Circle vs Memberful
An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.
The short answer
Editorial assessmentMemberful compared with Circle
Circle at $89 hosts the community, the courses, the events, and the billing in one product and takes 2 percent. Memberful at $49 plus 4.9 percent hosts nothing and does the billing better. Circle is cheaper in total at meaningful revenue and far simpler to run. Choose Memberful only when your community already exists somewhere you do not want to leave, which is a genuine and common situation, not a rationalization.
Choose Circle if
Creators, coaches, and small businesses running a paid membership or cohort program who want courses, events, discussion, and billing in one branded product on their own domain, and who are doing enough revenue that a 1 to 2 percent platform fee is a rounding error rather than a tax.
Choose Memberful if
Independent publishers, podcasters, and newsletter writers who already have a community running on Discord, Discourse, or WordPress and want to charge for access to it under their own brand, into their own Stripe account, without moving anyone to a new platform.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Circle | Memberful |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Community | Community |
| Starting price | $89 per month (Professional) (14 days trial) | $49 per month plus a 4.9 percent transaction fee (free trial) |
| Pricing model | Flat monthly platform subscription with unlimited members, plus a percentage transaction fee on every paid membership, course, or event sold through Circle checkout, plus paid add-ons for email marketing. | A single published plan at a flat monthly fee plus a percentage of transactions processed through your own Stripe account, with unlimited members, and a custom priced Enterprise tier above it. |
| Free plan | No | No |
| Free trial | 14 days on Professional and Business | Free until you go live and start accepting payments; there is no fixed length countdown |
| Best for | Creators, coaches, and small businesses running a paid membership or cohort program who want courses, events, discussion, and billing in one branded product on their own domain, and who are doing enough revenue that a 1 to 2 percent platform fee is a rounding error rather than a tax. | Independent publishers, podcasters, and newsletter writers who already have a community running on Discord, Discourse, or WordPress and want to charge for access to it under their own brand, into their own Stripe account, without moving anyone to a new platform. |
| Setup time | A working community in an afternoon. Signing up, creating spaces, connecting a custom domain, and wiring Stripe are all self-serve and take a few hours combined. Getting the content and the onboarding sequence right is the part that takes weeks. | A few hours. Connecting Stripe, defining plans, embedding the checkout, and authorizing the Discord or Discourse integration are each a small task, and nothing needs to be designed from scratch because the member facing pages are themeable templates. |
| Learning curve | Moderate for the admin, low for members. The spaces model, permission layers, and paywall rules interact in ways that reward reading the docs before you build, and communities that improvise their structure usually rebuild it once. Members need no instruction. | Low if you already run the community, moderate if you do not, because Memberful assumes you understand your own stack. There is no discussion product to learn, only plans, entitlements, and integrations. |
| Platforms | Web app, Native iOS app, Native Android app, Branded iOS and Android apps on Circle Plus, Custom domain hosting | Web, Members access benefits through your site, Discord, Discourse, WordPress, or their podcast app |
| Compliance | GDPR, Payment processing handled through Stripe | GDPR, PCI DSS handled by Stripe, Global sales tax and VAT collection at checkout |
| Founded | 2019 | 2013 |
| Headquarters | Remote-first US company | United States, distributed team |
| Ownership | Venture-backed | Owned by Patreon |
Strengths and limitations
Circle
Strengths
- The broadest feature set on a published price in this category: discussion, courses, events, live streaming, chat, payments, affiliates, a website builder, and native mobile apps all on the $89 tier.
- Unlimited members on every plan, so growth does not trigger a pricing cliff the way it does on Heartbeat or Bettermode.
- Custom domain and a white-labeled member experience from the entry tier, which is the thing free chat platforms fundamentally cannot offer.
- Native iOS and Android apps with push notifications keep engagement materially higher than a browser-only forum.
Limitations
- No free plan at all, which makes Circle a poor fit for a small free community and a hard sell for anyone testing whether a community is worth running.
- The transaction fee stacks on Stripe and is charged on gross, so a low-margin membership business pays Circle more than the subscription costs and cannot reach the 0.5 percent rate without a sales conversation.
- Branded mobile apps and custom SSO are both locked behind the unpriced Circle Plus tier, so the two things a maturing community most wants next are exactly the two things with no published cost.
- Admin and moderator seat caps of 3 and 10 on Professional are tight for a volunteer-moderated community and force an upgrade for reasons unrelated to features.
Memberful
Strengths
- The Discord integration is the best in this category: roles assigned by plan, invites sent at checkout, and access revoked automatically on lapse, with no bot to maintain.
