7 Best community platforms (I ACTUALLY tested them all)

I tested over 15 of the most popular online community platforms to discover where each excel and fall short.

I conducted these tests for two important reasons:

First, I’ve been planning on launching my first paid community as part of my coaching program.

To do that, I needed a setup with tools for:

• hosting live events, group calls, and 1:1 coaching,
• starting focused discussions,
• building structured courses,
• encouraging participation through gamification and challenges.

I’ve used Slack and Facebook Groups. But they have their sheer load of limitations.

Slack feels more like a corporate collaboration tool and wasn’t designed for community-driven learning. Facebook is riddled with distractions. Neither platform offered the control I needed to run a serious business around my community.

So, I’m done with these platforms. SIMPLY DONE.

Secondly, reading about features isn’t enough. I needed to know how these platforms perform when building an actual community. What’s the setup experience like? How effective are their features in practice? What’s the member experience look like?

Consider this the ultimate guide to choosing the best community platforms where I’ll show you where each tool measures up especially when it comes to:

• Ease of use
• Organization and management
• Member experience and engagement
• Monetization capabilities
• Branding and customization
• Analytics and reporting
• Value for money

Let’s get started.

My research process…

Any platform that supports threaded discussions in an online space can count as a community building platform. 

So what did I consider when evaluating the best tools?

To help you understand this better, let me start with why I needed a community platform in the first place.

I run a coaching program called Fractional Lab—where I help freelancers, consultants and service providers build profitable, lean fractional businesses.

I didn’t want to start yet another Slack group collecting dust. I wanted a setup where teaching felt organized, participation felt natural, and the community pulled each other up.

That meant the platform had to do a few things really well:

• Support online course creation.
• Let me gate content or specific spaces/subgroups.
• Host live events and allow members to RSVP
• Have built-in member engagement tools like discussion boards, chats (and maybe some gamification elements like challenges and leaderboards). 

Super straightforward, right?

Now, here’s what my selection process was like.

I started by making a list of 30 popular and top rated online community software.

And right away, I began cutting down my list.

First, I wanted to focus on community software platforms that:

• Are practical solutions for average creators, coaches, educators, knowledge entrepreneurs, and startups.
• Provide strong monetization features such as membership subscriptions, and paid content.
• Are affordable. Ideally, a $100 per month plan should let anyone build a community and monetize it.
• Are easy to use and shouldn’t feel like an add-on to a CMS (e.g., WordPress plugins).
• Let you own your community.

That said, I eliminated platforms that:

1. Are social media groups (e.g, Facebook, Discord and Reddit)

While they’re good starting places, it’s hard to build a professional community on them.

They don’t have native ways to monetize your groups. You also have limited control over branding, ownership and members’ engagement and data.

To put it simply,

I didn’t want to build my community in a place I had nearly no control.

So… Reddit, FB Groups, and Discord were out.

2. Are corporate & enterprise community software solutions.

These came down to two things. 

First, pricing.

I didn’t want to pay nearly 500 bucks for community software.

For example, Disciple’s cheapest plan starts at $729/month (if you choose to pay annual) for upto 500 members.

And it lets you even have a branded community mobile app.

But that’s still expensive.

Others like Disco, Zapnito, and GlueUp hide their pricing behind a “Book demo” button. Which doesn’t give you an idea on what to expect in terms of pricing.

Second, many of these enterprise community management software have a reputation of being clunky and a nightmare to work with. 

Here’s what few users on Reddit had to say about one of them.

In that case, Disciple Media, Disco, Zapnito, Discourse, GlueUp, Higher Logic, SocialPlus, Hivebrite, Khoros, MembersClicks, and WildApricot were also outta my list.

• Check out my detailed review of the best enterprise community platforms.

3. WordPress-based community and membership site plugins.

I have used WordPress to know enough. And honestly, it’s the last place I’d want to host my community.  

It has so many moving parts. 

You need to:

• Buy hosting (good ones like Rocket.net will cost you $60 per month)
• Install a theme and a couple plugins
• Watch for updates, theme and plugin conflicts

These are the things I didn’t want to deal with.

It’s an expensive venture in the long run. Money-wise, and time-wise.

Not to mention if you’re new to WordPress, you’ll quickly realize that it’s not the most user-friendly and secure CMS and website builder.

That said, I eliminated MemberPress, BuddyBoss, AccessAlly, and LearnDash.

4. Slack community

As I had mentioned earlier on, Slack lacks any native way to host a paid community. 

Yes, it’s free for unlimited members. Yes, there are workarounds to paywall your group via a third party like LaunchPass.

