Growing an audience
Running the business
Both cover community platforms. Here is what separates them on price, billing, what you can take with you, and coverage.
| Discourse | Memberful | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price | From $100 | From $49 |
| Pricing model | Free plan, paid tiers | Paid subscription |
| Free tier | Yes | No |
| Billing | Monthly or annual | Monthly or annual |
| Free trial | Not stated | Not stated |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Data export | Everything, in an open format | Not stated |
| Their cut | Not stated | 4.9% of what you earn |
| Runs on | Web, Linux | Web |
| Covers | Community Platforms, Website Builders | Memberships & Subscriptions, Community Platforms, Monetization & Payments |
| Works with | Nothing in particular | Nothing in particular |
| Founded | Not listed | Not listed |
| Reader rating | No reviews yet | No reviews yet |
| Live deals | None right now | None right now |
Forum software, hosted or run yourself
Discourse is the forum the internet settled on: threaded, searchable, indexed by Google, and open source, so a community that outgrows the hosted plans can take the database and run it on its own server. That escape hatch is the argument for it over anything closed. The hosted pricing starts where a hobby project stops, and self-hosting swaps the bill for a sysadmin.
Our note
The reason to choose this over Circle or Mighty Networks is that the conversation is public and indexed, which makes the forum an asset rather than a cost. The reason not to is that it is a forum, and an audience raised on Discord will find it slow.
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Paid memberships bolted onto a site you own
Memberful sells memberships from a site you already run rather than moving your audience to a platform, and it is the tool most WordPress publishers reach for when they start charging. One price covers everything and the money is charged on top as a percentage. Nothing is billed until a first payment comes in, so a launch that never launches costs nothing.
Our note
The 4.9 percent is the number to model, because it is charged on revenue rather than on profit: at $2,000 a month collected it is about double the subscription. Against Ghost, which takes nothing, this wins on flexibility and loses on arithmetic once you are large.
Ratings are the average of reviews readers left. The facts are stated by each tool’s own listing and are not verified by CloutStack. How we make money.
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