Mighty Networks Alternatives in 2026: Pick by Why You Are Leaving

The closest Mighty Networks alternatives to a paid Launch plan are Skool Pro at $984 a year, Podia Shaker at $1,008 and Circle Professional at $1,068. They diverge on 2 numbers: what the plan costs and what the platform takes out of each member payment.

Which one fits depends on why you are leaving. Podia charges no cut, Circle 2%, Skool 2.9%, and Discord 16% once you sell access. Cheaper entry plans exist on most of them, and every one buys its lower price with a bigger cut or a cap. Prices were read on each vendor’s own pricing page, on annual billing.

Nearly every switch on this list starts the same way. Something changed, and the bill or the limits moved with it.

A price jumps. A plan gets restructured. Or the cut per sale that felt like nothing at 50 members starts to look very different at 500.

So the search happens under pressure, and the pressure is what makes it go wrong. The right replacement is completely different depending on which of those things happened to you.

A host leaving over a course tool and a host leaving over a 5% cut should not land on the same platform. So this is sorted by why you are going, by what each option costs, and by the cut it takes.

Key Takeaways

• The 3 closest replacements for Mighty’s $950 Launch plan sit within $118 of it: Skool Pro $984, Podia Shaker $1,008, Circle Professional $1,068.
• Every cheaper entry plan buys its price with a bigger cut or a cap: Skool Hobby $90 takes 10%, Podia Mover $504 caps email at 100.
• Mighty Networks’ $350 Explore plan costs more than its $950 Launch plan above $20,000 a year in sales, because Explore takes 5% and Launch 2%.
• A free community platform costs nothing to run and plenty to charge on. Discord’s own fee schedule puts its cut at 16% on desktop.
• 2 pages ranking for this search state Mighty Networks’ price wrong, and one of them also says its fee is zero.
• If a branded phone app is what you are really paying for, leaving gets more expensive. The cheapest published price for one on both app stores is $1,999 a year.

How the real Mighty Networks alternatives differ, and what each costs

Mighty Networks is 5 products on a single bill: a community, a course platform, an events tool, a branded mobile app, and the billing that charges your members. Almost nobody uses all 5.

Worth checking whether the fee is the only leak, while you are looking. In a one person business the same problem tends to show up in 3 or 4 places at once. The Online Selling Mistakes Challenge walks through the 5 that cost solo sellers the most, 1 a day, at no charge.

Work out which 2 or 3 of those products you actually open, and the field narrows from a dozen names to the 6 in the table below.

The table below is anchored on Launch, because that is the plan most people leaving Mighty are actually on: unlimited members, courses included, 2% of every member payment.

The middle column is the nearest tier on each rival that does the same job, not the cheapest one they sell.

Skool Pro is $984 a year, Podia Shaker $1,008 and Circle Professional $1,068, so the 3 closest replacements for a $950 Launch plan sit within $118 of what you already pay.

All 5 paid alternatives host courses. Discord hosts chat and nothing else, which is why it has no entry in that middle column.

One of them cannot match Launch on members. Mighty gives unlimited members on every tier it sells, and Heartbeat’s Grow plan stops at 5,000.

All of those are annual billing, which is the one basis every vendor here publishes a real number for. Circle and Podia print annual rates only. Card processing sits on top of every row and none of these platforms absorbs it: Stripe’s published rate is 2.9% plus 30 cents per charge, with another 1.5% on international cards and 1% more if the currency has to be converted. If a decent share of your members are abroad, add that to every fee in the table.

Mighty Networks’ own ladder runs $350 a year on Explore, $950 on Launch, $2,150 on Scale and $4,250 on Growth, with Mighty Pro quoted individually. The fees run 5%, 2%, 1% and 0.5% in that order, so the fee gets smaller as the plan gets bigger.

Full breakdown of all 4 tiers, including the 2 that have no pricing card, is in the Mighty Networks pricing deep-dive.

If a plan change is what pushed you out

A Mighty Networks host who had something working wakes up to different rules.

The bill and the limits moved underneath a community that was running fine.

A community manager posted about exactly this on r/CommunityManager, in a thread titled around Mighty Networks destroying their business. Their words: “Before this, I was already paying approximately $59/month… But now, I’m stuck getting severely stripped-down features for $425/month.”

Read Mighty’s live pricing page and you can see what they ran into. Spaces are unlimited on every plan, but multi-feature Spaces are a Scale feature, listed on the Scale card under “Launch, plus”.

