Discourse VS Mighty Networks: Which Is Best For Software Companies Building Community?
Dec 20, 2023
Olivier van den Hoogen
Co-founder Turf
The aspects of a community platform that are most vital for community success
Many SaaS and software companies recognize the power of building an online community to drive their businesses forward, but what exactly do we mean when we talk about ‘community’? Before we start comparing these different platforms, it is a must to be clear about for which use case we are comparing the platforms. For SaaS and software companies, there are two possible use cases of ‘community’. First, a ‘community of practice’ about a specific niche or segment with the goal of attracting your target audience in this community to increase user acquisition. Second, a ‘customer community’ that is centered around your product or brand, and is focused on reducing customer churn and customer support costs.
In this comparison we focus on the use case of a customer community environment for SaaS and software companies.
The level of ROI and benefit of a customer community environment solely depends on how much you can engage your users to be active in the customer community environment. The more active your users, the more support costs you will save and the more your churn rates will be reduced.
With that goal in mind, we will focus this comparison on the key features and platform characteristics that are most vital for the level of engagement and activity in your customer community environment:
Threads and forum structure
Functionality to host and centralize other customer modules
In-app integration
Gamification
Business impact analytics and metrics
Customization of the community environment
Pricing
This is also where Turf becomes a part of the equation. Turf is a customer community platform built specifically for SaaS and software companies. Made to increase the effectiveness and business impact of customer community building, our platform gives you all the tools needed to not only nurture community engagement, but also measure the direct business impact of it.
Cant wait to launch your customer community environment? Talk to our team and get free access up to 100 community members. PS: You can launch your customer community environment with 2 clicks. No brainer, right? If not, be sure to keep reading for a comparison of the leading community forum platforms.
Threads and forum structure
The structure of the threads and forum functionality will form the basis of your community and will be the place where your users will interact and communicate with each other. Threads and forums need to be easy to use, allow post creators and moderators to pin ‘best answers’, and have the ability to create rich posts with screenshots, videos, code blocks, and more, so your users can discuss their topics and your application, accurately and in detail.
Discourse
Discourse is one of the only open-source community platforms that allows you to fully build on top of their out-of-the-box solution. In their out-of-the-box solution, they have a good thread and forum structure that is easy to use and gives a good overview of comments on comments, and makes it easy to understand which comments are part of which discussion. However, it is missing a voting system where members can both upvote and downvote posts and comments. Because of this, you can not present your members with an optimized feed that showcases the most valuable posts more prominently. The absence of downvotes also means that members do not get insight into what type of posts or comments are seen as not valuable, which means that you can not help guide them toward generating more valuable content in the long term. You can like posts and comments, but this doesn't affect the positioning of the content in the feed. Discourse has a great rich text editor that allows you to create detailed posts and comments. It allows you to add images, videos, code blocks, files, lists, calendar activities, tables, charts, and more. Compared to the other legacy community platforms that have been reviewed, Discourse provides one of the best rich text editors for creating posts and comments. Furthermore, Discourse allows you to filter your feed based on 'latest', 'unread', 'top', and 'categories'. The 'top' filter displays the posts with the most activity first. At last, you can not directly share posts or comments on any of the big social platforms. They only allow you to copy a link to the post or comment. All in all, Discourse has a good core forum and thread functionality, but the formatting and styling is very 'legacy' and make it more feel like a 'question & answer' forum than a real engaged community. You can solve this by customizing based on their open-source code base, but that does require manual coding work.
Mighty Networks
Mighty Networks has a good thread and forum structure that is easy to use and gives a good overview of comments on comments and makes it easy to understand which comments are part of which discussion. You can like posts and comments. The platform is missing a rich text editor, that allows members to create detailed posts and comments with videos, lists, code blocks, and more. Also, post creators or community moderators can not mark a comment on a post as ‘Best answer’ or pin a comment at the top. At last, the Mighty Networks forum functionality does not work with a voting system that allows your members to upvote and downvote posts and comments. The downside of this is that you are not able to provide your members with an optimized feed where the most valuable posts are shown higher. Through downvotes, members also get a sense of what types of posts or content are considered not valuable, therefore indirectly guiding your members to create more content that gets regarded as valuable, over the long run. At last, Mighty Networks allows you to directly share posts from your forum on the majority of big social platforms.
