10+ Best Online Community Platforms (2024)

Community Platforms: Build, Engage, and Grow Your Business

In a world where people can learn almost anything with a simple prompt in ChatGPT, Gemini, or any other generative AI platform, selling information alone isn’t as lucrative as it used to be.

People want something more.

They want engagement, personal connection, interactivity, and exchange of ideas.

A survey conducted in early 2024 found that 27% of consumers actively participate in online communities. Another study found that 98% of online community members feel a sense of belonging to their community.

By packaging informational products and courses with online communities, you can create an irresistible offer that not only attracts leads but also strengthens your relationship with your audience

This is where online community platforms like Circle, Skool, Mighty Networks, and others come in.

They are powerful tools for building communities you can run alongside your established online course business.

However, online course platforms vary in features and pricing. Plus, they’re designed for different use cases, industries, and community goals.

To help you find the best option for your business, we’ve dissected some of the best online community platforms in this article along with their core strengths and weaknesses.

What is a Community Platform?

An online community platform is cloud software that allows you to create, host, and manage interactive online communities.

It comes with member management, content creation, course selling, generative AI, and instant messaging features that help you build a thriving and interactive online community around your eLearning business.

Facebook and LinkedIn Groups are examples of free online community tools. However, if you want to monetize your community, sell products, and create a tailored environment for your community members, you’ll need a premium online community solution.

What Features Should You Look for In An Online Course Tool?

The ideal online community platform for your brand depends on your business goals. Some platforms have superior engagement features while others come with robust product-selling tools.

However, here are some of the core features you should generally look for in online community software.

Third-party integrations: Does it integrate with mainstream email marketing tools, CRMs, content creation tools, course platforms, or CMS platforms?

Member profiles and management: Does the platform allow you to give your members access to different community sections, moderate discussions, and control their visibility in the community? In addition, can members customize their profiles to build a unique identity.

Content creation: What content formats does the platform support? Does it offer video hosting and live streams? 

Generative AI: Can you and your community members create AI text and images? 

Channels, discussions, and threads: What features does it offer to organize discussions in different channels, topics, or hashtags? Can you run polls and engage members in different ways?

Monetization: Does it allow you to sell courses, memberships, coaching or any other digital products? Does it process payments?

Events: Can you host live events in the community, share recordings, and schedule events?

The Best Community Platforms by Category

Here’s a quick preview of the best community platforms by category:

Top Online Community Platforms For Creators And Entrepreneurs

These community platforms allow solopreneurs and content creators to combine community features with online courses, memberships, and other types of digital products.

• Mighty Networks: Best All-Inclusive Community Platform
• Bettermode (formerly Tribe): Best Community Platform for Brand Promotion
• BuddyBoss: Best WordPress-Based Community Platform
• Circle: Best Easy-To-Use Community Platform
• Thinkific: Best for Combining Courses and Community

Best Community Building Platforms For Organizations And Enterprises

These are enterprise community platforms designed to help organizations create better customer experiences through timely service and engagement.

• Vanilla Forums: Top Community Software for Enterprise Users
• Hivebrite: Best for Professional Networks
• Discourse: Best Open-Source Community Platform
• Disciple: Best for Monetizing Communities
• Khoros: Best for Analytics

Below, you can find in-depth reviews of each community platform included in this list.

1. Mighty Networks – Best All-In-One Community Platform

Best All-Inclusive Community Platform

Mighty Networks is an all-in-one platform for edupreneurs and content creators who want to build and manage a community around their online courses. It offers a wide range of features, including:

• Website Builder
• Online course builder and editor
• Content management system
• Membership platform
• Community platform

One of the challenges of using a single platform for so many different things is that it can be difficult to learn how to use all of the features. However, Mighty Networks has intuitive tools that make it easy to set up community spaces and facilitate interactions between your community members.

For example, you can provide your community members with chat messages, member categories, subgroups, and a personalized activity feed. Community members can interact with each other through text messages, images, sound files, videos, comments, polls, and questions.

Mighty Networks also comes with flexible monetization capabilities. It is easy to charge members for access to the spaces you create. Overall, Mighty Networks is a powerful option for anyone who wants to start a community-driven online course business. It is an independent platform that offers all of the basic business functionalities on one dashboard. This means that you do not need to use any third-party tools.

