Best Online Community Platforms: Top Picks for 2025

Are you considering creating online community platforms? Technically, community platforms are the IT thing in the current digital scenario. From visiting neighbors, meeting in a park, and having local meetups, people now look for a similar feeling in an online landscape via community management platforms. 

As a small business owner, you can bring your customers on a single membership community platform. Foster a loyal audience as a creator or build a strong support network with a community association management software. (professionals or specialists). 

Community building platforms bring people together in a meaningful, engaging, and scalable way. But how do you choose the best platform to build online community out of many in the market? 

Stop fretting and start reading through this article to get your answer. A bonus point? You’re going to understand two types of community building platforms, public and private community platform. 

What are Online Community Platforms?

Typically, an online community platform is a dedicated space for people with similar interests or qualifications who have a shared goal. This is your audience’s safe space for interaction, collaboration, issue resolution, and knowledge-sharing. 

On social media, your content is open to a wider audience, offering less control over who accesses your space. But with an established online social community platforms, you open the gates to a very cream public who want to engage and interact to the next level. 

There can be various types of communities: 

• A customer support forum to solve issues quickly 
• A fitness coach’s den for progress tracking and diet updates
• An artist’s hub for sharing exclusive content or BTS 
• A fandom-based online community 
• A community of online shoppers to share links and discount codes

This online community social network typically solves a specific issue. It helps people to communicate with others with similar interests. With this, you have greater control over content and engagement. 

Why Do You Need Community Platforms?

Remember, an online community is much more than just a place to chit-chat; it’s a space for meaningful connections and growth. It is a strategic model to foster connection, loyalty, and promote growth. Let us explore some of the top reasons to use a community management software. 

• Stronger Engagement: Tools like polls, live events, discussions, and interactions provide for goal-centric engagement. 
• Brand Loyalty: A community fosters a sense of belonging towards your brand. This can lead to long-term commitment and a recurring revenue source. 
• Valuable Insights: As a community moderator, you have all the audience data. Track how members interact and behave with your community. You can further finetune what you offer based on the analytics. 
• Monetization Opportunities: You might be thinking why all the fuss for free? But with the best online community platforms, you have the power to offer paid memberships, exclusive discounts, special content, early access, and so much more. 
• Enhanced Support: It is easier for members to ask questions and get quick support with a dedicated community. 

Creating an online community can convert a passive audience into an active one. But what features would you need? Let’s look at that. 

Key Features to Tick for the Best Community-Building Platform

An online community building platform must be wholesome enough to allow you some customizations. Its features should add a boost to your work and not increase your load. 

• Ease of Use: A platform must be easy to navigate, understand, and set up effortlessly. 
• Customization: It should further allow customizing the layout as per your needs and adding your logo, colors, or elements for consistent branding. 
• Engagement Tools: Apart from internal chatting among members, it should provide a live feed, discussion forums, polls, or group segregation based on interest. 
• Monetization Options: A community must be monetized using a membership model, subscription, or donations. 
• Integrations: Make sure the community building platform integrates with the tools you regularly use. Be it email marketing platforms, CRMs, membership software, or a booking plugin. 
• Robust Analytics: A platform that provides deep insights into how audiences engage with the community is the perfect choice. This helps you set a content calendar and schedule that aligns with your audience. 

Don’t worry, you do not have to go through it all to choose the top community platform. While curating our list, we have considered every aspect and have come up with suggestions of both, private community and public social networks. 

Public Social Networks vs. Private Community Platforms

Yes, Facebook and Instagram do provide options to create a Group or a Community. But can you call it your own? Can you customize it with your brand kit? Moreover, your visibility depends hugely on their algorithms. 

Let us have a quick look at their major differences. 

Aspect	Public Social Networks	Private Community Platforms
Control	Limited. Algorithms determine visibility.	Complete control over content and member data.
Monetization	Centered around ads and basic features	Flexible options like paid tiers and subscriptions.
Engagement	General and broad interactions.	Focused and niche-driven engagement.
Privacy	Generalized and Basic. Data often shared with third parties.	High. You control member access and privacy.
Community Focus	Divided across topics.	Tailored to your specific goals and audience.