So on the $950 a year Launch plan, a Space carries a single feature. Chat, or a feed, or a member list. Not several at once.

What to pick: the durable answer to “they changed the rules” is a platform where you hold the rules. That means self-hosted. BuddyBoss is the mainstream version, a WordPress plugin plus theme that gives you groups, forums, courses and memberships on a site you own.

What it costs: BuddyBoss Launch is $199 for the first year and renews at $399. The cheaper Start tier is $99 then $199, and it keeps a 2.9% fee, which Launch drops to zero. Add WordPress hosting on top, so budget somewhere north of $500 in year 2.

What you give up: everything Mighty was quietly doing. Updates, uptime, spam, the mobile experience, and the person who answers when a member cannot log in. That person is now you. This is the same year 2 renewal pattern that catches people across the whole category, and it is worth reading how it plays out on membership site platforms before you commit.

If your courses and your community sit in 2 different tools

Tool sprawl is the reason this group leaves, and price barely comes into it.

2 bills, 2 logins, and a member who has to be told which door the course is behind.

It comes up constantly. On the r/CommunityManager thread comparing the 2 platforms, a host described the same move: “We also had courses in Kajabi so have brought courses and community into Circle.”

What to pick: Circle if the community is the centre of gravity and the courses are a supporting act. Podia if it is the other way round.

What it costs: Circle Professional is $89 a month, which is $1,068 for a year, since Circle publishes only a per-month rate on annual billing and no annual total. It takes 2% of member payments, a number that lives inside a collapsed panel rather than on the plan card.

Podia Shaker is $1,008 a year, published as a total, with no cut at all, and it includes courses, community, a website and a checkout.

What you give up: Podia’s cheaper Mover plan at $504 looks like the obvious pick and usually is not. It carries a 5% fee and caps email at 100 subscribers, and it stops being the cheap one at $10,080 of sales a year, which is where Shaker takes over. Below that line Mover is genuinely the right answer.

Circle is the name that comes up most often as the like-for-like swap, and its own field of rivals is worth a look if you want to widen the search: Circle’s own field of rivals. If courses are genuinely the priority, Kajabi and Circle compared covers the other end of that trade.

If chat is all anyone opens and the budget is the real constraint

Some communities never needed the platform. They needed a room. The courses went unwatched, the events got 4 people, and the thing members actually use is the chat.

A nonprofit worker described this on r/nonprofit, on a thread that ranks on page 1 for this exact search. They liked Mighty Networks and could not afford it.

The most useful reply came from someone who had already made both moves: “My nonprofit used Circle.so for a couple of years… because it was more affordable than Mighty Networks… We eventually decided this year to move to Discord because it’s a more familiar platform for young people and it’s free. It’s not as secure and doesn’t have all the features we would want but it gives us some funds back.”

That is the honest version of free. You get the room and you lose the structure.

What to pick: Discord or a private Facebook group if the community is genuinely free. Skool if you want to charge for it and keep things simple, on Hobby while it is small and Pro once it is not.

What it costs: Skool Hobby is $9 a month, or $7.50 a month if you pay for the year. Skool Pro is $99 a month, or $82 a month on yearly billing, which is $984 for 12 of them.

Note that second number. Google’s own summary for this search says Skool “uses a flat pricing model starting at $99 per month”, and both halves of that are wrong. Skool starts at $9, and Skool Hobby carries a 10% transaction fee, so nothing about it is flat.

A commenter on the thread above put it plainly: “You can get that even with skool on a 9 dollars plan.”

What you give up: on Skool Hobby, the custom URL and the affiliate program are both crossed out, and the 10% cut is 3 times Pro’s 2.9%.

So Hobby is the right answer for a community earning under about $12,600 a year, and the wrong one above it. Past that line Pro costs less in total despite an entry price 11 times higher.

Discord is the bigger trap, because free is only free until you charge.

Its Monetization Terms, Schedule 1, set Server Subscriptions at a 10% platform fee plus 6% payment processing on desktop and browser. That is 16%. On iOS the processing line is 30% in year 1, so the total reaches 40%, and Server Subscriptions need US banking details before you can switch them on at all.

So run the community on Discord, and take the money literally anywhere else. What each of these actually costs at 100 members is broken down in what community platforms really cost, and Skool’s own pricing covers the fees its pricing page leaves off.

If the branded phone app is the only reason the bill is that size

Mighty Pro exists mostly to do 1 job: put your community in the App Store and on Google Play as an app with your name on it. If that is what you are buying, leaving costs more than most people expect.