But there are some huge risks that made me not consider it.

First, the Slack free plan limits your message history for upto 90 days. Meaning you and your members can’t access conversations older than 90 days. So if you have some good information buried down in your chats that your members might need, I’m sorry but after 90 days you have to kiss it goodbye.

Suppose you decide to go for its paid plan. Well, it’s prohibitively expensive. 

Most successful communities I know have around 500 members. Slack’s Pro plan costs $8.75 per member per month, which translates to $4,375 per month for a 500-member community. That’s a steep price unless you’re running a paid community—something I would never recommend doing on Slack.

So Slack was also off my list.

5. Basic community forum and membership site platforms

During my tests, I came across a few platforms that almost checked everything I was looking for.

(Podia, LearnWorlds, Thinkific and Patreon.) 

And I almost considered them.

Until I tested each one of them.

Podia checks the basics and could work if you just need a simple digital business setup. But it felt unpolished. The interface looks dated, templates are basic, and the entire community feature feels tacked on as an afterthought rather than a core part of the experience. 

LearnWorlds and Thinkific didn’t fare much better. Both are strong if you only want to build courses. But offered a barebones community building experience.

For Patreon — this was the last place I wanted to build an online learning community. Patreon is more of a membership site platform for creators. It screams “help a broke creator out” and I didn’t want to send the same message to my audience. 

Still, I tested it. And right away, I hit limitations. The only way to run an event is by livestreaming through Vimeo, YouTube Live, or Crowdcast. There’s no option to schedule events nativel, host interactive workshops or private calls using Zoom, Google Meet, or any video tool you actually control. 

Branding is another wall. Patreon offers minimal customization. You can’t whitelabel your community or use your own domain. Your membership always sits under the Patreon brand.

Then there are the fees. Patreon takes 8% to 12% of every transaction. The platform is free to join, but as your revenue grows, so does the cut they take. Over time, those transaction fees can add up fast and eat into your profits.

In that case,  LeanWorlds, Podia and Patreon were also out.

Best online community platforms reviewed

Now that I had narrowed down my list to 7:

It was time to actually test them in detail to see where each thrives and lacks.

So, buckle up.

#1: Circle.so

Best all-in-one online community platform overall.

After testing more than a dozen community platforms—including Skool, Bettermode, and Disco—Circle offered the strongest balance between pricing, functionality and user experience.

It has a clean and modern interface yet refreshingly easy to use. Its features are extensive without being overwhelming. Pricing is reasonable given what’s included.

Many platforms I tried struggled to strike this balance.

For example, Bettermode is flexible and highly customizable but has a steeper learning curve for beginners. Skool is simple to set up but feels barebones. And Disco is robust but expensive.

In Circle, you can organize your community using spaces and space groups.Think of spaces as channels in Slack, but with more flexibility. 

Each space can serve as a course hub, event room, discussion forum, chat room, or multimedia library.

You can control access by setting any space as public, private, or secret depending on what you want members to see or join.

Space Groups let you cluster related spaces under a common theme or topic which makes it for easier navigation.

I liked how modular and intentional Circle community organizational structure was. Because given this flexiblity you can design a community structure that fits your needs. From course communities, cohort-based learning programs, mastermind groups, to customer support forums.

Below are the features that stood out to me.

