BuddyBoss vs. BuddyPress & FluentCommunity
Discover the key differences in BuddyBoss vs. BuddyPress & FluentCommunity to build the perfect online community. Which platform fits your needs best?
This show delves into the key differences between BuddyBoss, BuddyPress, and FluentCommunity, three powerful platforms for building online communities. We’ll explore their unique features, benefits, and ideal use cases, helping you decide which solution best meets your needs. Whether you’re a developer or a business owner, understanding these tools is crucial for your community-building success.
This Week’s Sponsors
LifterLMS: LifterLMS
Convesio: Convesio
Omnisend: Omnisend
The Show’s Main Transcript
[00:00:01.810] – Jonathan Denwood
Welcome back, folks, to the Membership Machine Show. This is episode 121. This show will compare three of the best-known and popular platforms. Suppose you’re trying to build a community-type website on WordPress, which runs about 40 to 45% of all websites. Kirk and I, my co-host, passionately believe that WordPress is the right platform to use. Like I say, we’re going to be doing a comparison between Buddy Boss, Buddy Press, and a new player that’s gaining traction. That’s fantastic, and it’s called Fluent Community. We will be diving a bit, giving you some insights, and making a comparison. It should be great stuff. So, Kurt, would you like to introduce yourself to the new listeners and viewers?
[00:01:11.460] – Kurt von Ahnen
Sure, Jonathan. My name is Kurt von Ahnen, and I own an agency called Manananomas. We work directly with folks at WP Tonic and Lifter LMS.
[00:01:21.350] – Jonathan Denwood
Do me a favor, go to his website, join him on LinkedIn, give him some love. He’s had a hard day. He’s got some more clients of mine that he’s helping me with, the poor bugger. But I think I’m compassionate. I understand the frustration sometimes, don’t I?
[00:01:43.100] – Kurt von Ahnen
No, no, no. It’s all part of a day.
[00:01:45.760] – Jonathan Denwood
He is, isn’t he? Before we go into the meat and potatoes of this great show, I got a message from one of our major sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. I would also like to point out that we’ve got some special offers from the major sponsors, plus a list of the best WordPress plugins and other services that will help you build a WordPress membership website. Plus, we got a fantastic course done by Kirk that will show you how to utilize the best WordPress technology from beginning to end. And it’s a great course, and you get it at a massive discount if you go to this page, which is Wp-tonic. Com/deals. Wp-tonic. Com/deals. So let’s go straight into it, Kirk. So, how would you introduce… If somebody was coming to you for consultation, a chat, and they’d done some basic research and gave you a list, this free, what would be the introduction to the conversation, Kirk?
[00:03:06.380] – Kurt von Ahnen
The introduction of the conversation is… I’m not going to sugarcoat it, Jonathan. It’s a tricky conversation because somehow when you’re talking to people, you have to gauge their expectations versus what will get delivered versus their imagination. After all, expectation and imagination are not the same thing. For instance, and we’re going to talk about it at length, but I would say, what is your appetite for moderation? What is your appetite for being involved with your community? Because then you start to find out that they think it runs itself.
[00:03:45.310] – Jonathan Denwood
You’ve just said- Well, there are a lot of people on the internet who tell it that it runs itself.
[00:03:49.870] – Kurt von Ahnen
That’s true. And many of these gurus and influencers online are selling people a reality that is not reality. And so unfortunately, from the agency perspective, that puts us in that driver’s seat to go, Okay, so what’s your appetite for customizations? What’s your appetite for management? What’s your appetite for moderation? What did you think this would look, feel, and smell like for your users? What do you want your user experience to be? Then you whittle into, Okay, out of that, what do these tools do to meet those needs?
[00:04:24.980] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I think that’s fantastic, Kirk. I try to gauge the other part of my mind: Do you realize this will be much more work than just having a membership course subscription website, especially if this is your first attempt? It’s going to be a lot more work and a lot more effort. And have they already got a community? Have they got something on Facebook groups? Have they got something on Slack? Have they got something on another platform or community they will move to? Because if they haven’t and they’re just starting from the ground up, they’ve got no experience with launching a community, promoting it, and being the person behind the scenes. It’s going to be difficult, isn’t it, Kurt?
