Get Satisfaction and Website Toolbox both give your customers a public place to ask questions and get answers, but the first thing to understand about this comparison is that one of the two products no longer exists. Get Satisfaction was a popular customer community service through the late 2000s and early 2010s, was acquired by Sprinklr in 2015, and the standalone product was folded into that company and retired; its website now returns a service error instead of a product. This article looks at what Get Satisfaction did, how its model worked, and what Website Toolbox offers if you are evaluating forum platforms today, whether you are replacing an old Get Satisfaction community or starting from scratch.

Quick Comparison: Get Satisfaction vs Website Toolbox

What Get Satisfaction Did Well

It would be dishonest to write this comparison as though Get Satisfaction had nothing going for it, because for many years it was genuinely good at its job. It was one of the first services to popularize the idea of people-powered support: instead of every customer filing a private ticket and waiting, customers posted in public, other customers answered, and the company stepped in with an official answer that was clearly marked as official. Questions, problems, ideas, and praise were separate topic types, so feedback arrived organized rather than as one undifferentiated inbox, and the community could rate which replies actually resolved things.

The product was hosted from day one, which meant a company never had to install or maintain forum software, and it shipped as a widget you dropped on your own site. It was available in around a dozen languages, and at its peak it served communities for some of the most recognizable brands in technology and consumer business, including Twitter, Dell, Apple, Mozilla, and Facebook. It also had a free entry tier for a good part of its life, which made it an easy first experiment for small companies. For a support community in that era, it was an influential product, and a number of modern feedback and help desk tools borrow its model.

Embedding and Customization

The shape of the Get Satisfaction model is worth understanding, because it is the opposite of what most website owners want today. Your website contained a widget, and clicking it sent your customers to a community hosted on Get Satisfaction's domain. The discussion, the navigation, the search box, and the URL all lived on someone else's property. That was fine when the goal was to outsource support conversations, and it was convenient for the company running them, but it meant your community was never really part of your website and you had no control over what surrounded your content.

Website Toolbox embeds directly into WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, Shopify, and other website builders, so the forum becomes a page on your site instead of a place you redirect people to, and it can also run standalone on your own domain if you prefer. For WordPress sites there is a plugin that handles the embedding and single sign on for you: see our WordPress plugin documentation. Either way the discussions sit on your domain, under your navigation, next to the rest of your content, and your support team can customize the look, or we can do it for you.

White Label and Branding

Because the community lived on the Get Satisfaction domain, the Get Satisfaction brand was unavoidable. This was not a theoretical problem. In one well known case, 37signals published a widely read complaint that Get Satisfaction was presenting itself as the official support channel for their products when customers arrived, which started a long public argument about who owned the customer relationship when a community lived on a third party site. Whether you read that as a design flaw or a business model, the underlying fact is simple: when your community is hosted and branded by your vendor, your customers are interacting with your vendor as much as with you.

With Website Toolbox we become completely invisible to your members. The branding is 100% yours across your website, your forum, and a fully branded mobile app under your own name and colours, so members experience one brand everywhere they interact with your community. There is no vendor name in the navigation, no vendor logo in the corner, and no vendor domain in the address bar. See our mobile app documentation for details.

Single Sign On

Get Satisfaction ran its own account system on its own domain. Visitors registered a Get Satisfaction account, and while a community could allow optional registration, signing in still happened away from your website, with your members maintaining a separate identity from the login system your site already uses. There is no live product to integrate with today in any case, since the service has been discontinued.

With Website Toolbox, single sign on is seamless and our team sets it up for you. Members sign in on your site and are never sent away to a third party service, and the same identity flows into the forum whether it is embedded in your site or running standalone. See our single sign on methods documentation for the available options.

Themes and Design

Get Satisfaction offered one hosted design. Companies could add their logo and adjust the branding options the platform exposed, but the layout and the visual language belonged to Get Satisfaction, and meaningful redesign was not something a customer could do. Responsive mobile web design only arrived late in the product's life, after it had already spent years as a desktop experience.