Circle.so Features

• Flexible and private spaces: With Circle you can use spaces to build your community and organize it. You can create rich posts and threaded discussions with media embeds and searchable history. Or you  can choose other formats including chat, events, courses and media library. You can choose to set each of your spaces accessible to everyone, private and secret—which makes it easy to set multiple membership access inside your main community.
• Paywalls: Paywalls let you monetize your community natively. You can gate access to either your entire community or individual spaces which is ideal if you’re building a multi-tier membership. You can charge one-time fees, set up recurring subscriptions, or offer installment payments. Circle supports various payment options like Apple Pay, Google Pay, credit/debit cards, and even BNPL options like Affirm, Afterpay, and Klarna. Just note that Paywalls is all powered by Stripe, so it’s only available where Stripe is supported.
• Access groups: It’s a pre-configured bundle of spaces and space groups that make it easier to control which spaces members get access to when they join your community. Instead of manually assigning space access for each invite, paywall, or sign-up flow, you can link that entry point to an access group. You can create multiple access groups for different membership tiers, cohorts, or program types. When someone joins using a specific invite or paywall, they’re instantly placed in the right spaces based on the group you’ve connected. You can even combine multiple access groups during onboarding if needed.
• Solid events management: You can schedule events, send reminders, and let members RSVP. Circle also lets you natively host live rooms (up to 150 people) and livestreams (up to 2,000) replacing the need for third party web conferencing tools like Zoom. You can also record sessions for reuse in your courses.
• Online courses: Circle lets you create structured courses with drip scheduling capabilities. You can natively host your course materials but if you have your video recordings hosted elsewhere like on Wistia, Vimeo and YouTube, you can quickly embed them into your course curriculum via a link embed. I’ve tried a  ton of course platforms like Kajabi and Thinkific and they’re a pain when it comes to embedding video lessons hosted on third-party platforms. However, Circle isn’t the best solution if you’re looking to build sophisticated learning programs. It falls flat when it comes to student assessment since it only supports quizzes. It doesn’t support exams, gradebooks and  course completion certificate issuing so if you’re running upskill and certification programs you’d want to go with a more dedidated platform like Thinkific or LearnWorlds.
• Robust community post editor: Circle offers one of the most capable post editors I’ve used on any community platform. You can write long-form posts with rich formatting like subheadings (up to H3), bullet lists, blockquotes, and buttons. It also supports a wide range of media including images, video embeds, PDFs, and interactive elements from third-party tools like Typeform and Airtable. I tested several of Circle’s competitors, and very few came close in terms of editorial flexibility and publishing tools.
• Customization and branding: Circle’s UI is easy to brand. You can customize the color palette, modify the top nav bar, add your logo, connect your own domain and also white-label notification emails. If you want to go even further, Circle’s Plus plan lets you build a fully branded mobile app for your community.
• Workflows: Workflows is Circle’s built-in automation tool. It lets you automate repetitive tasks like sending welcome messages to new members or granting access to specific paywalled spaces. You can also use it to create basic automated email sequences which is useful if you’re not using an external email marketing platform. The only downside is that Workflows are only available on the Business plan and above. They’re not included in the lower-tier Professional plan.
• Marketing hub: This is essentially Circle’s email marketing tool. It’s not included in Circle’s subscriptions and instead it’s available as an add-on. You can use it to send email broadcasts, set up basic automations based on member activity, and create opt-in forms for list building. However, I found its email template designer and form builder fairly basic. 
• AI agents: Only available on Circle’s Enterprise and Custom plans, AI Agents let you automate support and engagement at scale. You can train agents using your community’s content including posts, courses, comments, and custom data. These agents can then answer questions, onboard new members, and handle billing or technical issues. 
• Gamification: Circle includes native gamification features like leaderboards and point-based rewards system. Members can earn points for actions like getting likes or comments, and level up over time. You can customize point thresholds, levels, and use workflows to reward members with badges, exclusive access, personalized thank-you notes, or even discounts on premium offers. 
• Segments: As your community scales, targeting the right members becomes harder. Segments simplify this by letting you create dynamic audience groups based on filters like roles, tags, and other attributes. You can use segments to filter your audience list, trigger workflows, send targeted email broadcasts, or push notifications on branded apps. 
• Affiliates: With Circle, you can create an affiliate program to allow members earn a commission for referring other people to your paid community boosting your digital business growth.

Circle.so Pricing

Circle isn’t the most affordable online community platform. But considering all the feature set that it comes packed with, it’s easy to see why it charges a premium pricing.

All its plans support unlimited members, but the number of spaces, admins, and moderators varies by tier.

Below is a simple price breakdown of Circle’s pricing.

• Professional – $99/month: up to 3 admins, 10 moderators, 20 spaces
• Business – $219/month: up to 5 admins, 15 moderators, 30 spaces
• Enterprise – $499/month: up to 10 admins, 100 moderators, 100 spaces
• Plus – Custom pricing: up to 20 admins, 200 moderators, 500 spaces

Circle.so Pros and Cons

Bottom Line: Why Choose Circle for Community Building

Circle offers well-rounded community-building features while also keeping user experience in mind. It’s the best community platform for building dedicated online spaces to offer exclusive content such as online courses, coaching, and digital downloads. It’s also ideal for building engaging communities using discussions, gamification and live events.

👉 Explore Circle.so free for 14 days.

Also read:

• Circle.so review
• Circle vs. Mighty Networks
• Circle.so tutorial

#2: Mighty Networks

Best for building structured, high-engagement, multi-level communities.

Mighty Networks is the best solution if you want more flexibility in structuring your community, impressive engagement tools and the ability to create multi-level experience in your network.

