Today there are 176 different community platforms to host and run your online communities with. We spent 110 hours comparing the top 50 to find the seven best you can use to create engaging communities.
What is the Best Community Platform?
- Skool — best of the best
- Mighty Networks — best mobile community platform
- Circle — best for serial course creators
- inSided — best for customer retention
- Slack — best for agencies
- Facebook Groups — best for organic growth
- BuddyBoss — best for Wordpress
1. Skool
Our Verdict — Best Of The Best
Price: Starts at $9/month
Skool lets you set up a new, better home for your tribe. You can have your community, courses, and events all in one place, and the whole setup can be done in less than an hour. Its fun, clean interface will encourage discussions to have more engagement, and the fun gamification features will incentivize people to stick around for longer.
The Best Part:
It’s easy for everyone. It’s super easy to set up your community on Skool. Also, the user interface is simple and sleek, and it feels a lot like Facebook. There’s no learning curve, which makes navigating Skool a pleasurable experience.
The Worst Part:
The cheap plan takes a big cut. Hobby charges a 10% transaction fee on every sale and leaves out a custom URL and affiliates, so a paid group outgrows it fast.
Get it if you want to offer the best community experience that keeps your subscribers engaged, is simple to set up, and offers an amazing user interface.
I recommend you get started with the 14-day free trial, then go with Pro for $99/month once you sell access, since its 2.9% fee beats the 10% on Hobby.
(14-day free trial)
Best For
Skool is best for anyone who wants to build engaged online communities with searchable archives of all their past content.
Top Features
- Lightning-fast setup. Setting up your Skool group is incredibly intuitive. Most users will have their groups ready to go in less than one hour, even if they’re setting up every single feature they offer.
- Your community feels like home. The entire community interface looks and feels a lot like a Facebook group. Users can create posts based on text, video, polls, or links, and they can be categorized to keep everything tidy. Users can comment on posts, subscribe to get notifications of new replies, and so on. All of that without the distraction caused by Facebook.
- Keeps your customers engaged. There’s a gamification aspect to Skool that’s really neat. When users create valuable posts, their likes get translated to “points” and “levels” that show up on their profile. You can even mark specific posts as “Gems”. All of those will display on the user profiles and on a leaderboard.
- Monetize your groups. You can set up your groups to be free or you can make them “pay to join” and have VIP groups for your high ticket customers, for example.
- Automatic affiliate money. If one of your group members creates a Skool group of their own, you automatically get 40% of their monthly subscription.
Pricing
Skool offers two pricing plans:
- Hobby: $9/month for unlimited members, courses and videos, with a 10% transaction fee.
- Pro: $99/month for a custom URL, affiliates and a 2.9% transaction fee.
Annual subscriptions provide a 17% discount.
Try Skool today with a 14-day free trial.
Our Verdict — Best Mobile Community Platform
Price: Starts at $95/month
Mighty Networks is an incredible software to run your community and online courses, content, video, events, memberships, and digital subscriptions. What I like about it most is it’s an all-in-one web based community platform, which turns it into an incredible mobile app.
The Best Part:
Your community in everyone’s pockets. When you get the Mighty Pro plan, they’ll build your own branded iOS app, Android app, and website for your community, quick and easy.
The Worst Part:
Customization is a bit of a pain. Mighty Networks doesn’t make it very clear for you to figure out the best logo and banner sizes, so you may need to experiment a bit before you find what works for you.
Get it if you intend to create branded iOs and Android apps for your community, now or further down the road, to give your brand that professional touch.
I recommend you start with the 14-day free trial, which runs on the Growth plan, then commit to Launch for $95/month if you can live without the Growth-only features, and move to Mighty Pro when you want your own branded apps for iOS and Android.
(14-day free trial)
Best For
Mighty Networks is best for people who want to bring their community to their users’ iPhones and Android phones.
Top Features
- Offer the warmest of welcomes to new members. Mighty Networks allows you to create amazing onboarding experiences. You can create a welcome checklist to guide new members through their first steps, ask an icebreaker question, and prompt them to get introduced to everyone.
