If you’re considering building an online course or community, it’s a fantastic time. People are looking for connection more than ever AND we’re getting used to learning stuff online. This means that creators are reaping the benefits of sharing what they know and bringing people together.
AND the great thing about course and community creation is the amount of solutions out there for white-label community software. With great white-label app options, your members can enjoy access on their mobile devices… from anywhere at any time.
It’s the option YouTuber Drew Binksy took. After traveling the world and racking up 5 billion views across his social channels, Drew wanted to launch an app to share the joy of travel with his fans. He built an awesome, white-label community app with Mighty Pro and 20,000 people joined in the first week!
Whether you’ve got Drew’s following or you’re just getting started, don’t stress. There are great solutions out there.
Today, we’re comparing two: Passion.io and Mighty Networks. We’ll show you what each of these platforms does for you in creating your own app, and rate them based on courses, community, events, and monetization.
Ready? Let’s go!
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In this article…
Passion.io vs. Mighty Networks: Factors for comparison
- App-Building
- Community
- Course Platform
- Events
- Monetization
Passion.io vs Mighty Networks: Who are they?
Features | Mighty Networks | Passion.io |
|---|---|---|
Branded Apps |  | |
Development Style | We Build | You Build |
Community on Every Plan? | |  |
Advanced Community Features | | |
Pre-Recorded Courses | | |
Cohort Courses (Teach Live) | | |
Token Gating | | |
Events | | |
Native Live Streaming | | |
Subscriber Limit | Unlimited | 100 (Basic Plan) |
Starts From... | $33 | $79 |
Mighty Networks
Mighty Networks is an all-in-one cultural software platform that lets you bring together community, courses, content, and commerce. Its community-first focus means that every single Mighty Network runs on a powerful community engine that includes all kinds of content options, notifications, and the Mighty Networks app. And Mighty's flexible Spaces let you mix and match features like live streaming, live events, courses, forums, and more!
For established brands and businesses that want a completely white-label app, Mighty Pro is the premium version of Mighty Networks and builds totally custom apps – past customers include Adriene Mishler, the TedX Network, and Marisa Peers. We’ll lay out the benefits of both Mighty Networks and Mighty Pro below.
Passion.io
Passion.io is first and foremost a no-code app development platform. It gives you a drag-and-drop app builder so that you create your own app. You can choose from templates like a course or membership app – or you can just create from a blank app. The design process feels a lot like Squarespace does for websites.
Passion.io vs. Mighty Networks: App Building
Let’s start off by comparing the app-building processes of these two.
Mighty Pro
First of all, Mighty Networks includes a beautiful app on every plan. So if you’re more interested in a community than a custom app, Mighty Networks does that. Starting from $33/month, the Mighty Networks app is in the App Store and Google Play Store, and your members simply download it and find your community. It works great, and members see your custom branding once they're into the community.
Mighty Pro is for creators and businesses who want totally custom apps. This means that the app is under your brand in the app store (not ours). Mighty Pro also includes advanced customization on the back end, which means things like branded live streaming and custom courses.
Basically, you bring the vision and we’ll work with you to create a beautiful app.
The biggest difference between Mighty Pro and Passion.io is the different approaches to app development. With Mighty Pro, we meet with you to plan your app – but we do the actual building. The result is a more advanced app than anything you could build yourself with Passion.io.
If you’re a busy business leader who doesn’t have time to tinker and figure out a drag-and-drop platform, Mighty Pro is for you. We’ll build the app, help you launch, and meet with you regularly to make sure everything’s running smoothly and talk strategy.
Mighty Pro’s custom-build process has been trusted by creators like Adriene Mishler, host of the popular YouTube Channel, Yoga with Adriene. We worked with her to create a beautiful custom app to help her 10 million+ subs connect and go deeper in their Yoga practice.
Passion.io
As we said above, the main difference between Passion.io and Mighty Networks is the design process. If you’re looking to build your own app from scratch with a simple drag-and-drop builder, Passion.io might be for you. It’s probably best to start from a template since they’ve put together the features you might need for different use cases and that gets you started faster.
The app builder is pretty simple and easy to use. You can add your own customization with things like video and copy, change the themes, and add or take away app tabs. The example below comes with a course function, tracking (for workouts), user profiles, and an optional community. We’ll talk about these features next. As you build, you can choose to add or remove widgets on each page:
Since Passion.io is a fairly easy-to-use app builder, the result is a pretty simple app. Depending on your use case, this might be enough – for example, it would work for a new creator trying to sell their basic program.
Passion.io vs Mighty Networks: Community
Mighty Networks
Mighty Networks comes with a powerful community engine that gives you access to creating ALL types of content, including long-form articles, short posts, videos, polls, and questions. The community also comes with Spaces, an advanced notification system, 1:1 and all-member chat, plus some cool member management features like “Members Near You” and advanced profiles. Finally, the platform also comes with a full set of community moderation and reporting options to help members feel safe – and you can recruit co-Hosts to act as moderators too.