[00:05:24.490] – Kurt von Ahnen
Again, I go back to expectations because no matter which tool you select, you need to investigate it. As the creator, you will have some experience or something you’ve taken away from your Facebook experience, X experience, Twitch, or whatever knowledge you have. And then when you have one of these community tools, you’re going to use it, and you’re going to say, well, how come it doesn’t do this? And chances are it could; it might be in the settings, but all platforms have a learning curve about the settings, the capabilities, and what they do.
[00:06:05.310] – Jonathan Denwood
Right. That’s fantastic. Let’s go in. We’re looking at Buddy Boss, Buddy Press, and Fluent Community. Let’s do a quick intro like you were talking to a consultant client. How would you quickly explain what Buddy Boss is and the main one or two things that you like about it, or the one or two things that you don’t like about it? And the money… Shall we go that route?
[00:06:35.490] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, it’s a great way to start off because part of why we endorse WordPress so much is because of its flexibility is because if you want to style something, if you want something to look a certain way, if you want something to behave a certain way or add certain tools, you certainly can. So when you have the conversation about Buddy Boss, I feel like that changes gears a bit. And other people could disagree with me, which is fine. But I find to get the most out of Buddy Boss, which is a great platform. It’s very powerful. It’s a top-schelf membership platform in my view. However, it comes as a package. So you have Buddy Boss, and then you have Buddy Boss Pro, which gives you some of the extra features that you’re going to want with your community. But to really optimize those features, you also want to use the Buddy Boss theme. And so that Buddy Boss This theme takes over the look and the feeling- Let’s not go in the second half.
[00:07:34.870] – Jonathan Denwood
I think we can go into the real nitty-gritty. Okay. I just wanted some general.
[00:07:41.090] – Kurt von Ahnen
The general thing is you get all kinds of crazy cool things, but it also limits some of your control of the rest of the site.
[00:07:47.940] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, the way I would do this, I want to see if you would agree, it’s an amazing platform. It is amazing if you really want to build a community. But the The opposite, it’s a beast. It’s a beast in resources that it needs, in hosting power, in maintaining it as the admin. It’s got so much functionality, but it really using a bit of London terminology, it’s the bee’s knees. But it was built on quite old and built upon and built upon, and it needs a lot of server resources, hosting resources. Another great strength of it is that You can host, and if you want a mobile app, what Buddy Boss offers, you have to go to them direct. But the deal they’re offering on a white-labeled app, if you don’t require it to be too customized. These prices go up quickly if you require a real customisation. But if you’re just talking about some minor customisation But you can have it totally white-labeled, your branding on it, what they’re offering on an app that works on Apple and Android, iOS, it’s very competitive compared to the leading SaaS offering. So that’s a major strength. The negativity or the con is, I think, especially if this is your first community, people get fixated that having an app will make their launch successful.
[00:09:53.770] – Jonathan Denwood
And I don’t agree with that. I think they’re deluding themselves. What do you reckon?
[00:10:00.550] – Kurt von Ahnen
I think the real estate on a phone is becoming more and more valuable. If you don’t have a really, really strong offer, some magic that’s going to come through connecting to your product through an app, people aren’t going to put it on the phone.
[00:10:18.960] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s all linked to our discussions in this podcast, folks. I would highly encourage you to listen to some of the previous episodes because we talk about finding a niche and then really finding solution to pain points, blah, blah, blah. Now, let’s move on. What do you see the main strengths and the main negativity, one or two, of Buddy Press?
[00:10:45.630] – Kurt von Ahnen
I don’t think Buddy Press gets a fair enough shake, to be honest with you, Jonathan. I still find it to be a pretty powerful tool, even though it’s the O. G. If I understand correctly, that’s what Buddy Boss was actually built on and then added to. Where Buddy Press fails, in my opinion, is it doesn’t have that look, that feel, that polish that Buddy Boss brings to the table. So a lot of the elements that you activate, it feels rudimentary in its experience. So unless you want to jump in with some customizations and CSS and things like that, if you use it straight out of the box, it’s going to feel as old as it Yeah, I think that’s fantastic.
[00:11:32.660] – Jonathan Denwood
I think its main is that it’s free. It’s free.
[00:11:38.640] – Kurt von Ahnen
I think that’s its main thing.
