Circle vs Mighty Networks: My Experience in 2025

Building an online community is a huge thing now for digital creators, online coaches, and businesses looking to forge a strong connection with their audience, receive feedback, and boost customer loyalty. And when it comes down to tools, Mighty Networks and Circle are two of the most popular platforms.
Both offer essential features for building engaging online communities and monetizing them through courses, coaching programs, and memberships—but how do they measure up?
I’ve been using both platforms for some time now to see where each thrives and falls short. In this Circle vs Mighty Networks comparison guide, I’m going to show you how the two tools stack up in terms of:
- Ease of use
- Community building capability
- Online course creation
- Customization and branding
- Monetization
- Affordability
Let’s go.
Mighty Networks vs Circle: A Quick Summary
While both Circle and Mighty Networks share many similarities, they differ in several aspects:
Circle — Build online learning spaces without complicated systems.
Circle is more user-friendly than Mighty Networks. Its UI is less cluttered, and its navigation is clear and easy to use. All core features and building blocks are conveniently placed on the left sidebar, which is the standard navigation for most web applications.
Circle also provides robust community management tools, including Community AI, workflow automations, and advanced moderation features.
However, unlike Mighty Networks, which lets you combine various features in one space, Circle restricts you to a single feature per community space. Which means, you can’t have discussions and online courses in a single space.
Due to its simplicity and ease of use, Circle is ideal for beginners, growing creators, and online coaches looking to build learning-focused community spaces without having to deal with the complexity that comes with traditional LMS platforms.
Mighty Networks — Build a white-label online community with multi-tier memberships.
On the other hand, Mighty Networks is more flexible and highly customizable. You can combine features from different space types into a single space.
For example, you can have discussions, live events, and online courses in a single space, independent of other community spaces. It’s like having a mini-community inside your main community—something you cannot do in Circle.
Mighty Networks offers better community engagement tools, including polls, badges, leaderboards, and a dynamic feed, although its native live streaming tool is somewhat basic. It also offers better branding features, allowing you to customize individual community spaces and elements to match your branding requirements.
Given that, Mighty Networks best suits growing online communities looking to bring learning and courses into a single platform. It is also an ideal solution for businesses seeking better branding features, the ability to build custom white-label community apps, and the option to build multi-level communities.
The table below summarizes how both community platforms measure up in aspects like pricing, online community building, monetization, branding, marketing, and more.
Mighty Networks | Circle |
---|---|
Pricing | |
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ The cheapest plan costs $49/mon but lacks courses and live-streaming capabilities. Mid-tier plans cost $119/mon and $219/mon, respectively. The most expensive plan is $360/mon. There is also a transaction fee of 1% to 3% on total revenue generated via the platform. | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ The basic plan starts at $49/mon but limits you to 100 members. Mid-tier plans cost $99/mon and $219/mon. The enterprise plan costs $399/mon. There is also a transaction fee ranging from 0.5% to 4% on your total community revenue. |
User-friendliness | |
⭐⭐⭐ The interface is generally hard to navigate for new users. Most tabs open as popup windows, which are unfriendly to use. Navigation elements can sometimes be misleading | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ The interface is clutter-free, simple, and user-friendly, with a better hierarchy of elements and easily accessible features. It also allows switching between multiple communities. |
Online Course Creation | |
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ The course setup process can be daunting for beginners. Supports video local uploads and embeds from external video hosting platforms. Includes quizzes but lacks certifications. | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Simple online course creation process and drip scheduling. Natively supports content embed from 1000+ content hosting platforms. Lacks student assessment tools. |
Community Building | |
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Flexible community spaces that can be mixed and matched to a single space. Superior student engagement features including polls, quizzes, livestreams, leaderboards, and challenges.streams, polls, videos, posts, and GIFs. It includes automation workflows for better community task management but lacks gamification features, | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Distinct community spaces. Supports polls, live events, discussions, chats, and weekly digests. Superior moderation tools and includes workflow automation to simplify community management. |
Sales & Marketing | |
⭐⭐⭐ Create a simple landing page for your network. Create multi-tier memberships or bundle your products and sell them as one. Offer free trials of your product but lack upsells, downsells, and discounts. Has a multi-step checkout system, limits you and limits you to Stripe gateway. | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Basic landing page builder for your space. Email white-labelling. One-step checkout system. Supports free trials, discounts, and coupons |
Customization and Branding | |
⭐⭐⭐⭐ Add a logo and theme colors ( community background, header & active items). Customize individual spaces including background colors, space icons, and banner images. | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Add logo, theme colors, space icons, and space background images. |
Third-Party Integration | |
⭐⭐⭐⭐ 11 native integrations. Zapier and SSO integrations but lack API access. | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 20 + Native integrations, Zapier, Webhooks, SSO, and API access. |
Try Mighty Networks Now | Try Circle 30-days Free |
Circle vs Mighty Networks: Pricing Review
Circle | Mighty Networks | |
Basic Plans | $49/mon | $49/mon |
Mid-Tier Plans | Professional: $99/mon Business: $219/mon | Courses: $119/mon Business: $219/mon |
Advanced Plans | Enterprise: $399/mon CirclePlus: custom | Path-to-Pro:$360/mon Mighty Pro: custom |
View Circle’s Plans | View Mighty Networks Plans |
Circle offers affordable monthly plans, but annual subscriptions favor Mighty Networks with higher discounts.
Mighty Networks and Circle seem to play the price card pretty much competitively. Both platform’s basic plans start at $49 per month.