- Unique feeds for a personal experience. In Mighty Networks, every one of your members gets their own unique feed, displaying activity from your community and all the courses and groups they might have joined.
- Your own mobile apps. With Mighty Pro (custom pricing), you can get all of Mighty Networks’ features on your own branded iOS app, Android app, and website, with no custom development of your own. They’ll do it all for you, and it’s quick-and-easy, unlike most app development providers out there.
- Get your members to socialize. With the “Members Near You” feature, you can enable online friendships to turn into real-life relationships, by making it easy for them to figure out the members who live in their area.
- Run all kinds of events. You can run masterminds, meetups, conferences, and much more super easily with their native live streaming solution or via third-party integrations, with software like Zoom. Even the members who are not aware of the event will be able to see your live stream on their feed.
Pricing
Mighty Networks offers four pricing plans:
- Launch: $95/month for unlimited members and 200 GB of storage.
- Scale: $215/month for unlimited members, API access and 500 GB of storage.
- Growth: $425/month for unlimited members and 1 TB of storage.
- Mighty Pro: Custom pricing, for your own branded iOS and Android apps.
Annual subscriptions provide a 17% discount.
Try Mighty Networks today with a 14-day free trial.
3. Circle
Our Verdict — Best For Serial Course Creators
Price: Starts at $89/month
Circle is one of the best tools for creating gated communities to go along with your different courses, without a lot of work. Serial course creators who want to give their customers access to a free (or paid) community with their purchase will love it.
The Best Part:
Create “rooms” and gate access. With Circle you can create many different rooms and tiers, and gate access based on their level. This goes great with memberships, courses, and so on.
The Worst Part:
High transaction fee. If you use Circle’s own payments to charge your customers, you’ll pay a 2% fee on the Professional plan, 1% on Business and Scale, and 0.5% on Circle Plus. That adds up, knowing you’ll pay another ~3% to your payment gateway like Stripe on top of it.
Get it if you want to offer gated communities that go along with your courses and coaching sessions.
I recommend you get started on the Professional plan, at $89/month billed annually, with the 14-day free trial.
(14-day free trial)
Best For
Circle is best for creators, course sellers, and coaches.
Top Features
- Gate access or offer different tiers. Circle makes it easy to lock and unlock access to certain parts of your community. This works great for memberships, coaching groups, courses, and so on.
- Keep your members updated with weekly digests. Circle allows you to send a summary report of all that happened over the past week, to keep your members on top of all the news.
- Everything from the first plan. Professional already includes unlimited members, courses, live events, a website, payments, gamification, a custom domain and iOS, Android and desktop apps.
- Use video to gather your people. It’s easy to create immersive live video experiences from your Circle community. Whether you’re doing a 5-person group coaching call or a 100-person broadcast, Circle makes it a breeze for you to run your video events, with multiple co-hosts. You can even pull attendees up on “stage” with you to chat.
- Brand your community. Every plan runs on your own custom domain, and from the Business plan ($199/month billed annually) you can remove the Circle branding altogether. Circle Plus even gets you your own branded mobile apps.
Pricing
Circle offers four pricing plans:
- Professional: $89/month billed annually, for unlimited members, courses, events and a 2% transaction fee.
- Business: $199/month billed annually, for workflows, API access and a 1% transaction fee.
- Scale: $419/month billed annually, for AI agents, unlimited workflows and a 1% transaction fee.
- Circle Plus: Custom pricing, for your own branded mobile apps and a 0.5% transaction fee.
All paid plans have a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Try Circle today with a 14-day free trial.