Turf
Turf has a good thread and forum structure. The thread system in Turf allows members to directly get an overview of which conversations are taking place, by displaying each comment and comment on comments in its own block. It is easy to use and comes with a detailed rich text editor that can be used when creating new posts as well as when creating comments. The rich text editor allows members to create posts and comments with images, videos, codeblocks, lists, headings, and more. Turf its forum allows members to upvote and downvote, posts and comments. This way members will get a more detailed sense of what types of posts and content are valuable, but also what types of posts and content are considered not valuable. This will speed up the guiding process of getting members to create more content that gets regarded as valuable. Also, post creators and community moderators are able to mark a comment on a post as ‘Best answer’ or pin a comment at the top. This way other members that have a similar question and find this post/thread by typing their question in the search bar, will directly see the correct answer to their question at the top, instead of having to look through all the comments on the post. At last, Turf allows your members to mark posts and threads as ‘This has helped me’ and you can share posts and threads from your forum directly on the majority of big social platforms.
Functionality to host and centralize other customer modules
This might be the most important factor in cultivating user engagement and activity in your customer community environment. Centralizing other customer modules such as knowledge base, help center, roadmap communication, product feedback, changelogs, bug reporting, feature requests, help desk, academy, technical documentation, and online events, in your customer community environment directly increases activity in your customer community. By doing this, you are giving your users consistent incentives to come back to your customer community environment. Your users will have to go to your customer community environment for almost all actions that they want to perform and at the same time will be exposed to all the other modules located there. This doesn't only increase activity in the community, but also increases usage of all other individual modules that are being centralized there.
Discourse
Discourse is focused on providing community forum software for all sorts of use cases. This means that they do not focus on the use case of 'customer community' and are also not focused on SaaS and software companies in particular. Because of this general approach, they don't take into account the existing ecosystem of customer modules with which the customer community environment needs to seamlessly work and fit into. Discourse only provides the core out-of-the-box functionality of community forums and does not have any other functionalities or modules included in their software.
Mighty Networks
Mighty Networks allows you to host and centralize courses, resource libraries, and live events, in your community environment. Mighty Networks is not focused on and built for software companies, meaning they don't take into account the existing ecosystem of customer modules with which the customer community environment needs to seamlessly work and fit into. If you are building a ‘community of practice’ as a creator or brand, Mighty Networks delivers exactly what you need with its centralized courses, resource libraries, live events, and ability to monetize your community. For software companies looking to build an engaged customer community, Mighty Networks is lacking key functionality such as the ability to create or integrate a help center, knowledge base, roadmap display, bug reporting, feature requests, help desk, customer feedback, and technical documentation. Not being able to centralize or integrate these modules will lead to significant engagement and activity issues down the line.
Turf
Turf is a customer community platform specifically focused on SaaS and software companies building a customer community. The platform is centered around reducing support costs and customer churn for the company. Turf allows you to host and centralize your knowledge base, help center, roadmap communication, product feedback, changelogs, bug reporting, feature requests, help desk, academy, technical documentation, and online event management. Turf allows you to host and centralize the entirety of other customer facing modules that SaaS and software companies might have - making your customer community environment the single meetpoint for your users and increasing the usage of each module as a result.
In-app integration
An in-app integration of your customer community environment, means that your users can access and interact with your community from within your SaaS application or software. The crucial thing to understand is that your users want to be active in your customer community when they are using your tool in real-time or when they have just used your tool. Therefore, activity in your customer community environment is significantly higher when your users can interact with and participate in your customer community from within your application.
Discourse
Discourse does not allow you to natively embed your community environment in your SaaS application.
Mighty Networks
Mighty networks does not allow you to embed or integrate your community into your SaaS application, software, or website, at the time of writing.
Turf
Turf allows you to embed your customer community environment in your SaaS application, software, or website, with an embeddable widget. Through this widget, your entire customer community environment is viewable and interactable. What is being displayed in the widget is customizable, so you can decide to either only display certain modules of your community in the widget or display the entire customer community environment in the widget. The Turf widget also comes with a chatbot that is trained on user behavior inside your SaaS or software and on the community activity & content. The widget gets installed with a simple code snippet that gets added to the pages where you want the widget to be displayed.
