Take a look at the most successful creators out there and you will see that they all have one thing in common: a loyal community.
It doesn't matter what kind of creator you are. Whether you're sharing your daily fits, building a brand, coaching the next gen of entrepreneurs or just vibing online, community is everything. Community is the thing that helps you grow, stay relevant, and connect with the right people.
So if you're a creator then building your own community is crucial to your success. But creating it isn't enough—you must nurture and grow it until you can reap the rewards of your fanbase.
If you're ready to start building your community, you're in the right place. We're going to take a look at:
- What an online community platform is and what types of communities there are,
- which dozen online community platforms we think are the very best,
- and what exactly to look for when you pick an online community platform.
What is an online community platform?
A community platform is a dedicated space for people who have something in common to connect with each other and bond over their shared interests.
Traditionally, communities have been physical spaces like places of worship, libraries, book clubs and community gardens.
Then in the 90s and early 00s we had the first widespread online communities with chatrooms and forums.
Today, online communities look nothing like the early forums and chatrooms of the 90s. They’re faster, more visual, and way more interactive.
Instead of static threads and text-only posts, modern communities are dynamic, multi-platform spaces powered by real-time conversation, live events, voice channels, memes, polls, reactions, bots, and more.
Modern online community platforms allow you to combine this feeling of community with content and commerce, meaning you can provide value and monetize your audience all in one place.
Different types of community platforms
Before we get into the list let's take a look at the different types of community platforms. The platform you choose depends on what you want to get out of it.
These are the three traditional types of online community platform, categorized according to how they’re used:
Personal
These community platforms are created just for fun, so they're usually pretty simple and without any advanced features. Sometimes simple group messaging is all that’s needed, so even WhatsApp could count as a community platform when used to organize meetings, events, or simply chats.
But, on the other end of the spectrum, a platform in this category might also have a big set of features—for example, many gamers use Discord as a community platform because it allows them to communicate in real time, stream their screens, and more.
Creator
These community platforms have a mix of strong features and integrations (payment gateways etc) to support the needs of creators and online entrepreneurs.
If you’re looking to monetize your community, you need a great platform that’ll help you to do so without having to stress about mixing and matching software.
Enterprise
Finally, there are also online community platforms for established businesses, providing professional services and top-tier features. Creators need the same things, but enterprise requirements can go a step further with things like branded apps.
20 best online community platforms (free and paid)
1. Whop - The best community platform overall
Whop is our pick for the best online community platform, and best of all, it’s free to use!
Whop is a go-to platform for a wide range of communities, but it really shines for entrepreneurs and creators.
Why? Because it combines everything you need to run a thriving community with powerful monetization options.
With Whop, you can sell almost any digital product, from ebooks to courses and memberships. Plus, it gives you full control over how your community is managed.
You can customize your whop (your online space) by adding native Whop apps, allowing you to hand-pick the features that work best for your members.
Whether you’re building a paid community, offering digital goods, or just want a seamless way to engage and grow your audience, Whop’s got the tools to make it happen.
This ability to customize your whop pushes the envelope of what’s possible—for example, if you don’t want your members to be able to DM each other, just don’t add the Chat app.
Whop is also unparalleled when it comes to marketing with Whop Content Rewards. With content reward you can launch clipping and UGC campaigns to grow your brand as a creator.
Features:
- Fully customizable community with your whop
- Various monetization options for every sort of digital product
- Free or paid memberships without restrictions
- Top-tier customer support
- Digital fulfillment for all your digital products
- Drag and drop apps to change your community settings in seconds
Video capabilities: You can run livestreams and upload recorded video for your audience, sell videos as premium products, and build your courses out of video content - if you want video to be a central part of your community, it's hard to find a better choice than Whop
Pricing: Free
Pros: Customization, full service and support for creators, low fees, easy setup, Whop marketplace can bring you additional growth
Cons: Whop isn’t as established as some of the other names on this list yet
Best for: Enterprises and digital entrepreneurs, especially good for creators thanks to fees and the variety of products you can sell to your community
2. Kajabi
Kajabi is a platform designed primarily for people who want to sell courses, but communities are one of its core product pillars. It’s considered a premium platform for creators thanks to the feature set it offers, mixing solid payment processing and a variety of payment options with marketing features designed to help you grow.
One of the main advantages of Kajabi is that you can use it without knowing how to code, meaning that you can set up your community easily. The proof's in the pudding given just how many creators are on Kajabi already, with the platform advertising over 100K businesses and counting, with 75 million customers served.
How Kajabi helps you have a lot to do with how it streamlines customer management and analytics alongside marketing. From their website and landing page builder to fully automated campaigns and funnels, growth is Kajabi’s main selling point.
That’s reflected in the platform’s pricing, though, with plans ranging from $119 per month all the way to $319 per month on offer for creators and small businesses.
