Circle and Mighty Networks are both powerful platforms for building online communities. They offer flexible community organization, rich content posts, engagement tools, such as events and online courses, and free and branded mobile apps.
However, Circle is more user-friendly, provides a better end-user experience, and has better community management and monetization tools, while Mighty Networks has more affordable pricing.
Pros:
Cons:
Circle (or Circle.so) and Mighty Networks are both cloud-based online community builders that offer the same core features:
Circle’s homepage
At a high level, both platforms are very similar, and the differences are only subtle.
For example, Circle supports features like automation workflows and public API. Mighty Networks, on the other hand, has more beginner-friendly pricing.
So, let’s explore their features in more depth to find out what sets them apart from each other.
When choosing a platform for your online community, the last thing you want is to spend days learning a complex system.
Fortunately, both Circle and Mighty Networks are designed for non-technical users, so an average person without specialized technical skills can use them.
In fact, both platforms have a similar community interface, with your spaces listed in the sidebar on the left while posts and other content appear on the right.
Circle’s user interface
Mighty Networks’ user interface
However, Circle offers a more thoughtful UI design, allowing you to perform admin tasks easily and with fewer clicks. Accessing analytics and moderation options, for instance, requires a simple click on the site’s title. In contrast, Mighty Networks involves navigating through the user profile and network settings before reaching these options.
Furthermore, Circle excels in organizing admin options logically, making it easy to find desired features. Its settings display intuitive menu options, such as Onboarding and Custom Domain, which make it clear what they do.
In contrast, Mighty Networks has vague categories, such as Navigation and Premium Features.
Additionally, you need to navigate back to the network settings page each time you want to access another category. So, you’ll need to spend extra time locating features and getting familiar with the platform.
For end-users, the community interface in both platforms is the same for members as it is for hosts, except they don’t see the admin settings.
While the experience is overall good in both cases, Circle does a better job. It has a cleaner design, and the options to create a new post are more easily accessible.
More importantly, Mighty Networks has this odd user experience where articles and course lessons open in a half-screen mode. Circle, on the other hand, opens these on a separate page, making it easier to read and navigate to other sections.
Overall, both Circle and Mighty Networks require minimal technical skills to use the platform, but Circle offers a more well-thought-out UI design, making it easier for admins to manage their online communities and for members to navigate the content.
Both Circle and Mighty Networks offer plenty of tools for community building and engagement. Yet, there are some significant differences between the two, which we’ll discuss in this section.
However, to start, both platforms cover the most essential community-building options:
Now, let’s review the specifics.
Community organization tools are important because they make it easier to explore your community and improve engagement.
Both platforms allow you to create what they call Spaces. They are like sections within your community, and all the community content lives inside them.
You can control privacy and access settings for spaces. For example, you can create private, open, or even secret spaces, allow all community members or just admins to invite others, and even require payment for access.
However, creating community spaces works differently on both platforms. In Circle, each space must be one of six types, and you can create multiple spaces of each type:
Spaces and Groups in Circle
In Mighty Networks, all spaces are created equal, but each space can have multiple sections:
These sections are displayed in a horizontal menu inside your space.
Spaces and Collections in Mighty Networks
Additionally, both platforms let you group spaces together and create a hierarchy within your community. The feature is called Groups in Circle and Collections in Mighty Networks, but they serve the same purpose.
Overall, both approaches work well and give you the same level of flexibility, and it’s more a matter of preference. We like Circle’s approach better because it simplifies the member experience.
In addition, both platforms let you categorize your content by using tags or topics. Mighty Networks calls these Highlighted Hashtags, while Circle calls them Topics. They add another layer of organization and make it easier for members to find what they are looking for.
Having said that, Mighty Networks has a couple of useful organizational tools that aren’t available in Circle:
Now, Mighty Networks has a unique feature called a Discovery page that allows you to can create a page to highlight the most important elements—top posts, top members, hashtags, and more—in your community.
Otherwise, both platforms offer similar features when it comes to creating and organizing community spaces.
Content is the pillar of any online community, and it’s important that your platform supports different content options.
With both Circle and Mighty Networks, you can create quick posts as well as full articles.
For quick posts, you can write text, add images, videos, GIFs, or files, and mention other members. You can publish your post immediately or schedule it.
However, Circle’s post editor does a few things better. The same editor is designed to create both posts and articles.
It doesn’t just make the experience better, but it also opens up all the formatting and embed options for creating quick posts. You can save them as drafts as well.
