100 Best Networking Apps for Founders and Small Teams
Networking looks different for every founder, from finding a local meetup to joining a specialized online community. This selection begins with widely used platforms and practical spaces for professional connection.
LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a professional network for building profiles, connecting with colleagues, sharing updates, and finding opportunities. It helps founders overcome limited visibility by making their experience, company, and professional connections easier to discover.
Meetup
Meetup helps people find, organize, and attend local or virtual events centered on shared interests and industries. It addresses the challenge of finding relevant gatherings by grouping events around locations, topics, and communities.
Eventbrite
Eventbrite lets organizers publish events and attendees discover, register for, and manage tickets to professional gatherings. It reduces fragmented event discovery by collecting registration details and event listings in one searchable platform.
Luma
Luma provides event pages, invitations, registration tools, calendars, and community features for online and in-person gatherings. It helps teams avoid cumbersome event coordination by centralizing invitations, RSVPs, reminders, and attendee information.
Slack
Slack is a messaging platform where teams and communities organize conversations into channels, direct messages, and shared workspaces. It solves scattered professional conversations by giving communities persistent topic-based spaces for questions, introductions, and collaboration.
Discord
Discord hosts text, voice, and video communities through servers organized into channels and member roles. It helps distributed groups sustain informal connection by combining live conversation with searchable community discussion spaces.
WhatsApp Communities
WhatsApp Communities groups related chat groups under one umbrella for announcements, discussions, and member communication. It addresses overloaded group chats by helping organizers separate announcements and conversations across related member groups.
Telegram
Telegram supports private chats, large groups, broadcast channels, bots, and file sharing across devices. It helps professional groups communicate at scale when they need channels and discussions beyond ordinary one-to-one messaging.
Geneva
Geneva is a community platform combining group chat, forums, events, audio rooms, and member profiles. It reduces the need for disconnected community tools by bringing conversation, events, and member interaction together.
Circle
Circle lets creators and organizations build branded online communities with discussions, events, courses, and member directories. It helps community builders avoid fragmented member experiences by hosting learning, networking, and discussion in one place.
Mighty Networks
Mighty Networks enables organizations to create member communities with feeds, groups, events, courses, and direct messaging. It addresses weak member engagement by offering structured spaces where peers can interact around shared goals.
Fishbowl
Fishbowl is a professional social network featuring industry-focused communities, workplace conversations, and career-related discussions. It helps professionals seek candid peer perspectives when traditional networking platforms feel overly polished or formal.
Blind
Blind is an anonymous professional community where verified workers discuss companies, careers, workplace issues, and industries. It helps workers ask sensitive career questions by enabling conversations without attaching public professional identities.
Lunchclub
Lunchclub matches professionals for one-to-one meetings based on shared interests, goals, and professional backgrounds. It reduces the effort of identifying useful new contacts by suggesting introductions with potential mutual relevance.
ADPList
ADPList connects people with mentors for career guidance through searchable profiles and scheduled mentoring sessions. It helps founders find experienced guidance when their existing network lacks relevant functional or industry expertise.
Peerlist
Peerlist is a professional community where people showcase work, connect with peers, join groups, and find opportunities. It helps independent professionals demonstrate practical work when a conventional résumé provides insufficient context.
Wellfound
Wellfound connects startup job seekers, founders, and investors through company profiles, job listings, and talent discovery. It helps startups reach people interested in early-stage work without relying solely on broad employment platforms.
Product Hunt
Product Hunt is a platform for discovering, discussing, and launching new products with an engaged technology community. It helps makers find early conversations around product launches when they need feedback and visibility.
Indie Hackers
Indie Hackers is an online community where independent founders share lessons, questions, projects, and business progress. It counters founder isolation by connecting builders facing similar product, marketing, and operational decisions.
GitHub
GitHub hosts software code repositories and enables developers to collaborate through issues, discussions, and pull requests. It helps technical founders build credibility and relationships by making their open-source contributions visible and collaborative.
Behance
Behance is a portfolio platform where creative professionals publish projects, discover work, and connect with clients. It helps designers present visual work clearly when text-based professional profiles cannot show creative execution.
Dribbble
Dribbble is an online platform where designers share visual work, explore portfolios, and find design opportunities. It helps creative founders locate design talent and peers through focused portfolios rather than generic job listings.
Reddit
Reddit organizes user-created communities where members post questions, links, advice, and discussions around specific subjects. It helps founders reach niche audiences when broad networking platforms lack specialized topic-based conversations.
