20 best online community platforms of 2025 (free and paid)

The best creators don't just have followers — they have a thriving online 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 selling digital products, community is everything. Community is the thing that helps you grow, stay relevant, and connect with the right people.

If you’re serious about growing your audience and turning it into a true fanbase, this guide is for you. We’ll cover:

• What an online community platform actually is (and the different types out there)
• The top platforms for creators, coaches, founders, and more
• What features to look for when choosing the right platform for your goals

What is an online community platform?

A community platform is a dedicated digital space where people with shared interests can connect, collaborate, and grow together.

Traditionally, communities have existed in physical spaces like places of worship, libraries, book clubs and community gardens.

That changed in the 90s and early 00s with the first widespread online communities, 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. Modern community platforms are dynamic, multi-platform spaces powered by real-time conversation, live events, voice channels, memes, polls, reactions, bots, and more.

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

Personal 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 top pick for the best online community platform.

Whop is a powerhouse built for modern creators, entrepreneurs, and digital product sellers. Whether you're running a paid membership, selling courses, or launching a community around your brand, Whop gives you everything you need to build, grow, and monetize your audience.

With Whop, you can sell virtually any kind of digital product:

• Memberships
• Courses
• ebooks
• Access to gated communities
• Templates, tools, and more

What really sets Whop apart is its customizability and control. You can fully tailor your online space (called a 'whop') using native Whop apps — meaning you can hand-picks the features you want for your community.

Don’t want members to talk to each other? Just leave out the Chat app. Want to add file sharing or courses? There’s an app for that.

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
• 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: Because Whop offers so many features and customization options, it can take a bit of time to explore all the tools and set up your community exactly how you want it.

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 as it offers solid payment processing, a variety of payment options, and marketing features.

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. Plus, 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: 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 than community space

Find the best Kajabi alternatives

3. Circle

Circle is a fairly new platform that offers a friendly, easy-to-use interface.

It’s built specifically for online communities, letting you create a white-labeled space where you can bring people together, share content, run courses, and host live streams — all under your brand.

Circle focuses heavily on communication, offering real-time chat, group messages, threaded posts, and private DMs. It also includes great engagement features like a member directory, event hosting, moderation tools, and more.

Plus, it’s easy to embed into your existing website, so your community feels like a natural extension of your brand.

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 with a selection of members, or stream to all of them.

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 one of the most popular platforms for online communities, with over 150 million monthly users. Originally built for gamers, it’s now used by all kinds of groups—from creators to startups to study groups.

It’s great for communication, offering powerful tools like real-time messaging, voice and video chat, and organized channels within servers. You can also use bots to automate tasks, manage members, or boost engagement, making Discord highly flexible.

While it’s great for bringing people together, Discord doesn’t do monetization well. You can make money on Discord with server subscriptions — but only if you likve in the US. Non-US creators work around this by offering paid access to exclusive channels, streams, or roles within their server.

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 for anyone outside of the US

Best for: Any sort of free community, but it’s perfect for paid communities if you manage your Discord via a platform like Whop

5. Mighty Networks

Mighty Networks is a community hosting platform for entrepreneurs. It offers a good range of community management tools and monetization options.

The cornerstone of Mighty Networks is its activity feed. This feed keeps members keep up to date at a glance, much like a Facebook or Instagram feed. On top of that, community members have access to chat, member list, events list and a course or resource library.

This is a simple feature set, meaning entrepreneurs can keep members engaged without getting overwhelmed. You can create your Mighty Networks community for free (with the free trial) and use AI to generate a community name, create descriptions, and even make some content to get you started, like polls and icebreakers.

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 work for learning-focused groups where interactivity and communal knowledge sharing are key.

Still 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.

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, Uscreen is for video creators. 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, Uscreen helps you to showcase your video in a way that makes is easy to discover and binge-watch.

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. With Uscreen you can live stream, sell courses, offer free trials, and much more.

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 also includes community management features.

Podia has a course builder and other tools for e-learning. When it comes to community features, these include forum-like topics for discussion (in multimedia) and members-only access to different products,..

You can make as open a community as you want with Podia, with free registration and public posts—or make money 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

Read our full Podia review

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. 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. But, it can also be purposed toward online communities thanks to its chat channels for group conversations, easy integration of bots, and APIs for community engagement.

But, it isn’t quite meant for communities, so lacks some of the purpose-built features of some of the platforms on this list.

Slack’s interface is intuitive and easy to get used to, and you can get more features — like group video calls — when you start to explore some of Slack’s advanced plans.

But, you won't be able to host events, and analytics are non-existent thanks to Slack’s corporate focus.

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 is one of the most used social media platforms in the world, so creating a community with a Facebook Group could be a good idea.

From a community member point of view, the amount of work needed to join and become part of your group is extremely low—all they have to do is log in (which, let’s face it, they probably do quite frequently) and visit your group page.

But, monetization on Facebook isn’t 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 making money.

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 any new community can easily get lost in the crowd.

Still, 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.

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 any topic.

But, if you want to make money with a community, Reddit is not the option for you, with no monetization methods.

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 helps 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.

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 more interesting platforms on this list. 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.

On Disco, digital products are called Experiences and include member spaces, events, and two course types: self-paced and cohort-based. The platform’s course and curriculum builders make it easy to create structured learning journeys, and you can also set up custom onboarding to welcome new members.

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 includes a simple course builder that lets you create video-based lessons by embedding content from platforms like YouTube, Loom, or Vimeo — since it doesn’t host videos directly. Lessons can also include text, transcripts, links, and downloadable resources.

While the course features are fairly basic, Skool stands out for its community management. Members have profiles with trackable metrics, leaderboards add a gamified layer, and you can host events using the 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 is a video-centric community platform, putting an innovative twist on how community owners like you interact with their members.

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.

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 InSided) is a community platform designed for a wide range of users — from creators to B2B companies — looking to bring customers together in one space. Unlike many creator-focused platforms, Gainsight doesn’t prioritize courses. Instead, it’s built around community support, content sharing, and knowledge building.

Users can ask and answer questions, rate responses, and highlight the most helpful content. You can moderate by pinning top answers and removing low-value ones. The platform also boosts discoverability with SEO-optimized content, while in-app widgets let users find answers without leaving your product—keeping their workflow intact.

Beyond support, Gainsight acts as a centralized feedback hub. It combines real-time user activity with CRM data to give you insights that help you make smarter product decisions.

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

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.

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 community platform is Whop.

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.