[00:11:41.910] – Jonathan Denwood
The person that coded it I know, he’s a great guy, but he would say that it needs recoding, really, but that would be a major undertaking. But there’s a bigger problem, in my opinion, folks, and that opinion is what is a community? Because it has elements. It doesn’t have the forum elements, hopefully. Or it’s got the forum? Because there’s two, isn’t it?
[00:12:12.140] – Kurt von Ahnen
There’s Bibi Press and Buddy Press.
[00:12:14.160] – Jonathan Denwood
What does Bibi always get confused with this?
[00:12:16.320] – Kurt von Ahnen
Bibi Press is the forums.
[00:12:18.680] – Jonathan Denwood
A lot of these community platforms, they’re a combination of what you would find on Facebook with a Facebook group, combined combined with what you would find in a forum, merged into one hybrid. That’s what you find with Buddy Boss and other SaaS platforms, where this is just the Facebook group without the forum bit. A lot of people don’t realize that. When they installed it, I haven’t got the forum bit, the fredded conversation, blah, blah, whatever that you get with a forum. So that causes confusion. Would you agree with that or do you think I’m on there?
[00:13:08.810] – Kurt von Ahnen
I think in general, not just the forums, there’s other things that are assumptions with community, the word community, and when it’s not there, people get lost or confused. I think that’s why this episode is important.
[00:13:22.670] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. And finally, you’ve been doing some work with me on a couple of projects that’s been using Fluent Community. What are one or two strengths and one or two weaknesses that you think people need to know about fluent community?
[00:13:43.480] – Kurt von Ahnen
I think its strength in its initial experience is its simplicity. It is adding features at a fairly quick rate. So I’m a little worried that the simplicity may suffer over time. I think that has yet yet to bear itself out. For instance, just last week, they sent out an email that said it’s now compliant with different themes and stuff. And so at our level of the game, we’re still experimenting with, oh, that’s a new feature. I got to figure that out. But it seems lightweight. It works quickly. It’s very intuitive in its use. I’ve been really happy with it. I think fluent is a really good answer for people that don’t want the full bells and whistles of Buddy Boss.
[00:14:33.780] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s a modern environment. It’s built for speed. The people behind it are very experienced in building quality WordPress solutions. The owner is a great guy. It hasn’t got all the swings and roundabouts of Buddy Boss. I’m not even sure if they should try and provide all the swings and roundabouts. Because if you’re really, really looking for the ultimate experience, that’s what you’re going to get your buddy boss. But be aware, it is a beast. Beast in resources, and there’s some a couple of things that you need to know about it that we’re going to explain in the second half. Fluent is much lighter. One of the main problems was when they initially released it, it had starved styles and other elements that were separate from the starter website or the theme or all the terms that are now used in WordPress that caused even more confusion. But it didn’t take the styles from your theme or your starter website. I think they’re the two main themes, the two main terminology terms that people hear. And it didn’t take the styles. So in some ways, If you had a website prebuilt, you would be better off having it on the subdomain.
[00:16:04.630] – Jonathan Denwood
But then there’s other factors that we will go through in the second half about that type of setup. But I don’t think you need to do that now because I think for the major page builders and with Gutenberg, there’s going to be a lot more taking cues from the theme or start a website and being able to change things in the page editor that you’re using. Would you agree with that?
[00:16:32.150] – Kurt von Ahnen
I would. I think it’s… Again, like I said in my original statement, I see Fluent Community continuing to evolve and get better. Again, my only hope is that it stays simple in its execution.
[00:16:46.340] – Jonathan Denwood
We’re going to do a quick show because Kurt’s really busy. We’re not going to because the last show was about, I think it was an hour and fifty minutes with it, the last show. Don’t worry, Kurt, it’s going to be a shorter one. We’re going to end it now. The first half of the show, we’re going to go into a bit more detail about all these a little bit, especially Budgie Boss and some other factors. It should be a great second half. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. We’ve had a feast, a feast about Community Solutions on WordPress, and you got some really great choices. Hopefully, we’ve cleared maybe… We haven’t confused you even more. Hopefully, no, Kirk hasn’t done that. I’ve probably done that. With my English accent and my butting in. It’s just enthusiasm. I’m very enthusiastic sometimes. But before we go into the second half, I do want to point out, if you’re looking for a It’s a great free resource. Why don’t you look at the Membership Machine Show Facebook group? It’s a great resource. It’s totally free. Just go to Facebook, put the Membership Machine Show in, and it will show up.