X
X is a social platform for publishing short posts, following conversations, and engaging with public communities. It helps founders join timely industry conversations when they need direct access to public professional discourse.
Facebook Groups
Facebook Groups gives communities dedicated spaces for posts, discussions, events, member management, and shared resources. It helps local and interest-based networks stay connected when members already use Facebook regularly.
Shapr
Shapr matches professionals using profile interests and discovery tools to facilitate business conversations. It helps people facing cold outreach fatigue find relevant contacts through curated profile discovery.
Alignable
Alignable connects small-business owners through local recommendations, referrals, groups, and direct professional messaging. It helps owners generate trusted local introductions when traditional advertising feels impersonal or expensive.
XING
XING provides professional profiles, job listings, groups, and event discovery for German-speaking business communities. It helps professionals navigate regional career networks without relying solely on broad global platforms.
The Dots
The Dots showcases creative portfolios and connects talent with collaborators, companies, jobs, and industry events. It helps creatives make work visible when traditional resumes fail to demonstrate visual capabilities.
Nextdoor
Nextdoor connects neighbors through neighborhood feeds, recommendations, local groups, and nearby business updates. It helps local operators build trusted community awareness instead of broadcasting anonymously across larger social networks.
InterNations
InterNations organizes communities, events, and online discussions for expatriates living in cities worldwide. It helps newcomers establish social and professional ties after relocating to an unfamiliar city.
Couchsurfing
Couchsurfing connects travelers with local hosts, events, and hangouts designed for in-person cultural exchange. It helps travelers meet locals and fellow visitors rather than navigating destinations in isolation.
Bumble For Friends
Bumble For Friends uses profiles and matching to help people form local platonic friendships. It reduces the awkwardness of initiating adult friendships by offering mutual, interest-based connection prompts.
F6S
F6S provides startup profiles, founder communities, funding-program applications, jobs, and event opportunities. It helps founders find startup programs and peer connections without searching many separate directories.
Elpha
Elpha hosts an online community where women in technology discuss careers, companies, and opportunities. It gives members a focused space for career advice when general professional networks feel overwhelming.
Startup Grind
Startup Grind connects entrepreneurs through local chapters, founder events, educational content, and community programming. It helps early-stage founders find nearby peers and learning opportunities beyond their immediate networks.
Whova
Whova provides event agendas, attendee profiles, messaging, community boards, and meeting coordination tools. It helps conference participants identify useful contacts instead of relying on chance hallway conversations.
Swapcard
Swapcard supports event communities with attendee profiles, messaging, meeting booking, and matchmaking recommendations. It helps attendees prioritize relevant conversations when large event directories are difficult to navigate.
Brella
Brella offers event matchmaking, participant profiles, meeting scheduling, and virtual or in-person networking tools. It helps eventgoers turn limited conference time into planned conversations with relevant participants.
Grip
Grip delivers event matchmaking, meeting scheduling, exhibitor discovery, and attendee engagement for business events. It helps exhibitors and attendees uncover potential leads within crowded event audiences.
Airmeet
Airmeet hosts virtual events with live sessions, social lounges, attendee tables, and networking features. It helps remote event participants recreate informal conversations that standard webinar formats often lack.
Remo
Remo creates virtual event spaces where participants move between tables for video conversations. It helps organizers enable spontaneous small-group interactions rather than limiting everyone to one broadcast.
Gather
Gather provides customizable virtual spaces where avatars move around and start proximity-based video conversations. It helps distributed teams create casual encounters that rarely happen in scheduled video meetings.
SpatialChat
SpatialChat offers virtual rooms where participants move freely and join proximity-based video and audio discussions. It helps online communities hold fluid conversations without rigid breakout-room assignments or formal agendas.
Bizzabo
Bizzabo supports event experiences with registration, agendas, attendee engagement, and networking-oriented event applications. It helps event teams centralize attendee information instead of managing disconnected communication and registration tools.
Cvent Attendee Hub
Cvent Attendee Hub provides event agendas, attendee directories, messaging, appointment requests, and engagement features. It helps attendees coordinate meetings and session plans without juggling separate event communications.
Webex Events
Webex Events supports virtual and hybrid events with attendee profiles, chat, sessions, and networking features. It helps organizers bring remote and in-person participants into one connected event experience.
vFairs
vFairs builds virtual and hybrid event environments with booths, chats, webinars, and attendee networking. It helps organizations create exhibitor interactions when audiences cannot attend a physical venue.
