Are you looking to build a thriving online community?

Mighty Networks might be on your radar. But is it really the right platform for you?

As someone who have used dozens of LMS and community platforms over years, I understand the importance of finding the perfect fit.

In this review, I’ll take you on a journey through the ins and outs of Mighty Networks, sharing my experiences and insights.

We’ll explore its features, analyze its strengths and weaknesses, and even compare it to other platforms.

Overview

Mighty Networks was founded in 2017 by Gina Bianchini, who previously worked at Ning, a social network platform serving over 100 million people. With a focus on audience engagement and a distraction-free platform, Gina shaped the development of Mighty Networks.

Initially, Mighty Networks was developed as a standalone community component that could be integrated into existing systems. However, it later evolved into a comprehensive end-to-end platform.

Their success is attributed to their strong focus on mobile usability. Their comprehensive mobile app stands out, especially in 2020 and 2021, as it was the only app that allowed users to create Facebook group-like communities under their own domain.

But now things have changed.

Keep reading.

Quick decision

👍 What I like about Mighty Networks?

• Customize term names: It comes with the ability to customize “term” names and the design of your community adds a layer of personalization and control.
• Variety of space templates: There’s a rich variety of templates available for creating different types of spaces including chat communities, feed communities, events or event series, cohort-based courses, content-only courses, discovery, and web pages. This variety provides a flexible foundation for structuring your community and courses.
• Live-streaming capabilities: Mighty Networks has built-in live-streaming functionality, allowing you to host webinars, coaching sessions, masterclasses, high-ticket events, and live meet-ups directly within the platform. This feature eliminates the need for external integrations like Zoom or YouTube Live for live video engagements.
• Native Calendar feature: Mighty Networks offers a native calendar feature that provides an overview of all sessions and events. With this feature, you can easily see all your upcoming programs in a single dashboard, enhancing your webinar attendee rate and boosting your nurturing efforts.
• Mobile accessibility (big +1): The platform provides feature-rich mobile applications for both iOS and Android, known as Mighty Pro. These apps are completely white-labeled, allowing for custom branding, which is a significant advantage over other community-building apps that may lack in app maturity or customization options.
• Zero transaction fee: Mighty Networks does not impose transaction fees on any of its plans, which is a cost-saving benefit for creators who are keen on monetizing their communities or courses.
• Ambassador program: Mighty Networks offers a built-in ambassador program to encourage member referrals. This program is not an affiliate program. It provides badges and allows you to enable manual rewards.

👎 What I don’t like about Mighty Networks?

• Poor user interface: The user interface of Mighty Networks can feel clunky and may take some time for users to familiarize themselves with, especially when compared to platforms with more intuitive and clean interfaces.
• Limited course features: Mighty Networks’ course capabilities are basic, lacking advanced features such as course completion certificates, quizzes, and surveys. If you require more advanced course creation tools, platforms like Kajabi or Thinkific might be better suited.
• Lack of gamification features: It lacks gamification features such as points, leaderboards, activity scores, etc. However, you can do workarounds, such as creating multiple spaces for different people based on their achievements and track record.
• Lack of weekly digest option: By default, Mighty Networks comes with a Daily Digest option, but for most of the irregular members in your community, Weekly Digest may be more useful because Daily Digest may quickly turn out to be spammy.
• Only Stripe integration: When it comes to payment gateways, it only supports Stripe, not even PayPal. And due to the lack of their API, you need to again completely rely on Zapier to integrate it with custom payment gateways.
• Limited integrations: The software lacks built-in integrations and does not have an API. As a result, you have to rely on using Zapier for many advanced workflow automation requirements. They don’t even have support for Make.com or Integrately (Zapier alternatives)!
• Lack of SSO: Unlike other platforms like say Circle, it doesn’t provide single sign-on (SSO) integration with external LMS or membership tools like Teachable, MemberSpace, Memberful, etc. (SSO eases the login process if you have multiple tools integrated into your business).

Upfront bottomline

Mighty Networks offers good value for money compared to other course platforms. It has a mix of community and course features at a reasonable price.

The mobile app is comprehensive and feature-rich. It prioritizes user engagement, which is a significant advantage. I guess this is one strong reason to choose Mighty Networks for many people.

However, it falls short in many areas.

