How Celigo doubled their community engagement after migrating to Discourse

We love celebrating our customers and their success with Discourse, but it’s especially exciting when that success comes quickly and shows the impact a strong community can have. After his LinkedIn post caught our attention, we connected with Tyler Lamparter at Celigo to hear about their community, why they chose to migrate to Discourse, and how things were going in their freshly launched Discourse community. 

How Celigo got started with community

Celigo is an integration platform that connects an organization’s apps to share information and automate tasks across various systems. Customers can use prebuilt integrations or design their own to fit their unique use cases. Celigo serves a variety of clientele across different industries such as healthcare and ecommerce.

Over time, the team began to see a clear pattern: the customers who built their own integrations were consistently the most engaged and loyal. Based on that insight, Tyler and the team determined that a Celigo community could play an essential role in their retention strategy. 

They decided to get started using their support platform’s free community feature. They envisioned a place for builders to connect, share knowledge and support each other. The hope was that a stronger builder network would lead to greater customer success and increase long-term loyalty to Celigo.

Platform problems

Celigo faced challenges from the start when using their support platform to host a community. The team wasn’t seeing the kind of meaningful, peer-to-peer engagement they had envisioned. At first, they attributed much of the problem to lackluster search. Without a strong search tool, members, including Celigo staff like Tyler, struggled to find relevant content or re-engage with existing conversations.

When members can’t find what they need, they tend to disengage. Some turn to support channels instead, which keeps the answer hidden from others. Others simply give up. In both cases, the result is the same: fewer interactions, less knowledge-sharing, and a stagnant community that doesn't contribute to customer retention.

As they continued trying to build momentum, the team realized that the problem extended beyond search. The platform made it difficult to surface active discussions or highlight related topics. Conversations felt isolated, and there weren’t many natural paths for members to explore or discover new content. Without an environment that encouraged exploration and connection, the community simply wasn’t taking off.

The search for something better

Tyler took the lead on searching for a new platform, and soon found Discourse. When comparing Discourse to other platforms, what stood out was Discourse’s own community. Compared to other platforms, Discourse’s community was thriving, with plenty of the peer-to-peer interactions that Celigo wanted in their own community. Seeing the success of the Discourse community gave Tyler a lot of confidence that Celigo could use Discourse to build this type of community for their own customers. 

Because Celigo leverages AI in their own platform, Tyler was also impressed by Discourse’s built-in AI integrations. Based on what he saw on other platforms, "Discourse is clearly on the leading edge of incorporating AI into communities.” He was thrilled to find that Discourse’s AI features aren’t partitioned off into an expensive add-on like with other platforms — they’re available on all Discourse plans. 

Getting started with Discourse

Discourse’s two week free trial was another important factor for Tyler, which meant he could jump right in and start testing things without going through a formal sales and procurement process. 

Tyler described getting set up as an easy process. “If I needed to find anything, I could go to the community or docs to figure it out.”. But when he needed extra help to troubleshoot a problem with member migration, our support team was there with fast and helpful responses. “I would get a response in a few hours and be on my way.” These resources helped Celigo get all their members and content migrated over in a couple weeks. 

Discourse let Tyler build a community for Celigo that was highly customized to their company brand, member needs, and organizational interests. The community looks like an extension of Celigo’s own site and makes it easy for members to share technical content through code blocks and attachments. Celigo itself can learn more about the community and foster its growth thanks to deep analytics that weren’t available on their last platform. 

Celigo’s community is benefitting from several AI features, including AI Bot, which they’ve integrated with Celigo documentation to make sure members have easy access to the answers they need. Tyler appreciated that there was no custom configuration required to get started with these tools. “With Discourse, we’re getting that value out of the box, which saves us a ton of time and effort.” 

“It’s easier to post, easier to navigate, and users get more relevant notifications, which keeps them coming back.” - Tyler Lamparter, Celigo

A flourishing community

Now that Celigo is on Discourse, they are seeing extraordinary improvements in their community. Since launching, they have doubled their monthly member engagement and are seeing lots of new activity every day. The Celigo team is especially excited to see customers interacting with each other in a way that wasn’t happening in their old platform. 

When asked about the reason for this exciting engagement growth, Tyler attributed it to the improved user experience on Discourse. “It’s easier to post, easier to navigate, and users get more relevant notifications, which keeps them coming back.” Search and the ability to organize content with categories and tags also means that members are finding what they need faster. Overall, the community is feeling “more active and useful, which naturally leads to more participation.”

The early success of the community is motivating Celigo to find more ways to bring customers into the community. For example, they’ve recently brought their Product Advisory Council into the community to better facilitate conversations with Celigo’s closest customers and partners. 

We were thrilled to speak with Tyler and learn more about how Discourse has helped to transform Celigo’s community. If you’ve outgrown your current platform and are ready to see your community thrive, too, get started with a free trial today.