100 Best Community Management Apps for Growing Engaged Communities
Community management software ranges from hosted forums and member networks to chat groups, event hubs, and analytics tools. This first batch covers 25 established options with different strengths, so the right choice depends on where and how your members prefer to participate.
Circle
Circle hosts branded online communities with discussions, member profiles, events, courses, and private spaces. It helps teams replace scattered conversations by organizing members and content inside one dedicated community home.
Discord
Discord provides text, voice, video, and forum-style channels for real-time community conversation and moderation. It helps communities manage fast-moving member chat by separating topics into configurable channels and roles.
Discourse
Discourse is open-source forum software for structured discussions, knowledge sharing, moderation, and member trust levels. It helps teams preserve useful answers that would otherwise disappear in chronological chat conversations.
Hivebrite
Hivebrite is a community platform for member directories, groups, content, events, and engagement programs. It helps organizations coordinate complex member networks without relying on disconnected spreadsheets and communication tools.
Higher Logic Thrive
Higher Logic Thrive provides online community tools including discussion forums, member directories, libraries, and automation. It helps association teams encourage peer support while keeping professional resources searchable and organized.
Mighty Networks
Mighty Networks lets creators build branded communities with feeds, groups, events, courses, and memberships. It helps founders bring audience discussion and learning programs together instead of managing separate platforms.
Bettermode
Bettermode provides customizable community spaces, discussion feeds, profiles, moderation, and knowledge-base integrations. It helps product teams offer customers a branded support destination without building community features from scratch.
Khoros Communities
Khoros Communities supports customer forums, peer-to-peer support, ideation, moderation, and community analytics. It helps larger support teams reduce repetitive inquiries by enabling customers to answer common questions.
Higher Logic Vanilla
Higher Logic Vanilla delivers customer community forums, Q&A, knowledge sharing, gamification, and moderation tools. It helps support organizations turn recurring customer questions into reusable, publicly accessible answers.
Mobilize
Mobilize is a community platform for member groups, messaging, events, directories, and engagement workflows. It helps mission-driven teams coordinate distributed members without losing visibility across local groups.
Slack
Slack organizes team and community communication through channels, direct messages, huddles, and app integrations. It helps groups reduce inbox clutter by keeping conversations organized around topics, projects, or interests.
Facebook Groups
Facebook Groups gives administrators tools for member discussions, posts, events, rules, and moderation. It helps organizers reach existing Facebook users without asking members to learn a new platform.
LinkedIn Groups
LinkedIn Groups enables professional communities to hold topical discussions among members on the LinkedIn platform. It helps business-focused organizers convene professionals where participants already maintain work-related identities and networks.
Reddit
Reddit hosts topic-based communities where members submit posts, comment, vote, and follow moderator rules. It helps interest communities surface useful discussions through voting rather than relying solely on administrators.
Skool
Skool combines a community feed, classroom content, calendar, member profiles, and gamified participation levels. It helps course creators keep student discussion and learning materials connected in one member environment.
Patreon
Patreon helps creators manage memberships, paid posts, member communications, and community access benefits. It helps independent creators organize supporter relationships while delivering membership content through a central service.
Geneva
Geneva provides group communication through chat rooms, audio rooms, events, and customizable community spaces. It helps communities combine live conversation and scheduled gatherings without switching among several communication apps.
Community
Community enables organizations to communicate with audiences through text messaging, groups, and messaging workflows. It helps teams reach opted-in members directly when email messages are overlooked or delayed.
Bevy
Bevy helps organizations run community programs with event management, chapters, member engagement, and reporting. It helps community teams coordinate local events and volunteer-led chapters from a shared operational system.
Peerboard
Peerboard provides embeddable community forums, Q&A, groups, and member profiles for product-led businesses. It helps software companies place customer discussions near their product instead of sending users elsewhere.
Talkbase
Talkbase centralizes community operations with member data, engagement tracking, programs, and reporting workflows. It helps community managers replace manual activity tracking with a clearer view of program performance.
Common Room
Common Room collects community signals from connected channels to help teams understand members and engagement. It helps go-to-market teams identify meaningful community activity without manually reviewing every conversation source.
Luma
Luma supports event pages, registrations, calendars, reminders, and attendee management for community gatherings. It helps organizers reduce event coordination work by centralizing invitations, registration details, and attendee communication.
Ning
Ning is a hosted platform for creating social networks with member profiles, groups, blogs, and forums. It helps organizations launch independent member networks without developing a social platform internally.