The platform lacks native integrations and has a poor UI and UX which can make it hard to use.

Also, while it has unique features like selling community access for crypto tokens, these may not be useful for many users.

They instead need to be Focusing on improving the basics like UI/UX and integrations could make Mighty Networks a better choice for more people.

If you examine the feature requests made by users over the years, it becomes apparent that many of the major requests have not been implemented. It almost seems as though the platform is trying to maintain an image of being receptive to user feedback, but in reality, they are quite reluctant to introduce many super-important features, which users have been requesting for a long time.

Personally, unless you have a compelling reason and some of the advantages of the platforms are truly game changers for you, I recommend thinking twice before choosing mighty networks. Instead, I suggest considering either Circle or even Kajabi, which has recently enhanced its community features, including gamification.

Explore Mighty Networks

Interface

Mighty Networks has been noted for its bloated and outdated user interface (UI), which may present a learning curve for new members.

The platform’s UI lacks the clean and intuitive design seen in competitors like Circle.

When UI feels funky, sometimes their funkiness detracts you from the most important features offered by the platform.

The platform feels bloated and does not feel intuitive to browse around.

Even the new members who join your community would complain that they took more time to get their heads around the platform.

One really annoying feature of Mighty Networks is its pop-ups functionality.

When browsing certain sections of their app, the pages open in a pop-up forcing you to again open the page in full screen by clicking on the full screen button at the top left corner of the pop-up.

For example, when your students click on a course lesson, it’s opening this lesson in a pop-up and for the students, it would be a real big distraction.

Mighty Networks went through numerous structural and design changes.

Community

Understanding the organization

Mighty Networks underwent significant changes, particularly in late 2022. Initially, it functioned like a typical forum platform, allowing users to create their own forums and groups.

However, they later introduced a feature called “Spaces” (similar to Circle.so) where users had to create a dedicated space for each course or product.

Inside these spaces, various features such as chat, events, table of contents (aka. Courses!), and pages could be enabled.

While this was a welcome addition, the implementation was poor.

Many users reported that the update was forced upon them, leading to disruptions in the structure of their communities and even the deletion of some content.

When it comes to organization, Mighty Networks has spaces and collections.

1. Spaces: Mighty Networks allows you to create dedicated spaces for each course or product. These spaces can have various features such as chat, events, table of contents, and pages.
2. Collections: You can use collections to group relevant spaces together so that the sidebar will be less cluttered. For example, you can use collections to group relevant spaces together. You can use collections to group relevant spaces together (maybe based on membership levels?).

You now know about collections, and under each collection, there can be multiple spaces.

Let me explain what all the things are that you can include in a specific space. When you go to any space settings, there are various available features that you can enable, as you can see in the screenshot.

For example, for every space, you can enable:

• Feed: Share updates, announcements, and content with your community.
• Events: Host and manage live events, such as webinars and workshops.
• Course: Offer courses with modules and lessons
• Discovery: Help members discover relevant content and engage with each other.
• Members: Provide information and profiles of community members.
• Chat: Facilitate conversations and discussions among community members.

🤔 Having the ability to include multiple content formats in one space may be better than what other platforms like Circle require. Circle requires you to create separate spaces for each content format, such as course space, events space, chat space.

Next.

In the Space settings, you have the ability to change who can join, view, or send invites to your space.

• Public – The space content and invite will be visible to all. Members can join without request.
• Private – The space will be hidden, and members must request to join.
• Secret – The space will be hidden until a member accepts the invite.
• Paid – The space content is hidden until a member pays the required fee for that space.

These options cover all your requirements.

Based on the privacy settings of your community, the text on the call to action button will be modified. As shown in the screenshot below, the current text is “Join.”

This means that if a community is set as public, individuals who are not signed in or not part of the community will need to click on the join button.

🚧 I strongly advise against setting the privacy of your space as public on Mighty Networks. This is because the platform lacks strong moderation features like a profanity filter and other spam rules, making it difficult to manage spam in public communities. Many users have expressed concerns about this on various review sites as well.

Now, let’s discuss about various features that Mighty Networks offer you to onboard new members to enhance their engagement right off the bat.

Enrollments and community access

When you go to community or network settings, you can create multiple pricing plans.

For each plan, you can select the products or the access to spaces that will be included.

