When it comes to finding a website builder that lets you create memberships, online courses, content, and a thriving community all in one place, all under your brand, and instantly available on every platform, there haven’t been a lot of options available.
Until Mighty Networks.
A Mighty Network is a powerful cultural software platform that gives you a website builder, online course platform, and flexible membership site software rolled into one solution. It’s offered under your own brand, and is instantly available on every device with the option of even offering your Mighty Network on your own mobile apps.
Creating your own Mighty Network means bringing your community, content, courses, and commerce together in vibrant, customizable Spaces. Since Mighty is used and loved by thousands of creators -- and ranked the #1 community platform on G2 -- it’s somewhat of a challenge to identify and evaluate compelling Mighty Networks alternatives.
What other platforms are out there? Does anyone else offer the same combination of features? What else should someone consider when evaluating alternatives to Mighty Networks?
Here are some of the best Mighty Networks alternatives that offer some combination of membership, online courses, and community.
If you want more support in building your online community, come join OUR Mighty Community for free and meet other new and established community owners! We’d love to meet you. Join for free!
In this article...
What makes a Mighty Network special?
Mighty Networks is an all-in-one cultural-software platform for creative businesses, brands, and creators that is powered by community. We started as a community platform whose customers saw the opportunity for them to add online courses and membership features, including paid subscriptions, to their offering.
When creators & entrepreneurs built their businesses on Mighty Networks, they recognized early on that their students:
- Finished their courses at a higher rate (since the majority of people who buy courses on other platforms don’t finish)
- Bought more courses overall
- Got more value from their membership subscriptions–sending loyalty through the roof.
The difference was community. Someone who buys a stand-alone course on another site struggles to finish. Someone who buys a course on Mighty Networks and instantly meets others like them on the same journey will finish it. As Hosts often tell us, people come for the course and stay for the community.
Better retention equals more revenue, plain and simple. And a community on a Mighty Network leads to better retention, lower membership churn, and less work for the creator because of the network effect.
As a result, Mighty Networks evolved from a community platform to something much more. It does what creators once needed 6 different programs to accomplish: they’d try to stitch together a separate online course platform, payment gateway, and Facebook group with a community-powered platform.
With Mighty Networks, they can do this all in the same place, building a community that gets more valuable to every member with each new person who joins.
The combination of things a Mighty Network offers means that, when we’re looking for an alternative, it needs to hold up in a lot of categories. We’re not just comparing a course platform or community software, we need something that does it all.
And very few do.
But we’ll show you some of the top contenders.
And if you want to try the original free for 14 days to get a sense of how it works, check it out! No credit card required.
Judgment Criteria
So here’s the criteria we’re looking for in Mighty Networks Alternatives:
Affordability
With a Mighty Network, you have options no matter what your budget. Unlike many Mighty Networks alternatives, our platform is built to reduce the need for a plethora of integrations to make your community work. Why? Because integrations are what will raise your recurring costs astronomically. The small cost to hosting a community is made up for in the multiple ways you can monetize.
Building community
With its strong emphasis on community, on a Mighty Network your members get multiple ways to foster connections, from direct & group messaging and a relevant, personalized activity feed, to multiple kinds of polls and Q&As and live streaming.
Not only can members build relationships with those near them and like them, but these connections only get deeper when you layer in online courses, workshops, and events–keeping people coming back and renewing their subscription, month after month. They’re building friendships they’ll keep for years to come!
Amazing online courses
Teach it live, pre-record and add community, or mix and match, Mighty's online courses are different. Imagine going through a course with peers, learning not only from the instructor but from each other. Imagine forging relationships in an online course you’ll keep for years to come. Imagine an online course that’s interactive and engaging, instead of one that you have to struggle to stay awake for.
That’s what Mighty Networks helps you build.
Customization options
Imagine. Yup, seriously. Close your eyes. What do you imagine your community, course, or event looking like. What features does it need?
Guess what? With Mighty Spaces, you can pretty much create EXACTLY what you need. Spaces gives you serious customization power -- letting you build your brand in the way you want to. Want a course with an events feed. Do it! Want a simple discussion forum for certain members, that you can also sell access to? Do it!
The power is yours.