Gamification
A gamification engine is one of the simplest ways to directly engage your community members. The gamification engine in a community should empower your super users, users who are posting valuable content, and other users that are performing ideal behaviour, while still involving and incentivizing your average community members and users.
Discourse
Discourse offers some gamification features, but they are limited compared to the other platforms under review. Discourse its out-of-the-box solution comes with a 'trust system', where members can be assigned different roles with permissions. The aim of this function is to serve the use case of letting members who become regular contributors, earn abilities to help maintain the community. Besides that, Discourse comes with the basic badges functionality, where you can assign members a set of badges that they can earn with specific behavior. You can assign preset badges but you can also add your own custom badges. To conclude, the gamification features in Discourse its out-of-the-box solution are very limited and have shortcomings when comparing it to the other platforms under review.
Mighty Networks
Mighty networks currently does not have any native gamification features. They do allow you to connect third-party applications that provide gamification features. Because you need an API integration for this, you will need a Mighty Networks Business Plan or higher. The entry-level plan does not allow you to use the API integration.
Turf
Turf offers a gamification engine that is driven by a voting system. Members can upvote and downvote all posts, comments, and resources in your community. Members get assigned a vote count based on the upvotes and downvotes that they have gotten over all their posts, comments, and other contributions to the community. The members in your community that are in the top 5% of members with the highest vote count get the label ‘Expert’ which is identified by a blue border around their profile picture, and have an increased weight of their votes by 4X. The members in your community that are in the next 15% of members with the highest vote count get the label ‘Senior’ which is identified by a green border around their profile picture, and have an increased weight of their votes by 2X. By giving these members increased weights with their votes, members that have proven knowledge and made valuable contributions to the community (according to all other members) will have a bigger influence in deciding what else is valuable or not valuable for the community. This system creates an autonomous improvement loop of the quality and value of content in your community and will make sure that your community will stay relevant and valuable over time. Besides that, Turf also has leaderboards and they allow you to create and assign badges. You can fully customize your badges and upload a specific design for your badges.
Business impact analytics and metrics
Obviously, you want to be able to get insights into how your community is performing based on activity and engagement metrics, but what about the effect of your community on key business objectives (for which you launch the initiative in the first place) such as change in customer lifetime value, churn rates, support costs, customer engagement, NPS scores, and more. This is key in understanding the effect and ROI of your customer community initiative.
Discourse
Much like the other platforms under review, Discourse offers all the needed community activity and insight analytics such as member count, activity metrics, and visitor metrics, but does not provide any business impact analytics. This leaves you in the dark about the actual impact of your community initiative on key business objectives such as churn rates and support costs.
Mighty Networks
Mighty Networks offers all the needed community activity and insight analytics such as member count, activity metrics, and visitor metrics, but does not provide any business impact analytics. This is mainly due to the fact that Mighty Networks does not focus on SaaS and software companies, or customer communities as a whole.
Turf
Turf offers all the needed activity and insight analytics such as member count, page views, visitor metrics, the most active days and timeframes in the community, and popular community posts, in addition to the business impact analytics that you need to effectively understand the ROI and impact of your customer community initiative on key business objectives. Through your Turf analytics dashboard, you get direct insight into how many support cases were deflected through the community, how many support costs were saved, the customer churn rate of customers who were a community member, the customer lifetime value of customer who are a community member, and the total added customer lifetime value through the community (comparing the CLV of customers that are a community member VS the CLV of customers that are not a community member). This allows you to easily calculate the ROI of your customer community initiative and see what impact it is having on your key business objectives.
Customization of the community environment
Branding your customer community environment is key in making your community a part of your existing ecosystem. The ability to customize the structure, categories, and logos will help with increasing the ease of use for your specific user base, will make the member onboarding process as frictionless as possible, and will further attach the value that your users are getting from the community, to your brand.
Discourse
Discourse stands out through its customization capabilities. As mentioned before, Discourse is the only community software that is truly open source. This means that you can fully customize and build on top of the out-of-the-box solution of Discourse. You will have a canvas where you can completely change and customize every detail to your needs. Note that to be able to do this you will need developer capacity, which makes it a bit more high barrier. This also means that it brings a lot of additional costs on top of the subscription fee that you're paying for the out-of-the-box solution.