Mighty Networks also has something called as “Gates” (better term would be Screening), which can be used as a qualification or evaluation process to ensure that users answer screening questions and go through a prequalification process before joining your network.

This pre-qualification can be particularly important based on the niche of your community and helps you avoid spam and focus on quality interactions.

One notable feature is the ability to toggle screening questions and approvals independently, which allows for greater flexibility in covering various use cases.

• Screening Questions only: The member would answer the questions and be able to make a purchase.
• Approval only: The member would require approval to make a purchase.
• Screening Questions and Approval: The member would need to answer the questions and receive approval in order to make a purchase.

👉 If you set your community as public, I strongly recommend implementing a rigorous prequalification process to prevent spam. This is particularly important because Mighty Networks does not provide community moderation features such as profanity filters and spam rules.

You can invite members/moderators/hosts to spaces by sending an invitation email that is customizable.

To ease the process, you can send bulk invites by uploading CSV and importing the contacts. Rather than sending individual emails this bulk process saves tons of time.

Onboarding new users

In Mighty Networks, you have the option to set custom landing spaces for your community members. You can choose a default space where returning members will land and a different space for new members upon enrollment.

For example, you can have new members land on a page where they can introduce themselves or showcase their work, facilitating an icebreaker.

For returning members, you can set the default landing space to the chat area of your community, allowing them to interact with other members with just a few clicks.

Also, Mighty Networks comes with a feature called the welcome checklist.

This checklist is visible to users on the right panel and can be customized by community managers.

You can include your own articles, posts, spaces, events, and polls in the checklist.

For example, you can ask members to fill out their profile, adjust their notifications, download the Mighty Networks app, and introduce themselves in the community.

Currently, there is no ability to create a space-specific welcome checklist, but this feature is a valuable tool for guiding new members through the onboarding process.

👉 I highly recommend you to have the welcome checklist strategically set up because it’s not uncommon for users to find the Mighty Networks interface confusing when they are first getting started, depending on how you have organized your collections and spaces.

Posting content

When people join your community, they will be able to navigate the spaces or collections that are relevant to them and there they can start posting content.

But how good is the post creator?

Depending upon your role in the community, you have the ability to create content various formats of content.

Members in your community have the ability to create quick posts, articles, ask questions, or conduct polls.

For example, most people will create quick posts using the feature-rich post editor, which includes AI features to quickly enhance their text.

Users can fix grammatical mistakes, simplify their message, and make it more succinct.

On the other hand, if users are creating an entire article, the text editor provides various formatting options such as bold, italics, alignments, and heading options.

Overall, the text editor is minimal yet effective.

Member discovery

Mighty Networks offers some unique features that are particularly helpful for member matchmaking and increasing the connectedness between like-minded individuals.

I was impressed with their prioritization of community engagement through member matching based on common interests.

Also, you have a member search engine that allows you to search members based on various filters as shown below.ir common interests.

• Top members: Based on the activities, it automatically recognizes the top member. If you like, you can even add a badge for their work so other community members will be inspired by it.
• Members near you: This match-making feature helps turn an online connection into a real-life relationship. This provides an opportunity for members to gain immense value by sharing each other’s interests.
• Member categories: Based on the space categories you have created, members can find relevant spaces. For example – you can create categories like marketing, blogging, LMS, etc.

As much as we go online, the ability for you to find members who are living near you can help you a lot to build a deeper connection with them and maybe host local meetups, which can be pretty tough on other platforms.

Online courses

To create a new space in Mighty Networks, you have various templates to choose from. When creating a course, you can either create a cohort course (community-based learning) or a content course.

🤔 What are cohort courses? Similar to typical courses, these courses are also organized based on sections and lessons. But it is made available to be taken by a group of students who have enrolled for a cohort at the same time and not necessarily be available all the time.

Under the course material section, you can create different sections and include various lessons in each section.

As shown in the screenshot below, I appreciate the way Mighty Networks allows students to access course material and in one-click interact with the community through tabs such as feed, events, chat, and other enabled features in any space.

When it comes to courses, you can create multiple sections and under each section you can create lessons.

When you create a new lesson, it comes with a text editor similar to the one that I’ve shown before in one of the previous sections.

In this lesson editor, you can upload any videos to Mighty Networks or embed say Vimeo/Wistia videos.

