Creating a Community & Forum

Smart CRM & Sales Hub Tips, Tricks & Best Practices
1

We built an app, we’d like to build a open community to ask questions, share feedback and make feature requests. Very similar to what what community.hubspot.com is. My question is, are there any products out there that do this and connect to HubSpot? Even better, what is community.hubspot.com built on?

Thanks,
Andrew

2

Hi @AMS_Andy,

The HubSpot Community is hosted by a third party vendor, Khoros.

For a full list of integrations available with HubSpot, I wanted to share this resource as well.

Thank you,
Jenny

3

Great thanks for the info!

4

I don’t see Khoros in your App marketplace. Is it no longer supported?

5

Create a Forum Website:
1. Pick a location to host your forum.
2. Choose software to create your forum website.
3. Organize your forum’s structure.
4. Design your forum’s theme.
5. Create user rules for your forum website.
6. Start conversations with interesting discussion topics.
7. Publish your forum on your website.

6

Thanks for sharing these tips, @TKeller14!

7

Don’t forget to promote it early on—getting initial members can really fischgrät kickstart the activity.

8

HubSpot does not currently have a forum feature. The only option is to create a subdomain and host the forum there.

In terms of recommendations, here are some popular options for you to consider:

  1. Discourse - a modern, open-source forum platform with a managed forum service option. It’s probably the most popular option today.
  2. BetterMode - A newer alternative. I have never tried this.
  3. Flarum - an open-source, free forum platform. I’ve used it for a personal project. The setup is a bit complicated, but its usage is very intuitive. Some coding and server setup are required.

There are some other older options like XenForo, Simple Machines Forum, and MyBB. It has been quite some time since I checked them, so I’m not sure if they have caught up with the newer JavaScript-based forums like the three options I listed above.

Hope it helps.

Best regards,

Abraham Ernesto

9

That’s an awesome idea for fostering engagement! I believe HubSpot’s community platform is built on Zendesk’s community tool voltix. There are also other options like Discourse or Vanilla Forums, which offer integration with HubSpot. Could help streamline everything in one place.