Best Disciple Media Alternatives, Competitors & Similar Software in 2023
Disciple is a community platform that allows you to build and manage your brand. It helps you build a following, engage your audience, and monetize your content.
Over the past few years, we have seen the creator economy bloom at an increasing rate like never before. The most important part of the creator economy is online communities. The more engaging, fun, and exciting community you build, the more benefit you can extract from it.
As a course creator, online teacher, and content creator, having an online community is essential because it allows you to interact with your students/members. Furthermore, creating an online community can generate recurring revenue streams for your business.
While Disciple advertises itself as an "online community software with great features," it offers limited customization and is pricey when it comes to adding more members and features.
So if you're looking for a platform to help build a more engaging, interactive, affordable online community. In that case, this post will give you a walkthrough of 6 fantastic Disciple alternatives.
Why should you look for alternatives to Disciple Media
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You'll have to spend a lot if you're starting a small business or a solopreneur looking to create an online community to increase your revenue stream. Disciple's community features will cost a lot of money which you can get for a much lower price on another platform. This particular reason has led to many people switching their online communities from Disciple.
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Previous Disciple users have also complained that setting up a community app with Disciple was time-consuming and that their users didn't find the community app welcoming.
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Disciple does not offer much customization, and there are limits to what you can do in your community, such as not being able to add a thumbnail to a PDF file or download it to a folder, and the searchability is poor. Moreover, your users cannot create groups, and there is no option for 1:1 or group video chats.
The Best Alternatives to Disciple Media
Graphy Community Platform
Mighty Networks
Circle
Tribe
Vanilla Forums
WildApricot
Graphy Community Platform
Graphy Community Platform is an ultimate community platform that helps you build a robust community where you can sell your courses and host live events, webinars, and live streams. It offers the best community features through which you can moderate, manage, and monetize your community all in one place - with your brand appearance, under your custom domain. Graphy Community Platform can also generate a whitelabelled mobile app and list it on the Play Store/App Store.
Features
Pros
- Available across in multiple formats & avatars; be it a web app under your domain, a native whitelabeled app on Android and iOS, integrations within your existing app or API-based integrations.
- Auto Scaling across platforms - Scenes uses powerful auto-scaling technology to keep your community blazing fast no matter how many visitors you have across all devices. They scale as you scale.
- The only platform that enables custom CSS for top to bottom granular-level user interface customization. You can make your community look close to your app/website's UI.
- A built-in coin system lets you incentivize your community members to engage more.
- Live audio-video features for your events, webinars and live classes where all your members can get notified and RSVP.
Cons
- You will lose some members during the platform migration process.
Mighty Networks
Mighty Networks allows businesses of any size to create online courses, mobile apps, and communities. In addition, one can create membership sites to offer paid courses, paid groups, or bundles of courses and groups.
Mighty Networks Features
- It offers platform capabilities that scale as your community scales, allowing a seamless experience for you and your community members.
- White-label and customize your community under your domain and replicate your brand aesthetics.
- It has many LMS features that let educators and course-creators manage and run their online courses in one place.
Mighty Networks Pricing
- Starts at $39/mo.
- A 14-day free trial is available.
Pros
- It offers good social engagement features like live audio/video and chat that lets your members engage with each other.
- It comes with a native mobile app that is fully Whitelabeled (available when you buy the Mighty Pro plan)
- It has a very user-friendly UI on the web that replicates Facebook groups on some level.
Cons
- Not very customizable when it comes to their user-interface. Community owners have to work within a relatively rigid set of constraints.
- At $30,000, the native mobile app is the most expensive compared to other alternatives.
- The course creation experience has been said to be 'cumbersome' by many of their paid customers.
Circle
Features
- Scale a community without chaos or complexity
- Gather your community under your own brand
- Build a business, without the burnout
Pros
- Only Mighty has data from hundreds of thousands of thriving communities cultivated over the past five years.
- That’s how we know things like the optimal price to charge for a monthly membership, or how much content you really need to build your first online course.
- We share these learnings with you and more through Mighty Community and Mighty Insights™, the deep analytics and benchmarking you get with Mighty.
