Here’s the fact:

Community building is the next big thing.

People want more than just pre-recorded videos.

They need community!

Circle and Mighty Networks are two of the most popular community platforms out there.

But what platform to choose?

This blog post will help you choose between Circle and Mighty Networks.

Here’s a quick comparison table:

Features	Mighty Networks	Circle.so
Pricing starts at 💲	$49/mo (community plan)	$49/mo (community plan)
Transaction fees	0%	4% on the lowest plan, 1% fee on the Professional plan, and 0.5% on the Enterprise plan.
Mobile apps 📱	Apps for iOS, Android and also completely whitelabel app (Called Mighty Pro)	Has both iOS and Android apps with whitelabel option called Circle Plus.
Courses	Yes. But it lacks certificates, course compliance features, video retention graphs, etc.	Yes. But lacks course completion certificates, compliance features, video retention graphs, etc.
Has native live streaming? 📷	Yes	Yes
Integrations	Poor at native integrations. You need to use Zapier. It surprisingly lacks API, unlike Circle.so.	Offers native integrations with over 10 apps. Additionally, it supports Zapier and Integrately integrations.

Quick overview ✨

Circle is actually a newcomer in the market, having been launched in 2019. It was founded by Sid Yadav (Teachable’s first designer), Andrew Guttormsen (VP of growth at Teachable), and Rudy Santino (head of design), who were former employees of Teachable.

Interestingly, Ankur Nagpal, the founder of Teachable, became one of the early investors in Circle and provided strategic guidance.

This backing, combined with Circle’s innovative features, has positioned the platform as a strong contender in the community and course hosting space.

Mighty Networks was founded in 2017 by Gina Bianchini, who previously worked at Ning (eventually sold for $150 million in 2011), a social network platform serving over 100 million people.

Gina’s understanding of the need for a distraction-free platform and focus on audience engagement shaped the development of Mighty Networks.

👉 Previously, both Mighty Networks and Circle were developed as standalone community components that you could plug into your existing stack. Later, they became end-to-end platforms.

Quick decision

👍 What do we like about Mighty Networks vs. Circle?

• Extra features: Mighty Networks offers unique features like events, a calendar, and location-based matchmaking.
• Group messaging: Your community members can create group chats with upto 9 members (may encourage in-group bias).
• Events calendar: Mighty Networks comes with an events calendar for you to get a quick view of all the upcoming events or live sessions.
• No transaction fees: Mighty Networks does not charge any transaction fees on its plans, providing cost savings for creators.

👍 What do we like about Circle vs. Mighty Networks?

• Intuitive UI/UX: Circle’s UI/UX is intuitive and clean, resembling Slack. It feels right at home. On the other hand, the Mighty Networks interface can feel clunky!
• Automation workflows: Circle’s new automation workflows (Business plan), allows you to automate various workflows right within the platform by making use of triggers and actions.
• Good community moderation features: Circle offer a keyword blacklist and profanity blocker to avoid spam, which can be useful for managing larger communities. Looking to build public communities with Mighty Networks? Stay away!
• Embed widget: Circle provides an embed widget to host your community or a space on external platforms you are using, say WordPress!
• Ships new features: Despite being a new entrant, Circle rapidly introduces new features, especially those geared towards automation and integrations. On the other hand, Mighty Network’s developmental road map has almost stalled in the recent years.

Upfront Bottomline✨

In my opinion, when comparing Circle and Mighty Networks, Circle is clearly the winner.

It is not only led by the founding team of Teachable, but its UI/UX are far superior to those of Mighty Networks.

Also, Circle’s development speed is impressive.

They release new features by emphasizing crucial aspects like automation, integrations, and marketing.

On the other hand:

Mighty Networks seems to have inertia as an early adopter and is not focusing on seemingly important aspects.

It has a bloated user interface and lacks essential features like integrations with other popular platforms inspite of lot of user requests in their community (deaf ears!).

In essence, Circle is clearly the winner. Despite being a late entrant, it is very well refined, and the rapid implementation of features puts it in a strong position.

Interface

Circle and Mighty Networks have distinct user interfaces.

Circle has a neat and clean interface, following the design principles of Slack.

The spaces are organized in the sidebar, similar to channels in Slack.

For users familiar with Slack, the Circle interface feels familiar, like a hybrid between Slack and forums.

For instance, see this:

Circle.so has a community switcher tool. With a single click, Circle members can switch between multiple spaces or communities. No more re-logins are required.

This is a really cool feature to help members switch between multiple spaces. Mighty Networks lacks this. Members need to log in manually for each community.

Now about Mighty:

The user interface of Mighty Networks feels quite unintuitive.

Also their UI elements deserves more love.

Because, they feel bloated and oversized.