Features:
- Sell digital products including communities
- Gives you a website and landing page builder
- Offers branded mobile app if you go with a premium plan
- Automated marketing features can take the stress off your workflows
- Highly-rated customer service
- Streamlined analytics suite and CRM solution
Video capabilities: Kajabi offers plenty of integrations and you can add a video player to your Kajabi product pages. However, you can't sell uploaded videos and digital products or run live streams
Pricing: $119 basic plan, with higher tiers available at $159 and $319 if you pay annually
Pros: Premium platform with excellent service and solid reputation
Cons: Weak features when it comes to running a community, even though you can sell one effectively
Best for: Established creators or enterprises who are looking for more of a digital store
Find more alternatives to Kajabi if you're a creator
3. Circle
Circle is a fairly new platform, having been around for just five years, but offers a friendly, easy-to-use interface that’s modular in nature and, therefore, extremely effective for the creation and management of communities.
A specialist platform for communities, Circle is designed to allow you to set up a white-label group to take full advantage of your online presence, bringing your people together and sharing information with them as well as running things like courses and streams. All you have to do is create an account, set up a community, and aim a domain or subdomain at it.
Circle does community well, with communication being central to its feature list - there are real-time chat spaces, group messaging, threaded conversations and, of course, private DMs. This pairs well with each member having a profile, letting your community network as effectively as possible.
The customizability of Circle is a big draw, but it also offers lots of excellent engagement tools, such as a member directory, chat, moderation, events, and tons more. It’s also easy to integrate Circle with your existing site, so the entire user experience should feel absolutely seamless.
Features:
- White-label branding options
- Powerful course builder lets you monetize online courses
- Customizable community service
- Multiple engagement tools including member directory and chat
- Different digital products and monetization options
Video capabilities: Circle's main video capability is its Live Room feature, where you can run video calls akin to Zoom sessions with a selection of members or stream to all of them. Events can also incorporate video content, and recordings are automated
Pricing: Basic plan starts at $49 per month, going up to the $99 Pro plan and a Business tier at $219. The top-of-the-range Enterprise tier is priced at $399, but all of these can be discounted if you choose to pay annually
Pros: Fully customizable white-label platform, the basic plan is cheaper than the competition, plenty of monetization options
Cons: Analytics features aren’t very powerful, and there’s no live chat support
Best for: Established creators or enterprises who need a white-label option
4. Discord
Discord is an instant messaging and VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) platform that’s been around long enough now that it's become ubiquitous in the world of online communities.
With well over 150 million monthly active users, Discord is a superb communication platform for members of a community thanks to its incredibly powerful messaging and voice chat atop the ability to create servers and channels.
This platform’s origin story is rooted in gaming, but its usage has spread far beyond, thanks to what you can do with it. The ability to integrate using bots is a major selling point in this regard, heightening server management capabilities and creating engagement.
While Discord is a brilliant place to bring your community together, what it doesn’t really offer is options in terms of monetization.
There’s no real way to make money off Discord directly, but what people are doing is creating premium Discord servers or channels—you can run your entire community on Discord but have certain areas, such as voice chats or streams, available only to paying subscribers or member tiers.
To actually sell those subscriptions and manage member access, get signed up with Whop and add the Discord app to your whop!
Features:
- You can create servers for communities
- Add different channels for different topics or activities or to organize and moderate members
- Direct messaging lets you engage members and communicate via group and direct messaging
- Voice and video chat features are of the highest quality
Video capabilities: Discord lets you run video chats and live stream to all of your server members, but you can't save the videos on-platform for asynchronous viewing
Pricing: Free
Pros: Superb communication protocols, extremely easy to organize communities
Cons: No direct monetization options
Best for: Any sort of free community, but it’s perfect for paid communities if you manage your Discord via a platform like Whop
Find out how to monetize your Discord community
5. Mighty Networks
Mighty Networks is a community hosting platform for entrepreneurs that offers a suite of community management tools alongside monetization options, meaning that you can build and run your community all on this one platform.
The cornerstone of Mighty Networks is its activity feed, letting members keep up to date at a glance. On top of that, they have access to chat and a member list, in addition to an events list and a course or resource library.
This feature set keeps it simple, giving digital entrepreneurs the chance to keep members engaged but not overwhelmed.
It’s possible to test Mighty Networks for no cost via its free trial, and creating a community is easy. AI is employed in this process, all the way from generating names and descriptions to header images and themes—and even some content to get you started, like polls and icebreakers.
Fortunately, you aren’t stuck with what AI (the trademarked Mighty Co-Host) gives you, and everything’s customizable. You'll get everything laid out for you and can make tweaks and adjustments as you see fit.
Features:
- Activity feed allows members to keep up to date at a glance
- Chat, member list and profiles, events, and live streams improve engagement
- Higher tier plans unlock more features such as white-label emails and member video uploads
- The Mighty Co-Host can help you get set up easily with a template you can adjust to your needs
Video capabilities: You can live stream for your members but member video uploads only kick in if you choose one of Mighty's higher-tier payment plans
Pricing: Basic community plan costs $49 per month, going up to Path-to-Pro at $319 per month
Pros: Easy integrations, and AI generation can help you in some cases
Cons: Mighty Networks branding is ever-present, and its feature set is limited
Best for: Creators who want a basic community platform
Read our comprehensive Mighty Networks review
6. Thinkific
Thinkific is an online product platform focusing on courses, digital downloads, memberships, and, you guessed it, communities.