[00:18:14.350] – Jonathan Denwood
And just join us. If you’ve got any questions about anything we discuss in the show, you can put your questions there. It’s a great community as well of WordPress people and people like you trying to build a Membership Community website on WordPress. Right, let’s have a bit of a deeper dive with Buddy Bosch, because I think one of the areas that causes a lot of confusion, and I hate going down this compensation in my own consultations, because I can literally see the people I’m talking to, their eyes glazing over in front of me, Kirk. I’m not surprised because they’re talking to me, but there we go. He’s trying to explain to them that it is a plugin, and the plugin is free, but they’ve also got functionality embedded in the theme as well. You can just upload the plugin, but you’re not going to have their demo experience. When you go to their demo website, if you When you just install the plugin, the demo experience isn’t there. If you can’t have two themes running at the same time, So you got the plugin, you got the theme. Now, if you want it to start having it look the way that’s not on their demo, you can hire somebody to start customizing it.
[00:20:00.020] – Jonathan Denwood
It is a nightmare to do customization on a Buddy Boss website. And every time they do an update, you’re going to have to have an individual on a retainer, and they’re going to have to check everything on a staging site before you upload it to a production. There are also third-party themes, but out there that supposedly offer more customization, but you’re putting even a third layer on a third layer. The only way to really deal with this at the present moment is what they recommend on the Buddy Boss YouTube channel is, and they don’t exactly make this public, it’s there, You got to do a dive, is they recommend that your website have a page build, and they recommend Elemator, which has its own problems because that on itself is resource hungry, and you added it to a beast that’s also resource hungry. When I’m trying to explain this to somebody. I normally, halfway through this conversation, Kirk, I can I’ve totally lost them. That’s why I love the community.
[00:21:37.970] – Kurt von Ahnen
I was actually going to bring up the fact that WP Tonic installs the Buddy Boss with the sample content. People don’t understand. That is a game changer. That’s a game changer in the way that that product is given. Because when I first started playing with Buddy Boss, I I installed it, I activated it, I went to the screen, I was like, what is it?
[00:22:03.270] – Jonathan Denwood
And you think, what the hell have I got here?
[00:22:05.320] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah. And then how do I get that menu? So I would go back to their demo site and I’d be like, what’s that menu? What’s that menu? Where does this come from? And it was frustrating. And so to know the way WP tonic loads it up with the sample content and it’s ready to go when you get it. Yeah, there’s some settings that you can change or tweak or move around, but that is such a game changer the way that that’s presented through you guys. There’s also something I want to mention with Buddy Boss and my experience with you versus experiences with others. And that is, I don’t even know if you’re aware of this, Jonathan. Pictures don’t show up in the news feed or in posts with a lot of different hosting sources. You have to have a thing called FFMPEG, FFM PEG, installed on the website in order for the pictures to work with Buddy Boss, and it’s totally counterintuitive. You’ll run into this, you’ll spend hours trying to troubleshoot it, and then you’ll put in a support ticket and you’ll figure out that you need FF MPEG to- Dies later.
[00:23:12.260] – Jonathan Denwood
Dies later.
[00:23:13.650] – Kurt von Ahnen
I get fearful that I sound like I’m complaining or that I’m… That’s not the message. Folks, I’m trying to lay out the stepping stones for you to make this quicker and easier. Newsflash, I requested my host at the time to add this FFM peg because I said, oh, a buddy boss said, I need to add this. And they responded back with, that’s not available at your level of hosting packages. You need to upgrade to get access to this feature. And I was like, feature? I just want people to upload pictures What feature? And it was just this crazy experience. And so when I know how it works with WP tonic and I see that smoothness, I get sold into, yeah, buddy boss is easy. I fall for the influencer’s message. But that’s because you make it easy. It’s not like that in most circumstances. There’s quite the learning curve with that program.