Unlike most community platforms—such as Circle—that only let you have courses, discussions, and memberships into distinct spaces, Mighty Networks gives you the flexibility to combine them into one.

For example, you can create course space and include engagement capabilities like discussions, chats, and events without creating separate spaces for each. 

This can come in handy especially if you plan to offer cohort-based courses where social and collaborative learning thrives.

You can gate access to individual spaces or bundle multiple spaces into a Collection where you can control access. 

The platform also integrates with Stripe, allowing you to charge for memberships, courses, or one-time purchases directly within the community. If you prefer external payment processing, you can connect tools like ThriveCart through Zapier.

Most platforms offer basic group segmentation, but Mighty Networks takes it further with automated workflows. You can set rules that automatically invite members to new spaces on course completion, engagement levels, or subscription status ensuring that the community scales efficiently without manual admin work.

Speaking of community engagement, Mighty Networks has various interactive tools to keep your community active. You can create community posts, articles and add media content such as images, videos, and GIFs. You can also go live inside a space, start polls, or run quizzes.

Unlike Circle and Skool, Mighty Networks doesn’t have a dedicated leaderboard system that you can use to gamify your community engagement. Although there are workarounds on that it would be better if it had a dedicated tool for that.

However, Mighty Networks makes up for this with more impressive gamification capabilities such as streaks, milestones, challenges, habit tracker, badges and ambassador program.

Mighty Networks Features

• Activity Feed: This feature provides real-time updates, keeping members informed about new posts, events, and discussions. It also features advanced filters to allow members to customize their feed to show only relevant updates. For example, they can use the “Personal Feed” to view activity from specific spaces they belong to.
• Customizable Member Profiles: Members can personalize their profiles to showcase their interests and expertise. Members can also view other members’ information such as the spaces they belong to, badges earned, followers, and connections within the network. This feature fosters deeper relationships by providing insights into each member’s background, encouraging meaningful interactions.
• Resource Library: A centralized hub where you can organize and share valuable content, such as guides, PDFs, videos, or articles. It helps community members easily access key resources, ensuring they find the information they need without searching multiple places.
• Online Courses: Mighty Networks allows you to create and manage online courses directly on the platform. This feature is ideal for community leaders looking to monetize their expertise or engage members through community-driven learning.
• Live Events: You can host and manage virtual events, webinars, or meetings within the platform. This encourages real-time engagement and offers opportunities for networking, learning, and discussing important community topics.
• Ambassador Program: It’s a referral system inside the platform that allows you to reward members for inviting others to join the community.

Mighty Networks Plans and Pricing

Mighty Networks offers one of the most affordable pricing packages in the market. Its pricing package “Community” start as low as $33 per month.

This is way below compared to its competitors like Kajabi or Thinkfic. However, the downside of this plan is that it doesn’t include an online course builder, or quizzes and has limited analytics.

Here’s a breakdown of Mighty Networks’ pricing structure.

• The Community Plan starts at $49/month
• The Courses Plan: starts at $119/month
• The Business Plan: starts at $219/month
• The Path-to-Pro Plan: costs $430/month
• Mighty Pro: contact their sales team to get custom pricing

Mighty Networks Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
✅ Unlimited members, Hosts, moderators, and Spaces	❌ A basic website and landing page builder
✅ Native live-streaming	❌ Transaction fee on your sales
✅ High level of customization and branding	❌ Limited integrations and analytics on low-tier plans (Community Plan)
✅ Create a white-labeled app for your community
✅ Affordable pricing
✅ Create a curated community feed that’s personalized
✅ User-friendly interface
✅ Strong gamifcation
✅ Robust member’s profiles

Bottom Line: Why Choose Mighty Networks for Community Building

Mighty Networks is the best platform for building custom, highly engaging social communities. It seamlessly integrates community features with online courses and memberships, allowing you to create a sustainable business while keeping members engaged. You can build branded communities that align with your theme, engage members through events, chats, posts, polls, leaderboards, and quizzes.

👉 Explore Mighty Networks free for 14 days.

Also read:

• Circle vs Mighty Networks review
• Mighty Networks review

#3: Kajabi

Best all-in-one digital business platform.

Kajabi is the best online community platform if you’re looking for a comprehensive digital business solution that comes with well-intergrated sales and marketing features. 

Unlike community-focused platforms like Circle and Mighty Networks, Kajabi provides everything you need to run your business in one place. You can build websites, create sales funnels, run email marketing campaigns, and set up checkout systems—without relying on third-party tools. For example, you won’t need Kit for email marketing or ClickFunnels for sales funnels because Kajabi has these features built in.