Accelevents
Accelevents manages event registration, agendas, attendee networking, ticketing, and virtual or hybrid sessions. It helps event organizers reduce tool fragmentation while giving participants ways to connect directly.
EventMobi
EventMobi provides event apps with agendas, attendee directories, messaging, polling, and community engagement tools. It helps attendees access event details and connect with peers from a single mobile interface.
Hopin
Hopin hosts online and hybrid events with stages, sessions, chat, and attendee networking tools. It helps organizers replace fragmented webinar tools when attendees need structured ways to meet.
Sched
Sched builds event agendas, session schedules, speaker listings, and attendee-facing mobile event guides. It reduces confusion around busy conference schedules by centralizing sessions and event information.
Splash
Splash provides event marketing tools for creating branded registration pages, invitations, and attendee communications. It helps teams avoid manually coordinating invitations and event updates across disconnected marketing tools.
Eventleaf
Eventleaf manages registrations, agendas, check-in, and event apps for in-person, virtual, and hybrid gatherings. It simplifies attendee administration for organizers who otherwise juggle spreadsheets, badges, and schedules.
CrowdComms
CrowdComms supplies mobile event apps, virtual event environments, and attendee engagement features. It helps event teams give participants a single place to find people, content, and updates.
Eventdex
Eventdex offers event registration, badge printing, mobile apps, and tools for attendee engagement. It reduces operational friction for organizers handling registrations and on-site attendee identification.
Stova
Stova provides event management technology for registrations, websites, mobile apps, and attendee experiences. It helps teams coordinate complex event workflows without relying on multiple disconnected systems.
Swoogo
Swoogo helps teams create event registration flows, manage attendees, and automate event communications. It addresses cumbersome registration setup by giving organizers flexible forms and automated confirmations.
HeySummit
HeySummit helps creators run virtual summits with registration pages, speaker schedules, and ticketing. It helps summit hosts organize many speakers and sessions without manually coordinating every attendee detail.
Mobilize
Mobilize helps organizations recruit supporters and coordinate volunteer events, shifts, and local actions. It solves the challenge of mobilizing distributed communities by centralizing sign-ups and event outreach.
Partiful
Partiful lets people create event invitations, collect RSVPs, and share gathering details with guests. It makes informal networking gatherings easier to organize than managing guest lists through group messages.
HiHello
HiHello creates digital business cards that users can share through QR codes, links, or NFC. It eliminates paper-card follow-up problems by making contact details easy to share and update.
Popl
Popl provides digital business cards and lead-capture tools for sharing professional contact information. It helps professionals capture event leads without manually entering contacts from paper business cards.
Blinq
Blinq creates digital business cards that share contact details using QR codes, links, or NFC. It solves outdated contact exchanges by letting users share a current profile from their phone.
Mobilo
Mobilo offers digital business cards and lead-generation tools for teams attending events and meetings. It helps sales teams collect and organize event contacts rather than losing valuable conversations afterward.
Linq
Linq provides digital business cards and smart contact-sharing products for professional networking. It reduces the need to carry printed cards while keeping shared contact information more current.
V1CE
V1CE makes NFC-enabled digital business cards that open customizable online professional profiles. It helps users make a memorable contact exchange without repeatedly printing and replacing paper cards.
Uniqode
Uniqode offers digital business cards with QR codes, profile management, and contact-sharing analytics. It helps organizations maintain consistent employee contact details across distributed teams and networking events.
Covve
Covve provides contact management tools, business card scanning, reminders, and relationship-tracking features. It helps professionals remember follow-ups when growing networks become difficult to manage manually.
CamCard
CamCard scans business cards and converts their details into searchable digital contact records. It saves users from typing contact information after conferences, meetings, and networking events.
Sansan
Sansan digitizes business cards and organizes company contacts into a shared customer relationship database. It helps teams prevent valuable relationship data from remaining isolated in individual employees' card collections.
Handshake
Handshake connects students and recent graduates with employers, jobs, career fairs, and campus opportunities. It helps early-career professionals discover relevant employer connections beyond their personal networks.
RippleMatch
RippleMatch matches students and early-career candidates with employers, jobs, and recruiting programs. It helps candidates find suitable opportunities when navigating entry-level recruiting feels opaque and time-consuming.
AlumniFire
AlumniFire helps schools and organizations build alumni communities for mentoring, jobs, and introductions. It makes alumni networks more accessible when members struggle to identify relevant people for advice.
Pavilion
Pavilion operates professional communities, events, and educational programming for go-to-market leaders. It helps revenue professionals find peers for practical advice beyond their immediate company network.