BuddyBoss
BuddyBoss provides WordPress-based community features including profiles, groups, activity feeds, forums, and messaging. It helps WordPress site owners add member interaction while retaining control over their website environment.
Gainsight Customer Communities
Gainsight Customer Communities provides branded spaces for customer discussions, knowledge sharing, product feedback, and peer support. It helps support teams reduce repetitive questions by directing customers toward searchable answers and experienced peers.
Influitive
Influitive helps companies build customer advocate communities through challenges, rewards, referrals, and engagement programs. It helps marketing teams organize enthusiastic customers who might otherwise advocate inconsistently or remain unidentified.
Salesforce Experience Cloud
Salesforce Experience Cloud creates branded portals and communities for customers, partners, employees, and service interactions. It helps organizations centralize scattered stakeholder interactions while connecting community activity to Salesforce records.
Zapnito
Zapnito provides a platform for expert communities to publish knowledge, host discussions, and connect members. It helps knowledge-led businesses capture expertise that would otherwise remain fragmented across individual specialists.
Raklet
Raklet manages memberships, events, payments, email communications, and online communities for member-based organizations. It helps small associations replace disconnected membership spreadsheets, event tools, and payment tracking processes.
Disciple
Disciple enables organizations to create branded community websites and mobile apps with content and discussions. It helps creators avoid building their member relationships entirely inside third-party social networks.
Heartbeat
Heartbeat provides community spaces for chat, threads, events, member directories, and shared resources. It helps community operators organize conversations that become difficult to follow in fast-moving chat channels.
Guild
Guild offers private professional communities with discussion spaces, member profiles, events, and direct messaging. It helps professional networks create focused conversations without relying on advertising-driven social media feeds.
Maven
Maven supports cohort-based courses with live sessions, shared materials, and spaces for learner discussion. It helps course operators keep participant questions and peer learning organized around each cohort.
Kajabi Communities
Kajabi Communities lets creators host member discussions alongside courses, digital products, and subscription offerings. It helps creators keep customer engagement near their educational content instead of across separate platforms.
Thinkific Communities
Thinkific Communities provides discussion spaces where course creators can connect learners and encourage peer interaction. It helps educators address learner isolation by giving participants a dedicated place to ask questions.
Podia
Podia helps creators sell digital products, courses, memberships, and community access from one storefront. It helps solo creators reduce operational complexity when monetizing content and managing paying members.
WildApricot
WildApricot provides membership management, event registration, websites, email tools, and online payment collection. It helps volunteer-led organizations automate renewals and registrations that are cumbersome to track manually.
NationBuilder
NationBuilder organizes supporter databases, websites, communications, fundraising, and volunteer engagement for campaigns. It helps organizers coordinate supporter outreach when contact information and activity history are scattered.
Glue Up
Glue Up combines membership management, event registration, CRM tools, email campaigns, and community features. It helps associations manage member relationships without manually reconciling data from multiple administrative systems.
Meetup
Meetup helps organizers create groups, schedule gatherings, manage RSVPs, and communicate with local members. It helps local community leaders coordinate recurring events without handling attendance through informal message chains.
WhatsApp Communities
WhatsApp Communities groups related WhatsApp chats under a shared structure with announcements and administration controls. It helps organizers reduce confusion when one community needs separate chats for topics or subgroups.
Telegram
Telegram supports large groups, broadcast channels, bots, file sharing, and moderated member conversations. It helps communities reach members quickly when they need both announcement channels and interactive discussion groups.
Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Teams provides chat, channels, meetings, file collaboration, and app integrations for organized groups. It helps distributed teams keep conversations and working documents together rather than scattered across email.
Mattermost
Mattermost is a collaboration platform offering channels, messaging, workflows, integrations, and self-hosting options. It helps technical teams maintain controlled internal communications when data governance requirements limit consumer chat tools.
Viva Engage
Viva Engage supports employee communities, leadership communications, discussion posts, and organizational knowledge sharing. It helps larger organizations surface cross-team conversations that may otherwise stay confined within departments.
Sprout Social
Sprout Social manages social publishing, engagement inboxes, monitoring, reporting, and customer message workflows. It helps social teams respond consistently when community comments and messages arrive across multiple networks.
Flarum
Flarum is open-source forum software for hosting lightweight discussion communities with extensions and moderation tools. It helps technically capable teams launch a forum without relying on a closed hosted community platform.
NodeBB
NodeBB is forum software with real-time discussions, user reputation features, plugins, and moderation capabilities. It helps forum operators encourage timely conversations without abandoning traditional topic-based community organization.
