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Mighty Networks is an online platform that allows you to host your community, courses, and memberships in one place. The platform’s strength lies in its core focus on community design and engagement and the powerful tools it offers to this end.
While the platform is easy to use, the user experience can be improved. Other, the pricing is quite reasonable, making it the best option for building a community on a budget.
Mighty Networks is a leading online community platform that also includes features for creating online courses and memberships. It offers a wide range of features and tools to help you build a community-focused online business.
But is it the right choice for you? What features does it include, and how do they compare to its competitors?
To answer these questions and make an informed decision, we’ve created this Mighty Networks review in which we’ll cover all of the platform’s features and discuss its pros and cons.
We’ll also share the insights we’ve gained from helping other creators launch their communities and courses on Mighty Networks.
Ready? Let’s dive in.
Mighty Networks is a hosted platform that offers all the tools you need to build an engaged online community on your website.
It offers powerful community features such as rich media posts, events, online courses, spaces, and personalized activity feeds. Moreover, there are livestreaming options, messaging features, and moderation tools.
On top of the community-building tools, you can charge for access to your community and courses, so the platform supports various community-led business models, including paid masterminds, live cohort courses, and membership sites.
Traditionally, creators have been using social media platforms (e.g., Facebook Groups) to host their communities, but they face many challenges. For instance:
This is where Mighty Networks comes into the picture. Unlike Facebook Groups, it’s designed to let you build an online community you own and control and monetize it however you want.
With this in mind, let’s take a closer look at all aspects of Mighty Networks.
Mighty Networks wasn’t always the most user-friendly platform, and the biggest challenge was that it wasn’t very intuitive to navigate.
However, they redesigned it to significantly simplify the structure and the building process for online communities. As a result, it’s much easier to understand how things work and navigate the website.
Now, the platform presents a clean, intuitive user interface. On the left side of the screen, you can find a list of your spaces, along with an option to create a new space at the bottom.
To create content inside a space, just click on that space in the sidebar, and you’ll see options for creating posts and managing your events, courses, and more.
Mighty Networks has a clean, intuitive interface
However, there are still some issues, and the biggest one is that the network-level settings aren’t well-organized.
These settings are segmented under different headings that aren’t very intuitive, and you need to dig deep to find features.
Another issue is that the menu options first open in a half-screen modal, requiring an extra click for full-screen mode. However, this may be more of a matter of preference.
When it comes to the end users, the interface is very similar to what the community owner sees, minus the admin settings.
It’s pretty straightforward to navigate different sections in your community and create new posts. Moreover, users can search through existing content or filter their activity feeds to easily find content that interests them.
Overall, it’s easy to get started with Mighty Networks. While it may take some time to get familiar with the platform, once you do, things will be much smoother. For end-users, there’s no real learning curve, and getting around shouldn’t take too much effort.
Community-building is the core aspect of Mighty Networks; all the other features it offers (e.g., online courses) are built on top of that. In this section, we’ll evaluate everything the platform offers in this regard.
To start with, it gives you these essential options:
Now, let’s delve into the specific features.
Setting up an account on Mighty Networks creates a community (also called a network) for you out of the box.
After this, you’ll simply need to follow a few steps, such as creating the structure, personalizing a few settings, and adding your branding, and you can start inviting members.
The building block of a Mighty network is what is called Spaces. You can think of them as different rooms within your network, and each can have the following:
Plus, Spaces are pretty flexible. You can choose what sections you want to show inside a space and show them in any order you want.
So, if you’re creating a regular discussion space, you may want to start with a feed and show additional elements like an events area and a member directory.
On the other hand, if you’re creating an online course, you may want to start with the course curriculum and then have a course-specific discussion area (feed).
Moreover, each section type has individual settings. You can rename the feed element as Discussions, change the display’s style, and choose what content types are supported inside of it and who can create what.
Finally, you can control the access permissions of each space. There are four options available:
Now, Mighty Networks lets you group your spaces using the Collections function. A collection is a purely organizational element, and you can use it in different ways.
For example, if you have a paid membership, you can create a collection for all the spaces exclusive to paying members. Similarly, you can group all your online courses under a collection.
