Being a group coach is simply awesome. The impact you can have bringing people together to master something important to them? There’s nothing better.
And where individual 1:1 coaching online or in person can be great, group coaching–where you connect small groups of clients to support, encourage, and learn from each other, as much as you–is even more valuable.
With group coaching, your clients can build new practices and habits faster and more easily, and ultimately get better results than they can on their own or just with 1:1 consulting. The structure and support to achieve our goals alongside other people is an essential service that only gets more important in a time and place where more of us are operating in a world full of unknowns.
Nothing beats the ability to navigate a rapidly changing environment than with a community of motivated people led by a group coach.
So, whether you’re ready to expand an existing coaching business or start a new one, you are in a position to positively connect and impact your clients. And there’s no better way to impact even more clients than by tapping software in the form of online coaching platforms.
In this article, we'll walk you through 5 group coaching software picks to help you figure out which one is right for you.
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Why group coaching software?
With online group coaching software, you can grow your client base, connect clients faster and more easily to each other, scale your coaching programs via online courses, and take care of payments for your services all in one place, all under your brand, and instantly available to your clients on every platform.
While the first generation of online group coaching platforms focused on client scheduling, new online group coaching platforms are built to support a new model of online group coaching with a way to:
- Run multiple “mastermind” groups on the same platform.
- Offer members profiles and direct messaging.
- Enable a group coach to reach all of their members with no algorithm standing in the way.
- Allow them to charge for subscriptions, online courses, mastermind groups, and/or bundles of each of these.
- Deliver this entire solution under their brand, immediately available on every device.
This is no longer just about group coaching software that schedules your calendar and sessions.
The best group coaching platforms let you build true community where you bring clients together to master something interesting and important to them.
If the idea of building a dynamic online coaching group excites you, read on to see which group coaching software is the right fit for you.
What makes a great online coaching group?
Moving your coaching group to a virtual space gives you more ways to make your coaching business even better.
For example, when you take your coaching business online, you can bring together more diverse and interesting perspectives and people to serve the needs of your group. This isn’t just about the size of your group coaching service and the ability to use online coaching software to reach more people, it’s also about the kinds of people you’re able to reach.
As you attract more diverse clients, they contribute their stories, experiences, and unique ideas to the group, making it more valuable to everyone with each new person who joins and participates.
Imagine an online coaching group targeted to yoga enthusiasts, populated by people with a variety of backgrounds and yoga styles. Sure, you’re giving people a chance to learn from you, but more importantly, they have the unparalleled opportunity to learn from each other.
Here are a few features that really make a group coaching program shine.
- Online courses. Online courses make delivering an online group coaching program so much easier. When you can structure a step-by-step, day-by-day journey to master something important to people (and see their progress), you’ve got a powerful tool in your toolbox for communicating new knowledge, ideas, and habits. You can teach either a pre-recorded or live course, depending on your platform.
- Community. An online community adds an extra layer of power. When your members can also connect with each other to ask questions, share their experiences, show their progress, and navigate their challenges, together, they have a much higher chance of doing the work and seeing the results they want.
- Real-time engagement tools. Lastly, with online group coaching, it’s a good idea to offer live coaching calls and the options for one-on-ones. Bonus points for setting up resources that your members can access outside of online group coaching sessions, like recorded workout videos, or written how-tos that your clients can refer to in their own time.
Here's the best group coaching software to let you do this.
Group coaching software options
1. Mighty Networks
Best all-in-one group coaching platform
If you’re looking for a powerful group coaching software that gives you ALL the tools to build and sell group coaching, packages, courses, tiered memberships, community, and more, Mighty Networks is the place to be. Mighty Networks is the ultimate group coaching software. And it’s offered under your brand!
Mighty gives you total customization power to build the Spaces you need with the features to serve your clients. Here are some of the ones we're most proud of:
- Live streaming
- Integrated events with Zoom built-in
- Dedicated community spaces and subgroups
- Create tiered plans and bundles
- Chat (individual + all-member)
- Charge in your home currency
- Token-gating
- Single sign-on (SSO)
- Amazing content options (video, text, etc.)
- Build + sell engaging courses (both pre-recorded and live)
- Notification and ConvertKit integrations
- Apps for every device
Here are some of the cool options these features give you for your group coaching business:
- The ability to create and deliver three different kinds of online courses. On a Mighty Network, you can create a “typical” online course with course content, but that’s only the beginning. You can also add a dedicated course community directly to an online course, or even build your online course “live” with your online coaching group, using your members and the community to create course content that you then add as you go.