Additionally, pages in Mighty Networks open in pop-ups, requiring users to click the full-screen button frequently.

This can be distractive, especially when consuming course content.

🏆 Winner: Overall, I really liked the user interface and experience of Circle. Feels clean, modern, and swift. Their UI scales beautifully as they add new features.

Understanding the organization

No let us understand the hierarchy and fundamental concepts on which each of these platforms are built.

With both of these platforms, you can build communities that have:

1. Groups (one group can contain multiple spaces)
2. Spaces (think of these as Slack channels or WhatsApp groups)

You can create separate groups for each training course that you’re having in your community.

With Circle, you can create different types of spaces:

• Posts: Create and share content with your community.
• Events: Organize and manage live events for your members.
• Chat: Engage in real-time conversations with your community members.
• Course: Educate your audience.

In Circle, one space = one content format

On the other hand, Mighty Networks offers a range of features that you can enable within a space:

• 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.

However, it’s important to note that Circle also has an additional feature where you can set the layout of each of the spaces.

You can choose from three different space layouts:

• Feed: Displays posts’ content in a scrollable feed
• List: Collapses posts to show only the title, the last post date, and like/comment counts
• Card: Posts are displayed in a grid showing the cover image

But most of the time, you would be good with the post view.

After all, Circle’s vision is to provide you with Lego blocks to help you build highly flexible communities. The founder also told that their approach is similar to that of Notion.

They always tell – “Circle provides you with the building blocks to bring your vision to life”.

🏆 Winner: Circle, as it offers an excellent organizational system, including various layouts to customize community building. However, there might be some clutter in the sidebar due to the limitation of having only one content format in each created space.

Content and Posts

Once you have set up your community, the next step is to start posting content.

Both Circle and Mighty Networks allow you to create multiple folders or collections within each space to keep your posts organized.

Let’s take a closer look at the post-creation process in each platform.

Circle offers a fully-featured editor for creating posts.

The post editor is similar to Notion, where you can insert various blocks of content such as text, images, downloadable files, and even embeds.

Additionally, you can add a cover image to each post, which is particularly useful for sharing full-length articles within your space.

Circle has also recently introduced AI co-pilot functionality, which suggests different post ideas and helps improve your writing.

On the other hand:

Mighty Networks has a basic content editor with no formatting options.

However, it does offer additional content types, such as formatting a specific post as a question, poll, etc.

🏆 Winner: Overall, Circle’s post editor is more feature-rich compared to Mighty Networks. Circle’s AI capabilities, including the ability to enter custom prompts, are commendable and enhance the post creation experience.

Course Builder 📚

Mighty Networks and Circle, both have a dedicated course builder. You can create online courses and live cohort courses.

As for Circle, you need to select the space type as “Course.”

You can choose from three types of course spaces:

1. Self-paced: Students have immediate access to all course content upon enrollment, allowing them to learn at their own pace.
2. Structured: Course sections are released gradually based on student enrollment. Sections are dripped after certain days relative to each student’s enrollment date.
3. Scheduled: Each section is released on a specific date for all students according to a predetermined schedule.

Their course curriculum consists of sections and lessons.

You can add content types like text, video/audio, images, and files.

When you’re creating any lesson, you have various building blocks that you can use to build your content.

You can drip schedule the lessons to avoid students binge watch them. Also, for engagement, they support comments feature available for each lesson.

Now, when it comes to Mighty Networks, as I mentioned earlier, once you create a space inside a space, you need to enable “Course” functionality for it.

You can create multiple sections, and under each section, you can create lessons or quizzes.

You can also drip feed course content similar to Circle.

Unlike Circle, Mighty Networks comes with the ability for you to create quizzes within the modules. You have various types of quizzes like sequential, timed, and scheduled

Also, you have the ability to set completion options for the quizzes, thereby enforcing the students to actually complete the quiz before moving on.

The completion rate and also the scores of the students will be recorded so that you can analyze how well your students are performing.

🏆 Winner: Both Circle and Mighty Networks have similar features, including limited course capabilities. However, Circle provides more blocks for lesson creation, while Mighty Networks includes quizzes for improved student engagement. In the near future, I have high conviction with Circle when it comes to course features.

Community access

Both Circle and Mighty Networks offer multiple ways to add members to your community.

With both you can manually invite them by inputting their email addresses, import a list of contacts using a CSV sheet, or generate an invite link.

First about Circle.

Circle supports Paywalls. You can gate access to content and charge access to communities.

For this, you need to set your spaces as private or secret.

Set up a paywall.

Circle recently introduced Circle Payments for multi-currency support, offering more control and flexibility without needing other payment provider integrations.

You have the ability to fill in membership details, set pricing, and select the Spaces that members need to access.