However, the video uploader interface feels very basic and lacks the ability to bulk upload bulk videos

When it comes to lesson delivery, there are three options available.

• None: The lessons are available to your students immediately.
• Timed: You can schedule the release of your course lessons.
• Sequential: The lessons are available only after completing the previous lesson.

Furthermore, Mighty Networks provides a video compliance option, where you can require users to watch an entire video to mark it as complete.

This feature enables Mighty Networks to track whether students are actually viewing the video.

You can set a pass score to enforce students to complete the quizzes before moving on.

👉 Although it tracks video completion rate, it’s important to note that Mighty Networks does not offer video retention graphs or analytics like specialized tools such as Teachable or Thinkific. Also it does not have a certification feature.

In terms of user experience, students can access the lesson curriculum on the left sidebar and consume the content.

However, the interface could be improved.

For instance, all uploaded videos will be too large without proper padding. It’s not very user-friendly.

Events and livestreaming

In Mighty Networks, you have the ability to host live streaming events for your community.

As a host, you can go live at any time using the “go live” feature, which is available not only on the web interface but also on the Mighty Networks mobile apps.

Additionally, you can schedule community events, which will be listed in your events space.

There are different types of events you can create, including live videos, live streams, webinars, online meetings, and text chat events.

Initially, I found the terminologies used by Mighty Networks confusing.

For example:

When conducting an online event on Mighty Networks, it can be confusing to determine whether to select live video, webinar, or live stream. The terminology used by Mighty Networks is not clear and can lead to decision fatigue. For example, webinars and live streams are essentially the same thing, and the distinction between them is unclear. It would be helpful if Mighty Networks improved the naming of their features to avoid confusion and contradiction.

Also, instead of broadly categorizing events as online or local, they could have used terms like “in-person” to make more intuitive sense.

When I said the platform needs a lot of UI and UX improvement, I was referring to these aspects.

Design and customization

As usual, Mighty Networks provides the option to customize your community name, visibility, logos, and brand colors.

You can change the colors of your headers, buttons, tabs, text links, and action items.

Additionally, community members have the ability to switch between dark and light mode in their account settings.

🔥 One unique feature that stands out in Mighty Networks is the ability to edit terms. This allows you to customize the names of collections, spaces, events, and members. For example, you can rename community as tribe, collections as groups, spaces as areas, events as hangouts, and members as soldiers, and so on…

Reporting and Analytics

On the Community and Business plans, Mighty Networks gives detailed analytics on the content, courses, and groups.

In the overview dashboard, you will get insights like daily active members and monthly active members. There is also a heatmap available that tells you when the members are most active and the platform from which they are coming.

In the content dashboard, you can see several insights like the number of posts by type, tiles of total posts, and % of posts in the network made by members.

Here you can also search for a course report by entering the name manually.

You can export the data to analyze and share with the team.

Mobile app

Mighty Networks has the most comprehensive mobile apps for both iPhone and Android.

Their mobile app is super comprehensive and doesn’t hold back any features available on their mobile apps.

You can go live straight from their mobile app and interact with the webinar attendees. It also allows you to send custom brand notifications, notifications related to in-app purchases, group coaching calls, live events, and even new product launches.

Having a really good mobile app is very essential when building any community because email open rates can be low.

With Mighty Networks, you’ll be covered in this aspect.

Additionally, it also offers a completely white-labeled solution called Mighty Pro.

With this, you can create, design, and launch your own apps and get them listed on app stores like Google Play and Apple App Stores.

I suggest you read a case study of Kula by Yoga With Adriene, who switched her community from Facebook Groups to Mighty Pro, after which she saw +130% growth in her business. Her custom-branded apps now have 220,000+ passionate members. It is just awesome.

Marketing and checkout

When managing your network’s landing page in Mighty Networks, you can access the lightweight template editor by going to your network access settings.

However, the available templates for the course sales landing page are limited.

There are two options: the creator template and the community template.

These templates have minimal differences, with the creator template being more suitable for portfolio-centric communities.

It’s important to note that Mighty Networks does not offer a full-fledged page builder for customization.

The template editor only allows you to visually edit certain information on the page, without the ability to add building blocks or advanced features like testimonials, hero sections, or videos.

As a result, many users prefer to build a separate landing page on platforms like WordPress using tools like Elementor or ClickFunnels, and then direct traffic to the checkout page.