- Discourse group mapping means an existing, search indexed forum can grow a paid tier without migrating and losing its rankings, which no all in one platform can offer.
- Payments settle into your own Stripe account, so your subscription data and merchant relationship stay yours and leaving does not force every member to re-enter a card.
- Genuinely white label. Custom domain, custom themes, and dynamic paywalls mean the vendor is invisible to members, which is why Patreon bought it as its non Patreon.com answer.
Limitations
- It hosts no community at all. Without Discord, Discourse, or WordPress already in place, there is nothing for the paywall to protect.
- The 4.9 percent fee does not improve with scale on the published plan, so the effective cost stays near 8.5 percent of revenue at any volume unless you negotiate Enterprise.
- No courses, no lessons, no progress tracking, and no certificates, so a course business needs a different product entirely.
- No mobile app of any kind, branded or otherwise; the member experience is the web plus whatever Discord or Discourse provides.
Pricing compared
Circle
Flat monthly platform subscription with unlimited members, plus a percentage transaction fee on every paid membership, course, or event sold through Circle checkout, plus paid add-ons for email marketing.
- Professional$89
- Business$199
- Circle PlusCustom
For a community that is genuinely a business, Circle is fairly priced and hard to assemble from parts. Courses, events, live streaming, native mobile apps, a custom domain, recurring billing, affiliates, and search over unlimited history at $89 a month would cost more than that in separate tools, and the tools would not share a member identity. For a community that is not yet a business, Circle is expensive in a way the sticker hides: $89 plus 2 percent plus Stripe plus $99 of Email Hub is a real monthly commitment for a group that could sit on a free Discourse instance or a Discord server. The cutoff is roughly whether the community produces revenue. Above that line Circle is good value, below it the fee structure works against you.
Memberful
A single published plan at a flat monthly fee plus a percentage of transactions processed through your own Stripe account, with unlimited members, and a custom priced Enterprise tier above it.
- Standard$49
- EnterpriseCustom
Memberful is excellent value at small scale and poor value at large scale, and you should decide which one you are. A podcaster doing $2,000 a month gets a genuinely well built billing system, automatic Discord entitlements, private podcast feeds, gift and group plans, retention discounts, and their own Stripe account for about $150 all in, which is fair. The same creator at $50,000 a month is handing over roughly $51,000 a year in fees for software that hosts nothing, when Podia or Teachable would do the billing for a flat $84 to $189 a month. The counterargument is real but narrow: nothing else automates Discord and Discourse entitlements this cleanly, nothing else keeps your Stripe relationship intact, and if your community is already thriving somewhere free, Memberful is the only product here that does not ask you to move it. Buy it as plumbing, negotiate Enterprise pricing the moment you pass roughly $20,000 a month, and never buy it expecting a community product.
Editorial verdict on each
Circle
Category LeaderCircle is the safe default for a community that is actually a business. Nothing else on a published price puts discussion, courses, events, live streaming, payments, affiliates, a custom domain, and native mobile apps in one product, and the company behind it is large, profitable, and shipping. Buy it if you are charging members and want the whole membership experience under your own brand without stitching five tools together. Do not buy it for a free community, because there is no free plan and the value proposition collapses without revenue to justify it. And go into the pricing with clear eyes: the honest monthly cost is the $89 plus a percentage of everything you sell plus Email Hub, and the exit cost is a discussion archive that will not move anywhere useful. Those are acceptable terms for a real membership business and bad terms for an experiment.
Read the full Circle profileMemberful
Memberful is the best answer to a specific question and the wrong answer to almost every other one. If your community already lives on Discord, Discourse, or WordPress and works, and you want to charge for access without moving anyone or handing 10 percent to Patreon, nothing else does this as cleanly: roles granted at checkout and revoked on lapse, private podcast feeds through your existing host, group plans, gifts, retention discounts, your own domain, and your own Stripe account so the subscriptions remain portable. That last point is worth more than it looks, because every other platform in this category makes leaving expensive by holding your billing relationship hostage. The reservation is the arithmetic. At 4.9 percent plus Stripe with a fee that does not improve as you grow, Memberful costs roughly 8.5 percent of revenue at $50,000 a month, where Podia or Teachable would do the billing for a flat sum and throw in the community, the courses, and the website. Buy it as plumbing for a community you already love, negotiate Enterprise pricing early, and do not buy it hoping for a community product, because it is not one and does not claim to be.
Read the full Memberful profileCircle profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Memberful last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.