I’m looking for an alternative to XenForo. We are looking to build a customer community for our D2C brand. We don’t have any specific requirements in mind, but the platform should be scalable.
We’d ideally want someone to take care of hosting, server, security and updates as we don’t have the bandwidth to manage the servers.
A colleague of mine suggested that I try Jatra forum software. How does Jatra compare with XenForo? How is it better than XF?
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@kaustubh • Dec 1, 2024
Thank you for considering Jatra, Rahul! Welcome to our official community.
Yes, Jatra is an alternative to XenForo. While we compete with XenForo, I have massive respect for the entire XenForo team and the platform they built. Fun Fact: I ran our biggest community on XenForo for over 7 years.
XenForo and Jatra have different takes on community building. XenForo takes a more traditional approach towards community building with its forum-structure.
Jatra, on the other hand, focuses on the 'feed-like' structure made popular by social media. We believe it's a better way to present content.
XenForo supports a few limited content types like: Article, Votes, Discussions.
Jatra acts as a community content hub. That is, we natively support creating long-form, SEO optimised articles, discussions, events, chats, quizzes, polls and more. We will continue to add multiple post-types in coming days.
Both Jatra and XenForo are strong on the SEO front. Jatra takes a step forward by adding structured data to the posts automatically. It enhances the content and improves your chances of getting listed in Google and Google's featured snippets. These are massive traffic-pullers.
Let me know if it helps you decide. Feel free to ask questions.
@rahulroy • Dec 1, 2024
First of all, thank you for your detailed answer. I'm leaning towards Jatra - because I like the UI. I am also impressed by your response time. You responded within 20 minutes of me posting the question - and it gives me good vibes.
Can you explain the SEO features a bit in more detail and also the post types?
@kaustubh • Dec 2, 2024
Haha - well, thank you! I'm glad you are enjoying Jatra. Fast responses to member's questions are something we take seriously.
Communities thrive on user generated content (UGC). From my experience of building communities from scratch - I've found that UGC is a goldmine for SEO.
The questions users post on communities or the discussions they start - are mostly the same as the questions or keywords they type in Google.
Also, search engines and AI bots - both need authentic, human-generated content based on real-life experiences to train their algorithms and LLMs.
This is the reason I believe forums and communities with authentic human participants will continue to thrive.
Jatra powers this UGC automatically through SEO. We have tons of optimisations implemented so that every content created on Jatra communities will automatically be made available to Google in optimized way. Here are some of the things we do:
I think this itself calls for a separate article on Jatra. I promise to write one sooon.
Secondly, after building communities for over 18 years (and many of them with XenForo, vBulletin and other similar software), I found that most of these platforms rely on discussions (post + replies) format. They don't make it easy to publish articles, videos, events, jobs, chats, quizzes, polls.
Jatra fills this gap by natively supporting multiple content types. Changelog is a prime example. As I type this - we are already working on 'feedback' post type that will let people vote on the ideas or feedback shared by other users.
I am excited about the possibilities that Jatra creates for its customers.
@paulad • Jan 10, 2025
Jatra still has a lot of ground to cover but I have been noticing your progress. Jatra holds more potential than most of its competitors. I've spoken with Kaustubh and his vision for Jatra is impressive.