TL:DR – Many cheaper or free community platforms (like Facebook Groups, Circle, and MightyNetworks) match the core functionality of enterrise platforms, but fall short in searchability, scalability, security, and integration. While enterprise platforms are expensive, they provide essential features like compliance, data security, AI training, and workflow automation that large organizations require. The high cost isn’t just for features—it’s for long-term stability, risk management, and seamless integration into existing business systems.
Are Enterprise Platforms Worth The Cost?
A few years ago, I wrote this:
“Launch a Slack channel, use Zoom to host events, create a shared events calendar on Google, use Mailchimp for emails, and post blog updates on Medium.
Use Tettra for sharing resources and Donut to help build connections between members (both of which integrate well with Slack).
For a few hundred bucks, you can hack together a pretty effective community solution that offers 70% of what the top platforms use (and is easier to use than many).
In practice, there are many reasons why organisations don’t do that.
This includes:
- There is a need to ensure that the community reflects the brand.
- Information privacy and security requirements.
- To maintain control over the community platform and get data out when needed
- Etc…
Over the past five years, platforms like Circle, MightNetworks, and Others have grown to consume much of the platform market.
This raises the question of whether enterprise platforms are worth the cost.
Why spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on an enterprise platform when alternatives offer a comparable feature set?
Can’t You Just Use Facebook Groups?
A good way of thinking about this is via the Elementor community.
Elementor is a community of more than 150k people hosted on a single Facebook group (note: they’re moving to Discord soon).
However, I spent some time browsing through it, and it’s a chaotic mess.
There’s no documentation of resources, it’s too overwhelming for any person to follow, and it’s almost impossible to browse for the information you want.
Worse yet, because the community isn’t well indexed on search engines, it’s only deflecting a fraction of the tickets it would otherwise be deflecting.
If this community was indexed on search, the quantity of search traffic would be 80% to 90% higher. You can see the long-term impact of this in the example below.
More annoyingly, the community search functionality is so poor that even when people visit, it’s almost impossible to find the information they want.
Instead, they must ask a question to find the answer they want.
This, in turn, means the community is filled with questions that have been asked and answered hundreds of times before.
While the community platform doesn’t cost Elementor anything, it’s only saving a fraction of the revenue it otherwise would.
There is also the non-insignificant problem of having no control over your Facebook group. You won’t be able to collect any email addresses of members or even reach most of the people you’re trying to reach. Facebook can increase or decrease the reach of your group without warning (and they can delete it, too!).
This is why most organisations want to be customers paying for a product, not part of the product being sold to advertisers.
(and it can’t be customised/branded as desired)
What About Circle/BetterMode/MightyNetworks?
Circle, MightyNetwoks, and BetterMode offer similar experiences focused on creators, membership groups, and those building smaller communities. In short, they are consumer-oriented platforms (vs. business-oriented).
These experiences are broadly feed-centric and modelled after Facebook. The navigation tab is on the left, and content appears in various formats.
These platforms generally do several things well.
- Media. They’re much better at integrating multimedia than any major enterprise platforms.
- Mobile. They all offer better mobile experiences than major enterprise community platforms.
- Courses. They do a fantastic job at integrating courses into the community experience.
- Modern look and feel. While the design of most enterprise communities hasn’t changed much in decades, these communities offer a more modern community experience.
But does this mean enterprises can’t use them?
Well, some do. These platforms host communities from Butter, Lenovo, and others.
But the vast majority don’t for many of the same reasons as above:
- Poor to non-existent indexing on search engines. This is similar to the problems with Facebook groups; the vast majority of content isn’t indexed on search engines, which significantly reduces the number of people who engage and participate. This, in turn, reduces the value of the community.
- They’re not designed to support communities. Support communities centre around Q&A experiences. While you can ask questions and get answers in a feed-centric expertise, this isn’t the best experience for a support community.
- Limited scalability and no customisations. You will notice that every instance of these communities looks broadly the same. Many organisations need more flexibility than this to satisfy the unique needs of their customers. These platforms also struggle to handle thousands of members trying to engage simultaneously.
- Integration. These platforms often lack advanced integration architecture, access to APIs, extensive connectivity (pre-built connectors), centralised management, advanced analytics, and complex support for business processes.
- Security and compliance. Enterprise organisations have extremely strict security requirements. This rules many of these platforms out of the running on the grounds of security features, data protection, and regulatory compliance.
- Support and service-level agreements. Large organisations typically require dedicated support staff and want strict service-level agreements to protect them. Smaller, consumer-focused organisations are not usually able to supply this. This isn’t compatible with their business model.
This doesn’t mean enterprise organisations can’t use these platforms—they’re often great incubators for testing the community concept and seeing if it gains traction. However, ultimately, most want to move on to an enterprise-centric platform that can support their unique needs.
“What About Salesforce? I hear they’re giving it away for free!”
Yes, they are (or at a heavily discounted rate), but that’s mainly because the platform is no longer worth paying for.
