Are you looking for the Best Online Community Platforms?
If yes, you’re at the right place.
Whether you are a creator or an online business owner, building a community of engaged followers allows you to reach new potential audiences, improve customer loyalty, gather customer feedback, and provide the best customer support
To help you pick the best online community platform, I reviewed the 11 best platforms available.
To help you in your decision here are the top three best online community platforms. You can continue reading to know about other platforms.
Podia
Podia is a no.1 all-in-one platform that allows you to build community, host courses, host webinars, and more.
Mighty Networks
Mighty Networks connects creators and entrepreneurs through their community, online courses, and sales pages.
Tribe Platform
Tribe is a great community platform for both creators and brand communities. it is also fully customizable.
Creating and distributing content is not the only thing that makes you a successful edupreneur or creator.
One of the greatest ways you can create value is by creating a community around your brand to drive engagement, grow your audience, and build your reputation.
While online communities have been proven to be powerful business tools, choosing the correct platform can be a challenge:
Here are some things you should consider
Best Online Community Platforms
Community platforms should be customizable, use modern design practices, be easy to use, and provide powerful gamification and moderation features.
By taking care of hosting, maintenance, and security, the solution should be able to grow with the number of members.
Without any further ado, let’s look at the best online community platforms.
1. Podia
Podia offers creators a one-stop shop. From the same platform, you can sell memberships, digital downloads, coaching, and webinars.
From the content you share to how you interact with members, Podia gives you complete control over your online community, unlike Facebook groups.
Your members will never miss a new post with free and paid memberships, unlimited discussion topics, and notification settings.
Furthermore, Podia includes a website builder, affiliate marketing, email marketing, and message management.
By arranging content by topic, sharing announcements, and uploading rich media files, you can make your Podia community a valuable resource.
There’s an area where you can upload courses and products, and your members can interact with posts, comments, and likes.
Social media links can be added to member profiles to build professional networks. To ensure that your profile is safe, search features are also available.
Community members can choose whether to pay or not to pay for podia. There is no limit to the number of plans or subscription tiers you can create, giving you lots of flexibility as your company grows.
Additionally, you can create private topics for premium members, cohorts, and masterminds.
Key Features of Podia:
Pricing:
Podia offers four different pricing plans for every type of need.
Free: This is a completely free plan. In this plan, you’ll get a full community, website, email marketing, live chat, and many more.
Mover: This plan costs $33/mo and in this plan, you’ll get full community, unlimited coaching, unlimited courses, and no transaction fees.
Shaker: This is the best deal plan that costs $75/mo. In this plan, you’ll get a full community, unlimited webinars, affiliates, unlimited downloads, and more.
Earthquake: This plan costs $166/mo and offers priority support, onboarding calls, monthly creator call, and more.
2. Mighty Networks
Mighty Networks is a well-known and powerful online community platform that allows you to build community, host courses, and offer memberships, all under one roof.
Everything it offers is built on top of this foundation, which is what makes the platform so strong.
Creators can build thriving online communities with features such as an activity feed, member directory, polls & quizzes, events, groups, etc.
It is even possible to create fully functional online courses inside the community.
You immediately have a community space (Network) once you sign up with Mighty Networks.
The structure is already in place, and all you need to do is add some content and make some settings in order to accept members.
You can start by controlling the privacy settings for your community. It is possible to make your community public so your community can be explored and joined by anyone.
The content inside your community can also be indexed by search engines.
You can also keep your community private, so in order to join your community, people will need to complete registration and be approved by the admin.
Mighty Networks’ free iOS/Android mobile app takes the end-user experience to a whole new level. All your community members can also participate via the app.
If you want, you can create a custom, white-labeled app for your brand.
Key Features of Mighty Networks:
Pricing:
Mighty Networks offer 3 pricing plans:
The Community Plan: This plan costs $33/month, you will get a website and community that you can charge for.
The Business Plan: This plan costs $99/month, you will get access to analytics, and Zapier integrations and can host events & online courses.
Mighty Pro: In this plan, you will get your own app, push notifications, and strategy support. You can get the pricing details by contacting them.
3. Thinkific
Thinkific is one of the best platforms to build a community. It offers a drag-and-drop editor, payment management, course management, and a wide variety of other features.
A platform like this might just be the best choice for you if you want to own the community experience and be in control of the data.
