5 Best Mighty Networks Alternatives to Scale Your Service Business Faster

Building an online community is one of the "next big things" for service providers including coaches, consultants and trainers. If you don't have an online community in 2024, be sure your practice loses points in the race for competitiveness.

A chance to scale marketing through user-generated content, offer peer-to-peer support, collect feedback from fans, and enable community members to forge valuable relationships: all under your brand.

To run an online community, though, you need a membership-enabled online community platform. And in the past, that often meant Mighty Networks was your only option.

But other, more flexible and feature-rich, alternative software solutions have emerged, so now you have a broad range of Mighty Networks alternatives.

Read on to consider them all and make an informed choice?  

What is Mighty Networks: brief overview 

Founded in 2017, Mighty Networks is a dynamic platform that redefines community-building and online collaboration. Picture a vibrant digital space where individuals with shared passions, interests, or goals converge to connect, learn, and grow together. Mighty Networks provides it. Considering its broad functionality, Mighty Networks empowers service providers to create, curate, and nurture communities with ease. 

How does Mighty Networks work?

Mighty Networks operates as a dynamic digital hub where community-building thrives effortlessly. It provides users with a versatile toolkit to craft and cultivate their own unique online spaces tailored to their specific interests, passions, or objectives. Through intuitive features such as customizable member profiles, discussion forums, multimedia sharing capabilities, and event scheduling tools, Mighty Networks facilitates seamless interaction and collaboration among members. 

Pros and cons of Mighty Networks to consider

To sum up: Mighty Networks may not be right for you if you're looking to build course platform experiences, easily integrate your community members into your service delivery, customize branding or want a more flexible feature set to grow your business. Or, if paid memberships are not the core focus of your online community.

The 5 Very Best Alternatives to Mighty Networks

"Best" generally depends on personal perceptions. Ultimately, we think the best Mighty Networks alternative should have clear benefits in terms of the four indicators of platform quality:

1. Richness of the platform features
2. Flexibility of the platform (across service delivery use cases)
3. Customization
4. Ease of integration (instead of relying on complicated, time-consuming, and unreliable integrations)

That said, here are five exciting alternatives to Mighty Networks that are gaining significant traction in the marketplace.

5. Mighty Networks vs Thinkific

Thinkific is a user-friendly and expert platform that empowers individuals and businesses to create, market, and sell online courses. With Thinkific, you can easily design custom courses, host multimedia content, engage with your students through discussions and quizzes, and monetize your expertise. The platform provides the tools and support you need to build a thriving online learning community.

Core Thinkific community management features

Discussion Forums: Thinkific provides discussion forums where clients can ask questions, participate in discussions, and collaborate with peers. You can moderate these forums to ensure a productive learning environment.

Messaging: While Thinkific does not offer direct messaging between clients as a standalone feature, they can communicate with each other within course discussions and through messaging with you.

Community Building Tools: You can foster a sense of community among your community members by encouraging collaboration, facilitating group projects, and organizing live Q&A sessions or webinars.

Student Profiles: Thinkific allows your clients to create profiles with basic information about themselves, which can help foster connections and networking within the learning community.

Feedback and Reviews: You are able to gather feedback from your community members through surveys, polls, and course reviews, allowing them to continually improve the learning experience and address any concerns raised.

4. Podia vs Mighty Networks

Podia is an all-in-one platform designed to empower creators, entrepreneurs, and online businesses to easily sell their digital products and services. There you can create and sell a variety of digital products, such as online courses, memberships, digital downloads, webinars, and even coaching services. You don't need to be a tech whiz or hire a team of developers to get started. The platform offers easy-to-use features for building your online presence, managing your customers, and tracking your sales and progress.

Core Podia community management features

Discussion Forums: Podia enables you to set up discussion forums where your community members can interact, ask questions, share insights, and collaborate. These forums can be organized by topic, course, or any other relevant category, providing a structured environment for meaningful discussions.

Direct Messaging: You can communicate directly with your community members through Podia's messaging feature. This allows for personalized communication, whether it's to provide support, answer questions, or offer guidance.

Announcements: Make announcements to your community members to share important updates, new content releases, upcoming events, or any other relevant information. Keep the community informed and engaged.

Member Profiles: Podia offers member profiles, allowing your clients to create their own profiles with relevant information about themselves. It helps personalize the community experience and encourages members to connect with each other based on shared interests or goals.

