Circle.so Review 2026: 4.7 Stars When Circle Asks, 2.4 When It Doesn’t

Circle.so is worth paying for if you run a paid community where members post and meet live most weeks. Professional costs $89 a month billed yearly and keeps 2% of every member payment, on top of Stripe’s fees. It is an expensive place to test an idea nobody has paid for yet.

This Circle.so review sorted all 135 of Circle’s Trustpilot reviews. Its 4.1 score rests mostly on reviews Circle requested from April 2026 on: 72 of the 85 5-star reviews came that way, and 26 of the 27 1-stars arrived unprompted. A team, or a community moving over from another platform, does better on Business at $199 a month.

A bad Circle fit means a migration. Your members learn where everything lives, their payments run through your Stripe account, and Circle bills its headline price by the year, so switching later is slow.

Circle’s Trustpilot page includes a host who moved a whole community in, then moved it back out after custom pages disappeared.

Before you pay $89 a month, find out how many members already pay you, how often you go live and who helps you run the community.

Below are Circle’s features and fees, who wrote the angry reviews, and 5 situations with a straight answer for each.

Key Takeaways

• The price: Professional is $89 a month billed yearly, Business $199 and Scale $419, taking 2%, 1% and 1% of member payments.
• The fee stack: a $100 monthly member payment on a US card leaves you $94.10 on Professional after Circle, Stripe and Stripe Billing.
• The reviews: 72 of Circle’s 85 5-star Trustpilot reviews came through its own review requests, while 26 of its 27 1-stars were unprompted.
• Who complains: of the 32 1- and 2-star reviews, 18 come from hosts, mostly about billing or bugs, and 7 from members.
• Moving in: Business imports only 5 members a day for its first 3 days, then 1,000 a day, so time your announcement.
• Leaving: cancelling your Circle plan does not cancel your members’ subscriptions, so you cancel each one and refund where it applies.

What Circle.so is, and what every plan includes

Circle.so is a community platform: a branded space where members post, chat, join live calls and take courses, with paid access charged through your own Stripe account. It was founded in early 2020 by people who were formerly on Teachable’s founding team, and every plan includes unlimited members.

If this will be your first time charging for access, the Online Selling Mistakes Challenge covers 5 common selling mistakes by email, free, so you can catch them before you commit to a plan.

Circle’s main tools, from its pricing page and help center:

• Spaces for posts, images and chat, plus direct messages between members.
• Courses that run self-paced, structured or on a schedule, with drip release and quizzes you can grade.
• Live streams, live rooms and events, metered by hours on each plan.
• Gamification: points, levels and a leaderboard.
• A website and a custom domain, so your pages and your community share one address.
• Paywalls, Circle’s checkout for subscriptions, one-time payments and free trials, paid into your own Stripe account.
• iOS, Android and desktop apps under the Circle Communities name. An app under your own brand needs Circle Plus.

Professional’s plan card lists community, courses, live events, a website, payments, gamification, a custom domain and the apps, so the core community tools are the same on every plan. Moving up adds limits, automation and AI tools: Business adds workflows, custom profile fields, API access and the option to remove Circle’s branding, and Scale adds AI agents, AI moderation, webhooks and custom single sign-on.

One gap worth checking before you buy: Circle’s help center has no article on course certificates. If your students expect one, ask Circle first.

What Circle costs once members pay you

Circle.so sells 4 plans: Professional at $89 a month, Business at $199, Scale at $419 and Circle Plus at a custom price. The 3 printed prices are monthly rates for yearly billing, and Circle’s pricing page notes they are “based on annual billing and do not include applicable taxes.”

Circle Professional keeps 2% of member payments and gives you 3 admins and 10 live hours a month, while Scale costs $330 a month more for a 1% cut, 10 admins and 20 live hours:

Older reviews list a different set of plans, so check Circle’s own pricing page before trusting any plan list.

What a $100 member payment leaves you

A $100 monthly member payment on a US card leaves you $94.10 on Professional, $95.10 on Business or Scale and $95.60 on Circle Plus:

Circle does not process payments itself. You connect your own Stripe account, and Circle’s percentage comes off each charge as an application fee. Circle’s paywall fees help doc lists the stack for a subscription: Circle’s cut, Stripe’s 2.9% plus 30 cents, and 0.7% for Stripe Billing. International cards and currency conversion cost more, per the same doc.

Business costs $110 a month more than Professional and saves 1% of member payments, so on fees alone it pays for itself once members pay you $11,000 a month. Scale charges the same 1% as Business, so its extra $220 a month buys limits and AI tools, never a lower cut. To set that bill against Skool, Mighty Networks and Heartbeat at the same member count, see what community platforms really cost.

