7 Best Facebook Group Alternatives in 2024: Detailed Review

Facebook Group is a popular free choice for building an online community. However, many creators, digital businesses, and knowledge entrepreneurs who rely on the platform to create a community around their brand or expertise often face multiple challenges:

• Lacks built-in community monetization features: Facebook Groups do not offer tools for payment processing, subscription management, or course hosting, which are essential for monetizing your community through paid memberships or selling digital products like courses and coaching program
• Limited customization and branding: its layout design is less customizable, and you cannot white label your community or host it on a custom domain.
• Your reach is restrained: Facebook’s algorithm controls your content’s visibility, reducing organic reach. You have less control over who sees your posts in your community.
• Prone to distractions: since Facebook Group is built on top of a social media platform, members can get sidetracked by message notifications from their friends or unrelated content in their feeds, reducing their engagement with your community.
• Limited moderation tools: Facebook’s moderation features are basic. Removing problematic content, enforcing group rules, and managing spam can be difficult for admins in larger groups.
• Privacy issues: like any social media, Facebook collects users’ data for advertising. Moreover, Facebook has an ugly history of safeguarding users’ data. Given that some users can be reluctant to join a community hosted on Facebook.

With these limitations, many creators and businesses are forced to find other options to build an online community around their brand where they have full ownership and monetize it.

In this guide, we’ll explore the best Facebook Group alternatives and discuss the areas where each platform excels and the users that are best suited for each.

Top 3 Best Facebook Group Alternatives

Choose Mighty Networks if you want a platform that lets you create a white-label online community, host unlimited members, and offer courses, group discussions, and live sessions all in one place.

Pick Circle if you want a platform designed for creators, with a more intuitive user interface (than Mighty Networks) and rich workflow automation features for managing your online community.

Go for Kajabi if you want an all-in-one digital business platform. It combines online community creation, online course creation, live coaching programs, email marketing, website building, sales funnel building, and podcasting.

Our Selection Criteria for the Best Facebook Group Alternatives

Many creators use Facebook Groups to build online spaces for members with similar interests.

However, despite its popularity, Facebook Groups has limitations: limited reach, no built-in monetization features, limited branding, and distractions for members.

To find the best alternatives to Facebook Groups, we developed strict criteria to ensure only the best community-building tools made our list.

We started with 25 tools and narrowed it down to the 7 best platforms. Here’s what we considered:

• Ease of use: Facebook Groups are easy for both members and admins to navigate, so we expected the same from its competitors. We assessed each platform’s user experience, focusing on how easy it was to create spaces, and posts, add content, and customize it. We also evaluated the UI’s load speed and dismissed platforms with slow, complex, outdated, clunky, or buggy interfaces.
• Branding and customizations: Facebook Groups offers nearly no branding opportunities so its best alternatives had to have these functionalities. Specifically, it had to allow hosting a community on a custom domain, adding branding colors and images such as banners and logos. We dismissed those that didn’t. Additional branding options like custom themes, space icons, and mobile apps were a plus.
• Community organization and engagement tools: Facebook Groups lack functionalities to organize communities into common topics, such as channels, spaces, servers, or circles. Every platform we considered had to include some form of community structuring. Additionally, they needed to have engagement tools like posts, group chats, discussions, polls, gamification, and events.
• Community monetization tools: A major drawback of Facebook Groups is the lack of built-in monetization features. Given that its alternatives needed to have a method to help hosts generate income from their communities such as membership subscriptions, and selling digital content like online courses, live events, and ebooks. We dismissed platforms reliant on third-party integrations for these functions.
• Value for money: A community platform should be reasonably priced since Facebook Groups are free. We looked for platforms offering fair pricing relative to their features and dismissed those that seemed too expensive for small to growing creators.

What are the Best Facebook Group Alternatives in 2024?

• Mighty Networks 
• Circle 
• Kajabi
• Skool
• GroupApp
• Podia
• Disco 

1. Mighty Networks

Best Facebook Group alternative to create a white-label online community.

Mighty Networks is an all-in-one community platform that combines online community building, course creation, and live events. 

As a community host, you can engage members through group chats and community posts containing rich media content such as images and videos, conduct polls and quizzes, and gamification.

You can also create online courses and host your content natively where Mighty Networks gives you a storage of 250GB – 3 TB depending on the plan you’re using. 

Additionally, it allows you to import content from third-party platforms such as Vimeo, YouTube, and Wistia, and using its embed feature. This feature also includes a proprietary tracking system that requires students to watch 90% of a video to unlock the next one.

Compared to Facebook Groups (and most platforms like Circle and Podia) Mighty Networks offers superior branding options.

While it allows standard customization options such as styling your community layout with your preferred color scheme, hosting it on a custom domain, and adding a logo.

It also allows you to design custom space icons and member badges and white-label your marketing emails.

Live events are another way to engage members on Mighty Networks.

The platform offers a native live streaming feature, allowing you to host live sessions and record them for future use as course content or prerecorded webinars. 

However, it limits views per stream and streaming duration.

The basic plan permits 5 hours per month and 50 viewers per stream, while the Business plan allows 30 hours per month and 500 viewers per stream.