The Kajabi online community builder is well polished. It has an intuitive UI and strong engagement features. You can create Circles to organize your community and manage access with Access Groups. You can then engage members using community posts, polls, challenges, live events and gamification.

Kajabi Features

• Community challenges: The platform allows you to engage community members with challenges to encourage them to work toward common goals or learning objectives.
• Built-in events: You can easily host online events like webinars, workshops, and live Q&As directly in Kajabi, without needing extra tools. It also supports 1-on-1 live coaching sessions. Plus, you can record these events and use them later as part of your course content.
• Native sales and marketing features: Once you sign up for Kajabi, you gain access to built-in marketing tools like sales funnels, a website builder, email marketing, and contact management—eliminating the need for external integrations.
• Student assessments and certification: Kajabi lets you create quizzes with automatic grading, making it easy to assess students. After they complete a course, you can quickly issue certificates of completion.

Kajabi Pricing

Kajabi comes at a higher price tag compared to other specialized online community platforms due to its comprehensive approach

Here’s a brief breakdown of Kajabi Pricing.

• Kickstater: $69/mon for up to 250 contacts
• Basic: $149/mon for up to 10,000 contacts 
• Growth: $199/mon for up to 25,000 contacts
• Pro: $399/mon for up to 100,000 contacts

Kajabi Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
✅ An all-in-one solution for building communities around your digital product	❌ Expensive for starters
✅ Mobile apps for both members and admins	❌ Analytics and reporting could be better
✅ Automation to streamline your digital business
✅ Detailed analytics and reporting tools
✅ AI tools to help you create online courses, email copies, landing page copy, and video scripts faster

Bottom Line: Why Choose Kajabi to Build an Online Community

Kajabi is the ideal choice if you’re looking for an all-in-one platform that not only supports online communities but can also handle the marketing aspect of your education or coaching business. Unlike platforms like Mighty Networks, where you need to integrate separate tools like Kit for email marketing and ClickFunnels for sales funnels, Kajabi includes all of these features in its plans. Additionally, Kajabi’s community platform includes engagement tools like challenges, polls, quizzes, and discussion boards—creating an interactive environment for your students.

👉 Explore Kajabi free for 30 days.

Also read: Kajabi alternatives

#4: GroupApp

Best community software for small creators and knowledge entrepreneurs.

GroupApp is an online community platform designed to help creators and online coaches establish an engaging community experience for their education and coaching businesses.

Despite being a relatively new platform, GroupApp exhibits promising features that will compel you to forego well-established competitors such as Circle, Skool and Mighty Networks.

To start with, GroupApp has a robust online course builder that lets you create and host courses directly on the platform. Its drag-and-drop curriculum builder enables you to organize courses into structured sections and lessons. You can add various content formats, including videos (uploads and embeds), audio files, and PDFs. 

Unlike Circle, which has limited options for course assessments, GroupApp includes quizzes, assignments and surveys which lets you discover how well your students have grasped your content and identify learning gaps. Moreover, you can track student’s progress and understand how they’re interacting with your course materials using its built-in progress reports.

GroupApp also lets you create channels (which are similar to spaces in Circle) to organize your community. 

Inside your community channels, you can share community posts taking various formats such as text, images, videos, GIFs audio, file attachments and code snippets. 

But unlike Mighty Networks, GroupApp has limited interactive tools like polls, badges and leaderboards that can boost engagement.

However, you control access to individual channels and set them as:

• Open access: Publicly available to all members.
• Private groups: Invitation-only spaces for exclusive discussions.
• Paid memberships: Premium content for paying subscribers.
• Subscription plans: Different membership tiers with varying access levels.
• Audience segments: Custom segments based on user activity and preferences.

This can be useful if you plan to build a community with various membership plans and tiers.

GroupApp Features

• Online course builder
• Resource library
• Channels and categories
• Events hosting
• Landing page builder
• Completion certificates
• Workflow automation builder.

GroupApp Pricing

GroupApp has a free plan and three paid packages, each offering a 14-day trial period. Let’s take a look at the details of these packages:

• Free: free plan
• Starter: costs $49 per month
• Pro: costs $109 per month
• Business: costs $259 per month
• Enterprise: custom pricing

GroupApp Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
✅ No transaction fees	❌ Limited interactive tools
✅ Comprehensive students progress reports	❌ No native live streaming
✅ Course completion certificates	❌ Limited customization
✅ Customizable membership access controls
✅ Easy-to-use interface
✅ Built-in landing page builder
✅ Free plan available
✅ Email white labeling
✅ Mobile app for on-the-go access

Bottom Line: Why Choose GroupApp for Online Community Building

GroupApp is the best solution if you want a comprehensive platform to host courses and foster a membership-driven community. It has an intuitive online course builder that supports student assessments and certification, making it easy to track progress and reward completion. GroupApp takes it further with its customizable access controls and segmentation capabilities which makes it easy to create a community with multiple membership tiers and tailor the experience for different community members.

