Choosing the Right Foundation: How Amplitude Scales Community Operations

A Growing Community With Expanding Demands

Amplitude, the leading AI analytics platform, supports a global community of product managers, analysts, and marketers who rely on the platform to understand user behavior and make data-driven decisions. As the community grew, so did the demands on the platform supporting it, and the team’s standards for what that platform needed to deliver.

Beth Saunders, Senior Community Manager at Amplitude, came to the role with an operator’s perspective. A former Amplitude customer herself, she had implemented the product, administered it, and used community resources to enable her own teams. When she stepped into the community manager role, she brought that same rigor to evaluating how the community itself should function, and whether the foundation beneath it was up to the task.

Reevaluating the Foundation to Support the Next Phase

From the outset, Amplitude’s community had been built on a platform chosen in part for its native integration with the customer success tool already in use—a consolidation decision that made sense at the time. But as the community scaled, the practical realities of day-to-day operations told a different story.

Beth describes this not as a single breaking point, but as a series of signals that prompted the team to step back and reassess. Certain foundational experiences—access, reliability, basic site management—required more effort than they should have. Single sign-on, in particular, became a recurring friction point. While a primary SSO flow was in place, the need for a secondary SSO experience introduced complexity that proved difficult to resolve.

Customization limits compounded the problem. As Amplitude invested more in community—scaling content, programs, and engagement—routine changes to the site required external contractors and consumed time and resources that felt disproportionate to the task.

“We were spending the limited community resourcing we had just to make basic updates to the site,” Beth said. “As we were scaling and had the ability to move quickly, it just felt like the platform was really limiting us.”

The integration that had once justified the platform choice wasn’t enough to offset what the team was working around to use it. Beth took this as an opportunity to evaluate what the community truly needed to support Amplitude’s next phase of growth.

What Mattered Most in Choosing a New Community Platform

Beth’s evaluation criteria were grounded in operational reality.

Single sign-on was a hard requirement. Any platform that couldn’t support multiple SSO flows wasn’t a viable option. Integration with Salesforce and Zendesk remained important too, ensuring community insights could flow easily to the sales and support teams who acted on them.

Flexibility was equally critical. Beth wanted a platform with strong out-of-the-box capabilities that didn’t require heavy customization or outside resources to maintain and iterate on.

Analytics became a key differentiator, particularly source tracking. Amplitude’s community was intentionally open, designed to surface in search results and LLM responses, but the team lacked visibility into how people were actually finding and engaging with the site. “We didn’t have a clear view into which channels were driving people to the community” Beth said.

Moderation and data quality rounded out the criteria. Without confidence in the underlying data, even well-designed dashboards were difficult to trust.

Together, these requirements shifted the evaluation away from ecosystem adjacency and toward how well the community platform itself could support day-to-day operations.

Making the Internal Case for Change

Any platform change at this level required careful alignment across the organization. Where some stakeholders preferred consolidation, Beth made the case that the effectiveness of the community layer justified the change.

“It wasn’t just about switching tools. It was about being clear on what we would gain and why it was worth it,” she explained.

By anchoring the discussion in tangible benefits—improved SSO reliability, cleaner analytics, reduced manual work, better moderation—Beth built both confidence in the decision and a shared understanding of what success would look like.

Early Clarity After Migration

Following the move of the Amplitude Community to Higher Logic Vanilla, the team saw value quickly.

Analytics became more immediately useful. Custom dashboards provided better insight into how people were arriving at the community, which content they engaged with, and how different channels contributed to activity. “Within weeks, looking at the analytics was a huge eye-opener,” Beth said.

Spam, which had previously obscured engagement patterns, dropped significantly through improved moderation controls. This surfaced a more accurate picture of actual community activity. “Now we can understand what real engagement looks like,” Beth said.

With cleaner data and easier controls, communicating community performance internally became simpler, and decision-making around priorities more grounded.

The team’s focus has shifted from managing friction to improving the experience, including refining content, exploring personalization, and planning future initiatives like gamification and deeper API-driven integrations.

For Amplitude, the migration ensured that the community platform could reliably support evolving needs—and that integration would enhance the community experience rather than compensate for its limitations.