I Tried Mighty Networks, Quite an Improvement: My Mighty Networks Review

Mighty Networks comes highly recommended among creators when it comes to building a thriving and white-label online community around your expertise and brand. 

But how good is it?

I’ve been using and testing Mighty Networks for nearly a year now to see where it thrives and lacks and here’s my honest take:

Out of the box, Mighty Networks is user-friendly, offering a seamless onboarding process. It uses AI to help you choose a community name, recommend the best design for your online community, and structure your online course, saving you time.

The platform also allows you to personalize the feed for your members, build a mobile community app, and host live events with its native live streaming tool, engaging your members further. While Mighty Networks also supports online course creation, it lacks a built-in student certification tool.

In this Mighty Networks review, I’ll dive deeper into its functionalities and see how it measures up especially when it comes to:

• User experience
• Community building and management
• Course creation and monetization
• Pricing

Let’s get started.

A Little Bit of Mighty Networks?

Mighty Networks (or simply Mighty) is an online community platform that allows creators and entrepreneurs to create online spaces and offer value to members with courses, events, group chats, and community posts.

It’s the brainchild of Gina Bianchini, who recognized the need for a platform that allowed creators to host their courses and memberships under their brand away from social media distractions and algorithms. 

Gina had previously founded a successful online community platform called Ning. In 2017 she teamed up with Tim Herby and Thomas Aaron to create Mighty Networks. 

Since then, the platform has massively grown enabling creators to build vibrant online communities and monetize them using memberships and online courses, all in one platform without relying on third-party tools.

Mighty Networks best suits creators, knowledge entrepreneurs, and digital businesses looking to build a thriving online community around their brand and expertise.

Mighty Networks Features at a Glance

Here’s an overview of Mighty Network’s features.

Now, let’s dig deeper into this Mighty Networks review and see how well the community platform performs.

Mighty Networks Review: User Experience

Mighty Networks offers a seamless onboarding process using AI to generate a community name, branding, and description.

Mighty Networks uses generative AI to help you brainstorm a community brand name, description, and signup page design. 

The platform starts by asking you to describe the core idea behind your community. Using this input, Mighty Networks’ AI generates a description that captures the essence of your online community goal.

The AI then suggests various community brand names that you can choose.

But it doesn’t stop there. Mighty Networks further suggests an ideal design for your community’s sign-up page which includes pre-added content and visuals.

This saves you time in brainstorming a community name, description, and design allowing you to focus on other high-priority tasks like creating content and inviting members to your brand-new community.

Most of its sections open up as popups requiring extra clicks to feel usable.

Mighty Networks dashboard looks clean and uncluttered, featuring clear options for creating community spaces, adding updates, managing members, and organizing events — neatly organized on the left sidebar just like Circle.

Its UI feels smooth to navigate and loads fast without any delay or buffering.

However, one aspect that could use improvement is how  Mighty Networks handles certain sections — by opening them as pop-ups rather than full windows.

While it may work for some users, others may find the extra clicks required to expand these pop-ups into full windows disruptive, adding an unnecessary interaction layer. 

Mighty Networks Review: Community Building and Management

Mighty Networks allows you to create diverse online space types including — community feeds, group chats, events, courses, and more but also lets you blend some of them into a single space.

Spaces are the core building blocks of creating a network (AKA community) in Mighty Networks. You can create various space types including:

• Chats: have real-time conversations with members. 
• Feed: share updates, posts, and discussion space.
• Events: plan and manage virtual or in-person gatherings for members to RSVP and join discussions related to the event. 
• Members: access a list of all community members to connect and collaborate with others.
• Courses: create structured learning experiences with modules, lessons, and quizzes for your members. 

Community owners have complete control over who can see and join each Space. For instance, you can create a Space set visibility to:

• Public – everyone can view and join
• Private for invited members
• Secret for only those with an invite

However, Mighty Networks also offers the flexibility to create a custom space that integrates some of the space types’ features.

 For example, you can design a single space that combines elements of different space types such as a feed, chat, events, and a members directory.

It offers various community engagement features including group chats, polls, quizzes, posts, badges, and live events.

Mighty Networks enables you to create a thriving and engaging community with features like community posts, group chats, polls, and more.

You can create a community post and add various media formats including images, videos, and PDFs. You can also use its embed functionality to add different elements such as forms, from external platforms like Airtable. 