[00:24:06.710] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, but the benefit is ownership, folks, because yeah, you can say- Ownership, absolutely. Mighty Network or Circle, why should I look at its ownership, ability to add customisation, which you’re never going to be able to do with Circle, Mighty Network, and the mobile at the right moment? Because if you are building a real community and you’re getting demand for a mobile app, that’s when to add it because it will make the community more sticky. It’s doing the right thing at the right time. It is the best deal on the market for pure white label. The competitors are in a totally different… They do offer branded mobile solution, but they have all their branding, mighty networks or circles, branding all over it. People don’t want that. That’s what One of the reasons why they want it because they want to put their own branding on it. But it is a beast. But now we’ve got two really great choices because the bulk of people, I think, for the community is the better path to start off with. And it will not be such hassle if you decide to upgrade at some stage to buddy boss, and you’ll have more experience about running a community anyway with your experience that you’ve built up with Fluent.
[00:25:55.540] – Jonathan Denwood
Can you see where I’m going, Kurt?
[00:25:58.830] – Kurt von Ahnen
Definitely. I think from a user standpoint, from a creator standpoint, like the person running the website, I think fluent is has a much easier learning curve than Buddy Boss.
[00:26:11.180] – Jonathan Denwood
Depending on your prior experience, Oh, yeah.
[00:26:16.340] – Kurt von Ahnen
I mean, there’s always someone that’s going to come to market with us that’s going to be phenomenal out of the gate. Like, I’ve already used this, this, and this, and I’m ready to go. But that client is rare. Usually, people are learning as they go. And to try and treat people with kid gloves and say, Okay, you’re learning as you go. Here’s a great way to get started. I think fluent is a really great way to get started. And their tutorials are good, too. It teaches people how to use the product.
[00:26:44.140] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. So let’s just go through some terms really quick, and then we go for the prices, and then we call it a day. Okay. Well, we’ve also got to mention about… Shall we talk about how they integrate? Shall we jump? Yeah, let’s jump features, and let’s go to integration. So you’re very tight with the Lifter. You’re one of the team at Lifter LMS. He’s a busy guy, folks. He does his work for Lifter. He does his own agency, and he’s a key part of WP tonic. So he’s a busy guy. I don’t know how you do it all. I don’t think you know, but I’m busy, am I? You are. We’re busy beavers, as we would say. So how does Buddy Boss… See, this must be the most frustrating situation is that you don’t hate one another. But I noticed recently that Buddy Boss has been promoting their integration with Tuta LMS.
[00:28:01.830] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yes, indeed.
[00:28:02.330] – Jonathan Denwood
But they’ve always… They never wanted to be really that close to the lovely Lifter LMS people. So what’s this about, Kirk?
[00:28:13.780] – Kurt von Ahnen
I don’t think it’s really that way, to be honest with you.
[00:28:17.640] – Jonathan Denwood
I was being flippant. No, I know.
[00:28:19.910] – Kurt von Ahnen
But out of the shoot, Buddy Boss, when I first got introduced to Buddy Boss, it was like, oh, LearnDash and Lifter, that’s great. Either one, fine. Good to go. But when they started to go down this mobile app development route, they started with LearnDash. And I think the initial inclination was to do both Lifter and LearnDash. If I’m mistaken, I’m sure that the people that own Buddy Boss can certainly correct us. My understanding was they were going to do both. But Jonathan, I think you would back me up on this. When you start going down the mobile development route, you start running into all kinds of speed bumps and expenses and development woes and falling behind schedule and things get crazy. And people were expecting a certain turnaround and a certain level of service with this mobile app development. And I think it became a bigger animal for them than maybe they anticipated. So the Lifter LMS task of making it a mobile app got back burnered, and it got back burnered so much that it became a, Hey, it’s probably never going to happen thing. And so now the understanding is, if you want to have a mobile app with Buddy Boss, you might as well just go with LearnDash.
[00:29:32.480] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, they highly encourage it, don’t they? I think you said there’s a third-party guy that has provided a plugin or some service.
[00:29:42.360] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, there’s three or four now creators that I know of that have multiple projects with Buddy Boss and Lifter and mobile apps, and it works really, really well. It’s just Buddy Boss doesn’t want to be on the back-end as the main support arm for that. It’s It’s not like Lifter LMS works great on multi-site, but if you go to their website, it says they don’t support multi-site installations. It’s because they don’t want to be on the hook to support the multi-site thing, even though it works great.
