Today in this post, we are going to present you Tribe.so alternatives. Tribe is one of the most powerful online Community platforms available today.

Tribe.so is highly expensive. It is only affordable for some. Also, unlike Circle.so or Mighty Networks, it doesn’t have courses or membership features. So, if you are a course creator, teacher, or coach who needs the power of courses + communities, Tribe disappoints you.

It also doesn’t have mobile apps. If you want to create custom-branded apps for your business, then you need to look at Tribe alternatives.

I have researched the best alternative solutions to Tribe. Let’s get started with the review.

Mighty Networks

Mighty Networks is an excellent alternative to Tribe. Its unique features include- courses and branded mobile apps. It is more affordable than Tribe.

If you are a course creator or a coach who wants to host courses, coaching, and communities under one roof, then Mighty Networks would be the best bet.

Notable features:

• Mighty Networks has an online now feature. This helps members to see who is online and connect with them in real-time, similar to WhatsApp.
• It has a built-in ambassador program with various access levels, like silver, gold, bronze, etc., to motivate your members to invite others and get rewarded for their work.
• Its community customization features are good. It supports text modifiers. For example – you can change spaces to groups/channels/classrooms/events. Best for educational or academic-related projects.
• All of its plans support unlimited hosts, moderators, and members. Some of the tools, like Circle.so, have limitations on these, and you need to buy add-ons if you need more hosts, students, or admins, which is disappointing.

Mighty Networks’ main USP is its mobile apps. It calls them Mighty Pro. These are completely white labeled, and you own the complete ownership. You can create, design, and customize the apps as you need.

If you don’t want to spend time building the apps, Mighty Networks has Done for you service. You just need to submit your requirements, and the team will create the app for you. The Mighty Pro apps will help you in taking your business to the take level.

Circle.so

Circle.so was previously developed as a dedicated community-building tool, but now it has also introduced courses. It is the closest competitor to Mighty Networks. It supports coaching (through its live streaming) and memberships features.

For engagement, it has features like group chat rooms, events, spaces, private messaging, rich posts, etc.

To monetize the community, Circle allows you to sell paid access to the content, recurring subscriptions, memberships, offer upsells, coupons, discounts, free trials, etc.

Recently, Circle has introduced a unique live rooms feature. It provides a Zoom-like video conference experience. The Pro plan supports up to 15 participants for live rooms.

Unlike Tribe.so, Circle.so has an iOS app. They are working on releasing an Android app which will be available soon.

Heartbeat

Heartbeat is a block-based community-building tool you can use to host chats, events, and spaces all in a single platform. Using the blocks, you can create personalized communities as per your requirements.

Heartbeat allows you to create groups based on members’ interests, locations, or specialties within your larger community. This helps members connect with others sharing similar interests.

Similar to Kajabi, it has an events feature. You can integrate it with Google Calendar and Outlook to schedule events, share invitations, send reminders, etc.

To monetize your community, it provides integrations with Stripe. With this, you can charge for memberships, gate access to private spaces, create paid groups, or even sell event tickets.

Kajabi

Kajabi is an advanced LMS platform for course creators, teachers, and coaches. It supports digital downloads, coaching programs, courses, communities, memberships, and podcasts.

Kajabi is 80% of courses and 20% of communities. Its community is pretty basic. It just supports posts, members, feeds, and topics. That’s it! When it comes to customization, you can add logo and sidebar messages.

If you just need a basic community component along with courses, Kajabi is good to go with. But if you need a powerful and feature-rich community or want to build a thriving community, you better go with platforms like Circle.so or Tribe.so.

Kajabi’s main USP is its marketing features. It has pipelines (sales funnels), email marketing, automation rules, and events. Using its automation rules, you can automate every task in Kajabi. For example – you can automate lesson completion, event registration, membership post-completion, assessment completion, course enrollment, etc. On higher pricing plans, Kajabi gives access to advanced automations with a conditional filter to specify the automations further. To know more about this, you can refer to my Kajabi review.

Thinkific

Thinkific (read my review) is king in course creation. It has the power of both courses and communities. If you are a course creator or a teacher and want to build course-specific communities, Thinkific would be the best bet.

You can either create a site-wide community or give the community access by a specific course, bundle, or group. Unlike free platforms like Facebook, there are no ads, tracking, or spam. You have complete control over your community.

Thinkific has a downside in that depending on the pricing plan; you have restrictions on the number of spaces and the communities you can create. On the Basic plan ($49/mo), you can host one community and create five spaces per community. None of its plans support unlimited spaces.

StoryPrompt – Video-first community platform

StoryPrompt is a video chat platform you can use to communicate with your teams, clients, family, and friends in real-time. You can use it to collect video testimonials, reviews, and feedback, offer coaching services, and conduct meetings.