Additionally, you can customize the post-purchase experience. This includes personalizing the thank you page, redirecting members to a custom URL, and editing the thank you email they will receive.

With these paywalls you can:

1. Charge monthly or yearly subscriptions
2. Offer paid add-ons and products. 🔌
3. Accept one-time payments

These Paywalls also support coupons, saved cards, multiple currencies, and one-click up-sells.

Now the question is, what will people who don’t have access to your private spaces see?

For that, you can set a lock screen.

👉 This lock screen will not substitute your sales landing page, but it can significantly boost conversions once people join your community or need to upgrade to higher memberships.

Also in Mighty Networks you can control access to each Space. They can be public, private, and paid.

Similar to Circle, Mighty Networks also allows you to set multiple plans and provide access to select spaces depending on the plan your users are in.

👎 However, it lacks a customizable login screen functionality that allows users to view content when they don’t have access to any space.

Design and Customization options ⚙️

When it comes to design and customization, there are notable differences between Circle and Mighty Networks.

With Circle you have the ability to change the community name, URL, visibility, header images, logo, and brand colors.

If you are seeking more customization, you can use dark/light mode, custom CSS to create unique themes and designs.

Mighty Networks also have all these features.

Additionally, Mighty Networks offers term editing functionality. This feature allows you to customize the names of groups, spaces, events, and members.

For instance, you can modify the term for a group to be referred to as a Circle, committee, space, section, tribe, or any other custom name.

This is lacking in Circle.

Nevertheless, both tools allow you to host your community under your custom domain!

🏆 Winner: Tie.

Engagement features 📌

What’s the use of a community platform if it doesn’t come with proper engagement features?

Both Circle and Mighty Networks provide the ability to host built-in events with live streaming functionalities.

You can invite co-hosts or guest speakers to provide more value for users.

Here are some unique features that Circle comes with:

• Weekly digests: Summaries of community activities sent to members weekly.
• Activity score: Numerical value reflecting member engagement levels.
• Leaderboard: Ranking system displaying most active members based on activity scores.
• Member tags: Labels for categorizing and managing community members.

Let me explain the activity score and member tags, as these two features are really effective for gamification.

Circle assigns an activity score to every member of your community based on their presence, contribution, participation, and connection as part of their Community AI.

Based on this activity score, you can add member tags that they can display on their profile as part of gamification.

Or, you can make use of Circle workflows to automatically tag or untag members based on certain actions they take in your community.

On the other hand, Mighty Networks comes with only a badges feature.

You can offer these based on course completions.

Also it has member matchmaking feature allows community members to connect with others who share similar interests.

Also, when you’re in the members directory, you have the ability to filter in the members based on their interaction, location, and also online now status.

👎 None of these platforms come with advanced gamification features like points, levels, challenges and what not. You may need to look at platforms like Skool and Kajabi.

🏆 Winner: Tie.

Workflow automation

Circle has recently introduced workflows similar to automation rules in Kajabi.

This feature is available for Business and Enterprise plan users.

Workflow types:

1. Automation Workflow: Streamline tasks with automated actions based on conditions.
2. Bulk Action Workflow: Perform actions on multiple items simultaneously for efficient management.
3. Scheduled Workflow: Set bulk actions to run on a recurring basis

With Automation Workflow, you can set up a dynamic event and multiple actions to automate the task:

1. When members join the community you can automatically send a welcome message. 💌
2. Add a tag for new members. 🏷️
3. Send a reminder to members when an event is about to start. ⏰
4. Add a member tag when a member is charged for a paywall. 💰
5. Congratulate members when they complete a course. 🎉

Also, in the entry rule, you can filter the target audience to which the automation should be applied.

This flexibility enables you to execute automations only for a specific sub-segment of the audience.

Also, Bulk Action Workflows allows setting audience rules for performing actions in bulk on a segmented audience, thus saving time.

Here are a few of the actions you can perform on the filtered audience

• Duplicate space members from one space to another 🔄
• Send a bulk message to every member of the space 📨
• Add a member tag to every member of the space 🏷️
• Add members with similar interests to a specific space or space group 🧩
• Send a direct message to members with a common profile field value (e.g. common interests, cities, professions) 💌

To know more about setting up workflows and all its future updates, click on this link.

👎 On the other hand, Mighty Networks doesn’t come with any automation features like this. You need to extensively rely on Zapier to create conditional automations like this.

Mobile app 📲

Both Mighty Networks and Circle come with feature-rich apps for iPhone and Android.

Both of these mobile apps are quite feature-rich and allow you to host group coaching calls, live events, and also send out push notifications.

They also offer a completely white-labeled solution called Circle Plus and Mighty Pro, where you can create, design, and launch your own apps in Google Play and Apple App stores.