The add-ons that grow a Circle bill

Circle charges these add-ons on top of your plan:

• Email Hub, Circle’s built-in email tool, costs $99 a month at 10,000 contacts, with the first 30 days free.
• Extra admins cost $10 a month each, and extra moderators or extra spaces $20 a month per 10, on every plan below Circle Plus.
• Branded email notifications cost $40 a month and custom profile fields $49 a month on Professional. Both come included from Business up.
• Extra live hours cost $50 a month per 10 hours. Extra live attendees cost $20 a month per 100 on Professional and Business.
• Circle AI credits come at 2,500 a month on Professional and Business and 5,000 on Scale, then $10 per 1,000.

One unprompted 1-star reviewer wrote that importing contacts alone added $25 a month to the bill, though they had not used them. Email Hub is priced by contacts, so check its slider before you import a list.

Circle.so reviews on Trustpilot: what the 4.1 is made of

Circle has 135 reviews on Trustpilot and a TrustScore of 4.1 out of 5. Circle claimed the page in January 2026, and the first review that came through one of its own review requests is dated April 1, 2026.

Trustpilot labels every review by how it arrived. Reviews marked Verified or Invited come through requests a company sends, and Circle’s transparency page says it asks its customers for reviews, positive or negative. Reviews marked Organic come from people who found the page on their own.

Reviews Circle asked for average 4.68 stars and unprompted reviews average 2.36, which is why the 2 groups read like reviews of different products:

A TrustScore is not a plain average. Worked out by hand, the 135 ratings average 3.90, not 4.1.

Requested reviews come from real Circle customers, but a company decides when to ask, and unhappy hosts can review without being asked. Before Circle’s requests began, its page held 15 reviews, and 12 of them gave 1 or 2 stars.

At least 3 of the 13 unprompted 5-stars praise a shop rather than Circle, and one names Target.

What Circle’s 4- and 5-star reviewers praise

Circle’s happy reviewers mention support more than any other theme I counted. 49 of the 96 4- and 5-star reviews mention support, the team, help or a quick response, against 10 that call Circle easy, simple or intuitive, and at least 10 name the person who helped them.

Several of the requested 5-stars rate a single support conversation rather than the platform. One reviewer gave 5 stars while writing that they still did not know why they had a Circle account.

The product praise is narrower:

• Easy to set up. One reviewer wrote that “even a guy with non tech background can setup very easily”, and another called the app “easy to navigate and well organized”.
• Better than a Facebook group. One reviewer called Circle “so much better than Facebook”.
• Steady updates. One reviewer wrote that Circle’s “update rate is insane and there are constantly new features being added”.
• Long-term hosts stay. A host who has run a 1,200-member community on Circle since mid 2020 called it “worlds apart from most software/SAAS companies”.

Even the 4-star reviews carry warnings. A host who ran a paid community on Circle called it a good fit for smaller communities but less flexible as theirs grew. Another, paying $129 a month, called the 2,500 monthly AI credits “a major issue”.

Who wrote Circle’s 32 1- and 2-star reviews

18 of the 32 low reviews come from hosts, 7 come from members or moderators inside someone else’s community, and 7 do not say which. Sorting them by writer changes what they mean, because a host and a member are complaining about different things.

The 18 hosts:

• 8 are about billing, prices or cancelling. One host cancelled weeks before renewal and was still billed $214.97. Another said their plan went from $89 to $129 a month “with no prior notice”. A third signed up through Capterra at a listed $49 a month and was then shown $89 a month, billed yearly.
• 6 are about bugs, lost work or slow support. A host who moved a fan community onto Circle moved everyone back out after custom pages their co-moderator built disappeared without a backup. Another wrote “Don’t migrate your paid members to Circle” after members could not add a billing address.
• 3 are about a limit they met only after paying: live hours, a daily import cap and bulk actions, all covered in the situations below.
• 1 is about value. A host on Enterprise wrote off several thousand dollars and moved to Wix.

The 7 members and moderators mostly describe the same problem. 5 of them could not leave a community or delete an account without going through the host or Circle. One wrote that “there is NO help area for members”, and another was added to a community they never agreed to join.

Circle hands that decision to the host. Its help center describes 3 switches:

1. Account deactivation. Admins can turn off “Allow my members to deactivate their account”, and then members must contact an admin to leave.
2. Self-cancelling. Each paywall has an “Allow members to self-cancel their subscription” toggle. Circle’s self-cancel help doc says to turn it on to let members cancel, and to keep it off if you want them to contact you instead.
3. Access groups. Members added to spaces through an access group cannot leave those spaces on their own.

Circle’s support team also forwards member requests such as billing changes and account reactivations to the community’s admin. A member who cannot leave can end up writing the 1-star review, and it is your community they are stuck in. Turn self-cancel on and leave deactivation on unless you have a strong reason not to.

