Facebook Groups

The short version

Facebook Groups is where most communities on this site started, and where most of the people reading it are leaving from.

It's free. It takes two minutes. Your audience is already logged in and already gets notifications. For a free community of a few hundred people who like talking to each other, it's fine, and it's the easiest thing on this site to set up.

It's the hardest thing on this site to run as a business. You can't charge. You can't email. You can't export. And you don't decide who sees your posts; the feed algorithm does. The group isn't yours. You're a volunteer moderator on Meta's property.

And the property keeps getting renovated without telling you. Subscription groups: tested, killed. Mentorship: removed. Units became Guides, and Guides come and go depending on which group you're in. Rooms: gone. The Groups API that let scheduling tools post into groups: shut down in 2024. Nothing on this page is guaranteed to exist next year, which is the whole point of the page.

Pricing we checked

Free. No plans, no limits that a creator will hit.

There's no paid group feature. Meta tested subscription groups years ago and dropped them. If you want to charge for access, you collect money somewhere else (Stripe, Systeme, Patreon) and add people by hand, then remove them by hand when they stop paying. Plenty of people do this. It's a job.

Transaction fees

None, because there are no transactions. We've entered 0. Don't read it as "0% fees." Read it as "no checkout."

Payments

None. Rated "None."

Community and gamification

The feed, posts, comments, reactions, polls, and the things Meta has added since 2022: Community Chats (text, audio and video), chat and audio channels for smaller side rooms, event chats, view-only chats for one-way announcements, and an admin-only chat. Events with RSVPs. Admin Assist for rule-based moderation, with a daily digest of what it did. Anonymous posting with nicknames since late 2025.

Gamification is badges. Top Fan, Conversation Starter, Rising Star and the rest, awarded by Facebook's rules, not yours. Meta has also tested "Community Contributions," where members earn points for activity and top contributors get profile badges. Rated "Points or badges." There's no leaderboard you control and nothing you can unlock with a level.

Here's what no feature fixes. Your post reaches a slice of members Facebook picks. Members on the default "Highlights" notification setting see what the algorithm thinks they'll engage with. A quiet member drifts out of the feed and never sees you again, and you have no way to reach them, because you don't have their email.

Courses

No course player. Guides, which let admins order posts into a sequence, have existed in some groups and not others, and Meta's help pages are blocked to automated checks, so we won't rate on a feature we can't verify. If you need lessons, progress and completion, it's not here. Rated "No."

The three email questions

Does it send members a digest? Facebook sends notification emails to members who've drifted, on its own schedule, with content it picks. You don't control it, can't see it, and can't write it. Rated "Basic notifications."

Can you email your members from inside it? No. You can post. Whether the post reaches anyone is Facebook's call.

Can you get your list out? Not from the group. Admins can see the member list but can't download it, and there are no email addresses in it. You cannot scrape emails members haven't given you.

So you collect them at the door instead. Make your third membership question "What's your best email? I'll send you a freebie." Then use a Chrome extension like Group Collector to capture the answer on approval, write it to a Google Sheet, and push it to Kit, Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign or whatever you use, in one click. The catch: that data is only visible before you approve someone. Click approve without the tool and it's gone. We've written up the whole setup, with the tool we use and why we switched off Group Leads: How to extract emails from Facebook groups.

This is the single most important thing to do with a Facebook group. Do it from day one. Rated "None" for export and "None" for list sync, because the group itself gives you nothing; the membership question is you building your own exit.

Getting in and getting out

Members in: Invite links, invitations, and membership questions. No import. You can't bulk-add people; they join. Rated "No."

Members out: Nothing from the group. No member export, no post export, no comment export. When you move, you post a link and ask people to follow you. If you've been collecting emails at the door, you email everyone and most of them come. If you haven't, in our experience about a third do.

Courses in: Nothing to put them in.

Mobile app

The Facebook app. Everyone has it, nobody opens it for your group specifically. Rated "Shared platform app."

Who it's for

• A free community for an audience that's already on Facebook, over 35, and not technical.
• A funnel: a free group that collects emails at the door and feeds a paid community somewhere else.
• Anyone testing whether a community exists at all before paying for a platform.

Who should skip it

• Anyone charging for access. Collecting money by hand and gatekeeping manually doesn't scale.
• Anyone who needs to reach every member. The algorithm won't let you.
• Anyone building the thing their business depends on. Meta can change the rules, the reach, or the feature set any month, and has.

Known limitation

No paid memberships, no email of any kind, no member or content export, and reach is decided by the feed algorithm. Meta adds and removes group features without a roadmap you can see, so anything you build on is temporary. Collect emails with a membership question from day one or you own nothing.

Sources

Checked 16 Oct 2026 against Meta's own announcements: "Introducing New Features to Facebook Groups" (Communities Summit, October 2022) and "New Facebook Update Gives Group Admins More Flexibility While Protecting Member Privacy" (November 2025). Facebook's help centre pages block automated access, so notification settings, badge names and the history of removed features come from our own experience running groups and should be treated as secondary. The email-collection method is our own, documented on our blog.