Hivebrite is a community platform that lets users build interactive communities and host events. While it has some great features, including its content management system, ability to access useful data, and events platform, there are several better platforms that will let you build and grow a more successful online community.
This post will walk you through 6 solid Hivebrite alternatives and give you ideas for the best place for your community, whether it’s a group of friends, alumni, a corporate community, or something else.
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1. Mighty Pro
As the #1 alternative to Hivebrite, Mighty Pro is a powerful cultural software platform. Mighty brings together community, content, courses, and commerce. Mighty Spaces give you flexible containers that can hold forums, chat, courses, live streaming, and integrated events. Ultimately, it's the place to build an amazing group of people dedicated to growing together.
Mighty also gives you a ton of monetization options, since you can charge for community membership, or to individual Spaces. This makes it perfect for monetizing with whatever features you need (e.g. a mastermind or private coaching group), build and sell immersive online courses (either asynchronous or synchronous), and choose options for membership fees.
Mighty gives you all these features in a completely branded app in the App Store and Google Play Store. And Mighty Pro also comes with a Mighty Pro team to help you build and grow; these are Account Executives and Community Strategists with experience scaling 7-figure brands and 8+ figure subscription businesses.
It’s perfect for all the things that Hivebrite markets itself for: building alumni networks, bringing together professional communities, growing a non-profit member group, or even connecting to corporate alumni.
We've built apps for Cambridge University, TED, Fortune, Adriene Mishler, and more!
Features
- Tons of engagement features like live streaming, polls, Q&A, & group chats
- iOS and Android apps
- AI community building with Mighty Co-Host™
- Add unlimited members, Hosts, and moderators
- A platform that grows with you, giving you monetization options
- Create beautiful and engaging courses members love
- Charge in 135 currencies or with token-gating
- Tons of useful member data and analytics
Schedule a call and we'll show you what we could build together!
2. Kajabi Community
Kajabi is a common creator platform that users can use to build online courses. As one of its features, Kajabi lets you build a community to go with your courses. The community platform on Kajabi has a functional discussion forum that can be divided into topics and courses, and it can be a good place to create a community.
There are two main downsides to Kajabi. First, the focus is more on selling courses rather than building community. If you don’t have a course to sell, and just want a community, it wouldn’t make much sense to build there. The other downside is that Kajabi is really expensive, almost twice as expensive as Mighty Networks.
Pros
- Community can be customized and branded to fit your course
- Create discussion posts and comments
Cons
- Limited community functionality–-focus is on courses
- High cost
3. Discourse
Discourse is one of the alternatives to Hivebrite that has some of its own custom coding options. It’s a basic community-builder that lets you create discussion boards and organize conversations, as well as giving you engagement options to respond to posts. The code is free on Github, and theoretically, you could code a community with it, but you still need to pay for hosting of some sort. The hosting on the Discourse site starts from $100 a month.
All this means that Discourse is a good option for people with some coding knowledge or who are willing to hire a developer. If not, the others on this list are probably a better fit for you.
The place where Discourse is limited as a Hivebrite alternative is on the events side–there are really no event features.
Pros
- Clean design
- Options for self-coding
- Good notification process & organization
Cons
- Complicated to use & expensive if you don’t code
- Limited video options
- No course or events functionality
4. Slack
If you’ve ever been hired in a modern workplace, there’s a good chance you’ve come across the co-working app, Slack. Slack is pretty much everywhere and lots of people know how to use it, making it a potential Hivebrite alternative for hosting your community.
The fact that everyone knows Slack means that it’s a decent alternative to Hivebrite, with some of the same discussion features. It also has a top-notch app for all devices.
The limitations to Slack as an alternative to Hivebrite are the same as its strengths. It’s great for discussions but doesn’t really do much more than this. Like Discourse, you couldn’t host an event on it; it’s much more for chatting than building powerful communities.
Pros
- Popular interface many people know
- Strong native apps for mobile
- Brings together groups that know each other
Cons
- No option for events
- Can’t brand your community
- Pay by the member
5. Discord
Discord was created for gamers, and it’s a good team chat platform. It’s sort of like Slack; it helps community members have conversations. These conversations can be divided into lots of different discussion topics within a Discord “Server.
Like some of the other options on this list, Discord doesn’t have it all. It does conversation well, but doesn’t have events and definitely lacks the analytics options that Hivebrite has.
Pros
- Free & well-known
- Good for conversations
Cons
- No live events function
- Not functional for organizing a large community
6. Facebook Groups
The final potential Hivebrite alternative we’ll talk about is Facebook Groups. Since it’s free and widely used, you might think Facebook would be a great option.
But it’s got some serious limitations.
The first challenge is that when you have a Facebook group, it doesn’t actually show all your content to your members. You’re fighting with the algorithm, and it’s hard to keep a group engaged.
More and more people are also boycotting Facebook for different reasons, which makes it challenging to create a community in a place where your members might not want to hang out.
Finally, you’re competing with just about everything on Facebook–from the 37 other groups each of your members joined to the pics of their BFF in the Bahamas.
For all these reasons, Facebook isn’t the best Hivebrite alternative out there–but it is an option for those looking for a free and easy option to set up a basic group.
Pros
- Lots of users are already familiar with it
- Solid products and web & native apps
- Easy group set-up
Cons
- Fighting the algorithm
- Competing for attention
- Members boycotting
- Limited features
Conclusion
If you’re looking for alternatives to Hivebright, most of these replace 1 or 2 of Hivebrite features. Mighty Networks actually lets you do everything Hivebrite does and more, giving you the ability to host great discussions, live stream, create posts, videos, and polls, sell membership in your home currency, and track detailed analytics.
Plus, it lets you build and sell courses as part of your community, without any extra software required!
