Part 1: What’s the best all-in-one platform for building a paid community? (Solo Series)

In the first episode of this two-part Solo Series, we’re hearing from Studio Dreamer. Our letter today deals with a community creator who is ready to build a proper home for their paid community but is unsure which all-in-one platform best suits their community goals.

This is one of the most common questions Bri gets from clients. In fact, over the last five years, she has partnered with dozens of clients and community members to select the right community platform for them and to avoid some of the most common pitfalls related to the process.

So, tune in for the information that will help you make the right choice for you. Bri is providing a broad overview of the five most common community platforms, including her two favorites, which are the ones where she's seen the most successful communities take off.

In this episode:

(00:31) The communitea: Studio Dreamer’s letter

(02:54) What to expect from today's special solo episode

(05:08) The definition of an all-in-one community platform

(06:54) Deep dive into Mighty Networks

(08:49) Deep dive into Skool

(12:06) Deep dive into Honeycommb

(16:43) Deep dive into Circle

(23:56) Deep dive into Heartbeat, where Bri built her Ember community

(27:43) Three main differences between Circle and Heartbeat

Tune into next week's Dear Bri Episode 25 for  the top three mistakes that people make when setting up their community platform.

Resources:

🔥 Build your community right. Book a discovery call with Bri

📺 Watch Bri's  more detailed Community Platform Comparisons on YouTube.

🎧 Catch up with Dear Bri Episode 4 with Noele Flowers, where we talk about  building on Slack versus in an all-in-one community platform.

🎙️ Listen to Dear Bri Episode 12 with Murtaza Bambot, the CEO at Heartbeat.

❤️ Sign up for Heartbeat. Bri’s recommended all-in-one community platform.

💛 Join Ember. The place for go-getter community creators building community-powered businesses.

Bri Leever

🖥️ Website

📩 Newsletter

📹 Youtube

Want your story to be next? Submit an anonymous letter about your community conundrum, fiasco, drama, or other dilemma here.

*Dear Bri is produced by Ideablossoms.

Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

This episode is going to be a little bit different. It's just me, and I'm going to tell you the deep dive, the skinny, all the things that you need to know about building community in an all-in-one platform in this two-part series. In part one, I'm going to give you an overview of the five community platforms that I come across most frequently and that I build in most frequently. And in part two, I'm going to give you the three most common pitfalls and mistakes that I see people making when they architect their community in an all-in-one platform. Let's dive right into our letter for this episode. Dear Brie, I'm finally ready to build a proper home for my community, but I'm stuck on which platform to use. My community is for creatives who are tired of hustling in isolation. It's a mix of monthly workshops, casual coworking, and a private space to share wins and roadblocks. It's a paid membership, and I want it to feel like a warm, inspiring studio you can drop into anytime, not just another app with endless notifications. I've looked into Circle and Mighty Networks, even Kajabi, but honestly, I'm overwhelmed. What's the best all-in-one platform for something like this? And how do I know what trade-offs are worth it? Warmly, Studio Dreamer. Dear Studio Dreamer, I'm so grateful that you're here. Because this is a really common question, and that's exactly what we're gonna dig into on this episode. Welcome to Deer Bree, an advice column for community conundrums, fiascos, and drama. This season of Dearbrie is sponsored by our friends over at Heartbeat. Heartbeat is an all-in-one community platform, and it's the one I chose to host my own community. Your members can finally have events, conversation, content, and even courses in one distraction-free, intimate, customized home. I chose Heartbeat for three reasons. First, Heartbeat is unparalleled in their events management features. Events are a core part of my community architecture, and their features make my life so much easier. Second is segmentation. It's super easy to break my community into smaller, more niche subgroups and create a more customized experience for that group in Heartbeat. And finally, their courses. Being able to host my educational materials and learning journey in a community-first platform makes my community that much more valuable and retention that much stickier. I'm an affiliate with Heartbeat, which means when you sign up through my link in the show notes, I get paid a small amount and no extra charge to you. Thank you for supporting my work in that way. And finally, I usually record this podcast from Hawaii Island. So a special thank you to the Kanakamali people on whose land I currently reside. Picking the right community platform in what seems like a sea of endless options and new options popping up every single day can be extremely daunting. And while I believe the substance of your community is infinitely more important than the tool that you choose to build it on, not all community platforms are created equally. And some can even create unnecessary obstacles and friction for your members to participate and engage in ways that are meaningful. Before I go any further, let me introduce myself. My name is Brie Lever, your friendly and also opinionated community strategist and CEO over at Ember, where I help coaches, consultants, and creators build and strategically grow online paid communities. Over the last five years, I have partnered with dozens of clients and members to select the right community platform for them and avoid some of the most common pitfalls when it comes to selecting your technology and architecting your community spaces. I'm a certified expert with Circle, Heartbeat, and Honeycomb. And I've tested and experimented with several other platforms beyond that. So I know a thing or two about not just what this platform architecture looks like today, but how this platform is going to evolve tomorrow and how it may or may not be equipped to scale with your community. I'm going to give you a broad overview of the five community platforms that I see most commonly. I'm going to tell you the two that I build on most frequently, and I'm going to tell you the one that has a really good marketing team, but has a terrible user experience. For more detailed comparisons between both platforms, you can look out for my platform comparison videos. I have these available on YouTube. There's a whole older series of videos, and we're getting ready to do a revamp with new video series. So make sure that you subscribe and like our YouTube channel to see them as they come out. Be sure to stick around to the very end because I save my two favorite platforms for the very end. And these are the ones where I've seen the most successful communities really take off. They're the leaders of the industry and would and am banking my money and my client communities on. First, let's define what an all-in-one community platform is. Because what I'm not talking about in this video are platforms where you benefit from the discoverability or the habituation of behavior where, quote, everyone already is on that platform. So we're not talking about Discord, we're not talking about Slack, we're not talking about Facebook groups. For more information about why I prefer to build communities in all-in-one community platforms over what I would term social network tools, you can check out my Dear Bree podcast episode with Noelle Flowers, where we talk about this within the context of building on Slack versus an all-in-one community platform. So, how do we define all-in-one community platform? There's two distinctions. First, I define an all-in-one community platform as like you own the relationship with your members. You own their email already. This person is joining your community because they know you and your brand, and they are opting in to be a part of the community experience. The community itself is just a tool versus in social networks, there usually is some form of discoverability available. So people might like stumble into your community because they are a user of that tool and technology. This is a little bit what school is trying to do, which we're going to talk a little bit more about. But generally, in all in one platforms, you own the relationship with your customer, and now you're a member and you are bringing them into your community experience. So instead of having a clustered tech stack of your Zoom links over here and your Luma calendar over there and your like notion resources over there, and then your Slack channel over here, and you have conversation events and content all in disparate places. We're bringing it all into one centralized home. Now, let's get started with our first community platform. First up is Mighty Networks. And while I love the team and the founder, Gina has been spearheading in the community spaces. She's a trailblazer and has been doing this for 10 years. Mighty Networks was the first all-in-one community product in the market. And we owe them so much for setting the pace for that. Unfortunately, the design, user experience, and just technology in general was built with an old technology that just does not, in my opinion, serve your members today. The tricky thing about Mighty Networks is they have a really good marketing team. They've been doing this for a really long time. They speak the language, they know your pain points. My