Nothing is as valuable for your business as building a tribe of loyal fans and one of the best ways to do that is through an online community.
Now there are several online community platforms that allow you to build one on your own website and one of the most popular options is Mighty Networks.
However, Mighty Networks is more than just an online community builder as it also offers features for creating online courses and building membership sites.
With a plethora of online course platforms and membership website builders around, a lot of creators find it difficult to understand where Mighty Networks fits in and they aren’t able to decide whether to use it or not.
So, here I’m with this in-depth Mighty Networks review where I’ll be covering all the features of the platform as well as discuss its strengths and weaknesses.
By the end, you’ll have a clear idea of what the platform has to offer and whether it is the right option for you or not.
Let’s get started.
Mighty Networks Review Summary
Mighty Networks is an online platform that allows you to create your community, courses, and memberships, all in one place under your own brand. The strength of the platform is its core focus on community design and engagement and everything else it offers is built on top of this core.
Pros of Mighty Networks
- Ability to create Quick Posts, Articles, Polls, and Events.
- Ability to create online courses.
- Lets you create sub-groups.
- Community area has a clean, modern design out of the box.
- Has native apps for iOS and Android devices.
- Ability for members to personalize notifications.
- You can charge for access to community & courses.
- Has a slack integration for community administration.
Cons of Mighty Networks
- Lacks native support for regular video and live video.
- Course builder lacks features like quizzes and certificates.
- Limited design options for building landing pages.
- Doesn’t support PayPal.
- Doesn’t have SSO integration with other course platforms.
- Charges a transaction fee on all pricing tiers.
What is Mighty Networks?
Mighty Networks is a cloud-based software that lets you build and manage an online community on your own website. The idea is to have an easy-to-use online community builder which allows you to create your own “Facebook Group”.
A majority of creators use a Facebook Group to host their online community but then there are a lot of challenges that they face:
- An average user gets a lot of noise on FB from things like political debates, chats, updates from friends, ads, etc. which makes it a distraction machine.
- Facebook makes it really difficult to reach out to your members. There is no way for you to message or notify all the members as it’s their algorithm that determines who receives notifications for what.
- You can’t do things like creating subgroups, charging for access, etc. with FB Groups.
This is where Mighty Networks comes into the picture. It lets you create a private space for your community members where they can discuss and connect with each other under your brand.
It offers all the important features like activity feed, member directory, articles, polls & quizzes, events, groups, etc. that creators need for building a thriving online community. You can even create fully-fledged online courses inside your community.
Finally, Mighty Networks gives you a few sales & marketing tools as well which includes the ability to build sales pages, charge a one-time or a recurring fee, etc.
So, Mighty Networks creators use the platform to offer community, courses, and memberships in one place as a lot of Mighty Networks users like Verbal to Visual do.
However, keep in mind that at the heart, it is an online community platform and all other features it offers (e.g. online courses) are built on top of that.
Now let’s delve deeper into each of the features to get to know more about Mighty Networks. This will help you make a better decision when choosing the “right” platform for you!
1. Online Community Builder
As soon as you sign up, Mighty Networks creates a community space (Network) for you. The structure is already there and you just need to do some settings and add some content before you can accept members into your community.
To start with, you can control your community’s privacy settings. You can make your community public, so anyone can explore and join it. Plus search engines will be able to index the content inside your community.
Or, you can keep your community private, so people will need to sign up and get approved by you or receive an invite in order to join your community.
In addition, you can keep your community ‘Secret’ or you can make it ‘Paid’.
Apart from privacy settings, you also have control over your community branding. So, you can use a custom domain, upload a logo as well as use your brand colors.
Now one of the most important aspects of any community builder is to let you create engaging content for your members and in this regard, Mighty Networks gives you a lot of options.
To start with, you can create Quick Posts and Articles. “Quick Posts” are like status updates while “Articles” are more like blog posts.
In addition, you can also create polls and questions inside your community. It supports three different types of polls – Multiple Choice, “Hot Cold”, and “Percentage” Polls and is very useful for engaging your members.
Plus you can publish Quick Posts, Articles and Polls either immediately or you can also schedule them for publishing on a future date as well. You can also notify your members via email/push messages when new content is published.
Another content type that Mighty Networks supports is Events which allows you to create virtual or in-person events for your community.
The Events feature is really powerful and gives you a lot of options. To start with, you can either create a one-time event or a recurring event.
For hosting live events, you have a direct integration with Zoom, so you can create a Zoom Meeting/Webinar right from inside Mighty Networks or you can also use a URL from other video conferencing services like GoToMeeting, Google Meet, etc.