#5: Swarm

Best for building video-rich online communities and coaching programs.

Swarm works a little differently than many other online community platforms I’ve tested on this list.

Instead of centering on courses, discussions, or gamification, it focuses more on offering a video-based community experience.

This can come in handy if you rely on video to connect with your audience. 

For example if you’re a YouTuber sharing behind the scenes content or online coach offering interactive workshops. 

In Swarm, your community will be structured and organized using Hubs. They’re similar to Circle’s spaces or Channels in slack. A Hub can either be video, or discussion, or chat focused.

Within your community hubs, you can choose to share content by recording a video or audio on the go right within the Swarm platform or you can upload video files from your local storage.

You can also embed your videos from external hosting platforms like YouTube, Wistia and Vimeo. 

Swarm also lets you create text based community posts with rich content such as images,GIFs, audio, polls and file attachments. 

Speaking of events, Swarm lets you natively stream your live sessions or you can choose to use a third party software like Zoom or Webinarjam. However, its native live events features come with serious limitations of 1 hour max for its high end plan and even 2 minutes (yes you’ve read that right) for its cheapest plan.

Swarm Community Features

• Host live video events inside your Swarm community
• Create video community posts
• Video and audio recording
• AI transcriptions
• Threaded messaging

Swarm Pricing

Compared to most platforms I’ve reviewed on this list, Swarm is slightly expensive. It places strict limits on the number of spaces (which function like groups), members, and live stream duration. However, if you need more flexibility and unrestricted access, upgrading to the Elite plan removes these limits and includes a branded community app.

Here’s a breakdown of Swarm’s pricing:

• Novice – $49/month for 1 community space and up to 25 members per space.
• Pro – $99/month for 5 spaces and up to 50 members per space.
• Expert – $199/month for unlimited spaces and up to 150 members per space.
• Elite – $339/month for unlimited spaces and members, plus a branded community app.

Swarm Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
✅ Native live streaming	❌ Expensive for low-budget creators
✅ Built-in video and audio recording	❌ No marketing tools
✅ AI transcriptions	❌ No online course creation tools
✅ Generative AI assistant
✅ Ability to build branded mobile apps
✅ Easy to use platform

Bottom Line: Why Choose Swarm for Online Community Building

Swarm is the best community platform if you’re looking to build an online space where video is the primary form of engagement. It’s useful especially for coaches and educators looking to build tightly focused communities where they can offer value to their clients either in small groups or 1-on-1 sessions. 

👉 Explore Swarm free for 14 days.

#6: Skool

Best for simplicity and community gamification.

Skool offers a simple, minimalistic platform ideal for beginners and digital business owners who need a powerful yet straightforward tool for building online communities and selling online courses. It avoids the complexity of traditional LMS tools, an all-in-one community platforms making it easier to manage and use.

With Skool, you can create online courses and lock content based on members’ levels, encouraging participation and engagement.

There’s no limit to the number of courses you can add, and you can drip-schedule your lessons to improve student engagement and knowledge retention.

You can gamify your community via leaderboards and use polls to boost member interaction.

 You also offer value using community posts, videos, and GIFs to engage members further. 

While Skool allows you to create events within your community, it lacks native video live-streaming features available in platforms like Circle and Mighty Networks — relying instead on third-party integrations.

Skool Features

• Community Forums: Enable structured discussions and Q&A sessions where members can share insights, ask questions, and exchange ideas within your community.
• Event Calendars: Schedule group events, meetups, and webinars. Members can view events in their local time zone and receive automatic email reminders, ensuring they don’t miss out on key activities.
• Classrooms: Create an integrated learning experience by offering courses within the community. Members can access course materials, participate in discussions, and engage with fellow learners, all within the same platform.
• Badges and Gamification: Boost engagement by rewarding members with badges, points, and levels. This can encourage participation and foster a sense of achievement among members.
• Email Broadcasts: Send professional-looking newsletters directly to all members. Group admins can use this feature to share important updates, announcements, or event details, ensuring everyone stays informed.