Cons
- Slower to reach ROI
- More Expensive
- Dangerous for public communities
- Adding live streams to your community can make it more alive. You get access to audio rooms where you can keep track of your community member’s interests and involve them in discussions.
Tribe
Tribe is a Whitelabell community platform for businesses. It is famous for its customizability and integration capabilities. Primarily, Tribe is built for text-based conversations using features like forums, polls, etc.
Tribe Features
- The UI is easy-to-use and comprises customizable blocks called 'spaces'.
- It offers powerful rich-text features to format and deliver your content how you want to present it to your users.
- A moderation panel that lets you manage your community smoothly and efficiently.
Tribe Pricing
- Paid Plan starts at $59/month.
- The free Plan includes 100 total members, essential apps, and a custom domain.
Pros
- Offers a white-label community with a good level of customizations that lets you match your community aesthetics to your brand aesthetics.
- Has widgets and APIs that let you integrate with several third-party applications.
- Has a generous free plan that lets you house 500 members (without the Paywall feature, however).
Cons
- More of an old-school forum-based tool rather than a full-fledged community platform with real time-communication features like live audio/video.
- It lacks an incentive system and gamification features necessary for community engagement. Your users need incentives to engage.
- No built-in shop/paywall system that lets your users buy products from you, such as premium memberships, courses, and the like.
Vanilla Forums
Vanilla Forum is a cloud-based community forum software that is also open source and community-supported. It offers features for community building, customer service, and sales engagement.
Vanilla Forums Features
- Vanilla Forum has a great communication management feature. It allows product manager to control discussion threads and offers the ability to merge or close thread as well.
- Vanilla has reinvented forums, and you would also expect a premium one at that. Vanilla was designed with a sleek and modern user experience that is easily comparable to any of the top content management systems on the market today.
- Vanilla can be set up so only registered members can log in, which makes the community private. You can decide if new registrants require approval before being awarded member status and you can delegate approval to moderators.
Vanilla Forums Pricing
- Starts from $689.
- Free version available.
Pros
- They have a great method for voting on the quality of posts.
- Very good gamification capabilities.
- It has a great API and we utilize this for badging our FREE, PRO and EDU users as well as providing access to our private EVP programs
Cons
- The API development has been slow but they have recently pushed out their new V2 but prior to V2, there were some inefficiencies in doing some automated user management.
- User management: pages often requires refreshing in the browser after changes have been made. It is not the most intuitive system although does the job.
- The editing functionality isn't in logical places for Admins.
WildApricot
With WildApricot, associations and non-profit organizations can automate and simplify membership management tasks. WildApricot allows you to add, edit, manage members, and collect dues and payments.
WildApricot Features
- Member application process – WildApricot offers membership management software that can automate the application process to give your new members a great first impression.
- Events – You can create a detailed event listing with descriptions and images and get an online event registration form. You can list events in a calendar on your WildApricot site or existing website.
- Email marketing - With WildApricot, you can send prospective members announcements or offers using modern email templates that match your brand.
WildApricot Pricing
- Starts at $60/mo.
- 30-Day free trial is available.
Pros
- You can easily customize your member database with WildApricot. You can use it to keep track of all sorts of information, and it's easy to use.
- WildApricot provides up-to-date member directories. You can also store membership information in the cloud, making it accessible to your team.
- WildApricot's drag-and-drop website builder creates a website easily, sells digital products and services, and quickly gets your business online.
Cons
- WildApricot does not give you the freedom to create a website that matches your brand strategy.
- WildApricot does not provide any specific functionality for course building, so you may have difficulty formatting your courses and displaying student progress. In addition, WildApricot does not host videos or digital files.
- You can only add a certain number of members, emails, and invites unless you spend some extra money.
Disclaimer: To curate the pros, cons and reviews - we mine the internet for customer references regarding the said software. Some of our sources include Reddit, Product Hunt, Twitter & Quora (and sites like G2 & Capterra).
What you should do now
Whenever you’re ready…here are 3 ways we can help:
If you’d like to turn your business into a community-led business, book a call with us. One of our community experts will understand your current situation, and suggest how a community can work for you.
If you’d like to learn the exact community-building formula we’ve used to help build 2000+ communities, watch this masterclass or read this guide.
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