Mighty Networks is a leading online community platform that also includes features for creating online courses and memberships. It offers a wide range of features and tools to help you build a community-focused online business.
But is it the right choice for you? What features does it include, and how do they compare to its competitors?
To answer these questions and make an informed decision, we’ve created this Mighty Networks review in which we’ll cover all of the platform’s features and discuss its pros and cons.
We’ll also share the insights we’ve gained from helping other creators launch their communities and courses on Mighty Networks.
Ready? Let’s dive in.
Mighty Networks Review Summary
Mighty Networks is an online community platform that allows you to host your community, courses, and memberships in one place under your brand. The platform’s strength lies in its core focus on community design and engagement and the powerful tools it offers to this end.
Pros of Mighty Networks
- Flexible community organization
- Multiple content types
- Events and livestreaming features
- Course creation features
- Free and branded mobile apps
- Unlimited members and hosts
- Flexible pricing
Cons of Mighty Networks
- Basic website builder
- No support for PayPal
- No single sign-on feature
- Transaction fee on all plans
What Is Mighty Networks?
Mighty Networks is a hosted platform that offers all the tools you need to build an engaged online community on your website.
It offers powerful community features such as rich media posts, events, online courses, spaces, and personalized activity feeds. Moreover, there are livestreaming options, messaging features, and moderation tools.
On top of the community-building tools, you can charge for access to your community and courses, so the platform supports various community-led business models, including paid masterminds, live cohort courses, and membership sites.
Traditionally, creators have been using social media platforms (e.g., Facebook Groups) to host their communities, but they face many challenges. For instance:
- There’s a lot of noise on Facebook, making it a distraction machine.
- You don’t own your audience, and you’ll always be at the mercy of the platform.
- Facebook makes it difficult to reach out to your members, and you have little control over member communication.
- You can’t customize the look and feel of your group or monetize it.
This is where Mighty Networks comes into the picture. Unlike Facebook Groups, It’s designed to let you build an online community you own and control and monetize it however you want.
With this in mind, let’s take a closer look at all aspects of Mighty Networks.
Ease of Use
Mighty Networks wasn’t always the most user-friendly platform, and the biggest challenge was that it wasn’t very intuitive to navigate.
However, they redesigned it to significantly simplify the structure and the building process for online communities. As a result, it’s much easier to understand how things work and navigate the website.
Now, the platform presents a clean, intuitive user interface. On the left side of the screen, you can find a list of your spaces, along with an option to create a new space at the bottom.
To create content inside a space, just click on that space in the sidebar, and you’ll see options for creating posts and managing your events, courses, and more.
Mighty Networks has a clean, intuitive interface
However, there are still some issues, and the biggest one is that the network-level settings aren’t well-organized.
These settings are segmented under different headings that aren’t very intuitive, and you need to dig deep to find features.
Another issue is that the menu options first open in a half-screen modal, requiring an extra click for full-screen mode. However, this may be more of a matter of preference.
When it comes to the end users, the interface is very similar to what the community owner sees, minus the admin settings.
It’s pretty straightforward to navigate different sections in your community and create new posts. Moreover, users can search through existing content or filter their activity feeds to easily find content that interests them.
Overall, it’s easy to get started with Mighty Networks. While it may take some time to get familiar with the platform, once you do, things will be much smoother. For end-users, there’s no real learning curve, and getting around shouldn’t take too much effort.
Online Community Builder
Community-building is the core aspect of Mighty Networks; all the other features it offers (e.g., online courses) are built on top of that. In this section, we’ll evaluate everything the platform offers in this regard.
To start with, it gives you these essential options:
- Custom domain: You have the option to use a custom domain for your community. By default, your community is hosted on a subdomain provided by Mighty Networks.
- Public or private community: Mighty Networks lets you create a community that can be open to everyone or restricted to members only.
- Branding customization: You can personalize the appearance of your community to align with your brand identity. This includes the ability to change colors and incorporate your logo.
Now, let’s delve into the specific features.
Community Organization
Setting up an account on Mighty Networks creates a community (also called a network) for you out of the box.
After this, you’ll simply need to follow a few steps, such as creating the structure, personalizing a few settings, and adding your branding, and you can start inviting members.
