I’m frequently asked what the difference is between MindTouch and Jive Software.   The short answer is that Jive is a social business construct where MindTouch is more of a business application platform.  Jive solves very specific business needs while MindTouch can solve a variety of business needs but typically needs customization for complex applications. 

Before I go any farther, let me state the obvious.  I’ve only met CEO Dave Hersh and the founders of Jive once.  I like them.  They’re good guys and if you use a Jive application you’ve made a great choice in not only the software but the company as well. 

This article is a guide to help potential customers make an optimal decision.  So let’s get on with it.     

The Quick Guide

In 10 words or less	We make business more social	The open source business application platform.
Key Customers	Cisco, SAP, Nike	Washington Post, Intel, EMC
Known for?	Social business communities	Ability to quickly create custom business applications to solve business needs.
By the way	Jive has over 2500 customers and 15% of the F500	MindTouch is an open source platform with millions of users
Set up time needed
Solves business needs for	Internal and external Community building	Customize platform to build intranets, extranets, knowledge bases, portals.
The videos	Jive Software	MindTouch Cloud
Cloud enabled?	Yes	Yes
Open Source	No	Yes, has free core version
Extendable?	Has over 100 modules	Build to suit.  Gives developers building blocks to build robust solutions.
SharePoint connector?	Yes, federated search and links	Yes
External facing or Internal?	Both, but internal is a better solution	Both

What is Jive Software?

Jive is a powerful tool to build internal and external corporate communities.  While they offer an external facing community, the feature set doesn’t appear as power as the internal solution.

Their new bridging capabilities are great, but they’ll need to offer a wider bridge in the future.  With bridging, Jive connects the external community with the internal employee community in order for employees to act on information published on the external site. 

Out of the box, Jive just works.  It ships with over a 100 modules to quickly customize your community.  The Microsoft Office connectors allow you to sync offline documents with those on Jive so that you’re not looking at an old version of the document.  It’s also makes for a good collaboration tool.      

If you want to monitor conversations about your company on social networking sites, then Jive is well suited. 

Jive is very wizard driven which means setting up the site is easier than most Enterprise 2.0 solutions.  The downside is that their solutions tend to be rigid in structure so changing the look and feel, the business need it solves, etc. can be much more difficult than MindTouch.   

Yet out of the box, there are a lot of ways to extend the solution.  A few examples include: Activity feeds, simple SharePoint integration, workflow support, and the ability to cut and paste html and CSS code

What is MindTouch?

MindTouch is a business platform.  What is that?  Think of MindTouch as SharePoint but with more flexibility.  In other words, you can quickly build a powerful solution on top of the platform in a fraction of the time versus building it from scratch. 

With Mindtouch, you can build and match Jive feature for feature, but it will take you a long time to do it.   You’re better off choosing Jive if you want all that they offer.  Want a custom fit solution?  Then MindTouch is a better choice.  

MindTouch has traditionally been a tool for developers, but they have recently embarked on a mission to build solution frameworks. 

Intranets, extranets, innovation portals, knowledge bases can all be  purchased from MindTouch but are suit to fit applications meaning they won’t work out of the box without some customization.

All of the document management tools are present including check in, check out, a desktop tool that allows drag and drop uploading and downloading, Microsoft Office connectors, and content moderation. 

For public facing communities and knowledge bases, content moderation allows the safe crowd sourcing of content.  Want the crowd to help build your technical documentation or self service help desk, then content moderation is an important tool. 

MindTouch has all of the tools to build a world class system.  In fact, they allow developers to build solutions on their platform to resell.  Want to build an Attask and Basecamp competitor.  You can do it on MindTouch. 

Have a different opinion?  Please share.

<Disclosure: I work for MindTouch>