Khoros

Enterprise social media management and branded community platform, now owned by IgniteTech

As of 31 August 2026, Khoros's pricing is not published; the vendor quotes on request. The merged Lithium and Spredfast platform covering branded communities, social publishing and social customer care. Softwr lists it under Social Media. Khoros is made by Khoros, LLC, available on Web, iOS, Android, API.

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Overview

What Khoros does

Khoros is an enterprise customer engagement platform with three main pillars: branded online communities with forums, knowledge and gamification, inherited from Lithium; social media publishing, listening and governance, inherited from Spredfast; and social customer care that routes public and private social messages into an agent queue with SLA tracking. Large consumer brands typically buy it because it is one of the few products that treats a self-service community and a social service queue as one system with shared identity and reporting. The fact that should reshape a shortlist is the ownership history. Vista Equity Partners bought Lithium in 2017 and Spredfast in 2018 and merged them into Khoros in 2019. On 27 May 2025 IgniteTech, part of ESW Capital, acquired Khoros, and roughly 116 employees were made redundant within weeks. ESW Capital is a serial acquirer of mature enterprise software known for running acquisitions on very lean cost bases. Under that ownership the product has been repositioned as khoros.ai, with the corporate domain moving from khoros.com to khoros.ai and an AI-first relaunch built around its Aurora and Iris AI branding. Buyers evaluating a multi-year community contract should ask directly about roadmap commitments, support staffing levels and named account coverage, because the acquiring firm has a documented pattern of maintenance-mode operation. Who buys it: telecommunications operators, banks, airlines, games publishers and consumer electronics brands with large public support communities where deflection to peer answers has measurable value. Pricing is quoted, not published, and community platform contracts in this bracket are annual and typically well into six figures once professional services and migration are counted.

What people use it for

A telecommunications operator that wants a public support community whose accepted answers measurably deflect contact centre volume
A consumer brand consolidating a dozen regional social accounts under one publishing approval workflow with regional role permissions
A games publisher running player forums where moderation load and volunteer moderator tooling matter more than publishing features
A bank that needs social service messages tracked against the same SLA framework as its email and chat queues

Where it falls short

Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about Khoros.

IgniteTech, part of ESW Capital, acquired Khoros in May 2025 and around 116 staff were made redundant within weeks, and ESW has a documented pattern of running acquired software on minimal cost bases, so support responsiveness and roadmap delivery are legitimate contract-negotiation issues rather than theoretical risks.
Community migration is genuinely hard: moving years of threads, accepted solutions, member reputation and SEO-bearing URLs off Khoros later is a project measured in quarters, which makes the switching cost far higher than the annual licence suggests.
Pricing is not published and the platform is sold on annual enterprise contracts with substantial implementation and design services, so the first-year cost is materially higher than the recurring licence and hard to benchmark.
The publishing and listening side inherited from Spredfast has been outpaced by dedicated social suites, so social-first teams frequently find themselves keeping a second tool for scheduling and analytics and paying for overlapping capability.
The product is the result of merging two large codebases and has now changed private-equity owner twice, and reviewers consistently report that community administration and social management still feel like separate systems sharing a login rather than one product.
Khoros Community Classic is being sunset in favour of the new Aurora AI community platform, so existing customers face a forced migration of an already hard-to-move asset, on the acquirer timetable rather than their own.

Cross-shopped

What people choose instead of Khoros

Each pairing was judged by two reviewers asking whether a buyer would genuinely weigh the two against each other. The ones that failed were deleted rather than published.

Khorosvs
Sprinklr
Sprinklr: If you want social publishing, listening and care in one suite from a vendor that is still independently operated
Khorosvs
Circle
Circle: If you need a modern branded community without enterprise social management, at a fraction of the cost
Khorosvs
Hootsuite
Hootsuite: If your requirement is really social publishing and analytics rather than a hosted support community

Pricing

What Khoros costs

Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.

Khoros

On request

Branded communities
Social publishing and governance
Social customer care queue
Moderation tooling
Aurora and Iris AI
Annual enterprise contract with professional services

Capabilities

Features

Branded communities
Hosts public forums, Q and A, knowledge articles and member profiles under your own domain
Community gamification
Ranks, badges and reputation mechanics to sustain volunteer expert participation
Social publishing
Plans, approves and schedules content across major social networks with governance workflow
Social customer care
Routes public and private social messages into an agent queue with SLA tracking
Moderation tooling
Automated and manual moderation queues for user-generated content
Listening and analytics
Tracks brand conversation volume and sentiment across social channels
Aurora and Iris AI
AI layer for content assistance, moderation and answer generation introduced under the khoros.ai relaunch
Knowledge deflection
Surfaces community answers into support journeys to reduce ticket volume
Role-based governance
Controls who can publish, approve or respond on behalf of the brand across regions
CRM and helpdesk connectors
Passes social and community cases into an existing service platform

Answered, with sources

Questions people ask

Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.

Who owns Khoros now?

IgniteTech, an ESW Capital company, acquired Khoros on 27 May 2025. Vista Equity Partners, which created Khoros by merging Lithium and Spredfast, is no longer the owner.

Why does the website say khoros.ai?

The company moved its corporate domain from khoros.com to khoros.ai as part of an AI-first relaunch under IgniteTech, centred on its Aurora and Iris AI capabilities.

Is pricing published?

No. Khoros quotes privately on annual enterprise contracts, and implementation services are a significant separate cost.

Should the ownership change affect my decision?

It should affect your contract. Ask for written roadmap commitments, named support staffing and exit or data-export terms before signing a multi-year community deal.

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Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for Khoros, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.