It tends to happen like this.
In member interviews, one or two members say it would be great to have a specific feature.
For example, letting members live stream themselves within the community.
Your colleagues love it and the feature scores the highest marks in your audience survey.
But you soon discover almost no platform offers it. So you end up ruling out all the top community platforms in favour of either building one yourself or using some obscure platform that does this one feature extremely well.
Both approaches are going to cause major headaches later on and sabotage your community effort.
If you find yourself dismissing most of the top platforms because it’s lacking a single feature, the problem isn’t the platforms but your fixation on the feature. It’s far better to hack together a solution for the feature (i.e. embedding Twitch live streaming within a community) than dismiss most of the top platforms.
None of the top community platforms is going to offer everything you want, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use any of the top platforms.