Mighty Networks Main Features

• Unlimited storage for files and photos
• Member management, reporting, anti-spam, and anti-abuse tools
• Unlimited video storage for courses
• Online courses
• Public, private, or secret virtual groups
• Public, private, or secret local groups
• Local or virtual events
• Community polls and questions
• Leaderboard for active community members
• Member search by category and location
• Private direct messaging between members
• Member profiles with custom categories
• Contact importing
• Mass messaging to all community members
• Posts, comments, and cheers
• Activity feed for text, links, images, and video
• Unlimited community moderators, admins, and members
• Mighty Co-Host, an AI-powered community platform

Mighty Networks Pricing

Mighty Networks offers a free 14-day trial and if you decide to sign up, they offer 3 pricing plans: Community, Business, and Mighty Pro.

Might Networks offers 4 pricing tiers: 

Community Plan – $49 per month or $41 per month when paid annually.

This includes: 

• Activity Feed and Featured Content
• Native Questions & Polls
• Rich Member Profiles
• Native Livestreaming & Video
• Chat & Messaging
• Events & Zoom Integration
• The Ability to Charge or Token-Gate
• Limited AI Features

The Courses Plan – $119 per month or $99 per month when paid annually.

You’ll Get everything included in the Community Plan, plus:

• Courses and Resource Libraries
• Quizzes and Assessments
• Unlimited Course Videos
• ConvertKit Integration
• Additional Sales Landing Pages
• Member Tags & Badges
• Zapier APIs & Workflows
• Native Live Streaming
• Premium Analytics
• Activity Feed and Featured Content
• Chat & Messaging
• Events & Zoom Integration

The Business Plan – $219 per month or $179 per month when billed annually.

The Business includes everything in the Community and Courses Plans, plus:

• White-Labeled Emails
• Ability to Configure SSO
• 2 TB of Storage
• Additional Live Streaming
• Charge for a Featured Event
• Automated Questions & Polls
• Additional Analytics and Member Data Download

The Path-to-Pro Plan – $360 per month

• Dedicated Path-to-Pro team
• Exclusive Path-to-Pro Community
• Community Strategy Consults
• Professional Design Assistance
• Additional Storage
• Member Video Upload
• Brand Banners per Space
• Allow Space Hosts & Moderators to Livestream
• Lower Transaction Fees

The Mighty Pro Plan

• iOS & Android Apps 
• Branded App Notifications 
• Additional AI Features 
• Migration & Launch Services 
• A Dedicated Community Strategist 
• Access to the Mighty Pro Membership Network 
• White-Labeling & Branded Notifications

Mighty Networks Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
All-in-one platform for online courses, memberships, websites, and communities.	Charges a percentage rate for transactions.
An unlimited number of community members, moderators, and admins.	Doesn’t support SSO integrations.
Built-in monetization tools for online communities.	Limited community gamification.
Free iOS and Android mobile apps.
Personalized activity feeds for community members.
Finds community members by categories and location.
Unlimited content storage.

See our full Mighty Networks review >>

2. Bettermode (formerly Tribe)

Given that it only focuses on building and managing communities – without the online course extras – Bettermode is not as robust as Mighty Networks. 

However, it is a powerful online community-building tool.

For example, Bettermode has perfected the art of white labeling. You can build fully customized online communities based on your brand – from the widgets and logos to the domain and layout colors. 

You can set them to run as fully-branded community websites on mobile and web browsers, or maybe as PWA apps. The choice is all yours.

The communities follow the standard social media architecture, meaning you can tweak your site to resemble and operate like social media sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn. 

A community consists of Spaces, Collections, and Tags. A Space is like a dedicated channel within a community for a specific topic or theme. Collections contain all the Spaces making them easier for the members to explore. Tags are searchable keywords that help members group their discussions and find relevant topics inside a community.

What’s more, Bettermode offers a social login feature that allows your community members to sign in with their social media credentials. You can have them log in via their Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, Slack, and Facebook accounts.