The building block of a Mighty network is what is called Spaces. You can think of them as different rooms within your network, and each can have the following:
- a feed where you and your members can create discussion posts
- a chat section for group conversations
- an events area to create and list events for the members
- an online course with structured course materials
- a member directory that displays a list of all the members in the space
Plus, Spaces are pretty flexible. You can choose what sections you want to show inside a space and show them in any order you want.
So, if you’re creating a regular discussion space, you may want to start with a feed and show additional elements like an events area and a member directory.
On the other hand, if you’re creating an online course, you may want to start with the course curriculum and then have a course-specific discussion area (feed).
Moreover, each section type has individual settings.
So, you can rename the feed element as Discussions, change the display’s style, and choose what content types are supported inside of it and who can create what.
Finally, you can control the access permissions of each space. There are four options available:
- Public
- Private
- Secret
- Paid
Now, Mighty Networks lets you group your spaces using the Collections function. A collection is a purely organizational element, and you can use it in different ways.
For example, if you have a paid membership, you can create a collection for all the spaces exclusive to paying members. Similarly, you can group all your online courses under a collection.
Apart from these, Mighty Networks has a couple of additional features that can help you keep your community organized and improve discoverability.
- Highlighted Hashtag List: You can think of these as topics or labels. As a host, you can create a list of hashtags, and you or your members can assign a hashtag to the posts and articles. Inside a space, a separate section lists all the hashtags, and your members can find content through them.
- Discovery: A discovery page enables your members to find the most important elements in your community, and you can create one at the global or space level. Here, you can show custom sections, like Top Posts, Top Spaces, Top Members, etc., in any order.
Finally, you can also choose to show some sections at the network level. These include a feed, an events area, a member directory, and a discovery page.
Overall, Mighty Networks gives you many options for building your community structure and keeping it organized, and there’s hardly anything to complain about here.
Content and Posts
One of the most important aspects of any community builder is producing engaging content for your members. In this sense, Mighty Networks gives you many options.
To start with, you can create Quick Posts and Articles. “Quick Posts” are like status updates, while “Articles” are like blog posts. Apart from text, you can also add images and videos.
Additionally, the platform has incorporated its AI assistant—Mighty Co-Host—into the post editor, which you can use to refine and enhance your text content.
When it comes to publishing posts, you can choose to either release them immediately or on a scheduled basis. In either case, you can notify your members via email/push messages when new content is published.
Additionally, you can create polls and questions inside your community. The platform supports four poll types:
- Question
- Multiple Choice
- Hot Cold
- Percentage
There’s also the option to create an Icebreaker Question, which is a regular question that your new members can answer when first joining a space.
Events and Livestreaming
Mighty Networks allows you to create virtual or in-person events for your community. It has a powerful Events feature, so that:
- you can create a one-time or recurring event.
- your members can RSVP for the event.
- you can host live events inside Mighty Networks.
For hosting live events, you can use the native live streaming feature or the direct Zoom integration. Otherwise, you can use a URL from other video conferencing services like GoToMeeting, Google Meet, etc.
Additionally, you can create a text chat event to let community members interact with each other through live chat.
Livestreaming is one of the most powerful community engagement features offered by Mighty Networks.
Using this feature, you can start an instant live stream from any of your community spaces, or you can go live from both the web and iOS and Android mobile apps.
To do a live stream, you just have to click on the “Go Live” option inside a space and grant access to your webcam and microphone. At this point, you can choose to record the live stream and send notifications to all members.
During the live session, a chat section appears on the right side. Here, hosts and members can talk. However, there’s no way to remove or hide it.
Live streaming is great for engaging your community members. However, you can also use it to deliver live lessons in your online courses, which we’ll talk about later.
Apart from these, Mighty Networks has another engagement tool worth mentioning. It’s called Welcome Checklist, and it allows you to create a custom list of tasks to onboard new members.
For example, you can ask them to introduce themselves or go through the community guidelines.
Online Courses
Mighty Networks offers course-building tools, and you can create video, audio, and text lessons for members.
A course in Mighty Networks has two organizational elements: Sections and Lessons.
With the course builder, you can add sections and lessons and easily change their order by dragging and dropping.
The lesson editor is a simple HTML editor where you can easily add videos (includes unlimited video hosting), text, and images, attach small files, or embed external media. You can even add multiple content types in a single lesson.
Apart from text/video lessons, you can also add quiz lessons to your course. You can create multiple-choice questions and grade your students.
