The best online community platform for you is whichever one's pricing shape matches the size of your membership, because the software has converged and the money has not. Every serious option now gives you threads, a member directory, events, courses and a phone app, so a feature grid will not separate them. How they charge still does. A vendor either bills a flat monthly plan and leaves your sales alone, or charges little up front and takes a share of every payment your members make, or sets a low plan with a share layered on top of it. At twenty members the share is trivial and the plan is the expensive part of the month. At two thousand that reverses, and a share can cost several times the plan you turned down. So the comparison worth doing is arithmetic on your own figures, not a shortlist: run your member count and your monthly price through each vendor's published plan fee and published cut with the platform price index on this site, then follow the membership site guide when you build.
Picking the best platform to build online community: what separates vendors now
Circle, Skool, Mighty Networks, Podia, Patreon and Kajabi all host a paying membership, and their feature sheets read almost identically. The real differences are narrow and worth checking one at a time: whether courses live inside the same membership or are sold as a separate product, whether members get a branded app or a shared one with the vendor's name on it, whether events and live calls are native or bolted on, and whether you can export the member list and the email addresses attached to it. Everything else is presentation. Decide those four, then decide on price.
Run your own numbers first
Suppose you charge 29 dollars a month and 75 people pay it. That is 2,175 dollars of gross revenue a month. The processor takes its share whichever vendor you pick: card processing on a creator platform is the processor's standard fee, 2.9% + $0.30, so on 75 charges that is 63 dollars and 8 cents on the volume plus 22 dollars and 50 cents across the charges, 85 dollars and 58 cents in all, leaving 2,089 dollars and 42 cents. A vendor taking a tenth of your sales would take another 217 dollars and 50 cents out of that month, every month, and more as you grow. A flat monthly plan at any sane figure is cheaper than that, which is the whole argument for paying up front.
Revenue share, and when it is the right deal
A share is the right deal exactly while you are small, because it costs you nothing in the months when nobody has paid you yet. The clearest published example of the shape is the newsletter side of the same market: Substack takes a 10% share of paid subscription revenue: writers keep 90% minus card fees. Community vendors that price this way work the same, and the arithmetic behaves the same too, which is that the bill is a straight line through the origin and a plan fee is a flat one. They cross once. Find your crossing point, write the member count down, and diarise the switch instead of discovering it a year late.
Best community apps: what to ask of an online community app
Members join on a laptop and then live in the notification, so mobile matters more than founders expect. Ask three things of any vendor. Does the phone experience push a notification when someone replies to a member, or does it only email them. Is the app the vendor's own with your space inside it, or is it carrying your name and icon. And what does the branded tier cost, because a white-label app is almost always the jump to a top plan rather than a small add-on. If your members are not the sort of audience who install anything, none of that is worth paying for and a good mobile web experience is enough.
Questions people ask about best online community platform
Do I need a separate course tool as well?
Usually not. Most community vendors now host lessons inside the same paid membership, and one login for the room and the lessons is worth more to a member than either feature is on its own.
Is a free tier good enough to launch on?
It is good enough to gather people, but check that it can take a card before you promise anyone a paid tier. A tier with no checkout can only hold a free group, however good the discussion tools are.
How many members do I need to justify a paid plan?
Divide the plan fee by your monthly price and add a margin for card fees. Once your paying members clear that figure with room to spare, the plan is cheaper than any share arrangement you could take instead.
What happens to my members if I switch vendors?
The posts and lessons can be moved, the recurring payments generally cannot. Members re-enter a card on the new platform, so announce it early, keep the price the same through the move, and expect some quiet churn.