Our Top Three Picks
Here’s a quick summary of our top three picks:
- Skool — best of the best
- Mighty Networks — best mobile community platform
- Circle — best for serial course creators
Here’s a quick comparison of our top seven picks:
Tool | Entry Offer | Pricing |
|---|---|---|
Skool | 14-day free trial | Starts at $9/mo |
Mighty Networks | 14-day free trial | Starts at $95/mo |
Circle | 14-day free trial | Starts at $89/mo |
inSided | None | Custom quote |
Slack | Free plan | Starts at $8.75/mo |
Facebook Groups | None | Free forever |
BuddyBoss | Free plan | Starts at $228/yr |
Here are the top 50 community platforms we considered in this review:
- Skool
- Mighty Networks
- Circle
- inSided
- Slack
- Facebook Groups
- BuddyBoss
- Higher Logic Thrive
- Tribe
- Discourse
- BigMarker
- Mobilize
- Thinkific
- Khoros
- HiveBrite
- Panion
- Uuki
- Disciple
- Influitive
- Higher Logic Vanilla
- Vesta
- Webex Events
- Viafoura
- Zapnito
- Rungway
- Glue Up
- Memberium
- Lounjee
- Wild Apricot
- Website Toolbox Forums
- PeerBoard
- Brainly
- ProBoards
- Spectrum
- phpBB
- OpenWeb
- Magentrix
- Ning
- vBulletin Cloud
- ToucanTech
- AnswerHub
- Beam.gg
- Clowder
- Tapatalk
- Codementor
- GroupFire
- GetSocial
- Axero
- Heartbeat
Frequently Asked Questions About Community Platforms
What is the best community platform?
Skool is our top pick. You set it up in under an hour, get gamification built in, and keep searchable archives of past content, so your members find what they need fast.
Which community platform is best for customer retention?
inSided is our pick for customer retention. It is built to keep your customers engaged over time, so they stick around.
Is there a free community platform?
Yes. Facebook Groups is free and our pick for organic growth, so you can build a community without paying for a platform.
Which community platform is best for building a branded mobile app?
Mighty Networks is our pick for a branded mobile community. On the Mighty Pro plan, it builds you branded iOS and Android apps for your community.
What features should a community platform have?
You want built-in monetization, real-time chat, discussion threads, and direct integrations. Add online courses, event management, video calls, and content moderation to run the whole thing in one place.
Skool vs Circle, which one should I choose?
Reach for Skool as the top all-around pick for its quick setup and gamification, and Circle if you are a serial course creator who wants to gate rooms by membership tier. Pick by whether community or courses lead.
Which community platform is best for WordPress?
BuddyBoss is our pick for WordPress. It brings full community features right into your WordPress site.
Which community platform is best for agencies?
Slack is our pick for agencies. It is the communication-first choice for agency teams that run their community around fast messaging.
What makes an online community successful?
Successful communities give members personalized feeds, work well on mobile, and run on quality user-generated content. Gamification and third-party app integrations keep people coming back.
What is an online community platform?
Community platforms help anyone create and manage online communities to bring people together and even help them organize offline meetups.
Online community management platforms, just like social networks, thrive when there's engagement. Both smaller, private communities and larger communities alike need to have strong community engagement in order to become relevant.
Communities connect members through discussion forums, message board posts, private messaging, personalized activity feeds, and email campaigns, to mention a few.
What key features should a community software have?
Choosing the right community software takes some figuring out what your needs are, and some research.
Some may need a standalone online community software that only solves the need of getting people to interact. Others might need a community tool that offers additional features, such as:
- Inbuilt monetization tools / in-app purchases
- Real-time chat messaging app / direct messaging
- Real-time discussion threads
- Direct integrations with other tools
- Online course capabilities
- Community memberships
- Event management
- Video calls
- Search and filtering capabilities
- Language options
- Advanced security features
- Customization
- Community moderation tools
- Capacity to moderate content
What are the characteristics of a successful online community?
In order to have a successful online community, you have to get people to feel connection and emotion. You have to offer relevant content.
Some characteristics that you should look for when choosing your community platform software are:
- Personalized content and activity feeds
- Mobile friendly
- Good quality user-generated content
- Engaging discussions
- Behavioral tracking
- Third party app integrations
- Search capabilities
- Gamification
The Bottom Line
Here are our top picks for the best community platforms to try this year:
- Skool — best of the best
- Mighty Networks — best mobile community platform
- Circle — best for serial course creators
- inSided — best for customer retention
- Slack — best for agencies
- Facebook Groups — best for organic growth
- BuddyBoss — best for Wordpress