Oh, and in case we didn't mention it. Your community also comes with apps for every device, and if you want TOTAL CUSTOMIZING POWER we'll build you a white-label app too.
If that's your jam, you can find more details here.
Awesome live events
Last but DEFINITELY not least, let’s talk about live events. Ask anyone who’s ever been in a Mighty Network and they’ll tell you how much they loved coming to live events. The platform makes it ridiculously easy to set up, collect RSVPs, and host live events–whether you’re running a virtual summit or a community happy hour.
These are the touchpoints that remind members they aren’t alone on their journey, and they love them!
5 Alternatives to Mighty Networks
1. Kajabi
The first Mighty Networks alternative we’re going to look at is Kajabi. Kajabi is a membership and course platform designed to run paid memberships and market, sell, and deliver online courses. It’s well-known in the course-creation space, and has a lot of options for selling and marketing an online course.
Kajabi pros
Course content flexibility. When it comes to online courses, Kajabi offers a variety of course content structures. You can set up courses with text, files, photos and videos (hosted on the platform Wistia); engage students with quizzes and polls; and deliver online courses by dropping them all at once, dripping them out by date, or requiring a student to finish a prior lesson first.
Marketing your online courses or memberships. Where Kajabi really shines is in how it lets instructors market and sell their courses with robust marketing tools to deliver email campaigns, welcome flows, weekly updates, and more; marketing landing pages to create email waitlists or sell exclusive “windows” for purchase; and checkout and payments that support multiple currencies around the world.
Kajabi cons
It’s expensive. As far as alternatives to Mighty Networks go, Kajabi is the most expensive. Its most basic plan starts at $119 a month. This is exacerbated by the fact that you'll be paying for many integrations for business in addition to Kajabi's monthly cost.
Limited community. While Kajabi offers a web-only online forum, it’s basically just a discussion board. It’s so limited that the vast majority of Kajabi instructors use Facebook groups for their online courses or Kajabi memberships, which have issues of their own. There aren’t events, live streaming, or the many other engagement features you get with Mighty Networks.
2. Teachable
Teachable is the dominant platform for online course instructors that want to offer their courses on their own website under their own brand. As far as a Mighty Networks alternatives, if you’re looking for a different place to run your online courses, Teachable is a strong contender after Kajabi.
Teachable lets creators customize a lot about their course, including landing and sales pages. One of its best features is that creators can make an affiliate program; when others refer customers to them, a creator can reward them with a percentage of the course sale.
But the place where Teachable doesn't match Mighty, is with community. Teachable is a course platform only, with no options for community, events, or the many other features of Mighty Networks.
Teachable pros
Easy to set up. Building an online course on Teachable is a straightforward process. The online course platform allows you to add multiple content types to your courses, including videos and quizzes.
Enables certification. Unlike a Mighty Network, Teachable gives course creators the option to create certificates for course completion.
Affiliate program. Teachable also lets you recruit affiliates to help sell your course.
Teachable cons
No community. Like the other Mighty Networks alternatives, Teachable doesn’t offer a community option, period. Many course creators end up going one of two ways. Most start Facebook groups, where they have little control over what their students see (including their own messages and posts). Others forgo a community altogether, driving down their student completion rates, mastery of the material, and relationship to their brand or course content. With the many features Mighty Networks has to create thriving communities, live events, teach live courses, and really just grow through human connection, Teachable doesn’t compare.
No membership features. Teachable is not designed to be a membership site. It exclusively powers online courses, limiting the upsell and cross-sell opportunities of course creators who want to offer ongoing membership subscriptions to alumni or creatively deliver new courses to long-time members.
No mobile apps. Again, while they claim native mobile app access, it’s just not there. The mobile web is only available on iOS, not Android.
3. Podia
Podia is a digital storefront that lets you create and sell online courses, memberships, and content downloads. It has some webinar functionality too, and teachers can create themed discussions around their course.
Podia markets itself as a replacement for those who are selling courses on WordPress, which takes a bunch of plugins and integrations, so it also has a no-code website builder and email campaigns.
Podia pros
Beautiful, flexible content that’s easy to set up. Podia is a content creator’s alternative to Mighty Networks. In terms of being an all-in-one platform, they recently launched a community feature on their platform, bringing it more in line with the features of Mighty Networks.