Apart from these, Mighty Networks has a couple of additional features that can help you keep your community organized and improve discoverability.
Finally, you can also choose to show some sections at the network level. These include a feed, an events area, a member directory, and a discovery page.
Overall, Mighty Networks gives you many options for building your community structure and keeping it organized, and there’s hardly anything to complain about here.
And if you need inspiration for organizing your community, check out this ultimate list of Mighty Networks examples.
One of the most important aspects of any community builder is producing engaging content for your members. In this sense, Mighty Networks gives you many options.
To start with, you can create Quick Posts and Articles. “Quick Posts” are like status updates, while “Articles” are like blog posts. Apart from text, you can also add images, GIFs, videos, and files.
Additionally, the platform has incorporated its AI assistant—Mighty Co-Host—into the post editor, which you can use to refine and enhance your text content.
When it comes to publishing posts, you can choose to either release them immediately or on a scheduled basis. In either case, you can notify your members via email/push messages when new content is published.
Additionally, you can create polls and questions inside your community. The platform supports four poll types:
Mighty Networks has an interesting AI feature called Infinite Question Engine that generates a continuous stream of questions and polls based on the space description.
You can edit the questions or regenerate them at any time. You can either post them manually or enable the auto-posting feature to let the system publish them on your behalf.
Finally, there’s also the option to create an Icebreaker Question, which is a regular question that your new members can answer when first joining a space.
Mighty Networks allows you to create virtual or in-person events for your community. It has a powerful Events feature, so that:
For hosting live events, you can use the native live streaming feature or the direct Zoom integration. Otherwise, you can use a URL from other video conferencing services like GoToMeeting, Google Meet, etc.
Additionally, you can create a text chat event to let community members interact with each other through live chat.
Livestreaming is one of the most powerful community engagement features offered by Mighty Networks.
Using this feature, you can start an instant live stream from any of your community spaces, or you can go live from both the web and iOS and Android mobile apps.
To do a live stream, you just have to click on the “Go Live” option inside a space and grant access to your webcam and microphone. At this point, you can choose to record the live stream and send notifications to all members.
During the live session, a chat section appears on the right side. Here, hosts and members can talk. However, there’s no way to remove or hide it.
Live streaming is great for engaging your community members. However, you can also use it to deliver live lessons in your online courses, which we’ll talk about later.
Apart from these, Mighty Networks has another engagement tool worth mentioning. It’s called Welcome Checklist, and it allows you to create a custom list of tasks to onboard new members.
For example, you can ask them to introduce themselves or go through the community guidelines.
Mighty Networks offers course-building tools, and you can create video, audio, and text lessons for members.
A course in Mighty Networks has two organizational elements: sections and lessons.
With the course builder, you can add sections and lessons and easily change their order by dragging and dropping.
The lesson editor is a simple HTML editor where you can easily add videos (includes unlimited video hosting), text, and images, attach small files, or embed external media. You can even add multiple content types in a single lesson.
Apart from text/video lessons, you can also add quiz lessons to your course. You can create multiple-choice questions, add images or videos to them, and grade your students.
While the platform has a satisfying course builder, it does lack some essential features like bulk uploading. In fact, you can’t upload multiple videos in one go and turn them into lessons, which slows down the whole process.
Regarding the available learning and engagement tools, Mighty Networks performs below average.
It misses out on some important assessment features, such as assignments and certificates.
It does, however, provide content locking and dripping features. There are three options:
Besides dripping and locking, there’s a video compliance option where members must watch the entire video to mark it complete.
On top of that, every course can have a separate discussion area, and you can even stream your live lessons inside the space, making it a good option for delivering live cohort courses.
When it comes to course delivery, unfortunately, Mighty Networks’ course player isn’t well-designed from an end-user perspective.
When a user clicks on it to watch a lesson, it first opens in a half-screen modal with no visible navigation. They can then expand to a full course player experience with a navigation sidebar, but the additional step makes the process inefficient.
Mighty Networks’ course player experience isn’t very optimal.