Skool Pricing

Skool provides cost-effective, transparent pricing. For $99 per month, you gain access to unlimited course creation for an unlimited number of students. This plan includes all features, such as email broadcasts, chat, and community metrics, ensuring a complete solution without unexpected fees.

Skool Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
✅ Simple and user-friendly interface	❌ No inbuilt live streaming features
✅ Community gamification	❌ Lacks student assessment tools
✅ Unlimited courses and members	❌ Less customizable
✅ Affordable subscription model
✅ Built-to-scale courses

Bottom Line: Why Choose Skool to Build an Online Community

Skool is one of the best online community software for creators who want to offer a community experience for their students. It allows you to gamify course content via leaderboards, and boost community engagement using posts, events, discussions, and chats. Skool is also easy to use making it a no-brainer even for first-timers to build their first community and offer value via courses and coaching.

Also read: Skool Review

#7: Podia

Best community platform for online coaches and eduprenuers.

Podia is an all-in-one online platform for selling digital products, offering features similar to Kajabi. It encompasses a website builder, a native email marketing tool, an online course creator, and an online community platform.

I personally used Podia’s online community builder to assess how it measures up when it comes to online community building.

Let’s begin by examining how Podia manages community organizations.

Right out of the box, Podia allows you to organize community discussions, topics, and posts within what they call “Topics.”

Within each topic, members can share posts in various content formats, including text, videos, images, and PDF files.

Furthermore, using its “embed” feature, you can seamlessly incorporate diverse media and content formats, such as videos, audio, forms, code snippets, and quizzes from over 1900 supported sources.

This is a super helpful feature as it enables you to share content from various platforms. 

Do you have a video hosted on a third-party platform like Wistia? No worries. Want to embed a code snippet or a quiz form from platforms like Typeform? Podia has you covered.

Once content is posted, members can engage with one another through comments, likes, and mentions.

Much like Kajabi, Podia also features a user-friendly drag-and-drop website builder that simplifies the creation of a digital storefront for your products.

The website builder is intuitive and offers various customization options, including fonts and colors. You can easily drag and drop different page elements such as images, videos, text, opt-in forms, FAQs, testimonial boxes, and more.

Overall, I found Podia to be an appealing choice for edupreneurs and digital creators seeking a platform that extends beyond a community builder. It boasts a user-friendly website builder, a robust LMS platform, and effective email marketing tools.

Although its design is clean, I found Podia lacking in aspects like website templates, native live streaming features, and live events which may be a consideration for users with specific needs in these areas.

Podia Pricing

Podia has one of the most affordable paid plans you’ll find in any online community software platform. 

• Free: includes a website builder, community, one coaching product
• Mover – costs $39 per month: includes unlimited courses and coaching
• Shaker – costs $89 per month: includes email addon, affiliates,  and chat support

Podia also includes a 17% discount if you choose to pay annually.

Podia Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
✅ User-friendly interface	❌ No website templates
✅ Drag & drop website builder	❌Analytics could be better
✅Great content embedding tool	❌Limited customization
✅ Feature-rich free plan
✅ Coupons and upsells

Also read: Podia vs. Circle.so

#8: Bettermode

Best standalone online community software—ideal for SaaS businesses looking to create customer communities for education, support, and feedback.

Bettermode (formerly Tribe.so) is an excellent choice for building branded customer communities. It’s designed for businesses looking to engage customers through online communities.

Right of the box, Bettermode offers a user-friendly interface that allows you to manage your community using Spaces, Collections, and Tags. 

Spaces act as customizable containers, providing a platform to host content and connections centered around common themes or purposes. 

Collections, on the other hand, enable you to group relevant Spaces together, streamlining the organization.

For instance, in the example community below, Spaces like “Knowledge Base” and “Product Updates” are conveniently grouped under the Collection “Resources.”

Bettermode offers strong branding and customization options for your online community. You can customize your Spaces icons, profile fields, typography, and colors and even host your community on your custom domain.

To further foster engagement within the community, Bettermode incorporates gamification features such as badges, points, virtual currency, and a leaderboard system.

Additionally, members can actively interact with each other’s posts by adding comments, mentions, emojis, GIFs, and more.

Analytics and reporting are areas Bettermode excels at. The platform provides granular reports about members’ activity, your community traffic, and Spaces performance.

You can also pick a timeframe on when to view the data. Generally, their reporting is easy to use even for new users. 

Bettermode also integrates seamlessly with third-party apps like Zapier, Slack, and Hotjar, though the range of supported integrations is not as extensive as those from Kajabi or Thinkific. 

However, if you’re a developer or have a developer on your team you can use API and webhooks to integrate your community with some applications that you’re ready to use.