Mighty Networks
Mighty Networks allows you to fully brand your community environment with your own logo, adjust the colors of the header and buttons, customize the categorization of your community environment by adding spaces and feeds, and add custom images to your spaces icons. You can also add your own custom domain to host your community environment on.
Turf
Turf allows you to fully customize your customer community environment through custom categorization with tabs and channels, the ability to create private channels, your own logo’s, the ability to edit the structure of the side menu in your community, the ability to create custom badges, and the ability to add custom image banners to every page in your customer community environment so you are completely in charge of the look and feel of your community. Your customer community environment will also be hosted on your own custom domain.
Pricing
Nobody wants to invest too much cash upfront when the outcome of the initiative is not yet set in stone. Then how much should such a customer community platform cost? It should vary based on your company and user base size and should be directly attached to the ROI that you are getting from the initiative.
Discourse
Discourse has a transparent pricing module with three different subscription plans. They offer a 14-day free trial for all the subscription plans. The cheapest plan starts at 50 USD per month and allows up to 100 community members, 50k monthly page views, and 10GB storage of community data. It does not give you access to customize the environment, add your own domain, or have the ability to have non-members view it. Their 'Standard' plan does give you access to these 3 functionalities, allows for unlimited members, 100k monthly page views, and 20 GB storage of community data. Their highest subscription plan is the 'Business' plan which allows for unlimited members, 500k monthly page views, and 100GB storage of community data. Discourse can also create custom plans for enterprises that need more storage, page views, and other custom integrations or functionalities. The structure of their custom plan pricing is not clear and requires you to reach out to their sales team.
Mighty Networks
Mighty Networks offers a 14-day free trial for their Mighty Networks Community plan ($39/month) and their Mighty Networks Business plan ($119/month). When signing up for the free trial, no credit card is required. Their third plan, the Mighty Networks Mighty Pro plan can only be purchased by talking to the sales team and works with custom pricing. The Mighty Networks Community plan of $39 per month gives you access to all their features, except you can not brand and customize your community environment and its notifications, do not have the courses/academy functionality, can not host resources, do not get access to all the crucial community analytics, can not integrate with Zapier or Google Analytics, do not have access to the API, can not create your own community mobile app, and can store maximum 250gb of content in your community. The Mighty Networks Business plan of $119 per month gives you access to all their features, except you can not brand and customize your community environment and its notifications, do not have access to the API, can not create your own community mobile app, and can store maximum 1tb of content in your community. The Mighty Networks Mighty Pro plan is a plan with customized pricing and gives you access to all their features and modules. To start on this plan, you need to get in touch with their team.
Turf
Turf offers 3 different subscription plans and each plan has a free trial of 14 days. The Turf subscription plans are differentiated almost solely based on the number of admin/moderator seats. After signing up, you can directly launch your customer community environment, without talking to the team. The 14-day free trial allows you to get familiar with the platform, start structuring your community, and invite your super users to get feedback on the experience, before committing to the platform. The Turf Starter plan of $95 per month gives you access to all their features, except the custom SSO functionality, custom domain functionality, and custom integrations that you might be in need of. Note that you do get access to a suite of standard integrations that have already been built. The plan allows you to build your customer community environment with 1 admin and moderator seat and allows for up to 250 community members. The Turf Premium plan of $195 per month gives you access to the same features as the Starter plan, but has unlimited members and allows you to build your customer community environment with 2 admin and moderator seats. Lastly, the Turf Pro plan of $395 is the same as the Premium plan in that it also allows for unlimited members, but in addition, you get 4 admin and moderator seats, custom domain functionality, and custom SSO. If you need more moderator seats, or other custom integrations, Turf also works with a custom plan where you can schedule a call with their team to communicate your needs and they can offer you a custom pricing.
Conclusion
Mighty Networks is focused on and delivers the best community platform for creators and brands trying to build a ‘community of practice’, and therefore lacks crucial features for SaaS and software companies trying to build a customer community environment.
That leaves us with Discourse and Turf. Discourse is focused on enterprises in general (not specifically software or SaaS companies and not even specifically the use case of 'customer community') and because of their pricing, completely excludes other software companies that are not on an enterprise level. Besides their pricing, Discourse is also missing some key features that would allow software companies to maximize user activity in the community and the ability to measure the business impact of their customer community initiative. Even for enterprise software companies looking for a customer community platform, Turf would be a better option based on this review.