personal opinion is that the user experience of the platform does not hold up to the promise of community building that they provide. That being said, if you have already built your community on Mighty Networks and it's doing like a B plus or better, I don't think it's worth it to move. The platform itself, as it is, and with the changes that they've made, they did a really big revamp where they essentially modeled their space architecture off of what Circle does, which was a smart move for them. But there's still elements of their architecture that are clunky, that you have to click way more times than is necessary to find what you need. And it's still very difficult to actually understand like where to find the things that you need, how to get there and where they actually live. So my personal opinion is that the UX is not great. If you are building a new platform from scratch, I do not recommend Mighty Networks. If you've already built your community there, again, I don't think it's worth making the migration because there are communities that are thriving and engaged on Mighty Networks. Just because you build on Mighty Networks doesn't mean that your community is destined to fail. I just think that there are better tools out there and that are better equipped to serve your members than Mighty Networks today. Next up is school. And if you caught my circle versus school comparison video, then you know I'm not the greatest fan of school and I vastly prefer circle over it. That being said, upon greater reflection, I have found a use case for which I would recommend school to users. And here's who it's for. School is great for testing your community concept. Because their platform is so simple, it is the fastest, it is the least clunky, it is the simplest user experience. Your members will immediately be able to know where to go for what. There's not a question of where I can find things, it's not overcomplicated. It's very simple, which when you're testing a concept for a community, removing all of the variables of complexity and over-architecting and making a really complicated space is huge because the most important test you need to run is especially for a paid community, are people going to pay for this community? So school really keeps the guardrails up for you to be able to launch a minimum viable community and test it and learn does the market want this? Do they enjoy this? Will they pay to be a part of it? That being said, what you gain in simplicity and speed, you lose in customizability. Which, if you're just starting out, that's not a bad thing because some of the customizability of platforms like Circle and Heartbeat, you can easily get lost in perfection, paralysis, and analysis. And I've seen people just self-sabotage over and over again, playing around with this new tool and these new features and trying to perfect their spaces when really all they need to do is just launch their community and get it into the market to see if it lands. So if that's you, and if you know that's your tendency to do a little bit of overanalysis and perfection paralysis, then school could be a great platform for you. My only caution is to not fall too heavily for school's like sexy promises of discoverability and gamification. So I talk about this in the other video, but school's two promises, which it's a brilliant model, are hey, as a community builder, the two hardest things for you to do are find new members and get them engaging with each other. We've taken care of both of those problems. With our discoverability, anyone who's a user of school can find and discover your community and join it. Our gamification has taken care of the issue of engagement. Now you don't have to worry about prompting people to share or getting them active or like bringing this ghost town of the community to life because we've introduced a gamification mechanic which incentivizes people to engage in meaningful ways. Those are two very big promises that I don't believe they'd ultimately deliver on. So if you're joining school because you want a shortcut to finding new members and getting them engaging in meaningful ways, there's not a shortcut for that. And even the best tool in the world is not going to be able to do that work for you. You have to intentionally and strategically guide and lead your community. And there are plenty of resources, Ember in particular, that can guide you in that direction. But the platform itself is not going to that's that's like a very big promise. And it's not one that I think that they ultimately deliver on. Next up is Honeycomb. And I position Honeycomb as a pretty decent mobile first experience because their origins was in a mobile-first customized community app that is like designed for people to experience on their phones. Since that origin, about a decade ago, like they got started building some like pretty big super fan communities for Lady Gaga and other celebrities. Since then, they've backtracked to more of a web-based experience. And along with everybody else in the community industry, we've learned that these communities are best approached with an iterative strategy. So to dive all in with like thousands of dollars on a customized app to build your community, unless you have tested your community concept in other ways, it is not a smart strategy because we want to start with your minimum viable community. So Honeycomb has like really adjusted their model. When you sign up with Honeycomb, you get access to all of their features. And as you make more on your community, that's when they charge you more. Unlike Circle, whose pricing structure is based on the features that you get and you quickly find yourself upgrading because you need those features. I do like that Honeycomb has like a better scaled pricing model that's more accessible for folks to start with a web-based community and then move eventually to a custom mobile app. That being said, I do not love the user experience in Honeycomb. And while the mobile experience is really fast, it's in my opinion, it's pretty clunky. The main thing that really sticks out for me is when you join Honeycomb, there's this chat versus feed feature. And we do not need to give folks two options for where to post a discussion. The second that somebody has to ask, and this goes for all community building, but especially when it's baked into the platform like this, it like really irks me. The second somebody has to ask, oh, does this go in the chat or is this like a feed post? The second we have introduced that question to our members, we have lost. Like we have lost the battle. And this is a really hard thing to do, especially even in circle communities, even in heartbeat communities. It's so easy to get overzealous with the number of channels and topics and places that people can post things. But the second somebody has to pause and ask, wait, where should this go? You've created unnecessary friction and you've made it even easier for your member to say, ah, I don't really know. I don't want to get in trouble. It's too complicated. I'm not gonna post. So that friction is like massively important to not sign your members up for. And unfortunately, Honeycomb's main feed, you can either post to chat or post a feed. I hate that they present that option to their members in order to post anywhere. So it's a fast, like good mobile first experience. But that element of UX, I think, is totally cutting them off at the knees when it