Community
|
November 15, 2022

The Best Guide to Circle.so and the 5 Best Alternatives for Your Community 

A complete overview on Circle.so and the 7 Best Alternatives to circle for Your Community 

Rishika Shidling
Community

The Best Guide to Circle.so and the 7 Best Alternatives for Your Community 

Having a successful and well-built community is the backbone for many creators, but when the global pandemic hit, brands also found that they needed similar engagement with customers that were now interacting with their products online. Smart brands understand the value of creating an environment that encourages users to produce useful and authentic content. Successful online communities use their platform to crowdsource ideas from their most invested customers. This is when circle.so comes into play.

Contents

  1. What is circle.so?
  2. How Much Does Circle.so Cost? 
  3. What are the top features of circle.so?
  4. 7 best alternatives to circle.so
  5. Benefits of a successful online community
  6. Conclusion 

What is circle.so?

Circle.so is an all-in-one community platform for creators and brands. It is basically a community platform designed for creators who want to gather their community members around their content, engage them in discussions and turn them into paying members. Members of a community can also connect to each other via Direct Messaging too.  

They have recently raised a $24.7m funding round to redefine the future of online communities. With Circle.so, creators have a chance to build different types of communities. These include newsletter, course, product, and coaching communities. The platform also allows membership and podcast communities. 

Circle provides you with the building blocks to bring your vision to life. Using circle.so creators can create private & secret spaces for groups. Posts come alive on Circle. Easily add rich formatting, media, emojis, and embed your favourite 3rd-party tools. You can also easily add your own brand colours, use a custom domain, and integrate directly with your website or product. Circle is customizable, flexible, and beautiful. 

There's some other stuff.  You could send out weekly digest emails, so, you know, if you want to email your community every week, you can do it.  So if you don’t have an email service provider and you want a way to send emails, Circle gives you that. 

How much does circle.so cost?

Circle starts at just $39/month with additional perks for Teachable customers. Plus, a 20% discount on higher plans. For those who just want to try it out, Circle.so offers a free trial period of 14 days. However, when that period expires, you have to pay to use this community platform — there is no free plan. The most affordable option is the Basic plan, which costs $39 a month. The Professional plan is $79 a month, with a 20% early bird discount. This one allows 10,000 monthly active members and 100 spaces. It also includes API access and custom CSS and JavaScript. 

There’s also a good thing about circle.so, in case you are not satisfied with their services or for any reason, you decide that Circle isn't the right fit for your community, they offer you a 100% money back guarantee. They will give you a full refund in such cases.

What are the top features of circle.so?

  1. Affordable pricing: One of the best reasons to use circle.so is it’s affordable starter plan. Circle starts at just $39/month, Plus, a 20% discount on higher plans.
  2. Easy sign-up experience: Signing up on circle.so is very easy, all you need to do is enter your email address, first and last name, and a desired password then tap Sign Up when ready.
  3. Launch a paid community: you can launch a paid community to earn money from your members. Circle.so can be integrated with Stripe for credit card payment processing from your members.
  4. Share your content easily: if you are using Kajabi or Teachable, Circle. so makes it possible to share your content created there with your Circle community.   
  5. Monetize your community: Circle.so helps you monetize your community and the efforts you put into building it by using Circle paywalls. This helps you charge for your community and get access to premium spaces and even exclusive content.
  6. Analytical statistics: It also provides you with analytical statistics and reports that show you which are the topics that people engage with the most for you to up your discussion game and be forward in the same.
  7. Integration with multiple tools: Circle allows you to integrate multiple handy tools with your community through a Single Sign-on. 

7 best alternatives to circle. so

  1. UUKI 

Uuki is built around a single notion “To help you manage and grow your community directly on your website”. Whether it's through in-person events or online forums, communities are key to brand loyalty, awareness, and overall success. A strong and engaged community will lead to improved products, learning, and innovation, as well as company growth. 

It is a community platform for web3 creators to build meaningful relationships with content, discussions, and events under your brand.