It also allows you to start group chats enabling members to connect and converse in real-time, fostering a sense of belonging and camaraderie. The chats are customizable to suit the needs of each community network, with options for direct messaging.

However, one issue I encountered is that once you’ve created a chat, you can’t add additional members. If you want to include new members in an existing group chat, you need to start a new group chat with all previous and new members.

Furthermore, Mighty Networks also lets you engage members through polls, allowing you to gather their opinions and insights.

Creating polls is simple, and it offers flexibility with four poll types to choose from: questions, multiple choice, hot-cold scales, and percentage-based queries.

Live events are another way to engage members in your community space in Mighty Networks. The platform offers a proprietary live streaming tool where you can engage with your members in real-time, and host workshops, live Q&As, and AMA. 

You can schedule the events within the platform, with options for RSVPs, reminders, and follow-up content.

Mighty Networks’ native live-streaming tool can replace specialized video conferencing tools like Zoom.

Mighty Networks offers built-in live streaming features, eliminating the need to use external tools like Zoom. 

With a few clicks, you can start a live stream directly within any community Space, creating an interactive environment for sessions such as Q&A, or for delivering live lessons as part of your course offerings.

You can share your screen with members and even record the live sessions which you can later repurpose into your course content or as pre-recorded webinars. 

Unlike Zoom, which imposes limitations on the duration of your live streams to 40 minutes, Mighty Networks offers the flexibility of hosting live sessions for up to two hours. This extended time frame provides ample opportunity for in-depth discussions and comprehensive training sessions with your audience. 

Furthermore, the platform supports up to nine speakers simultaneously in a live stream. The participant capacity is also scalable, ranging from 50 to 500 members, depending on the tier of your community plan.

Mighty Networks Review: Online Course Creation

Mighty Networks helps you build online courses to share your knowledge with your community and earn an income from it. But how capable is it?

Its course builder gives you the flexibility to choose from two online course templates.

Mighty Networks allows you to choose from two main online course templates:

1. Cohort Course
2. Content-Only Course

The Cohort Course template allows you to create a community-focused learning experience for a specific group of learners within a designated space. This template combines community features and online course features in a single space.

You can invite members to the space and engage them with community posts, articles, live events, polls, and quizzes. 

This integrated approach eliminates the need for separate spaces to access online community features, fostering group learning for each course.

The Content-Only Course template focuses on online course creation without community features—making it ideal for straightforward online course delivery without the complexity of community management.

However, it supports live streaming and chat tools, where you can engage your students.

Suppose you later decide to build a community around the course. In that case, you can create a separate space and invite the course participants, allowing you to maintain flexibility based on your needs.

Mighty Networks’ course builder offers versatile content hosting, and a video tracking feature to enhance online course completion rates.

Mighty Networks allows you to structure your online courses using Sections and Lessons. You can manually structure your course or use its AI tool to help you brainstorm your course outline.

Mighty Networks offers various options to add content to your online course that all work effortlessly. 

You can upload video files from your local computer, with a limit of 4GB per upload, or import them from video hosting platforms like YouTube, Vimeo, Wistia, Searchie, and more.

Mighty Networks takes it a notch up with its “Tracked Video”  functionality which allows you to set “Video Completion” criteria, requiring members to watch at least 90% of a video before progressing to the next Lesson—which can boost course engagement.

Besides video, Mighty Networks supports other media formats, including images, PDF attachments, slides, and spreadsheets, with each file limited to 25MB. This versatility allows you to create a rich and multimedia learning experience.

You can add quizzes to your course but a completion certificate is not supported.

Mighty Networks lets you create quizzes with multiple-choice questions in your course with automatic grading, so members see their scores immediately after completing the test. You can even set completion requirements, like a passing score as a percentage. 

However, unlike dedicated online course platforms like Kajabi and Thinkific, Mighty Networks does not support issuing certificates upon course completion. If you want to issue certificates, you’ll need to integrate a third-party tool and create an automation using Zapier.

You can drip course sections and lessons.

Mighty Networks gives you control over how your course content is delivered. You can drip course content using the “Sequential” setting to unlock content only after the student completes the previous section, or choose from other options like “Timed” and “Schedule”.

• Timed: grant access to specific sections at a set interval after a member joins your course. 
• Schedule: sections unlock on a scheduled date and time for all members.

The drip functionality has a limitation in that it lacks flexibility in scheduling content releases. For instance, if you want to release content daily or weekly, students can only unlock the next section after completing the previous one.

