Hivebrite

comprehensive and user-friendly platform

Pros:

Hivebrite is a comprehensive and user-friendly platform that effortlessly bridges the gap between organizations and their communities. The customizability of the platform stands out, allowing for a tailored experience that aligns perfectly with the specific needs and branding of any organization. The variety of tools available for engagement, from event management to membership directories, fosters a vibrant community atmosphere. Additionally, Hivebrite’s support team is exceptional, providing quick and helpful responses to any queries or issues that arise.

Cons:

While the platform is generally user-friendly, some users might find the initial setup and navigation through the plethora of features a bit overwhelming without thorough guidance.

Great for hosting online community discussions; event capabilities are a work in progress

Comments: The Hivebrite people are amazing! Our implementation team was top-notch. While we are experiencing some issues with our back-end Salesforce integration, and a few shortfalls in event registration management, overall Hivebrite is a much better bang-for-our-buck than our previous platform. It is also continuing to grow and improve which means we're on the forefront of community-building tech.

Pros:

The community discussion tools are top notch!

Cons:

The event capabilities show promise but need work until they meet the needs of ever-growing and expanding nonprofits.

Accessibility

Comments: None

Pros:

Easiness of creating and sharing content

Perfect Platform for Alumni Relations (Even a 1-Person Alumni Relations Office)!

Comments: I am a one-person team for my alumni relations office. The fact that I met with vendors over a three month period and then designed and launched the platform in 8 weeks means that anyone can do it and it's a very user-friendly product. I would highly recommend Hivebrite to universities to use this platform for their alumni, students, faculty, and staff engagement/professional development platform.

Pros:

This platform is all-encompassing. It's nice because you can just turn on and off features as you need them. Most companies make you "add-on" additional modules which is expensive and annoying. The only add-ons that isn't included for Hivebrite is Mentoring and Campaigns, but these add-ons are cheap compared to other vendors. It's a very easy platform to use and brand the way you want it.

Cons:

Your IT team or a third party vendor has to complete the API's to sync with your alumni database which has been interesting to navigate. It would be nice if Hivebrite did it all in-house for you or worked with your IT team to make it happen. You also can't archive past events or forum discussions. This would be nice so that you can clear out these sections instead of seeing everything you've ever done.

YourMembership to Hivebrite migration

Comments: We needed to expand our community building effort beyond a single country, while ensuring that each entity may define different membership rates and collect fees in a separate account. The Groups and multiple Payment accounts capabilities provided by Hivebrite matched our requirements.

Pros:

it has been an enjoyable UX/UI experience using Hivebrite. A platform that combines some of the best features of Squarespace, Mailchimp, Facebook, LinkedIn and Kickstarter. It is easy to use and easy to integrate.

Cons:

The page builder functionality requires further refinement and enhancements, in addition to further enhancements across the reporting and analytics related to payments, email and web.

WARNING: Hivebrite has Ethical Issues

Comments: I'm not a fan of this company or their software. They assured me they would work with me as a start up that has very little funding. I explained their competitor Mighty Networks has a monthly package that could be a better fit. Their sales rep [SENSITIVE CONTENT]
promised they help companies like mine but when the platform was missing KEY functions that we discussed on DAY 1 of implementation I CANCELLED. After cancelling I didn't hear back from [SENSITIVE CONTENT] for weeks at which time he only defended his actions and said they will not cancel the agreement. As a minority owned startup, I should never have trusted them. Their sales tactics are unethical. Now I'm struggling to determine how to cover a $10k+ debt for software I never used or implemented at all. Seem they don't mind a quick snatch and grab. Seems criminal to me that a company with their supposed history would do this. But I wouldn't be surprised if there were a lot more people who they're doing this to. NO HUMAN BEING deserves this kind of treatment and I hope they get what they deserve for their unethical actions.

A good fit for community-building focus and basic resource sharing.

Comments: Overall, I think this is a great platform for connection, community building, and basic resource sharing.

Pros:

We enjoy the community building and interactive elements of our Hivebrite platform, including the live feed, forums, events, announcements, emails, app. We enjoy having a support team to troubleshoot technical issues.

Cons:

The lack of analytic information on what the users are consuming, and lack of support for team packages. We've had to manually build quite a bit to make our team-based structure work and have very minimal information and analytics on users activities. I'm concerned about the lack of attention on AI and analytics, especially in the L&D/courseware space.

A modular platform to suit all your community needs

Comments: Overall the Hivebrite platform is a fun, efficient and pleasing place to connect with our audience.