Then, to keep the community members engaged, Bettermode allows you to set up a personalized activity feed, as well as gamify the experiences. You can, for example, rally members using virtual currencies, membership points, badges, and a leaderboard.

Bettermode Main Features

• Single sign-on and social login.
• White-labeling
• Public and private communities.
• Custom domain.
• Customize in real-time with an intuitive interface.
• Reach members via omnichannel notifications.
• Personalized activity feed.
• Granular level analytics.
• Customizable community landing page.
• Discussion topics based on user interest.
• Keyword blacklist and profanity blocker.
• Moderation panel for allowing, editing, and rejecting posts.
• Embeddable third-party content.
• Customizable Open Graph tags.
• SEO-friendly.
• Members can ask questions, post answers, upvote, and accept the right solution.
• Thread-based communication between members.
• Organize community by spaces.
• Migration assistance.

Bettermode Pricing

Bettermode offers four subscription plans including a free version.

Free: Create up to 5 spaces with 10 members and take Bettermode for a test drive.

Lite: $24/month (monthly billing) or $19/month (annual billing) for unlimited members and 5GB storage. Ideal for small community owners.

Pro: $59/month (monthly billing) or $49/month (annual billing) for 25 GB storage, more members, and additional engagement features. Designed for established communities.

Business: $119/month (monthly billing) or $99/month (annual billing) for 100 GB storage, additional collaborators, more spaces, and priority support. Designed for enterprises and established businesses.

Bettermode Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Extensively customizable	Price
White-labeled communities	Limited community members
Single sign-on capability	No built-in monetization tools
Multiple community gamification options	Doesn’t offer mobile apps
Structures communities by spaces
Supports custom domains

3. BuddyBoss – Best WordPress-Based Community Platform

Best WordPress-Based Community Platform

If you’re a WordPress fan and want to turn an existing site into a thriving and world-class online community, BuddyBoss is worth checking out.

With over 50,000 users including Stanford University, Yale, foundr, and many other organizations, BuddyBoss is among the top online community WordPress plugins.

The native customization capabilities of WordPress combined with the online community features of BuddyBoss give you total control over your community’s appearance and functionality.

You can, for example, use it to set up personalized activity feeds, notifications for members, group messaging, private messaging, member directories, social groups, social posts, sub-groups, etc.

BuddyBoss also lets you host live events via Zoom and seamlessly integrates with LearnDash and LifterLMS enabling you to sell courses to your community members.

But that’s not all. BuddyBoss also offer the ability (at additional cost) to create your own branded native mobile app, which community members can then access through their Apple App Store and Google Play Store accounts.

BuddyBoss Main Features

• Create site-wide events or group only events for members.
• Create and manage custom file extensions.
• Set privacy for your personal documents and social group documents.
• Fully compatible with WordPress.
• Members can share any file type.
• Customizable email API.
• Custom push notifications to community members.
• Global, personal, and group feeds.
• Private 1-on-1 message to all the members of a social group.
• Thread-based group messages.
• Create your own member dashboard.
• Create one-time and/or recurring online class sessions.
• Create organizers or moderators within a group.
• Create public, private, or hidden groups.
• Custom profile types and fields.
• Learning Management System (LMS) integration.
• Community gamification.

BuddyBoss Pricing

BuddyBoss starts at $299 per year for one website.

You can also purchase a 5-site license for $349 per year or pay $449 per year to run it on 10 websites.

BuddyBoss Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Fully compatible with WordPress.	Not compatible with non-WordPress sites.
Integrates with LearnDash, LifterLMS, and Tutor LMS.	The process of setting it up can be technically challenging for non-coders.
White-labeled native mobile apps.	Doesn’t offer a free package.
Supports membership plugins.	Its third-party integrations can add up.
Facilitates extensive customization.
Community gamification.

See our full BuddyBoss review >>

4. Circle – The Most User-Friendly Community Platform

Best Easy-To-Use Community Platform

While many community platforms try to squeeze in as many features as possible, Circle takes a minimalistic approach.

If you prefer to keep everything neat and clutter-free, while still having the tools to grow a thriving community and sell online courses, Circle can be a great choice.