XenForo
XenForo provides self-hosted forum software with member profiles, moderation controls, add-ons, and discussions. It helps established communities maintain ownership of forum data and customize member participation rules.
Invision Community
Invision Community provides forums, clubs, calendars, and member profiles for branded online communities. It helps moderators centralize discussions and memberships instead of maintaining separate forum and event tools.
vBulletin
vBulletin is forum software for publishing discussion boards, member profiles, private messages, and moderated conversations. It helps organizations create structured discussion spaces without building forum features from scratch.
phpBB
phpBB is open-source forum software for hosting categorized discussions, user accounts, and moderation workflows. It helps technically capable teams launch customizable community forums while avoiding proprietary platform dependence.
MyBB
MyBB is free forum software with discussion boards, user permissions, plugins, themes, and moderation controls. It helps small communities establish organized conversations when budget limits rule out paid forum platforms.
Simple Machines Forum
Simple Machines Forum is open-source software for running member forums with boards, permissions, and moderation tools. It helps administrators manage growing discussion archives without relying on scattered social-media conversations.
bbPress
bbPress adds lightweight discussion forums to WordPress websites through a plugin-based forum system. It helps WordPress site owners host member discussions without managing a separate community application.
BuddyPress
BuddyPress adds member profiles, activity streams, groups, and messaging features to WordPress websites. It helps WordPress communities offer social-networking features without commissioning custom member-profile development.
Forumbee
Forumbee provides hosted community forums with discussion categories, moderation tools, and knowledge-base style organization. It helps support teams organize customer questions into searchable conversations rather than repeatedly answering emails.
Answerbase
Answerbase provides question-and-answer community software for customer support, product discovery, and searchable knowledge sharing. It helps businesses reduce repetitive support requests by enabling customers to find peer-generated answers.
UserVoice
UserVoice collects customer feedback, feature requests, and product insights through dedicated feedback portals. It helps product teams consolidate scattered requests and identify recurring customer needs more clearly.
Canny
Canny collects user feedback, organizes feature requests, and publishes product roadmaps and changelogs. It helps teams prioritize requested improvements instead of tracking ideas across disconnected support channels.
Orbit
Orbit organizes community member data, activity, and relationship signals in a community relationship management system. It helps community teams identify engaged members when interactions occur across many platforms and events.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite manages social-media publishing, monitoring streams, inbox messages, and team collaboration from one dashboard. It helps social teams respond consistently when community conversations arrive across multiple social networks.
Buffer
Buffer schedules social-media posts, analyzes performance, and supports audience engagement through shared publishing workflows. It helps small teams maintain regular community communication without manually posting on every channel.
Agorapulse
Agorapulse combines social publishing, inbox management, monitoring, reporting, and collaboration tools for social teams. It helps managers prevent unanswered social comments by routing incoming conversations through a shared inbox.
Brandwatch
Brandwatch monitors online conversations and provides consumer intelligence through social listening and analytics tools. It helps teams understand community sentiment by finding relevant discussions beyond their owned channels.
Oktopost
Oktopost manages B2B social-media publishing, employee advocacy, engagement, and social performance measurement. It helps B2B teams connect social community activity with coordinated marketing and employee participation.
NapoleonCat
NapoleonCat provides social-media publishing, comment moderation, analytics, and automated responses across supported networks. It helps lean teams manage high comment volumes without switching repeatedly between native social apps.
MemberClicks
MemberClicks provides membership management, event registration, websites, email communication, and member directories for associations. It helps association administrators replace manual membership records with centralized operational tools.
GrowthZone
GrowthZone provides association management software for memberships, events, communications, directories, and billing. It helps chambers and associations coordinate member operations without relying on separate spreadsheets and systems.
YourMembership
YourMembership provides association management tools for member records, events, email, websites, and online communities. It helps membership organizations keep member information and engagement activities in one connected system.
MemberLeap
MemberLeap offers association management software for membership databases, events, websites, communications, and member portals. It helps membership teams reduce administrative duplication when managing renewals, events, and member communications.
Neon CRM
Neon CRM manages constituent records, donations, memberships, events, email campaigns, and volunteer activities. It helps nonprofit communities connect supporter engagement data instead of maintaining fragmented constituent records.
ClubExpress
ClubExpress provides membership management, websites, event registration, payments, forums, and communications for clubs. It helps volunteer-led clubs handle routine administration without juggling separate website and membership tools.
Tradewing
Tradewing provides a community platform for professional associations with member networking, groups, and event engagement. It helps associations foster member connections between events rather than limiting engagement to annual gatherings.