Community Directory: Podia provides a community directory where your clients can discover and connect with other like-minded people within the community. It makes it easy for them to find and network with others who share similar interests or goals.

3. Mighty Networks vs Tribe

Tribe is a community management platform that enables businesses to build and manage online communities. It provides tools for creating branded community spaces, fostering engagement among members, and analyzing community activity. Tribe allows businesses to cultivate relationships with customers, gather feedback, and drive growth through community interaction.

Core Tribe community management features

Community Building Tools: Tribe provides tools for creating customized, branded community spaces tailored to your needs and preferences. You can design the layout, structure, and branding of your community platform.

Member Engagement Features: Tribe facilitates member interaction and engagement through discussion forums, messaging capabilities, and activity feeds. It encourages collaboration, knowledge sharing, and relationship-building among community members.

Content Management: You can easily create, publish, and manage various types of content within the community, including articles, discussions, polls, and events. Tribe supports multimedia content such as images, videos, and documents.

Gamification: Tribe incorporates gamification elements to incentivize participation and reward engagement within the community. It includes features like badges, points, leaderboards, and challenges to encourage active involvement from members.

Integration Capabilities: Tribe integrates with other essential tools and platforms, such as CRM systems, marketing automation software, and collaboration tools, to streamline workflows and enhance the overall community experience.

2. BuddyBoss vs Mighty Networks

BuddyBoss is a community management platform designed primarily for WordPress users. It provides a suite of tools and features to create and manage online communities, memberships, and e-learning platforms. It's highly flexible and can be tailored to various community needs, making it popular among businesses, educators, and organizations looking to build engaging online communities.

BuddyBoss community management features

Member Profiles: Customizable profiles allow your community members to showcase their information, interests, and activity within the community.

Activity Feeds: A central hub where your clients can share updates, posts, photos, and other content, fostering community interaction and discussion.

Discussion Forums: Robust forum functionality enables your community members to create and participate in discussions on various topics, enhancing knowledge sharing and collaboration.

Events: Integration with event management tools to organize and promote community events, meetups, webinars, and more.

Content Dripping: You can schedule and deliver content over time, ideal for e-learning platforms or membership sites offering courses or exclusive content.

1. Profi - the most holistic Mighty Networks alternative

What's an all-around better alternative to Mighty Networks across every quality indicator?

Well, Seth Davis, an Adult Sleep Coach, votes for Profi for the win.

"As a coach, I have been looking for a platform that can help me keep all or most of my coaching process in one place. And Profi is the closest tool I've found by far. It helps me with everything from scheduling sessions to managing client information, from providing clients with intake forms to hosting video calls."

Profi provides an all-in-one solution for professional service providers (coaches, consultants, and trainers). You get all the tools you need to organize & provide your services:

• Community-building and membership features
• Scheduling and booking
• Multiple service types including individual sessions, group sessions, packages and course creation (it's an online course platform integrated into your services and community)
• Forms and journaling
• Client management (CRM)
• Secure video calls and messaging
• Branded client portals and more

The platform is flexible enough to scale as you grow from a solopreneur into a team or an enterprise. And you can create multiple online communities based on the services you provide or programs you create, so you don't have to turn to disconnected and distracting social networking sites.

It's certainly the most holistic, integrated platform for fast-growing service providers. As Alina Trigubenko, Profi's founder and a coach herself, highlights, 

"Besides offering great community-building and membership features, Profi shines in helping you organize all your bookings end-to-end, easily impress clients with engaging experiences, and increase revenue."

The Bottom Line: finding a suitable alternative to Mighty Networks that helps you help others

There's no doubt that Mighty Networks can help you set up a community platform for your professional services - all thanks to community-focused features that drive engagement and its low-cost offerings. The software, however, has some significant drawbacks: relying on user-driven integrations and setup, having limited or inflexible features that don't cover the service delivery spectrum, and restrictions on users' ability to brand and monetize their client interactions.

Fortunately, many popular alternatives to Mighty Networks, such as Thinkific, Podia, Tribe, BuddyBoss and Profi, resolve some or all of these challenges.‍

What we find is that users are better off doing their due diligence when it comes to choosing a software platform for the long term. Look closely for a secure software that can grow and scale flexibly with your business. Better yet if that company has a business model that aligns well with your own so you can follow the old carpenter's advice: measure twice, cut once.

Want to try Profi.io? Book a personalized demo with one of our experts or use our Free Trial if you’re a Solo practitioner.