🏆 Winner: Tie. But, Circle app and interface is quite clean!

Moderation and security

Circle has recently introduced community moderation tools like profanity checking, flagging inappropriate posts, and spam prevention features.

For instance, you can set the number of reports after which a particular member will be flagged.

👎 On the other hand, Mighty Networks doesn’t provide any moderation tools, which is a major complaint from people hosting public communities with them.

🏆 Winner: Circle

Analytics and reports📈

Both Mighty Network and Circle provide analytics to help you analyze how your community is growing.

Circle.so provides analytics related to members, engagement, community traffic, leaderboards, messages, spaces, etc.

The insights you get include:

• Top members
• Active commenters
• Post starters
• Active spaces
• Active posts
• Etc.

Also, Circle has leaderboard feature allowing you to display 30-day top members, active posts and also active spaces to identify and maybe reward the most engaged members in your community.

With Mighty Networks you will get analytics on:

• Members – Details active, returning, and contributing members.
• Content – Shows data on posts, their interactions, and member engagement.

Click here to know all the analytics that Mighty Networks provides.

🏆 Winner: Tie. However, according to Circle’s roadmap, they are planning to work on more in-depth analytics, such as per-student course retention reports, in the near future. This makes sense, as the team previously worked with Teachable!

Affiliate program

Mighty Networks provides an ambassador program to incentivize members to refer others to your community.

This feature, available on Mighty’s Community and Business plans, allows members to become community ambassadors through different tiers (Bronze, Silver, Gold) based on the number of referrals they make.

However, unlike an affiliate program, this program does not track sales and payouts.

On the other hand, Circle offers the ability to set up your own affiliate program, which can also be associated with different paywalls that you create within the app.

And when a paywall sale isn’t linked to any affiliate, you have the option to manually attribute the sale to a certain affiliate.

This flexibility is a great feature.

However, when it comes to paying affiliate commissions, you need to manually initiate the payout process by clicking the ‘start payout’ button in your affiliate dashboard.

Currently, there is no automatic payout function for your affiliates, which could be viewed as a drawback.

Integrations

Mighty Networks offers native integrations with popular tools such as MailChimp, Thrivecart, ActiveCampaign, ConvertKit, and HubSpot.

This can be advantageous if you’re already using these applications.

However, for other tools not included in its native integrations, you’ll have to rely on Zapier.

On the other hand, Circle, despite being newer in the market, already has an API that broadens its integration capabilities.

However, it currently lacks native integrations.

That said, Circle’s ‘Workflows’ automation feature can help you save on Zapier costs, but it’s worth noting that this feature isn’t included in all of Circle’s plans.

In terms of future prospects and development, Circle appears to be more proactive.

It’s already working on providing Webhooks integrations and, given that it’s following the footsteps of successful tech platforms like Notion and Slack, there’s a high expectation for Circle in terms of its integration and automation features.

Pricing and discount 💰

Circle’s pricing starts at $49 per month; however, it only supports up to 100 members.

For most people, the $99 per month Professional plan would be ideal as it comes with courses and live streaming features.

However, if you want additional features like automation workflows and API access, you may need to opt for their business plan at $199/mo.

Mighty Networks pricing starts at $49 per month.

If you want additional features like courses, native live-streaming, integrations, and Zapier, then you may need to go with their “Courses” plan at $119/mo.

At this price it’s costlier than Circle!

If you want your own custom-branded mobile apps, you should opt for Mighty Pro. For pricing details, please contact the support.

🏆 Winner: Mighty Networks. It supports unlimited members on all of their plans.

Support

Mighty Networks and Circle.so both provide good support to assist you.

Mighty Networks has a YouTube channel, in-depth knowledgebase articles, and public community to assist you.

Whereas Circle has knowledgebase articles and a public community of Circle’s users. You can join these communities and ask your queries.

I personally liked the Circle’s knowledge base documents more because they are well detailed and also contain GIFs to easily understand technical concepts.

🏆 Winner: Tie.

Wrap up: Mighty Networks vs Circle.so

In conclusion, both Circle and Mighty Networks offer powerful features for building online communities.

When considering the choice between Circle vs. Mighty Networks for community platform needs, Circle emerges as the superior option.

It has roots in Teachable’s experienced team, Circle has a strategic approach to feature rollouts, emphasizing crucial aspects such as automation, integrations, and marketing tools. It is mirroring successful tech giants like Notion and Slack.

Although Mighty Networks is comprehensive, it suffers from a bloated user interface and lacks essential features like API integrations and automation workflows.

In conclusion, for a reliable, refined, and feature-rich platform to build a thriving community, Circle is the optimal choice.