If you want a higher control over your community, Private or Paid Community Platforms are the way to go. In our list of suggestions, we will explore both. You can further make a choice based on your budget and requirements. 

Best Platforms to Build Online Community

ARMember for Membership-based Communities

Using a membership plugin is the top choice to create a dedicated online community. It helps with the creation of multiple tiers to cater to different audiences. And the best part? Create your own pricing plans and decide who will get access to what content. 

Key Features:

• Multiple types of memberships range from free, paid (finite), paid (infinite), and recurring subscriptions. 
• Earn from your online memberships by using a payment gateway of your choice from 21+ options. 
• ARMember Online Community Add-on to create your own private social community network. Allow follow/unfollow, friend requests, internal chatting, group creation, feed posting, and a lot more by building an online community website using ARMember. 
• Content restriction rules and content scheduling features to keep your content secure for online community members only. 
• Email marketing, social login, online courses, digital downloads, and many more features in a single place. Get access to various inbuilt addons as well.

Pricing: You can easily opt for the ARMember Pro Version at $69/year. This budget-friendly option comes with 57+ in-built add-ons. Its social community add-on can be availed for starting $30/year. Learn how to use Social Community Addon

ARMember is one of the best community platforms for you if you want to run a complete membership business with a community feature. It is effective, scalable, and provides multiple ideas to start your business. 

Disciple for Mobile first Online Communities

Disciple is one of the top community building platforms that helps you create a mobile app. With this community engagement software, you will run your online community platform over a fully-branded, personalized app. You do not require any coding skills and your social community platform will be ready in just 4-weeks. 

Key Features:

• Create an application that is complete as per your branding kit with Disciple’s white label community platform. 
• Create a content library with dynamic content support for video, audio, and text. Craft varied courses with the help of this. 
• Create varied groups, post events, and let your members interact with each other via DMs. No ads, no algorithms. 
• Sell one-off courses or create a subscription. You can easily restrict your content using a paywall. This way only members will have access to your posts. 
• An advanced console to manage your community, send notifications, view analytics, or third-party integrations. 

Pricing: $729/month for up to 500 members.

If you have the budget to go all in, then choose Disciple to invest in. Its features will just make the perfect social community platform for you. 

Circle for Creators with Online Memberships

Circle helps you create a huge online community platforms. Here, you can easily host your members and provide them with courses. Thus, content and member management can be done from a single platform. It further helps you manage discussions, create private spaces, group chats, event spaces, live streaming, member directories, and so much more. And above all, all of this with customized branding. 

Key Features: 

• Use the mobile application for easy, all time access to community building software via phone. 
• Multiple monetization options like paid memberships, subscriptions, one-time payments, coupons, discounts, and even free trials to build a community social network. 
• Setting up multiple integrations and automated workflows
• Access to advanced analytics

Pricing: After a free 14-day trial, you can choose the professional plan that starts at $89/month. 

BuddyPress for WordPress Lovers

If you are looking for an open source plugin that is free to use, choose BuddyPress. This is no doubt the best free community platform to build an online community website. Its smooth integration with WordPress makes it even more useful. You get all the community features here like user profiles, activities, groups, notifications, and more. 

Key Features:

• Allow members to register, create user profiles, and have internal conversations.
• Exclusive API that fits perfectly with any WordPress theme. 
• Set up your community with integrations of Akismet and bbPress. 
• Get information on recently active members, a list of members, embed an activity, sitewide notices, a friend list, and a group list, among others. 

Pricing: It is a free WordPress plugin that can be downloaded from the WordPress repository of Plugins. You will find some paid themes or tools to enhance BuddyPress in the market. 

If you are low on budget and still want to be among the powerful online community platforms, start using BuddyPress. 