Leaving is more expensive than staying, or at least it is not obviously cheaper. Of the platforms here, only 4 will tell you a price for a branded app at all. BuddyBoss on both stores renews at $1,999 a year, Movement’s Business plan is $2,868, Kajabi Pro is $4,788 and includes an app it values at $199 a month, and Heartbeat Scale is $9,200. Mighty Pro and Circle will not publish one.

What to pick: BuddyBoss if you already run WordPress. Its $1,999 app tier is the lowest published price for both stores, though you also need the $399 web plan and your own hosting, which puts the real total close to Movement’s $2,868. Movement if you want 1 bill and no WordPress site underneath it. Kajabi Pro if you were going to pay for courses and marketing anyway and the app comes along.

What it costs: watch the fine print on the cheap end. Movement’s free plan does put a branded app in your hands, and it takes 15% of every sale and caps you at 100 active members. The App Store listing itself only arrives on the $239 a month Business tier. Movement’s paid plans take 2.5%.

What you give up: Movement and BuddyBoss are app-first products. Their courses and community depth are thinner than Mighty’s, and on BuddyBoss you are running a WordPress site plus an app. Compare the numbers against Kajabi’s full tier list and Heartbeat’s 3 plans before you assume the app is the cheap part.

If the cut per sale is what grew, not the plan

The transaction fee is the one reason to leave where the honest answer is sometimes to stay.

The community manager from earlier did the arithmetic out loud: “If I grow to just 5,000 members paying $360 a year, they would make $18,000-$36,000 annually from fees alone.” Check it and the maths holds. 5,000 members at $360 is $1.8M a year, and 1% to 2% of that is $18,000 to $36,000.

A plan stops at its price, while a percentage keeps climbing with every sale you make.

So the cheap plan with a big fee is only cheap below a line, and every platform here puts that line somewhere different.

Below the crossover the small plan wins, above it the bigger plan with the smaller fee wins. Mighty’s Explore and Launch plans cost exactly the same, $1,350, at $20,000 of annual sales. All 5 pairs below are priced on yearly billing.

Read that table before you read any roundup.

If your sales sit above any of those lines, the fix is 1 tier up, not a migration.

Run the same arithmetic on the plans you would actually buy and the ranking rearranges.

At $30,000 a year in member payments, Podia Shaker costs $1,008 all in, because it charges no fee at all. Mighty Launch comes to $1,550, Circle Professional $1,668, Kajabi Basic $1,716, Skool Pro $1,854, Heartbeat Grow $2,240, and Discord $4,800.

The platform charging no plan fee at all finishes most expensive. And the 3 that sat $84 apart on the sticker, Skool Pro, Podia Shaker and Circle Professional, spread to $846 apart once the cut is counted.

Years ago I had a sales call for a service I used to run, fixing emails that were landing in Gmail’s Promo Tab. The prospect was already a customer of mine, so it would have been an easy close.

His emails were already landing where they should. I wrote afterwards that I had been “VERY tempted to take his money”, and I told him on the call instead that he did not have the problem, and ended it early.

Same call here. If a tier change fixes this, take the tier change.

What to pick if it really is time to split things up: stop paying a percentage on sales that have nothing to do with the community. Run the community wherever it is cheapest, and put your products, courses and one-time sales through a checkout that takes no cut of them.

What it costs: a checkout is the cheap half of this. CartMango is my own platform, so read this paragraph with that in mind. CartMango is free during beta and runs $10 to $30 a year afterwards, with no per-transaction fee on any tier.

Put that against the same $30,000 of sales used above. A 2% cut is $600 a year and a 5% cut is $1,500. CartMango’s cut of it is nothing, and the plan is $10 to $30 for the whole year. CartMango sells one-time products and subscriptions, hosts the sales page itself through Mini Pages, and drops every buyer into your email tool.

What you give up: CartMango cannot replace Mighty Networks, and will not be able to this year. CartMango does not host a community or a course today, and both land on the $30 a year plan when they arrive. Until then this route means running 2 tools, so only take it if the fee is genuinely the thing that hurts.

Where this goes wrong

The most common mistake is trusting the page you land on, and this search punishes that harder than most.

Every ranked article on page 1 is published by a vendor with something to sell, including 2 slots held by Mighty Networks itself. There is no independent editorial result on the page. That would be fine if the numbers were right, and 2 of them are not.