Forumotion
Forumotion hosts customizable online forums with discussion categories, moderation tools, and member profile features. It helps organizers avoid building forum software from scratch while keeping conversations organized and moderated.
ProBoards
ProBoards provides hosted discussion forums with configurable boards, permissions, member accounts, and moderation controls. It reduces the technical burden of launching a structured member forum for ongoing topic-based discussions.
Groups.io
Groups.io runs email-based groups with searchable message archives, file sharing, calendars, and member management. It helps distributed groups centralize long-running email conversations that otherwise become difficult to retrieve.
Google Groups
Google Groups creates mailing lists and discussion groups with membership, posting, and access-management settings. It helps teams manage group communications without manually maintaining email distribution lists across separate inboxes.
Verint Community
Verint Community supports branded online communities for customer discussions, knowledge sharing, and peer support. It helps organizations deflect repetitive support questions by enabling customers to find peer-generated answers.
Jive
Jive provides collaboration spaces where employees or members can discuss topics, share content, and form groups. It helps organizations replace scattered internal conversations with persistent, searchable spaces for shared work.
Threado
Threado helps teams manage customer communities and engage members across community channels and conversations. It helps community teams keep track of member questions and engagement without relying on disconnected tools.
Commsor
Commsor provides community operations tools for organizing member data, programs, and engagement activities. It helps community managers understand member relationships when participation data is spread across multiple platforms.
Gradual
Gradual combines virtual events and community experiences for organizations hosting member programming online. It helps event-led communities maintain engagement between gatherings instead of treating each event as isolated.
Airmeet
Airmeet hosts virtual events with sessions, networking features, exhibitor areas, and attendee engagement tools. It helps community teams create interactive online gatherings when video meetings alone feel too passive.
RingCentral Events
RingCentral Events supports virtual and hybrid events with sessions, networking, registration, and event production tools. It helps organizers coordinate large online community events without stitching together separate webinar and registration systems.
CMNTY Platform
CMNTY Platform provides branded online community spaces for discussions, events, content, and member connections. It helps membership organizations create a dedicated digital home rather than relying solely on social networks.
Ugenie
Ugenie helps creators and organizations run membership communities with content, events, messaging, and payments. It helps operators consolidate member experiences that would otherwise require separate content, event, and communication tools.
Open Social
Open Social is an open-source platform for building online communities, collaboration spaces, and member networks. It helps organizations needing custom community infrastructure avoid starting development from an entirely blank foundation.
HumHub
HumHub is open-source social networking software for creating private community spaces, groups, and activity streams. It helps teams build self-hosted social communities when control over data and customization matters.
phpFox
phpFox provides social networking software with member profiles, groups, feeds, messaging, and content sharing. It helps community builders launch a social-network-style experience without developing core member features themselves.
IdeaScale
IdeaScale manages idea communities where participants submit suggestions, vote, comment, and collaborate on proposals. It helps organizations collect and prioritize community ideas instead of losing feedback across unstructured channels.
Wazoku
Wazoku supports innovation programs by collecting challenges, ideas, expertise, and collaborative problem-solving contributions. It helps innovation teams find relevant input from broad contributor networks around specific business challenges.
QuestionPro Communities
QuestionPro Communities manages research communities for recruiting participants, running surveys, and maintaining member panels. It helps research teams avoid repeatedly sourcing respondents for studies by maintaining an engaged participant community.
Alchemer Community
Alchemer Community helps organizations manage research panels and gather ongoing feedback from selected participants. It helps teams organize recurring customer research without manually tracking participants, invitations, and response histories.
UserEcho
UserEcho provides customer feedback forums, support portals, knowledge bases, and suggestion voting tools. It helps product teams capture customer requests in one place rather than sorting feedback from many inboxes.
Nolt
Nolt offers feedback boards where users submit, discuss, and vote on product suggestions. It helps product teams make customer demand visible without relying on ad hoc spreadsheets and support tags.
Frill
Frill provides feedback boards, product roadmaps, announcements, and voting for customer-facing product communication. It helps teams close the feedback loop by showing customers which requests are planned or completed.
Featurebase
Featurebase combines customer feedback collection, voting boards, roadmaps, and product changelog publishing. It helps SaaS teams connect feature requests with public product updates instead of managing separate systems.
Fider
Fider is open-source feedback software that lets users submit, discuss, and vote on ideas. It helps teams gather transparent product feedback while retaining more control over their feedback infrastructure.
These tools illustrate how broadly community management can be defined, from moderated forums to member operations and live events. Evaluate your audience habits, moderation capacity, and ownership requirements before selecting a platform.