Khoros

What it is

Khoros is the enterprise branded-community platform that used to be Lithium. Lithium (founded 2001) and the social-media tool Spredfast were both bought by Vista Equity Partners and merged under the Khoros name in March 2019. On 27 May 2025 IgniteTech, the AI-first software holding company in the ESW Capital group, announced it had acquired Khoros; a Texas WARN notice recorded 116 layoffs at the Austin headquarters that summer. khoros.com now redirects to khoros.ai, whose footer reads “Powered by IgniteTech”.

On 10 April 2026 the product line was relaunched as two platforms. Aurora AI is the community product: forums, Q&A with accepted solutions, knowledge base, ideas, and the badges-ranks-leaderboards reputation system Lithium was known for. Khoros describes it in three layers: a “Human Engine” (gamification and member journeys), an “Intelligence Layer” (a Community Language Model, Answer Assist, and AI Moderation, all launched in beta), and an “Action Layer” called Orchestrator, a rules-based routing and escalation engine that runs without an LLM and keeps an audit trail. Iris AI is the social-media management and listening product, monitoring sources in 187 languages. The older community product is now called Community Classic.

Khoros says its technology has powered more than 4,000 community deployments since 2001 and 1.8 billion community visits a year. This page scopes Khoros as a support-community platform for CS and support leaders; for social care, see Sprinklr.

Why it shows up in Customer Success stacks

• The install base is large and old. Big-brand support communities from the Lithium era — many with ten or more years of indexed solutions — still run on Khoros. The decision most CS leaders face is not “should we buy Khoros” but “do we renew, move to Aurora, or leave”.
• The feature depth is real. Moderation tooling, the reputation engine, SEO control over community pages, and analytics remain strong. Richard Millington of FeverBee, a consultant openly critical of the vendor, scored Classic 8/10 on discussions, moderation, and analytics in July 2026 while still advising most customers to plan an exit.
• Case deflection into Salesforce is built. The Khoros Connector for Salesforce, documented for Aurora, escalates a community thread to a Salesforce case and shows member details in Salesforce. It needs a full Salesforce licence. Zendesk connectors exist only through partners such as Grazitti.

Pricing reality

Khoros publishes no prices; every contract is quoted. Vendr’s buyer data puts the median annual contract at $164,649, with observed deals from about $53,000 to $259,000 a year. By module, Vendr reports Communities at $75,000–$200,000 a year for 10,000–50,000 registered users and often above $300,000 for large enterprises. Budget a branded support community at roughly $75,000 a year minimum, and twice that for a global one. Against Bettermode at $399–$1,500 a month, or Discourse Business at $6,000 a year, the $75,000 floor alone is 4x to 16x as much, before services.

Two commercial terms matter more than the licence. First, migration from Community Classic to Aurora AI is free through 31 December 2026; Khoros’s own launch release says migrations under the previous owner cost up to $500,000. Second, customers quoted by FeverBee report large overage invoices tied to community traffic they believe is mostly bots and crawlers, and charges for extra data exports. These are customer reports, not published terms — ask for both in writing.

Best for

Community and support-operations leads at large consumer or B2B brands who already run a mature Khoros community with years of SEO-indexed solutions, and who need to decide before 31 December 2026 whether to take the free move to Aurora or leave. A new buyer with no Khoros history should treat it as a shortlist entry only if a vendor-run, quote-priced enterprise community is a hard requirement.

Alternatives

• Higher Logic Vanilla — one of the two share leaders for enterprise B2B Q&A communities. Pick it when you need Khoros-scale moderation and SEO control from a vendor with a stable owner; Atlassian moved its community off Khoros to Vanilla on 22 September 2026, citing a contract deadline and degraded security and performance.
• Gainsight Customer Communities (the former inSided) — the other share leader. Pick it when the community should feed CS data: it assigns community roles from CS data, and Gainsight says it has completed more than 25 Khoros migrations.
• Circle — the fastest-growing entrant, at $89–$199 a month. Pick it only when the community is a membership product with courses and events, not a support channel.
• Discourse — pick it for technical audiences and when owning the data and the exit matters most; it is also where many former Khoros communities have landed.
• Bettermode — pick it for a branded, embeddable B2B hub at a published price.

The pick for an undecided Khoros customer: run a priced Higher Logic Vanilla or Gainsight evaluation in parallel with the free Aurora migration offer, and decide on the comparison, not on the deadline. If none fit, keep Classic for one more term — it still receives support and maintenance — and use the time to export and test your data.

Watch-outs

• Classic is frozen. IgniteTech has announced no end-of-life date for Community Classic, but all new feature development is Aurora-only. Guard: treat any renewal on Classic as the last; write a 12-month exit or migration plan into the renewal decision rather than assuming Classic will keep up.
• Aurora is new and not yet complete. The AI agents launched in beta, and as of the 26.5 release (23–24 September 2026) headline features such as federated search were still Early Access behind a feature flag. Guard: list your top ten Classic features, have Khoros demonstrate each one live in Aurora, and put any missing feature in the order form with a delivery date.
• The team that knew your community is mostly gone. The 2025 layoffs removed much of the staff, and FeverBee reports contractors now do much of the platform work. Guard: put support response times and an uptime SLA with service credits in the contract, and escalate through named contacts, not a shared queue.
• Data portability is not guaranteed. Customers report difficulty getting full exports, and migrations lose things: when PTC left Khoros, private messages did not transfer and some kudos badges disappeared. Guard: request a complete export of content, members, and URLs now, before any renewal or migration talk, and test that it loads somewhere else; map every old URL to a 301 redirect to keep search traffic.
• Traffic-based billing can surprise you. Guard: before signing, get the metering definition in writing, require bot and crawler traffic to be excluded, and cap overages as a percentage of the annual fee.