While the platform has a satisfying course builder, it does lack some essential features like bulk uploading. In fact, you can’t upload multiple videos in one go and turn them into lessons, which slows down the whole process.
Regarding the available learning and engagement tools, Mighty Networks performs below average.
It misses out on some important assessment features, such as assignments and certificates.
It does, however, provide content locking and dripping features. There are three options:
- None: The lessons are available to your students immediately.
- Timed: You can drip your course lessons on a scheduled basis.
- Sequential: The lessons are available only after completing the previous lesson.
Besides dripping and locking, there’s a video compliance option where members must watch the entire video to mark it complete.
On top of that, every course can have a separate discussion area, and you can even stream your live lessons inside the space, making it a good option for delivering live cohort courses.
When it comes to course delivery, unfortunately, Mighty Networks’ course player isn’t well-designed from an end-user perspective.
When a user clicks on it to watch a lesson, it first opens in a half-screen modal with no visible navigation. They can then expand to a full course player experience with a navigation sidebar, but the additional step makes the process inefficient.
Mighty Networks’ course player experience isn’t very optimal.
Overall, Mighty Networks is great for creating online courses to engage your community. Plus, it’s also good for running live cohort courses with a strong community component.
Messaging and Notifications
Mighty Networks supports one-on-one and group messaging so that you can chat with a member or a group of members privately.
You can send text messages, emojis, photos, and files to other hosts and members. In turn, they can archive chats, mute other members, and even block them.
Moreover, you can disable direct messaging for all members, but the option to disable it for specific ones isn’t available yet.
Speaking of notifications, Mighty Networks gives you several ways of notifying your members. You can do this through:
- Email updates
- Browser notifications
- Mobile app notifications
However, it’s up to individual members to choose their preferred notification method. They can turn on email updates as well as mobile notifications.
Most importantly, your members can select specific activities and spaces from which they want to receive notifications.
When it comes to email updates, instead, they can choose to receive an email for each activity or a summary email from the entire day’s activity.
Apart from the activity notifications, as a host, you can message all of your members in one go, which is useful for sending important notifications and announcements.
Mobile Apps
Mighty Networks has free iOS and Android apps for members to access your community on the go.
Mighty Networks apps have a clean design and support features like push notifications, which help bring members back to the community.
The good thing is that the apps support all the functionalities available on the web platform, including creating posts, attending livestreams, watching courses, messaging other members, etc.
Another great thing about the apps is that they also support admin options, so you can make respond to members and also make changes to your community on the go.
While the apps are completely free, they are still Mighty Networks’ apps. However, you can also get custom community apps for your brand, even though you’ll have to pay for them separately.
So, Mighty Networks enables you to start with the free apps and then upgrade to branded apps if you want.
Community Builder – The Bottom Line
Overall, Mighty Networks is a great platform for building and managing an online community.
It has flexible community organization tools and comes with powerful engagement features, like posts, articles, events, group chats, and online courses.
It also offers free mobile apps for members, allowing them to access your community on the go.
Sales and Marketing
In this section, we’ll talk about the sales and marketing tools that Mighty Networks provides. Let’s start with the website builder.
Landing Pages
Starting with the basics, Mighty Networks includes website hosting and a free SSL certificate. Your website comes with a free subdomain, but you can use a custom one if you want.
However, the platform doesn’t offer full-fledged website building, and, as a result, most Mighty Networks creators host their brand websites outside the platform.
What you get is the ability to create a landing page that acts as your website’s homepage.
There are two landing page templates: the Creator and Community templates. However, there’s not much of a difference between the two regarding style or layout.
Moreover, there’s no real page builder. The landing page consists of a couple of sections, each with pre-defined settings, and you can only modify the text and images.
Apart from this, you can’t add new sections or reorder them, which limits your design options significantly.
All in all, you can use Mighty Networks to create a simple landing page for your community, but it can’t accommodate your brand website.
Product Pricing Options
An important promise of Mighty Networks is that you can monetize your community as you prefer.
In fact, the platform lets you create pricing plans that can include access to the main network and/or the community spaces. You can choose the spaces to include in a plan, and you can also have the same space in multiple plans, so it can support all community models:
- Keep your main community and certain spaces free and charge for access to premium spaces, which can be online courses, masterminds, etc.
- Bundle the network and spaces and sell them together, which works well for creating a membership site.
- Create multiple access levels and include additional benefits in the higher tiers.
