Circle vs Scoold
Circle
circle.so
Scoold
scoold.comSide by side
| Figure | Circle | Scoold |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $89/mo | Free |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| iOS | Yes | — |
| Android | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 4 | 3 |
| Spec score · Customer Community Software | 8.9 (#3) | 7.9 (#14) |
| Integrations | Circle lists integrations including Airtable, Google Sheets, Memberstack, WordPress, Memberful, Typeform, and Slack through native connections, embeds, snippets, or Zapier. | The maker lists Slack, Microsoft Teams, Mattermost, Zapier, and n8n integrations; chat integrations are marked Pro. |
| Notable limits | The pricing page lists live stream attendee limits of 100, 200, and 500 for Professional, Business, and Scale, respectively. | The free plan allows at most 10 spaces, 1 admin, and 1 whitelisted identity domain; Pro removes those listed caps. |
| Support | The pricing page lists standard support for Professional and Business, priority support for Scale, and premium support for Circle Plus. | Scoold Pro licenses include free updates and support for 12 months after purchase; the maker offers a 14-day money-back guarantee. |
| What it does | Circle brings community, content, events, courses, payments, email, and website tools together on one platform. | Scoold is a self-hosted Q&A platform, forum, and knowledge base for teams. |
Plans
Circle
- Professional$89 a month
- Business$199 a month
- Scale$419 a month
- Circle PlusPriced on request
In their own words
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.
Scoold
Scoold is a self-hosted Q&A platform, forum, and knowledge base for teams. It can support team knowledge bases, community forums, developer hubs, support centers, Q&A platforms, and issue trackers. Members can ask and answer questions, vote on posts, earn badges and reputation, and review edit history. Full-text search covers indexed content, while posts can include Markdown, media, files, code snippets, and syntax highlighting.
Scoold provides a RESTful JSON API described with an OpenAPI specification. Listed integrations include Slack, Microsoft Teams, Mattermost, Zapier, and n8n; chat integrations are Pro features. Identity options include LDAP, social login, and two-factor authentication, while Pro adds SAML 2.0 SSO, SCIM, and custom authentication. It can be deployed as a JAR or Docker setup on an operating system with Java 21 or higher and a Para backend. The free plan allows up to 10 spaces, 1 admin, and 1 whitelisted identity domain. Scoold Pro is €499, paid once; Pro + Source is €1,999, paid once.