Podia cons
No Apps. The biggest thing missing from Podia is the apps. While Mighty Networks has beautiful, responsive apps for every device, and even the option to customize your apps, Podia has none. This is a big miss, since most of your members will want app access.
Limited customization. With Podia, you won’t be able to build a dynamic website with your own branding. Plus, there’s no option for mobile app access, so your students won’t have a dedicated place to access their courses and content on their tablet or mobile device.
A one-dimensional course builder. Podia’s courses may be wrapped in a well-designed package, but the platform’s course builder is limited. Yes, you’ll be able to build out custom courses, but you won’t be able to add graded quizzes, assignments, or course certification.
4. Tribe
Tribe is a platform that caters to big companies who want to add a community to their existing website. It is a Mighty Networks alternative for the Mighty Networks enterprise solution, Mighty Pro. This means that it’s not really made for smaller creators; it’s made for enterprise users. Tribe lets big-name corporations add a white-label community platform under their brand where customers can have discussions, share content, and ask questions.
Tribe pros
White label customer community. Like Mighty Networks, Tribe reflects how powerful a community can be, especially for big companies that are typically pretty removed from their customers. Members can use Tribe to ask questions, start discussions, share content, participate in polls and more on both a company’s website and their own native mobile apps.
White label mobile apps for enterprise. Tribe started by offering brands their own native mobile apps and have recently pivoted into integrating a community application into an existing website as well. As the data on native mobile apps is striking–increased engagement, longer retention, and closer connections between your members. When you want to evaluate the only Mighty Networks alternative that offers mobile apps like with Mighty Pro, your best bet is Tribe.
Tribe cons
Limited community features. Interestingly, while Tribe allows for a way to map a community to an existing website, the actual community features are more limited than on a Mighty Network. There aren’t the same ways to connect members by location or interests, nor other features many have come to expect from online communities.
No mobile apps outside of the enterprise. While any Mighty Network has the option to access its mobile apps on iOS or Android, this isn’t available with Tribe. With a web-only alternative to Mighty Networks at its lower prices, the engagement is more limited.
No online courses. Tribe is not an all-in-one platform, so it doesn’t have courses.
5. AccessAlly
As the last alternative to Mighty Networks we evaluated, AccessAlly is a small learning management system (LMS) that lets you sell courses, online memberships, and digital products.
AccessAlly pros
Designed for formal online learning. AccessAlly is designed, first and foremost, with formal, conventional online courses in mind. Meant to mirror how instruction has been delivered for hundreds of years, only now online, there are strong features built for progress tracking and quizzes to video bookmarks.
AccessAlly cons
Complicated customization. AccessAlly is a WordPress plug-in that requires you to have your own hosted WordPress website. Not only will you be on the hook for your WordPress customization and operations, you’ll also have to download, integrate, and pay for additional apps, including a CRM like ActiveCampaign or ConvertKit in order for AccessAlly to work.
Expensive. On top of the thousands of dollars you’ll pay for your WordPress installation in order to use AccessAlly, you also have to pay for their software. Their lowest tier package starts at $82 per month, and their most popular package is priced at $108 per month for just online courses.
No community or memberships. Given its focus on its learning management system, AccessAlly is not meant for creating and running memberships or a community. In fact, it believes that an active community in an online course distracts from course content, a contrarian perspective that’s out of step with the direction online courses have rapidly taken over the past few years.
Conclusion
While we’ve given some alternatives to Mighty Networks in this list, none of them have it all. Each of these is missing one of the key features of a Mighty Network, whether it’s memberships, online courses, content, and community all in one place, all under your brand, and instantly available on every device.
It means that when you choose a Mighty Network, you’re investing in cultural software, you're building your OWN culture. Not someone else's.
What’s more, with your own Mighty Network, you can celebrate the inherent power in connecting people together who have similar motivations and passions. Your people will be able to build relationships around their shared interests, enabling them to master something interesting, together.
In the end, this is the fundamental difference between Mighty Networks and Mighty Networks alternatives–the opportunity to deliver more value at a fraction of the cost to you and your members as you build a network that gets more valuable to everyone with each new person who joins.
So before you go, why not give Mighty Networks a try? Start playing around to see what you could create! It’s free to try for 14 days, and you don’t need a credit card to register.