Pros:

The platform has a modular structure, so you can have everything or choose the modules that work for your community. You may not need all the available functionality so I love that I can turn on the modules that work for us and therefore make our community relevant to our members, clean and uncluttered and easy to navigate.

Cons:

The notification structure is a bit heavy in its regularity. You can manage this on your profile but I do think it could do with some improving to filter notifications to reduce the inbox getting full of emails.

Great for managing digital communities

Comments: Overall, Hivebrite has been an amazing platform to host our online community. We're looking forward to setting up the mobile app, which is included in our contract!

Pros:

- Easy to set up - Interface is completely customizable, also offer great design templates - Content management is seamless - Ability to automate content, host live digital events with Zoom integration - Fantastic CRM for managing users

Cons:

- Anything outside of their pre-set templates you are required to figure out on your own. Makes customization a little trickier if you don't have the technical expertise in-house. - Hivebrite offers API integration in the platform, but again, you need to figure it out on your own. More support on their end in setting it up would make things much easier for content managers.

Great platform with lots of functionalities!

Comments: An overall good experience, and good customer service.

Pros:

The multiple functionalities that it has and that it`s easy to use

Cons:

It gets a bit slow if you have a lot of information or tabs

So far, so good.

Pros:

Ease of use, and availability of the support team.

Cons:

There have been a decent amount of bugs so far, and so that's been problematic.

Powerful platform for managing a community!

Pros:

Love how personalizable this platform is to be able to align it with the organization and users! Great threads you can keep organized through job boards, larger forums, and other groups.

Cons:

Sometimes tricky to craft messages that are sophisticated from a graphic design perspective when launching email campaigns.

An essential platform to promote community participation and management.

Comments: I have been able to manage my database efficiently, send mass and personalized communications, and be able to create and promote events quickly and easily.

Pros:

I like how easy it is to set up and customize the platform to my needs, access to all features and tools so I was able to manage my data efficiently.

Cons:

It would be very helpful to have more detailed documentation or video tutorials to help me better understand how I can get the most out of it.

La Aprendedora at Hivebrite

Comments: Was great specially to have [SENSITIVE CONTENT] as customer support. He's great and was always close and helpful with problems and ideas.

Pros:

Flexibility, UX and adaptability. Customer service was great.

Cons:

To be honest, all good. I found the platform maybe a bit expensive considering other products in the market.

Great Choice for Alumni Orgs

Comments: HiveBrite has been instrumental in helping HBSANC reach our goals which centered around increased membership metrics and more efficiently executing our expansive events calendar (including a recent complete pivot from live to online events). HIveBrite’s Membership and Events modules has empowered us to reach all of those goals with the highest revenue numbers in club history and more club memberships than in the past five years and still climbing. Engagement is high as a large percentage of our alumni base is active on our platform even if they are not paid member. We have also successfully managed over 300 events in the past 2 years since migrating.

Pros:

- Migrating our data was incredibly challenging as our existing database had many duplicate users and a vast array of legacy fields to either map to existing fields or create custom fields for. Migration support went above and beyond to guide us in best practices for both cleaning the data, customizing fields and even developing custom filters for our alumni map specific to our org’s needs. - Ability to efficiently create value for our members with restricted access to online gated content and to features like the sleek Alumni map - eliminating the need for time consuming manual benefits we had been manually tracking previously - User friendly interface with all in one modules for events, emails, website, analytics - Great payment processing and integration with Stripe. - Always developing new features and modules to improve and listening to customer feature requests - Great customer service. The platform that have some limitations (as all platforms do) but their customer support team is always quick with a solution or work around. - Not an anonymous large company but working relationship with a team there to support us and cares about our success and meeting our goals.

Cons:

- Limited customization of reports- beta reporting module is in development - Lack of integration All in one and easy to use but It does not integrate with other platforms - No user forum to learn best practices for different features and use cases- I thinks is on the timeline

A Comprehensive Community Building Platform

Comments: Hivebrite has allowed us to double down on our community-centric approach to building a business and deliver a data backed approach to growing and maintaining a membership base of engaged and informed users. It has become a one-stop shop for all our member needs and the support and genuine interest from the Hivebrite team in how we deliver our implementation has allowed us to go beyond our initial goals for the platform and start to implement new initiatives and ideas with Hivebrite at its core.