It’s a good choice for creators looking to sell their skills, and the platform’s community-building aspects are especially suited to learning-focused groups where interactivity and communal knowledge transfer are key.
That being said, you can also use Thinkific if you’re not trying to be a teacher and mentor, thanks to the platform’s simple drag-and-drop website builder and template-based landing pages.
You can customize your domain and take full advantage of Thinkific’s built-in email and affiliate marketing tools, as well as coupons and sales widgets.
The platform is, nonetheless, best suited to creators or enterprises with a course to offer since their course builder is the true stand-out feature of the platform. It’s really easy to use but the end product is of very high quality, featuring all sorts of content like audio, quizzes, surveys, downloads, assignments, and much more.
Features:
- Excellent, easy to use course builder
- Drag-and-drop website builder
- Landing pages and your own custom domain
- Marketing tools at your fingertips to grow your reach
- AI-powered templates you can adjust quickly
Video capabilities: You can upload videos and offer them as digital downloads with Thinkific, and offer streaming content like coaching sessions and webinars live and face to face
Pricing: Basic, single-community plan starts at $36 paid annually, and there’s a free option too, but for a solid feature set, you’ll need the $74 or $149 tiers
Pros: Course builder, various tools and features, well-reviewed support
Cons: Most required features are gated behind the higher subscription tiers
Best for: Content creators with a course to sell
7. Uscreen
If Thinkific is a top choice for course creators, then video creators need to pay attention to what Uscreen has to offer. Totally focused on digital entrepreneurs putting out video content, Uscreen combines that content with the community to provide a very unique option.
Inspired by Netflix and YouTube (which a lot of their users hail from), Uscreen allows you to showcase your content in a manner that encourages discovery and even binge-watching.
Members can then interact in the comments of your videos, download them, and manage their own playlists—all within a safe community space that’s right next to your video library.
Uscreen offers branded apps within 30 days and adds flexible monetization options to the mix—you can live stream, sell courses, offer free trials, and much more. On top of that, there’s plenty of marketing tools and automation built in, letting you keep right on top of your membership’s engagement via analytics.
Features:
- Branded apps for that white label experience
- Versatile monetization options
- Community is placed right next to the video library to encourage discovery
- Built-in marketing and automation tools
Video capabilities: Uscreen is all about video, and its video library is central to the entire offering with members able to interact in your video comments and download them to create their own playlists. It's also possible to stream live, and include video in your Uscreen courses
Pricing: $149 plus $1.99 per paid member per month for the basic plan, $499 plus $1.49 per month for the pro plan, which adds community features and the branded app
Pros: Innovative, powerful platform that encourages engagement and discovery
Cons: Expensive compared to most others, and charges per paid community member too
Best for: Well-established video creators who want a premium white-label app
Read our in-depth Uscreen review
8. Podia
Podia is a digital product platform centered around a website builder and email marketing, but it has community management features that could definitely interest you as a creator.
What Podia boils down to is a white-label option that can be used for just about any community, alongside a unified look and feel to your site and marketing emails.
The platform also has a course builder alongside a lot of other tools for e-learning, but its community features revolve around effective management. You can set up forum-like topics to prompt discussion (in multimedia), give members access to different products, or simply use your community as a private feed.
You can make as borderless a community as you want with Podia, with open registration and public posts—or go the other route by posting to a membership feed for paying customers instead.
Bottom line? Podia is an effective means of communicating with your audience, and you can use it in any fashion you want thanks to the ability to create open or closed groups and set up multiple communication channels.
Features:
- Create open communities or private groups
- You can post to your communities and hit member feeds
- Communities can then be organized in tiers, including free and multiple paid plans
- Custom domains and chat support available if you go premium
Video capabilities: You can put video on your Podia page and in your courses as well as offer them as digital downloads but streaming isn't part of the package
Pricing: There’s a free option that includes community building, but you can pay $4 per month for the plan with custom domain and chat support. Adding third party code and then affiliates pushes Podia’s cost up to $33 and then $59 per month, paid yearly. Only the latter option does not have a transaction fee, with the free plan going up to 10%
Pros: Extremely affordable option if you only need a select set of features
Cons: Not as powerful for communities as comparable options in terms of features, and 10% is steep for what little you get for free
Best for: Casual groups who want unified templates or starting creators who only need very basic features
9. Disciple
Disciple is an online community platform that’s all about giving you your own branded app. You don’t need to know anything about coding, meaning that you can have your community moving onto your own app more easily than you might ever have imagined.
Your logos, colors, and brand take center stage with Disciple, and you can customize how it works to give your community members the perfect experience.
There’s a content library if you’ve got podcasts, videos, or articles to share, and you can integrate things like courses, calendars, and events with ease.
Your members have lots of freedom, such as being able to slide into each other’s DMs, but you’re ultimately in full control of the platform—it’s safe and secure, and the Disciple team will guide you through the entire process of setting your app up to make sure it’s exactly as you want it.
