If you're thinking about creating an online community, bringing together a group of people around something that matters, you know how much power a community can pack.
Online communities are becoming huge in the creator economy, as people look for ways to monetize their work and audiences. People also love joining online communities, since we are more and more searching for ways to connect with those who share our passions.
And, as the community Host, you can create an awesome business with a recurring revenue stream that offers more value per member than any other monetization strategy.
Disciple Media is an online community software that promises to give you the space to build this type of community for your members. And while it has some great features, its choose-your-own-adventure approach to features and pricing – with higher costs the more members or features you add – make it a pricey option.
So, whether you're about to launch your first community or you're working with Disciple and ready for a change, this post will walk you through 6 awesome Disciple alternatives.
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!
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1. Mighty Networks
Mighty Networks brings you the power of cultural software with an all-in-one community-building platform. It has a community engine, based around a forum experience – like Disciple. With this comes flexible Spaces to combine content, community, courses, and commerce, with features like live streaming, live events, group messaging, articles, polls, and more.
And on top of all this, there's an intuitive course-building platform that lets you create a business around sharing your knowledge. You can monetize your Mighty Network in a bunch of different ways, bundling Spaces together and charging in 135 currencies or token-gating.
The biggest difference you'll see between Mighty Networks and Disciple Media is in the pricing. While Disciple adds costs to your bill whenever you increase members or add features, Mighty Networks gives you all of the tools you need and unlimited community for one flat rate.
2. Mighty Pro
Mighty Pro is the totally custom, white-label version of Mighty Networks. It comes with all of the features mentioned above, but also includes your own mobile app, delivered under your own branding, across every device.
Instead of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to create a custom app, Mighty Pro’s white-label approach will give you more for less. Our team will work closely with you; you bring the vision and we'll take care of designing your community app.
Plus, we are in it for the long haul, supporting you throughout your community journey and delivering up valuable growth insights.
Book a call with us and we'll show you what you could do with Mighty Pro!
3. Tribe
Tribe is another white-label community platform that is a good alternative to Disciple. Its main use is to help businesses add a customer community or forum function to their existing website. Tribe gives you a place to create the discussions, post content, and serve up value to your customers on mobile apps.
It doesn't come with a course feature, so if teaching something is going to be a part of your business you might want to look elsewhere. But it's a good forum solution for existing corporate uses.
4. Hivebrite
Hivebrite is a community builder that was created for alumni networking. More and more colleges, universities, and even companies are realizing the power that alumni networks have to create long-term, beneficial relationships. And the modern alumni network is so much more than just asking for money.
Hivebrite offers a community for your alumni to keep in touch and to build relationships with current faculty and students. It offers features like branded apps and push notifications, not to mention a job board – a great thing to have for connecting students to work.
And Hivebrite is increasingly being used in different verticals beyond higher ed.
There are two main features Hivebrite is missing. First, it doesn't have an option to host events, which is a strange thing to be missing since events are so crucial to alumni engagement.
It's also missing an online course function. Not every alumni network chooses to include courses, but adding in training options for things like career searching or professional development can be a really great way to add value to your alumni.
You can learn more about what to look for in alumni management software in this post.
5. Vanilla Forums
Vanilla Forums is another corporate option that was built to give businesses the ability to create a customer community. It gives you the tools to customize your own brand and a set of community management features. Your members can publish content, create groups and subgroups, and add questions and polls.
But as a Disciple alternative, it's missing a few features. Most importantly, it doesn't have the option to sell memberships, so if you are looking for a community that you can monetize, this isn't the right choice.
6. Wild Apricot
The final Disciple Media alternative we'll talk about here is Wild Apricot. Wild Apricot is a community management software created specifically for nonprofit organizations. As such, it has some good features for community engagement and discussions. It also has member management software, to keep track of membership in your organization or association.
It has a website builder so that you can create an online home for your nonprofit. Plus, it has subgroup options that are built for organizations with regional chapters, so that each can have its own website and community. Finally, it has functionality for live events and can be used for ticketing and membership sales. If you are running a non-profit, it's a good alternative to Disciple.
Conclusion - Ready to start?
We've talked about a bunch of different Disciple alternatives in this post. And while there are a ton of different options for building an online community, you won’t find many of them that do everything you need.
Mighty Networks does and it makes it easy for you to get started. Mighty has developed AI-powered Mighty Co-Host™ their community name and brand generator.
Type in any idea you have and Mighty Co-Host™ will will quickly give you a whole set of options to make your community name memorable, shareable, and descriptive. Mighty Co-Host™ runs on Chat GPT and can create your Big Purpose statement, community name, brand, landing and sales pages, and more.
So why not try it?