Mighty Networks Review: Customization and Branding

A thriving community goes beyond just functionality and Mighty Networks empowers you to build a visually unique and branded online community that reflects your identity. 

You can customize the color scheme, space icons, member badges, add a logo, and host your community on a custom domain, but custom fonts are not supported.

Mighty Networks offers extensive branding and customization options to ensure your community reflects your brand’s identity. You can personalize your community’s appearance with a custom color palette for key elements such as the header, buttons, tabs, text links, and action icons.

Additionally, you can add your community’s logo and a banner image to the signup page, creating a welcoming and branded first impression for new members.

Beyond the general appearance, Mighty Networks allows for granular customization of individual spaces within your community. You can adjust the theme colors and space icons for individual spaces to match the overall brand aesthetic.

Furthermore, unlike many other community platforms that limit you to default badge designs, Mighty Networks enables you to create custom badges. The badge creation tool allows you to design a custom badge image and add a badge name and description. 

Mighty Networks also supports hosting your community on a custom domain, which enhances your brand’s professional image.

However, Mighty Networks does not allow you to use custom fonts for your community. While this is not a huge issue for most users, it can come in handy for users who what to establish a white-label online community where everything feels unique to their brand.

Mighty Networks’ landing page builder has limited customization options.

Mighty Networks allows you to create a landing page for your network that is visible to non-members. However, it lacks a wide range of well-designed templates and extensive customization features such as drag-and-drop elements and custom fonts. The platform offers two prebuilt templates that you can customize with a community logo, headline, description, call-to-action button, and header banner.

Below the fold, you can add various content formats, including images, videos, text, and forms. Content can be further formatted with bullets, numbers, and headings.

If you want to create a presentable landing page for your online community, you’ll need to use robust platforms like Leadpages or ClickFunnels.

Offers native mobile apps for both Android and iOS devices with a feature-rich and intuitive experience for both members and administrators.

Your community members can leave posts, reply to discussions, answer questions in forums, and participate in polls through the mobile apps. 

Members can even access course materials and learning modules directly through mobile apps to learn at their own pace, even during commutes or breaks throughout the day. 

As an admin, you can create and edit posts, articles, discussions, and other content through mobile apps to ensure the community stays fresh with new and engaging content, even when you’re far from your desk.

You can also moderate member activity through the app, including approving new members, addressing reported issues, and managing discussions. 

While you can still access member engagement metrics through the app, advanced analytics are more comprehensive on the web platform. 

Mighty Networks Pricing Review

Mighty Networks offers 5 paid packages including: 

• Community: costs $49 per month
• Courses: costs $119 per month
• Business: costs $219 per month
• Path-to-Pro: costs $360 per month
• Mighty Pro: custom pricing

All packages except Mighty Pro have a free 14-day trial to give you a taste of the product before deciding to buy it.

Mighty Networks has affordable pricing packages with unlimited access to community admins, moderators, and spaces.

The basic plan allows unlimited hosts, moderators, members, and spaces.

You still have to pay a transaction fee for every payment you receive on Mighty Networks.

Mighty Networks takes a small percentage of every payment you receive on the platform, ranging from 1% to 3%. 

These transaction fees exclude the Stripe payment processing fee, which usually ranges between 2.5% and 5%. The more subscribers you get the more these fees will cut into your profits. However, there are no Stripe fees charged for purchases made through the Mighty Networks iOS app. 

Mighty Networks Pros and Cons

Mighty Networks Review: Final Verdict

Compared to its competitors like Kajabi and Thinkific, Mighty Networks excels with affordable pricing and a feature-rich basic plan. This plan includes essential community-building tools like discussion boards, groups, events, online courses, polls, and surveys. Higher-tier plans offer flexibility to provide membership and online courses in one place. Additionally, Mighty Networks allows unlimited community members, admins, and moderators in your spaces.

However, Mighty Networks falls short in a few areas.

For one, its user interface can be hard to navigate for new users. Unlike Circle (read more on our Circle vs Mighty Networks review) and Bettermode which offer a seamless UX, most of Mighty Networks’ navigation items are difficult to locate and unclear. Moreover, many of its tabs open as popups by default rather than full pages.

With that in mind, choose Mighty Networks if:

• You want to build a branded and engaging online community with features such as live events, discussions, badges, group chats,  polls, detailed member profiles and more
• You need to build an online community and offer online courses on a single platform.
• You want a community platform that provides both web and mobile experiences for your members.