If you have an audience but nobody paying yet

Wait before buying Circle if nobody has paid you yet. Circle has no free plan, and the cheapest way in is Professional at $89 a month billed yearly, which is $1,068 for the year, after a 14-day trial that needs no card.

Circle’s refund policy gives you 30 days from your original start date to ask for your money back. After that, no refunds are issued for the rest of the subscription, and renewals do not restart the clock.

Years ago I built an online training course that fewer than 5 people bought, and that flop nearly made me quit selling online altogether. Since then I ask for payment before I build, because “Do you want it?” gets answers anyone can give, while “You can buy it here” shows who truly wants in.

For a paid community, that means selling the first month before you build spaces and courses. A 14-day trial is short for a launch, and the 30-day refund window can close while you are still setting up. A checkout page plus a weekly call tests the same idea for a fraction of $1,068.

That checkout can be CartMango, the platform I run. CartMango takes one-time and subscription payments on every plan with no cut of your sales, and it is free right now, from $10 a year once paid plans start in November. CartMango’s community and course features are not live yet, so it covers the paying part only, and the first sessions happen on a call or in a group chat.

If you would rather start inside a community app with a cheaper entry plan, the Skool review covers Skool’s Hobby plan and the fees under it. Once members are paying, you can judge whether Circle’s tools are worth $1,068 a year.

If members pay you every month through Circle

Pick Professional at $89 a month if members pay you monthly and their payments stay under $11,000 a month. On a US card you keep $94.10 of every $100, and at $5,000 a month Circle’s own 2% comes to $100 on top of the plan.

Before your first member signs up, turn on the self-cancel toggle. With it off, a member who tries to cancel sees a message telling them to contact you, which is the problem the member reviews above describe.

What leaving Circle does to member subscriptions

Cancelling your Circle plan leaves your members’ subscriptions running, so you have to cancel each one yourself. Circle’s cancellation help doc covers the rest:

• Member subscriptions: cancelling your plan “won’t automatically cancel your member’s paywall subscriptions”, and any refunds that are due are yours to handle.
• Your Stripe account “will always remain connected” to Circle, and the doc recommends against using it for anything else.
• Your plan runs to the end of the billing cycle, so a yearly plan keeps the community open until the year ends.
• Your data goes about 90 days after cancellation. Support can send a CSV of members (without passwords), spaces, posts (without images) and comments, and the doc warns it is not easy to re-import.

The doc describes no way to carry live subscriptions out to another platform, so ask Circle before you count on moving them.

If you run live calls most weeks

Circle meters live time by the hour, so count your calls before you pick a plan. Professional includes 10 hours a month, Business 15 and Scale 20, and each extra block of 10 hours costs $50 a month.

2 calls of 90 minutes a week come to about 13 hours a month. For that, pick Professional plus 1 block of extra hours, $139 a month in all, over Business at $199 with 15 hours. A single weekly call fits inside Professional with room to spare.

One unprompted reviewer learned the cap after paying: “Base package you get 10 hours combined over all your spaces. In a month.”

Professional seats 15 people in a live room and 100 on a stream, and Scale raises those to 50 and 500:

What you give up on Professional is room size. Only 15 people can be in an interactive live room together, so a coaching call where everyone speaks fills up fast. A stream holds 100 viewers, and on Professional or Business each extra 100 costs $20 a month.

The Skool vs Circle comparison lists Circle’s live caps and shows where each platform gets cheaper as your revenue grows.

If you are moving a paying community over

Pick Business at $199 a month for a move, and schedule the import for day 4 of your paid plan. Business adds standard migration services, and free course migration is for annual Business plans and up. Professional still includes a payments migration “if eligible”, which Circle describes as moving “active subscriptions and payment information from your legacy platform to Circle”.

Circle’s help doc on importing members in bulk sets a different start-up limit per plan. Professional allows 50 imports a day for the first 7 days of a paid plan. Business allows 5 a day for the first 3 days. Both then rise to 1,000 a day.

So Business is the slower start and the faster finish. By the end of day 3, Professional can have imported 150 members against 15 on Business, but on day 4 Business jumps to 1,000 a day while Professional stays at 50 until day 8.

One host upgraded to Business, told a class they would be invited into the new community, and hit the 5-a-day limit. Entering people one by one did not work either, they wrote.

So, in order:

1. Import after day 3 on Business, and expect invites sent one by one to wait too. Announce the move only once your members are in.
2. Run a test purchase on every paywall with a real card, including adding a payment method. One migrating host lost paying members to a billing-address bug.
3. Keep your old platform running for a month until renewals show up in the Stripe account you connected to Circle.