Circle is built to handle just the most critical elements of community creation and management. You’ll find it easy to set up discussion boards, moderate the community, facilitate private messaging and member connections, and organize content.

It also has powerful naive community-driven online courses that make online learning more engaging and fun.

Circle’s modern, simplistic design doesn’t cater to administrators alone. Community members also get the benefit of working with an intuitive user-friendly interface.

The system makes it convenient to navigate the community boards and participate in both group and private discussions.

One of the most impressive things about Circle is its constant evolution based on user feedback. It has some of the best online course creators like Pat Flyn as advisors and closely monitors user feedback to constantly improve its features.

Circle’s Community AI is an example.

This AI-powered feature allows your community users to write posts and generate ideas. In addition, it can automatically generate subtitles for any videos you upload and make them more accessible for users.

Earlier in 2024, Circle introduced several new features like quizzes, advanced analytics, automated workflows, and automated event reminders.

It also supports Stripe, Apple Pay, and Google Pay as digital wallets for all Circle communities.

Circle also has robust iPhone and Android apps allowing you to manage your communities on the go.

Circle Main Features

• Integrate your community right into your website, product, online course, or membership.
• White-labeled community experience.
• Neat, modern interface design.
• Rich posts, member profiles, and direct messaging.
• Organize community discussions in public or private spaces.
• Single Sign-On (SSO) support.
• Automated community moderation.
• iOS native mobile app.
• Supports custom domain.
• Custom CSS & JavaScript.
• Circle Community AI.

Circle Pricing

Circle offers three pricing plans.

The cheapest is Basic, which accommodates 10 spaces and 1,000 community members for $49 per month.

Professional, on the other hand, gives you an allowance of up to 100 community spaces and 10,000 members for $99 a month – while Business is $219 and Enterprise is $399.

Circle Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Modern, intuitive interface design.	No Android mobile app yet.
Communities can easily be embedded on third-party sites.	Limited community members, spaces, and content storage.
Robust online course creation features	No native online course capabilities (but integrates with Teachable).
Facilities SSO integrations.
Automates community moderation.
Easy to use.
White-labeled community.

See our full Circle review >>

5. Thinkific – Best Course Features With Basic Community Tools

Thinkific is an online course platform with built-in tools to help you design, create, launch, promote, and sell your educational offering. 

In addition to the content creation and website building tools, you also get access to Thinkific Communities. 

This is a new feature that allows you to create and manage online learning environments where learners can participate in an interactive educational experience to help drive engagement and boost learning outcomes. 

Each community is a landing page on your Thinkific website where learners and instructors can interact through posts (text, image, or video) and comments. You can split each community into “spaces” to further organize your members into relevant groups.  

Unlike many other online community builders that offer tons of impressive bells and whistles that you will likely never use, Thinkific’s main focus is on simplifying the process of creating and managing your online group so you can spend more of your time taking care of more important matters in your business.

The Communities feature provides you with multiple ways to engage and monetize your audience. With the updated community builder, you can price, package, and sell your community just like any other digital product.

Use communities with your existing courses or offer them as a standalone product. Your community can be free, or you can convert it to a paid product (memberships) to generate an additional source of revenue for your business.

Thinkific Communities Main Features

• All-in-one course creation and community connection
• Customizable community page 
• Flexible spaces to organize community
• Member count on the main page
• Member profiles and mentions for increased engagement
• Thread-based communication between members
• Notifications for new posts, replies, or reactions
• Branded mobile app
• Community analytics
• Community moderator roles
• Trending posts
• Live events
• Custom domain
• Unlimited community members 
• Bulk import member contacts

Thinkific Communities Pricing

Thinkific has four pricing plans to choose from when building your online course. Each plan comes with the ability to create an online community and spaces within that community. 

The Basic plan costs $49/month, or $36/month billed annually, and allows you to build 1 community with 5 spaces. The Start plan costs $74/month for 1 community with 10 spaces. 

If you intend to build more than one community, then you’ll need to upgrade to the Grow plan which costs $149/month and lets you build 3 communities with 20 spaces per community.

