Heartbeat vs Whop
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
Both sides assessedHeartbeat compared with Whop
Whop charges no monthly fee and takes 2.7 percent plus 30 cents, with a large marketplace that can send you buyers, and it will gate a Discord you already run rather than asking you to move. Heartbeat charges $49 a month and gives you a real product with courses, documents, workflows, and your own domain. If you already have a Discord and only need billing and access control, Whop is cheaper; if you want to own the community experience end to end, Heartbeat is the actual platform.
Whop compared with Heartbeat
Heartbeat costs $49 a month for 350 members with a 5 percent fee and gives you channels, courses, documents, workflows, and your own domain. Whop costs nothing monthly and takes a smaller headline percentage but leaves your community living on Whop. Pick Heartbeat when you want to own the experience end to end and the community is worth a fixed monthly investment; pick Whop when you want zero fixed cost and access to a marketplace that might send you buyers.
Choose Heartbeat if
Coaches, cohort operators, and creators running a chat-heavy paid community of a few hundred to a few thousand members who want Discord's conversational feel with a paywall, a course builder, automation, and their own domain, and who value real-time energy over threaded permanence.
Choose Whop if
Creators who already have an audience or an existing Discord and want to charge for access without paying a monthly subscription, and sellers who want a marketplace that actively sends them buyers rather than a platform that only hosts what they bring themselves.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Heartbeat | Whop |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Community | Community |
| Starting price | $49 per month, or $40 per month billed annually (Build) (14 days trial) | $0 per month, then 2.7 percent plus 30 cents per successful card transaction (free plan available) |
| Pricing model | Flat monthly subscription banded by member count, with a separate percentage transaction fee on everything sold through Heartbeat's checkout that falls as you move up tiers. | No monthly subscription. Whop monetizes entirely through per-transaction fees on sales, payouts, and optional services, so cost scales directly with revenue rather than with platform usage. |
| Free plan | No | The platform itself is free to use with no subscription tier. You can build a whop, host a community, and list in the marketplace without paying anything until money changes hands. |
| Free trial | 14 days, no credit card required | Not applicable; the platform is free to use until you make a sale |
| Best for | Coaches, cohort operators, and creators running a chat-heavy paid community of a few hundred to a few thousand members who want Discord's conversational feel with a paywall, a course builder, automation, and their own domain, and who value real-time energy over threaded permanence. | Creators who already have an audience or an existing Discord and want to charge for access without paying a monthly subscription, and sellers who want a marketplace that actively sends them buyers rather than a platform that only hosts what they bring themselves. |
| Setup time | A live community in an afternoon. Channel structure, a course outline, a landing page, and Stripe connection are all self-serve, and the custom domain is included from the entry tier so you are not deferring that step. | Under an hour. Creating a whop, setting a price, connecting a Discord, and listing in the marketplace are all self-serve with no card required, because there is nothing to subscribe to. |
| Learning curve | Low for anyone who has used Discord or Slack, which is most of the target market, and that familiarity is the main argument for the chat-first model. Automation workflows are the one area with a real learning curve, and they are also where most of the operational value sits. | Low for the community and selling side, moderate for the fee model. The genuinely hard part is not the interface but working out your actual effective rate across processing, gating, payouts, and any optional services you enable. |
| Platforms | Web app, Native iOS app, Native Android app, Branded iOS and Android apps on Scale, Custom domain hosting | Web app, Mobile apps, Discord and Telegram integration, Embedded infrastructure for third-party products |
| Compliance | GDPR, Payment processing handled through Stripe | Payment processing and payouts across many countries, Optional tax collection and remittance at 2 percent per transaction |
| Founded | 2020 | 2021 |
| Headquarters | New York, New York, United States | United States |
| Ownership | Venture-backed, angel and seed stage | Venture-backed |
Strengths and limitations
Heartbeat
Strengths
- The chat-first structure genuinely produces a different community feel from forum-shaped competitors, and voice and video rooms create spontaneous conversation that scheduled events cannot.
- A custom domain on the $49 entry tier, which almost nothing else in this category offers at that price.
- Unlimited channels, courses, events, and documents on every plan, so the entry tier is feature-complete rather than crippled.
- Native iOS and Android apps included from the entry tier, which is a meaningful engagement advantage over web-only platforms like Bettermode and Discourse.
Limitations
- Member-count pricing bands are the wrong shape for free communities, since 5,000 members costs $149 a month whether or not any of them pay you anything.
- The 5 percent Build transaction fee is the highest published rate among serious platforms here, and stacking it on Stripe means roughly 7.9 percent all-in on the entry plan.
- The branded mobile app requires the $849 Scale tier, which is a very expensive way to get your own icon on a phone.