[00:30:11.030] – Jonathan Denwood
I think that’s the… They basically, to provide the mobile app, folks, they were hitting real technical hurdles, which they overcome, but they really only want you to have the mobile app with a membership, with a learning management system, and that learning management system has to be LearnDash. It’s one of the main reasons why… It’s one of the only reasons why I offer LearnDash, and I have to pay the yearly subscription for the people that are hosting with us. And at some stage, I might drop it because… Anywho, because LearnDash is great.
[00:30:59.920] – Kurt von Ahnen
So what’s your experience with it working Buddy Boss with LearnDash then? The integration portion of it works really, really well. It comes from their side of it. So you install You install Lifter LMS, you install Buddy Boss, you go in through their settings, you select Lifter LMS, and it gives you the ability to be like anyone that registers as a student becomes a member and gets access to… It works really well.
[00:31:28.620] – Jonathan Denwood
What about LearnDash? Do you have any experience of Buddy Boss with LearnDash?
[00:31:33.080] – Kurt von Ahnen
It’s basically the same. We’ve talked before about the difference between Learn Dash and Lifter LMS, so I don’t want to turn this episode into that. The user experience is slightly different based on the tools you use for the membership controls. Lifter LMS has membership built in. Learn Dash has a couple of options for selling memberships. Depending on how you set up that user experience is how it’s going to connect to Buddy Boss. But both integrations work really well. I wouldn’t say one is better than the other.
[00:32:07.490] – Jonathan Denwood
What about Fluent? How does it work with Lifter LMS?
[00:32:14.720] – Kurt von Ahnen
It It works well. I was part of the beta test with Fluent, and it behaved different in beta than it did after release. So now with the release, it almost, and I hesitate to say it this way because I might get corrected by somebody, but it almost seems more SaaS-like in that you install Fluent Community, and then you enter the portal in the admin menu. Instead of setting something up inside your admin part of your website, it launches what feels like really simple scheduling does. It’s got its own portal page and its own settings, and it does all of that right there. It seems removed from the site a little bit.
[00:33:00.380] – Jonathan Denwood
Because they got their own membership element influent, but it’s very basic. How does it… With Buddy Boss, can you share the membership user between the two?
[00:33:15.820] – Kurt von Ahnen
Share the data between the two, yes.
[00:33:18.100] – Jonathan Denwood
Right, you can.
[00:33:19.520] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah. That part works great. I guess the next question would be, Buddy Press and Buddy Press integrates with Lifter through Lifter LMS’s settings. You literally just go into Lifter LMS, Integrations, select Buddy Press, select Enable, and boom, as long as it’s installed, it connects.
[00:33:40.670] – Jonathan Denwood
All these three work with Lifter LMS and work with LearnDash, I would say. I haven’t, I don’t think you have actually worked on integrating fluent community with LearnDash, but I’d be very surprised if it’s any real difficulty. I can’t I can’t talk about Tuta LMS because I just don’t know, folks. Let’s just talk about prices. Buddy Boss, one-site license, $399. If you host with WP tonic, not on our starter plan, our next plan up because it needs some real server resources. You get it for free if you host with WP tonic. If you buy it normally, and I’m given the non-verse year discount price. It’s $399, $400. That’s still the bargain of the century. That’s the bargain price for what you get if you need it compared to the SaaS solutions out there. Would you agree?
[00:34:49.060] – Kurt von Ahnen
I would. When you hear what our clients say when they’ve been shopping for Mighty Networks or Circle, and then any conversation about doing a mobile app on top of it, it’s astronomical.
[00:35:01.230] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. Next one, Buddy Press. Well, you can’t argue in a way. It’s free. You’re going to need some decent hosting even with that It probably needs more server resources than Fluent because of when the code was coded. Next one, the other bargain of the year. Like I say, if you host with WP Tonic, you get a free version of Fluent Community, fully licensed and supported by ourselves. If you want to buy it directly from Fluent Community, one-site license, $199. A bargain, would you say?
[00:35:46.880] – Kurt von Ahnen
It is. And my mind is spinning right now, Jonathan. I apologize for that.
[00:35:52.040] – Jonathan Denwood
I do that all the time. Poor old Kirk. I confuse him regularly, don’t I, Kirk?
