What are the best software solutions for online communities and membership sites? 🤔
As a former moderator and administrator of massive forums in the early 2000s, communities are the core of building strategic relationships.
I’m a member of over 35 communities – and I’m reviewing all apps today.
Here are 16 platforms I currently use that you should test, broken into 4 core categories:
📗 Multipurpose Engagement ⬇️
1. Clarityflow: Ran by Brian Casel, one of the first people who taught me to productize services. I used the early version, ZipMessage, for async message sending to my community and gathering testimonails. Taking payments, collecting different groups, and multi-channel content formats.
2. Kleq: A complete solution for memberships, courses, funnels, automation – and 1:1 conversations. James Schramko is a core supporter and runs his advisory group there. I’m sending voices and texts ad-hoc to pick his brain and gather ideas.
3. GoHighLevel: One of the best funnel builders + outreach systems out there (similar to ClickFunnels and Systeme). Their community module is turning into a monster!
📗 Content-Focused ⬇️
4. Substack: A newsletter-first community for video, podcasts, bloggers, finance writers, authors, comic creators, local news, and more. Aggresive push for monthly payments (which is great to upsell to a paid branch of a newsletter). Peter Yang, Graham Stephan, Andrei Zinkevich scale there.
5. beehiiv: Starting as a newsletter with built-in sites, the platform evolves with site builders, freebies, lead funnels, email responses, and other membership plans (plus paid newsletters, too). I run my newsletters there.
6. Circle: Widely used in my investor communities like SeedBlink and MarketBriefs, but I rarely see people there. Notification system can be better and more engaging.
7. Kajabi: One of the leading courseware systems also accommodates students and runs into a membership integrated with classes. Not my favorite platform out there, but plays well with their great course platform.
8. Skool: Eric Siu, Clifton Sellers, Joe Davies manage their communities on Skool and they are pretty good. Classes are supported too + downloadables.
📗 WordPress-Driven ⬇️
9. Paid Memberships Pro: A WordPress plugin for granular content management, subscriptions, bundles, and a lot more within WordPress. If you run a blog on WordPress and want to incorporate commerce and members, take a look. My community is there + Slack.
10. BuddyBoss: The leading social community plugin for WP where you can build a clone of Facebook groups or reddit. Super powerful and can supplement everything you can build in WordPress!
📗 Messaging & Social ⬇️
11. Facebook Groups: I see coaches, local businesses, dropshippers and niche communities on Facebook. Not my favorite platform and tons of notification spam, but 3 billion members so who am I to judge?
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👉 Repost to get more reviews for the best platforms on Earth.