However, Circle is slightly cheaper if you prefer monthly payments. Its two mid-tier plans (Professional and Business) cost $99 and $219 per month. Choosing an annual subscription saves you $10/month on the Professional plan and $20/month on the Business plan.
Meanwhile, Mighty Networks’ mid-tier plans (Courses and Business) cost $119 and $219 per month—which is slightly higher than Circle, but annual subscriptions bring the price down to $99 and $179 respectively. With that, Mighty Networks’ annual plans are a better deal in the long run.
Circle limits members, admins, and spaces in its plans, while Mighty Networks offers them all unlimited across the board.
Mighty Networks lets you add unlimited members, admins, hosts, moderators, and spaces into your community across all its plans.
Meanwhile, Circle imposes strict limits on the same aspects. On the Basic plan, you’re capped at 100 members, with the ability to host unlimited members available only on higher plans. Community spaces are limited to 10-100, and moderators to 1-100, depending on the plan. The Basic plan restricts you to 1 admin, while the highest plan allows up to 15 admins. Adding extra admins, moderators, or spaces incurs you additional costs as follows:
- $10/month per admin
- $20/month per 10 moderators
- $20/month per 10 spaces
Verdict: Mighty Networks is more affordable than Circle for scaling communities. It allows you to add unlimited members, admins, moderators and spaces across all its plans while Circle’s posses hard limits requiring you to purchase addons.
Circle vs Mighty Networks: User Experience
Circle | Mighty Networks |
---|---|
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Provides a user-friendly interface for both members and community hosts. Supports keyboard shortcuts for quicker navigation. | ⭐⭐⭐ Offers greater functionality but has a steeper learning curve. Some tabs are less intuitive, and some menus can be confusing. |
Circle UI is simpler to navigate than Mighty Networks.
Circle has a clutter-free layout that’s easy to navigate for both admins and community members. The layout is consistent across all tabs with all its core settings conveniently grouped in the left sidebar, making them readily accessible.
Circle even takes it a step further by offering keyboard shortcuts, allowing you to perform common actions (such as adding a new space, or opening the theme customizer) quickly reducing the number of mouse clicks.
On the other hand, the Mighty Networks interface has some quirks that make it feel less intuitive. Its layout elements are inconsistently sized, with some feeling overly large and others appearing too small.
Additionally most of its tabs open as popup windows by default that appear on the right side of the interface which requires extra clicks to feel usable.
I also found Mighty Networks’ UI to be a bit misleading. For example, when creating an online course, the platform has two navigation items labeled “Create” in its course space—a button in the top bar and a text link halfway down the interface.
If you are creating a course, you might expect that clicking the top “Create” button would allow you to start structuring your course by adding modules and lessons.
That’s the most visible item, right?
But that’s not the case.
Instead, clicking the button displays the options to “go live” and “invite” members to your course space.
Meanwhile, adding modules to your course requires you to click on the less visible navigation link that’s halfway down the interface.
Verdict: Circle easily wins over Mighty Networks due to its simplicity and clutter-free interface. Mighty Networks UI feels less polished and it’s hard to navigate for new users.
Circle vs Mighty Networks: Community Building and Management
Circle | Mighty Networks |
---|---|
⭐⭐⭐⭐ Keeps it simple with one content type per space. Includes workflow automation and offers better moderation features | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Flexible spaces that can support different content types. Superior gamification features. |
Mighty Networks spaces are flexible while Circle maintains a rigid, predefined structure.
Mighty Networks provides over five community space types, including a feed, chats, courses, events, resource libraries, and more.
However, what makes Mighty Networks Spaces different is that you’re not restricted by the functionality of the space type included. Instead, it lets you mix and match features from different categories, creating dynamic “super spaces.”
For example, if you select the “Content-Only Course” template, you can also incorporate features like a feed, chats, and events within the same space. This encourages community-based learning and fosters more interactive and engaging environments.
Meanwhile, Circle follows a more structured and predefined approach to space design. Each space type in Circle is isolated with its own set of features.
For example, a “Course” space will have unique features for building online courses but won’t include functionalities like event calendars, discussion posts, or chat options
To access these features, you’ll need to create entirely separate spaces, which can lead to a disjointed community experience, especially for complex membership models.
Both platforms allow you to engage members using live events, polls, discussion boards, leaderboards and chats but Mighty Networks goes a step further with better gamification.
Mighty Networks allows you to create discussion boards, live events, and group chats around specific topics. On the discussion boards, you can post long articles, quick updates, questions, or polls to get the conversation going.
One thing I love about Mighty Networks is the flexibility in creating polls. You can make a simple question, a fun quiz with multiple choices, or a percentage-based poll. Depending on the poll type you’ve chosen, Mighty Networks does a great job of displaying them in a visually appealing way to invite members to engage with them.
But it doesn’t stop there. It also allows you to take community engagement up a notch with gamification features like badges, leaderboards, and an Ambassadors program. You can reward your most active members with custom badges for their contributions or automatically when they complete course lessons.
Its Ambassadors program is another fantastic way to grow your community and boost engagement. Using the program you can encourage members to invite others to join your community where you can reward them with points, discounts, merchandise, and more.
On the other hand, Circle offers similar tools for member engagement—community posts, group chats, events, leaderboards and polls. However, their polls are limited to one format and lack the visual appeal of Mighty Networks.
Mighty Networks’ community feed offers more granular control but Circle focuses on simplicity.
Mighty Networks’ feed offers extensive customization with advanced filters and sorting options, enabling a highly tailored user experience. Using it, members can filter community posts on their feed with filter options like “Everything”, “Personal Feed”, “Your Activity”, “From Your Hosts”, “Near You”, “Unanswered”, “Quick Posts”, “Questions and Polls”, “Articles” and “Events” and they can even select multiple filters at one time.

