12 Best Community Platforms (After 1 Year of Testing)

After testing over 30 platforms, Circle stands out as the top online community platform for its ease of use, flexible course spaces, and robust engagement tools like livestreaming, leaderboard, group chats, and discussion forums.

Mighty Networks came in second, offering flexible community spaces, high engagement, and branding tools. It also includes features like course creation, native live streaming, and a dynamic activity feed.

Kajabi is also a solid option but offers more value at a higher price tag. Along with community engagement features like leaderboards, chats, and challenges, you get marketing tools like a website builder, sales funnels, and email marketing.

In this post, I’ll explore the best community platforms, breaking down where each excels, who they’re best suited for, and what to expect in terms of pricing, features, and usability.

Best Community Platforms: A Quick Summary

For quick decision-making, the table below summarizes the top community-building platforms highlighting their best features, and prices.

What Makes the Best Community Platform? How We Made This List.

Any platform that allows group discussions or chats in an online space qualifies as an online community platform. But how do you know which one to choose?

The truth is, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution for building an online community. The right platform will depend largely on your specific needs and budget.

For example, if you’re a course creator or online coach, you need tools for delivering courses, hosting events, livestreaming, and fostering discussion. Your goal is to engage and educate your audience interactively.

On the other hand, if you’re building a customer community, things change. While courses and webinars are useful, a robust knowledge base and an active forum are far more essential. 

Customers value quick access to answers and a self-sustaining community where they can find solutions without relying on support tickets. Here, engagement is about providing useful resources and nurturing user-driven conversations.

With these varying needs in mind, we developed a clear process to evaluate and rank the best community platforms based on what they do well and who they’re designed for.

We started with over 30 platforms—free and paid—and after rigorous testing, narrowed it down to the top 12.

• Ease of use: The best community platform should be easy to use. It shouldn’t feel like you’re building a skyscraper with an IKEA manual. We favored platforms with intuitive designs, clutter-free, and fast loading speeds.
• Pricing: A good community software should be reasonably priced. We prioritized platforms that strike a balance between affordability and functionality. We also discarded expensive platforms that gatekeep essential features behind high tiers.
• Monetization: Communities today aren’t just about connection—they’re valuable assets for businesses and creators. And if you’re building an audience, you’re probably thinking about monetizing it—whether that’s immediately or down the road. We evaluated each platform to see if they support monetization features like membership subscriptions, paid content (like courses or eBooks), merchandise, paid events, and more. 
• Branding opportunities: Your community should feel like an extension of your brand, not a generic out-of-the-box solution. We checked whether each platform allows for meaningful customization—like tailoring the layout, color schemes, logos, and even custom domain options.
• Moderation features: Every community faces issues with difficult members at some point. Whether it’s spam or toxic behavior. Given that, a good community platform should offer effective moderation tools. We looked for features like user banning, content filtering, and customizable permissions to keep discussions on track and ensure a safe environment for members.
• Engagement tools: The best community platforms keep members active and engaged. We prioritized platforms that offer features like gamification (badges, points, leaderboards), notifications, polls, live chat, and discussions. 

Now that you know what criteria we used to choose the top community-building platforms, let’s review our recommendations and see where each excels.

Best Community Platforms of 2024

• Circle: Best for ease of use
• Mighty Networks: Best for community-led courses
• Kajabi: All-in-one platform for courses and marketing
• GroupApp: Best for knowledge entrepreneurs
• Skool: Best for gamification
• Podia: Best for selling digital products
• Bettermode: Best for building customer discussion boards
• Slack: Best for collaboration and communication
• Disciple Media: Advanced branding
• Discord: Best for gamers
• Swarm: Best enterprise-grade community platform
• Hivebrite: Best for non-profits
• Uscreen: Best for video monetization

1. Circle.so 

Best community platform overall.

Circle is an all-in-one online community platform that integrates discussion boards, group chats, courses, events, and livestreaming—all in one place.

While this isn’t something new as platforms like Mighty Networks and Podia offer similar setups, two aspects  make Circle stand out. 

It’s robust yet incredibly easy to use.

Not many software or web applications manage to strike this balance.

For example, Mighty Networks offers well-rounded community-building features but has a steeper learning curve for beginners. Meanwhile, Circle offers robust features without sacrificing user experience.

Let’s start with its user interface.

Circle UI Review

Everything about Circle’s interface feels polished. The design looks modern and clutter-free. Its core features are intuitively placed on the left sidebar, making navigation straightforward. 

Additionally, its interface loads fast and with no noticeable glitches ensuring a smooth user experience. 

Circle takes it a step further by offering keyboard shortcuts that streamline navigation. You can perform actions with just a few keystrokes, reducing the need for mouse clicks. For instance, pressing ALT + T opens chat threads instantly.

Circle’s Community Organization and Engagement

Circle allows you to organize your online community using Spaces and Space Groups, providing a highly structured way to manage interactions.  

Essentially, Spaces act as separate containers where you can create dedicated areas for discussions, group chats, courses, resource libraries, events, and more. 

You can set access to these spaces and even set up a paywall to allow only paid members. This can come in handy especially when setting up a community with multi-tier memberships.

Space Groups allow you to organize multiple Spaces by topic or theme, making it easier for members to navigate.

Circle also supports rich media community posts, so members can share videos, polls, and attachments. You can gamify engagement further with a leaderboard that awards points and badges based on contributions.

Circle goes further by offering gamification features to encourage members’ participation. You can reward points and badges to members based on their contributions.

Below are some of the impressive Circle features.