What I like about the Zoom integration is that when a user clicks to join the event from the iOS/Android app, the Zoom video plays right inside the app.
In addition, you can also create a Text Chat Event where you can interact with your members through live chat.
What I like about content creation in Mighty Networks a lot is that it gives you the freedom to decide who can create what type of content.
For example, you can choose to enable not just the host and the moderators but also your members to contribute articles to your community. Same goes for things like Events and Polls & Questions.
When it comes to creating content in your community, the only thing that’s missing is native support for both regular video and live video.
Apart from creating engaging content, what’s equally important is to keep your community organized and help your members easily find what’s important.
The first feature that Mighty Networks offers for community organization is Topics. So, you can create topics and assign one to your Quick Posts, Articles, Polls as well as Events.
You can think of these topics as categories inside your community. Your members will be able to filter posts as well as search through the community feed based on topics.
Then Mighty Networks creates a few default pages for your community, e.g. Discovery Page. It is one of the most important pages in your community and Mighty Networks gives you complete control over what your members see here.
So, you can show the sections (e.g. Top Posts, Top Members, Topics, etc.) in any order and you can also hide them if you want.
Now you also have what are called “Welcome Section” and “Featured Section” where you can include specific articles, courses, events, etc. and show them at the top of your members’ activity feed and even on the Discovery Page.
The Welcome Section and the Featured Section are like pinned areas for new and returning members respectively and you can pin/unpin posts and other content to them.
Now there are a couple of other important features in Mighty Networks that take community building to the next level.
The first one is Member Categories with which you can select a category most relevant for your members and then you can add various options for your members to select from.
This allows you to organize your members around their profession, interests or other commonalities and enable them to connect better with each other.
Another such feature is Groups which allows you to create sub-groups inside your larger community. These sub-groups can have their own branding, content and topics, members, access plans and you have the similar control over settings.
So, if you want to create a paid mastermind group or want to offer separate community space for your coaching clients, you can easily do that with the Groups feature.
Overall, Mighty Networks has best-in-class features for community design & engagement and there isn’t much that you can complain about here. The platform is easy to use and you can get your community up & running pretty quickly.
2. Online Course Creator
Mighty Networks’ most important offering beyond communities is for online course creation. So, you can create and deliver an online course to your members right inside your community.
In order to create an online course, you need to enter some basic details like Course Title, Tagline and Description. And then you can use the drag-n-drop builder to create the structure and add content.
A course in Mighty Networks has two organizational elements – Sections and Lessons. With the course builder, you can easily add sections and lessons as well as you can easily change their order by dragging and dropping.
In order to add content to a lesson, you need to click on the ‘Edit’ button which will open the lesson editor. The lesson editor is a simple HTML editor where you can easily add text and images, attach small files or embed external media as well.
The thing is that Mighty Networks currently allows you to attach files of up to 25 MB in size. For anything else, you’ll have to host somewhere else and embed inside Mighty Networks.
For example, if you want to use videos in your courses, you’ll have to host them on a video hosting platform like Vimeo or Wistia and then embed them inside your lessons in Mighty Networks.
Lack of inbuilt video hosting is a huge drawback as it doesn’t just mean that you have to pay separately for video hosting but it’s also more difficult to manage your content and you’ll miss out on important analytics.
Another thing that I don’t like about the course builder is that it doesn’t support important features like bulk uploading and cloud import offered by the best online course platforms out there.
Once you’re done adding content to your lesson, you can do a few settings for how you want your students to access your content.
The first one is the Unlock feature which has three options – None, Sequential and Timed. With the first option, the lesson will be available to your students immediately while with the third option, you can drip feed your course lessons based on a schedule.
With the Sequential option, the lesson will be available only when they complete the previous lesson. This feature is useful if you want to create a learning path inside your course.
Now you can even do these settings at a Section level which means you have a lot of flexibility in terms of how you want your students to progress through your course.
For example, you can drip entire sections rather than individual lessons. Similarly, you can require your students to complete only the sections in a certain order while giving them the freedom to watch lessons inside a section in any order they want.
Coming back to the lesson settings, you have another useful feature which lets you decide when you want to mark a lesson complete.
So, you can either mark a lesson complete when a user visits the lesson page or clicks on the Complete button. If you embed videos from certain providers, you can even force your students to watch the video completely before it can be marked complete.
