Hivebrite Reviews

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.

Alternatives Considered: Firsthand, PeopleGrove, Graduway, Qooper and Almabase

Reasons for Switching to Hivebrite: 1. Sales rep was not pushy or aggressive which I appreciated. PeopleGrove had a very aggressive sales person that was rude. 2. Cost - it's a good price compared to other vendors 3. All-inclusive - the modules are available to you at any time and you control when you turn them on or off

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.

Alternatives Considered: MemberClicks, CommUnity, Raklet and Wild Apricot

Reasons for Choosing Hivebrite: Follow this link for more information - YourMembership to Hivebrite migration — A Primer [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN]

Switched From: YourMembership

Reasons for Switching to Hivebrite: Hivebrite had all of the features we currently use from YourMembership, in addition to Projects, Companies, Career, Life Feed, Mentorship and Groups, allowing us to expand our community beyond a single country and more importantly a modern, responsive user interface (backend and frontend), at a comparable price.

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.

Alternatives Considered: Mighty Networks

Reasons for Switching to Hivebrite: In the end I chose Mighty Networks because they have an affordable monthly package that works better for me at this state of business.

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.

Alternatives Considered: AlumnForce and NetAnswer

Reasons for Switching to Hivebrite: Price, Platform features, GDPR compliance, data security...

Humanin Haus

Comments: Very good predisposition of our account manager

Pros:

is intuitive and resolved our interest in creating a community

Cons:

It is not 100% user frendly, we have to adapt our business to functionality, we still could not find a person to carry out the hivebrite integration with hubspot. We need them to improve quickly: media center, user scoring system and add functionality on discussion forum so that it can be carried out in synchronicity.

Alternatives Considered: Mighty Networks

Reasons for Switching to Hivebrite: Because Mighty Networks did not exist in Spanish

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.

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)

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.

Best Alumni platform ever

Comments: Currently the Alumni to which I belong is defining between AlmaShines and Hivebrite. AlmaShines is undoubtedly the most cost-effective, without a doubt, however Hivebrite has a better usability and aesthetics, which is making us have doubts about the final choice. If money is not an issue, your Alumni should definitely choose this platform.

Pros:

It is the platform that best implements the features. In particular, it is the only one that allows a high degree of customization in the construction of the platform's internal pages by the administrator himself, not depending on requesting changes to the company. It is the most beautiful and complete of all.

Cons:

Technical support is the worst of all compared to competitors. The price, while not the highest, is among the highest. There is a charge for each financial transaction made by users within the platform, in addition to the standard fee for Stripe and Paypal, which is quite abusive and inconvenient.

Alternatives Considered: Almashines and Graduway

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.

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

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!

Good software to manage communities

Comments: We were looking for a software to unite and engage a very spread alumni community all over the world. It served the purpose good although there is a lot of soft engagement to be done in our side. But the platform helps to keep engagement.

Pros:

Visual map of alumni is impressive. Easy events setup and communication is good. It will not fit all for sure, but will fit most.

Cons:

Some features can be improved but they are on their track.

Alternatives Considered: AlumnForce and Graduway

Reasons for Switching to Hivebrite: Several factors.

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.

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.

All in one Community building tool

Comments: Excellent. Our community has taken to it very well, the features are a great fit for our team and our community, and the support from our account manager and the support team has been really great.

Pros:

For us the best thing about this software has been how user friendly it is, both in the back end and for general users. This gave a greater uptake by users than expected and made it easier to on board new admins.

Cons:

In some aspects, more customisation options would be preferable. In some of the key features like events, or mentoring it would be great to be able to customise the buttons or labels, or forms to our needs.

Alternatives Considered: GoTo Connect

IIT Alumni review

Comments: .

Pros:

I like the Event section as it is very complete. The customer service is excellent and very punctual and always polite. The "People" page is very good, as it allows to have a quick visual of all the network and where it is located. The fact that I can pull out reports quite easily about many things from the "community" section in the back Office is also extremely useful!

Cons:

Certain section should be more customisable. Such as the wall or the job&careers page by, for example, adding filters - especially for the jobs. I would like the Digest to be more customisable and, especially, I would find very useful to be able to create more than just one page like the NEWS one. Meaning, more than one page in which single pieces of content can be seen listed all together and then, by clicking on the single content, access another page or a pop-up window. The fact that folders in the Media Center section cannot be given an image, instead of remaining simple blank folders, is not very appealing

Great Tool for Community Management

Comments: It has been fascinating to see Hivebrite grow over the years from a start-up to a hugely professional software provider with an extremely professional and fast helpdesk, great relationship manager and fantastic updates on some of the key features.