comes to seeing their conversation channels really be optimized for engagement. This podcast is sponsored by Ember Consulting, where I'm the founder and head community creator. At Ember, we help people who are familiar with running their business on content, coaching, or consulting become community-powered. As you hear in this podcast, creating a community is really tough, and managing it can be even harder. So don't do it alone. Whether you're looking to launch a new community or pivot your strategy, our one-on-one consulting helps you skip the learning curve and do it right the first time. And when you're ready to belong to a space just for community creators learning, testing, and growing their communities together, check out the Ember Community. Now, back to the episode. Okay, now we're getting to the good stuff. I'm gonna tell you about the two platforms that I build on most frequently. They are circle and heartbeat. I'm gonna give you an overview of each of them, and then I'm really gonna do a deeper dive into who each platform is a better fit for. Because even though at the end of the day, once you're between like circle and heartbeat, I don't think there's really like that huge of a difference. But when you consider where you're headed in the future, your marketing engine, and just a couple like really specific questions that I think a lot of people miss in the beginning when they're picking their community platform can have pretty dramatic implications on like how effectively you can use that platform in the future. Let's kick off with Circle. I call Circle the confident choice that you'll pay out the ass for. So I love Circle. I'm a Circle expert. I love the Circle team. I've been with them for like in using Circle for five years now. They are a super confident choice. They have gone through several rounds of funding. They have a massive team that is growing every day. The number of like successful communities that I see on Circle or migrating to Circle continues to tick up. So they are a super confident choice. It's super customizable. So they're adding and layering new features on all the time to make even more custom features. That's probably one of my like main criticisms is like their attention to the back-end UX experience versus the front-end member UX experience is, in my opinion, sorely lacking as they've added features. They've just layered it on. So on the back end, it can be quite confusing, even for someone like me who's used it for five years. I can still find myself being like, wait, what? How does that work again? Or where did that feature go? So you really have to be dedicated to learning the tool. And that's why I don't think it's a great place to test your initial community concept. I think something like school or even Heartbeat, Heartbeat's also kind of verging on that like highly customizable learning curve. When we're talking about just getting your community started, I think all of these customizable features can really get in the way of you learning what you need to do and you're introducing a lot of unnecessary variables for yourself and your members when you just need to know are people willing to pay for this? Here's my one beef with Circle UX, which I generally think is like really amazing. It's simple, it's sleek. Community builders can get carried away if they're not given like the proper boundaries. It's really easy to architect a community in circle that is not optimized for great engagement, that has too much friction, too many obstacles. So I definitely support my clients and my members in this because if you're choosing to build in circle, it's having someone to provide some guardrails is really important. But my main beef with Circle, and it's such a tiny thing, but it just it really irks me, is that there's not an easy way to host public events. And they've made it easier. But in order for someone to, so this is like a common, one of the most common and effective methods for attracting new members into your community, is to host an event in your community that is also open to the public. In circle, in order to do this, your community in general has to be public. And then you have to have an independent public events space where you list these public events. When people are a CP to that event, technically what it has them do is create a profile and join your community. I don't like this for a couple reasons. Number one, I don't believe in the freemium model, which we're gonna cover in depth in video number two, where I talk about common pitfalls that people fall into when they're architecting their community platform. And this design leads people to build a freemium model, which I don't think is ultimately in service to you or to your members. The second reason I don't like this feature is because when your members join the community, this is like a catalyst moment. This is a moment of commitment. This is a moment of signing the social contract, of coming into the group. But when people are RSCPing to your event, they're not signing up to join your community. They're signing up to RSCP to join an event. And so I think it just muddies the waters and it blurs the lines a little bit between what's actually happening here. Am I a part of this community? Am I not a part of this community? Functionally, all that happens is they sign up, they create their profile, they only have access to that public event space. They can RSCP to that event and they're good to go. But I like the moment that someone formally joins the community and creates their profile, I want that to be like a catalyst moment. I want that to be a moment of participation, of action and commitment. And I think that the way that the UX is designed in Circle, it doesn't give it that feeling because people are like, Am I joining the community or am I or am I RSCPing to an event? If you are using events as the primary magnet, the primary mechanism for leading people and guiding people into your community. And for me and my community, they are. Honestly, they have great live streaming, they have streaming rooms, so they have great event features, but ultimately that user experience I don't personally prefer. My only other criticism of Circle is that they nickel and dime meal. So if you're signing up for anything less than the business plan, you're gonna find yourself quickly limited by the lack of accessibility to the API and custom profile fields. Those two features in the business plan tend to be like the main thing that get people hung up. The other Thing that I think overpromises First Circle is their marketing hub. Not in the sense that like their marketing hub is incredible for sending email communication to people inside of your community. But it's when people start to use the marketing hub or think they can use the marketing hub to like manage all of their funnels. And now it's managing the communication of their non-members and their members. That's where I'm like, that feature that is not built for that. The marketing hub is great for managing communication with your members once they have joined your community, but it is not great for like funnel development. Your CRM and your email service provider are going to be way better equipped to funnel people and you're gonna have way more features available. So I don't think circle over promises this, but I think that people get it in their minds that they can use it like their email service provider and they're like, oh, it's