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.
Membership Stack: Breaking Down Where To Build Your Community
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!
WhatsApp Communities
Free umbrella for up to 100 WhatsApp groups with an admin-only announcement group. Hard cap of 2,000 members per community and 1,024 per group. No payments, no courses, no member export.
The Honest Limitation
2,000 members total per community (1,024 per group), no way to charge anyone, no member export, and you can't create one from the WhatsApp Business app.
What WhatsApp Communities actually is
A WhatsApp Community is a folder. You take up to 100 WhatsApp groups, put them under one name and icon, and WhatsApp adds an announcement group where only admins can post. Members join the community, pick which sub-groups they want, and get your announcements whether they like it or not (they can't leave the announcement group without leaving the whole community).
That's it. It's the best-known chat app on earth with a thin layer of structure on top. It is not a membership platform and WhatsApp doesn't pretend it is.
We checked WhatsApp's help centre and blog on 26 October 2026.
Pricing: free, with no paid plan to upgrade to
WhatsApp is free for consumers and there is no creator plan. Our pricing field says $0 because there's nothing to buy. The one wrinkle: you can't create a community from the WhatsApp Business app. You create it on the consumer app, and you can keep owning it if you later register that number as a business.
The caps, straight from WhatsApp's help centre
This is the whole story for anyone thinking of growing here.
- 2,000 members per community, total. That number includes everyone across all sub-groups and the announcement group. When it's full, nobody else can join until someone leaves.
- 1,024 members per group, including the community's general chat.
- 100 groups per community.
So the ceiling is 2,000 people. Not 2,000 per group, 2,000 for the entire structure. A Telegram group alone holds 200,000. A free Skool community has no member cap. If you're at a few hundred members and growing, WhatsApp is a room you will outgrow, and there's no door to a bigger one inside WhatsApp.
What you get inside
- Announcement group: admins broadcast to everyone; members can reply (replies are grouped and minimised, notifications muted for all), react, and vote in polls.
- General chat: an optional discussion group new members can join, capped at 1,024. Admins can turn on Approve New Members.
- Events (May 2024): anyone in a community group can create an event, members RSVP, attendees get a reminder as it approaches. It's the reason our calendar field says yes.
- Polls, media, voice notes, group calls: everything a WhatsApp group already had.
Payments, courses, email: none
Nothing in a community can be charged for. No tiers, no checkout, no gated groups. WhatsApp announced channel subscriptions in June 2025 ("exclusive updates for a monthly fee"), but that's for Channels, the one-way broadcast feature, not Communities, and WhatsApp's post gives no price, no fee and no revenue share. If you want a paid WhatsApp group, you sell access somewhere else and add people by hand.
Courses, gamification, a feed, an email list: not here. Members are phone numbers. You will never get an email address out of WhatsApp.
Getting members in
You add people from your contacts or share an invite link. There's no CSV upload and no API for consumer groups. Every member has to be added or has to tap a link, and when the 2,000 cap hits, that's the end of it.
Getting your data out
Per chat, one at a time: open a group, Export chat, pick all messages or a date range. From a phone you can include media; from desktop you can't. You get a ZIP with a text file. Disappearing and view-once messages aren't in it, and the file can't be re-imported anywhere because it's text, not a backup.
There is no member list export. The transcript shows who said what (names for your contacts, phone numbers for everyone else), which is why our export field says members, posts and comments. In practice you're leaving with a pile of text files and no list you can email.
Where it fits
WhatsApp Communities is right for a local club, a school, a church, a small coaching group where everyone already has WhatsApp open all day and nobody is going to pay through it. It's the lowest-friction place on earth to get a message read. It's the wrong place to build anything you plan to sell, grow past a couple of thousand people, or ever move.
Known limitation
2,000 members total per community (1,024 per group), no way to charge anyone, no member export, and you can't even create one from the Business app.
Sources we checked
- How to create a community: https://faq.whatsapp.com/438859978317289
- About community announcements: https://faq.whatsapp.com/582420703681043
- About general chat for communities: https://faq.whatsapp.com/1418342145436771
- About communities on the WhatsApp Business app: https://faq.whatsapp.com/1062663711575428
- How to export your chat history: https://faq.whatsapp.com/1180414079177245
- Events and replies in announcement groups (1 May 2024): https://blog.whatsapp.com/new-to-communities-events-and-replies-in-announcement-groups
- Channel subscriptions and Status ads (16 June 2025): https://blog.whatsapp.com/helping-you-find-more-channels-and-businesses-on-whatsapp
- About creating a WhatsApp Channel: https://faq.whatsapp.com/265055289421317
- Communities Learning Center: https://www.whatsapp.com/communities
Pricing Page
Pricing Page
Export Documentation
Export Documentation
Reviews
No reviews yetSimilar listings in category
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.