MightyNetworks vs BuddyBoss

Deciding between the two most well-known community plugin options – BuddyBoss vs MightyNetworks – can be a difficult decision to make for most businesses.

Ideally, you want your community plugin to offer extensive features that help you easily create and manage an online community under your brand name. In this article, we’ll compare the two options MightyNetworks vs BuddyBoss to help you make an informed decision.

MightyNetworks vs BuddyBoss Overview

MightyNetworks is an all-in-one platform that offers community creation, custom branding, memberships subscriptions, and course creating features for businesses.

By using a single platform to overlook all aspects of your community under your brand name, you make it easy to manage day-to-day business operations. In addition to this, MightyNetworks also offers advanced analytics for you to go over important metrics that can help take your business growth to the next level.

BuddyBoss offers a platform that’s dedicated to helping you easily sell online courses, offer membership subscription programs, and create and run an online community under your brand.

BuddyBoss offers extensive monetization tools that let you offer subscriptions, sell content as one-time purchases, or let users download content from your website as paid add-ons to their membership. Additionally, it seamlessly integrates with WooCommerce stores and membership plugins.

Be sure to check out our full review of BuddyBoss for more information.

Features to compare between MightyNetworks vs BuddyBoss

Here, we’ll highlight some features that you should consider when deciding between the two platforms: MightyNetworks vs BuddyBoss.

#1. Intuitive to start your community

If you sell online courses on your website or you’re running a membership site, you need to have a solid community plugin that lets you manage and run a community easily. You need to figure out which plugin works the best for you according to your business requirements.

MightyNetworks

Building a community around your brand on a platform that’s easily accessible for most users is crucial for its success.

MightyNetworks shines in the accessibility department as it’s a SaaS platform. MightyNetworks being a software as a service and a cloud-based platform makes it easy for users to access your community with any device that has an internet connection.

This also means you can build and manage your community through a channel that’s separate from your main website. This helps reduce the load on your main website which can help decrease website hosting costs and site maintenance costs for your business.

MightyNetworks offers a robust community creation solution for businesses looking for a more “hands-off” approach. This means you can use robust tools to run and manage your community without having to worry about the technical side of things and without losing your unique brand look.

BuddyBoss

BuddyBoss offers a simpler yet professional open-source platform for creating communities that are designed to be used with your existing WordPress site. This way, you can add a community directly to your business website.

This is great for boosting engagement on your website and help speed up growth for your business. Membership sites that already have subscriptions set up on their site may find it beneficial to build and run an online community from the same place. Since most members are already visiting the membership site to view content, it allows them to further engage with your brand through the community.

In addition to this, BuddyBoss’s monetization features help your business generate revenue by offering one-time purchases of content or setting up subscriptions on your WordPress site. This is great for businesses looking for one platform to manage their community and their subscriptions or sales easily.

#2. Native functionality

The community plugin to decide to go with should offer decent native functionality that helps you run and manage your community. This way, you don’t have to spend extra or rely on third-party plugins for adding functionality.

It also ensures you don’t run out of budget when paying for additional features to properly run your community. You don’t want to build a community and not be able to run it properly due to a lack of features and tools.

MightyNetworks

MightyNetworks offers an intuitive all-in-one solution for creating and managing a community for businesses and organizations. This also means that you don’t need to depend on third-party plugins for functionality, you have all the features built-in on the platform.

By using MightyNetworks, you can create an online community, create and offer online courses to your members, and host stunning virtual events under your brand name. This is great for saving a lot of time switching between multiple plugins and platforms to do various tasks.

Other than having strong built-in features, MightyNetworks also helps you cut down costs. Now, you don’t have to worry about subscribing to multiple services to do the job, you can use one platform to manage your community and other important aspects of your business.

BuddyBoss

BuddyBoss is an open-source platform that needs to be integrated into your WordPress site to work. This also means, other than offering some basic membership and community creation functionality, BuddyBoss is very limited when it comes to its native functionality.

On the other side, with BuddyBoss and third-party plugins, you do have complete control over what you want to do with your online community. You can do things such as customizing the community according to your unique brand’s look or adding functionality to enhance your community as well as engaging your members.

#3. Customization features

Customization is important if you want your community to represent your brand’s unique look and feel.

Ideally, you want to be able to customize your online community according to your brand’s requirements, according to your members, and according to the use case of your community for your business.

MightyNetworks

MightyNetworks offers extensive customization tools for making your community look exactly how you need it to. This means that you can create a personalized and unique experience for members of your online community that’s true to your brand.

The best part about MightyNetworks is the integration of customization features with online communities. All features are designed to work seamlessly with your online community. In addition to this, MightyNetworks also offers businesses the option to use a personalized domain name.

BuddyBoss

BuddyBoss is great if you’re looking for a highly customizable community plugin for your WordPress site. It lets you add customization features through other WordPress plugins.

This means that you can add as much functionality you want by selecting the third-party plugins you prefer. For instance, you may want to add functionality to charge for subscriptions or let members pay a one-time fee to access courses and content on your website.

In addition to this, the LearnDash integration with BuddyBoss makes it easy to seamlessly create and sell online courses from a single place.

#4. Mobile-friendly

You want to make your online community as accessible as you possibly can. This way, you let all types of users including mobile users, desktop users, and tablet users access your online community.

MightyNetworks

MightyNetworks seamlessly works across all devices. This means that all your customization features and added functionality will look the same across all devices.

This not only makes your online community much more accessible but also helps represent your brand better. You can provide a much more seamless experience for members if they want to switch devices. For instance, if a member wants to access your community on their mobile device instead of using the desktop, they can do that from anywhere and using any device they prefer.

BuddyBoss

BuddyBoss is not a dedicated platform. It integrates into your existing WordPress site. This means that to make your online community mobile-friendly, you have to first make your website mobile-friendly. The good news is that most WordPress themes are mobile-friendly out of the box.

If you’re using other third-party plugins with BuddyBoss, you need to make sure those plugins are also mobile-friendly. You don’t want to add functionality and customization features only for desktop users.

Limiting access to your online community across all devices can harm your business’s growth.

This way, people using a mobile device will bounce right away from your online community and website.

#5. Pricing

If you’re looking to build and run a community, you need to decide on a plugin for the long term. This also means you need to set aside a budget for the subscription costs or the costs of other third-party plugins.

Considering the pricing of the community plugin can help you keep subscription costs within the budget you set aside.

MightyNetworks

MightyNetworks’s entry-level price starts at $23 per month paid annually for The Community Plan subscription.

MightyNetworks also offers a free trial for The Business Plan and for The Community Plan.

BuddyBoss

BuddyBoss’s entry-level price starts at $228 per year for a one-site plan. You can also try the free demo to see what features suit you the best.

Conclusion

Deciding between the two robust community plugin options MightyNetworks vs BuddyBoss can be a challenge. You need to ask yourself questions such as:

How easy is it to start a community? What features come built-in? Does the plugin have customization options? Will the online community work across all devices? Does it fit my assigned budget?.

These questions can help you better decide what is the right option for your business and your online community. To recap:

MightyNetworks is great for businesses that want an all-in-one platform that is great for managing everything from a single, separate channel. It’s also a solid option for brands that require advanced analytics tools to see if campaigns or their marketing is working and to further enhance the growth of their business.

On the other hand, If you’re looking for a simple solution to creating an online community directly on your WordPress site, BuddyBoss might be the best option for you. It’s also great for businesses wanting to build a community around their membership site.

What other features do you look for in a community-building platform? Let us know in the comments box below.