Overall, Mighty Networks is great for creating online courses to engage your community. Plus, it’s also good for running live cohort courses with a strong community component.
Mighty Networks supports one-on-one and group messaging so that you can chat with a member or a group of members privately.
You can send text messages, emojis, photos, and files to other hosts and members. In turn, they can archive chats, mute other members, and even block them.
Moreover, you can disable direct messaging for all members, but the option to disable it for specific ones isn’t available yet.
Speaking of notifications, Mighty Networks gives you several ways of notifying your members. You can do this through:
However, it’s up to individual members to choose their preferred notification method. They can turn on email updates as well as mobile notifications.
Most importantly, your members can select specific activities and spaces from which they want to receive notifications.
When it comes to email updates, instead, they can choose to receive an email for each activity or a summary email from the entire day’s activity.
Apart from the activity notifications, as a host, you can message all of your members in one go, which is useful for sending important notifications and announcements.
Mighty Networks has free iOS and Android apps for members to access your community on the go.
Mighty Networks apps have a clean design and support features like push notifications, which help bring members back to the community.
The good thing is that the apps support all the functionalities available on the web platform, including creating posts, attending livestreams, watching courses, messaging other members, etc.
Another great thing about the apps is that they also support admin options, so you can respond to members and also make changes to your community on the go.
While the apps are completely free, they are still Mighty Networks’ apps. However, you can also get custom community apps for your brand, even though you’ll have to pay for them separately.
So, Mighty Networks enables you to start with the free apps and then upgrade to branded apps if you want.
Overall, Mighty Networks is a great platform for building and managing an online community.
It has flexible community organization tools and comes with powerful engagement features, like posts, articles, events, group chats, and online courses.
It also offers free mobile apps for members, allowing them to access your community on the go.
In this section, we’ll talk about the sales and marketing tools that Mighty Networks provides. Let’s start with the website builder.
Starting with the basics, Mighty Networks includes website hosting and a free SSL certificate. Your website comes with a free subdomain, but you can use a custom one if you want.
However, the platform doesn’t offer full-fledged website building, and, as a result, most Mighty Networks creators host their brand websites outside the platform.
What you get is the ability to create a landing page that acts as your website’s homepage.
There are two landing page templates: the Creator and Community templates. However, there’s not much of a difference between the two regarding style or layout.
Moreover, there’s no real page builder. The landing page consists of a couple of sections, each with pre-defined settings, and you can only modify the text and images.
Apart from this, you can’t add new sections or reorder them, which limits your design options significantly.
All in all, you can use Mighty Networks to create a simple landing page for your community, but it can’t accommodate your brand website.
An important promise of Mighty Networks is that you can monetize your community as you prefer.
In fact, the platform lets you create pricing plans that can include access to the main network and/or the community spaces. You can choose the spaces to include in a plan, and you can also have the same space in multiple plans, so it can support all community models:
When it comes to the pricing options, you can charge a one-time fee or a recurring fee, or you can keep it free, and you can show the pricing in multiple currencies.
For subscriptions, you can have monthly and/or annual pricing and even offer a free trial if you like.
While the product pricing options are fine overall, a few are missing:
Finally, Mighty Networks has a handy feature that gives you the ability to choose which platforms to enable a plan on. So, you can make a plan available only on web and Android devices, or you can allow purchases on iOS devices.
Mighty Networks only supports Stripe for processing payments.
So, if you’re from a country where Stripe isn’t supported, or you want to have PayPal as a payment option for your customers, you’ll need to use a third-party checkout platform.
Apart from payment gateways, it also supports Web3 Token-Gating, so you can gate spaces with ERC-20, ERC-721, or ERC-1155 tokens.
Also, you can integrate with Quaderno for tax handling.
When it comes to the checkout process, you have a multi-step checkout process where the user needs to create an account and upload a profile picture before making the payment.
We’re not big fans of this approach, as there’s a lot of friction in the process, which isn’t great for conversions.
Step 1: Create an account
Step 2: Upload a profile picture
While the signup and checkout pages look good, you can’t customize them. For example, you can’t add testimonials or list the plan’s benefits.