Thinkific Communities Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Easy to set up and use	Limited capabilities for community organization
Integrates smoothly with other products on Thinkific	Inability to make spaces private, or to group multiple spaces together
Structures online community by “spaces”	Users can’t choose which notifications to receive among all the spaces they’re part of
Robust email marketing and community management features
White-labeled native mobile app
Built-in tools for monetizing your online communities

See our Thinkific Community review >>

6. Skool – Simplest Online Community Platform

Skool is an online community platform built for course sellers, coaches, and digital product owners.

Built by Sam Owens, a successful course seller and consultant himself, and backed by Alex Hormozi who invested over $100 million to become a co-owner, Skool is one of the fastest-growing community platforms.

It is built entirely around three things:

• Enabling creators to grow free and paid communities.
• Helping them sell online courses to community members
• Making the online community experience more interactive and engaging.

Skool immediately stands out for its ease of use and robust community features. Anyone can discover your free or paid community using Skool’s search bar.

Every community has a landing page with an introduction video and text explaining the purpose and goals of the community. As a community owner, you can allow users to join instantly or ask screening questions before approval.

Inside a community, users can post new threads, participate in discussions, or react to comments. 

You can moderate these threads, approve/delete messages, and control how conversations are shaped inside your community.

Community owners and moderators can also send community messages as broadcast emails for important announcements.

Every community has a classroom section where you can list your premium or free courses.

This is where it gets really interesting.

You can use gamification to make your courses more desirable to the community members. For example, users can only access a course after they perform a list of actions and reach a certain Level inside your community.

The community also has a leaderboard showing the top performing members in the last week or month. This is an added incentive for members to engage with the community and access new content.

Skool also helps you organize one on one or community wide live events. With its Calendar feature, you can schedule public, private, or individual live sessions with reminders for all the participants.

This is an excellent feature for boosting engagement and holding personalized sessions with your community members.

However, Skool cannot directly host videos or live events. So, you’ll need to use YouTube, Wistia, or Zoom for your course videos and live calls.

You can dive into Skool’s detailed community analytics to identify your top-performing content and find engagement patterns to understand audience needs.

There’s a lot more to Skool than these features and we’d encourage you to read our detailed Skool review to learn why some of the most well-known course creators and eLearning specialists use Skool to host their online communities.

Skools’s Main Features

Community Engagement Tools: Discussion forums, live chats, events, and user-generated content sections.

Course Management: Video lessons, quizzes, and assignments to track student progress.

Gamification: Points, badges, and leaderboards to motivate community members and course participants to stay active and engaged.

Customizable Interface: Customize community and course pages to align with your brand identity.

Event Hosting: Schedule and host live events, webinars, and virtual meetups (needs video hosting integration)

Analytics and Reporting: Track user engagement, course progress, and other key metrics.

Monetization Options: Courses, coaching, one-time purchases, subscriptions, and memberships.

Integrated Messaging: Integrated messaging features, members can communicate directly with each other or with the community leaders.

Skool Pricing

Skool has an uncomplicated pricing structure with all features available for $99/month, starting with a 14-day free trial.

Skool Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Skool is built for growing a community around your course business, making it an ideal platform for eLearning professionals	Skool doesn’t have funnels of advanced landing pages for more sophisticated marketing campaigns.
If any member of your community starts their own Skool community, you automatically get 40% of their subscription fee.	Skool doesn’t offer video hosting which means you’ll need to host your videos on a third-party platform and embed them in your courses.
You can create onboarding DMs for new members to increase engagement.	Skool lacks advanced course creation and student assessment features.
Skool’s event calendar ensures your members never miss a public or private event in your community.

7. Vanilla Forums– Best Enterprise Community Platform

Best Community Platform for Enterprise Users

Vanilla Forums isn’t your regular community platform for member-to-member interactions. It is optimized to help mid-sized businesses and enterprises engage with their customers and prospects and enhance sales through strategic audience engagement and customer support.

So, if you’re a solopreneur or a creator looking to build a community around your personal brand, this is NOT for you.

However, if you’re an enterprise or a mid-sized business looking for a place to engage with your customers, read on.

Businesses can use the platform to build and run up to 20 sub-communities at once. Then to help you manage all that, Vanilla Forums allows you to assign community administration to up to 100 staff members.

