AARP is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that empowers people to choose how they live as they age. Whether synchronous or asynchronous, video options add tons of value for your members. That changed in the 90s and early 00s with the first widespread online communities, chatrooms and forums. Traditionally, communities have existed in physical spaces like places of worship, libraries, book clubs and community gardens. Gainsight (formerly InSided) powers b2b communities focused on customer feedback, product education, and support automation. Skool focuses on courses and communities in one gamified interface with leaderboards and engagement tracking.

Seek Volunteer offers another searchable database with similar coverage. Most Australian state and territory volunteering peak bodies (Volunteering Victoria, Volunteering Queensland, and so on) also maintain their own opportunity listings. Global Volunteers offers one-to-three week programs for students, families, individuals, professionals, and retirees. Projects include teaching English, supporting women’s craft cooperatives, improving computer literacy, and nutrition education, with destinations ranging from Cuba to China. Volunteer.gov is a great fit for people in the US who are passionate about nature, conservation, and animal protection. You can search for opportunities by state, project, or date, and no specific experience is required.

Members include adults and older teens who want to make real, meaningful friendships based on shared interests. FriendMatch connects you with people looking for real, platonic friendships — not dating. Create your profile, explore members worldwide, and start meeting new friends who share your interests. In the Rooms hosts over 150+ live video meetings,virtual aa meetings &12 step meetings online every week, run by fellowship chairpeople who invite members to share amongst the group. With an meeting attendance confirmation option, members can track the meetings they attend.

Build A Member Profile

And while alone time is important, it’s equally essential to cultivate a sense of belonging beyond our individual bubbles. Research shows that stronger community ties actually support mental and overall health. With this in mind, making space for community is a vital part of living a healthy, fulfilling life.

After all, you’d likely be pleasantly surprised to discover that there are many other people out there who like the same combinations of things that you do. As mentioned, write down all the things that you feel are important to you. Then place those in order of how much time you’d like to spend doing them. If several of those overlap or are of equal importance, that’s okay!

The downside is that this enterprise focus can make the platform feel quite heavy. Thinkific makes a lot of sense when you’re already running a course or education business, but it can feel expensive if all you really want is a place for people to chat and connect. In that situation, you’re paying for a much broader learning and commerce platform than you may actually need.

It’s free to get started, highly customizable and gives members plenty of ways to interact beyond simply posting comments. The biggest question for a business community is the look and feel. Discord is deliberately informal and has strong gaming and consumer associations.

For a B2B customer community, professional network or premium membership, it may feel a little too casual. I was disappointed that prospects cannot properly explore the platform without booking a demo. The dedicated mobile apps and branding options are also a strong selling point if having your own community experience is important to you. It doesn’t try to overwhelm you with endless features, and the core experience of creating and interacting with posts is simple and intuitive. The main downside is that Disciple is aimed at businesses that are prepared to invest in their community. The pricing is considerably higher than many of the more accessible platforms on this list, so it can be difficult to justify for datingblog24.com/blog/bestdates-review-what-i-found-going-feature-by-feature/ smaller communities.

How Much Do The Best Online Community Platforms Cost?

Slack’s pricing is based on active users, rather than giving you a fixed number of community members for one monthly fee. Slack defines an active user as someone who takes an action in the workspace during a 28-day period. Bettermode is a good option for businesses that value customization and integrations, particularly if they want to embed their community into an existing website or product. Pricing is based on the level of community management, automation and customization you need. Professional and above includes live streams and live rooms, with options for co-hosts, moderators, Q&A and recordings. How do you meet new people when life is busy, when you need a change, or when you move to a new city?

In 2025, the options are more diverse and accessible than ever before. A community is a group of people who share common interests, values, or goals. They interact with each other regularly to pursue those commonalities. Since 2002, members have used Meetup to make new friends, meet like-minded people, spend time on hobbies, and connect with locals over shared interests. Catherine Winter is an herbalist, INTJ empath, narcissistic abuse survivor, and PTSD warrior currently based in Quebec’s Laurentian mountains. Choose a volunteer opportunity that speaks to you, and that you think will allow you to connect with others of like mind.

• The flexibility that makes Discord powerful can also make it feel overwhelming as a community grows.
• The majority of opportunities are remote, making it easier for busy professionals to donate their time on a flexible schedule.
• Whop gives you everything you need to launch and scale your community—powerful tools, seamless integrations, unlimited ways to monetize, and reliable payments that just work.
• Volunteer.gov is a great fit for people in the US who are passionate about nature, conservation, and animal protection.

You can sell a community as a standalone product, bundle it with courses or include it as part of a wider membership. For a community you want to build into a long-term asset, the lack of ownership and control becomes a much bigger consideration. However, Facebook’s wider platform includes advertising and other content that members will see alongside your community. They’re also seeing posts from friends, pages, notifications, ads and an endless stream of other content.

If simplicity and getting a community up and running quickly are the priorities, a hosted community platform will be considerably easier to manage. That makes it particularly interesting for businesses that have a more complicated vision for their community. For example, you could create a membership community with courses, a directory of members and a marketplace, all within the same WordPress website. Reign has dedicated integrations for a number of popular WordPress platforms, rather than expecting you to start from scratch.

Larger communities may offer diverse perspectives and resources, but smaller, more focused groups can provide a tight-knit, intimate environment where members form deeper connections. Once you’ve found an online community that aligns with your interests and values, it’s time to start engaging with other members. These communities can take various forms, such as forums, social media groups, membership sites, or dedicated platforms. They may be public and open to anyone or private and exclusive to members who meet specific criteria. Connecting more than 200,000 organizations with millions of people looking for social-impact jobs and volunteer opportunities.

The biggest difference between Swarm and many community platforms is its approach to video. As a creator and a brand in your own right, you’re the one who’s going to suffer if something goes wrong. So, the online community platform you choose needs to have absolutely top-notch customer support and be able to help your members when they need it. That means the community platform you choose has to support video if you want to keep people truly engaged. At the very least, you’ll want to be able to embed videos in your courses. In this guide, we’ll show you what a community platform actually is, the main types out there, and how Whop stacks up against 22 other options for creators and businesses.

With its white-label options, your community can feel like your space, rather than another group living inside someone else’s platform. Mighty Networks is an established community platform that combines community spaces with courses, events, memberships and live experiences. It has a visual, relatively straightforward interface and gives community owners plenty of control over how their spaces are organized.

Once you understand how everything fits together, however, Skool is relatively simple to use. Its deliberately focused approach means there aren’t hundreds of settings or complicated configuration options to work through. This can be a real advantage for communities where members primarily want to check in, join discussions, respond to questions and interact with other members from their phones. If you’re looking to build a genuinely engaging, video-first community, Swarm brings your community, content and monetization together in one place. And as AI makes more of our online experiences automated, genuine human connection is becoming more valuable, not less.

This gives you much more flexibility, but it also makes BuddyBoss considerably more hands-on than a hosted community platform. Rather than trying to be the best community platform, best course platform, best website builder and best email marketing tool separately, it brings all of those pieces together in one place. You can also create private channels and use roles to control who has access to different parts of your server.