One of the drawbacks of Mighty Networks is that it doesn’t allow you to create an affiliate program for your products. If you want this feature, you’ll need to use a specialized tool like ThriveCart.
However, it does allow you to have an ambassador program. This way, you can give your users badges and some custom rewards when they refer new members to your community.
Overall, Mighty Networks does an average job in sales and marketing. You can create product plans and monetize your community, but the checkout process isn’t optimized for conversions, and you also miss out on marketing tools such as coupons and affiliate marketing.
In this section, we’ll cover the reporting and administrative features of Mighty Networks.
When managing a community, the first thing that comes to mind is how easy it is to add members.
In Mighty Networks, you add members by:
And when members send requests to join a community, you can either accept or reject it.
Mighty Networks supports adding tags and badges to your members. While tags are for internal categorization, badges can be used as recognition for member achievements.
While there’s no way to add tags and badges automatically, you can assign them manually to individual members or in bulk.
It has another member management feature called Member Categories.
It allows you to create categories based on their role, interests, or anything else, and your members will be able to choose the category when they log in.
Apart from members, you can also invite people to join as hosts and moderators, which are admin roles. The good thing is that you can have hosts and moderators at both the network and space levels.
Network hosts are like owners and have access to all the settings inside your community, including payment settings and income reports.
On the other hand, moderators focus on managing content and members by:
Speaking of moderation tools, anyone can report content. After that, hosts and moderators can check the reported content and take a call to remove it or keep it.
Besides that, there’s an integration with Slack that allows Hosts and Moderators to monitor community activity in real-time.
Finally, Mighty Networks gives you the freedom to decide who can create what type of content.
For instance, you can choose whether only the host and moderators can contribute to articles or extend this capacity to members, too. The same goes for posts, events, and polls.
Mighty Networks has a robust reporting and analytics feature, Mighty Insights, that give you insights into your members and their activities.
There are several dashboards that provide data and insight into different aspects of your online community.
Take the Overview dashboard, for instance. It provides a quick glance at the level of member activity in your network, with daily, weekly, and monthly charts for active members.
It also has heatmaps and charts that show when your members are active, what platform they use, and their retention rate.
Apart from the overview page, there are specific tabs for different community aspects:
Apart from network-level reports, similar reports are also available at the space level.
For instance, the Members report helps track members and their actions in the space. Similarly, the Feed dashboard shows post creation trends and engagement levels over time.
Overall, Mighty Networks has excellent reporting capabilities, and its Insights feature will work well for analyzing your community’s performance.
Mighty Networks supports a few third-party integrations.
Regarding tracking codes, you can just integrate with Google Analytics, Meta Pixel and TikTok Pixel. There’s no way to add custom scripts or tracking codes.
Mighty Networks has a direct integration with only one email marketing solution—ConvertKit. To send information to other email service providers, you’ll need to use Zapier.
The good thing is that there’s a two-way Zapier integration, which means that you can also do certain actions in Mighty Networks based on events in other apps.
So, if someone makes a payment using a third-party checkout platform like ThriveCart, you can automatically send them an invite to your community.
Mighty Networks supports single sign-on (SSO) through OAuth 2.0. This is useful if you have an existing membership site or eLearning platform and want to seamlessly integrate it with your Mighty Network community.
However, keep in mind that it doesn’t have any out-of-the-box SSO integrations with popular platforms like WordPress or Thinkific. As a result, you’ll need to get some custom development work done to make it work.
Finally, Mighty Networks doesn’t have public APIs yet, which means that you can’t build custom integrations with other tools or platforms.
As you would expect from any good online platform, Mighty Networks has a dedicated support team.
On all plans, it offers support via email and the chat widget inside your admin area, and you can click on it to leave a message with your questions.
While this isn’t a live chat, you can expect to get a quick response during the support hours (6 AM to 6 PM Pacific Time).
On top of creator support, your members can directly reach out to the Mighty Networks team for any technical issues. Not many community platforms offer end-user support, and this will definitely save you some time.
Instead of reaching out to support for everything, you can also use the knowledge base, which has video tutorials and step-by-step articles on how various features work.
