Which community and membership stack is best for you? I break them all down and show you what their sales pages won't say out loud!
Free, unlimited members, the best chat on the internet. No email, no courses, no member export, no gamification without bots. Native paid tiers take 10% and are US-only, so everyone else charges through Patreon, Whop or Memberful.
Discord is the free default. Unlimited members, channels for everything, voice rooms, forum channels, threads, scheduled events, and an app everyone under 35 already has installed.
What it isn't: a business. There's no email address for any member, ever. No course player. No member list you can download. No way to charge outside the US without a third-party tool. And no digest, so a member who doesn't open the app doesn't hear from you.
If your community is the product and your members live in chat, Discord is hard to beat. If you need to own the relationship, Discord owns it, not you.
Free. No plans, no member limits that matter, no fee on a free server. Discord's caps: 25 million members, 500 channels, 50 categories, 250 roles. Boosting your server raises emoji slots and upload sizes, not those caps.
Nitro ($9.99/mo) is for members, not for you. It doesn't change what you can do as a server owner.
If you can charge natively, Discord keeps 10%. Server Subscriptions run on a "90 / 10 split" per Discord's own Creator Revenue FAQ, with processing fees on top, and payouts once a month on or before the 15th.
The catch is in the next line of the same FAQ: "Server Subscriptions will not be available outside of the United States." You need US banking and US identification. If you're in Canada, the UK, Portugal, anywhere else, there is no native way to charge for your Discord.
We've entered 10 in the fee filter. For most of the world the real number is whatever Patreon, Whop or Memberful charges to gate your roles, which is how most paid Discords actually work.
US creators: a Stripe account Discord creates for you, monthly payouts. Everyone else: none. Rated "Platform processor only" because that's what exists.
This is the whole product, and it's excellent. Text channels, voice channels, stage channels for talks, forum channels for threaded posts, threads inside any channel, categories to group them, roles to gate them, an onboarding flow and a server guide for new members, and Scheduled Events with RSVPs and reminders.
Gamification: none built in. Levels, XP and leaderboards come from bots (MEE6, Arcane, Tatsu) that you install and sometimes pay for. It works, but it's a third party in your community with its own pricing and its own data.
The real limitation isn't features. It's attention. Your server is one of twenty in every member's sidebar. A dormant member never sees a notification, never gets an email, and quietly forgets you exist.
No. Some creators pin lesson videos in channels. That's a playlist, not a course. No progress, no completion, no certificates, nothing to import.
Does it send members a digest? No. Discord notifies through the app and will email you about missed direct messages, but there's no summary of what happened in your server. Rated "None."
Can you email your members from inside it? No. You can @everyone in a channel, which reaches whoever opens the app. You can't email anyone, because you don't have their address.
Can you get your list out? No. You never had it. Discord doesn't expose member emails to server owners, and there's no member list export. What you have is a list of usernames, which belong to Discord, not to you. Rated "None" on both export and list sync. This is the single biggest reason to pair Discord with something else.
Members in: You share an invite link. There's no import; people join themselves. Rated "No."
Members out: Nothing. No member export, no message export without a bot or the API, and the "Your Discord Data Package" is your own account's data, not your server's.
Courses in: Nothing to put them in.
The Discord app on every platform, and it's the best mobile community app on this site. Not branded, and your server is one tab among many.
No email of any kind: no digest, no broadcasts, no member addresses, no export. Native paid memberships are US-only and take 10%. Gamification needs third-party bots.
Checked 16 Oct 2026 against Discord's Creator Revenue FAQ (updated 28 Aug 2025), Discord Account Caps, Server Caps, and More, and the Scheduled Events and Forum Channels support articles.
Where most communities start and most migrations come from. Free, instant, three billion people already logged in. No way to charge, no email, no export, an algorithm that decides who sees your posts, and features Meta adds and removes on a whim. A shaky place to build. Collect emails at the door or own nothing.
Not a community platform yet, but building toward one. Channel memberships at a 70/30 split, members-only posts and lives, free Courses with PDF attachments, quizzes and polls in the community tab. No email, no export, and the biggest audience on earth.