Moreover, your course can have its own activity feed where only those who are enrolled can discuss and engage. The activity feed works in a similar way to your main network and is a great way to deliver live courses or other programs which have a community component.
Having said that, Mighty Networks doesn’t support some very essential learning and engagement features like quizzes, assignments and certificates and this can be a deal-breaker for some creators.
So, Mighty Networks isn’t the most powerful online course platform out there and it won’t be the best option for you if your main objective is to build an online learning business.
Having said that, if you want to sell simple online courses to your community or offer them as part of your community-based membership site, Mighty Networks should work well for you.
3. End-User Experience
One of the biggest strengths of Mighty Networks is how easy and intuitive it makes it for the end-users to navigate through and engage in a community.
First of all, the design of the community area is very clean and simple. So, once a user understands how to navigate through the interface, it won’t be difficult at all.
When a user comes to your Mighty Network, they first see a personalized activity feed where they can find posts, articles, polls, events, etc. and upvote, comment and share them as well as start new discussions themselves.
Moreover, there are a few options for your members to customize the activity feed. So, they can choose to see just their own activity or activity from the hosts or just the activity near them.
Similarly, they can filter the activity feed based on the content type – Quick Posts, Articles, Polls or Events. They can also sort the content based on last activity, creation date, popularity or distance.
Plus there is an option to switch to a list view where your posts are in a collapsed state by default and so things are much more compact.
Now your members can easily navigate to different areas in your community (Members, Topics, Events, Courses, Groups, etc.) using the left panel.
For example, if they want to explore the member directory and connect with other members, they can do that from the Members tab. They can choose to follow other members and even send them a direct message if you’ve enabled the option.
Similarly, they can go to the Course page to see various courses that you have to offer. They can either purchase a course or access an already purchased course from here.
When they access a course, they’re taken to the curriculum page from where they can go to the course player and watch the content. The default course player in Mighty Networks is very well-designed and looks elegant.
The navigation is on the left and the content area is on the right where your videos and other resources appear. They can also leave a comment right below the content area which is awesome.
Another great thing about Mighty Networks from an end-user’s perspective is that they have complete control over what notifications they want to receive and how they want to receive.
So, they can choose to receive notifications either via email and/or via push notifications on mobile. For email notifications, they can opt to receive an email for each activity or kind of a summary email for the entire day’s activity.
And then they can select what types of content and activities they want to receive notifications about which is great.
Finally, Mighty Networks has mobile apps for Android and iOS devices which your members can use to access your community and courses.
Like everything else, the mobile apps have a clean, intuitive user interface and can be very effective in bringing members back to your community.
While the mobile apps are completely free, they are Mighty Networks’s branded apps. You also have the option to get custom apps for your brand but you’ll have to pay for that separately.
The only thing that I don’t like about end-user experience in Mighty Networks is that when someone opens an article, an event or even a course, the content first shows in a slide-in window.
They can switch to the full-screen mode as well but for that they need to click on the icon at the top which isn’t very intuitive and also means an additional click.
Apart from that, Mighty Networks does an excellent job in terms of end-user experience. Right from clean, simple design to personalized notifications to mobile apps, there is a lot to like about the platform.
And if you’re coming from a Facebook Group, you’ll love the fact that your members aren’t shown any ads or stuff from other communities and they will enjoy this distraction-free experience as well.
4. Sales and Marketing Tools
In this section, we’ll talk about the sales & marketing tools that Mighty Networks has to offer. Let’s start with the options you have for structuring your payments.
The first thing that you need to understand is that there are a few different things that you can charge for access to – your main community, groups within the community and your online courses.
So, you can keep your main community free but then you can charge for access to courses and groups inside the community.
This works very well if you want to build a larger community in your niche and then monetize the community with online courses and mastermind groups.
In case, you want to keep your community paid, you charge for access to just the community and then sell your other offerings like courses separately.
Or you can also bundle your community with online courses and groups and sell them together. This approach works well if you want to create a membership site.
The only problem with how payments work in Mighty Networks is that if you want to just sell access to your online courses without requiring your students to become a member of your community, that’s not possible.
When it comes to the pricing options supported, you can either charge a one-time fee or a recurring fee for access to your products. You don’t have an option to create a payment plan though.
If you’re creating a subscription, Mighty Networks lets you create monthly and/or annual subscriptions and you can also create a free trial as well. However, you can’t currently create weekly or quarterly subscriptions.
There are a couple of other issues with how product pricing works in Mighty Networks as well. The first one is that the only currency supported is USD.
Secondly, you can’t really enter your own price for your plans. Rather you can select from a list of predefined prices which I find a bit restrictive.
