Today in this post, I am going to review Mighty Networks and Tribe.so. Mighty Networks is a standalone platform for courses, communities, and memberships. While Tribe.so is dedicated only to online communities.

If you are a course creator/teacher/instructor looking to build course-specific communities along with selling online courses, Mighty Networks would be the best choice.

If you are a marketer, a business owner, or a brand owner who is already hosting business on other platforms and now looking to add a community component to it, you can consider Tribe.so.

For a quick breakdown of the features, you can refer to the table below.

Let’s get started with Mighty Networks vs Tribe.

What do we like about Mighty Networks over Tribe.so?

• Mighty Networks has a dedicated course builder. You can create online courses and cohorts. If you are just beginning and want to create basic courses, Mighty Networks LMS features are enough. It along with community features gives emergence to a lot of interesting use cases.
• Mighty Networks supports multiple currencies. With this, you can sell your offers in the local currency based on your member’s geographical location. This helps in getting more sales. In the case of Tribe, it depends upon the payment gateway you choose.
• Mighty Networks supports unlimited members, students, courses, and instructors on all its plans. While Tribe has restrictions on the number of members based on the plan you choose. Its lowest plan at $99/mo supports 2500 members. If you have larger communities, you will end up paying more with Tribe.
• It includes an ambassador program that rewards community members for referring others. For this, there are various levels available like bronze, silver, and gold. This feature helps in scaling your community faster.
• Mighty Networks also has an events calendar for students to get a birds-eye view of all your events and the live sessions. You can use this in sync with your personal calendar as well. Tribe and even Circle.so lacks this, but you can use Google Calendar with these.
• One of the top USPs of Mighty Networks is its mobile app (available for both iOS and Android – it calls them as Mighty Pro). These apps are completely white-labeled and you have complete ownership of them.

What do we like about Tribe.so over Mighty Networks?

• Tribe supports block-based community building. You have CTAs, leaderboards, filter tags, accordions, iFrames, etc. Using these you can create the community as you wish. Think of building a welcome dashboard that appeals to community members.
• Tribe provides community moderation features like hiding posts, keyword blockers, and profanity checkers. They are also working on releasing features like flag posts and flag members. These features are really helpful to avoid spam. Mighty Networks lacks these. But if you have a community solely for paid members (which I recommend), spam detection may not matter much.
• For gamification, Tribe has badges and a leaderboard system. You have welcome badges for new members, VIPs, team badges, etc. You can also create any custom badges like an active member, top ambassador, etc.
• Tribe has excellent native integrations. It integrates with Discord and Slack. You can sync your Tribe channels with these two tools and receive notifications with the Tribe’s community bot.

Common downsides

• Unlike tools like Kajabi, both these platforms lack funnels and automations. In case you need it, you can use external funnel-building tools like ClickFunnels. For automating the community tasks you can use Zapier.
• Both of these platforms lack marketing features like upsells, order bumps, downsells, etc. These are essential to increase conversions. If you need these features you can consider tools like Circle.so or Kajabi.

Latest product updates

Recently, Mighty Networks has introduced several new features like –

• Welcome checklist for new members – you can customize how the community should appear for new members. Provide them with the necessary resources so they can easily explore the community.
• New analytics dashboard – The new dashboard gives insights on members, content, messages, plans, etc. This feature is available for Business plan and Community plan users.
• Mighty Networks now supports polls and is available on the Web, iOS, and Android devices.

Tribe.so updates:

Lately, Tribe has introduced integrations with HubSpot and Discord. With HubSpot integration, you can manage all the member’s data in one place. With the Discord integration, you can receive community notifications directly in Discord with the help of a community bot.

Now, Tribe supports 1:1 private messaging to build stronger member connections.

It has introduced Member badges. It helps in identifying members’ achievements and motivates others to do so.

Upfront bottomline :

Mighty Networks is for you, if along with building communities you also need the ability to sell other products like courses, digital downloads, and memberships. For this, you need an all-in-one platform, i.e. a tool that has the power of communities + digital products. With this, you don’t need to spend money on external integrations apart from building funnels, advanced email marketing, or automation features.

The Tribe.so is the best bet if you only need a tool that supports the community component. For larger communities or if you want to scale your existing community, Tribe is the go-to platform as it has excellent community moderation tools to keep your community secure against spammers. Also, it supports block-based community building. With this, you can create customized community pages, and dashboards and make them interactive without writing a single line of code.

Community features

Mighty Networks community has features like groups, chats, online now (similar to Whatsapp), direct messaging, etc. You have the flexibility to rename what a group should be called – a space, channel, or whatever you wish.