- The opportunity to break out clients into multiple smaller coaching groups. A Mighty Network isn’t just one big community, but has the option to break clients out into smaller “mastermind” or coaching groups within the Mighty Network. Don’t think of it as a Facebook Group, but rather your own Facebook with the option of multiple groups within it.
- The option to create subscriptions and charge clients. With a Mighty Network, a group coach can create a membership site by charging for access to the overall Mighty Network or leave it free to prospects and offer paid online courses (with dedicated course communities) or smaller paid coaching groups at different membership tiers.
A Mighty Network has the most options for structuring the kind of group coaching programs you want to offer and charging for either individual areas or bundles of multiple courses and groups.
2. Mighty Pro
For those who have a proven audience and/or solid revenue, Mighty Pro takes the cultural software of Mighty Networks and adds one more thing.
Completely branded apps.
This means that you get YOUR app in the App Store or Google Play Store, and your clients will find you. It’s great for coaches with a larger following.
One of our amazing Hosts using Mighty Pro to create a powerful business that includes group coaching is Zach Bush, MD. Zach is a physician specializing in internal medicine, endocrinology, and hospice care. He created The Journey of Intrinsic Health to help people think differently about health. It mixes a community, a course, live streamed events, and – you guessed it – group coaching!
And they do it on beautiful custom apps that showcase their brand.
Request a call to find out more about Mighty Pro and if it's right for you!
3. Kajabi
High-end course platform with coaching options
Kajabi is a well-known course platform that can build a group coaching program. Kajabi and Kartra (below) do a lot of the same things. The main difference is, Kajabi does them better but is much more expensive. Kajabi has a good LMS that gives you the options to build custom landing pages, add evaluations, and deliver content in different ways (e.g. dripping).
Kajabi’s best features are its marketing options, which are complex and give you things like tripwires, cart abandonment options, and discounts.
Kajabi's “group coaching” features are mainly the ability to drip an asynchronous, prerecorded course.
If you’re looking for a fully automated “group coaching” program with high-end marketing built in, Kajabi might be an option.
The areas where Kajabi is the weakest is community and live teaching. Kajabi recently acquired a company to add communities to courses, but this means Kajabi's community platform is actually a separate software. Community and courses don't exist together, and you even need two separate apps to run a program and a community.
But Mighty Networks does all the same stuff for half the price, PLUS adds in amazing community features to bring your group coaching practice to life.
This makes Kajabi the group coaching software pick for a pre-recorded course and complex coaching funnel--but not for live teaching or community.
4. Satori
The best group coaching software for administration
Satori is an app designed initially for yoga instructors that’s focused on the administrative side of group coaching. According to the company’s website, online coaches use Satori to automate admin, deliver stellar client experiences, and grow their coaching practice “with confidence.”
What this means in practice is that Satori can help you schedule and organize in-person workshops and classes. It’s extensively thought of how to make a series of in-person dynamics between a group coach and their clients easier.
It works on a calendar model, letting you build packages and also letting clients schedule time to meet with you. For managing group coaching, Satori gives you the option to create a “Group” which allows you to book for more than one person at once.
Satori is a great group coaching platform for scheduling. But it's missing the community and course features.
- No online small groups or communities. Again, while Satori has focused on packaging group coaching sessions, it doesn’t offer a coach a way to deliver 1:1 consulting or small coaching groups.
- No direct messaging. Satori automates follow-up and keeps track of client communication for you, but doesn’t give you the ability to actually message your students or members via direct messaging or connect them to each other.
5. Kartra
Course platform with basic group coaching capability
Kartra is fundamentally a course platform, not a dedicated group coaching software. But it does have the capability to add group coaching to a course that you’ve created or to offer it as a standalone product. It also has a calendar built in tool for scheduling coaching, although it’s probably more designed for 1:1 than group coaching.
Its course platform is simple but good, giving you different options for building your course landing page and related content.
The community features of Kartra are really limited, but it has some marketing features like email integrations that might help you sell your group coaching package. It's sort of like a more simple version of Kajabi, at a lower price but also not as good.
Ready to start?
If you're ready to launch and scale a group coaching practice, come build on Mighty! You’ll be able to broaden the client base you can serve; organize them seamlessly into online courses, course communities, and small coaching groups, so that they get as much from each other as they get from you; and charge for different subscriptions or membership levels, based on what those clients want or need.
Charge in 135 different currencies, experience the people magic of Mighty Co-Host™, build bundles, and build a program that reflects your brand.
With your own Mighty Network, you are helping more people come together to master the topics that are most important to them in the fastest, easiest ways possible.
And at the end of the day, isn’t that what coaching is all about?
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