If you’re an event organizer and want your participants to keep flocking back to your events & conferences every year, you need to keep them engaged year-round and not just for the event.
Start by giving them an online community platform to create engagements that inspire action. Keep them involved and connected. The more they’re invested in building, growing, and engaging with your online community, the higher is the chance they’ll join your in-person event.
We researched the best online community software based on their features list, user interface & user experience, and pricing.
Forumbee
👍 Best Used For
Community forums & knowledge base
🎯 Key Features
☑ Discussion Forums
☑ Community Q&A
☑ Knowledge Base – Publish help articles and content
☑ Collect feedback, discover popular ideas, prioritize
☑ Community Management
☑ Community Analytics
💰 Pricing
Starts from $250/mo
Discourse
👍 Best Used For
Civilized discussion for your community
🎯 Key Features
☑ Engage in searchable discussions with your customers
☑ Create a self-service hub of common questions, interesting ideas, and useful discussion
☑ Automatic trust system lets the whole community help cultivate fruitful conversation
☑ Customize the style, integrate your favorite services
☑ Customize any visual element of the theme easily
☑ 100% free, open source forum software
💰 Pricing
Starts from $100/mo
Tribe
👍 Best Used For
Customized community platform
🎯 Key Features
☑ Enable your users to connect and discuss under your brand
☑ Ready-to-use widgets to add social components
☑ Users can follow, ask questions, start discussions, upvote, comment and share content
☑ Apps and integrations to engage, and retain more users
💰 Pricing
Starts from $85/mo
Insided
👍 Best Used For
All-in-one community platform
🎯 Key Features
☑ Central platform for engagement amongst customers in different categories, user-groups
☑ Customer Success knowledge base with guides, tutorials
☑ Product feedback & ideation
☑ Keep customers informed and updated about new product developments
💰 Pricing
Request a Quote
Website Toolbox
👍 Best Used For
Online Forums
🎯 Key Features
☑ Easily customize the colors, add your logo, header, and custom CSS of your forum
☑ Enable single sign on & custom domain
☑ Charge a one-time or recurring subscription fee to view the forum
☑ SEO-friendly
☑ Incentivize quality content by assigning users a reputation score
☑ Users can send instant messages to each other
💰 Pricing
Starts from $29/mo
Vanilla forums
👍 Best Used For
Community software
🎯 Key Features
☑ Members can format posts with html, and mention each other in discussions
☑ Users can have private one-on-one discussions
☑ Set to private so only registered members will be able to log in and participate in the community
☑ Create a knowledge base article from a community discussion
☑ Community members are notified when their question receives a response
☑ Allow community members to submit and vote on ideas
💰 Pricing
Request a quote
Muut
👍 Best Used For
Discussion Boards
🎯 Key Features
☑ Clean, uncluttered design
☑ Private rooms with sub-categories
☑ Responsive & Mobile friendly
☑ Group messaging
☑ Customize look & feel using CSS
💰 Pricing
Starts from $16/mo
Hivebrite
👍 Best Used For
Nonprofit community
🎯 Key Features
☑ Create discussion forums around specific topics
☑ Allow members to find and share job opportunities via job board
☑ Manage memberships and donations
☑ Communicate with other members through private messages
☑ Send automated, personalized weekly digests
☑ Send in-app alerts and notifications to users
💰 Pricing
Request a quote
Crowded
👍 Best Used For
Enterprise community software
🎯 Key Features
☑ Build an engaged community to interact with your stakeholders
☑ Members can stay up-to-date on their favorite topics by following different channels
☑ Hire new talent by promoting open job vacancies
☑ List all the relevant events in your community
☑ Easily collect new ideas from your community
☑ Create extensive documentation about your product or service
💰 Pricing
Starts from $799/mo
ProBoards
👍 Best Used For
Online forum
🎯 Key Features
☑ Create as many categories, boards, members, threads, topics and posts
☑ Mobile App — Android & iPhone
☑ Members can share their favorite YouTube clips and embed them directly into discussion posts
☑ Upload attachments directly into topic posts
☑ Ability to use your own custom domain name, remove advertising from your forum
💰 Pricing
Free