Circle’s post editor
Mighty Networks, on the other hand, has a separate editor for posts and articles.
With the posts editor, you can’t format your text, embed Instagram posts or Google Maps, add a hyperlink, or save the post as a draft. The article editor does have all these options, though.
Mighty Networks’ post editor
Another difference is regarding their AI writing assistants. While both platforms have integrated AI into their editors, Circle’s AI tool, content co-pilot, lets you not only enhance content but also write content, generate ideas, create outlines, and much more.
On the other hand, the AI assistant from Mighty Networks offers only limited functionality. It allows basic tasks such as correcting grammar, adjusting tone, etc. but lacks the capability for content generation.
Circle’s AI writing assistant
Apart from quick posts and articles, you can also create polls on both platforms to gather feedback from your community members.
However, Mighty Networks offers more flexibility in this aspect. It supports multiple-choice, hot/cold, and percentage-type questions, while Circle only supports multiple-choice polls.
Questions and polls in Mighty Networks
It has another feature called Infinite Question Engine that uses AI to generate an endless supply of questions for your community members to engage with. You can edit these questions and post them manually or schedule them to be posted automatically.
Both of these community platforms support events and live streaming, with similar capabilities, except for a few minor differences in how they work. Here’s what you can do with both:
Creating an event in Circle
Overall, both Circle and Mighty Networks have similar capabilities for content and engagement, even though Circle boasts a more powerful posts editor.
Both Mighty Networks and Circle support online course creation, with a few differences between them.
They both have a drag-and-drop course builder to structure courses into sections and lessons.
They allow you to host your video content and create lessons with text, audio, and video content. You can also attach files and enable comments in the lessons.
Circle’s course builder
When it comes to learning tools, both platforms support content dripping and content locking. However, Mighty Networks also lets you create quizzes in your courses.
Mighty Networks supports content dripping and locking
However, to foster engagement, both Circle and Mighty Networks let you integrate your course content with other community tools, including discussion feeds, live sessions, and group chats. This makes these platforms great for community-driven cohort courses where students can connect, collaborate, and learn together.
From a user experience standpoint, Circle’s course player outshines Mighty Networks. The course player in Circle looks more elegant and also has better navigation.
Circle’s course player interface
In contrast, Mighty Networks’ course player has some shortcomings in terms of design and usability. Upon clicking a lesson, it initially opens in a slide-in window that occupies only half of the screen, lacking a visible navigation area. Only by clicking the Expand icon can users access the full course player experience.
A walkthrough of Mighty Networks’ course player experience
In summary, both Circle and Mighty Networks can be used to create courses in your community. However, Circle has an edge in terms of the course player design and user experience.
Additionally, with Circle, you can integrate with popular course platforms like Teachable and Thinkific. So, if you don’t want to use Circle Courses for any reason, you can use an external platform instead.
Both Mighty Networks and Circle have one-on-one and group messaging features.
For group chats, both support features like chat threads, mentions, and emoji reactions. However, Circle also supports voice messages and message pinning.
Circle’s group chat feature
Now, let’s move on to notifications. Both community builders allow members to receive email and push notifications. Plus, they can select what activities and spaces they want to be notified about.
Member notification settings in Mighty Networks
Overall, both platforms make it easy for members to get notified about the activities that matter to them.
One of the most important offerings of both platforms is their free app for iOS and Android users.
The apps allow you and your members to access your community on mobile devices and stay updated about the latest activities through push notifications.
With each app, community members can create new posts, react to discussions, send private messages, attend live sessions, and watch courses.
The app’s interface is optimized for mobile devices, and navigating between spaces and performing actions, such as creating a new post, are straightforward.
Circle app’s user interface
Mighty Networks app interface
Having said that, Mighty Networks’ app also includes all the admin features and settings. While this makes it possible to make changes to your community and even build it entirely on a mobile device, it isn’t a great idea for a few reasons:
As a result, we believe that a separate app for admins to build and manage their communities would be a better solution.
The Circle app, on the other hand, focuses on the end-user experience, and it executes this very well. However, unlike Mighty Networks, it doesn’t support in-app purchases.
Finally, both platforms let you create branded apps for your community. However, Mighty Networks supports new member signups and in-app purchases through their branded apps, while Circle currently does not offer these features.
Community Builder – The Bottom Line
When it comes to community building, it’s a close call between Mighty Networks vs Circle, and you can’t really go wrong with either of them.
Both platforms have all the features you need for building your community, including posts and articles, events and livestreaming, online courses, 1-on-1 and group messaging, personalized notifications, and mobile apps.
