Geneva vs Heartbeat

Geneva is a group chat app for discovering communities, meeting people, and finding or arranging local events and meetups. It is available on the web and through iOS and Android apps, with a free plan listed at free. Chat rooms support mentions, threaded replies, reactions, GIFs, attachments, polls, and pins. Audio rooms provide drop-in group audio with no stated participant limit; forum rooms support formatted posts and sorting by recency or popularity. Broadcast rooms allow up to 9 people on air and thousands of viewers, while video rooms support up to 16 people. Group tools include member questionnaires, event invitations, a calendar, token-gated rooms, and configurable roles and permissions. Geneva says its service will remain free and that it will not show ads or sell user data. Creating an account requires a phone number rather than an email address. Following its acquisition by Bumble, Geneva said it was temporarily making the service invite-only during a transition. The site links to a Help Center and contact page for assistance.

Heartbeat is a paid platform for running online communities, with Android and iOS apps. Its listed features include private spaces, event hosting, moderation tools and custom domains. Plans vary by community size: Build supports up to 350 members, Grow up to 5,000 and Scale has unlimited members. Build costs $49 a month billed monthly; Grow costs $149 a month billed monthly; Scale costs $849 a month billed monthly. Build includes five automation workflows and one custom landing page. Grow includes unlimited automation workflows and 50 hours of native video hosting. Scale includes 50 custom landing pages, 200 hours of native video hosting and a white-label branded mobile app. Native video hosting is also available as a $19 a month add-on for 50 hours of storage. Integrations include Zapier, Zoom, Outlook Calendar, Google Calendar, Slack, Circle and Peerboard imports. The 14-day trial does not become a continuing free plan: communities are deactivated if they are not upgraded afterward, and inactive communities are automatically deleted after 30 days.