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!
The open-source forum that runs half the internet's support communities. Free hosted plan with unlimited members, Pro at $100/mo, or self-host for nothing. Trust levels that unlock abilities, weekly activity digests built in, full data export, Stripe subscriptions on Pro. No courses, no app of your own.
Discourse is a forum. The grown-up, open-source, runs-on-your-own-domain forum that powers the support communities for half the software you use. It's been quietly adding chat, AI, and a free hosted plan, and it now sits in an odd spot: the most portable, most owned community platform on this site, and the least like Skool.
If your community is conversation, searchable and long-lived, where the answer someone posted in 2024 still helps someone in 2027, Discourse is better at that than anything else here. If your community is a feed with a leaderboard and a course player, it's the wrong tool, and no plugin will fix it.
Four hosted plans, or self-host for free.
Annual prices aren't shown. Education gets 85% off Pro and Business, non-profits 50%.
Self-hosted: the software is free and open source. You pay for a server (a small VPS runs a modest community) and your own time. Every plugin, including Subscriptions and Gamification, is free when you host it yourself. That's the trade: $500/mo hosted for gamification and events, or $0 plus a weekend and some patience.
The free hosted plan is the surprise. Unlimited members at $0 is unheard of on this site, and 500k page views is a lot of forum.
0% from Discourse. The Subscriptions plugin runs on your Stripe account and Discourse takes nothing.
Stripe only, via the Subscriptions plugin, which is Pro and up on hosted or free self-hosted. It sells recurring or one-time subscriptions that grant membership of a Discourse group, and groups gate categories. That's your paid tier. Rated "Stripe only."
Categories and sub-categories, tags, groups with permissions, private categories, chat with channels and DMs, polls, solved-answer marking, and moderation tools that put every other platform here to shame: trust levels, flagging, watched words, slow mode, silencing, and the ability to let your best members moderate for you.
Gamification is two things. Built into core: trust levels, where members climb from 0 to 4 by reading and participating, and each level unlocks abilities (posting links, editing titles, eventually moderation powers). Plus badges, dozens of them, awarded for behaviour. That's levels with unlocks, by the original definition; Discourse was doing it before Skool existed. The difference is what's unlocked: abilities and standing, not courses and bonus modules.
Then the Gamification plugin: points for participation and a leaderboard, with scoring contests you configure. Business plan on hosted, free self-hosted. Rated "Leaderboard and levels with unlocks," with that split noted.
Spaces: yes, in abundance. Rated "Yes."
No. There's no lesson player, no progress, no completion. Some communities build "courses" as a sequence of pinned topics in a category, which is a reading list. Rated "No."
Does it send members a digest? Yes, in core, and it's the model everyone else copied. The activity summary email goes to members who haven't visited, on a schedule they choose (default weekly), with the best topics since their last visit. Members can also watch categories for every post. Rated "Digest with content (daily or weekly)."
Can you email your members from inside it? No. There's no broadcast tool. You can post an announcement that watchers get by email, or run the Newsletter plugin on hosted plans, but there's no campaign builder. Rated "None."
Can you get your list out? Yes. Admins export the user list as CSV, including emails. And beyond that, you can download a full site backup from the browser: every user, post, category, upload. Move it to another host, or to your own server, and it comes back up as the same forum. API and webhooks on every plan for anything live. Rated "Zapier or API only" for sync, because there's no native ESP app, but "Members, posts and comments" for export, which no other platform on this site matches.
Members in: Bulk invite from a CSV of emails, with group and topic assignment, built in. Rated "Yes."
Members out: User CSV plus full backup. This is what "owning your community" looks like in practice.
Courses in: Nothing to put them in.
DiscourseHub, a shared app that opens any Discourse forum, plus a PWA that installs from the browser. No branded app. Rated "Shared platform app."
No course builder, no email broadcasts, no branded app. Paid subscriptions need the Pro plan ($100/mo) or self-hosting; gamification and events plugins need Business ($500/mo) or self-hosting. A forum is a forum: members who want a Skool-style feed will say so.
Checked 16 Oct 2026 against the Discourse pricing page, the Subscriptions plugin page (available on Pro, Business and Enterprise; requires Stripe), the Gamification plugin page (available on Business and Enterprise), and Discourse's own feature documentation for trust levels, activity summary emails, bulk invites and backups.
A social network on your own WordPress. Free open-source core, paid plans from $99/yr (renewing at $199), groups, forums, feeds, a daily or weekly digest since September 2026, gamification on Scale, and a white-label app from $499/yr. You own everything, and you maintain everything.