Both platforms have similar capabilities, with a few differences here and there.
Both Circle and Mighty Networks come with built-in monetization tools. Both allow you to create simple landing pages and charge payments, which is what we’ll focus on in this section.
Mighty Networks has a page builder that lets you build a simple landing page for your community. It has a couple of pre-built sections, including a hero section, a text block, and pricing plans, and you don’t get any real customization options here.
Mighty Networks app interface
In Circle, the feature is called Lock Screen, and again, the page-building capabilities are limited.
It supports just four page sections: banner section, description, course lessons, and call-to-action (CTA) sections. You can customize these sections a bit more, but nothing too significant.
Circle’s landing page builder
However, it’s more useful because you can use it to create landing pages for each space or pricing plan, and you have more flexibility in that sense. On the other hand, Mighty Networks lets you create just one landing page for your community.
When it comes to payments, there are a few similarities between the two platforms:
So, both platforms cover the essential features, but the similarities end here. And it’s Circle that shines beyond this point.
When it comes to the checkout page, Circle again has the upper hand. Circle’s checkout page is more streamlined than Mighty Networks. The account creation and payment happen on the same page and look more elegant as well.
A sample checkout page created on Circle
On the other hand, Mighty Networks’ checkout page has multiple steps. In fact, step two asks users to upload their profile picture, which doesn’t make sense and is definitely bad for conversions.
Step 1: Create an account
Step 2: Upload a profile picture
Step 3: Complete the payment
Now, Circle also offers built-in affiliate marketing tools, allowing you to add affiliates and provide fixed or percentage-based commissions to them.
Mighty Networks doesn’t have affiliate marketing features, even though it has something called an Ambassador Program that lets you provide badges and custom rewards to your members for referring other members.
Overall, Circle has an edge over Mighty Networks in terms of landing pages, payments, and checkouts.
In this section, we’ll compare Circle vs Mighty Networks in terms of the tools they offer for reporting and administration.
Both platforms provide essential tools for managing your community and members:
However, Circle has a couple of features that take the whole administration stuff to the next level.
It lets you create custom profile fields to collect additional information from your members, which can make it visible to everyone or keep it private to admins.
However, the most important one is Circle Workflows. Workflows has dozens of triggers and actions, allowing you to automatically perform actions based on certain events inside your community.
For example, you can create auto-messages that are sent to new members when they join your community or even a space. Similarly, you can tag members when they buy a subscription or attend an event.
Automation workflow to message members when they join a space
Workflows also has a bulk action module that lets you select a specific segment of your users at once and perform an action on them at once, like sending a message, adding a tag, removing them from a space, canceling their subscription, etc.
While Mighty Networks also lets perform some bulk actions, they are more limited in comparison.
Overall, Circle stands out with better tools for managing your community and members.
Circle and Mighty Networks have similar reporting and analytics capabilities.
With Circle, you have an overview page that displays high-level statistics, such as daily active members, number of new members, top posts, and top members.
Circle’s Overview dashboard
Besides that, there are detailed reports to get more information on your members, posts, events, messages, and payments.
What’s good is that these reports have several visual tools and graphs, making it easier to drive insights.
With Mighty Networks as well, you get an Overview page with high-level data and separate reports for members, messaging, and livestreams.
Mighty Insights’ Overview tab
Moreover, the reports are well-designed with charts and graphs for better understanding.
The only other difference is that Circle offers better filtering options.
In Mighty Networks, you can filter your reports based on date range and spaces, while in Circle, you also have the option to filter by tags and profile fields.
This can be helpful if you want to get deeper insights into a specific segment of your community.
Otherwise, both platforms provide sufficient reporting and analytics tools to track your community’s growth and engagement.
This is another area where Circle is a clear winner over Mighty Networks.
With Mighty Networks, you get two main options:
And that’s it. While Circle also supports these integrations, it goes much further.
Circle offers iFrame widgets that let you embed your entire Circle community, a specific space, or comments from a specific post on another website.
Circle supports out-of-the-box SSO integrations with many popular membership platforms like Thinkific, Teachable, and MemberPress, allowing users to log in with their existing accounts. There’s even a custom single sign-on option.
Circle’s SSO Integrations
However, Mighty Networks only supports custom SSO integration, which can be a significant barrier for those who aren’t familiar with coding.
Finally, Circle’s public API provides developers with access to the platform’s backend, enabling them to build custom integrations and applications.