Thinkific enables you to create on-brand communities that don’t require learners to go to social platforms (e.g., Facebook Groups) that aren’t under your control.
In addition to automatically adding users to your communities, you can create tiers of memberships and even use Thinkific Groups to determine membership.
Your communities can be accessed by learners directly from your website, or through their dashboard, where they have access to all the courses and communities that you have listed.
Besides that, you can share any type of content you are interested in, including courses, videos, PDFs, and articles.
To build and grow your community, you can make use of your trusted tools and services with their powerful integrations.
You will also get access to analytics that allow you to evaluate the success of your content and know where to make improvements based on its performance.
Key Features of Thinkific:
Pricing:
Thinkific offers 4 different pricing plans.
There is also a free version to test out the platform and see if it’s a good fit for you.
Their paid plans are as follows:
Basic: This plan costs only $39/month.
Pro: This is their most popular plan that costs only $79/month.
Premier: This plan is for big businesses that cost $399/month.
4. Tribe
There is no doubt that Tribe is an outstanding platform for both creators and brand-led communities.
It is easy to use the communities built by Tribe both on the web and on mobile. There is even the possibility of converting them into apps (PWA).
Through Tribe Platform, your community can be fully customized to reflect your brand.
Top brands like Decathlon, ASUS, Pipedrive, and ConvertKit have been using Tribe for quite some time already
Tribe helps in launching and growing a community with value-add services in addition to providing a powerful community platform that engages users, increases retention rates, boosts revenue, and collects feedback.
With Tribe, you can create a fully branded experience from the logo to widgets to colors and domain.
Tribe lets you create content by writing articles, posting images and videos, and asking questions and answering them.
Additionally, you can categorize content and explore seamlessly with a personalized activity feed.
You can also build communities with this tool, which is highly secure and 100% GDPR compliant.
Your community members can also join easily through the Social Login system, which supports Facebook, Slack, LinkedIn, Google, and Twitter.
Key Features of Tribe:
Pricing:
Tribe platforms offer five pricing plans:
Free: This plan is free for up to 100 members and gives you access to all the essential features like content posting, topics, and groups.
Plus: This plan costs $59/month and allows 2,500 members. You will get a custom domain, analytics, Zapier integrations, and more.
Premium: The premium plan costs $299/month, this plan allows 25,000 members and other features such as SSO, API, Staging environment, premium apps, and more.
Advanced: This plan costs you $599/month, In this plan, you will get white labeled email, customer success managed, and allow up to 100,000 total members.
Enterprise: To get the pricing details of this plan you need to contact their sales team, in this plan, you will get data residency, better security, custom billing, and more.
5. Circle
In contrast to most online community platforms, Circle doesn’t try to pack in as many features as possible.
For those who prefer things neat and clutter-free, this is the community platform for you.
Community creation and management are just two of the primary functions of Circle.
Setting up discussion boards, moderating the community, facilitating private messages and member connections, and organizing content are all easy with Circle.
Despite its simple, modern design, Circle isn’t just geared toward administrators. The intuitive interface makes it easy for community members to work.
Navigating community boards and participating in both group and private discussions are made convenient by the system.
Users of the Apple App Store can download CIrcle’s native iOS mobile app. Android devices are not able to download the app.
A compatible mobile application has not yet been released for android users.
Circle has made a good effort to integrate into a variety of ecosystems with its integrations.
If you want, you can embed the community as a whole community or only select spaces and widgets to embed on your site.
Key Features of Circle:
Pricing:
Circle offers three different pricing plans.
Basic: This plan costs $39/month, in this plan you will get essential features such as discussions, group chats, private messaging, and more.
Professional: This is their most popular plan that gives you access to key features such as live streaming, advanced analytics, API access, and more. This plan costs $99/month.
Enterprise: This plan is best for brands. The enterprise plan costs $399/month and unlocks the most powerful features like SSO, priority email support, a dedicated customer success manager, and more.
6. PeerBoard
PeerBoard is a free, easy-to-use community platform that lets you create forums, online groups, and other types of online communities.
PeerBoard allows you to share short and long-form articles, create discussion threads, customize the feed for your users, and arrange private spaces.
Additionally, it allows you to manage your members and moderate your online community.
Likewise, you can choose colors and fonts that align with your website’s branding to customize the look and feel of your community.