Circle Features

• Customizable community spaces: Circle lets you design your community spaces to match your brand and engagement goals. You can choose from six space types—like courses, posts, chats, and events—and customize each with icons, cover images, and access settings, allowing specific members only.
• Intuitive course builder: Circle’s course builder is hands-down easier to use than many specialized course platforms. You can quickly structure your course curriculum into modules and lessons, upload media, or easily import it from platforms like YouTube, Wistia, or Vimeo using one-click link import. Having used platforms like Thinkific and Kajabi, where media link import functionality is often buggy, I find Circle’s a big win.
• Native livestreaming: With Circle, you don’t need to pay for an external live-streaming platform like Zoom because it has this tool built-in, which can come in handy when offering live coaching sessions and cohorts. You can choose to host a live room for up to 30 attendees, where everyone in the session can participate using live video, audio, and chat. Or you can choose to host a normal livestream or webinar for up to 100 people, where only co-hosts or promoted attendees can participate with video and audio.
• Workflow automation: Circle allows you to automate tasks and deliver a personalized experience. You can set up triggers and actions to handle repetitive tasks, such as welcoming new members or sending notifications about important events.
• Robust integration: Circle natively integrates with over 30 third-party apps. It also supports SSO, API, and Zapier integrations allowing you to create a workflow of your choice.
• Mobile apps: Circle has mobile applications for both Android and iOS devices. Using the app, members can access course content, join live events, and participate in discussions and chats.
• Strong moderation tools: Unlike many community platforms, Circle excels at moderation. It includes profanity filters, lets you flag members after a certain number of reported comments, and gives you the ability to ban toxic members, helping you maintain a safe and healthy community environment.
• Email marketing: Circle recently launched a new email marketing feature called Marketing Hub. Using it you can send email broadcasts or build automated email sequences to nature your leads.

Circle Pricing

Circle offers four paid packages each with a 14-day free trial. The community platform also has transaction fees of 1-4% of your Paywall billings depending on the plan that you’re using. 

Here’s a breakdown of the Circle’s pricing.

• Basic: costs $49 per month
• Professional: costs  $99 per month
• Business: costs $219 per month
• Enterprise: costs $399 per month

Circle also offers an additional plan called Circle Plus that enables you to create a fully-branded online community and mobile app. This can come large businesess looking to white-label their community.

Circle 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.

2. Mighty Networks

Best for building branded social communities

Mighty Networks offers unmatched flexibility not found in many community building platforms. To begin with, it allows you to mix and match different features into a single space instead of having separate spaces for that — which is how platforms like Circle work.

For example, you can create a dedicated space inside your pillar community featuring online courses, events, discussions, a feed, and chats. This can be ideal if you want to create a community with multi-tier memberships.

Mighty Networks also allows you to build online courses. It provides prebuilt templates for different course types, allowing you to launch quickly. You can choose a content-only course (which includes only course material) or a cohort-based course that combines community interaction with course content in a single space.

In addition to courses and live events, you can engage your community with group discussions, chats, polls, quizzes, and gamification to incentivize participation.

However, a few things that I like about Mighty Networks making me rank it as one of the best community platforms is that it’s also highly customizable. You can customize individual community spaces to match the feel, vibe, theme, and branding. You can change space icons, change the header background and header image.

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.

• Community: starts at $33/ month
• Business: starts at $99/ month
• Mighty Pro: contact their sales team to get custom pricing

Mighty Networks Pros and Cons

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.

3. Kajabi

Best all-in-one digital business platform.

Kajabi is a comprehensive digital business platform. Unlike community-focused platforms like Circle and Mighty Networks, Kajabi offers additional tools, including a website builder, sales funnels, email marketing, and even podcast hosting.

This makes it the best community platform for digital creators who want to create and sell products such as courses, online coaching, and memberships, while also fostering an engaged online community.

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

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 ConvertKit 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.

4. GroupApp

Best community platfrom for small creators and online coaches

GroupApp is an online community platform designed to help creators 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 Skool, and Mighty Networks

With GroupApp, you can build courses directly within the platform. Its drag-and-drop curriculum builder lets you organize courses into structured sections and lessons, with support for various content formats including videos, audio files, PDFs, and slides.

You can also drip-feed content to keep students engaged over time.

Unlike Circle, which has limited options for course assessments, GroupApp includes quizzes and assessments to help you track student progress and identify learning gaps.

To create a thriving learning community, GroupApp provides well-integrated discussion spaces where members can connect, and share ideas.

It also integrates a community calendar with automated event reminders, making it easy to organize live events and keep members informed.

As of now, GroupApp doesn’t support gamification.

GroupApp Features

• Content Library: Upload and organize all your course materials in one place, making it easy for learners to access everything they need.
• Course assessments and certification: Easily assess your student’s understanding of the material, track progress, and identify knowledge gaps. You can also issue certificates of completion when members finish a course.
• Community events:  allows you to create live events such as workshops, AMAs, and webinars to engage your students and community members. You can add the events to your community calendar, where members can view and RSVP. 
• Paywalls: You can gatekeep premium content so that only paying members can access it. 
• Mobile Apps: Provide easy access to learning materials, community discussions, and chats via the GroupApp mobile app, keeping members connected wherever they are.

GroupApp Pricing

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

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

GroupApp Pros and Cons

Bottom Line: Why Choose GroupApp for Online Community Building

GroupApp best suits creators and coaches looking for simple online community software for building learning-focused spaces. It has an intuitive online course builder that supports student assessments and certification, making it easy to track progress and reward completion. GroupApp also includes a content library a useful for organizing course materials—a feature missing in platforms like Circle and Skool.

5. Skool

Best for community engagement and retention.

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, 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

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.

6. 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

7. Bettermode

Best standalone community platform—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

Frequently Asked Questions