Overall, Circle’s extensive integration options make it both more compatible with your current tech stack and more extendable.
Both community builders’ customer support services are almost at the same level.
Neither of the two offers live chat support, even though both have help widgets inside the admin area from where you can quickly get in touch with their teams. And the response time is usually fast.
Circle’s support widget
Besides this, both have comprehensive knowledge bases where you can find answers to almost everything. The articles come with clear instructions and step-by-step processes.
Finally, both Circle and Mighty have engaged user communities where you can ask questions and get help from admins and other community hosts.
Regardless of the platform you choose for your brand, we highly recommend that you join both communities anyway to learn as much as you can about community building.
Mighty Community
To sum up, both platforms offer reliable customer support, and there is no significant difference between the two in terms of support quality.
When it comes to pricing, both Circle and Mighty Networks offer monthly subscription plans.
Circle’s Basic plan costs $49 per month plus a 4% fee, while Mighty Networks’ Community plan costs $49 per month plus a 3% fee.
Circle’s pricing plans
Mighty Networks’ pricing plans
Both plans have similar features, but it’s worth noting that Mighty Networks allows you to have unlimited members, while Circle supports only up to 100 members.
Moving on to the higher tiers, Circle’s most popular option is the Professional plan, which costs $99 per month plus a 2% fee. Meanwhile, Mighty Networks offers the Courses plan, which costs $119 per month plus a 2% fee.
Both plans are comparable and include a similar set of features (e.g., courses and live streams). However, Mighty Networks offers more generous limits on storage as well as the number of moderators and admins.
| Circle Professional | Mighty Business | |
|---|---|---|
The only thing that works in Circle’s favor here is that the Professional plan allows you to remove Circle branding, which is available only on Mighty Pro ($30K/year), a custom plan that also provides branded mobile apps for your community.
Lastly, both platforms have additional plans better suited for larger communities. Circle and Mighty Networks’ Business plans cost $219/month each, and both support increased limits on storage and livestreaming and features like email white-labeling and Workflows.
And like Mighty Pro, there’s Circle Plus ($30K/year) that lets you get your own community apps.
In conclusion, while both platforms offer similar pricing plans, Mighty Networks provides better value for money. It offers more generous limits and has an edge over Circle in this regard.
In this guide, we’ve compared Circle and Mighty Networks based on every single aspect.
While both platforms are similar in many ways, Circle emerges as the winner in many regards, be it the ease of use, end-user experience, monetization features, community management tools, or third-party integrations.
Moreover, it’s suitable for any type of community, regardless of whether it is managed by online creators or a SaaS brand. If you’d like to give it a try, you can start a free trial by clicking below.
On the other hand, Mighty Networks is more budget-friendly. Plus, it matches Circle’s capabilities in critical areas like community organization and engagement.
If you’re an online creator looking for a more affordable option, you should explore Mighty Networks.
Yes, Circle is better than Mighty Networks in many regards. It’s easier to use, more feature-rich, better for end-user experience, and offers more third-party integration options.
Circle focuses on ease of use and supports additional features, like automation workflows, public API, and single sign-on, while Mighty Networks more affordable pricing.
Circle is a better choice if you need to manage large communities. It has better community-management tools, offers public API, and supports single sign-on, all of which make it easier to scale up your community.
Mighty Networks has more affordable pricing. Its entry-level plan doesn’t just cost less but also allows you to have unlimited members, while Circle’s plan limits you to 100 members. Even its Courses plan has more generous limits on things like storage and the number of moderators, making it more reasonably priced.
Hey there! I'm Baidhurya, the brains behind SellCoursesOnline. I used to run a digital agency, where I helped course businesses launch their eLearning platforms. I also led the tech and marketing teams at StationX, helping it grow to 500K+ students. In addition, I created the popular supply chain network design course. With 8+ years of experience, I'm here to share my expertise and insights on course creation and platforms with you.
SellCoursesOnline is supported by its audience. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn affiliate commissions. However, this doesn’t influence our reviews or product listings. All opinions are based on our tests and personal experience with a product/service.
Copyright © 2024 by SellCoursesOnline
Hey there! I’m Baidhurya, the brains behind SellCoursesOnline. I used to run a digital agency, where I helped course businesses launch their eLearning platforms. I also led the tech and marketing teams at StationX, helping it grow to 500K+ students. In addition, I created the popular supply chain network design course. With 8+ years of experience, I’m here to share my expertise and insights on course creation and platforms with you.
We respect your privacy and will never spam you.