Website Toolbox takes a different approach: multiple genuinely different themes rather than colour variations of one design, plus an easy theme builder, and a support team that will customize the look for you if you would rather not do it yourself. For someone who wants the forum to match an existing site and prefers to hand the work over, that combination of ready made variety and a team that does the job is the faster path.

Discussion and Focus

Get Satisfaction was focused, which was its strength, but focused on a narrower job than a forum. It was built for support conversations and product feedback: a question type, an official answer, a rating, and a closed loop back to the company. It was not trying to be a general discussion community, so things like rich categories and permissions, threaded conversation across a whole knowledge base, private groups, paid access, and the day to day culture of a member community were outside its design. If your goal was a broad community where members talk to each other about everything your product or organization covers, you were stretching it.

Website Toolbox stays focused on being an excellent discussion forum first, which lets us add everything a forum needs in a way that stays fast and easy to use, and integrate with the platforms that specialize in everything else rather than rebuilding them. Discussions that live on your domain are organized, searchable, and yours, and they keep working for members long after the post that started them is over.

Mobile App

Get Satisfaction never offered a mobile app for your members. Its community was a web page on its domain, and near the end of its life it improved that page for phones, but nothing was ever published under your brand for anyone to install.

Website Toolbox offers a fully branded mobile app under your own name and colours, so members download an app that carries your brand on their home screen, alongside a responsive forum that works on every device. That matters if your audience largely interacts with the community from a phone and you want the brand to be consistent across website and mobile. See our mobile app documentation.

Pricing

There is no pricing to compare, because you cannot buy Get Satisfaction. In its early years it ran a free entry tier with paid plans above it, and later it dropped the free tier in favour of paid plans, before the whole product was retired following the acquisition. Any pricing you find quoted online is a historical record of a product you can no longer sign up for.

Website Toolbox has simple, transparent pricing with migration included in every plan and webhooks and API access part of the standard plan. You pay one straightforward price for your forum, you can be running it the same day, your revenue stays yours, and nothing you have outgrown is held back behind a higher tier.

Customer Support

Get Satisfaction's whole premise was that the community answered itself, with company staff stepping in for official answers. Vendor side support for the product went away with the product: there is no team to email about a Get Satisfaction community today, and if your old data raises a question, you are relying on archives rather than on a supplier.

Website Toolbox offers email, phone, and chat support on every plan, and our team helps you set up, customize, integrate, and use your community, including doing the work for you when that is what you need. Having a person who will set up your embedding, your themes, or your single sign on is the difference between starting a community this week and starting it after you have learned to do four new jobs yourself.

Company and Longevity

This is the part of the story worth dwelling on. Get Satisfaction raised venture capital, grew quickly, was a fixture of the customer community conversation for about eight years, and was then acquired by a much larger company in 2015 and maintained for a while before being folded in and retired. That is a common path for venture funded products: the roadmap ends up decided by an acquirer's platform strategy rather than by the customers who built their support process on top of it. Communities that had run for years on someone else's servers found that the servers, the accounts, and the vendor itself were all outside their control.

Website Toolbox is a profitable company with 24 years of experience, and forum software is its only product. There is no parent portfolio shuffling it between brands, nothing funded by investors waiting for an exit, and the roadmap and the company you talk to are the same ones building the forum.

Conclusion

There is no live version of Get Satisfaction to choose today, so if you are reading this because you still run one, the practical question is where to move your community: choose Website Toolbox if you want an embeddable, fully branded forum that we host, maintain, and set up for you, on your own domain, with your own mobile app, seamless single sign on, multiple genuinely different themes, paid memberships, webhooks and API included, transparent pricing, and migration handled, so that this decision does not have to be made again when a vendor changes direction. If what you valued in Get Satisfaction was the narrow, feedback first model of questions and official answers, that pattern works perfectly well inside a full forum, and it works on your domain instead of a vendor's. See our single sign on documentation if you need to connect an existing login system, our mobile app page if your members live on their phones, or the WordPress plugin documentation if your site runs on WordPress.