Pros:

Hivebrite offers a huge amount of functionality to build and grow an online community. When searching for a software that could do it all Hivebrite came top of our list in terms of the sheer number of tools provided to help grow a community platform. The features, functionality and backend options allow you to really dial in the system to meet your needs - with core functionality that covers pretty much all aspects of building and running a community around your business, organisation or interest. It's relatively simple to build out a front end website, launch memberships, customise your membership portal and setup events, run email campaigns, share and store content and more. If you want to get more custom you can also dive into code, or connect your other platforms via the API which has proven very handy as we have scaled our business. The team is also super helpful in onboarding you onto how to make best use of the platform and build creative strategies to engage and inspire the community within - in fact i'd say that the customer support in general is one of the best in the business in terms of engagement, responsiveness and genuine interest in supporting your goals as a business.

Cons:

The app is a bit disappointing and doesn't do the web based product justice. UX improvements and gamification features on the front end would help users to explore and utilise the platform more regularly. Admin backend can sometimes be a little confusing to use - however the HIvebrite Customer Service is second to none in my experience.

Hivebrite is cooler + has richer functionality + is more flexible + is a ridiculously-good value

Comments: Seriously. I found Hivebrite at the very end of an exhaustive search of over 50 different alumni management platforms. After countless platform demos that would generally end with having witnessed a feature/function-poor platform, or witnessing a polished platform that cost 3x or 4x what my non-profit was looking to spend, I met Jean, who gave me a tour of the Hivebrite platform. I think at one point I literally asked Jean 'What's the catch?' because I didn't get it: Hivebrite was the sexiest, most-feature-rich platform I had seen, yet its price point was one of the lowest of all the vendors I had vetted. There was no catch. Jean and his team have built'and are continuing to evolve'an incredibly sophisticated alumni management and engagement platform. Let me expound just a bit on a few points: »»Cooler. Richer functionality.
- The overall structure of the site is clean and tastefully executed.
- The map interface of the `Events' of `People' is not just slick, but also super-functional as an intuitive and inviting way for alumni to engage with relevant fellow alumni and happenings. It's leaps and bounds better than anything I had seen from any provider.
- With its ability to have alumni create `pitch pages' for their businesses and ventures, interact in group and forum tabs, post and attend events together, Hivebrite simply does more'and does it better'than any other provider. Hivebrite's functionality actually gave me ideas on how I can create engagement with alumni that I had not previously thought of.
- Targeting a specific segment of your alumni for an email campaign is perfectly straightforward. Did I mention they have integrated email-campaign analytics?
- With all this functionality housed under one roof, I no longer need to waste time toggling back and forth between my alumni CRM/Eventbrite/MailChimp/etc. »»More flexible.
- When you talk to the support team at Hivebrite, if the answer isn't 'Yes', it's 'We'll make that a priority in our next iteration'. They have integrated many, many adaptation requests into their platform, and their platform is what it is today largely due to them improving based upon their client feedback. They have really valued my input and make me feel like we are on a team together, working to develop an awesome solution for my alumni and for my organization. That means the world to me. Thank you Jean, Flo, and the whole Hivebrite team for helping me do more for my alumni.

Flexible and powerful community management platform

Pros:

The Hivebrite platform is a powerful solution for our large and diverse community (currently 20,000+ users). Its core features (feed, directory) enable extensive engagement and collaboration among our members, while the additional functionality (esp. groups, events and campaigns) have enabled us to sustain meaningful sub-communities. The Hivebrite team provide strong technical support as well as thought leadership in the field of community management. It has been a pleasure to work with the team to enhance the platform's capabilities.

Cons:

As our community increases in size, we need the platform to do more work to enable users to discover relevant and meaningful content and connections. This is an area Hivebrite are actively working on, and we are already seeing some promising new and evolving features developed.

Hivebrite strengthens our capacity to address our alumni community

Comments: Very happy to have made to move and implemented Hivebrite . It has given us additional "muscle" to manage our association.

Pros:

With the implementation of Hivebrite we have replaced an outdated website. We are now in a position to manage a dynamic communication with our members and better manage events (e.g. managing registration of participants and communicating with them).

Cons:

For the time being we still have issues in making payments easier, in particular membership fees. We have technical issues to connect most usual payments systems in Switzerland with Hivebrite .

Best modulable alumni platfotm

Comments: We were looking for a database, alumni platform and a workspace (groupe with feed, media center, event for meeting and deadline..) and billingual.

Pros:

A lot of personalization (a lot of possibility) Easy to learn and use Best customer service you can have Easy to admin Always update et good communication If you have idea (new feature) you can submit them on the blog, people vote and the most voted are choosed for devloppement French and english customer service Billingual platform Back-Office CRM

Cons:

The mobile application need some optimisation The Media center is great but is not optimal as well Except that, I think it is the best software on the market (I looked for more than 25 alumni platform before making my top 3 than my final selection)

Super user-friendly, responsive, fun and simple platform for alumni!

