Which tools do you use to build communities around your products?

At first I was using Slack for building a community around Write.as -- the problem was that none of the knowledge-sharing and conversations there were accessible to the wider web. So in the last few months I started up a server with Discourse on it (discuss.write.as), and I've seen more people visiting, giving feedback, and asking questions in a short period of time.

The forum format lends itself much better to building a community, especially since you can own the data and really make it part of your main product/service by customizing it however you want. In my mind, a community like this should be more of a destination than just another quick stop in the shopping mall that is Facebook :)

Man, this is a great question and I would love to hear others opinions on the matter. I recall Adobe XD using https://www.uservoice.com to handle feedback and that naturally created a community. In addition, I participate in the Framer Facebook group often. Finally, if your product has an API and you have the resources, it's nice to use the socials to communicate with those using your product.

I see more and more communities transfering to spectrum.chat which is like a combination of a chat interface and a forum.

I've used https://vanillaforums.com/en/software/ for forum software before.

It had better UX than the main players back then, and I think is still a good option now.

I use https://canny.io for 3 of our sections:

1. Feature Requests

2. Bug Reports

3. Community Support

It is extremely easy to use, intuitive, and due to the nature of the setup has wide use cases.