It Gives your audience a destination to interact with each other, and engage in discussion with rich text and media.

It also creates beautiful event pages, invites the audience, collects payment, interacts, and sends them updates.

-Sell premium content for a one-time payment or easily set up a subscription with UUKI. Great for courses, NFTs, coaching, and more

  1. Higher logic

Higher Logic is a G2 Leader in Online Community Management Software. Higher Logic already integrates with a lot of platforms so incorporating it into your suite of tools will be fairly straightforward. 

With higher logic, online community platforms, be where your members or customers are. Give them a space to connect, create, and innovate. 

  1. Tribe

Tribe is a modern and fully customizable community platform built with a collection of social media best practices to help businesses and creators launch branded online communities. 

Tribe pricing starts at $49.00 per month. There is also a free version. The main disadvantage of this community platform is that it doesn’t allow you to include your online courses.

  1. Vanilla forums

Vanilla Forums allows you to create an online community that your customers or audience will love. It is a cloud-based forum software that helps companies engage their audience, reduce support costs and increase sales. 

It has one of the best tools available for community management. Vanilla Forums is the top-rated enterprise online community solution today. 

  1. Hivebrite

Hivebrite provides top organizations with all the tools they need to build, manage, and engage their community. Hivebrite offers a large set of engagement features users can access anytime, anywhere.

 Hivebrite allows you to keep full control over your website and community with comprehensive content management and simple moderation. You can optimize engagements and simplify your workflows with easy online payments for paid events and memberships.

6. Discord 

Discord is an instant messaging and digital platform. Here, people can communicate with messaging, voice calls, video calls, share files and media in communities or private chats called “servers”. As of 2021, the service has over 350 million registered users and over 150 million monthly active users. A server is like a community group, with different rooms, each room is referred to as a channel.

Discord has bots which help us to achieve small tasks with ease. Discord bots make it easier to create an engaged community. You can use them to welcome new members to the server. Discord Bots are a great way to maximize productivity on one's server by fetching important data, delivering notifications, scheduling events etc.

Discord gives you the ability to get personal with your like-minded community members rather than spamming links at them.

7. Slack 

With Slack, you can automatically push notifications to mobile when you’ve been inactive on the desktop client for a specified period of time, from ‘as soon as I’m inactive’ to ‘after I’ve been inactive for 30 minutes.’

Slack is a messaging app for businesses that connects people to the information they need. Slack offers more customization options, with many different ways to tweak the sidebar’s look and what appears on it, such as whether to always include all direct messages, how to sort content, and so on.

Slack isn’t just a tool for sending messages. It’s a place where workflows between all your teams, tools, customers, and partners wherever and whenever you’re working. In Slack you can turn routine meetings and tasks like stand-ups, approvals and requests into automated workflows to save on the back and forth. 

 

 

Benefits of a successful online community

  • They provide insights in customers’ preferences and needs and can increase customer retention and loyalty.
  • The most impactful online communities use data to their advantage. With analytics tools, you can easily keep an eye on your potential or existing customers’ interests.
  • When people are brought together in a community to discuss new ideas or address problems, unexpected solutions are often the result.
  • Customer communities can lead to cheaper costs in support but also in up-selling, generating new contacts, etc.

Conclusion

A community is all about relationships and interaction. Online communities offer the most value to businesses when they fully integrate with existing systems.

 Circle. so it is one of the best online community platforms! Go check it for yourself! 😊 

 

 

 

What is HuggingChat? Everything you need to know about this open-source AI chatbot
A compact analysis of HuggingChat.
author
Rishika Shidling
MiniGPT-4: Open-Source Model for Complex Vision-Language Tasks Like GPT-4
A pithy outlook on MiniGPT-4: an open-source model for complex vision-language tasks like GPT-4
author
Rishika Shidling
AutoGPT vs BabyAGI
A concise comparison between AutoGPT and BabyAGI.
author
Rishika Shidling