I Tested Best Community Platforms – 3 are Not Even Good!

A paid community is one of the steadiest ways to earn from your skills. Members pay every month, help each other learn, and often stay for years once they get results. So I tested the best community platforms of 2026... especially that claim to capture exactly that kind of recurring income.

A group of 100 members paying $49 a month brings in close to $59,000 a year. But it largely depends on what community platform makes it happen

Best community platforms 2026: the quick answer

• Skool: best for engagement and finding new members. Starts at $9/month + 10%
• Circle: best for a branded, structured community business. From $89/month (annual billing) + 2%. fee
• Mighty Networks: best for livestreams and courses in one app. From $79/month (annual billing) + 2% fee
• Kajabi: best when the community sits inside a course and email business. From $143/month (annual billing) and charges.
• Heartbeat: best for small cohort programs. From $40/month (annual billing) + 5%, up to 350 members.
• Whop: best for selling access with no monthly fee. 2.7% + 30¢ per payment.
• Systeme.io: best free community attached to funnels and email. $0, with no platform fee.
• Discord: best free home for real-time chat. Owners keep 90% of subscription revenue after deductions.

Skool now runs Meta ads for its community owners and pays for them itself. Circle sells a $419 Scale plan built around AI agents, while even the entry plans at Mighty Networks and Heartbeat include an AI assistant. So there is a lot of noise out there.

For eight years I have helped creators build communities, alongside consulting for more than 10 tech startups. My own community runs on Skool. Forbes published my article on community-led marketing in 2023. So I am somehow credible to discuss this subject. Let's find out the best community platforms that actually work.

Skool: best for engagement and member discovery

Skool turns participation into a visible game, which brings members back more reliably than a plain feed does. Every like a member earns counts toward a level. Levels can unlock courses you choose, while a leaderboard shows who contributed most this month.

I have used Skool for three years and run my own community on it. The interface stays deliberately small: a feed, a classroom, a calendar, a member map and the leaderboard. In my experience, that restraint suits members who dislike busy software.

Brand control is where Skool gives ground, a trade-off my Skool review covers alongside the classroom and mobile app. You can't change brand colors or fonts. The classroom also offers no completion certificates.

Email sequences and sales funnels live outside Skool, so owners typically pair it with a separate email tool.

Skool pricing and fees

• Hobby: $9 a month plus 10% + 30¢ of every payment.
• Pro: $99 a month plus 2.9% + 30¢, rising to 3.9% + 30¢ on single payments above $900.

Card processing is already inside those fees. Yearly billing gives two months free. Billing is per community, so a second group means a second subscription.

On monthly billing, Pro becomes the cheaper plan once a community earns about $1,268 a month.

Since mid-2026, Skool's Growth Boost has run Meta ads for communities at Skool's own expense. It is on by default, with a switch in settings to turn it off.

Best fit: owners who value engagement and a steady trickle of new members over brand control.

Circle: best for a branded community business

Circle suits a community that carries its own brand and needs more structure than a single feed. You organize it into spaces for discussions, events, courses and chat, all on your own domain.

The entry Professional plan, which I go through in my Circle.so review, already includes gamification, a member directory, live events and 2,500 AI credits a month. Members use Circle's own mobile app on every plan.

Circle pricing and fees

• Professional, $89 a month: 2% transaction fee, 3 admins, 20 spaces.
• Business, $199 a month: 1% fee. Adds workflows, APIs, activity scores and white-label options.
• Scale, $419 a month: 1% fee. Adds AI agents, webhooks, custom SSO and 100 spaces.
• Circle Plus, custom pricing: 0.5% fee. The only plan with custom branded iOS and Android apps.

Circle quotes those prices on annual billing. Stripe's processing comes on top of Circle's percentage. A 14-day free trial needs no credit card.

Workflows start on the $199 plan and AI agents on the $419 plan, while a branded app needs a custom Circle Plus contract. At $2,900 a month in member revenue, Circle Professional costs about $261 once fees and processing are counted.

Best fit: creators who want a polished, branded space and can budget for higher tiers as the community grows.

Mighty Networks: best for livestreams but lacks 1

Mighty Networks folds livestreaming, courses, events and discussion into a single app, which suits hosts who teach live. Every plan includes streaming hours. Even the entry plan comes with an AI assistant Mighty calls AI Cohost.

I haven't run a community on Mighty Networks myself, so the figures below come from its pricing page.