When it comes to the pricing options, you can charge a one-time fee or a recurring fee, or you can keep it free, and you can show the pricing in multiple currencies.
For subscriptions, you can have monthly and/or annual pricing and even offer a free trial if you like.
While the product pricing options are fine overall, a few are missing:
- You can’t create weekly or quarterly subscriptions.
- You can’t offer a payment plan.
- You can’t create discount coupons.
- You can’t limit the members in a plan.
Finally, Mighty Networks has a handy feature that gives you the ability to choose which platforms to enable a plan on. So, you can make a plan available only on web and Android devices, or you can allow purchases on iOS devices.
Payments and Checkouts
Mighty Networks only supports Stripe for processing payments.
So, if you’re from a country where Stripe isn’t supported, or you want to have PayPal as a payment option for your customers, you’ll need to use a third-party checkout platform.
Apart from payment gateways, it also supports Web3 Token-Gating, so you can gate spaces with ERC-20, ERC-721, or ERC-1155 tokens.
Also, you can integrate with Quaderno for tax handling.
When it comes to the checkout process, you have a multi-step checkout process where the user needs to create an account and upload a profile picture before making the payment.
We’re not big fans of this approach, as there’s a lot of friction in the process, which isn’t great for conversions.
While the signup and checkout pages look good, you can’t customize them. For example, you can’t add testimonials or list the plan’s benefits.
Other Marketing Tools
One of the drawbacks of Mighty Networks is that it doesn’t allow you to create an affiliate program for your products. If you want this feature, you’ll need to use a specialized tool like SamCart.
However, it does allow you to have an ambassador program. This way, 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, even though it’s not equivalent to an affiliate program.
Sales and Marketing – The Bottom Line
Overall, Mighty Networks does an average job in sales and marketing. You can create product plans and monetize your community, but the checkout process isn’t optimized for conversions, and you also miss out on marketing tools such as coupons and affiliate marketing.
Reporting and Administration
In this section, we’ll cover the reporting and administrative features of Mighty Networks.
Community Management
When managing a community, the first thing that comes to mind is how easy it is to add members.
In Mighty Networks, you add members by:
- creating an invite link and sharing it manually.
- sending an email invite by entering the emails manually or bulk importing the member’s list.
And when members send requests to join a community, you can either accept or reject it.
Mighty Networks has another member management feature called Member Categories.
It allows you to create categories based on their role, interests, or anything else, and your members will be able to choose the category when they log in.
Apart from members, you can also invite people to join as hosts and moderators, which are admin roles. The good thing is that you can have hosts and moderators at both the network and space levels.
Network hosts are like owners and have access to all the settings inside your community, including payment settings and income reports.
On the other hand, moderators focus on managing content and members by:
- creating and removing content
- inviting members
- approving requests to join
- removing or banning members
Speaking of moderation tools, anyone can report content. After that, hosts and moderators can check the reported content and take a call to remove it or keep it.
Besides that, there’s an integration with Slack that allows Hosts and Moderators to monitor community activity in real-time.
Finally, Mighty Networks gives you the freedom to decide who can create what type of content.
For instance, you can choose whether only the host and moderators can contribute to articles or extend this capacity to members, too. The same goes for posts, events, and polls.
Reporting and Analytics
Mighty Networks has a robust reporting and analytics feature, Mighty Insights, that give you insights into your members and their activities.
There are several dashboards that provide data and insight into different aspects of your online community.
Take the Overview dashboard, for instance. It provides a quick glance at the level of member activity in your network, with daily, weekly, and monthly charts for active members.
It also has heatmaps and charts that show when your members are active, what platform they use, and their retention rate.
Apart from the overview page, there are specific tabs for different community aspects:
- Livestreams: Number of livestreams, duration, and participants.
- Private Chat: Number of messages exchanged between members and the break up between one-on-one and group chats.
- Plans: Number of subscriptions, monthly recurring revenue, subscriptions started and canceled, free trials, etc.
Apart from network-level reports, similar reports are also available at the space level.
For instance, the Members report helps track members and their actions in the space. Similarly, the Feed dashboard shows post creation trends and engagement levels over time.
Overall, Mighty Networks has excellent reporting capabilities, and its Insights feature will work well for analyzing your community’s performance.
Third-Party Integrations
Mighty Networks is quite limited in terms of the integrations it supports.
