Top 15 Recommended Software for Building Community Websites
In today's digital age, building and managing online communities has become essential for various organisations and individuals. Here's a comprehensive guide to 15 top community website software options available in 2025, along with their key features, pros, and cons.
Skool
Skool is an all-in-one platform that combines community and course features, along with live streaming, gamification, and payment options. It's user-friendly and ideal for course creators, offering a built-in live streaming feature. However, its pricing starts at $99 per month, which might be a concern for some.
Mighty Networks
Mighty Networks offers AI-powered engagement tools, multi-feature Spaces (discussions, courses, live streams), and native mobile apps. It is highly rated for its AI features and strong monetization options. However, its feature-richness might lead to a learning curve.
Circle
Circle is a community platform that offers clean UI, good support for creators and brands, and supports memberships and paid communities. While it lacks native event features, it excels in membership management and offers custom domains and branding options.
GoHighLevel
GoHighLevel is an all-in-one marketing and community tool that offers CRM, memberships, marketing automation, and funnels. It's more business/marketing-oriented and has a complex setup.
Bettermode
Bettermode is a forum-first platform that offers modular custom forums, advanced AI moderation and content search, and white-labeling. However, it lacks native course/event/payment systems and mobile apps.
Disco
Disco is a social and community engagement platform that offers modern social features and is easy to use. More information about Disco is limited, making it more of a niche option.
Kajabi
Kajabi is an online course and community platform that offers marketing tools. It excels in course creation and is good for memberships and sales. However, it can be pricey and less focused purely on community.
Podia
Podia is a website builder that offers membership and e-commerce features. It's easy to create sites and memberships, and it includes a built-in checkout. However, it lacks advanced community features.
Vanilla Forums
Vanilla Forums is a cloud-hosted forum platform that offers community management tools. It has mature forum features and extensive customization options. However, it's more forum-centric, and pricing varies.
Discourse
Discourse is an open-source, modern forum software for community discussion. It offers powerful moderation, plugins, and is open source. However, it requires self-hosting or managed hosting, and tech setup is needed.
Facebook Groups
Facebook Groups is a widely used social platform for communities. It offers a massive user base and is easy to set up. However, it has limited branding and is dependent on Facebook policies.
Slack
Slack is a team chat platform with channels and integrations. It offers real-time communication and flexible integrations. However, it's not designed as a public community platform and requires paid plans for large groups.
Discord
Discord is a voice, video, and text chat platform for communities. It's popular with gaming/tech groups and offers free tiers. However, it's more specialized and lacks structured forum-like features.
Hivebrite
Hivebrite is an all-in-one community management platform designed for organisations and professional networks, with a focus on alumni networks, associations, and corporate communities. It offers member directories, user profiles and roles, event management with ticketing options, donation and fundraising tools, advanced content moderation and access controls, and analytics and reporting features. However, it can be expensive for small organisations and can be complex to set up without guidance.
BuddyBoss
BuddyBoss is a WordPress-based community builder that offers courses, forums, memberships, and integrates with WordPress ecosystem. However, it requires WordPress knowledge and hosting and maintenance.
Tribe
Tribe is a community platform for businesses to create customer-centric online communities, particularly well-suited for SaaS companies. It offers custom widgets, user profiles, activity feeds, forums, moderation tools, content approval workflows, and gamification through badges and leaderboards. However, it has a limited free plan and lacks advanced design customization without developer help.
PeerBoard
PeerBoard is a modern community platform that focuses on building discussion forums and knowledge-sharing communities. It offers easy setup and seamless integration with WordPress and other tools. However, it has limited customization options and fewer advanced features compared to competitors.
Vesta
Vesta is a unique community platform designed to help brands build authentic, customer-focused communities, with a focus on data-driven insights. It offers ideal feedback and survey tools, strong analytics and reporting features, and user-friendly interface. However, it's limited to customer-centric communities and has premium pricing with limited customization.
SocialEngine
SocialEngine is a white-label social network platform that offers customized, branded communities with both cloud-hosted and self-hosted options. It offers custom themes, member profiles, activity streams, groups, built-in social features, moderation tools, and integration with third-party plugins and APIs. However, it's more expensive compared to open-source alternatives and has a steeper learning curve for advanced customization.
This overview should guide selection depending on your community goals—whether you prioritize engagement AI, course sales, forums, or seamless integrations.
- In the realm of education-and-self-development, Skool combines community features with live streaming, gamification, and payment options, making it ideal for course creators. However, its monthly pricing of $99 may be a concern for some.
- For tech-savvy individuals or organizations seeking advanced features and strong monetization options, Mighty Networks, with its AI-powered engagement tools, is highly rated. Nevertheless, its feature-richness might lead to a learning curve.