Pros:

The Live Feed, Events, and Directory are great features for a community. Particularly welcome are that the users are able to create their own events, post on the live-feed and update their profile as they wish. The customization is easy and allows to integrate into the existing CDI.

Cons:

The media center is even after 4 years not what I hoped it would do. It is difficult to share files for the users and in general just unclear to use. I am very much looking forward to the new mentoring module that is currently being implemented!

Hivebrite is essential to the way we support our global membership base

Comments: Hivebrite are a great company to work with - responsive and supportive to our needs they offer a great service that is affordable for an SME like ours. I would highly recommend.

Pros:

Very accessible and easy to use interface Customisable to allow for your own look and feel Provides most of the functionality you would look for in an online social community platform Friendly and approachable team Scalable for large numbers of users Easy to adopt

Cons:

It's a single platform architecture for all business users so limited customisation as all users receive the same updates/changes The integration of video conferencing within the platform would be a huge boost in functionality More customisation choices would be nice, but not essential

Alumni Network Platform from Hivebrite

Comments: The overall experience is great! Especially concerning the interaction with Hivebrite, they are very quick in assisting with any questions and solving problems. The team also regularly asks the customers for possible improvements and tries to implement those. In general the relationship with Hivebrite does not feel like a customer/service provider relationship but more like a collaboration of two organisations that work towards a common goal.

Pros:

The software is quite intuitive and easy to use also for people without a lot of computer experience. We love the design of the Network, it looks very modern and all the pictures as well as colors can be customized. One of the best features about this platform is that events, and news can be made public and used for marketing purposes. Also the built-in newsletter tool is a big advantage of this software.

Cons:

One downside of Hivebrite is, that eventhough the software creates great statistics about user activities, post etc. those statistics cannot be exported or filtered for certain periods. The software is also still very young and has some bugs, but the development team is working hard to resolve those as quick as possible.

internal networking platform with intuitive interface

Comments: It is was nice to work with such an experienced partner in community management, that not only offers good value for money, but also offers good advice in building a professional community platform.

Pros:

I especially like the event user tap. Via Hivebrite, you can invite your members easily to an event and the platform ensures a smooth processing of payments. Furthermore, Hivebrite provides a platform, which completely undertakes the task of data management. If there is missing data of your members, you can easily start a campaign to collect the data you need. Since I am not an IT nerd, I really enjoy the user friendliness and the intuitive handling of the platform. Our alumni and student community is really happy about our new homepage. Especially the live feed and the weekly digest, which summarizes news, forum discussions or job opportunities, has become a must read for every community member.

Cons:

Some features are not costumizable, but the Hivebrite team is doing the best to fulfill the special requirements of an alumni association and takes every suggestion into consideration.

The team at Hivebrite was incredible. They were and continue to be flexible to our needs!

Comments: The ability to streamline our Program to best fit our users. Hivebrite integrates numerous functions that provide an easy to use interface for our team as well as incredible customer service and support for questions that arose during the setup process!

Pros:

The Front Office interface and mobile software is very user friendly. Our team members love the aesthetic and multi-faceted system that Hivebrite provides. It is also very customizable from the Back Office so from an Admin perspective, setup was easy!

Cons:

The lack of customizable options when it comes to font, color, sizing, and general edits. However, I believe that this is something that is being developed so it's really only a growing pain that Hivebrite is adjusting to!

PANDA Women Leadership Network / PANDA Directory

Pros:

design, ease of use, growing set of functionalities that fit our purposes, very good customer support that helped out quickly when we had questions or problems

Cons:

The most relevant problem for us was that sometimes sharing an event over the platform doesn't work our because there are two links - the "normal" one people share when they want to forward an event to a friend, but which works only for logged in platform members and the backend link that works for external visitors as well.

just a hones reveiw

Comments: great onboarding process and support while onboarding. also very fast answers on tickets!!! clear communication what is possible and what is not, always helping to find a solution for our problems or challenges.

Pros:

A logically and well organised backend, easy imports, easy exports, clear overview, an easy to customise frontend. modern templates. very easy to use, almost dummy prove easy.

Cons:

there are some limitations, when it comes down to ticket options for events, media management in groups and events is not very sexy, there is no "past events" section, can't attach pictures directly to a past event, it has to be via link from the media page. use of tables in customised websites is bad.

Alternatives Considered: Graduway

Reasons for Switching to Hivebrite: Hivebrite was easier to use, looked a lot nicer (UX), provided data hosting in switzerland, was best value for price.