Best of all, you can manage your community from one place, and the Disciple console can even be used from your phone.
Features:
- Your own branded iOS and Android app
- Customizable with your messaging, colors, and logos
- Web pages in-app, activity feed, content library, and more community engagement features
- Full post management and moderation
Video capabilities: You'll need to pay for storage for videos if you want to upload them to Disciple, and courses (with video) are an additional cost over the basic subscription fee
Pricing: $633 per month
Pros: Versatile, easy to use branded app that brings your community together
Cons: Extremely premium option with a price tag to match
Best for: Established creators or enterprises seeking a branded app to take their digital business to the next level
10. Slack
Slack is a well-known chat-based collaboration tool for teams and is very commonly used by businesses. However, it can also be purposed toward online communities thanks to its robust chat channels for group conversations, and easy integration of bots and APIs to add more community engagement.
It isn’t quite meant for communities, so lacks some of the purpose-built features of some of the platforms on this list, but Slack is definitely an option to consider if you’re coming from nothing at all or an extremely basic situation such as a WhatsApp or Telegram group.
Slack’s interface is intuitive and very easy to get used to, and you can get more features, such as group video calls, when you start to explore some of Slack’s advanced plans.
However, you’ll have to deal without things like events, and analytics are non-existent thanks to Slack’s corporate focus - the app wasn't really designed for online member communities although it can certainly be used that way to a point.
Features:
- Slack’s chat channels are perfect for online communities
- Easy integration with your existing tech stack
- Bots and APIs can add value to your community
Video capabilities: You can run group video calls if you pay for an advanced plan, but on-demand video is out as you can't upload video to Slack
Pricing: Basic package is priced at $7.25 and is suitable for small communities, but you’ll probably need to talk to sales for the right option
Pros: Robust communication platform and easy integrations with other services
Cons: Productivity-focused and therefore lacking in several key community features. Gives you less and costs more than Discord
Best for: Small communities with basic needs such as text chat and one-to-one voice chats
Leveling up your community? Here’s how to migrate from Slack to Discord
11. Facebook Groups
Facebook catches a lot of flak for various reasons, but the fundamental reality is that the social media giant is in the position it is because just about everyone has an account. It’s one of the most massively adopted platforms on a global scale, so making use of its reach via Facebook Groups could be a good idea.
From a community member point of view, the amount of work required to join and become part of your group is minimal in theory—all they have to do is log in (which, let’s face it, they probably do quite frequently) and visit your group page.
That said, there are plenty of people who refuse to join Facebook on principle, so you’ll be alienating them.
In terms of actual engagement, users will have to visit your group to get the latest news and see what’s going on, so it’s not as perfect a solution as if posts from your group were to show on their feeds.
Furthermore, monetization on Facebook isn’t terribly easy—it’s best used as a glorified group chat or a starting point for your community, and you’ll need to migrate away when you want to scale up and really start to drive revenue directly or indirectly from your online tribe.
Features:
- Easy to get started with and manage
- Quick adoptions since many of your members are probably users of Facebook already
- The platform allows DM, group chats, and posts of different kinds
- Members by nature already have detailed profiles and can communicate with each other
Video capabilities: You can upload videos for your community and create posts with embedded video from other platforms, but live streams need to be done off-platform
Pricing: Free
Pros: Massive existing user base
Cons: Privacy concerns, group posts don’t show on users’ feeds, monetization needs to be P2P
Best for: Very casual groups or those just starting up - it's a good idea to start a Facebook Group for your nascent community and then migrate away to a better alternative when things start picking up
How to promote and make money from your Facebook Group
12. Reddit
Reddit is one of the biggest and best-known online community platforms in the world, but it’s down at the bottom of this list because of the fact that any new community can very much get lost in the crowd unless managed skillfully.
However, the potential for growth is immense on Reddit, given that the site is visited by hundreds of millions of people across the world on a daily basis.
One of the many additional advantages of Reddit is the fact that it’s free, so there’s no real loss in hopping into the platform and creating a subreddit. It’s easy to do, and allows you to put the building blocks of your community in place.
Once this is done and you’ve populated your subreddit with a few entries, such as a FAQ to let people know what you’re all about, you can start putting the word out there.
Your subreddit can serve as something like a forum for your community, and members can create text as well as video posts. You (and other Reddit users) can then comment and get involved, allowing for an unrestricted dialogue on a variety of topics.
Importantly, the people who join your subreddit will have it added to their feed, meaning that they don’t have to go out of their way to see what’s happening - posts in your subreddit will hit their feeds automatically, especially if there’s significant traction.
