Top 7 Community Platforms to Watch in 2025: The Ultimate Software Review Guide

Discourse is an open-source platform for online discussions, offering both a cloud-hosted option and a wide array of features designed to enhance engagement and communication.

Thinkific stands out as a top platform for building and connecting with your community.

It provides a variety of community-centric features, including an intuitive drag-and-drop site builder, comprehensive course management tools, and integrated payment options.

This platform is especially beneficial if you want full ownership of your community space and greater control over your data. You can easily share various types of content such as courses, videos, and articles.

In terms of integrations, it supports seamlessly connecting your preferred tools and services to help grow your community. With built-in analytics, you can monitor how your content performs, identify what’s effective, and see where improvements are needed.

While designing landing pages can be challenging on this platform—since it’s not primarily built for that purpose—the core features for building a trusted community are strong.

Key Features:
– Drag-and-drop website builder enables professional site creation.
– Includes e-commerce functionality for selling products and services.
– Offers flexibility to provide a diverse range of products.
– Marketing tools and social media integrations help expand your reach.
– Customizable themes allow you to tailor the look and feel of your site.
– Advanced options give you full control over your website’s design.

Pricing:
Thinkific offers a free plan to get started and test the platform’s capabilities. Their paid plans are as follows:
– Basic: $39 per month
– Pro: $79 per month
– Premier: $399 per month

Choosing an annual plan provides about a 20% discount compared to monthly billing, making it a cost-effective option.

2. Skool.

Best For Simplicity.

Skool was designed for easy online course creation with built-in community features that foster trust and engagement. It helps you create a straightforward experience for your members, making it ideal for those seeking simplicity.Skool offers a straightforward way to develop online courses with a focus on progress tracking and simple content creation. It serves as an efficient platform for learners eager to transition into digital education, providing tools that make course development easy and effective.

Skool is a solution for complex online course platforms that often require significant time, effort, and financial resources. It is ideal for instructors seeking an easy way to develop interactive and engaging courses while managing them efficiently.

Skool streamlines the organization and sharing of course content, making it simple for instructors to build and distribute their lessons. Its user-friendly interface and powerful functionalities allow educators to quickly prepare course materials and start teaching without delay. The platform excels in fostering community interactions, featuring a built-in forum that connects instructors and students, keeping everyone engaged and connected. Additionally, it offers an analytics dashboard where instructors can monitor student progress and engagement in real time, ensuring they can optimize their teaching strategies.

Key features of Skool include easy community management to build brand loyalty, a quick learning curve for new users, an active and growing user base, gamification elements that boost interaction, email broadcasts for direct communication, notification systems for updates, and metrics to measure engagement and success.

The platform is available at a clear subscription rate of $99 per month, which grants access to all features, making it an accessible option for educators looking to create impactful online courses.

There’s also another top choice for online communities—Mighty Networks—which costs between $33 and $81 per month and is regarded as one of the best platforms for nurturing online communities.

Mighty Networks is a platform designed to support creators and entrepreneurs by combining community features, online courses, sales pages, and more. It allows you to manage all these elements under your brand on the web and through dedicated iOS and Android apps. It lets users connect via activity feeds, sub-groups, member categories, and chats. You can build articles rich in CMS, embed multimedia like images, videos, and audio, and create polls and questions with comment and like functionalities. For a detailed overview, check out my full Might networks review. Key features include personalized member feeds, topic and article management, direct messaging, options to create public, private, or paid communities, Zapier integrations for workflow automation, analytics, custom domains, and membership monetization. Pricing varies from $33 to $99 per month, with discounts offering two months free annually and a 14-day free trial for new users.

There are four subscription plans to choose from: Community costs $33 per month and allows you to connect your community to a custom domain. Business is $99 monthly and provides features like hosting online courses, Zapier integration, and advanced analytics. The Pro plan offers mobile apps, push notifications, and branding options; pricing details can be obtained by contacting the Mighty Networks team.

If your main goal is to create a membership-based community with courses, Mighty Networks is an excellent platform to consider. You can Start your 14-day free trial today.

The most flexible community platform (free to $199/month)

Tribe is a powerful platform ideal for both content creators and brands building communities.

It works seamlessly across both web browsers and mobile devices, providing a smooth experience. You also have the option to turn your community into a dedicated app, known as a Progressive Web App (PWA).

With Tribe Platform, you can personalize your community’s appearance to match your branding. You can even transform features like activity feeds, groups, and posts into widgets that you easily embed into your website or product. The design draws inspiration from popular social media platforms, enabling you to create your own version of Facebook, Quora, or LinkedIn. The platform ensures high security and is fully compliant with GDPR regulations. Members can join your community rapidly through social login options supporting Facebook, Slack, LinkedIn, Google, and Twitter.

Tribe provides four pricing tiers:

Tribe already counts clients like IBM, ASUS, Pipedrive, Decathlon, and Convertkit among its users, reflecting its established reputation.

A well-known, mature community platform ($100–$300/month)

Discourse is an open-source forum platform designed for discussions. It also offers a cloud-hosted version for easier setup and maintenance.

While the open-source version is free, hosting and maintenance are costs you need to cover separately.

For managed hosting, Discourse offers three plans:
– Standard: At $100/month, it includes 100,000 page views per month, unlimited members, five staff accounts, and 20 GB of storage.
– Business: Costing $300/month, it supports up to 500,000 page views, offers 100 GB of storage, unlimited members, and 15 staff members.
– Enterprise: Designed for large organizations, this custom plan provides over 3 million page views monthly, unlimited staff and members, and 200 GB of storage.