So, if you want to price your course for $15, you can’t do that. You’ll have to price it as $14.99 or $15.99. Similarly, you can’t have a course price greater than $999.99 which doesn’t make sense.
In terms of payment gateways, Mighty Networks currently supports just Stripe. The PayPal option is completely missing and I think it’s a big issue especially for creators in countries where Stripe isn’t supported.
When it comes to the checkout process, you have a multi-step checkout process where the user is first required to sign up to create an account before he/she can make the payment.
While the sign up and checkout pages look good, you can’t customize them at all. So, you can’t change any of the existing elements or add new elements like testimonials, money-back guarantee, etc.
Apart from the ability to process payments, you can also build a landing page for your main network (homepage) as well as individual courses and bundles.
When you create your main landing page, you can choose from one of the two templates – Creator Template and Community Template, both of which have a clean, modern design out of the box.
Using the editor, you can add new sections to your page or modify the default sections. Plus you can modify text and add images/videos to existing sections.
But that’s pretty much it. There are no pre-built page sections that you could use and you can’t modify the section layout or even design. Plus you have no control over things like margins and paddings.
The page builder is even more limited when it comes to creating other landing pages. For example, for an online course, Mighty Networks will automatically create a landing page based on the course and plan details you enter.
Now there are a couple of important sales & marketing tools missing from Mighty Networks.
The first one is coupons. So, you currently don’t have a way to create discount codes for your product plans. The alternative is to create multiple plans but that’s not ideal.
Another important feature missing from the platform is the ability to create an affiliate program for your paid products.
It does allow you to create an ambassador program, so you can give your users badges and some custom rewards when they refer new members to your community.
Having an ambassador program is great for word-of-mouth marketing and works well for a community-based business. However, it can’t be a replacement for an affiliate program.
Overall, Mighty Networks does a pretty average job when it comes to sales & marketing. It lacks some essential features and this is the biggest weakness of the platform.
You can always use specialized tools like ThriveCart for selling access to your community and courses but I would still like to see Mighty Networks improve on some of these things.
5. Reporting and Administration
As far as reporting and analytics are concerned, Mighty Networks offers some useful tools. There is a dedicated analytics area in your dashboard where you can see various data for your community.
To start with, you can easily get an overview of how your community is performing. So, you can see the number of members in your community, member growth over time, what day and time they’re online, etc.
And then you can also see how many new members have joined your network in the past 30 days, how many past members have come back, how many have contributed to the community, etc.
In addition, you have two separate sections for Post Activity and Member Activity.
Under Post Activity, you can see individual posts and track post impressions and engagement. You can easily identify things like which are your top performing posts, what type of content is doing well, etc.
Similarly, under Member Activity, you’ll be able to see the individual members and a high-level overview of their activity in the community. And then you can click on each member to see a more detailed activity profile.
Now let’s talk about community administration. Mighty Networks lets you add admin-level users to your community – Hosts and Moderators.
Network Hosts are like owners and have access to all the settings inside your Mighty Network including payment settings and income reports.
On the other hand, Network Moderators’ role is focused on moderating content and members. They can create and remove content, invite members, approve requests to join, remove or ban members, etc.
Apart from Network-level admins, you can also have Hosts and Moderators at a group/course level which gives you greater flexibility.
Another very useful feature that the platform offers for community administration is a Slack integration which allows Hosts and Moderators to monitor activity in the community in real-time.
Finally, let’s talk about the native integrations Mighty Networks support and I must say that it is very limited in this area.
It doesn’t have a direct integration with any third-party email marketing solutions (e.g. ActiveCampaign, ConvertKit, etc.)
This doesn’t mean that you can’t integrate with them but for that, you’ll have to use Zapier.
So, when someone joins your community or even leaves it, you can pass that information to your email service provider via Zapier.
Now it has a 2-way Zapier integration which means you can also do certain actions in Mighty Networks based on triggers in other apps.
For example, if someone makes a payment using, say ThriveCart, you can automatically send them an invite to your community. Similarly, if someone’s payment fails, they can automatically be removed as well.
The Zapier integration works seamlessly and you can integrate with 1000s of online platforms, the only issue is that you’ll have to pay for it separately.
The second issue and a bigger one is the lack of Single Sign-On integrations with membership site platforms like Kajabi/Podia and even WordPress.
So, if your courses or memberships are already hosted on any of these platforms and if you want to use Mighty Networks for your community, you’ll find this seriously limiting as your users will require to have multiple logins.