Features:
- Evolution of the beloved forum format
- Cross-pollination from other communities
- Unobtrusive design
- Spurs dialogue between community members on a variety of topics
- Members can upload different media with their posts
- Lots of people already use Reddit so it’s easy to just join another sub
- Public forum so non-members will also see posts although you can restrict their ability to get involved
Video capabilities: You can embed or upload video when you make a post, but Reddit doesn't really have a native live streaming option
Pricing: Free
Pros: Extremely popular platform with hundreds of millions of users, likely familiar to potential community members, easy to create and manage your subreddit
Cons: No real monetization options for creators, but posts can be used like classifieds if desired
Best for: All, though mainly as a secondary platform and means of communication with casual users or customers
13. Higher Logic Vanilla
Higher Logic Vanilla is one of the platforms that enterprises use, rather than creators. One of the main focuses of the platform is customer support communities. This helps enterprises communicate with their customers in a much more friendly way.
The platform also allows enterprises to embed their content directly into their website to create documentation or FAQs. Companies like Smartsheet, Oracle, TeamViewer, and Zyxel are among the ones that use the platform on their sites.
This sort of service allows brands to support customers at scale, and customer engagement is driven by the content and discussions that tend to pop up. It's also a good way to lower the amount of support tickets since answers are much more easily found than without a solution like this.
Higher Logic Vanilla also allows you integrate other systems such as a LMS, ticketing tool, or marketing platform, which will make managing your business a whole lot easier.
Features:
- A user-friendly platform with highly customizable content
- Integration into other websites
- Makes it easy to connect with customers
Video capabilities: You can use video in your knowledge base and conduct webinars via Higher Logic Vanilla
Pricing: Depends on the enterprise and the solutions they want.
Pros: Easy to use and offers great customization and gamification features. Companies that use Higher Logic Vanilla see great improvements in their customer relations.
Cons: Lacks advanced analytic reports, and embedding into your website feature might not be easy for everyone.
Best for: Enterprises looking to create a custom gamified platform to improve their customer relations.
14. Bettermode
Bettermode is a community platform that allows businesses to create highly customizable community platforms. One of the best parts of Bettermode is that it's a no-code builder, meaning that you don't have to have any coding skills to get started with it.
With the use of modules like discussion boards, help centers, and member clubs, businesses are able to create a platform that's unique to them. The platform allows you to access advanced analytics about your community and supports integrations with other services and platforms like Zapier or Slack.
Bettermode is used by some very recognizable brands and boasts thousands of B2B and B2C communities, and serves as an easy, convenient knowledge platform to keep customers close.
It unifies community tools, centralizing customer engagement and support, and pulls all of the different customer interactions you might expect into one community - and delivers actionable insights along the way.
Features:
- Easy no-code platform builder
- Simple moderation capabilities
- Unifies search, notifications, and content management into the community
- Advanced analytics, insights, and reporting
Video capabilities: Given the nature of the platform, video isn't a big part of it - it's all about text, information, and searches. However, it's possible to run events directly via the platform
Pricing: Bettermode has three pricing options. Starter, the free option, supports 100 members and 20 spaces with a Bettermode domain. The Pro option, which is $49 per month, supports integrations, unlimited members, custom domain, advanced analytics, and add-on support.
The last pricing option, Enterprise, requires you to contact Bettermode's sales team, and it includes a guaranteed SLA, data residency, a type 2 SOC, dedicated account support, and more.
Pros: The platform is no-code, so everyone can easily create a community. The moderation tools are easy to use and powerful. The platform itself is also very easy to use from the perspective of regular users.
Cons: While the integration capabilities of Bettermode are great, it can be a bit hard to actually set up for people who lack the technical capabilities. For creators looking for a simple platform, the high customizability Bettermode offers can be a bit overwhelming.
Best for: Businesses and creators wanting to create an easy to use platform with no code.
15. Discourse
Discourse is for sure one of the most interesting platforms we've talked about so far. It's an open-source community platform, meaning that everyone can download and start using it for free.
The platform is highly customizable, allowing businesses, creators, and individuals to truly customize it to their liking, thus keeping the brand look. The platform's priority feature is forums - it also has regular community platform features like user profiles, private messages, badges, add-ons, moderation tools, and more.
While everyone can download and use Discourse on their own server, the platform offers hosting services as well because downloading the software, setting up the server, and starting to self-host the platform might be a hard task for people who lack the necessary skills.
Features:
- 100% open source
- Prioritizes forum-type communities with modern interfaces
- Offers plenty of customization options
- Powerful moderation tools enhanced by AI
- Wide variety of integrations and additional features available via plugin
Video capabilities: Discourse is another platform that doesn't go all-in on video thanks to the enterprise focus, although it does allow you to integrate Zoom meetings - along with plenty of other similar apps and services
Pricing: While Discourse is an open-source project, they also offer hosting services starting from $20 with unlimited members, 2 staff, 20k monthly pageviews, and a Discourse domain.
The other three options are $100 with 100k monthly pageviews, a custom domain, more plugins, custom themes, API/Webhook access, $500 with even more room, and the enterprise plan, which has a price based on your business.
Pros: The platform can be used for free by self-hosting. The UI and ease of use of the platform are up to modern standards.
Cons: Self-hosting can be a bit hard for people who lack the skills to do so, even when compared to other forum software. Some users say migration to/from Discourse is tricky.
