There's a question I'd ask about any community platform before I asked about price, and nobody puts it on the pricing page.
When I post, who sees it?
Not "how many members do I have." Who, specifically, gets shown the post, and who decides. Because on half the platforms in this directory, the answer is "a slice of your members, chosen by software you can't see." And on the other half, it's "everyone who opens the app, in the order it happened."
That one difference explains why people leave Facebook Groups for Skool, why Skool people complain about members joining twelve groups, and why I keep banging on about email.
Two kinds of reach
Reach you control. You post, it goes to the top of the feed, every member who opens the platform sees it until something newer pushes it down. The platform doesn't rank, filter, or guess. Circle, Mighty Networks, SchoolMaker, Podia, Kajabi, Thinkific, LearnWorlds, Stan Store and Skool all work this way inside your space. Discord does too, inside a channel.
Reach the platform controls. You post, and an algorithm decides which members see it based on what they've engaged with before. Facebook Groups is the pure version. The default notification setting for a group member is "Highlights," which means "whatever Facebook thinks you'll click." A quiet member sees less, engages less, gets shown less, and drifts out entirely. You never find out, because you can't see who was shown what.
YouTube's community tab is the same. Post to your subscribers and YouTube decides who gets it in their feed.
Here's the thing that gets missed. On a platform that controls reach, your community shrinks silently. Member count stays the same. Reach doesn't.
The sorting trick
"Chronological" isn't quite the whole story on the platforms you control either.
Skool's feed sorts by activity by default. A post gets a new comment, it jumps back to the top. That's not an algorithm hiding things from people; everyone sees the same feed. But it does mean the posts with conversation under them win, and a post nobody replied to sinks in an hour. The leaderboard and levels are there to make people reply, which keeps the feed moving, which keeps people opening the app. It's a loop, and it works, and it's also why a Skool group with no engagement feels dead faster than a Facebook group with no engagement.
Circle and the course platforms let you sort by newest or by latest activity and mostly leave it alone. Less lively, more predictable.
Either way, your post reaches everyone who shows up. The question is whether they show up.
Who else is in the room
The second thing the pricing page won't tell you: who's competing for your members' attention in the same place.
Facebook Groups: everyone. Your post sits in a feed with the member's cousin's holiday photos, forty other groups, Reels, and ads. You're competing with Facebook itself for the member's time inside Facebook.
YouTube: the entire platform. Your community post is one item in a home feed designed to show people the next video from anyone.
Discord: every other server in the sidebar. Your community is a tab. A member in twenty servers sees your unread badge next to nineteen others.
Substack: other writers, by design. Substack's home feed and Notes recommend other publications to your readers. That's the growth engine and it runs in both directions. Your readers are shown the competition inside the app you're paying 10% to use.
Skool: other Skool groups. There's a discovery page, members join multiple groups, and the app shows them all. This is the complaint I hear most from Skool owners: "my members are in six other groups." Less competition than Facebook, more than Circle, and it's the price of the $9 plan and the discovery traffic.
Circle, Mighty, SchoolMaker, Podia, the course platforms: nobody. Your community is on your domain or your subdomain, and the only thing in it is you and your members. No discovery, no recommendations, no sidebar. You have to bring every member yourself, and once they're in, you have their full attention.
Patreon: adjacent competition. Your page sits on patreon.com next to everyone else's, but the relationship is posts emailed to members, so the feed matters less.
There's no right answer here. Facebook and YouTube give you strangers for free and then compete with you for them. Circle gives you nobody and then leaves you alone. Skool is in between, and so is Substack.
The second algorithm: the inbox
Reach inside the app is half of it. The other half is whether the platform reaches out to members who didn't open the app. That's the digest.
I wrote a whole piece on the three meanings of "does it have email," so the short version:
- Skool: daily digest of what happened, if there was anything.
- Circle: weekly digest with content, configurable.
- Podia: the member picks: instant, hourly, daily at 8:10, weekly on Friday, or off.
- Thinkific: weekly, Tuesdays, no member choice.
- Mighty Networks: digests, plus a native Kit integration.
- Substack and Patreon: every post is an email. The platform is the digest.
- SchoolMaker, LearnWorlds, Stan Store, Kajabi: notifications on events (someone replied, someone mentioned you), no summary.
- Discord: nothing. If they don't open the app, you don't exist.
- Facebook Groups and YouTube: emails on the platform's schedule, with the platform's wording, to members the platform picks.
A member who gets a daily email with the three best posts in it will come back. A member who gets nothing won't, and on Discord that's every member.
What I'd actually do with this
If you're on Facebook or YouTube, you're renting reach. That's fine as a top of funnel. It's not fine as the place your business lives. Collect emails at the door (membership question plus Group Collector on Facebook, a lead magnet link in every YouTube description) and move the people who matter somewhere you control.
If you're choosing a paid platform, decide how much competition you can stand. Skool's discovery brings people in and also shows them the exit. Circle's walled garden keeps attention and brings nobody. For a first paid community, I lean Skool: you need the discovery more than you need the moat. Past a few hundred paying members, the maths flips.
Whatever you pick, the digest is doing more work than the feed. A platform that emails your members a summary is a platform that brings them back without you posting. Weight that heavily. It's worth more than gamification and most people never check it.
And own the list regardless. Every platform above, including the good ones, can change its feed, its digest, or its recommendation engine next quarter. The only reach nobody can take away is a list of email addresses in a tool you pay for.
Reach and digest behaviour for each platform is taken from the verified listings on this site, each of which cites the vendor's own pricing page and help centre. Where I've described a feed as chronological or activity-sorted, that's from using the product, not from a vendor page, and I'll correct it if a vendor tells me otherwise.