It’s not a competitive offering on the market, and Salesforce has undertaken almost no development work on the platform over the past five years.
Once it became clear it wouldn’t be a big business, Salesforce stopped working on it and it merged into the ‘experience cloud’.
Since the acquisition of Slack, it’s hard to imagine any further updates or progress on the platform.
Consider this slide from our 2024 Buzz Report evaluating the top enterprise community platforms.
Salesforce performs abysmally in almost every category (except data privacy and security).
Most people who use Salesforce as their community platform are stuck with a clunky UI, outdated features, and an inability to do even basic actions without investing vast sums of money in people to do it for them.
I know many organisations that have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars wrangling the Salesforce platform to do what it should offer out of the box.
Being given the Salesforce platform for free is a little like being given an abandoned home for free.
You didn’t pay much to acquire it, but owning it is incredibly expensive.
What Are Organisations Paying For With Enterprise Platforms?
I’ve met people who can’t understand why anyone would pay thousands of dollars for an enterprise community platform when these organisations could easily build a thriving community on a wide range of cheaper, similar platforms.
Many alternative forum-centric platforms offer 70% to 80% of what the major platforms do at 5% to 10% of the cost.
But the catch is that the remaining 20% to 30% is the stuff that enterprises care about and cost far more to serve.
I can’t stress enough that the needs of enterprises are very different from those of solo community builders. That’s concerned about things like:
- Information security concerns. Enterprises want to avoid being fined 4% of their global revenue for failing to take enough care when handling their members’ data.
- Integration. Enterprises need to ensure they can integrate community data with other data to train their upcoming AI tools and keep pace with competitors.
- Dedicated support teams. Enterprises need dedicated account reps and implementation teams to support them whenever a problem arises and help them customise the platform they want when they need it.
- Compliance. Enterprises must strictly comply with global regulations on website accessibility and their internal policies.
- Branding. Enterprises need to offer members a simplified, seamless brand experience where members can use all services using just a single account.
- Workflows. Enterprises want efficient workflows which enable easy escalation of serious issues to the right people at the right time.
- Supplier risk management. Enterprises need all suppliers to abide by their code of conduct and standards, and stable companies are unlikely to go out of business (hence why small vendors are problematic).
- Analytics and intelligence. Getting detailed analytics to understand better their audience needs, behaviours, and potential upsell opportunities and customers at risk of churn.
This isn’t a comprehensive list, but you get the idea.
It’s not overly complex to replicate the basic functionality of any of the significant community platforms. Discussion boards, groups, ideation, and gamification aren’t overly complex. But much of what enterprises need lies beyond that.
And that’s why enterprise platforms often cost as much as houses.
Map The Current State vs. Future State
So, what should you do?
I recommend first building on the economic and emotive argument shared below.
This is an area where consultants can really help.
We’ve been through this many times with many clients and can build the business case quickly.
Another crucial thing to do is to perform a gap analysis looking at the current vs. the desired states.
You can build on the template shared below.
Now you should know the strengths and limitations of inexpensive platforms, the economic and emotive arguments for moving to an enterprise platform, and the clear needs and benefits you need from moving to a platform.
The next step is to review the platform options and select the ones which best matches your needs (p.s our $1400 technical analysis report is now available for free).
Summary
Let’s summarise what we’ve covered.
Cheaper Alternatives Exist To Enterprise Platforms, But Have Limitations – Basic community solutions can be hacked together with tools like Slack, Zoom, and Mailchimp, offering 70% of the functionality of major platforms for a fraction of the cost. However, organizations often avoid this due to branding, security, and control concerns.
Enterprise Platforms Are Expensive, But Are They Worth It? – With alternatives offering similar feature sets at lower costs, the question arises: why should organizations spend hundreds of thousands on enterprise platforms?
Challenges of Free Platforms Like Facebook Groups – While some large communities use Facebook Groups, they suffer from poor search functionality, lack of documentation, and limited control. These issues reduce their effectiveness in deflecting support tickets and engaging users long-term.
Consumer-Oriented Platforms Have Drawbacks – Platforms like Circle, MightyNetworks, and BetterMode offer modern design, strong media integration, and mobile-friendly experiences. However, they lack robust indexing, customization, scalability, and enterprise-level integrations, making them unsuitable for large organizations.
Salesforce’s Community Platform Is Weak – Though Salesforce offers its platform for free or at a discount, it has seen little development and is widely considered outdated, difficult to customize, and expensive to maintain.
Enterprise Platforms Justify Their High Costs – While alternative platforms provide similar core features at a lower cost, the missing 20–30% covers critical enterprise needs like security, compliance, AI training, and workflow efficiency, which justify the high expense.
Enterprise Communities Prioritize Long-Term Viability – Organizations don’t just pay for features; they invest in long-term stability, risk management, and deep integration into their existing tech ecosystems, ensuring a seamless and scalable community experience.