Best for: Businesses or creators who want to create a simple but powerful forum-based community and have the technical sysadmin skills to deploy it.
16. Disco
Disco is a community platform that leans heavily into the power of AI to help you combine educational content and effective management of your audience.
What this means is that you’re going to get all of your tools and data in one convenient place, and the platform doesn’t require you to spend too much time navigating and learning how things work.
Given how central AI is to Disco’s value prop, it’s no surprise that it’s woven into nearly every part of the experience. No matter what task you start—whether it’s creating a new course, setting up a workflow, or writing a post—you’ll get AI-powered suggestions to guide you.
There’s even an interactive chat-style assistant built in, making it feel like you’ve got a co-pilot helping you move faster and smarter.
On Disco, you can create online spaces for your audience to interact and network while your course material remains central to everything that goes on - and of course, you can monetize said course, as well as membership and any events that you choose to run.
The digital products Disco lets you sell are actually called Experiences, and include member spaces and events as we already mentioned, as well as two types of courses. One is the self-paced course, which members can complete at their leisure, and the other is a cohort-based course that’s more of a social and collaborative learning product.
You can put your courses together using Disco’s curriculum and course builders, with both features working hand-in-hand to let you put together as structured a product as possible. A custom onboarding experience is also easy to set up, letting you give your members as warm a welcome as possible.
Disco operates directly in your browser, so there’s no need to download any complex software or client. It’s a simple but versatile solution that can fit the basic needs of most online communities - especially those that aren’t put off by the presence of AI.
Features:
- Flagship AI provides you with help and suggestions every step of the way
- AI can also be trained for automated member responses to boost member management and engagement
- Strong course and curriculum builders
- Browser-based cloud software, so no tricky downloads
Video capabilities: Disco’s course modules can naturally be configured with video, but the platform is a little bit more reliant on text communication especially thanks to how it uses AI
Pricing: Disco has no free option but each of its plans have a fortnight-long free trial. The cheapest plan gives you one community, ten products, a single admin and a cap of 1000 members, and works out to $79 per month if you pay annually. For 10,000 members you’ll need to go up to the $359 per month plan, or the $999 per month plan for 25,000 members
Pros: You can save a lot of time and effort with Disco’s AI and it also offers several integration to minimize disruptions to your tech stack
Cons: As a platform, Discord is extremely pricey since you’re funnelled very swiftly toward their plans costing hundreds every month
Best for: Creators who are comfortable leaving most of the work to AI
17. Skool
Skool is a gamified online course platform that’s easy to use and has seen some love from the creator community in recent years.
Created by Sam Ovens back in 2019, Skool focuses on two key areas - courses, and communities. If you’re after anything else you should probably go elsewhere right away, but if that’s all you’re after, Skool might fit the bill.
It’s easy to get started on Skool, and when you join up (with your payment information, naturally) you can immediately get started with the creation of your community. They start off private, but this can be changed at any time in case a public community is more your thing. Customization is limited to just a cover photo and description for your community.
Skool has a course builder that kicks in when you want to add a course to your new community. These courses can be in video format, but notably Skool doesn’t host these files - you’ll have to embed them from platforms like YouTube, Loom, or Vimeo.
Each course module is considered a lesson on Skool, and these are put together into sets that make up your course. Video can be a big part of your course, but text, transcripts, links, and resource files are all good too.
If all of this sounds pretty basic, you’d be right in thinking so. Where Skool sets itself apart is in how communities are managed.
First of all, members have their own profiles with different metrics, all of which you can study and base decisions on. There are also features like leaderboards which can gamify the learning experience, and you can also run events via Skool’s built-in calendar.
Features:
- Gamified community management
- Member profiles let you chart things like member activity effectively
- Members’ habits can be analyzed to develop more personalized digital products
Video capabilities: Skool lets you use embedded video as part of your courses but that’s the extent of it, so the platform falls behind many others in this respect
Pricing: Skool costs $99 per month flat per group and lets you have as many courses and members you want, and tacks on a 2.9% payment processing fee on your subscriptions
Pros: Skool’s user profiles are useful and rarely provided by other platforms, and the fact that you can have unlimited courses and members under one flat fee is also a big plus
Cons: Skool’s selection of digital products you can sell is extremely limited - it’s courses and communities or bust
Best for: Anyone who wants to monetize a course and/or a community but also knows for sure that they have no plans to offer any other products
- Read our ultimate Skool review before you sign up
- Find the best alternatives to Skool if you want to go beyond just courses
18. Swarm
Swarm bills itself as a video-centric community platform, putting an innovative twist on how community owners like you interact with their people - and, crucially, how said people interact with each other.
Instead of defaulting to the faceless, chat-handle mode of communication that’s usually the norm, Swarm lets your community members send short videos to each other.
As a result, Swarm feels more intimate than many competitors, and fosters the sort of environment where communities can really grow tight-knit. It’s not quite in-person, but if that’s the feel you want to create, this is the next best thing.
It goes without saying that Swarm also provides text and audio communication for when it’s needed, but video is front and centre. In a sense, your Swarm Spaces can become a little like Zoom calls, and you can structure them however you like to best fit your online community’s needs.
