We aren’t afraid of competition at Open Social. In fact, we’ve gone out of our way — continue reading
We aren’t afraid of competition at Open Social. In fact, we’ve gone out of our way to create a number of detailed comparisons with our top competitors, such as Hivebrite & Jive, so that anyone who is interested in Open Social knows that they are making the best choice for their organization.
The 62 points of comparison between Open Social & Hivebrite
The best way to compare two similar products is to put them side-by-side and see how they match up. To facilitate this process, we created a guide with 62 points of comparison for you to download, flip through, and use it to inform your decision making!
We compare the two software on:
- Price
- Basic online community features
- Advanced online community features
- Collaboration and co-working features
- Platform customizability
- Unique features
Want to see how Open Social compares to Hivebrite, Facebook Workplace, Discourse, and other competitors? See all our competitor comparison guides here.
What is Hivebrite and what does member monetization mean?
Like Open Social, Hivebrite is an online community platform that allows organizations to manage members and give them an online space to connect, communicate, and share information.
Hivebrite has four main solutions that align to the industry specializations of Open Social: Corporate Alumni, Education, Professional Network, and NGO. Open Social has the corresponding solutions: Online communities, which are focused on NGOs; Social Learning; Social Intranet, which is focused on professional networks; and Knowledge Platform.
On the surface, Hivebrite and Open Social look like pretty similar products. But when you start looking closely at Hivebrite’s features and offerings, however, you realize that it is a very different software solution. What makes Hivebrite unique is that it has a strong focus on the commercial side of online community creation, such as monetizing membership. For example, just like Open Social, it allows the creation of community events. But Hivebrite has a specific focus on ticketing, ticket pricing, and online payments for events.
It also has features for targeted email campaigns that allow you to market to your community. And while Hivebrite has an NGO solution, their focus is not on organizing volunteers or creating member-driven goals for an NGO, but rather on facilitating fundraising and driving donation campaigns within a community.
If this is your organization’s primary focus when creating an online community, Hivebrite would suit you well. However, if your organization focuses is more on building an active, and productive community that can generate internal value instead of revenue, then keep on reading!
What is Open Social best suited for?
What makes Open Social unique is that it uses open-source technology. This not only means that we benefit from the expertise of a large international community of tech experts, volunteers, and professionals, but it also means that the company and product has a certain philosophy.
Our products focus on innovation through collaboration, co-working, and creating shared knowledge. This is why Open Social is much more focused on features such as realtime collaboration, crowd-innovation, resource libraries, and much more. The Crowd Innovation extension, for example, allows your community to create and develop new ideas or projects through community collaboration. The Policy Kitchen community uses this feature to help shapes foreign policy through the promotion of open dialogue
Open Social also focus much more on the growth and development of your community. This is done through our Social Learning solution, with features such as graded e-learning courses, quizzes and certificates.
By contrast, Hivebrite’s Education solution focuses on boosting “alumni placement statistics” and how to “facilitate fundraising”.
If your aim is to create a more engaged, active, and continuously developing community, then Open Social is for you.
So what should you choose for your organization?
Although they might, at first glance, look very similar, Open Social & Hivebrite each offer very different approaches. To decide which one you need, you have to think about what the specific aim of your online community will be.
For a more in-depth and data-driven comparison, you can always also take a look at our #62 Points of Comparison Between Open Social & Hivebrite guide.
Of course, there is a much easier way to find out which platform will work best for you: take them for a test-drive. You can easily schedule a demo of Open Social, and even see what it would look like set up specifically for your organization. Simply schedule a live 1:1 demo below:
