What are the best community platforms?
The best community platform is customizable, uses modern design practices, is easy to use, and comes with powerful gamification and moderation features.
It should also be able to adapt to member growth and provide a seamless experience by taking care of hosting, maintenance, and security.
These benefits are available in a cloud-based (SaaS) solution.
In my opinion, the best community solutions are Thinkific, Mighty Networks and Tribe, followed by Discourse, Vanilla Forums, Spectrum.chat, Slack (A few alternatives) and Facebook Groups.
This community management software allows you to create your social network (also known as a social community).
You can connect your audiences, customers, partners, employees under your brand to build authentic relationships.
It will be a safe social platform for sharing ideas and learning from each other in a collaborative approach.
Here's my pick of the best online community software to try this year.
1. Thinkific.
Best global community platform creator.
Thinkific is the best platform for creating a community for your business. It offers a wide variety of features, including a drag-and-drop editor, course management, and payments.
If you want to take ownership of your community's experience and have better control over the data, this might be the best platform for you.
Plus, you can also share any type of content you want, including courses, videos, and articles.
When it comes to integrations, you can use your trusted tools and services to help build and grow your community.
With analytics, you can track the performance of your content and see what's working well and what you need to improve.
Features
- The drag-and-drop website builder allows you to quickly create a professional website.
- E-commerce is included so you can start selling products and services now.
- Product flexibility allows you to offer a wide range of products and services.
- Market & sell allows you to reach more customers through marketing tools and social media integrations.
- Website themes allow you to customize the look and feel of your site.
- Advanced customizations give you total control over your website design.
Pricing
With a free version that allows you to test the platform and see if it's right for you, Thinkific is one of the most affordable community platforms on the market.
Their pricing plans are as follows:
- Basic: $39 per month
- Pro: 79 dollars per month
- Premier: $399 per month
The annual plan also allows you to benefit from a 20% discount compared to the monthly payment.
Start with Thinkific.
2. Mighty Networks.
The best online community platform ($33-$81/month)
Mighty Networks serves creators and entrepreneurs by bringing together their community, online courses, sales pages, and more, all under their brand, on the web, and in native iOS and Android apps.
Connect community members with an activity stream, subgroups, member categories, chat messages, and more.
Create articles using a rich CMS, embed images, videos, and audio files, ask questions, and launch polls, all with comments and a “Like” button.
Indeed, it is a user-friendly platform for improving community engagement.
Features
- Personalized activity flow for members
- Topics and articles
- Direct private messaging
- Making the community public, private or paid
- Zapier integrations for automating workflows
- Analytical
- Custom domain
- Membership fees
Pricing
There are 4 price options:
- Community: Costs $33/month and allows you to point your community to a custom domain.
- Business: Costs $99/month and allows you to host online courses. You also have access to the Zapier integration and premium analytics.
- Pro: Get access to native mobile apps, mobile push notifications, and app store marketing, all under your brand. Pricing details can be collected by contacting the Mighty Networks team.
Choose Mighty Networks if collecting a membership fee and offering courses are essential for your customer community project.
Try Mighty Networks
3. Tribe.
The most customizable community platform (free - $199/month)
If you are looking to create a community platform that is both suitable for brands and creators, Tribe is a great option. I recommend that you take a look at it if you want software that is both user-friendly and has great potential for scalability.
Your members can also easily join your community using the social login system that supports Facebook, Slack, LinkedIn, Google, and Twitter.
Features
- Activity streams like popular social networking sites to provide personalized content.
- Support for various types of messages and rich media (for example, direct video uploading).
- Allows members to vote for, comment on, and respond to messages.
- Create groups and topics to form sub-communities and categorize content.
- Change colors, add brand elements, and change the theme using CSS.
- Embeddable widgets to add social components to sites.
- Localize your community with over 25 international languages.
- Leverage powerful notification tools to keep members engaged.
- Rich gamification systems, such as reputation score, badges, and rankings.
- Moderation system combining both user reporting, standard moderator tools (editing, deleting, merging, etc.) and automation (e.g. keyword blacklist).
- Powerful SEO to ensure that your community is well optimized to be indexed by search engines.
- You can export all member and content data because you have total control over the community through this software platform.
- Tribe has direct integration with over 20 popular third party tools. One of these, Zapier, allows you to connect to over 2,000 popular applications.
- With SSO, you can allow existing users of your site and product to connect to the community.
- Extensive reporting capabilities allow you to measure key metrics in your community.
Pricing
Tribe offers four pricing plans:
- Plus: $59 per month
- Premium: $299 per month
- Advanced: $599 per month
- Business: Contact their sales team.
Overall, Tribe is a well-established platform that currently has customers such as IBM, ASUS, Pipedrive, Decathlon, and Convertkit.
You can start using Tribe for free and upgrade to a paid plan to get more features.
Try Tribe
4. Discourse.
One of the most popular and oldest online community platforms ($100/month - $300/month)
Discourse needs no introduction. The famous forum software powers some of the largest online communities in the world, allowing a community of any size to set up a beautiful, feature-rich forum in no time.
Features
- Infinite scrolling to cover conversations on a single page
- Deploying the link
- Responsive for mobile
- Single sign-on
- Additional privileges granted to members based on the trust score
- Possibility to respond by email
- Plugins to add features to your discussion board
- A powerful API
- Translation into 45 languages
- Moderation system with the possibility of tagging content
- Personal messaging
- Reporting dashboard
Pricing
Although the open-source version is free, you still need to pay for hosting and maintenance.
The managed hosting option includes 3 subscription plans.
Standard: This $100 per month price entitles you to 100,000 page views per month, unlimited members, 5 staff members, and 20GB of storage.
Business: This plan costs $300 per month. It entitles you to 500,000 page views per month, 100GB of storage, unlimited members, and 15 staff members.
Business: This is a personalized plan that is offered to large businesses. It includes over 3 million page views per month, unlimited members, unlimited staff, and 200GB of storage.
Popular brands that use Discourse include Twitter, Samsung, Docker, and Patreon.
5. Vanilla Forums.
One of the most mature community platforms (starting at $689/month)
Offering the ability to create a brand community, Vanilla Forums can be used for customer support, as an online course, or even as a place to build an online audience for your business.
Features
- Possibility to match themes to your brand guidelines
- Gamification system
- Moderation system (merge, edit, delete, demerit points, ban)
- Question and answer system
- Events (programming, sharing, discovery and reservation possibility)
- Groups or sub-communities
- Social login and SSO
- WordPress integration
- APIs and Webhooks
- Integration with Salesforce, Zendesk, etc.
Pricing
Vanilla Forums offers 4 pricing options, starting at $689/month.
- Essential: This plan offers 250,000 page views per month, 5 staff members, JSConnect SSO, access to a private or public community, gamification, and more.
- Business: This plan offers 1 million page views per month, 10 staff members, CRM integration, ideation, API access, advanced SSO, and more.
- Enterprise: This plan offers a custom page view plan, personalized personal users, enhanced security, service level agreement, and more.
- Enterprise Plus: For those who need maximum resources for their business.
6. Spectrum.
The platform that combines chat and discussion threads (free)
Spectrum allows you to launch a free and public community with a real-time chat conversation.
At the same time, unlike messaging apps, conversations on Spectrum can be discovered by search engines and indexed.
Features
- Unlimited chat
- Unlimited members
- Customizable registration page
- Secure and private channels
- Email invitations to members
- Single DM inbox
Pricing
At this point, Spectrum is a free platform, you can start using this solution if there are budget constraints.
7. Slack.
The easiest platform to create a community of professionals (free - $12.5/member)
Slack is a popular business collaboration and messaging tool.
However, many also use it to create professional communities.
Features
- Possibility to create discussion channels and categorize them using sections.
- Real-time communication
- Powerful management integration with third party tools
- Member directory
- File browser
- Video call
- Support for various pre-designed models
Pricing
Slack offers 4 pricing options:
- Free: Unlimited private and public channels, 10,000 searchable messages, 10 apps/integrations, 1:1 video or voice calls, and file sharing.
- Pro ($6.67 per member): Unlimited message archiving, unlimited apps, and group video calls.
- Business+ ($12.50 per member): SAML-based SSO, data export, 99.99% service level agreement.
- Business: This is a personalized plan for businesses. It includes unlimited workspaces, advanced security features, and compliance systems.
It is highly recommended for real-time discussions. It is not suitable for the asynchronous communications required for discussion boards.
8. Facebook groups.
The best platform to easily acquire members (free)
Facebook groups are used to create groups dedicated to people with a common passion so that they can discuss various topics related to their area of interest.
For a business, these Facebook groups can be used to discuss your offers and increase awareness of your business.
Features
- Messages, reviews, and comments
- Setting up a questionnaire for the approval of members
- View rules for moderations
- Possibility to assign the privilege of mentor to your most loyal members
- Create learning modules (similar to courses) to train your members.
- Connect the Facebook group to the Facebook page
- Reports and analytics
- Real-time chat with Messenger (if members are not friends, messages go to the “Message Requests” section)
Rates
Facebook groups are free and currently, Facebook is focused on improving group functionality.
Overall, if you're just starting out, Facebook groups can be a good option.
It doesn't allow you to customize the app to suit your brand, the data doesn't belong to you, privacy can be an issue, and the platform is inherently full of distractions (due to notifications and ads).
What is a community platform?
A community platform allows you to create a safe and secure online space where your members can interact with each other and with your business, share knowledge, help each other, and create valuable personal and professional networks.
The software that allows you to create an online community is known as a community platform.
These solutions help you create a community around your business and keep members engaged.
This improves user retention and reinforces customer loyalty.
There are several options on the market, including Tribe, Discourse, Vanilla Forums, and more.
That you create a membership site, a community for your online courses or simply a place for your customers to interact, you need to choose the best software to achieve that.
Great community management software for small businesses should be easy to set up and facilitate interesting discussions.
Thanks to a strong commitment from customers, you will be able to retain them, Retain them, to encourage and recommend them.
Many businesses also tap into social communities of customer brands to promote self-service, gather product reviews, and improve user experiences.
Ultimately, all community tools have community features such as easy content publishing, content management, member profiles, rich media support, discussions, moderation, and more.
Content created in your community can also be indexed by search engines, increasing the organic visibility of your brand.
For example, search engines generally tend to highlight user-generated content on sites like Quora, support forums, and Stack Overflow (for programming questions).
It should also be noted that community management is a relatively new profession.
Besides the platform you choose, how you execute the community management system plan will also determine the success of your community.
Summary
We explored some of the best community solutions based on their ease of use, growth potential, and features.
However, the question remains which community platform is best for your business?
That depends on your specific needs.
That said, the first step is to list all of the features you need and your budget. Then, you should choose the community platform based on this list.
Is it also crucial to consider what business goal you're trying to achieve and how your community platform can help you measure success?
By proving the return on investment, you won't be able to
The best part is that the majority of these tools have a free version or a free trial.
This will allow you to test the community platform according to your use case.
If you are looking for my best choice, I recommend starting with Thinkific Or even Mighty Networks.