Comments: It has been a great pleasure to work with Hivebrite team and to introduce this platform to alumni. As a luxury institution, we needed a unique product that would offer a high-quality solution for our end-users and optimise the current alumni network. This is exactly what we got from Hivebrite - a true win-win solution: a user-friendly and fun platform for alumni; and simple management and strong support for the alumni association.
The platform offers an easy-access to the alumni from anywhere and more opportunities to engage and stay connected.
Moreover, the Hivebrite team is constantly improving everyone's experience by actively listening to suggestions and finding innovative solutions for all requests.

Pros:

The features offered by Hivebrite platform are very useful for both end-users and the administrator, for example: - The possibility to connect with channels like LinkedIn simplifies the login for users: one less password to remember! And the simpler it is, the greater number of people will stay connected which will facilitate the administrators' jobs. - The interactive map and "check-ins" are an excellent tool for alumni to find each others and strengthen the network. - The possibility to create chapters is one of the most important features for our network. Through the chapter live feed, alumni can discuss the popular topics in their countries or organize more gatherings independently. For administrator, this feature helps in chapter management and creating greater alumni communities around the world. But the greatest advantage of this platform is that it is constantly improving. The Hivebrite team takes every suggestion into consideration in order to develop new features that enhance the users' experience even further. I cannot give them enough positive feedback!

Three years on , still happy to have chosen Hivebrite

Comments: We are lucky to have a great account manager at Hivebrite who facilitates all aspects of our contacts with the company. [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN] listens to what we say and comes back with solutions. A pleasure to work with him!

Pros:

Very easy to use, flexible AND reliable. You can tailor it to the contents and look & feel that you wish to give to your platform. The possibility to add any field of your choice, which are fully integrated in the overall standard functionality. Extensive search criteria for the community. Mobile app with push notifications. Excellent performance and responsiveness Fully multilingual - we serve both an English and a French audience

Cons:

Minor irritating bugs, little visibility on developments road map although this has improved recently.

An all-in-one platform to manage your alumni community

Comments: Fast and efficient customer support, dynamic team, very useful release radar webinars.

Pros:

When we chose the Hivebrite software, we compared it to other competitors on the French market. Almost two years after starting using it to manage our alumni community, we are very satisfied with our choice : this software as a system was hands on, easily customizable and useful in terms of features (mapped alumni directory, clusters, timeline, events, jobboard, statistics, etc.).

Cons:

Developing and launching new features (if requested by client) is not sistematically possible. The email builder would require some upgrades.

Solid platform for managing your alumni activities

Comments: All in all, solid alumni management tool. After using it for over a year, I see that they are continuously offering improved updates and adding features as well, so have kept using it.

Pros:

It's mostly covering all alumni management needs - you have a members directory, there's live feed to share news, you can set up alumni events and then send out newsletters automatically, all as one website. If needed, even collect payments via Stripe integration.

Cons:

There's certainly a learning curve that took a while on the admin side, but once you know it, you'll appreciate the many configuration options. On the event landing pages, I'd preferred to have sign-up/register button shown at the bottom, more distinctively.

After over a year trying to build with a major competitor, finding Hivebrite was a gift.

Pros:

-User's layout is easily intuitive and makes sense. -Content rich design has a lot of useful places for various types of data/info. -Elegant visual design that draws your members towards useful info. -Clean, cool, contemporary presentation. -For admin, the backend is smart, efficient, and makes sense relatively easy for an intelligent novice to quickly get it and get to work designing and building. -We're a U.S. law enforcement nonprofit and our member base is law enforcement. Obviously, data storage, login security, and hacking issues are important to us. We spent a lot of money trying to make another vendor's package adequately secure and never really got there. Hivebrite's top-tier data storage coupled with leveraging Google's streamlined sign-in authentication can't be beat. -Tech support is outstanding, brilliant people who know how to engage efficiently, and even smile. -Value. We shopped hard. We're getting so much more than we could find anywhere else, at a great price point. -After over a year of struggling to get a competitor's product to work, we almost launched nationally with the thought to just make-do. But just a couple weeks before launch, our engineer spent several nights scouring the competition. He sold us on abandoning all our work and switching one of our endeavors to Hivebrite. After our first day of building, we knew this was the platform for both projects. We know what's out there. Hivebrite can't be beat.