In addition, members can sort content, by clicking the “Showing By” button, for Top (most relevant), Newest (most recently published), or Oldest (oldest published).
Meanwhile, Circle tends to keep everything simple with its basic filter options. Members can easily jump in and see the latest discussions, and hottest topics (through the trending posts sidebar), or revisit older content.

Circle offers stronger community moderation tools than Mighty Networks.
Circle provides robust moderation tools to ensure a safe environment for community members. It includes automatic profanity filters to remove offensive language from posts and comments reducing the burden on moderators in maintaining a respectful community atmosphere. You can block as many keywords as needed, ensuring comprehensive coverage as per your community guidelines.
Circle also allows you to flag specific members for review enabling moderators to closely monitor and manage potentially problematic individuals.
Mighty Networks, on the other hand, provides fewer moderation options. Unlike Circle, you cannot configure specific moderation rules for different spaces within your community. It lacks profanity filters requiring moderators to manually review and remove offensive language, which can be time-consuming and less efficient.
Circle simplifies community management using workflow automations while Mighty Networks requires Zapier integration.
Circle’s built-in workflow builder allows you to automate community tasks without needing external tools. For example, using its “if-then” automation rules you can create a workflow where you can automatically add a tag to members and enroll them in a paywall trial upon joining a specific space.
Mighty Networks, on the other hand, doesn’t offer a dedicated workflow builder. To automate tasks, you need to use a third-party service like Zapier—which can add extra charges.
Verdict: This is a tough call, but Mighty Networks has the edge over Circle in several key areas. It excels with its flexible spaces, advanced gamification, improved member profiles, and a more dynamic community feed. On the other hand, Circle shines in community management, thanks to its strong moderation tools and workflow automation. If you prioritize engagement features, Mighty Networks is the better choice. However, for simpler community management, Circle is the way to go.
Mighty Networks vs Circle: Online Course Creation
Mighty Networks | Circle |
---|---|
⭐⭐⭐⭐ Can combine community features and online courses in a single space. Includes quizzes but has a cumbersome content drip scheduling setup process. | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Simple online course builder but limited video tracking tools. Better drip scheduling for course content. |
Both Circle and Mighty Networks let you offer online courses in various content formats, such as text, video, and downloadable resources. You can import content from YouTube, Wistia, and Vimeo. Both support content dripping and provide mobile apps for iOS and Android, allowing members to access course materials on the go.
However, there are areas where each excels and falls short, and in this section, we’ll dive deeper and show you how both tools measure up in terms of online course building.
Mighty Networks integrates community features into your online course space to foster cohort-based learning while Circle requires separate spaces.
Mighty Networks fosters community-based learning by allowing you to integrate community features into your online course space. During setup, the platform offers two major templates— cohort courses and content-only courses.

The Cohort Course allows you to bring your learning materials and community together in the same space for community-based learning.
In this space, you can conduct group discussions, host live events, and create polls, among other features.