Skool – Create and Find Online Communities

Skool is an exclusive online community platform wherein you can host your communities, create course content, and also events. All in one place with one tool. It is a perfect tool for creators to connect with their audiences. It also provides various gamification features to make it more engaging.

Key Features:

• With the core feature of community, you can indulge in group discussions and member interactions. It provides feeds, likes, comments, replies, etc.
• Members can DM each other in inboxes to spark up a private conversation.
• The main feed allows you to add GIF, video, poll, etc.
• You get a classroom tab that allows creators to build and sell online resources within the same platform.
• You can charge for membership subscriptions right on the platform by adding account details. It helps in setting up subscriptions.

Pricing: Skool offers a flat fee of $99/month per group. There’s no limit to the number of members in each group. When you opt for monetization, you need to pay 2.9% + 30c fees for each monthly subscription payment that you receive.

Mighty Networks – Online Community Platform

Mighty Networks is a comprehensive platform that helps you build and monetize communities in a simple way. It offers multiple tools for courses, memberships, and varied events. It provides AI support to set up and customize your community in just a few seconds.

Key Features:

• Provides AI features to assist in content creation and member engagement. Thus, it supports your community-building process and makes it smooth.
• It provides features for community interaction, online courses, memberships, as well as events in one place.
• It provides feed for threaded conversations, reactions, image uploads, and so much more. Post multiple polls and questions using the AI module.
• It provides 2000+ embed options to extend your social community as per your requirements.

Pricing: You can try their business plan for free for 14-days. Thereafter, its community plan starts at $41/month if billed annually and $49/month if monthly. The higher plans are available at $99, $179, $360 per month if billed yearly with additional features.

Podia – All-in-one Community Platform

When you host your business on Podia, you get all the features in one place. Including community management. Create multiple communities and allow who can get access to which community. This is one of the popular online community platforms that you must try.

Key Features:

• Create community hubs, a dedicated space for your members to engage and share content internally.
• It also allows creators to create and sell online courses with multiple features like video hosting, quizzes, and assignments.
• Here, you can sell various digital products like eBooks, PDFs, printables, etc. with secure payment processing.
• Here, you do not get charged transaction fees, thus, you can retain more of your earnings.

Pricing: Use the 30-day free trial with all the features post which you can choose a plan that suits you. Its mover plan starts at $33/month with 5% transaction fees and the shaker plan is for $75/month with no transaction fees.

Facebook/Instagram/YouTube Community

You must have come across Facebook Groups and Instagram Communities. Moreover, YouTube also provides a feature to manage your online community. All these provide options for exclusive content sharing and monetization to a certain extent. Let’s look at all three separately. 

YouTube Memberships: You can motivate your subscribers to join your membership with a monthly fee. Based on that, you can provide member perks and badges. This way, the people who already watch your content can become your loyal members. 

Facebook Groups: Did you know you can set a membership fee to allow people into your Facebook group? Moreover, you can sell products, services, sponsored content, and manage affiliates. You might need a tool to set things up, however, there’s a possibility of a robust online community setup on Facebook. 

Instagram Community: Now, with Instagram, creators get a subscription feature. It allows your followers to pay a monthly fee to receive special content. Subscriber broadcasts, subscriber badges, and exclusive space for interaction are some of the perks that an audience receives. 

If you want a low risk, low budget option to fire up your existing social media presence, opt for any of these options. It is a perfect online community setup wherein you engage with your audience as you want. 

Are you Ready to Launch Your Best Online Community Platforms?

The options for the best online community software are endless. However, this article narrows down the decision fatigue. If you think an online community will drive higher engagement for your content, go for it. Its benefits are endless to power up your business. 

Just make sure to tick the boxes of all the necessary features if you’re scouting for community platforms on your own. Think whether you need a private platform or can work with a public one. Both are useful and can be a good start toward managing a private community of members.

Related Articles:

• How to Create a Community on Your WordPress Membership Website
• How to Start Membership Support Groups with WordPress?
• Social Features Integration for Building a Successful Membership Website