BNI Connect
BNI Connect helps Business Network International members manage referrals, visitors, chapter activity, and member profiles. It reduces scattered referral follow-up by centralizing relationship activity for chapter-based business networking.
LeTip
LeTip provides chapter members with referral tracking, meeting information, and resources for structured business networking. It helps members avoid losing promising referrals by organizing introductions and local chapter participation.
Network After Work
Network After Work organizes in-person professional networking events where attendees can meet local business contacts. It gives professionals a clearer path to finding local networking opportunities instead of searching independently.
Bevy
Bevy helps organizations build community programs through events, chapters, ambassador networks, and member engagement tools. It addresses the difficulty of coordinating distributed community events by giving organizers one operational platform.
Hivebrite
Hivebrite is a community management platform for member directories, groups, events, content, and engagement. It helps associations and alumni networks replace fragmented member communication with a centralized online community.
Higher Logic
Higher Logic provides online community software with discussion forums, member directories, automation, and engagement analytics. It helps membership organizations sustain peer conversations without relying solely on email newsletters.
Bettermode
Bettermode lets businesses create branded online communities with discussions, spaces, profiles, and moderation controls. It solves the challenge of hosting customer or member conversations outside disconnected social media groups.
Discourse
Discourse is open-source discussion forum software for building searchable communities around topics, products, or professions. It helps groups preserve useful conversations by organizing discussions into durable, searchable topic threads.
Common Room
Common Room collects community and product signals to help teams understand and engage their audience. It helps community teams identify meaningful member activity when interactions occur across multiple channels.
Disco
Disco combines community spaces, learning programs, events, and member profiles for cohort-based professional networks. It helps program operators connect learning and peer relationships rather than managing separate tools.
Heartbeat
Heartbeat provides community spaces, chat, events, member profiles, and integrations for online member networks. It reduces the friction of running active communities when discussions, events, and member information are separated.
Nas.io
Nas.io helps creators launch communities, memberships, events, and digital offerings from a single platform. It helps independent organizers monetize and manage their communities without assembling multiple services.
Skool
Skool combines community discussions, courses, calendars, and gamification for groups focused on shared learning. It helps educators and founders keep members engaged by placing lessons and peer interaction together.
Glue Up
Glue Up provides event management, membership management, customer relationship tools, and community engagement features. It helps associations avoid manually coordinating members, registrations, and communications across separate systems.
PheedLoop
PheedLoop offers event management software for registrations, sessions, exhibitors, mobile apps, and virtual events. It helps event organizers coordinate attendee experiences without juggling separate registration and engagement tools.
SpotMe
SpotMe is an enterprise event platform supporting virtual, hybrid, and in-person audience engagement experiences. It helps large event teams create interactive attendee experiences across different event formats.
Guidebook
Guidebook enables organizations to create mobile guides containing schedules, maps, speaker details, and attendee information. It helps attendees navigate complex events without relying on outdated printed programs or scattered emails.
Eventcombo
Eventcombo provides tools for ticketing, registration, virtual events, venue management, and event marketing. It helps organizers reduce administrative complexity when selling tickets and managing event logistics.
Zoho BackStage
Zoho BackStage helps teams plan events with registration, agendas, speaker management, attendee engagement, and reporting. It helps small teams manage event operations without maintaining spreadsheets for every planning task.
RingCentral Events
RingCentral Events supports virtual and hybrid events with stages, sessions, chat, networking, and exhibitor areas. It helps remote event hosts create more structured participant interaction than standard video meetings allow.
Conference Compass
Conference Compass creates event apps with personalized agendas, messaging, networking tools, and exhibitor information. It helps conference participants find relevant sessions and contacts amid crowded multi-track programs.
Jifflenow
Jifflenow manages business meeting schedules for enterprise events, including requests, approvals, and calendar coordination. It helps sales teams avoid scheduling conflicts when arranging high-value meetings during major events.
Yapp
Yapp lets organizers create mobile event apps featuring schedules, announcements, attendee information, and social updates. It helps smaller event teams share timely event details without developing a custom mobile application.
InEvent
InEvent provides event management software for registration, virtual sessions, attendee engagement, and event analytics. It helps organizers run hybrid events while keeping attendee data and session operations connected.
b2match
b2match provides event matchmaking software for participant profiles, appointment scheduling, and business networking. It helps attendees arrange relevant one-to-one meetings instead of relying on chance encounters.
The most useful networking app depends on the relationships you need: local peers, specialist communities, mentors, collaborators, or prospective hires.