Mighty Networks pricing and fees

• Launch: $79 a month on annual billing ($950 a year), with a 2% fee. It includes 20 streaming hours a month and up to 100 viewers per stream.
• Scale: $179 a month and a 1% fee, with 30 streaming hours and 200 viewers.
• Growth: $354 a month and a 0.5% fee, allowing 40 hours and 1,000 viewers.
• Mighty Pro: custom pricing with a 0.5% fee. This is the only tier with your own branded apps.

Several independent reviews put Launch at about $95 month to month. The 14-day free trial runs on the Growth plan and needs no credit card.

The viewer caps are the limit a live-teaching host is likely to hit first. A 100-viewer ceiling on Launch fills fast once live sessions become the main reason members pay.

Below Mighty Pro, members join through the Mighty Networks app rather than one carrying your name.

Best fit: hosts whose members pay mainly for live teaching, with courses and discussion around it.

Kajabi: best when the community sits inside a course business

Kajabi makes sense when the community is one part of a larger course, email and sales-page business. Its $143 entry price is the highest on this list, so paying it for community features alone rarely adds up.

Kajabi prices by contacts rather than members. Every free lead-magnet subscriber counts toward your cap, so a growing email list can force an upgrade before your community needs one.

Kajabi pricing and fees

• Basic: $143 a month billed annually ($179 monthly), with 2,500 contacts and 1 community.
• Growth: $199 a month billed annually ($249 monthly), with 25,000 contacts and 1 community.
• Pro: $399 a month billed annually ($499 monthly), with 100,000 contacts, 3 communities and a branded mobile app.

Kajabi takes no platform percentage when you use Kajabi Payments. Processing costs 2.9% + 30¢ on Basic, 2.8% on Growth and 2.7% on Pro. A third-party payment gateway adds 2% on Basic, 1% on Growth and 0.5% on Pro.

Against Skool, Kajabi wins on marketing tools and loses on engagement and price, a trade I weigh in my Skool vs Kajabi comparison.

Best fit: course businesses that want email, sales pages and a community under one login.

Heartbeat: best for small cohort programs

Heartbeat is built for structured programs, mixing channels, threads, courses, events and payments in one place. Templates do much of the setup, so an organized program goes live quickly.

Its entry price looks cheap, but the 5% fee on that plan adds up. At $2,900 a month in revenue, Heartbeat Build is the second-most expensive option on this list.

Every plan includes Pulse, Heartbeat's AI co-builder, which suggests a channel structure for your niche and drafts onboarding sequences and workflows. When I tested it for my Heartbeat review, Pulse worked best as a starting point rather than a co-pilot to run everything through.

I rated Heartbeat 4.2 out of 5, with its strength in structured programs rather than chat-heavy groups.

Heartbeat pricing and fees

• Build: $49 a month ($40 billed annually), up to 350 members, 5% fee.
• Grow: $149 a month ($124 billed annually), up to 5,000 members, 2.5% fee.
• Scale: $849 a month ($766 billed annually), unlimited members, 1.25% fee. It is the only tier with a white-label mobile app.

Heartbeat's fees sit on top of Stripe's processing. On annual billing, Grow's lower fee outweighs its higher price above roughly $3,400 a month. A 14-day free trial needs no credit card.

Best fit: coaches running cohorts or structured programs for a few hundred members.

Whop: best for selling access with no monthly fee

Whop is the cheapest way to charge for a community, because it has no subscription at all. Each domestic card payment costs 2.7% + 30¢, with processing included.

I have used Whop for over two years. It handles paid access to Discord servers especially well, granting and removing roles automatically as members pay or cancel.

The same storefront sells courses, software and digital downloads, which suits creators with more than one product. Its community tools, though, feel assembled from separate apps rather than designed as one space. My Whop review covers where Whop fits best, from product bundles to gaming creators.

Owners who want members living inside the platform day to day will likely feel more at home on Skool or Circle.

Whop fees

Whop adds surcharges on top of its base rate:

• 1.5% on international cards
• 1% for currency conversion
• 2% when Whop calculates and remits sales tax for you
• 4% + $1 per payout if you want your money instantly

Stripe charges similar surcharges for international cards and currency conversion. Whop's lead over Stripe-based platforms therefore holds with overseas buyers too.

Best fit: creators selling several digital products, or running paid Discord servers.

Systeme.io: best free community for course sellers

Systeme.io gives you a community with unlimited members on its free plan and takes 0% of your sales. The community shares one contact record with Systeme's funnels, email automations and courses.