While this can be enough when starting, it’ll force you to use third-party tools like Zoom if you exceed your live-streaming resources.

In other areas, Mighty Networks is generous with resources. It does not limit the number of spaces, members, admins, and moderators in every plan.

Competing platforms like Circle and Kajabi impose strict limits on these aspects.

Mighty Networks Pricing

Mighty Networks doesn’t offer a free plan, but you can sign up for a 14-day free trial to test the platform before upgrading to a paid plan.

The Community package is the most affordable option and includes all community-building features but does not have an online course builder. The custom Mighty Pro plan includes branded community mobile apps and a dedicated community strategist.

Here is the platform’s pricing breakdown when you choose to pay annually.:

• Community: starts at $41/ month
• Courses: costs $99/ month
• Business: starts at $179/ month
• Path-to-Pro: costs $360/ month
• Mighty Pro: contact the sales team for custom pricing

Mighty Networks Pros and Cons

Bottom line: Mighty Networks offers superior branding and community engagement features than Facebook Groups. It also offers community monetization options such as paid online courses, tiered membership subscriptions, and events. Given that it best suits creators and coaches who want more branding control and better monetization features. Try Mighty Networks for 14 days free.

2. Circle

Best alternative for creators, coaches, and info businesses.

Circle provides a more creator-friendly environment than Facebook Groups with robust tools to help you build a dedicated community around your creative work and monetize your digital products. 

The platform features an intuitive, modern design that is clutter-free. Navigation is clear and consistent across all tabs and menus.

It supports keyboard shortcuts to help you quickly accomplish various tasks within the community, such as opening the post editor, customizing your profile, or accessing direct messages.

Circle uses Spaces to organize your community, which also serve as the building blocks for your community.

You can create dedicated spaces for posts, events, chats, courses, and members, and set access levels to Private, Public, or Secret.

You can then engage members in those spaces using group discussions, direct messaging, gamified rewards, community posts, weekly digests, polls, and quizzes.

Circle also has a built-in live-streaming tool, eliminating the need for third-party platforms.

Hosts can start a live room or stream in an event space and allow members to RSVP, add to the calendar, and receive event reminders. 

Depending on your plan, you can have up to 50 on-camera co-hosts and 1000 attendees.

Circle online course builder is easy to use and also allows you to drip course lessons immediately after students enroll.

However, it doesn’t support student assessment tools like quizzes, grading systems, or completion certificates, so you’ll need to integrate third-party tools for these functionalities.

Another top highlight of Circle’s community platform is workflow automation, which allows you to automate community tasks such as member onboarding, event reminders, and automated member tagging just to mention a few.

You can choose from a selection of 12+ workflow templates representing common automation scenarios or create one from scratch using “if this, then that” automations.

Circle Pricing

Here’s a breakdown of Circle’s packages:

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

Circle Plus offers a branded online community app for creators who want to increase their engagement with branded mobile users. 

Depending on your plan, the platform charges transaction fees of 1-4% of your paywall billings. 

Circle Pros and Cons

Bottom line:  Circle offers more robust community management features than Facebook Groups and many dedicated community platforms. Its workflow builder lets you automate most community tasks, allowing you to focus on content creation. The platform is ideal for creators, online coaches, and educators who want a simple yet powerful solution for building a thriving online community. Try Circle for 14 days free.

3. Kajabi

The all-in-one digital business platform that goes beyond online community building (best for knowledge entrepreneurs).

Kajabi is a comprehensive creator business platform with online community building part of its offering.

It triples as an LMS, website builder, and a marketing platform.

You can use it to run your info business without purchasing extra tools to build checkout systems, sales pages, or even email marketing campaigns — features not found in Facebook Groups and most community platforms. 

The Kajabi Community is intuitive and allows you to host paid or free online community spaces on your Kajabi website, much like a forum, and offer it as a standalone product, an add-on to courses, or a subscription. 

You can organize your community into Circles and manage access with Access Groups. You can further engage members through leaderboards, group discussions, chats, posts, polls, and challenges and even share various content formats in your community spaces, including PDFs, audio, video, and images.

Kajabi also supports hosting live events for up to 200 attendees. Members can join via the web browser or the Kajabi App. You can record live sessions and repurpose them into courses or webinars.

Kajabi Pricing

Kajabi costs more than most community platforms but provides better value in every plan. 

Here’s a quick overview of Kajabi pricing:

• Kickstarter: $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

Bottomline: Kajabi is expensive but offers value for its price. As a comprehensive digital business platform, it is best suited for creators and edupreneurs who need a single solution for online course hosting, live events, sales, email marketing, and website building. Try Kajabi for 14-days Free.

4. Skool

Best gamification features.

Skool has a minimalistic interface that resembles a simple forum website.

Despite its simplicity, Skool offers strong community engagement and monetization features that rival Facebook Groups and most community platforms.

Skool communities are simple to create and navigate. Members can create posts and engage through comments and reaction emojis, similar to Facebook Groups.

Additionally, Skool allows embedding various content formats, including videos, images, GIFs, and polls inside its posts.

Hosts can incentivize engagement with leaderboards where members are awarded points for contributions, engagement with community posts, and course completion.

