Jive
An enterprise intranet and employee collaboration platform, now sold as Jive AI by IgniteTech. Large organizations run it as an internal digital workplace: discussion spaces, groups, document collaboration, activity streams, and company news for employees, hosted on Jive's own site or in the customer's data center.
Website Toolbox
A hosted, turnkey, embeddable discussion forum. Our team sets it up, customizes it, and supports it for you, with 100% your branding, a fully branded mobile app, and single sign on handled for you.
Jive and Website Toolbox are both described as community platforms, but they are built for different audiences. Jive is an internal employee tool: an intranet where staff share news, documents, and discussions inside the company, on a site the company runs for its own people. Website Toolbox is a discussion forum for your customers or members that embeds directly into the website you already run, or runs standalone on your own domain, entirely under your own brand. This article compares the two products so you can decide which one fits the community you are building.
Quick Comparison: Jive vs Website Toolbox
| Feature | Jive | Website Toolbox |
|---|---|---|
| Focus | An enterprise intranet and employee collaboration suite: spaces, groups, documents, news, search, and analytics for internal communication. | Forum-first hosted service, a master of one focused on the discussion experience, with everything else handled by integrating specialist tools. |
| Audience | Built for a company's own employees behind sign in. The external customer community product Jive once sold (Jive-x) was sold to Lithium, now Khoros, in 2017, so today's Jive targets internal teams. | Built for your customers, members, or audience, public or private, as an owned part of your own website. |
| Hosting | Managed cloud hosting or a deployment in your own data center, administered by your IT team. | Fully managed hosting. No server to set up, patch, or maintain. |
| Embedding | Jive runs as its own destination site and app. There is no published option to embed a Jive community inside the pages of your existing website. | Fully embeddable directly into your existing website, or standalone on your own domain. |
| Branding | Employees use Jive's product and Jive's mobile app. It is presented as your internal digital workplace rather than a public-facing extension of your brand. | 100% your brand on every plan. Website Toolbox is invisible to your members, including a fully branded mobile app. |
| Single sign on | Enterprise sign on against a company identity directory, which suits one organization's employees rather than members of a public community. | Seamless single sign on without members leaving your site, and our team sets it up for you. |
| Themes and design | Customizable spaces and layouts, but reviews consistently report that meaningful customization needs technical resources, and the interface is often described as dated. | Multiple genuinely different themes plus an easy theme builder, and our team can customize it for you. |
| Mobile | A mobile intranet app published under the Jive brand, with reviews describing the mobile experience as inconsistent. | A fully branded mobile app published under your own name and colours, plus a responsive forum on every device. |
| Discussion tools | Discussions exist as one feature inside a broad workplace suite that also handles documents, news, and search. | A complete forum: categories, topics, threading, moderation tools, member permissions, and search, all managed by you. |
| Payments | Not a feature of the platform. Jive is an internal tool and has no subscriptions or payments for community access. | Subscriptions and payments for access to the community, categories, or features, using your own payment provider. |
| Support | Enterprise support arranged through the sales process, backed by a support portal and knowledge base, with scope depending on your agreement. | Email, phone, and chat support, with a team that can set up and customize your forum for you. |
| Webhooks and API | A published REST API, with automation depending on your plan, your agreement, and developer effort on your side. | Webhooks and API access included in the standard plan. |
| Migration | Moving an existing discussion community into Jive means reshaping it into an intranet deployment alongside your IT rollout. | Migration included in every plan: an automated import you can run yourself in a few clicks, or we can do it for you. |
| Pricing | Quote based. No public pricing: you contact sales and receive a tailored estimate based on size, deployment, integrations, and customization, which reviews describe as expensive and hard to benchmark. | Simple, transparent pricing with migration included in every plan and webhooks and API in the standard plan. |
| Company | Public until 2017, then owned by Aurea, and part of IgniteTech since 2023, both ESW Capital companies, so ownership has changed twice in recent years. | Profitable company with 24 years of experience, and forum software is its only product. |
What Jive Does Well
It would be dishonest to write this comparison as though Jive had nothing going for it, because for its intended job it is a serious product. Jive is built for internal employee communication at scale: spaces and groups for departments and projects, document collaboration with versioning, activity streams, company news, enterprise search, and engagement analytics, all wrapped in administration, governance, and security controls aimed at large and often regulated organizations. Its vendor lists financial services, government, and healthcare among its industries, and it integrates with Microsoft Office and other business systems. Reviews on TrustRadius score it around 8.7 out of 10, and users consistently praise its collaboration and knowledge management capabilities. If your goal is an internal digital workplace for your own employees, Jive is a legitimate contender.