6. Customer Support and Community
As you would expect from any good online platform, Mighty Networks has a dedicated support team to resolve any potential issues and answer any questions.
On the lower tiers, you only have email support. So, you can leave a message through the contact form in their help center and they generally get back to you within 24 hours.
On the Business plan, you get priority support where you can expect a quicker response. Plus there is a chat widget right inside your admin dashboard which makes it easier to reach out to their team.
However, it’s not really live chat support. You leave your message inside the chat widget and when they get back, you’ll receive the response in the widget as well as get notified via email.
One thing I like a lot about their support is that you can direct your members to reach out directly to their team about any technical issues. Not many community platforms offer end-user support and this will definitely save you some time.
Now you may not want to reach out to the support for everything in which case you’ll find Mighty Networks Knowledge Base pretty handy.
The knowledge base has video tutorials and step-by-step articles on how various features work inside the platform and you can easily search through it to find answers to your questions.
In addition, Mighty Networks offers a dedicated community for its users – Mighty Hosts. The community is pretty active and it is a great place to hang out with and learn from other community owners.
Even if you decide not to use Mighty Networks, you should be a part of this community as you’ll learn a lot about community design and engagement here.
Finally, Mighty Networks has this premium online course called Community Design Masterclass. Even though it is a paid course, it’s the best training on the topic that I’ve seen and you can consider enrolling in it.
7. Mighty Networks Pricing: How Much Does It Cost?
Before we conclude this Mighty Networks review, let’s talk about pricing.
Mighty Networks on a freemium pricing model. The Free Plan gives you access to the basic community features that Mighty Networks has to offer. Plus you can have an unlimited number of members in your community.
However, the Free Plan is limited in terms of the community features it supports. You can’t use a custom domain for your website plus you’ll need to pay a 5% transaction fee to Mighty Networks.
The next tier is the Community Plan and it costs $28/month (+3% transaction fee). With the Community plan, you have the ability to use your own custom domain and you also get access to all the community features.
The Community Plan is very reasonably priced and if you choose to pay for the entire year, you’ll get 2 months free.
However, what I don’t like about it is that you don’t get any third-party integrations on the plan. So, you can’t integrate Mighty Networks with your email service provider or third-party analytics and tracking services like Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, etc.
This isn’t very practical and so, if you’re a serious creator, you’ll have to be on their Business Plan which costs $98/month ($81/mo when paid annually).
On the Business Plan, you get access to everything that Mighty Networks has to offer including online courses, Zapier integration, and premium analytics.
While the Business Plan is very reasonably priced, you need to keep in mind that you’ll be paying a 2% transaction fee to Mighty Networks. Personally speaking, I don’t like the fact that I have to share revenue with them even on their highest plan.
Apart from these two commonly subscribed plans, there is a third plan called MIghty Pro where you can get custom white-label mobile apps for your brand. Plus you’ll be able to remove the footer branding which is visible on your community otherwise.
Overall, Mighty Networks has a reasonable as well as flexible pricing structure except that they should support some basic third-party integrations on the Community Plan and consider removing the transaction fee on the Business Plan.
Mighty Networks Review – Final Verdict
In this Mighty Networks review, we’ve discussed all the features that the platform has to offer and I hope you were able to decide whether it’s the right option for you or not.
Mighty Networks offers some very powerful features for building an engaged online community, you can also create online courses and the best part is that your members can access your community and content through their iOS and Android mobile apps.
However, if you haven’t been able to decide yet, let me share my recommendation based on the scenarios where I have seen the platform to work well (as well as not work that well).
In fact, let me first tell you the two scenarios when I recommend you to stay away from Mighty Networks.
If you’re already using a hosted platform like Teachable or Kajabi for your courses, you should know that Mighty Networks doesn’t have a Single Sign-On feature and so your students will need to have two logins which is not great.
Similarly, if your primary objective is to sell online courses and you don’t need the community aspect or maybe it isn’t that important, Mighty Networks won’t be the best option for you.
Having said that if your business is based on the philosophy of community first, content follows approach, Mighty Networks will work great for you.
For example, you may want to build a community-focused, subscription-based membership site.
Or, you may want to build a larger community in your niche and monetize it with online courses or paid mastermind groups.
Or, maybe the idea is to just create a thriving community in your niche.
In these scenarios, Mighty Networks will be a great option for you and you can start a risk-free trial of the platform using the button below.
I hope you found this Mighty Networks review helpful. If you have any questions about the platform, please let me know in the comments below.
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