A student who buys through a funnel can land in the course and the community with no extra wiring. The free plan does cap you at one community, one course and one tag, limits my Systeme.io review covers in detail.

Systeme's community lacks the tools that bring members back unprompted. It has no points or leaderboards, no discovery network and no branded mobile app.

It suits a discussion space attached to a course far better than a community sold as the product.

Systeme.io pricing

The free plan costs nothing and charges no platform fee. Paid plans start at $17 a month on the Startup plan. Your payment processor, such as Stripe or PayPal, still takes its normal fee.

Best fit: course sellers who want funnels, email and a member space on one bill.

Discord: best free home for real-time chat

Discord costs nothing to run and suits audiences who already live there, such as gamers, developers, traders and crypto groups. Real-time voice and text chat is where it outclasses everything else on this list.

It is weak at anything slow or structured. In a busy server, conversations scroll away within hours. There is no proper course area either.

Every member also needs a Discord account, which can put off buyers outside those niches.

Discord pricing

Running a server is free. Server Subscriptions let you charge for access directly. Discord says owners keep 90% of that revenue after applicable deductions. Discord sets eligibility requirements before a server can sell subscriptions.

Best fit: gaming, developer and trading audiences who already spend their day in Discord.

Community Platforms that Bring you new members

Hosting members and finding them are separate jobs. Among the platforms here, only Skool and Whop run networks that send buyers your way.

Skool lists communities on its Discovery page, sorted by category and searchable across its whole network. Its 2026 Discovery update appears to reward quality signals, such as retention and how well your About page converts.

I explain those signals in how to rank your community on Skool Discovery and growth boost. Growth Boost adds Skool-funded ads on top of that organic listing.

Whop runs a marketplace where buyers browse products from across the platform, which my guide to what Whop is and how it works explains. Marketplace terms can differ from the standard rate, so the current terms in your dashboard are worth checking before you count on that revenue.

Discord also lists eligible public servers in its Server Discovery. Circle, Mighty Networks, Kajabi and Heartbeat have no marketplace that sends members to you.

On those four, every member arrives from your own content, email list or ads. For a creator starting from zero, that gap is the strongest argument for Skool.

Leaving a platform: what you can take with you

Switching costs the most when the platform itself bills your members. Skool and Whop run subscriptions through their own payment systems, so paying members generally have to sign up again after a move.

Systeme.io connects your own Stripe or PayPal account instead, so payment history stays with a processor in your name. Every extra step in a migration usually loses some members, whichever platform you leave.

Before a community reaches 50 paying members, these questions are worth answering:

1. Can you export every member's name and email address as a file?
2. Who bills your members, the platform or your own Stripe account?
3. Can you download your course videos and posts, or only view them inside the platform?
4. Can you email members directly, outside the platform's feed and notifications?

An email list you own, built from the first subscriber, answers the fourth question and softens the other three. With every member's email on file, a move means sending one message rather than rebuilding a list from nothing.

Which platform fits your business model

The right community platform depends less on features than on what you sell and at what price.

A low-ticket membership ($9 to $49 a month) lives on volume, which is the math behind my 1,000 members principle. Skool fits best here, starting on Hobby and moving to Pro as revenue grows.

A high-ticket mastermind or cohort ($1,000 or more per seat) makes per-sale fees visible. Fees on a single $3,000 payment:

• Whop: about $81
• Kajabi Basic and Systeme.io: about $87
• Skool Pro: about $117
• Circle Professional and Mighty Networks Launch, including Stripe: about $147
• Heartbeat Grow, including Stripe: about $162
• Skool Hobby: about $300

Masterminds also need small groups, private calls and an application step more than leaderboards. Circle and Heartbeat's Grow plan tend to handle that structure better than Skool does.

A course with a community attached fits Kajabi if you also want its email and sales pages. Systeme.io covers the same ground on a tight budget. My Skool vs Circle vs Kajabi breakdown compares the three platforms course creators weigh most often.

A free community used as a lead magnet sells nothing, so transaction fees don't apply. Skool's $9 Hobby plan adds Discovery traffic, while Systeme.io's free plan costs nothing at all.

A Discord-native audience is best left on Discord, with Whop handling payments and roles.

What keeps members paying on any platform

A platform can make participation easier, but it can't give members a reason to stay. An audience follows you, while a community connects members to each other, a difference I unpack in community vs audience.