- The step from Grow to Scale is a 5.7-fold price increase triggered by member count, with no intermediate tier to soften it.
Whop
Strengths
- No monthly subscription at all, which makes the downside of trying a paid community genuinely zero and is a completely different risk profile from every competitor here.
- The public marketplace is a real acquisition channel at scale, and since May 2025 marketplace-sourced sales carry no extra commission.
- Access gating for an existing Discord or Telegram means you can monetize a community without migrating anyone, which removes the largest single obstacle to charging.
- A published, itemized fee table covering processing, payouts, fraud, tax, and optional services, which is more transparency about the mechanics than most competitors offer even if the total is complex.
Limitations
- Your community lives on Whop and looks like it. There is no meaningful white-label story and no custom-domain member experience of the kind Circle, Heartbeat, and Mighty Networks all include at their entry tiers.
- The real all-in rate is hard to determine. Third-party analyses report an additional platform percentage on gated-access sales that the published fee table does not itemize, which is a poor position for a platform whose whole pitch is transparent transactional pricing.
- Purely transactional pricing means cost never plateaus; at meaningful revenue a flat subscription competitor is cheaper, and the crossover arrives sooner than the 2.7 percent headline suggests.
- The community product is the newer, weaker half. Courses lack cohort scheduling, moderation tooling is thin next to Discourse, and there is no equivalent of Circle's spaces-and-permissions depth.
Pricing compared
Heartbeat
Flat monthly subscription banded by member count, with a separate percentage transaction fee on everything sold through Heartbeat's checkout that falls as you move up tiers.
- Build$49
- Grow$149
- Scale$849
Heartbeat is priced well at the bottom and awkwardly at the top. Fifty dollars a month for a custom domain, unlimited courses and events, mobile apps, a member directory, and a real checkout is the best entry-level package in this category, and the 14-day trial with no card required makes it genuinely low-risk to try. The problem is the shape of the curve. Member-count banding punishes free growth, the 5 percent Build fee is steep enough to matter as soon as revenue is real, and the leap from $149 to $849 is severe for a community that has grown members without growing income. The sweet spot is a Grow-tier community: a few thousand members, real revenue, 2.5 percent fees, and unlimited workflows for $149. Either side of that band, a competitor is usually cheaper.
Whop
No monthly subscription. Whop monetizes entirely through per-transaction fees on sales, payouts, and optional services, so cost scales directly with revenue rather than with platform usage.
- Standard$0
- CustomNegotiated
Whop's economics are excellent at the bottom and unremarkable at the top, which is exactly what a purely transactional model produces. For someone testing whether an audience will pay, or running a modest paid Discord, the value is unbeatable: zero fixed cost, a checkout, access control, an affiliate programme, and a marketplace that might send you buyers, for nothing until money moves. For an established membership business doing serious monthly revenue, the arithmetic reverses, and a flat subscription with a 1 percent fee costs less than a stack of transactional percentages. The marketplace is the wildcard that can justify the fees regardless of scale, because it is real distribution and nothing else in this category has it. Just do the calculation with your actual fee configuration rather than with the 2.7 percent on the homepage.
Editorial verdict on each
Heartbeat
Heartbeat is the best answer for a specific and common situation: you have a community that behaves like a Discord server, and you want to charge for it without losing what makes it feel alive. Channels, threads, and voice rooms preserve the real-time energy, while courses, documents, workflows, and a checkout make it a business, and the custom domain on the $49 plan undercuts everyone. The catch is the pricing shape. Member-count bands punish free growth, the 5 percent entry fee is the steepest here, and the $149 to $849 cliff arrives on member count rather than on revenue. Buy it for a paid chat-first community in the few-hundred to few-thousand range, ideally sitting on the Grow tier where the economics are genuinely good. Look elsewhere if your community is free and growing, if you need SSO or public search visibility, or if a lightly funded startup holding your subscription revenue is a risk you would rather not take.
Read the full Heartbeat profileWhop
InnovationWhop is the answer when the question is how to charge for a community you already have. Zero fixed cost, automated Discord and Telegram gating, a checkout, affiliates, and a marketplace that can actively send you buyers make the downside of trying essentially nothing, and the developer platform underneath is far more serious than anything else in this category. It is also, unmistakably, a commerce platform with a community product attached rather than the other way round: your community lives on Whop and looks like it, the course tooling is thin, and there is no white-label story. And for a platform selling transparent pricing, the gap between the advertised 2.7 percent and the effective rate reported by third parties on gated-access sales is an uncomfortable one. Use it to monetize an existing audience with no fixed commitment, get your exact rate in writing before you scale, and recheck the arithmetic against a flat-fee competitor once the revenue is real.
Read the full Whop profileHeartbeat profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Whop last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.