The Tribe has spaces (similar to groups in Mighty Networks), members, private messaging, etc.

The best thing about Tribe is it supports block-based community building. The blocks available include – leaderboard, spaces, iFrame, filter tags, accordions, etc.

With both tools, you can create as many spaces as you need and set them as either private or public. As a monetization strategy, you can charge a fee for private spaces or restrict access only to paid membership users or customers (who purchase your courses or any products).

I really liked the online now feature that Mighty Networks has. With this, the members who are online can connect with each other in real-time and involve in the discussions, and assist & guide others in need.

Also, Mighty Networks has a matchmaking feature. With this, members can connect with others based on their geographical location, their interests, and the communities they share. This also helps in offline meetups and networking.

Community moderation:

Tribe excels over Mighty Networks in this aspect. If you have a large community, moderation tools are very essential to avoid spam. For this, Tribe has a keyword blocklist, profanity checker, manual email verification, and member-suspending features.

They are also working on releasing features like flag posts and flag members.

As of now, Mighty Networks lacks these features.

Winner: Tribe.so. Both these tools have good community features. While Tribe excels over Mighty Networks with its block-based community building and community moderation tools.

Course Builder

Mighty Networks has a pretty basic course builder. It supports online courses and cohort courses. Unlike tools like Thinkific and Kajabi, Mighty Networks doesn’t provide course templates to get started.

Its course curriculum consists of sections and lessons. For adding the course content, you can use text, video, images, and files.

There is a drip scheduling feature available for you to unlock the content over a period of time. With this, you can avoid students binge watch the lessons. You can either drip schedule sequentially or unlock at a specific time period.

What about the course compliance features?

There are no course compliance features available. If these LMS features matter to you the most to improve the students learning progress, you can consider tools like Teachable or Thinkific which provide enforced video completion and graded quizzes features.

Also, Mighty Networks doesn’t offer course completion certificates, pre-launching the courses (but with a workaround, you can do this manually by creating a separate landing page for this), video retention graphs, etc. If you need these features, you can go with Mighty Network’s alternative tools like Podia or Thinkific.

Tribe lacks courses feature. To host courses, you need to use any other online course creation platforms like Teachable, Thinkific, or Teachery.

Winner: Mighty Networks. It has a dedicated course builder and you can create both cohort and online courses. But it lacks features like course compliance, certificates, video retention graphs, etc.

Gamification and engagement features

For gamification, Tribe has member badges and a leaderboard system, while Mighty Networks just supports member badges.

You can create welcome badges for new members, or create badges for VIPs, active members, students, etc. Mighty Networks as of now provides badges only for hosts and ambassador program members. But they are working to make it available for all. You can expect custom badges in the near future.

Both these tools have native live-streaming features. You can conduct events, live classes, and offer coachings to connect with community members in real-time, and increase engagement.

Winner: Tie. Mighty Networks has an ambassador program and badge features while Tribe has badges and leaderboards. Some more gamification features are necessary for both tools.

Mobile app

Tribe.so doesn’t have mobile apps. But its community is built to be mobile responsive and work well on mobile apps.

Mighty Networks has both iOS and Android apps (Mighty Pro – completely white-labeled community apps).

These apps are completely custom branded and are owned by you. You don’t need to spend time custom-coding them. Mighty Networks’ team will handle all the launch, design customization, and technical support. Once apps are ready, you just need to submit them to play stores. That’s it!

If you are not a developer and don’t want to spend time and money building apps from scratch, Mighty Pro is a game changer for you.

As these apps are white-labeled, you can customize them to match your brand, as you wish, and make them appealing to your users.

The students can access courses, memberships, and communities and also attend live streams all in an app. Mighty Pro supports in-app purchases – which means you can sell premium access to courses & memberships inside the apps.

Also, to increase the member’s engagement, Mighty Pro apps support custom branded notifications. You can use this to sell your high-ticket programs, and notify them about your group coaching calls and live events.

What’s more?

Mighty Pro also gives you access to –

• “Mighty Pro Design Lab” which gives you access to its design library of world-class design, splash screens, and app store marketing strategies.
• 1:1 Community Design coaching which guides you on how to launch the apps, get engagement and minimize retention in your community.
• If you want to migrate your business to Mighty Networks, the team will help you migrate your workflows smoothly.

Considering the value that you will get , Mighty Networks is really worth your money.

Winner: Mighty Networks, obviously.

Sales and checkout options

Compared to Tribe.so, Mighty Networks is really good at sales and checkout features.