All of this organization is done by creating Hubs, which you can think of like channels within a Discord server. However, they can then be divided into subsections too, letting you be as specific as you want with how your community works.
It’s worth noting that Swarm’s member-to-member video feature is also asynchronous, meaning that it doesn’t have to be done in real time. One person can create a video and send it to another as a video message, and they can reply in their own time.
As a creator, that sort of thing is cool because, let’s face it, time zones can be a pain - but this way, you can reach every member of your audience at the time that’s most convenient to them.
This feature can definitely help when managing a community of people from all over the world, especially if you’re doing something time-specific like live trading that folks can clock in later on and watch like a saved stream.
Features:
- Asynchronous video interactions not just with your members but between them
- Interactive buttons on your videos as well asAI-generated summaries and automatic captions plus video transcripts
- You can white label your community to enhance branding via your own domain and app
Video capabilities: Swarm is all about the video, with asynchronous video that can be shared between members as well as live streaming capabilities. You can screen-share as well, and invite video responses from your community members
Pricing: Swarm starts at $39 per month giving you a single Space and max. 25 members. The $149 Expert monthly plan allows unlimited Spaces with up to 150 members per, and it’s only the $339 per month Elite membership that gives you unlimited Spaces and members
Pros: Swarm’s video messaging is a feature that sets it apart from many other online community platforms, and it can give your community a little something to make it interesting
Cons: The throttling on membership means that Swarm actually gets pretty pricey if you want to have even a medium sized community, and the top premium plan is the only real option worth considering
Best for: Creators who want to lean on video messaging and have a big enough community to warrant the steep monthly fee
19. Gainsight
Gainsight (formerly known as InSided) is a community platform that caters to all sorts of users, from content creators all the way to traditional businesses looking to bring B2B customers together in one online place.
For that reason, courses don’t play as much of a prominent role as with many of the other platforms here. It’s more about building out a knowledge base to ensure that your customers’ knowledge gaps get filled and giving them the sort of content they might be missing.
It’s also possible to build out a strong user community here and let customers answer the questions posed by other customers. They can also mark the best answers and rate them, and you can follow up by pinning the most helpful content and removing the least helpful.
Gainsight also makes your content search engine optimized, meaning that users who aren’t already on the platform are exposed to it anyway on Google - and as a counterpoint, in-app embeddables ensure that your users don’t leave your product even when searching for answers, leaving their workflow uninterrupted.
Quite simply, Gainsight functions as a centralized feedback hub for your community with you in control - and along with that, you’re going to get actionable insights into their wants and needs, and feedback combined with CRM data will let you put your best foot forward when it comes to product development.
Community moderation is easier too thanks to real-time updates on user activity as well as filters that alert you when specific content is discussed, making this solution a powerful one even though it’s laser-focused on the support side of the community equation.
Features:
- B2B community platform that’s best deployed as a knowledge base
- Customers can connect with each other and share their expertise in interacting with your products
- Surveys, health scorecards, dashboards, and more can help you keep right on top of your customer analytics
Video capabilities: It’s possible to embed videos from other platforms, but video is far from a critical feature as far as Gainsight is concerned
Pricing: Gainsight is extremely opaque with its pricing, with two plans that offer 10 and 20 company users with 100 and 200 customers per user respectively. You’ll have to request pricing information directly from Gainsight if you want to know exactly how much the plans may cost
Pros: Extremely professional platform for customer support and Customer Success if you’re in the B2B realm
Cons: Opaque pricing and and a style of community management that’s quite niche
Best for: SaaS creators or small businesses dealing in highly complex products
Find alternatives to Gainsight if you want to monetize your SaaS business effectively
20. Zapnito
Like Gainsight, Zapnito is an enterprise-grade community platform although the focus is more on customer engagement to supplement the knowledge hub that it, too, attempts to create.
Customer education and growth comes to the fore with Zapnito, alongside engagement via expertise-on-demand - what that means is building a single central depot of knowledge for your customer community, personalized to their needs and allowing them to connect and share.
This allows your customers to problem-solve by themselves, and you can post articles, documents, and video, structuring them however you want - including the creation of courses. You can run events too, and have public, private, as well as secret rooms within your community.
Zapnito tends to encourage plenty of user-generated content among your customers too, with some brands seeing thousands of posts by users every year. That means all of the relevant social options are in place too, including profiles, mentions, follows, DMs, and more.
And of course, you’ll be able to optimize via your analytics dashboard and gain a complete view of user behaviour in order to further your product development aims.
Features:
- B2B engagement is driven well by the platform
- White label experience with custom branding and domain
- You can populate your knowledge hub with videos, documents, discussions, courses, and events
Video capabilities: You can upload video and create courses so there’s on-demand video available through this platform
Pricing: Zapnito is an enterprise-grade platform, and so its pricing which starts at $900 per month. This Basic plan gives you one admin seat and up to 250 registered users. For anything more, you’ll have to contact them directly
Pros: Zapnito combines modern UI and features with modern concepts of content delivery and audience engagement, making it a compelling proposition if you’ve got the budget for it
Cons: Given its price and how enterprise-focused it is, Zapnito is a niche B2B platform and may not suit all sorts of creators
Best for: SaaS businesses or medium-sized enterprises looking to engage customers better
What to look for in an online community platform
Now comes the tough question—how do you choose from the 20 community platforms on this list?