Gurucan’s comparison page, ranking in the top 5, puts Mighty Networks at “$23/month” in a table and marks its transaction fees as “0%”. The real entry price is $350 a year and the fees run from 5% down to 0.5%, which Mighty publishes in its own developer documentation. Movement’s page states Mighty’s plans as “$39/month Community”, “$119/month Business”, and Mighty Pro at “$2,000/month”. None of those plan names exists on Mighty’s pricing page, and Mighty Pro carries no public price at all.

Google’s summary of the same search is better and still not right. It puts Skool at “$99 per month” when Skool starts at $9, and Kajabi at “$89 per month” when Kajabi’s cheapest plan is $143 a month on annual billing and $179 month to month, with no $89 tier anywhere on the page.

The second mistake is scale. Several of these roundups recommend Hivebrite, Higher Logic and Forj to somebody who was paying $79 a month. Hivebrite’s own pricing page starts at $895 a month billed annually, which is $10,740 a year, and every plan’s button says “Talk to us”. That is association software, priced for organisations with staff and a procurement process.

The third one is quieter, and it is about your members. Mighty’s own developer documentation, in its article on managing plans, is clear about what happens when you switch a paid plan off: “Subscription Plans: Members keep access until the end of their current billing period”, and members are shown “Your subscription to [Plan Name] has been canceled.”

Your member list exports as a CSV, though the billing relationships behind it do not travel with it.

Whatever you move to, set the new subscriptions up before you turn the old ones off.

Costs on this table run from nothing to $2,868 a year. Discord and Skool Hobby are the 2 cheapest community routes, and they take the most per sale, 16% and 10%.

FAQ

Is there a free version of Mighty Networks?

No. Mighty Networks has a free trial but no free plan, and the trial is not free in the way most are. Mighty’s own developer documentation lists the fee schedule as 5% on Explore, 2% on Launch, 1% on Scale, 0.50% on Growth, and 5% on the Growth Free Trial.

So anything you sell during the trial still carries a cut, which is unusual and worth knowing before you load a paid membership into it.

What are the best free community platforms?

Discord and a private Facebook group are the only genuinely free ones, and both are free to run rather than free to sell on. Discord’s own fee schedule takes 16% on desktop the moment you charge for access, and Server Subscriptions need US banking details. Circle, Skool, Mighty Networks and Heartbeat have no free plan at all, so Skool’s $9 Hobby tier is the cheapest paid entry here.

Which is better, Circle or Mighty Networks?

Circle for a cleaner, chat-led community. Mighty Networks for depth. Circle Professional is $89 a month on annual billing with a 2% fee, and Mighty Launch is $950 a year with a 2% fee, so the yearly cost is close and the fee is identical.

Real hosts who have moved tend to cite 2 reasons: consolidating a separate course tool, and members finding Circle less cluttered. Hosts who stay tend to cite mobile and native video.

Who owns Mighty Networks?

Mighty Networks is privately held and independent. Gina Bianchini is the co-founder and CEO, and she previously co-founded Ning with Marc Andreessen and started Mighty Networks while the first entrepreneur in residence at Andreessen Horowitz. No acquisition, so the platform’s direction is set by its founders and investors.

Can I take my members with me when I leave?

Your contact list comes with you, and your billing does not. Mighty lets you download member information for any plan as a CSV.

The active subscriptions stay behind, because they were created on Mighty’s Stripe connection. Rebuilding them on the new platform means asking every paying member to enter their card again, and that is where most of the drop-off in a migration happens.

Do the alternatives charge transaction fees too?

Most of them. Circle takes 2% on Professional, Skool takes 10% on Hobby and 2.9% on Pro, Heartbeat takes 5% on Build, Podia takes 5% on Mover and nothing above it, Movement takes 15% on free and 2.5% on paid, and Discord takes 16% on desktop. Kajabi is the exception on its own processor. Card processing is charged separately by Stripe on every one of them.

What you keep when the plan changes again

Every situation above rests on the same thing. You built something, and the platform holding it can change what it costs at any time. So the question underneath all 5 is how much of your business sits somewhere that can reprice it.

The one part you can permanently take out of that risk is the money. A checkout that takes no cut of a sale cannot quietly get more expensive as you grow, and a subscription created there keeps paying you after you cancel.

CartMango is free during beta, then $10 to $30 a year, with no per-transaction fee on any plan. CartMango sells one-time products and subscriptions, hosts your sales page through Mini Pages, and every buyer lands in your email tool ready for the next offer. Course hosting and community are not yet live on CartMango, and both arrive on the $30 a year plan in October 2026. If you are still weighing Mighty Networks alternatives, this is the piece you can settle now and stop paying a percentage on.

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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