Popular brands such as Twitter, Samsung, Docker, and Patreon utilize Discourse for their online communities.

One of the most established community platforms (starting at $689/month)

Like Discourse, Vanilla Forums offers both an open-source version and paid managed plans. The paid options unlock additional features not available in the free version.

Vanilla Forums offers four paid plans starting at $689 per month. The plans vary in features and resource allocations:

– Essential: Suitable for small communities with up to 250,000 monthly page views, five staff members, and includes features like jsConnect SSO, private/public access, and gamification.

– Corporate: Designed for larger communities with 1 million monthly page views, up to ten staff members, and additional tools such as CRM integration, API, advanced SSO, and more.

– Enterprise: Tailored for very large organizations needing custom pageview and staff limits, with enhanced security and guaranteed uptime SLAs.

– Enterprise Plus: The most resource-intensive plan, suitable for businesses requiring maximum capacity and support.

An entirely free platform that combines chat and discussion threads

<ahref=”https://spectrum.chat/” target=”_blank” rel=”noreferrer noopener”>Spectrum allows you to create a free and public community that offers real-time chat conversations. Unlike messaging apps, conversations on Spectrum can be indexed by search engines, making them discoverable.

However, the platform has limitations, including a lack of full customization options, such as hosting under your custom domain, SSO, moderation tools, integrations, reporting, and analytics.

Currently, Spectrum is completely free, making it an accessible choice for communities with limited budgets.

The simplest platform for building a professional community (free to $12.50 per member)

Slack is a widely-used collaboration and messaging platform for businesses.

Many teams and communities also utilize Slack to foster professional networking and discussions.

The main advantageThe popularity of Slack is driven by its free plan, excellent usability, and widespread availability across devices. However, starting with the free option can quickly lead to limitations. For instance, only the first 10,000 messages are searchable in the free plan, and building public communities is not possible, which means your group can’t be discovered via search engines. Additionally, the free plan lacks features such as customization options, moderation tools, or analytics to track engagement.

Key features of Slack include creating channels for discussions and organizing them into sections, real-time messaging, seamless integration with various third-party tools, a member directory, file sharing, video calling, and a variety of pre-designed templates to enhance your workspace.

There are four main pricing options offered by Slack. The free plan provides unlimited private and public channels, access to the most recent 10,000 messages, up to ten app integrations, one-on-one video or voice calls, and basic file sharing. The Pro plan, costing around $6.67 per user per month, adds unlimited message archives, unlimited app integrations, and group video calls. The Business+ plan, priced at about $12.50 per user per month, introduces advanced security features such as SAML-based Single Sign-On, data export capabilities, and a 99.99% uptime SLA. For large organizations, Slack offers an Enterprise Grid plan tailored to enterprise needs, including multiple workspaces, enhanced security, and compliance features. This plan is ideal for real-time collaboration but less suitable for asynchronous discussions typical of forums.

Facebook Groups is another popular option, especially for free community building. These groups are ideal for creating dedicated spaces around shared interests or topics, which can be leveraged by businesses to foster discussions and raise awareness about their brands. They support features such as posting, liking, commenting, setting member approval questions, displaying community rules, assigning trusted members as mentors, creating educational modules, connecting with Facebook pages, and offering reporting and analytics. Members can communicate via Messenger; messages from non-friends are routed to “Message Requests.”

Facebook Groups are free, and Facebook continues to enhance their functionalities. Starting a group on this platform can be a good initial step for new businesses, though it has limitations: lack of branding customization, you do not own the data, privacy concerns, and the platform’s tendency to distract users with notifications and ads. For those seeking more control and advanced features, reviewing alternative platforms might be beneficial.

What is a Community Platform?

A community platform provides a secure online environment where members can interact, share knowledge, support one another, and build both personal and professional relationships. The top community platforms help cultivate engagement around your brand, which in turn improves user retention and fosters customer loyalty. Options like Tribe, Discourse, and Vanilla Forums are popular choices for various needs. Whether you’re creating a membership site, supporting an online course, or simply offering a space for customer interaction, selecting the right community software is essential.

Effective community management software should enable quick setup, support lively discussions, and facilitate meaningful engagement. Strong community support can increase customer loyalty, foster advocacy, and generate referrals. Many companies leverage social communities to promote self-service, gather product reviews, and enhance overall user experience. Typical features include straightforward content posting, content management, member profiles, support for multimedia, discussion forums, moderation tools, and more. Content generated within your community can also be indexed by search engines, boosting your brand’s organic visibility, much like platforms such as Quora, forums, or Stack Overflow, especially for niche or industry-specific discussions.

Here are the fundamental qualities that define an excellent community platform:

While possessing robust community management tools is beneficial, growing and actively engaging a community requires more effort and strategic planning. Several effective methods can help boost community participation:

We’ve reviewed some of the top community platforms, focusing on their ease of use, growth potential, and available features. The key question now is: which platform suits your organization best? The answer depends largely on your specific requirements. Start by listing the features you need and defining your budget. Then, compare different platforms to see which best fits these criteria. It’s also important to keep your business goals in mind and consider how each platform can help you track and measure your success.

Fortunately, most of these tools offer free trials or demo versions, allowing you to test them out and determine whether they meet your needs before making a commitment. If you’re unsure where to begin, I recommend starting with Thinkific or Skool, which are highly recommended options.