Circle vs Open Social

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.

Open Social is a community collaboration platform for organizations connecting and working across their communities. Its suite has six products: Community Management System, Cloud Platform, Gaia AI, Engagement Studio, Connection Hub and Lumina Insights. The Community Management System supports custom roles, permissions and organizational arrangements, including complex, multi-layered structures. Gaia AI assists with workflows, content moderation and advanced search. Connection Hub connects with external systems such as Salesforce and Snowflake, and supports GraphQL, webhooks, Kafka and no-code Zapier connections. An optional Document Collaboration Suite enables real-time co-editing of documents, spreadsheets, presentations and drawings in formats including docx, xlsx, pptx, odf and visio. A branded native app for iOS and Android is also available as an add-on, with push notifications. The core Community Management System is free in the Drupal community; its SaaS subscription adds hosting, other products and professional services. SaaS customers can receive enterprise services, and an on-premise hosting option is described for organizations with infrastructure requirements. The maker identifies Amsterdam as its base and says it is ISO 27001 certified.