Well, that depends on what you need.
If you’re not looking to make your community a part of your business, for example, you don’t really need to worry about monetization—so Podia, Discord, or a free whop would all fit the bill, but in very different ways.
Here's what you should keep in mind when looking for a community platform:
Key features
If all you want is a platform for your gaming group to meet up and communicate in real time, Discord is a great bet—but if you want to create an informational community around that same game, Reddit might be the way to go.
Look at the different online community platforms through the lens of what their main offering is and whether that matches up with what you want out of your community.
Video
Video platforms like TikTok and YouTube dominate the internet—and it’s easy to see why. Video is the most engaging, versatile form of content out there, and with tech advancing so fast, things like storage and bandwidth aren’t really a problem anymore.
That means the community platform you choose has to support video if you want to keep people truly engaged. At the very least, you’ll want to be able to embed videos in your courses.
But ideally, you’ll also have tools for livestreaming, hosting video events, and sharing content directly with your members in a way that feels personal and dynamic.
Member profiles
Many of the best online community platforms will now have some form of member profiles, so you can take a look at member activity, whether it’s how long they spend on the platform or how exactly they engage.
These sorts of analytics can be extremely valuable when it comes to fine-tuning your content and deciding what new digital products to offer.
Monetization
When picking an online community platform, especially as a creator or digital entrepreneur, monetization is a key consideration. Platforms that don’t allow you enough options are essentially locking off different revenue streams, and you want as many avenues as possible open to you.
Whether it’s subscription plans, tiers, one-off digital product sales, coupons, digital downloads, or anything else, you want an online community platform that facilitates as much as possible.
Pricing
Just as monetization is important since you need to earn and make your content sustainable, the pricing model a platform uses could be just as important. Many community platforms make you pay a flat fee which is quite significant even at the “Basic Plan” level.
If you’re just starting off on your content creation journey or are looking for a platform for your small but growing community, these fees can cut deeply into your revenues and become prohibitive.
In these sorts of situations, a platform that lets you build a community for free and just charges a small transaction fee per subscription or sale would make perfect sense for you.
Scalability
When you start your online community, you might have just a handful of members. This is going to grow fast, and even if you’re coming in with hundreds, odds are you’ll be able to add a couple of zeroes to that within a reasonable amount of time.
Your chosen online community platform shouldn’t be restricting how many members you can have, because that’s going to cap your community growth.
Customer service
As a creator and a brand in your own right, you’re the one who’s going to suffer if something goes wrong. So, the online community platform you choose needs to have absolutely top-notch customer support and be able to help your members when they need it.
Pick the wrong platform, and it’s your brand that takes the hit through no fault of your own when things go wrong.
Payments
Another big thing to make sure of is how solid the payment infrastructure of your platform is. If they can’t serve certain regions or have a track record of failures in payments, that just adds to lost revenue for you.
Create and monetize your community with Whop
If you’re hunting for the ultimate online community platform, you need something that gives you the perfect mix of features, flexibility, and support to actually grow.
That’s where Whop comes in.
Whop is packed with powerful community tools, seamless integrations, unlimited monetization options, reliable payments, and customer support that keeps both you and your members happy.
Whether you’re selling courses, templates, memberships, or something totally unique—you can do it all from your own Whop. Stay connected with your audience through livestreams, video content, webinars, DMs, chat servers, or forums. However you want to engage, it’s ready to go with one click.
Build your whop today and bring your community to life.
FAQ
What communities can you run on Whop?
Whop allows you to run any sort of community you want, no matter whether it’s free or premium, or what sort of niche you’re building around. Fitness, trading, cooking, business, SaaS, social media—every community can find a home easily on Whop.
What’s the most important feature of a good community platform?
A good community platform should offer you as many ways as possible to get your content to your audience—that means different sorts of media and communication options such as streaming, podcasts, blogs and more.
What role does video play in an online community platform?
Video is undoubtedly one of the most important forms of video out there, and you risk losing engagement if your online community platform doesn’t give you the option to deliver video lessons or messages to your audience, live stream for them, and so on.
Whether synchronous or asynchronous, video options add tons of value for your members.
How much do the best online community platforms cost?
The best online community platforms will allow you as many members as possible within your chosen subscription level - or better yet, be entirely free! That way you can launch a brand new community on a platform like Whop and not pay a single cent until one of your community members makes a payment or buys one of your digital products.
How to monetize your online community?
An online community can be monetized in several ways. Firstly, charging for membership is the simplest answer.
Beyond that, even a free community means an interested, invested audience close at hand - you can market your digital products such as courses and ebooks to them directly and expect far better results than you might from the general public.