Unfortunately, Bettermode doesn’t offer an inbuilt online course builder and a native live streaming capability.

This can be inconvenient for businesses looking to nurture their audience with quality courses rather than just using a community to build relationships and for customer support.

Bettermode Pricing 

If you’re seeking an affordable community builder, Bettermode may not be the ideal choice for you.

Their starting plan the Advanced plan costs $599 per month, which is a higher price point compared to other options in the market.

Bettermode Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
✅ Highly customizable and brandable	❌ Can be expensive
✅ SSO functionality supported	❌ Does not offer mobile apps
✅ Create a fully white-label online community	❌ Limited integration
✅ Gamification supported
✅ Personalized activity feed

👉 Explore Bettermode free for 14 days.

#9: Slack

Best free online community platform

Slack is a solid choice if you’re looking for free online community software. It’s especially useful for small, tight-knit groups and new creators who want to launch a community without upfront costs.

There’s a reason many creators and coaches start with Slack:

Firstly, it’s free. You can build a community on Slack without spending a dime.While that sounds interesting on the surface, there are some serious downsides that come with this. 

Slack limits messages and files history for up to 90 days. This means you can’t access messages older than 90 days and to do so you need to upgrade to a paid plan.

Suppose you decide to pay for its premium plan. Well, it’s prohibitively expensive. 

Most successful communities I know have around 500 members. Slack’s Pro plan costs $8.75 per member per month, which translates to $4,375 per month for a 500-member community. That’s a steep price unless you’re running a paid community—something I don’t recommend doing on Slack.

Secondly, Slack is already widely used. Many of your potential members are likely active on Slack for work or other communities, making it easier for them to engage. Unlike Facebook Groups, Slack feels more professional than a social media platform and it has fewer distractions. 

Thirdly, it has excellent chat functionality. Conversations feel natural, engagement is instant, and members can get answers quickly. This creates a more interactive experience compared to slower, forum-style discussions.
Lastly, unlike social media community platforms like Facebook Group and LinkedIn Group, Slack lets you integrate third-parties tools which can extend functionality. For example you can integrate a tool like LaunchPass to charge for your community access, or Zoom for live sessions.

Slack Features

• Channels: Slack channels help structure conversations by topic, project, or team. Instead of unstructured group chats, you can create dedicated spaces for different discussions, such as announcements, interest-based topics, or support. This makes it easier for members to navigate conversations and engage with relevant content.
• Direct messaging: For personal or confidential conversations, Slack allows direct messaging between members. This is useful for networking, mentorship, and private support. 
• File sharing & collaboration: Slack makes it easy to share files, documents, and links within channels and direct messages. It supports previews for various file types, making collaboration seamless. However, files shared on the free plan are subject to Slack’s 90-day limit, meaning older files become inaccessible over time unless you upgrade to a paid plan.
• Huddles: They facilitate spontaneous audio and video conversations directly within channels or direct messages. This feature is ideal for quick check-ins or brainstorming sessions, allowing multiple participants to join without the need for formal meeting setups. Additionally, Huddles support multi-person screen sharing, enabling collaborative review of documents or presentations in real-time. However, on the free plan, Huddles are limited to two participants, while paid plans accommodate up to 50 participants.
• Integrations: Slack integrates with hundreds of third-party tools to enhance productivity. For example you can connect Zoom for live webinars, or Zapier for enhanced workflow automation.

Slack Pricing

Slack offers a free plan that supports unlimited community members but comes with significant limitations. Message history is limited to 90 days, you can integrate up to 10 apps, and video or audio calls are restricted to one-on-one meetings. Paid plans are costly, with the Pro plan at $8.75 per user per month and the Business+ plan at $15 per user per month.

Slack Pros and Cons 

Pros	Cons
✅ Free for unlimited members	❌ Expensive paid plans
✅ Third party integration	❌ Deletes your data older than 90 days
✅ Impressive group chat and private messaging capability	❌ No moderation features
✅ Slack huddles for live sessions
✅ Easy-to-use interface and familiar for many
✅ Mobile apps

Bottom Line: Why Choose Slack for Online Community Building

Slack is a compelling choice for new creators looking to build their first online community without any upfront costs. Its familiar interface and solid chat functionality make it easy to set up an engaging space. If you’re on a tight budget, Slack is a practical starting point. As your community grows, you can transition to platforms like Circle, Mighty Networks, or Skool for more advanced functionality and scalability.

👉 Create a free Slack account.

Best Online Community Platforms: FAQs