With Mighty Networks, you can sell courses, digital downloads, memberships, and events for a fee. As Mighty Networks has the flexibility to rename “courses”, you can call it a digital download and sell eBooks. Similarly, you can name groups as events, and sell the premium access.

Mighty Networks also supports bundles where you can sell access to groups, courses, and memberships, all at one fee. For this, you need to use the Bundle plan (inside Mighty Networks).

You can sell your products at a one-time fee or through subscriptions. You can even sell them for free or offer free trials for a certain period. This helps customers get to know the value of your products and you can later pitch them to go for premium access.

As already told, with Mighty Networks you can sell your products in various currencies, thus increasing sales. (But the supported currencies vary depending on the payment gateway you use).

When it comes to accepting payments, users can purchase through credit cards, debit cards, or prepaid cards.

Note: The users can purchase only on the web, desktop, and iOS apps. The Android app doesn’t support in-app purchases. Android users need to purchase on the web.

Unlike Circle. so, both of these tools don’t support upsells, discounts, and coupons.

Winner: Mighty Networks. You can sell various products all within a single platform and increase sales by offering purchases on mobile apps.

Analytics and reporting

Both Tribe and Mighty Networks have recently updated their reporting feature making it easy for you to consume the data easily.

Mighty Networks’ new insights feature presents the data in interactive charts and heatmaps. These insights let you know how your members interact with each other and your content, courses, and groups.

What insights you can see?

• The heatmap in the overview dashboard gives you insights into the active and contributing members.
• The content tab gives you analytics on –
  • Number of posts by type.
  • Total posts and
  • % of posts in the Network/group/course made by members.
• Track your subscription revenue.
• Etc.

Tribe.so provides analytics on –

• Reach & engagement –
  • Provides insights into community activities, page views, unique visits, and popular days and hours. By analyzing the popular days & hours you can plan for important announcements.
• People –
  • Insights on new member growth and active member growth trends. You can use this to analyze whether your membership is increasing or decreasing over time. What is the growth rate? If it is declining, you need to find out the reasons and take action on them.
• Posts –
  • Trends related to posts, replies, and reactions. Plan your content strategy based on what posts have received the most engagement.
• Spaces –
  • Gives a tabular view of top spaces in terms of posts, views, and members. You can take actions like – providing incentives to the top members to motivate them,
• Audit logs
• Email logs

Note : The analytics you get varies depending on the plans. Tribe’s Plus plan gives access to the last 90 days of data and the Premium plan gives 1-year data. While the Advanced and Enterprise plans give access to all-time data.

Winner: Tribe. It has very advanced and detailed analytics with colorful graphical representations. On its higher plan, you even have complete access to full-time data.

Integrations and automations

Tribe.so has more native integrations than Mighty Networks.

Mighty Networks integrates with MailChimp, WordPress, ActiveCampaign, Convertkit, ThriveCart, Flodesk, HubSpot, etc. You can also use Zapier to integrate with thousands of other services.

As of now, 4 triggers and 6 actions are available to automate the tasks in Mighty Networks.

While Tribe.so integrates with Slack, Discord, HubSpot, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, MailChimp, Hotjar, Mixpanel, Fullstory, Intercom, and much more.

As of now, Tribe.so has 13 triggers and 14 actions with Zapier.

Winner: Tribe. It has more native integrations compared to Mighty Networks. You can click here to see all the apps that Tribe supports.

Pricing and discount

Mighty Networks offers a 14-day free trial and Tribe has a free account for up to 100 members. Tribe’s premium pricing starts at $99/mo while Mighty Networks ‘ price starts at $39/mo.

If you have a larger community and want to build a long-term committed community or want to scale your community, Tribe would be the best option. As it has good community security and moderation features to avoid spam.

Mighty Networks discount:

If you choose the annual plan, you will get 2 months free. That means you can save up to $240/year.

If you have small communities and you are just beginning, Mighty Networks would be the most affordable option.

Support

Both these platforms offer good support. They have a good community to help their customers, in-depth knowledgebase articles, and mail support as well. Both have YouTube channels to guide and educate customers.

Winner: Tie.

Wrap up: Mighty Networks vs Tribe.so

Go with Mighty Networks if you need –

• LMS features along with communities.
• Completely white-labeled mobile apps.
• Ambassador program to incentivize the students to promote your products.
• Community match-making features.

Choose Tribe.so if you –

• Need Block-based community building for customization.
• Want to scale your existing communities.
• Need community moderation features for security.

I hope you found this post on Mighty Networks vs Tribe helpful.