Community Platforms
Community platforms host a branded space for customers or an audience to talk to each other and to the company, usually combining discussion, events, courses, and paid membership.
Community became a go-to-market channel once founders realized a Slack group has no memory and no search. The platforms here trade the immediacy of chat for threaded discussion, gated content, and a member directory that compounds in value. The commercial question is whether the platform is a home for a free customer community, where support deflection is the payoff, or the product itself, where courses and paid membership carry the revenue.
Bettermode
A modular customer community for B2B teams who care about retention, not memberships
Circle
Category LeaderThe all-in-one home for a paid community, courses, and events under your own brand
Discourse
The open-source forum that still wins on public discussion, search, and Google
Heartbeat
Discord's structure with a paywall, a course builder, and your own domain on top
Mighty Networks
Cohort courses, memberships, and a branded app for creators who teach
Skool
MomentumOne opinionated layout, ruthless gamification, and a $9 entry price
Whop
InnovationNo monthly fee, a marketplace that sends you buyers, and a percentage of everything you sell
Raklet
Membership admin first, discussion second, with a free plan and a branded app you can actually buy
Kajabi
The all-in-one creator business, with the community bundled into the funnel
Memberful
The membership billing layer for a community you host somewhere else
Podia
Best ValueOne small subscription for a website, a community, courses, and a checkout
Teachable
The cheapest way into a branded course business, with a quiet community attached
Thinkific
A serious course platform that grew a real community product on the side
Discord
Free, unlimited, and where your community already is, with everything that costs you
Flarum
A free, fast, self-hosted forum you own outright, if you can run a server
Patreon
Free to start, 10 percent forever, and your members live on someone else's domain
Slack
The work chat tool a thousand communities run on, priced for a company instead
Profiles are listed in editorial order. Placement cannot be purchased; see our methodology.