You can then engage audiences through a variety of methods, including private messaging, forum discussions, questions and answers (Q&A), and knowledge bases. Vanilla Forums also tries to enhance community experiences through features such as gamification, notifications, and ideation – while administrators get to capitalize on smart history, avatars, federated search, automated summaries, revision history, and performance tracking.

Vanilla Forums Main Features

• Control fine-grained, role-based permissions.
• Create, edit and delete users and user use-cases.
• Open Graph protocol to help social media display the right content.
• Supports the most popular social logins,
• Multiple SSO protocols.
• Groups can be public, secret, or private.
• Private one-on-one discussions between members.
• In-page and email notifications for members.
• An advanced editor that recognizes HTML, BBCode, and Markdown.
• Post questions and polls.
• Reward members with ranks.
• Profile pages display a member’s reputation, badges, and recent activity.
• Custom badges.
• Reputation scores for members.
• Peer-based moderation.
• Community members are allowed to submit and vote on ideas.
• Community-driven knowledge base.
• Customize the community with custom CSS.

Vanilla Forums Pricing

Vanilla Forums is available in four packages – all of which are designed for the needs of mid-sized businesses and enterprises. The lowest cost package starts at $689 per month.

Vanilla Forums Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Specially optimized for mid-sized businesses and enterprises.	Can be costly to small businesses and solopreneurs.
Supports extensive customization.	The customization process is a bit too technical for non-coders.
Numerous gamification features.	No native course selling features
Provides a community-driven knowledge base.	Not designed for solopreneurs and creators.
Integrates multiple SSO protocols.
Enhances customer support.
Accommodates up to 100 staff users at a time.

Check out Vanilla Forums >>

8. Hivebrite – Best Professional Community Platform

Best Community Platform for Professional Networks

Sixth on our list of the best community platforms is Hivebrite, a community management solution that’s specially optimized for alumni networks, nonprofit organizations, and most importantly, professional networks. This is the type of platform you turn to when your target audience is professionals in a particular field.

With Hivebrite, you can create a LinkedIn-type experience– one that allows community members to share opportunities, exchange ideas on the best practices, network and collaborate with their peers, and distribute industry news.

Members can, for example, easily share presentations, documents, and videos, as Hivebrite’s media center is capable of supporting all media formats. You can also allow members to create dedicated groups or forums based on their interests and locations, network in-person after checking in via community maps, or crowdsource support for projects.

Another distinguishing feature of Hivebrite is that it enables community members to push job opportunities through job boards. Employers can post open vacancies, while job seekers get tools for uploading and sharing their resumes.

The platform also allows you to group member networks together, host events and sell tickets, integrate customer relationship management systems, send out push notifications and emails to members, manage content through a content management system, offer native mobile access through branded iOS and Android apps, and embed social media sign-in options for Facebook, LinkedIn, and other major networks.

Hivebrite Main Features

• Communicate with other members through private messages.
• Create groups to match specific organizational models.
• Donation pages and campaigns.
• Create membership plans and determine associated prices and privileges.
• Create discussion forums around specific topics.
• Allow members to display their projects.
• Job boards for finding and sharing opportunities.
• An integrated email marketing tool.
• Social networks integration.
• Organize events for your community.
• An integrated content management system.
• Powerful search and targeting filters.
• Import and export member data.
• Resume upload and sharing for community members.
• Engagement scoring that identifies the most active users.
• Engagement and email analytics.

Hivebrite Pricing

The only free options with Hivebrite are a demo and a time-limited trial. Beyond that, pricing starts at $500 per month for the basic plan.

Hivebrite Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Offers professional tools for connecting partners, investors, and co-founders.	Can be costly for solopreneurs and small businesses.
Allows members to post jobs and share opportunities.	No native online course capabilities or established LMS integrations.
Comes with an integrated email marketing tool.
Gives you the chance to set up branded mobile app versions of your community.
Engagement analytics reveal the most active users.
Provides built-in monetization tools.

Check out Hivebrite >>

9. Discourse – Best Open-Source Community Tool

Best Open Source Community Platform

Discourse is one of the few community platforms also takes a community approach with its code. It comes with a framework that’s 100% open source, allowing you to endlessly tweak the underlying code.

