Building an online community is a great way to grow your digital profile. According to GWI, 76% of internet users worldwide participate in online communities. Whether you’re an experienced course creator or setting up as a trading coach, digital communities connect you with your customers and build trust in your brand.
That’s where platforms like Hivebrite can help. Hivebrite is a community engagement platform that makes it simple to foster a thriving online space. But how does it work, how much does it cost, and is it worth it?
What Does Hivebrite Do?
Put simply, Hivebrite is a platform for creating online communities. You can use it to create customized online hubs centered around your brand. It’s aimed at commercial brands, along with educational institutions, non-profits, and associations.
With this platform, you can build a space to connect with customers, and even monetize your community through paid events and memberships. Hivebright makes it possible to tailor your online community to your brand, including with visual editing tools and a unique URL.
You’ll also have access to Hivebright’s customer support as you develop your community.
Hivebrite Key Features
So, what can you do with your Hivebrite community? We’ll take you through the platform's main features below.
Community organization and management
Hivebrite includes many features to manage your community. That includes segmenting your members, adding custom fields for community user profiles, and creating tailored workflows for your member sign-up and acceptance processes.
Additionally, you’ll have options for managing administration duties, so you can delegate tasks and give permissions to trusted members of your admin team. You and your admins will be able to manage and remove problematic content as needed.
There’s also:
- Detailed access to user records
- User flagging system for inappropriate content
- Tags and categories to add to content across the platform, making it easier to find
- Options for private and public groups, as well as groups that are invisible to certain members
- Advanced tools for creating sub-communities
If you’d like to analyze the progress of your community, you can do this through the analytics tools. Access to community data enables you to understand members and make data-informed strategies for boosting engagement and ROI. However, as we’ll discuss below, some customers feel the analytics tools aren’t robust enough.
Community engagement
Aside from managing your community, there are also tools to promote engagement on the platform.
Events management tools make planning, promoting, and executing online and offline events simple. There are plenty of options for creating tailored events, including those organized by your team and between members. You can offer public or members-only events, including free and tiered options.
On top of this, you can access a directory to list your event once you’ve added it, with notifications to encourage members to join. And when the event starts, Hivebrite provides tools to manage attendees, report on your event, and more.
Events aren’t the only way to connect with community members, though. You can also give back to them with opportunities, including mentoring, job boards, collaborative projects, and badges.
Connect directly with members through communications tools, including:
- Pop-up messages
- Automatically generated, tailored newsletters
- Targeted push and email notifications, with analytics tools
There are also tools to share meaningful content with community members. Add your resources into a library that your members can search, and keep them up to date with your latest content through an automated feed. Create bespoke landing pages and guided journeys to encourage engagement and bring new members on board.
Networking tools
Hivebrite gives your members the tools to connect and collaborate with one another. In groups, users can join over shared interests, with options to create a private space and enjoy live feeds sharing content from across groups and the wider site. Plus, users can join the conversation via forums - an important feature for all community platforms.
Members can also connect on a more personal level, including through maps and directories. Members will have a personalized profile to share their details, along with a portfolio for showcasing their own articles and sharing other pieces of media.
Other features for members to interact include:
- On-platform messaging tools
- The option to set up their own meetings and activities
- Opportunities to engage with content through tagging, comments, reactions, and thread creation
Branding tools
You can tailor your online community to match your branding. This includes a visual editor for adjusting colors, gradients, logos, and typography. Members can also download a mobile app for your community that’s customized with your branding.
Further customization options include language and translation, brand compliance, and custom tags.
Customization options are available across your content management tools as well. Hivebrite features templates, an advanced email and page builder, along with an HTML editor.
Aside from customization, there are tools for promotional purposes too. SEO and social media sharing buttons help to boost your community’s visibility. Encourage new members to join through public pages, where you can share relevant content. Tailoring your community’s URL to your domain name is also easy to implement, so you can link up with your main website.
Monetizing your community
Online communities can build your reputation and foster customer loyalty, plus they can be monetized as another source of income for your brand.
One popular option is through paid memberships. With Hivebrite, you can add free and paid membership tiers with their own specific pricing. You’ll also be able to control membership access, offer promotional codes, and automate recurring payments.
As mentioned above, there are plenty of options for selling access to events. You can tailor event tickets so they’re available specifically to set locations, groups, and membership tiers. There’s also the functionality to tack on additional merchandising options to tickets. If your organization is a charity or wishes to run a fundraiser, there are tools to gather, report on, and distribute donations.
Additionally, you’ll be provided with mechanisms to make money from sponsorships, including various sponsored content options like links, custom pages, groups, and more.
Specific memberships can even be designated to your partner organizations. Space is provided for you to promote your sponsored partnerships within your groups and on your public-facing pages.