all in one, meets all in one, meets all in one. And it's it's an all-in-one community platform. It is not like your all-in-line community, CRM email service provider. And if anybody is promising that, go high level. It means that they're not doing any single one of those things. Well, it means that they're just providing like a pretty shitty experience across all fronts. So you do all in one means events, conversation, and content all in one place. Don't start to think that all-in-one means that you can get email and like Zoom and CRM. It's it just doesn't, that's not reality. It doesn't work that way. I'm beating up on Circle a lot, but I like I do want you to know that like I love them. Like I've built more communities on Circle than any other platform. So in my like platform comparisons, I'll do another deep dive where I can show you like some of the benefits of Circle. Like, hands down, they are the most confident choice in my book for building a community, but you just gotta be ready to pay for it. You gotta be ready for the learning curve, and you've got to just know how to navigate that public event feature. And finally, I'm so excited to tell you guys about Heartbeat. So, Heartbeat is where I chose to build my own community. This is a platform that is near and dear to my heart. I came on to the Heartbeat team to help them kick off their customer community back in the day. It's been years now. This platform is as a company, they are less developed than Circle. They've gone through a couple rounds of investment. They are growth-oriented and their team is growing, but they don't quite have that like same just like maturity level as a company that Circle has. So there's a little bit more risk involved in choosing Heartbeat. But with being willing to take on a little bit more of that risk, I believe you ultimately get way more for your money from Heartbeat than from a platform like Circle. So I call Heartbeat like scrappy, quick, they're the best bang for your buck. And the biggest thing for me, and why I chose to build my community there is they have a very events-centric model. So you've heard me talk about those three pillars: events, conversation, and content. And usually an all-in-one platform will get started with one of those as their sweet spot. So, platforms you're not hearing me talk about are like Kajabi, which would be like a content and course platform that like layered on community. I still consider them more of a learning management system than a community platform, which is why I'm not talking about them here. But Heartbeat really, in their essence, got started with like events as the core of their community platform architecture and it shows. And honestly, it makes your life like so much easier. So little things like their Zoom integration automatically posts the Zoom recording to that event once it's completed. You can have one-off events and you can decide to make that event public. And then you get like a public sharing page where people RSCP to that event. So, unlike Circles user experience on this in Heartbeat, when you share that public event page, people are prompted simply to RSCP to the event. They're not joining your community. We're not muddying the waters at all. You get their email, you can see their email RSCP, and you still get all the automated functionality within Heartbeat for that event and for that external member to join without having to muddy the waters and like, do are they a member or are they not? Heartbeat segmentation is also so sick. They have a couple just really cool features. Like they introduced a waitlist feature, which actually came about after Mortiza and I did an episode together on Deer Brie where we were talking about launching your community and having a waitlist functionality where you can charge people like a small amount to join the wait list and then charge them a different amount when your community launch date hits is huge. Like when you're launching a community, that's like the scariest step. So to be able to test that and bring in some income and get some buy-in early in, early on, is huge. And finally, the reality of Heartbeat's affordability is just like insane compared to what you're getting in Heartbeat versus what you like have to pay for to get that in circle is like a pretty wide disparity. And even compared to school, which is like $99 a month, it's like the only tier that they have to date as I'm recording this. Heartbeat's starter package is $40 a month. So you can test your community in Heartbeat for an even more affordable rate. The only downside to that is that it is quite customizable, which again introduces a layer of complexity for the community builder that might inhibit your ability to launch like a very simple test and just get it out into the market. But you can do it for an even more affordable rate than school. So I think testing your community on heartbeat or school, and then even seeing for yourself like what you like, what you don't like, and for your members, you might decide to migrate eventually to something like circle, or you might find that heartbeat meets all of your needs today and tomorrow. So, to recap, the three main differences between circle and heartbeat that my clients and members come up against one is the branding. People who choose heartbeat would say that circle feels more sterile. It feels a little bit more corporate. People who choose circle over heartbeat would say that heartbeat feels like too soft, too like cozy. I find that a lot of wellness, spiritual, healing communities build on heartbeat like really consistently. And I find that more business corporate communities like build on circle. So definitely the branding and the vibe is something to take into consideration a little bit. The second thing is like how risk averse you are and how much money you have to pay. Like the more if you are willing to accept a little bit more risk and pay a little bit less, like you're gonna get a lot more bang for your buck in heartbeat. If you're like, hey, this we've tested the community concept. We just need a platform that we're gonna feel like super confident in today and five years from now, then like Circle might be a better fit for you. But you also have to be prepared in your budget to pay for it. And then the third final element is just comparing how you intend to attract new members to your community. And if you're using events as a lead magnet and you want to host those events in your community, I do think that Heartbeat has a better user experience for that. If you are going to build your community yourself on anything other than school, I highly recommend some type of strategic support to set up your layout because there's some common mistakes that people make. And a lot of my clients will do six strategy sessions with me when they are DIYing their community. And during that time, we cover the foundation of their community strategy and architecture so they don't make these common mistakes. That being said, the next podcast episode is going to cover the top three mistakes that people make when setting up their community platform. So make sure that you like, subscribe, follow along the Deer Bree Podcast to hear more. Thank you so much for sharing some space with me on this episode. Please like and review wherever you find your podcast. To submit your own community conundrum, fiasco, or other drama, go to the link in the show notes. Aloha, and catch you next time.