Regarding tracking codes, you can just integrate with Google Analytics. To add a Facebook Pixel or any other tracking code, instead, there’s no option inside your admin dashboard, but you’ll need to reach out to support to get them added.
Moreover, there’s no direct integration with any email marketing solutions (e.g., ConvertKit, ActiveCampaign, etc.). To send information to your email service provider, you’ll need to use Zapier.
The good thing is that there’s a two-way Zapier integration, which means that you can also do certain actions in Mighty Networks based on events in other apps.
So, if someone makes a payment using a third-party checkout platform like SamCart, you can automatically send them an invite to your community.
Besides everything, the biggest issue is that it lacks Single Sign-On integrations with other membership site platforms and even WordPress.
Let’s say that your courses or memberships are already hosted on any of these platforms and that you only want to use Mighty Networks for your community. Then, your users will require multiple logins, which is a serious limitation.
Customer Support
As you would expect from any good online platform, Mighty Networks has a dedicated support team.
On all plans, it offers support via email and the chat widget inside your admin area, and you can click on it to leave a message with your questions.
While this isn’t a live chat, you can expect to get a quick response during the support hours (6 AM to 6 PM Pacific Time).
On top of creator support, your members can directly reach out to the Mighty Networks team for any technical issues. Not many community platforms offer end-user support, and this will definitely save you some time.
Instead of reaching out to support for everything, you can also use the knowledge base, which has video tutorials and step-by-step articles on how various features work.
Finally, Mighty Networks offers a dedicated community for its users called Mighty Community, which is a pretty active place to learn from other community owners.
Even if you decide not to use Mighty Networks, we advise you to be a part of this community still, as you’ll learn a lot about community design and engagement.
Pricing Plans
Now, it’s time to discuss Mighty Networks’ pricing.
There are three pricing plans to choose from:
- Community Plan: $39/month
- Business Plan: $119/month
- Mighty Pro: Available on request
On top of the monthly cost, there’s a transaction fee on all plans of 3% on the Community plan and 2% on the Business and Mighty Pro plans.
With the Community plan, you get all of the community-building features. Moreover, the plan supports unlimited spaces, members, hosts, and moderators.
However, you can’t create courses, use the Zapier integration or access advanced analytics. For these features, you have to go for the Business plan, which also offers more livestreaming hours in your community.
Apart from these two plans, there’s a third one called Mighty Pro. The most compelling feature of this plan is the ability to get branded, white-label mobile apps for your community.
Overall, Mighty Networks has a reasonable and flexible pricing structure, even though we’re not big fans of charging a transaction fee.
If you’d like to explore the platform, you can start a 14-day free trial. And the best thing is that you won’t even need to add any credit card details.
Mighty Networks vs the Competition
Before making a decision, let’s look at the top Mighty Networks alternatives and how they compare with the platform.
The most popular Mighty Networks competitor is Circle. While there is a significant overlap in features between the two platforms, Circle holds an overall edge.
Circle has SSO integrations with popular platforms like Teachable and WordPress, gives API access, and has better community management tools. It is also easier to use and has a cleaner design.
Read our Circle vs Mighty Networks guide for a detailed comparison.
Another popular competitor in the community builder space is BuddyBoss. It is WordPress-based and offers great flexibility when it comes to design and features for your community. However, it is more complex to set up and manage, so it is better suited for tech-savvy users.
Finally, Mighty Networks is also often compared with Kajabi, even though they’re very different platforms. Kajabi offers features for courses, coaching, community, and more; Mighty Networks, instead, only focuses on communities and does a better job at community building.
Moreover, Kajabi is an all-in-one platform with powerful marketing tools, including sales funnels and email marketing, which allows you to run your entire business on the platform.
Mighty Networks Review – The Final Verdict
Mighty Networks offers compelling features for building an engaged online community. These include spaces, media posts, events, group chats, livestreaming, online courses, and more.
However, the best part is that the platform has free iOS/Android apps for your members, and you can also get white-label apps for your community.
One major area where it lacks is single sign-on, so you can’t have your courses/membership program on another platform and use Mighty Networks to run your community.
Otherwise, Mighty Networks is an excellent option for building a standalone community or creating community-centric courses or memberships.
If you want to try it, you can start a free trial by clicking on the button below.
We hope you found this Mighty Networks review helpful. If you have any questions about the platform, let us know in the comments below.