StoryPrompt automatically transcribes all the videos helping users to refer to the transcription notes anywhere, anytime they need.

The best thing is that it automatically applies your branding, logo, titles, music, and more to the videos you receive. Also, it has a built-in video editing tool with features like trimming the clips, changing the aspect ratio, adding music and the b-rolls, etc.

What’s more?

This community platform supports spaces, direct messaging, threads, rich posts, polls, memberships, intake forms, and much more.

Discord

Discord is an online community platform developed for gamers. Now it is spreading its wings toward other niches like tech, education, businesses, etc.

It calls its channels servers. You can host all your communications inside servers. There are topic-based channels on Discord that allow you to collaborate, share, and connect with fellow members without crowding the group chat. You can create either public servers or invite-only servers to avoid spam.

As an owner, you have complete control over member access. That means you can moderate the channel for those who can post, share screens, start a voice or video calls, etc. If you need features like emojis, personalizing the profile, or sharing bigger files, you need to switch to Discord Nitro.

Slack

Slack is a team communication app suited for small to medium to large businesses, entrepreneurs, and organizations, to host all their conversations in one place.

You can create both public and private channels. There is a “Slack Connect” channel available to connect with members outside your organization. You can connect with clients, vendors, agencies, and more.

Slack has a Huddle feature – a tool for audio-video conversation and connecting with people in real time. This eliminates the need for switching over to tools like Zoom for meetings. This brings more productivity to your workflow. Huddle supports multi-person screen sharing, drawing & cursors, emojis, reactions, and stickers.

Facebook Groups

Facebook Groups are an open-source platform to host your public or private communities. Communities hosted on Facebook are very easy to join and access.

In contrast to dedicated community tools, Facebook Groups don’t allow you to control posting, group customization, community moderation, or feed. You can make the groups private, add welcome messages, see the group insights, etc.

If you are a beginner and looking for a free platform to host your communities, Facebook Groups are worth considering. LMS platforms like Kajabi and Thinkific have hosted their customer communities on Facebook.

Discourse

Discourse is a free, open-source platform suited for every kind of business. You can use this as a forum, space, channel or create private/public groups to connect and chat with the target audience.

It has some notable features like –

• Dynamic notifications
• iOS and Android apps
• Single sign-on
• Community moderation
• Spam blocking
• Badges and emojis
• Two-factor authentication
• One-click upgrades

PeerBoard

PeerBoard is a plug-and-play community platform best for creators, startups, and brands. With this, you can create communities for eLearning, SaaS, LMS, non-profits, and NGOs.

Its community features include –

1. Spaces
2. Rich user profiles
3. Real-time commenting
4. Member management (Review members, change roles, add badges, and control member access).
5. Moderation tools (Post and comment reporting, pre-moderation queue for fresh accounts, moderator role).
6. Complete white labeled, and you can host communities under your domain.

Vanilla Forums

Vanilla Forums is one of the top community platforms used by brands and companies to host customer support communities. You can use it to either create Reddit-like forums or spaces targeting your audience.

Some of the notable features of Vanilla Forums are –

• Discussions and QA
• Gamification (ranks, badges, and leaderboard)
• User groups
• Single sign-on
• Community moderation (spam filters, edit & delete logs, dismissible messages, etc.).
• Much more.

inSided

inSided is an online customer success community software you can use to create communities, host your knowledgebase, product ideation & feedback spaces, or product communications.

Teachfloor

Teachfloor is an LMS tool best suited for organizations, educational institutions, and creators to host their courses. Unlike LMS tools like Thinkific or Teachable, it is SCORM-compliant.

You can create course-specific communities helping your students to connect with others and engage better. You can monetize your community with a subscription-based business model and sell paid access to your courses, members, digital downloads, etc.

Amity

Amity is an online tool that helps you convert your app or website into a social media network and a community site. This is possible with the help of Amity’s pre-built plug-and-play blocks.

You can add 1-1 group chat, live chat, forums, feed, video stories, etc. Similar to other tools, it also supports comments, reactions, mentions, push notifications, content searches, and real-time events.

Conclusion

Mighty Networks, Circle.so, and Heartbeat are the top 3 Tribe alternatives.

Choose Mighty Networks if you need –

• An affordable community platform.
• All-in-one courses + community tool.
• Custom-branded mobile apps.
• Built-in ambassadors, like programs, and badges, for community engagement.

Choose Circle if –

• You have hosted your business on other platforms like Teachable and want to add a community component to it.
• Custom branded mobile apps are not a major deal breaker for you.

Go with Heartbeat if you need-

• Block-based community-building platform.
• White labeled mobile apps.
• Built-in live streaming and events features.