What is the best community software?
One of the most common questions I get is: What is the best community software out there today?
People don't realize what a large question this is.
To answer it fully, we would need to dig into your current technology systems, your members’ needs and comfortability with technology, your organization’s goals, your budget, and other constraints. It’s not the kind of question anyone should answer flippantly for anyone else, but it happens all the time. A large part of my practice involves migrating people off of platforms that someone else told them to use…
To avoid making the wrong decision and sinking invaluable time and effort into the wrong platform, I created this resource to guide you through the best way to answer this question for yourself.
First, a story you can likely relate to…
Recently, a client came to me looking for a way to connect with the members of their community. These members live all over the world, and they connect across timezones and languages. Before the pandemic, they met at in-person conferences and stay in touch only informally via social media in between. Given the circumstances, they had to ask themselves: Where do we go from here? How do we continue to connect our members when all we have are digital tools?
When their Director came to me, she was desperate for a solution. So she asked me almost immediately: What should we pick? What would you do?
To answer her/your, we have to answer a few other questions first, including:
What do you need the software to do?
What features do you need (and has this answer been validated by research)?
Is it important to you that you own the community data, or are you okay with using a more limited-access solution hosted by a social network?
Now, these are not necessarily simple questions. They can have complicated answers and, more often, no right answers at all. It is in the process of attempting the answers that you will become more and more clear about the best community software platform for you and your unique goals.
Here’s how you can think about answering these questions for yourself:
What do you need the software to do?
Does your software need to be front-end or backend? With this question, we are assessing whether you need something internal/team-facing or community member-facing (where members can find one another or see each other’s posts or chat privately).
Often, when people think they need the latter, what they first need is the former. An internal-facing platform can help you better record who your members are so you have a bird’s eye view of who is in your community, what their needs and expertise are, and what they have in common. Internal-facing platforms then help you implement new communication and operational workflows behind the scenes.
In some cases, your answer to this question might be: we need both. That was the case for the client I described above. But just because you need both does not mean they must come in one platform. They can actually come from totally different platforms, as long as they integrate together in a way that makes sense for your organization's operations (e.g., through Zapier automation or native integrations that pull and push data from one system to another).
So what is it that you need: front-facing, internal-facing, or both? Do you mind working with two (or more) different systems or do you want something all-in-one?
Answer those questions clearly and the number of software options becomes a bit more manageable.
What features do you need (and has this answer been validated by research)?
The next question to ask is: What are we actually planning to do with members on this platform?
That answer likely looks like mapping out a workflow (if internal) or journey (if member-facing), such as the journey of how you hope members go from discovery to joining your community. That's something you can write or draw out and even potentially automate.
If it’s a member-facing platform you’re after, you’ll need to answer: what features do people want to have enabled? What kinds of activities would they like to do together? Oftentimes clients make assumptions about the answers to these questions. What we need to do in order to answer this question — to the best of our ability without spending a ton of money and wasting a ton of time — is talk to our members.
I never ask members what they want to see from a community because people will say all kinds of things. Instead, I try to understand what urgent challenges they are they facing right now. And, specifically, what kinds of urgent challenges are they facing that only meeting other people can solve? There can be many, many challenges, but they can be solved through myriad products or services such as taking a course or buying a product. If the need that they have can only be solved by being in a community with others, then we're cooking with fire. 🔥
Once we understand these deeper needs, we can then design potential community solutions to meet those needs.
Only at this point can you make a strong decision about the features of your ideal platform. Maybe you decide you need chat functionality (video, audio, text, or all). Maybe it becomes clear you need distributed events, meaning that members can run their own events.
If you can answer this second question clearly, the options sharply decline from about 80 different community platforms to around 5-10 viable choices.
Is it important to you that you “own” the data from the platform, or are you okay with using a free or more limited solution hosted by a social network or forum provider?
Most platforms charge a licensing fee. In exchange, you get a space that you can customize and often more data about your members, such as their emails, return rates, and engagement rates.
Depending on the platform, you can get a lot of data about members (in the case of open-source software, you can get all of it), or very limited and pre-determined data points.
Now, if you’re okay with a solution provided by a social network or forum provider (think: Facebook Groups, LinkedIn Groups, Twitter Communities). These platforms are free and benefit from an existing network that can then discover your community. I often only recommend these options when people are trying to validate the viability of a community concept or if their primary issue is with discovery or marketing. That’s because these solutions’ drawbacks in terms of limited functionality and lack of data access are countered by the power of the existing network upon which they are built: people are already there and are already comfortable with the technology.
The best community software is the one that works for your specific use case: front-facing and/or back-facing platforms, with the features your members need to meet their goals, and with the access to the data critical for your organization to succeed.
As of this writing, there are over 80 different community software platforms on the market. Some of those do 50 things, some of them do just one thing, really, really well. Some are operating systems. Other ones look like traditional forums. They're all over the board.
I can never answer the question “Which community platform is best?” in one conversation because it's going to depend on your answers to all of the above questions. Go through the process of answering these questions, and the answer is likely to reveal itself.
Looking for more guidance? Check out these videos:
Should you leave Facebook Groups?
What platforms can serve both courses and communities?