Hivebrite Pricing
Hivebrite’s exact pricing is unclear, as they don’t list any set prices on their website. However, according to sites like GetApp, pricing appears to start from around $799 per month.
Hivebrite is a premium platform and unfortunately does not have a free plan or trial available. To get a clear price, you’ll need to book a demo with the Hivebrite team.
With that being said, here’s a quick rundown of the three plan options available.
Connect
This tier offers “pricing plans for all sizes” and includes the platform’s core features. With this plan, you’ll have access to:
- Free and paid memberships
- Global-level administration
- Customizable landing pages
- Directory and map for community users
- Groups
- Custom member profiles
- Direct messaging functionality
- Resource libraries
- Content live feed
- Reports and analytics
- And more
Scale
With this plan, you’ll have further scope to develop your community, with additional features for branding, monetizing, and more. This includes:
- Features from the Connect tier
- Free and ticketed events
- Access permissions for memberships
- Group administrators (with custom permissions)
- Restricted visibility options
- Custom domain
- And more
Enterprise
For the largest brands that already have established community systems, there’s also the option for a customizable Enterprise tier. This tier offers the most specialized features, including:
- Tailored branding support
- Specialist onboarding, with workshops and more
- Advanced features for groups and sub-communities
- And more
Ultimately, with Hivebrite, you’ll need to be aware that costs can vary depending on your location, currency, industry, and the features you need.
Pros and Cons of Hivebrite
Hivebrite has a diverse range of community management tools for businesses, but how effective are they? Let’s take a look at what customers say…
Hivebrite benefits
- Community features: Users appreciate the variety of community-building features, from the forums to events. Hivebrite offers a lot of scope for member engagement and monetization.
- Customization options: Hivebrite provides options for tailoring the platform to your branding, with further customization of admin duties, member access, and more.
- Customer support: Users find Hivebrite’s customer support to be responsive. The platform offers tailored support for onboarding across all plans, which can help new users become familiar with the features.
Hivebrite drawbacks
- User overwhelm: While there is onboarding support, some users find the platform to be confusing during the initial setup process.
- Limited analytics: Some customers feel that the analytics data provided about user activities on the platform is too limited for their needs.
- Expensive pricing: Hivebrite’s pricing can be expensive for many smaller brands, limiting start-ups from using their online community tools.
Alternative Options for Your Online Community
While Hivebrite’s community-building tools are useful, the platform won’t suit everyone. For example, some start-ups and small businesses will find the pricing too expensive.
So, here are some alternative platforms that might also suit your needs.
Whop
Whop is truly a leader when it comes to creating and monetizing online communities. leading ecommerce marketplace for digital creators. With Whop, you can create your own whop in just minutes and make your community with your digital hub.
Whop makes it simple for you to customize your online community. You can add the features you want for your community through Apps, which are the features that you want to add. This allows you to create a completely tailored platform for your needs.
For example, you could add the Forums app so members can respond to your posts and develop discussions, the Chat app for community conversation, the Video calls app for live calls with your members, and the Giveaways app to give back to your community. It’s as simple as that. You don't have to stop there either - you can also offer up online courses, files like ebooks and PDFs, and more - which you can put behind a paywall.
Plus, Whop is free to use. You’ll only pay a 3% transaction fee when you make a sale - no costly monthly subscription to worry about.
Thinkific
Though Thinkific is primarily geared towards course creators, you can also use it to sell other digital products, including communities. If you create courses, you can have a community as an add-on or sell a standalone community.
Thinkific offers a free plan, on which you can create one community. However, to offer paid memberships and bundle your community alongside a course, you’ll need to upgrade to the Start plan at $74 per month.
Discord
Although it started as a voice and text chat service for gamers, Discord has branched out into servers (aka communities) across all interests and industries. The platform offers lots of useful tools if you're aiming to build a thriving online space, including video calls, forum-type threads, and more.
Discord bot integrations also make it easy to add extra functionality to your Discord server and automate some server management tasks. There are many other ways to customize your server, including with custom emojis, stickers, and more.
However, Discord is relatively limited in terms of monetization options. Aside from Discord’s 10% fee, their Server Subscriptions also require you or the server owner to be US-based.
If you’re set on using Discord for your online community platform, there are other ways to monetize your server. For example, you can sell paid access to your server through online marketplaces like Whop.
Grow a Thriving Online Community With Whop🚀
Online communities provide a perfect platform to connect with your customers, upsell your products, and generate new revenue streams. Although Hivebrite is a leading platform, it’s not the only option.
Whop makes it easy to create, sell, and promote your community. Plus, there are plenty of other ways to monetize your brand when you sell on Whop.
Why not craft courses with Whop’s built-in course creation tool, and then sell them to community members? Or sell webinars or ebooks as an add-on? The possibilities are endless.