Finally, Mighty Networks offers a dedicated community for its users called Mighty Community, which is a pretty active place to learn from other community owners.
Even if you decide not to use Mighty Networks, we advise you to be a part of this community still, as you’ll learn a lot about community design and engagement.
Now, it’s time to discuss Mighty Networks’ pricing.
There are five pricing plans to choose from:
On top of the monthly cost, there’s a transaction fee of 3% on the Community plan, 2% on the Courses and Business plans, and 1% on Path-to-Pro and Mighty Pro plans.
With the Community plan, you get all of the community-building features. Moreover, the plan supports unlimited spaces, members, hosts, and moderators.
However, you can’t create courses, use the Zapier integration, or access advanced analytics. For these features, you have to go for the Courses plan, which also offers more storage and livestreaming hours.
The Business plan provides access to advanced features, such as single sign-on, email white-labeling, and Infinite Question Engine, while the Path-to-Pro plan offers reduced transaction fees and priority support.
Apart from these plans, there’s another one called Mighty Pro. The most compelling feature of this plan is the ability to get branded, white-label mobile apps for your community.
Overall, Mighty Networks has a reasonable and flexible pricing structure, even though we’re not big fans of charging a transaction fee.
If you’d like to explore the platform, you can start a 14-day free trial. And the best thing is that you won’t even need to add any credit card details.
Before making a decision, let’s look at the top Mighty Networks alternatives and how they compare with the platform.
The most popular Mighty Networks competitor is Circle. While there is a significant overlap in features between the two platforms, Circle holds an overall edge.
Circle has SSO integrations with popular platforms like Teachable and WordPress, gives API access, and has better community management tools. It is also easier to use and has a cleaner design.
Read our Circle vs Mighty Networks guide for a detailed comparison.
Another popular competitor in the community builder space is BuddyBoss. It is WordPress-based and offers great flexibility when it comes to design and features for your community. However, it is more complex to set up and manage, so it is better suited for tech-savvy users.
Finally, Mighty Networks is also often compared with Kajabi, even though they’re very different platforms. Kajabi offers features for courses, coaching, community, and more; Mighty Networks, instead, only focuses on communities and does a better job at community building.
Moreover, Kajabi is an all-in-one platform with powerful marketing tools, including sales funnels and email marketing, which allows you to run your entire business on the platform.
Mighty Networks offers compelling features for building an engaged online community. These include spaces, media posts, events, group chats, livestreaming, online courses, and more.
However, the best part is that the platform has free iOS/Android apps for your members, and you can also get white-label apps for your community.
One of the major drawbacks of Mighty Networks is its not-so-intuitive user interface.
Otherwise, Mighty Networks is an excellent option for building a standalone community or creating community-centric courses or memberships.
If you want to try it, you can start a free trial by clicking on the button below.
We hope you found this Mighty Networks review helpful. If you have any questions about the platform, let us know in the comments below.
Mighty Networks is a platform that you can use to build an online community on your own website. Apart from standalone communities, you can also sell community-focused courses and memberships.
Mighty Networks was founded by Gina Bianchini, Tim Herby, and Thomas Aaron in 2017. Top venture capital firms, including Owl Ventures, back it.
Yes, Mighty Networks has excellent community-building and engagement tools, and it’s a great option for building and running a community-centric online business.
The core focus of Mighty Networks is to let you build an engaged online community. So, in this regard, it offers the best-in-class features. Additionally, you can create online courses and mastermind groups within your community and even charge for access.
Yes and no. While Mighty Networks allows you to create simple landing pages, it doesn’t offer proper website building features. For example, there are no themes and no page builder.
You can alway have your website/blog on WordPress and your membership area on Mighty Networks. You can also integrate Mighty Networks with your WordPress membership site using the SSO feature.
No, Mighty Networks doesn’t have a public API. However, it integrates with Zapier, so you can easily integrate it with other third-party applications.
Mighty Networks has several competitors. In the community space, it competes with platforms like Circle, while in the course creation space, it competes with platforms like Kajabi.
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.
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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.
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