Apache Answer vs Circle
Apache Answer
answer.apache.org
Circle
circle.soSide by side
| Figure | Apache Answer | Circle |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | $89/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | Yes | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | — |
| iOS | — | Yes |
| Android | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 1 | 4 |
| Spec score · Customer Community Software | 9.1 (#1) | 8.9 (#3) |
| Integrations | Official plugins connect services including Google, DingTalk, Slack, WeCom, Redis, Algolia, Elasticsearch, Meilisearch, S3, and Tencent COS. | Circle lists integrations including Airtable, Google Sheets, Memberstack, WordPress, Memberful, Typeform, and Slack through native connections, embeds, snippets, or Zapier. |
| Support | Support is offered through community discussions, documentation, issues, mailing lists, and Discord, with no guarantee of an instant Discord response. | The pricing page lists standard support for Professional and Business, priority support for Scale, and premium support for Circle Plus. |
| What it does | Apache Answer is software for running community forums, help centers, or knowledge-management Q&A sites. | Circle brings community, content, events, courses, payments, email, and website tools together on one platform. |
Plans
Circle
- Professional$89 a month
- Business$199 a month
- Scale$419 a month
- Circle PlusPriced on request
In their own words
Apache Answer
Apache Answer is a free, open-source Q&A platform for community forums, help centers, and knowledge management. Members can ask and answer questions, comment, vote, and earn reputation and badges. Tags, advanced search filters, and live suggestions help organize discussions and find relevant questions. Administrators can manage admin, moderator, and user roles, add users in bulk, and inspect edits in revision history. Themes and layouts can be customized, and plugins can add capabilities such as Google or generic OAuth2 login, Slack notifications, Redis caching, Algolia or Elasticsearch search, and S3 storage. Deployment options include Docker Compose, Docker, binaries, and aaPanel. The project lists binaries for Darwin ARM64, Linux AMD64 and ARM64, and Windows AMD64, and supports MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQLite. Documentation describes controls for registration, login methods, allowed email domains, and member access to content. Apache Answer is licensed under Apache License, Version 2.0. Its security guarantee covers official repository plugins only, not third-party plugins.
Circle
Circle brings community, content, events, courses, payments, email and website tools into one platform. Its community features include discussions, chat, member profiles and directories, gamification and analytics. Courses can be self-paced, structured or scheduled, with sections, lessons and quizzes. Events, live streams and live rooms include Q&A, attendee participation and session recordings. Circle lists integrations such as Airtable, Google Sheets, Memberstack, WordPress, Memberful, Typeform and Slack through native connections, embeds, snippets or Zapier. It offers Admin and Headless Member APIs, with request limits varying by plan. Access includes Android, iOS, Mac, Windows and web; desktop apps are available to communities on all plans. Professional costs $89 a month with annual billing, Business costs $199 a month with annual billing, and Scale costs $419 a month with annual billing. A 14-day trial is listed, but there is no free plan. The pricing comparison lists live-stream attendee caps of 100, 200 and 500 for Professional, Business and Scale, respectively.