Passion.io
Passion.io does come with a community function, but it's extremely basic. It has the option to create channels (focused conversations), and post to a message board that sort of looks like a chat app. Beyond the channels function, there’s no real way to organize conversations and no advanced content features. The community could work as a sort of FAQ or support feature for the course, but on the whole, Passion isn’t a community platform – it’s a synchronous course platform. Which we’ll talk about next.
Passion.io vs Mighty Networks: Course platform
Mighty Networks
Mighty Networks gives you the option to teach courses in two different ways – live and pre-recorded. The fancy word for this is synchronous vs. asynchronous. You can teach a totally live, cohort course with the intuitive live-streaming platform, which includes branded live streaming for Mighty Pro users. Creating a cohort course allows you to presell the course, generating money before you even launch. And it lets you engage with your class as you teach, answer questions on the fly, and adapt and learn.
BUT, even if you create a cohort course, you can always take the video and add it to Mighty Networks’ course platform (LMS) to create an awesome pre-recorded course. People who watched live can watch the replay, OR you can resell it as a pre-recorded course.
Mighty Networks ALSO works great for people who just want to build a pre-recorded course from the beginning. If you want to work to get the course just right, customize it, and let it live in your Mighty Network, you can do that too. The LMS comes with the options to build different kinds of course content, forum features under every module, native video, downloads, and built-in events and course community.
Unlike Passion.io, Mighty Networks and Mighty Pro give you unlimited courses, members, and moderators, while Passion.io charges you more money as your business grows in size.
Passion.io
Passion.io is primarily a white-label course app, and it works best for pre-recorded courses. In fact, the pre-recorded course function is probably its strongest feature. It gives you the ability to drag and drop premade course widgets into your app to create the course you want.
When you create a course, you give it a name, image, and summary. From there, you can add singular lessons or sequences into the courses that use things like text, video & audio files, typeform worksheets.
You also are able to add interactive lessons. For instance, if you have a workout challenge, you can create short videos for each exercise and include a countdown timer for members to use during your workout.
Passion.io doesn’t really do cohort courses because of its lack of live streaming capability – but we’ll talk about that next.
Passion.io vs Mighty Networks: Events & Live Streaming
Mighty Networks
Every Mighty Network is more than a community and course platform. Communities need events! That’s why each network on Mighty Networks and Mighty Pro comes with an intuitive virtual event platform too.
You can schedule events in advance, with a detailed summary, built-in questions, notifications, and RSVPs. All your upcoming events live under a unique “Events” tab.
When it comes to actually hosting the event, you can opt for the native live streaming feature. Or you can choose to use Zoom since every Mighty Network comes with 1-click Zoom integration and scheduling. You can post videos of past events for those who missed or, as we said above, spin up your video into a course.
When you choose Mighty Pro, you’re hosting these events on your own completely branded apps.
Passion.io
Passion.io doesn’t come with native event capability, meaning that you’ll have to build out events on a different platform. You could do this by announcing events in the discussion section and then linking to another platform, but it’s cumbersome. You’d be mixing and matching solutions, where Mighty Networks and Mighty Pro come with events built-in.
Passion.io also doesn’t come with live streaming built-in, but you can integrate with YouTube to create a live-streaming effect. You’d get this by going on YouTube and setting up live streaming there, then embedding a live streaming link into your online course.
Passion.io vs Mighty Networks: Monetization
Mighty Networks
On Mighty Networks and Mighty Pro, you can monetize in a bunch of different ways. This includes selling membership to a community, selling membership to subgroups, selling live or pre-recorded courses, selling events, OR creating bundles with different combinations of these things. This gives you a ton of different ways to monetize.
You can sell in multiple currencies from around the world. Or, if Web3 is your thing, you can also allow access to your community through token-gating. You can connect a crypto wallet and sell access this way (you can read more about this here).
Passion.io
Passion.io lets you create different plans at different levels, and you can select which features are included in each plan. So, for example, if you had a premium course, you’d simply check the box on the premium course to include it with that plan. When members access the app, they can choose which plan to purchase.
It doesn’t have the flexibility to offer upsells and downsells within the platform or to offer a one-time sale on something like a subgroup. The single point of sale is at the beginning.
Ready to start?
We hope that this comparison has you really excited to launch your online membership, course, and app! If you want to come build with Mighty Pro, schedule a call with us! It’s a no-pressure call and we’ll show you exactly what a beautifully branded app will do for you.
Here's what community Hosts are saying about building on Mighty:
And if you’re getting started with an online course and/or community and not quite ready for a completely branded app yet, come build with us! You can create an amazing Mighty Network your members will love, and we’ll help you upgrade when you’re ready.
