Whether you’re an established creator with a monster audience of fans or a new creator just dipping your toe into the online space, you probably know that it’s an amazing thing to earn from your work.

And when so many of us are sitting in day jobs dreaming of doing the thing we love full-time, you know that there’s got to be a way to make the leap. But the important question is: how?

How can you actually get paid to do work you love that matters to you and to other people? How can you go beyond a hobby and earn enough to pay your bills and focus on your craft?

You probably know the answer. You need to figure out a way to monetize. And two platforms that are leading the creator economy in terms of helping creators monetize their audience are Mighty Networks and Patreon.

Both give creators ways to earn from their work and do what they love. But which is the right one for you? In this post, we’ll walk you through how Patreon and Mighty Networks work, and help you to figure out which is best for you and your audience.

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Patreon is a website that lets creators monetize themselves and their work. The idea of having a patron dates back to the Roman Empire when wealthy citizens would become benefactors of causes they cared about.

It’s the same idea that launched Patreon in 2013. Musicians Jack Conte and Sam Yam envisioned a platform to fund creators while letting them focus on their work. While the idea is to simply have fans support creators, often for the love of their craft, Patreon has evolved to include ways that creators can give back to their supporters, including offering patrons benefits, selling merch, and more.

Mighty Networks is an all-in-one community platform that lets you monetize with content, memberships, courses, and events.

Unlike Patreon, it doesn’t work on a patronage model. Instead, it gives creators a way to build powerful communities of people who love their work and vision. Mighty Networks lets creators sell memberships at different tiers, and they can sell access to live and pre-made courses, events, and more.

And Mighty's flexible Spaces let you choose from features like live streaming, live events, courses, forums, messaging, member profiles, and a bunch of content options.

In short, Mighty Networks and Patreon both give people ways to monetize their work and join the creator economy, but with different philosophies behind them.

Patreon and Mighty Networks both achieve roughly the same thing, helping creators earn a living from their audience so they can focus on what they do best: creating.

But they go about it in totally different ways and have different philosophies. Here’s how we’ll compare the two:

It’s also possible to mix Patreon and Mighty Networks to get the best of both–we’ll cover this at the end.

• Community engagement: How does each help you build community, host premium content and experiences, and connect members to you and others?

• Monetization: How do these platforms help you earn from your work? And what can you reasonably expect to earn?

• Branding & Personalization: What options do you have to create bespoke experiences and branded Spaces? Can you build YOUR brand?

• Pricing & Features: Both Patreon and Mighty cost something, either a platform fee or a cut of your revenue. We'll compare.

Although we used the word “community” here, Patreon’s model is probably better described as bringing together your fans. The relationship between the patrons and the creator is pretty one-dimensional, but creators can create posts for their patrons to see.

You can also message your fans, whether to say thank you or promote upcoming work, so you do have a way to contact them.

• Patreon is intuitive for content creation, offering text, video, posts, and reactions.

• You can DM supporters either 1:1 or in groups.

• Tiered support levels mean you can serve people at different levels.

• You can create premium experiences for members.

• Patreon has huge brand recognition among creators and fans.

But the sense of “community” is limited. Your fans will know you and your work, and you can let them know about what’s new, but they won’t be able to meet each other unless you create events on a different platform.

Some people might like this model, since it arguably could take a bit less time to just add membership tiers and collect income from your fans. But your fans love to connect with you, too, and the minute you try to create events, live streams, or other cool things for your fans to join, you get beyond the limit of what Patreon can do–you need to start mixing in other software and platforms to get the functionality to fully serve your community.

Mighty Networks lets you create a community in every sense of the word.

It takes you beyond the one-directional relationship of creator-fan and lets you create a whole network of people who care about the same things and are excited to talk about it.

In fact, Mighty is ranked as the #1 community management software by G2.

Mighty Networks means:

• Lots of content options, from discussion feeds to posts to events to livestreams to courses.

• Built-in gamification and AI-boosted engagement tools to get members talking to each other!

• Landing pages, payment and funding tiers, and different ways to bundle access.

With Patreon you start every conversation; you initiate everything that happens. With Mighty Networks this can happen organically, and that’s amazing.

And Mighty Networks also comes with a whole bunch of awesome features to serve your community and help it flourish, stuff like live streaming, polls, discussion forums, and access from either the web or from native apps for every device.

There’s no stitching together software to do an event or run a webinar–it’s all built-in.

Like we said above, Patreon and Mighty Networks are both ways to monetize your work. But they work very differently.

Patreon is about support. It gives the people who love your work the ability to support it. Some of them, the people who believe in you the most, might agree to support you on a monthly basis without ever expecting anything back. These are your true patrons, and–if you have people like this–kudos! For this type of thing, it works really well.