Embedding and Customization
The clearest difference between the two products is what happens to the website you already have. Jive is built as a destination: your team goes to the Jive site or opens the Jive app, and there is no published option to embed a Jive community inside the pages of your own site. That is the right shape for an intranet, which is meant to be a place employees visit, but it is the wrong shape for a customer or member community that should feel like part of your website.
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. Customization does not depend on your comfort with code either, because our support team will help you customize the forum, or do it for you.
White Label and Branding
Jive is Jive's product. Employees work inside Jive's interface, sign in with Jive's app, and carry the Jive name on their home screen. For an internal tool that mostly does not matter, since employees are told which tools to use, but if the community you are building is customer facing, the brand your customers see would be Jive's rather than yours.
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. See our mobile app documentation for details.
Single Sign On
Jive supports single sign on as an enterprise identity feature, tied to the directory your IT team already manages for employees. That is exactly what an intranet needs, because everyone using it belongs to one organization. It is a different problem from what a community owner faces: your members are customers or audience, not staff, and they sign in through the login system your website already has.
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
Jive allows spaces and layouts to be configured, and administrators can adjust the look of their deployment, but reviews of the platform repeat two themes: meaningful customization generally needs technical resources, and the interface is often described as dated compared with modern tools. Plan on implementation effort and ongoing administrative work rather than a quick visual refresh.
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
Jive is a broad workplace suite. Discussions sit alongside documents, news streams, search, analytics, and an expanding set of AI features, because the product's job is the whole internal digital workplace. That breadth is a strength for internal communication and a drawback if what you actually want is an excellent forum: discussion features share the roadmap with everything else, and reviews report a steep learning curve for new users.
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
Jive ships a mobile intranet app under the Jive brand, and user reviews describe the mobile experience as inconsistent across devices. It carries Jive's name and icon, which again is fine for employees and less useful when the app should represent your brand to your customers.
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
Jive does not publish pricing. You contact sales and receive a tailored quote that varies with organization size, deployment model, integrations, and customization needs, and independent reviews describe the cost as high and difficult to benchmark before you commit. Implementation is a project rather than an afternoon: review sites report an average implementation measured in months, typically with IT and admin effort attached, and the total cost of ownership reflects that.
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
Jive's support is arranged as part of an enterprise agreement, backed by a support portal and knowledge base, with what is included depending on the contract you negotiate. Because deployments are complex and self administered, much of the day to day work of configuring and maintaining the platform falls on your IT team.
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
Jive has a long history and a turbulent ownership one. It traded publicly until 2017, was acquired by Aurea that year, and became part of IgniteTech in 2023, both companies belonging to the same ESW Capital group, so the product has changed hands twice in recent years. Its external customer community business was sold off separately in 2017 to Lithium, now Khoros. That corporate context is worth weighing against a roadmap you will depend on for years.
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, and the roadmap and the company you talk to are the same ones building the forum.
Conclusion
Choose Jive if you need an internal employee intranet: company news, document collaboration, and team spaces for your own staff, deployed with your IT department's involvement and a negotiated enterprise agreement. Choose Website Toolbox if the community you are building is for your customers or members and is meant to be an owned asset: 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. 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.