test with your real data before you commit.
- Will attachments and images come across?
- They can, but they need handling deliberately rather than assuming the export carries them. Pull the files down, upload them into the WordPress media library and rewrite the references during the import. Check a sample of image-heavy threads before you trust the whole run.
- What about our existing SSO?
- WordPress supports SAML and OAuth through mature plugins, so most existing identity providers can be reconnected. It is configuration rather than a switch, and it is worth testing with real accounts early because authentication problems surface late and badly.
- Is there a size where this stops working?
- Not a plugin limit so much as a hosting one. Past a few hundred thousand posts the deciding factors are database indexing, object caching and a host sized for it. Test with a copy of your real data rather than a sample, because forum tables behave differently at scale.
- What does hosting actually cost?
- Hosting is the running cost people forget to budget. A small community runs comfortably on shared or entry-level managed WordPress hosting for a few hundred dollars a year. Past a few thousand active members you want managed hosting with object caching, which is more like $50 to $100 a month. That is still an order of magnitude below $689 a month for a cloud plan, and unlike a subscription it buys you infrastructure you control rather than access you rent.
- What happens to our oldest threads?
- They come across, and they matter more than you might assume: on a long-running forum the decade-old threads are usually the highest-traffic pages you own. Import them, keep their URLs redirected, and check a sample from each era, because formatting conventions change over the years and the oldest posts are where an import breaks quietly.