[00:35:56.760] – Kurt von Ahnen
I was just thinking of every instance that you and I have done Fluent Community with Lifter LMS, we’ve also provided Fluent CRM and Fluent Form. And that is where you really unlock a lot of really good secret sauce. I mean, that’s where you get to do automated upsells and you could sell messaging and all kinds of stuff through the CRM tool with tagging, and you can enroll people in certain parts of Fluent Community. You can enroll them in courses, unenroll them for courses when That’s where the magic really happens. Of course, you provide those tools as a set. You provide with your host.
[00:36:37.500] – Jonathan Denwood
For the time being, I do. There’ll be a stage, but we’ll probably have our in-house solution. I’m always scheming, as Kirk would tell you. I’m always scheming something, can’t I, Kirk? The only time I ever stop doing that is probably when I’m dead. All right, let’s finish off then. But both Buddie, for what you get and the possibility of the app, start at 2,000 to help you to a certain level, customization. And then if it goes above that, they give you an individual custom quote, that’s a bargain. And then I think it’s a couple of hundred dollars a month. But if you want the plugin and the theme, like I said, it’s just under 400, which is impressive. But it’s a fantastic value for getting an influencer for a couple of hundred dollars. Final thoughts, Kurt. What’s your final thought, my beloved Kurt?
[00:37:45.810] – Kurt von Ahnen
The more we discuss these things, the more I return to them. Maybe it’s the day’s flavor for me, with customer expectations, and ensuring we meet those expectations is the package. It’s stuck because Fluent Community and Buddy Boss both do courses, but I would never recommend using the course feature. I’d always recommend Lifter LMS for the courses.
[00:38:09.620] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, but the thing is, if you go to Mighty Networks, Circle, or Kajabi, the interface is a little bit more integrated and polished. But I still… I would love the WordPress interface to be improved. To my mind, it’s still not that bad. I love third-party plugins, certain providers, and what they do, but I have a problem with it, but we won’t go there. But if you log in to Kajabi, you’ve mentioned it. If you log in to Kajabi, if you log in to Mighty Networks, it’s a learning curve. You’re not setting anything up in a couple of hours. No. Two weeks later, you’re still going to be at it. Unless you’re very experienced. You’re still going to be at it, aren’t you?
[00:39:06.910] – Kurt von Ahnen
We have a client for whom we gave a WordPress playground in town. He is an IT person. He develops his custom software for people. So whatever that means in that space, that’s not my space. He confided to me at one of those network things you attended with me once. I’ve been trying to figure this out on Squarespace for a couple of months, and I’m just lost. I’m like, let me give you… You know what? I will provide you with a starter template on a little sandbox, and I’ll give you a little tutorial on it, and see how that does. And he said, This is much easier than what I’m trying to figure out and make happen in Squarespace.
[00:39:49.370] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, and Kirk’s done a lovely job for one of our clients, setting up a community, a fluent community website with Lifter LMS, haven’t he? You’ve done a beautiful job on it. It’s using one of our fluent WP themes that you get. And it’s come out nice. You’ve done a lovely job, haven’t you?
[00:40:12.730] – Kurt von Ahnen
I’m impressed with this one. It came together really, really well. And in this particular case, the client also had a copyright expert. So the wording is done well, too. So the content is good, the site looks good, and the features are good. So it’s like it’s all around winter. It’s an excellent product.
[00:40:34.080] – Jonathan Denwood
Thank you so much, Kirk. What’s the best way for people to learn more about you and what you’re up to, Kirk?
[00:40:39.970] – Kurt von Ahnen
You already told people to check out my LinkedIn, so now we must hold their feet to the fire. When you find Kurt von Ahnen on LinkedIn, you know you’ve got me because I’m the only one there.
[00:40:48.860] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s always amicable. We’ve got the WP Tonic YouTube channel if you’re looking for another great free resource to help you build your membership community website in 2025. It’s massive, folks. Got over 1,600 plus videos that cover loads of reviews, marketing tips, insights, reviews on SaaS, membership, and community products. It’s a fabulous free resource. So go over to WP Tonic’s YouTube channel and think about subscribing because I’m adding new videos weekly to that channel, and it’s rapidly growing. I think this month or next month, we will have up to 10,000 subscribers. So we love you to be part of that. We will be back next week with another great discussion. We’ll see you soon, folks. Bye.
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