Comparisons & pricing
Being asked to migrate off Khoros Communities? Do the math first.
Draft — for review. Author: Thomas Panas, founder of PilotPM. 2026-07-05.
If you run a customer community on Khoros Communities (the classic platform, the one that used to be Lithium), you've probably had the conversation by now: there's a new platform, migration is free for a while, and it would be great if you moved.
I build PilotPM, which now includes a community product, so I have an obvious horse in this race. I'll try to earn your trust the boring way: with sourced facts, real numbers, and an FAQ that includes the answers that don't help me.
What's actually happening at Khoros
Here's the verifiable version:
- May 2025: IgniteTech acquired Khoros (CX Today). IgniteTech is part of the ESW Capital family, which has bought a long list of enterprise software companies and is known for running them lean.
- Deep staff cuts followed, reported widely on layoff trackers and LinkedIn. FeverBee — probably the most respected independent voice in community management — published a review in 2026 titled "Khoros in 2026: An Honest Review (And Why I'd Leave)". Their argument isn't that the product is bad. It's that a community platform is a 3–5 year bet on the vendor, and they no longer like the bet.
- April 10, 2026: Khoros launched Aurora AI, an AI-native successor to the classic Communities platform (press release). All new feature development happens there.
- Free migrations from Community Classic to Aurora AI run through December 31, 2026. Khoros itself notes that under legacy ownership, migrations cost customers up to $500,000 and took months.
To be clear about what is not happening: Khoros is not shutting down. Classic customers keep support and maintenance, and no end-of-life date has been announced. But if you're on Classic, you are — politely, with a deadline — being asked to migrate.
A forced migration is a terrible thing to waste
Here's the thing nobody's CSM will say out loud: a migration is a migration.
Whether you move to Aurora or anywhere else, you're doing the same work. Content export. URL redirects. SSO rewiring. Ranks and badges that never map cleanly. Re-onboarding your members. Retraining your moderators.
You're going to pay that cost roughly once. So the question isn't "should we take the free migration?" The question is: if we're migrating anyway, where do we want to live for the next five years?
Maybe that's Aurora. Genuinely — if you're an enterprise with hundreds of thousands of members and you're deep into the rest of the Khoros suite, it might be. But you should decide that deliberately, not by default, and not just because the path of least resistance has a deadline attached.
What a community actually needs in 2026
I'll tell you what I believe, and you can discount it appropriately since I built a product around it.
Most customer communities fail the same way: they become a silo. Members ask questions your help center already answers. Your support team answers the same question twice — once in a ticket, once in a thread — and neither answer knows about the other. Moderation eats hours of somebody's week.
So when we built community into PilotPM, the spec was:
- AI moderation on every post, included. Spam, abuse, and junk get handled without a human reading everything. Not an add-on, not a tier — every post, every plan.
- AI answers grounded in your support knowledge. Optionally, the community can answer member questions using your own help-center articles — the same knowledge base your support team maintains — instead of a model's best guess. It's billed as normal AI credits, same pool as everything else in PilotPM. No separate SKU.
- Community and support in one system. A complaint in a thread and a complaint in a ticket roll up into the same themes, so your product team sees one picture.
- Staff-only test spaces, so you can pilot structure and content before members ever see it.
- Pricing you can read without booking a call. It's on the website. That alone shouldn't be a differentiator in 2026, but here we are.
The cost math
Khoros doesn't publish pricing, but Vendr's contract data puts typical annual contracts at $50,000 to $400,000+, depending on modules and community size.
PilotPM's community add-on is $500/month on any plan, with 2,000 active members included and $0.30 per active member above that.
| Khoros Communities | PilotPM Community | |
|---|---|---|
| Published pricing | No — custom quote | Yes — public pricing page |
| Typical annual cost | $50k–$400k+/yr (Vendr) | $7,788/yr all-in on Starter ($649/mo) to ~$36k/yr on Growth ($2,999/mo) |
| Members included | Negotiated per contract | 2,000 active members, then $0.30/active member |
| AI moderation | Aurora AI's headline feature — check what your quote includes | Included on every post, every plan |
| AI Q&A on your help center | Check your Aurora quote | Optional, grounded on your own help-center articles, billed as normal AI credits |
| Support + community | Separate Khoros products | One platform, one taxonomy |
| Migration | Free to Aurora through Dec 31, 2026; historically up to $500k | White-glove — we run it with you |
Worked example, so the per-member fee isn't hiding: a community with 5,000 active members on our Starter plan is $149 + $500 + (3,000 × $0.30) = $1,549/month, about $18,600/year. That's the honest, fully loaded number — compare it to the low end of a Khoros contract.
How the migration actually works
I won't pretend we have a magic one-click importer, because we don't. Migration off Khoros is a white-glove project we run with you: we take your content export, map boards and categories to spaces, plan the URL redirects (this matters more than anything for SEO and old bookmarks), stage everything in a staff-only test space, and open it to members in waves. I'm on those calls personally. That's the trade at our size — you don't get a self-serve importer, you get the founder's phone number.
Honest FAQ
Is Khoros shutting down? Not that we know of. Khoros says Classic customers keep support and maintenance, and no end-of-life has been announced. What's true is that new development is happening on Aurora AI, and free migrations end December 31, 2026.
Is taking the free Aurora migration a bad idea? Not necessarily. If you're enterprise-scale and invested in the broader Khoros suite, it may be the right call. My argument is only: you're going to migrate once, so price at least one alternative first.
Can PilotPM handle my community's size? Honestly scoped: we're built for communities from a few hundred to tens of thousands of active members. If you're running a 500,000-member community, we're probably not your platform yet, and I'd rather tell you that now.
What does the AI Q&A cost? Normal AI credits — the same pool that powers the rest of PilotPM. If you don't turn it on, you don't pay for it.
What happens after 2,000 active members? $0.30 per active member per month. "Active" means they did something that month — a lurker archive doesn't run up your bill.
If you're staring at a Khoros renewal or a migration deadline, the pricing is public and I'm happy to walk through a migration plan for your specific community — even if you conclude Aurora is the better fit. Write me.