If a team of moderators helps you run it

Pick Business at $199 a month once your team needs automations or bulk actions, and Scale at $419 once it needs more than 20 bulk actions a month. Professional gives you 3 admins and 10 moderators, Business 5 and 15, and Scale 10 and 100. Extra admins alone do not justify moving from Professional to Business: an extra admin costs $10 a month, and 10 more moderators $20 a month, on any of the 3.

Bulk actions and automations climb the same ladder: none on Professional, 20 on Business, and no cap on Scale. One Business host wrote that removing hundreds of members from a space group each year meant doing it by hand, because bulk removal needed a higher plan and support could not help.

A solo host with 1 community can live without either. A team that approves posts, tags new members and clears out expired subscribers every week will outgrow Professional fast.

Where older Circle reviews have gone out of date

Several reviews still ranking on Google’s first page describe plans Circle no longer sells:

• A review first published in 2021 compares a “$79 plan” with a “$39 plan”.
• A 2023 review lists Basic at $49, Professional at $99, Business at $249 with $199 early-bird pricing, and Enterprise at $399.
• 2 reviews updated in September 2026 still leave out Scale at $419.

Monthly billing is harder to pin down. Circle prints only its yearly prices and shows no monthly toggle, yet the data behind its pricing page gives Professional a monthly price of $99 in the plan comparison and $129 on the plan card. One page-1 review quotes $99 a month, another quotes $129, and 2 Trustpilot reviewers describe paying $129 a month.

If checkout offers you monthly billing, read the price on that screen before you enter a card.

Which Circle plan fits, and when to skip it for now

Circle Professional fits monthly-paying members and most live schedules, Business fits a move or a growing team, and a checkout costs less for anyone not yet paid:

The last row is CartMango, my own product, and it is there for 1 situation only. CartMango takes the payment and pays it straight into your own Stripe or PayPal account, but it does not host a community or courses today. Once your members are paying and talking, Circle is a better home for them than a group chat.

If Circle is a no for a different reason, the guide to Circle competitors sorts 8 alternatives by the kind of host each one suits, and the Mighty Networks review covers another community platform with courses on the same bill.

FAQ

Is Circle so a legit company?

Yes. Circle was founded in early 2020 by Sid Yadav, Rudy Santino and Andrew Guttormsen, who were formerly on Teachable’s founding team, and its careers page says it has raised $30 million and serves 10 million members. Member payments go into your own Stripe account. On Trustpilot it scores 4.1 from 135 reviews, with requested reviews far kinder than unprompted ones.

How much is Circle so per month?

Circle Professional costs $89 a month billed yearly, which is $1,068 a year. Business costs $199, Scale $419, and Circle Plus has a custom price. On top of the plan, Circle keeps 2%, 1%, 1% or 0.5% of member payments, and Stripe adds its card fee plus 0.7% for subscriptions.

How does Circle so make money?

Circle earns from 3 places: the plan price, a cut of every member payment (2% on Professional down to 0.5% on Circle Plus), and paid add-ons such as Email Hub, extra admins, live hours and AI credits. Branded mobile apps come with the custom-priced Circle Plus plan.

Who owns Circle so?

Circle was founded by Sid Yadav, Rudy Santino and Andrew Guttormsen, and its careers page says it has raised $30 million from investors. It is a different company from Circle, the business behind the USDC stablecoin.

Can members leave a Circle community on their own?

Only if the host allows it. Circle lets admins turn off account deactivation and turn off self-cancelling on each paywall, and members added through an access group cannot leave those spaces alone. In every one of those cases the member has to ask the host.

Does Circle have a free plan?

No. Circle offers a 14-day free trial with no card required, and the cheapest paid plan is Professional at $89 a month, billed yearly. Its refund policy gives you 30 days from your original start date to ask for your money back.

Taking the first payment before you pay for Circle

Circle.so earns its price once members show up to talk and meet every week. Until someone has paid you, a checkout is enough.

CartMango is built for that first step: one-time and monthly payments with no cut of your sales, paid out to your own payment account, and subscriptions that keep paying you if you ever leave CartMango.

About the Author

👋 I’m Welly, founder of CartMango (the site you’re on), a checkout platform for digital product sellers. We’ve previously processed $179M+. I also run BirdSend (email marketing tool, 3.1B+ emails sent). On the side I show other non-techie digital sellers how I use AI workflows to automate 50%+ of my operations. Find me on LinkedIn.

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• Skool vs Circle: live prices, the 2% Circle keeps and where each gets cheaper
• Mighty Networks review: another community platform’s Trustpilot reviews, sorted
• Skool review: who wrote Skool’s Trustpilot ratings, and what each kind of host should do
• What community platforms really cost: Skool, Circle, Mighty Networks and Heartbeat side by side