On the other hand, Circle simplifies things by keeping courses in separate spaces. Discussion boards and events are kept separate from courses and cannot be combined.
Mighty Networks offers video tracking to both video embeds and local uploads while in Circle the feature is available to local video uploads.
Mighty Networks online course builder offers a video tracking feature that requires students to watch at least 90% of the video before unlocking the next lesson. The feature is available for both video material imported from external content hosting platforms like YouTube, Wistia e.tc and content uploaded from your local computer to your allocated storage in Mighty Networks.

Meanwhile, in Circle, the video tracking feature is only available for content manually uploaded to their platform to ensure members watch the content before proceeding to the next lesson.

However, if your video content is hosted on external platforms such as Wistia, Vimeo, or YouTube and imported using Circle’s embed feature, the video tracking functionality is disabled. This limits the tracking to only the content hosted on Circle.

Setting up drip scheduling is more straightforward in Circle than in Mighty Networks.
Circle offers a “Structured” course space type specifically designed for course content drip scheduling. This feature allows you to easily manage the timing of content release relative to members’ enrollment.

You can choose to release course modules immediately after a member joins or schedule them for later. For example, you can unlock the first module immediately, release the next module the following day, and continue this pattern for subsequent modules. This flexibility makes it easy to control the pace of the course.

Meanwhile, Mighty Networks offers nearly the same functionality but can be cumbersome to set up. Unlike Circle whose setup is super straightforward, in Mighty Networks it takes more steps and can be daunting for beginners. First, you need to access your content modules and click the three vertical dots menu to display more settings.

After which you need to click on “Section Settings” where you’re redirected to a new tab. Next, you need to locate the “Unlock Options” section, then click on “Timed” and the duration when you want to release the course module relative to members enrolling to the space.

Then you need to repeat the same process for all of your modules that you want to drip schedule which can be cumbersome if you have a large course or various courses.
Both have quizzes to assess students but lack course certification capability.
Neither platform provides built-in student certification tools, necessitating third-party integrations for this functionality. This can be a bummer for course creators looking to offer a course completion certificate to their students.
Verdict: Mighty Networks is better for building community-based learning for larger communities with multiple membership tiers. Meanwhile, Circle is best suited for coaches and growing creators who a simple online course builder to offer digital courses in their communities.
Mighty Networks vs Circle: Customization and Branding
Mighty Networks | Circle |
---|---|
⭐⭐⭐⭐ Add logo, and space icons, customize individual space appearances, and change community background color. Host your community on a custom domain and white-label your community (only available on Mighty Pro). | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Add logo, customize community background, header, active items, and space icons. Custom domain supported. White-label your community (available to Circle Plus plan only). |
The ability to customize most aspects of your community such as color themes, layout, logos, and others to match your branding needs is one huge thing—and there’s a clear distinction on how Circle vs Mighty Networks approach this:
Circle provides greater control over the community aesthetic, while Mighty Networks allows for more unique branding in individual spaces.
Mighty Networks allows you to customize individual community spaces to feel unique, and topic-specific—this is huge for established brands with multiple community spaces.
You can add a custom color pallet for individual spaces:
a custom space icon and a banner image where you can also add video at the hero section of your community space sign-up page.
While Circle allows you to customize individual spaces (icons and banners), it focuses more on creating a cohesive look and feel across the entire community with a single theme color, where you can add a custom color for— your community header, background, sidebar, buttons, and active items.
It also offers more options for adding custom space icons allowing you to choose from emojis, shapes, or custom icon designs.
Verdict: Both platforms offer fair customizations and from the experience, none perform objectively better than the other. In that case, it’s a draw.
Circle vs Might Networks: Pros and Cons
Circle Pros and Cons | |
✅ Pros | ❌ Cons |
Intuitive user interface | Transaction fee |
Better community moderation | Limited basic plan |
Native live streaming | |
Workflow automations | |
Minimalistic course builder | |
Mobile apps |
Mighty Networks Pros and Cons | |
✅ Pros | ❌ Cons |
Flexible community spaces | Complex user interface |
Community gamification | Limited reporting |
Mobile apps | Basic landing page builder |
Native live streaming | |
Add unlimited members, admins, and spaces. | |
Highly customization |
Which is Better, Circle or Mighty Networks?
Both Circle and Mighty Networks are two huge contenders when it comes to building learning-focused community spaces.
As seen from our Circle vs Mighty Networks review, both tools share a bunch of similarities. But when it comes to flexibility, customization, and community engagement—that’s where they chart their differences.
Opt for Circle if you want a simple, easy-to-navigate, yet robust online community platform. Circle also allows you to sell online courses, making it a good choice if you’re looking for a straightforward, user-friendly solution.
On the other hand, go with Mighty Networks if you prioritize flexibility, better branding features, and diverse community engagement tools. Mighty Networks offers more customization options, enabling you to create a unique and engaging community experience.
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