PeerBoard stands out because it integrates with so many platforms. There is native integration with WordPress, Shopify, Thinkific, etc. In addition, you can integrate with any other platform using the API functionality.
Moreover, you can embed all of the communities on your website.
By using PeerBoard, your community will not have to leave your website to connect to a subreddit-style space.
PeerBoard provides a single categorized news feed, similar to what you would see on Facebook, instead of the traditional forum layout.
By ranking posts by engagement and recency, the PeerBoard algorithm helps ensure community members don’t miss important updates or the best content.
Key Features of PeerBoard:
Pricing:
PeerBoard offers four different pricing plans.
Free: This plan allows you to start your community for free with no usage limits.
Starter: This plan costs $29 per month and allows rich customizations with 3 private spaces.
Professional: This is their most popular plan that costs $79/month with 30 private spaces and better management.
Growth: The Growth plan costs $299/month and comes with the most advanced features like SDK for deep integrations, unlimited private spaces, webhooks, API, mobile apps, and more.
7. Vanilla Forum
Vanilla was first released as an open-source community platform in December 2009. Vanilla Forums is currently used by thousands of companies across the globe to deliver the best community experience to millions of users.
Vanilla Forums isn’t a typical online community platform for member-to-member interaction. Instead, it helps medium-sized businesses and enterprises better interact with their prospects and customers.
In order to increase sales and drive loyalty, it is essential to engage audiences strategically and provide customer support.
Growing businesses looking to take their business to the next level will find it a great platform as a community-based platform.
With the platform, businesses can create and run up to 20 subcommunities simultaneously. You can assign administration responsibilities to up to 100 staff members with Vanilla Forums so you can keep track of all that.
A variety of methods can then be used to engage audiences, including private messages, forum discussions, questions and answers, and knowledge bases.
Several other features offered by Vanilla Forums are designed to improve the community experience, these include gamification, notifications, and ideation.
In addition to smart histories and avatars, administrators can use automated summaries, revision histories, and performance tracking.
Key Features of Vanilla Forum:
Pricing:
Vanilla Forums offer three plans:
Essential: This plan is best for smaller communities. In this plan, you will get 5 admin seats, user groups, 1 SSO connection, and more.
Corporate: This plan is best for emerging businesses. In this plan, you will get 2 SSO connections, 10 admin seats, and 3 sub-communities.
Enterprise: This plan is for large communities that want advanced features such as multi-site management, 50 admin seats, and 3 SSO connections.
To know the pricing of these plans you need to contact their sales team.
8. Facebook Groups (Free)
Users can create Facebook Groups to facilitate discussions relating to their interests so they can create dedicated groups for people who share the same passion.
Using these Facebook Groups, businesses can promote their offerings and boost their brand awareness.
I’m also using Facebook groups to manage my community.
Facebook groups are the best and free way to build and manage every size of the community.
You can create a public or private online community and manage it effectively with its powerful tools.
Facebook offers advanced analytics tools, admin assists, automation tools, and more for free.
Facebook lets you post photos, videos, polls, host Q&A, live streaming, create a room, and more.
Key Features of Facebook Groups:
Pricing:
Facebook groups are completely free to use.
Summary
Based on ease of use, potential growth, and features, we studied a few of the best online community platforms.
Despite this, the question remains, how can you choose the right community platform?
Your specific requirements would determine what you need.
Depending on the type of community, its goals, and purpose, different types of online community platforms provide different benefits.
Selecting the right community platform can therefore have a significant impact on both the members’ experience as well as how the community is managed.
I hope you found this guide helpful. Is there anything you need help with online community platforms?
Please ask in the comment section.
Hey Ayush,
In 2022, there are lots of people who are looking for a community platform, I was also one but your article suggests to me the right product.
Thank You
Indrajeet
Yup
In today’s world we need to connect with each other in online also, but i was searching for platforms which is providing the opportunity. This blog shows number of platforms and i checked them. Most of the platforms are really helped me that’s the reason i am sharing this to you. Thank you
Thanks Gautham
Hey Ayush, Once again you proved as better blogger to help your fellow people in your blogging community. Networking plays a major role in any industry and particularly in blogging its vital, but the hard fact is many dont aware of the destinations to build their networking. I have tested few, works well for us. Thanks.
Yes Aadiv networking is the key.