In a Forbes article on the tribe effect, I wrote that a sense of belonging is what turns customers into advocates. Inside a paid group, that same belonging tends to drive renewals.

Several habits protect retention on any platform:

• A first win in week one. A member who gets a result early is far less likely to cancel in month two.
• A fixed weekly live call. A predictable ritual gives members a reason to open the app.
• A steady flow of new members. Fresh arrivals keep conversations from settling into a closed clique, an idea I call the New Blood Principle.

Gamification, AI assistants and branded apps can amplify these habits. Designing them in from the start, as I describe in how to build a community, does more for retention than any single feature.

Platforms I left off this list

Facebook Groups are free and familiar, but Meta controls your reach and your member data. Selling access also takes workarounds, though a free group still works as a top-of-funnel tool, which I cover in Facebook groups for business.

Slack shows only the last 90 days of messages on its free plan. Paid plans are priced per active member, which gets expensive for a large community.

Patreon is built for fans supporting a creator's ongoing work. Its tools serve fan memberships better than learning communities.

Best community platforms 2026: my verdict

Skool is the best starting point for most coaches and course creators. It gets members participating, helps you find new ones, and costs $9 a month until revenue justifies Pro.

Once a community has its own brand and budget, Circle is the natural upgrade. Kajabi earns its higher price only when you also use its email and sales pages.

Hosts who teach mostly live will get more from Mighty Networks, while Heartbeat suits small cohorts that need structure. For selling access with no monthly bill, Whop is the cheapest route. Discord remains the free choice for audiences who already chat there.

Systeme.io is the budget pick when the community exists to support a course. If Skool itself stops fitting, my Skool alternatives guide maps the exits.

Among the best community platforms 2026 offers, the right choice keeps your members engaged and stays affordable at the revenue you expect next year, not just today.

Community FAQs

What is the best community platform in 2026?

Skool is the best community platform for most coaches and course creators in 2026. It leads on engagement, with points, levels and leaderboards. Its Discovery network can also send new members your way. Circle is the better choice for branded communities with a bigger budget. Kajabi suits course businesses that need built-in email marketing.

What is the cheapest community platform?

Whop is the cheapest paid option for most creators. It has no monthly fee and takes 2.7% + 30¢ per domestic payment, including processing. At $2,900 a month in member revenue, that comes to about $108. International cards, currency conversion and tax handling add surcharges, much as Stripe does on other platforms.

Is there a free community platform?

Yes. Systeme.io includes a community with unlimited members on its free plan and charges no platform fee. Discord is also free. Server owners keep 90% of Server Subscription revenue after deductions. Neither offers the engagement tools of a paid platform such as Skool or Circle.

Does Skool charge transaction fees?

Yes. Skool's Hobby plan keeps 10% + 30¢ of every payment. The Pro plan keeps 2.9% + 30¢, or 3.9% + 30¢ on payments above $900, according to the Skool Help Center. Card processing is included in both rates. On monthly billing, Pro becomes cheaper than Hobby at about $1,268 a month in revenue.

Is Circle better than Skool?

Circle is better for branding, structure and integrations, while Skool is better for engagement, member discovery and cost at low revenue. Circle starts at $89 a month plus 2% and Stripe processing, per its pricing page. Skool starts at $9 plus 10% + 30¢. My Skool vs Circle comparison weighs both in detail.

Which community platforms have a branded mobile app?

Kajabi includes a branded mobile app on its Pro plan, at $399 a month billed annually, according to its pricing page. Circle offers branded apps only on custom-priced Circle Plus. Mighty Networks limits them to Mighty Pro, and Heartbeat to its $849 Scale plan. Skool and Systeme.io don't offer branded apps.

Do community platforms offer free trials?

Circle, Mighty Networks and Heartbeat each offer a 14-day free trial with no credit card required. Mighty's trial runs on its Growth plan, so some features may not carry over to Launch. Systeme.io and Discord are free to start without any trial. Whop charges nothing until you make a sale.

Can I run courses and a community on one platform?

Yes. Skool, Circle, Mighty Networks, Kajabi, Heartbeat and Systeme.io all combine courses with a community. Skool's classroom is the simplest, with no completion certificates. Kajabi and Systeme.io have the fuller course tools, while Circle, Mighty Networks and Heartbeat sit in between.

Can I move my community to another platform?

You can, though paying members usually need to sign up again. On platforms that bill members themselves, such as Skool and Whop, subscriptions generally don't transfer. Exporting member emails early and keeping your own email list makes a move far less risky.