These leaderboards are displayed on member profiles and in the community, highlighting top-ranking members. 

Members can also connect through direct messaging and view each other’s availability. But unlike Mighty Networks, Skool does not support group chats. It also lacks native live-streaming tools and instead depends on third parties like Zoom.

Skool online course builder is also simple to use avoiding the complexity that comes with most LMS platforms like Thinkific and LearnWorlds.

However, due to its minimalist nature, Skool communities are less customizable. You can upload a logo and a cover image but cannot choose a custom color palette, as available in Circle, Mighty Networks, and Bettermode.

All communities on Skool look similar, which is a good thing because if some of your members have ever been to a Skool community before, they won’t have a hard time navigating yours because everything will look familiar.

To say the least, Skool is a good Facebook Group alternative for new creators looking to build simple communities with superior gamification and host learning materials.

Skool Pricing

Skool offers a single-paid plan at $99/month, which allows you to have unlimited members, courses, and content.

However, you are limited to one group for your community and it’ll cost you an extra $99 per month to add a new group making it challenging to build memberships with multiple tiers.

Skool Pros and Cons

Bottomline: Skool has a simple UI and superior gamification. It’s best suited for beginner online creators and educators looking to build an engaging community around their courses. Try Skool today.

5. GroupApp

Best Facebook Group to build online learning-focused communities.

GroupApp consolidates your online courses and community in one platform to enhance student engagement, course completion, and improve the overall learning experience.

It keeps everything simple with an intuitive online community builder where you can organize it into common topics called channels that you can set access to specific members in your community. 

You can engage members within these channels through posts that support various content formats, including videos, audio, images, text, and document attachments.

But unlike Mighty Networks and Skool, GroupApp lacks gamification features. 

It allows you to create events within your community, with RSVP options and reminders, though it relies on third-party platforms like Zoom and Demio for hosting live sessions.

GroupApp Pricing

GroupApp offers three paid plans based on the number of members, admins, and channels:

• Basic: $49/month for up to 1,000 members
• Pro: $109/month for up to 10,000 members
• Business: $259/month for unlimited members

GroupApp Pros and Cons

6. Podia

Affordable Facebook Groups alternative for all-in-one digital businesses.

Podia is a versatile digital business platform.

It has a website builder, email marketing tools, an online course creator, and a community space, making it a great alternative to Facebook Groups, especially for online coaches and educators who also find Kajabi a bit expensive. 

Straight out of the box, Podia allows you to organize discussions and posts within “Topics.”

Members can share different types of content on each topic, including text, videos, images, and PDFs from over 1900 sources. Furthermore, they can interact with content through comments, likes, and mentions.

To further engage your communities, the platform supports webinars, online courses, and live coaching sessions. 

Podia’s drag-and-drop website builder is user-friendly and fully customizable. You can create a digital storefront for your products with elements like images, videos, text, opt-in forms, and more, without any technical skills.

The platform also excels in course creation, offering both self-paced and drip courses. You can set up cohort-based courses with specific start dates to improve engagement. 

Podia Pricing

Podia offers four plans:

• Free: $0 (website builder, community, one coaching product)
• Starter: $9/mon (1 coaching product, community, and custom domain)
• Mover: $39/mon (unlimited courses and coaching)
• Shaker: $89/mon (includes email addon, affiliates,  and chat support)

Podia Pros and Cons

7. Disco

Best for enterprises

Disco is an online learning community platform that combines the features of a dedicated LMS and online community software.

It serves as an effective Facebook Group alternative for learning institutions, and enterprises, aiming to offer educational content to their employees and build engaging communities around the courses.

Disco’s course builder is user-friendly and offers flexibility with three templates: self-paced, cohort-based courses, and event series. You can also create courses from scratch. 

The platform supports drip scheduling of course modules and includes assessment tools like assignments and quizzes, with automatic grading for added convenience.

You can engage members using group chats, polls, posts, and events. However, Disco does not have native live-streaming features and depends on third-party integrations.

Moreover, like Circle, with Disco you can build basic automation workflows such as sending a welcome email when a member joins your community. 

Disco Pricing 

Compared to many community platforms Disco is expensive. It comes with one pricing package starting at $449 per month, limiting you to 50 products in one community, 100 automations, and 1000 members. It also comes with a custom plan but you need to contact their sales team.

Disco Pros and Cons

Frequently Asked Questions

Which is the best Facebook Group alternative?

There isn’t a single “best” Facebook Group alternative because the ideal platform depends on your needs. Consider your community’s goals, target audience, and desired features to help you make the right choice. 

Is there a more secure alternative to Facebook Groups?

Yes, many alternatives are more secure than Facebook Groups as outlined in this guide. I’d suggest switching your community from Facebook entirely because the platform has faced many lawsuits regarding data breaches and user privacy issues. These concerns can be a big risk to your community’s information.

How can I migrate my Facebook Groups community to a new platform?

Once you’ve chosen your new community platform, notify your members on Facebook Groups about the move and its benefits. You can also explore options to import data (if available) and set up a familiar space on the new platform. Be sure to leave the old Facebook community active for a while to smoothly transition your members to the new space.