Now about checkout.

With Mighty Networks, when users click on the buy button, they will be prompted to either create a new account by entering their first name, last name, email, and set a password or sign into their existing Mighty Networks account that they may be using with other communities.

Once this is done, in the next step they will be prompted to provide their billing details to complete the checkout process.

The checkout process involves multiple steps, which adds to the friction involved in the conversion process.

It is surprising that Mighty Networks, being an established community, has not implemented a single-step checkout functionality, which is a high priority for many online selling platforms.

Also when it comes to the checkout functionality, Mighty Networks only supports Stripe as a payment gateway and does not offer integration with PayPal.

If you are in a country that does not support Stripe, you will need to use third-party payment solutions integrated with Mighty Networks through Zapier.

For example, you can use Thrivecart to handle payments and the checkout process, and set up a Zapier Zap to automatically add members to the appropriate Mighty Networks plan based on their purchase in Thrivecart.

👎 It’s disappointing that Mighty Networks lacks support for multiple payment gateways, instead focusing on Web3 and token gating features that may not be as useful for the majority of users.

Integrations

Mighty Networks has limited integrations. While it allows integration with Google Analytics and the addition of a Facebook Pixel tracking code, there are not many other options.

It does not have direct integrations with popular email marketing software like ConvertKit, ActiveCampaign, MailChimp, and others.

Additionally, it lacks API support for building custom integrations.

Instead, you must rely on Zapier for automation.

Moreover, it does not integrate with other Zapier alternatives like Make.com (formerly Integromat), and you need to pay for Zapier.

It’s almost like they have an exclusive deal with Zapier or something.

Despite multiple support requests, there have been no updates regarding the integration with other platforms like Zapier.

Referral program

Mighty Networks has an ambassador program that allows you to motivate other members to refer more people to your community.

This program is not an affiliate program that pays commissions for sales driven by members.

Instead, you can enable rewards and recognition systems for members who successfully invite others to join the community.

When you enable the ambassador program, each member receives a unique referral link that they can use to invite others.

The number of members they invite determines the rewards they receive.

For giving rewards, you can set use cases like –

• Get a discount of 10% on the store for referring 5 members.
• Level up to receive a place as our featured member of the month.
• Get a free ticket to the upcoming masterclass.
• Etc.

Please note that these are just examples, and you can customize the rewards and recognition according to your community’s needs and goals.

Mighty Networks pricing

If you are already hosting your courses on a separate platform and do not need access to Zapier API, then the community plan at $39 per month may be suitable for you.

However, if you want the ability to create courses within Mighty Network and also have Zapier integration, then the business plan at $119 per month would be the better choice.

For most people, Zapier integration is necessary, leading them to opt for the $119 per month plan.

The $39 per month plan has limitations when it comes to scaling up.

For instance, without Zapier integration, you are unable to use custom landing pages or payment gateways of your choice. This restricts you to using only Stripe (not even PayPal), and also their highly limiting sales landing page.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Mighty Networks is a popular community platform. However, if you value a great user interface and experience, Mighty Networks may disappoint you. They have a history of poorly planned major revamps, which led to the loss of structure and content for many community managers.

While the platform has improved in recent years with a complete revamp, it still takes time to understand how it works. Additionally, many user requests, such as integration with email marketing software and support for other payment processes beyond Stripe, have been ignored over the years.

On the positive side, Mighty Networks has the most comprehensive mobile app, making it a worthwhile choice for community builders who prioritize the mobile app experience.

However, for my business, if I were to choose a community platform, I would go with Circle.so.

Keep in mind that everyone’s needs may vary. You can refer to this blog post on Mighty Networks vs. Circle.so to make a more informed decision.

FAQs on Mighty Networks

What is Mighty Networks?

Mighty Networks is a one-stop destination for online communities and courses. It is best for course creators, teachers, coaches, and, marketers to host their businesses on a single platform.

What is Mighty Pro?

Mighty Networks calls their apps Mighty Pro. These are completely white labeled custom branded mobile apps.

Does Mighty have a free plan?

No. Mighty Networks is a premium platform. But it gives 14-day free trial which you can signup for with this link.

Can I try out the tool before going with premium?

Yes, of course. Sign up for its 14 days trial and you are good to go.