Patreon has also evolved to give people the choice of membership tiers to invest in, and each membership tier usually comes with benefits. So, for example, for people who support at $5/mo, a creator might include a printable piece of art. For people who support at $25/mo, a creator might include access to a hangout or Q&A with them. For $50/mo they might include a personalized piece of art.

The reward structures built into Patreon tiers are totally unique to each creator and what they make, but most find ways to give value to the people who support them.

Many creators will also run events, courses, etc., and they can’t do this on Patreon. They’ll need to pile on additional software–more on this in a minute. But Patreon has recently added the option to create merch for your members. It’s a neat feature for people who are creating visual products or who have a good logo they want to spread around, and Patreon takes care of the production and the shipping.

Your monetization options on Patreon

• Tiered support

• Selling merch

Mighty Networks is built on the principle of creating and monetizing a community. Unlike Patreon, it isn’t one-directional, but multi-directional. Members don’t only consume a creator’s content, they can also build a relationship with both the Host and with other members. They can create their own content.

This makes for a really unique form of monetization, and many people who join an online community are surprised to find that, over time, the connections and friendships they make there are the best thing about it (and the reason they stay).

If you’re a creator, you can monetize your community by charging a membership fee–either a one-time fee or a monthly, recurring fee like Patreon. This lets you unlock the power of a recurring revenue model business.

But, with Mighty Networks, you can also create subgroups and charge for them, you can build beautiful, interactive courses with an intuitive ai-boosted course-creator, or you can sell live events and courses. It gives you a TON of options to monetize your work, and since you’re building a community that knows you and trusts you, upselling into a course on the same platform is way easier.

That means that the best part of Mighty Networks on the monetization front is the sheer flexibility–you can monetize in a bunch of different ways, and you can add more options as you go.

Your monetization options on Mighty

• Create different membership plans

• Sell events and courses

• Sell access to subgroups

• Choose from one-time or recurring costs

• Bundle your offerings

Patreon gives you some options for customizing your page with the look and feel of your brand. You can add a custom avatar and header image, and you can customize your web address as a subdomain on Patreon (ie. patreon.com/yoursite).

As we mentioned above, you can also create merch as a way to reward your members, so this is definitely a way to add a bit of your brand’s flavor to Patreon.

Ultimately, personalization isn’t really what Patreon is all about. Patreon creates their brand first, not yours. But it is possible that people recognize the Patreon brand and are familiar with it, which might be a good thing for your cause.

Mighty Networks is a place to build YOUR brand. It gives you a platform that you can style and customize, adding your own brand colors, feel, logo, and even a one-click option to create your own domain.

The brand carries over wherever you access your community, whether web or mobile.

You also have the option to completely independently brand your groups within Mighty Networks too. So let’s imagine you were a creator with an awesome following, with two different programs you use to teach your members.

You could add custom branding to each of these to give them individual flavor. This applies to creating a course too, each can be customized with their own look and feel.

Mighty Networks also has totally branded community apps! You can learn more here.

The final thing worth comparing to understand the differences between Patreon and Mighty Networks is the way that each platform is priced.

Patreon is “free” to use, but the platform takes a cut of your income depending on which plan you’re on.

As of Aug 4, 2025, Patreon takes a 10% cut off of all platform earnings. This is now the standard. Patreon also takes a cut of things sold on the platform, from 5% - 10%.

Mighty starts from $79/mo as a flat fee.

As you grow on Mighty, you won't get charged more in fees.

We did mention at the top that some creators choose to combine Mighty Networks and Patreon. There are a couple of ways this might make sense.

First of all, as we mentioned above, Patreon is missing a bunch of the features that Mighty Networks has, requiring 3rd party integrations to make it work.

So, you might choose to add Mighty Networks to Patreon for events, live streaming, a course, or even an interactive community. This might especially make sense for you if you’ve already got a following on Patreon and are concerned about moving it; although we’ve got a great guide for how to move an online community too.

The other reason you might combine both Mighty Networks and Patreon is if you’ve got some fans who just want to support your work and leave it at that, and some who are looking for a more extensive community. You might have a membership tier that is just a donation, and another tier that includes access to a Mighty Network.

You can be creative about what this looks like, but there are ways the platforms can complement each other.

Do be careful though, at some point you’re going to end up paying a lot more in fees if you’re trying to do everything in both places. (BTW, it’s probably not worth Patreon just for the merch feature. There are a ton of companies out there that will print and send your merch, if you want Mighty Networks members to have some swag.)

Patreon is pretty passive. You set up the link and go. For monetizing content, it's foolproof. Problem is, creators don't earn much on it. It's not built for a real creator business.

Mighty has an average membership price of $48/mo. For a community that builds itself, that members can really engage in. And it can all be done under your brand.

Do you want a bit of support? Or do you want a creator business? That's the difference.

And if you’re still wondering, you can try Mighty Networks totally free, no credit card required, for 14 days–so check it out!