But don’t let that scare you if you’re not into coding. The default Discourse platform is actually simple enough to be comfortably used by all types of edupreneurs, including the technically unskilled ones. You’ll be pleased that its interface is quite neat and straightforward, as it focuses only on the most important stuff.

Right off the bat, you’ll be able to create custom communities, add administrators to help you with community management, an onboard moderator. What’s more, the platform enables you to easily set up and organize categories, threads, and topics. Then, instead of dividing discussions into cluttered sub-forums, Discourse takes the approach of listing them by their categories.

As for community members, they’ll find pretty much the same features their accustomed to with established social media giants like Facebook. They can easily share content, message their peers, interact through mentions, and comment on posts.

But that’s not all – Discourse also saves you the frustration of dealing with spammers, trolls, and the likes through an internal defense system that’s capable of building automatic immunity. You can count on it to consistently flag suspicious activity, as well as help you with content moderation.

Discourse Main Features

• 100% open source code.
• Comprehensive API.
• Custom badges for community members.
• Condense long topics to just the most interesting and popular posts.
• Add common social logins like Google, Facebook, and Twitter.
• Built-in Akismet spam protection and heuristics.
• Replies flow down the page in a line.
• Incoming and outgoing link tracking.
• Self-managing member groups.
• Easily add private spaces.
• Sitewide alerts and pinned topics.
• Inline and bulk moderation.
• Personal messaging.
• Embeddable polls.
• Anonymous posting.
• Email invitations.
• Automatic and custom avatars.
• Global CDN support.
• Automatic backups.
• Markdown, BBCode, and HTML formatting in posts.
• SEO optimized for Google indexing and searching.
• Translates between more than 46 different languages.

Discourse Pricing

As an open-source platform, you’d probably expect Discourse to offer its tools for free. That’s not the case – the only free thing here is a trial that runs for 14 days. Once that ends, you’ll be paying at least $100 per month to use the platform.

Discourse Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
100% open source community platform.	Private messages between members can be accessed by administrators.
Built-in spam protection and heuristics.	Setting it up can be a bit cumbersome for users who are not technically skilled.
Runs polls.	No native online course capabilities or established LMS integrations.
Supports anonymous posting.
Provides automatic translation for over 46 languages.
Your whole community platform is automatically SEO-optimized.
Intuitive and user-friendly.

Check out Discourse >>

10. Disciple– Multiple Monetization Tools

Best Community Platform for Monetizing Communities

Your monetization strategy doesn’t always have to be restricted to online courses and membership subscriptions. You can, for example, make money from sponsorships and advertisements – and Disciple can help you do just that, along with a range of other monetization options.

Disciple allows you to create and distribute sponsored posts within your communities, as well as direct traffic to landing pages.

You can also set up premium subscription options to give paying members access to exclusive areas of the community. Disciple even helps you entice prospects with free trials and freemium content offers.

The platform also makes it possible for community creators to generate money from in-app purchases and paid app downloads. This capability is courtesy of its iOS and Android apps, which you could ultimately publish in the respective app stores as fully-branded mobile versions of your community.

While you customize the app, Disciple allows you to choose the content areas that you’d like to lock off as premium sections, accessible only through in-app purchases.

The platform isn’t only about monetization, though. Disciple manages to maintain the same level of flexibility when it comes to community creation and management.

You can, for example, set up fully-branded communities, create subgroups, schedule and post any content format, track community metrics, moderate members’ posts, build personalized feeds, as well as segment and manage audiences with private and public groups.

Disciple Main Features

• Connect with audiences through targeted push notifications.
• Live video streaming to your entire community.
• Track vital engagement metrics.
• Moderation tools.
• Schedule unlimited posts.
• Drive polls.
• Threaded comments.
• Custom member profiles.
• Private messages between community members.
• Content library.
• Charge subscriptions.
• Personalized activity feed.
• Segment members by interest and demographic.
• Multiple monetization options such as membership subscriptions, exclusive content, sponsorships, and much more.
• Private and public groups.

Disciple Pricing

The Disciple community platform has a rather unique way of charging its users. What you end up paying depends on the community versions you choose to build, the volume of members you intend to host, and the add-ons that you decide to integrate.

The grow plan hosts up to 500 members on unlimited space at $759 each month for 6 months. The last option is the Pro Plan for $1,199 each month for 6 months which hosts 5,000 members.

As for the add-ons, you can expect to pay as little as $20 per month to as much as $130 a month, depending on the specific add-on.

Disciple Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Numerous community monetization options.	Accommodates a limited number of community members.
Custom branded Android and iOS apps.	Considerably costlier than its closest competitors.
Built-in live streaming tools.	Charges transaction fees.
Personalized messages and notifications for targeted audiences.

Check out Disciple >>

11. Khoros – Best Enterprise Analytics And AI Features

Keeping tabs on all the interactions happening within your online community can be challenging – unless, of course, you’re running it all on Khoros.

Khoros comes with a pretty robust AI-driven analytical engine. Once you build a community for sharing experiences, developing expertise, providing answers, and growing your brand, you can count on Khoros to monitor all the interactions, and then provide you with real-time analytics about your audience engagement.

You’ll get valuable insights into how your members are interacting, what they respond best to, their customer journeys, and more. And, of course, you can leverage that data to optimize the performance of your community.

Khoros’ Engagement Manager, which offers advanced moderation capabilities, also leverages AI. It’s effective at recognizing, flagging, and blocking off content that might be inappropriate or offensive to your community members.

To top it all off, Khoros Communities offers advanced gamification capabilities, community syndication, and analytical tools like heuristic analysis, and user journey mapping.

Khoros Main Features

• Motivate customers to engage with your brand through gamification.
• Workflow automation for moderators.
• Profanity and abuse detection.
• Configurable spam management.
• Benchmarks from more than 400 brand communities.
• Shareable dashboards.
• Real-time analytics.
• Automatic tagging, routing, and prioritization.
• Content syndication.

Khoros Pricing

The ability to leverage artificial intelligence in your community comes with a premium price tag. Khoros is probably the highest priced option covered in this round-up. You’ll have to contact the company for a personalized quote but expect to pay mor than $3K per month – and that’s before adding on modules for things like gamification, or a knowledge base.

Khoros Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Keeps tabs on your members’ community activities	Beginners might face a slight learning curve
The Khoros Engagement Manager facilitates intelligent community moderation	Expensive for small businesses and solo edupreneurs
AI-driven.	No native course capabilities or established LMS integrations
Leverages benchmarking data from more than 400 brand communities
Robust content management
Seamlessly integrate into business systems such as CRM, SSO, Marketing Automation, LMS, etc
Integrates personalized content into the customer journey

Check out Khoros >>

Community Platform FAQs

What’s the difference between a community platform and a membership platform?

While a “community platform” tries to help you set up a social-based site that brings together individuals with common interests and goals, a “membership platform” primarily seeks to control content access without necessarily linking up the registered members.

As such, you’ll find that membership platforms don’t always come with social features like messaging and discussion boards. Community platforms, on the other hand, power all sorts of social interaction features to keep the conversations alive.

What is the cheapest community platform for edupreneurs?

All things considered, the best low-cost community platform for edupreneurs is Mighty Networks.

Besides providing a decent permanently free package, it allows you to set up and run an extensive community – with an unlimited number of members, admins, and moderators – for as low as $23 per month. 

What is the best community platform for WordPress users?

If you’re running a WordPress-based website, your best community platform option is BuddyBoss.

This open source plugin is capable of not only powering your WordPress communities, but also helping you sell online courses (through its LMS integrations), as well as memberships (via its membership platform integrations). You can also use it (at additional cost) to build a branded native mobile app for iOS and Android users.

That’s why, so far, BuddyBoss has managed to serve more than 50,000 businesses.

Jeff Cobb, Founder of Learning Revolution

Jeff Cobb is an expert in online education and the business of adult lifelong learning. Over the past 20+ years he has built a thriving career based on that expertise – as an entrepreneur, a consultant, an author, and a speaker. Learning Revolution is a place where Jeff curates tips, insights, and resources to help you build a thriving expertise-based business. Learn more about Jeff Cobb here.