Facebook groups used to be the go-to option for building online communities, but times have changed. While it's true that the platform has an impressive user base, many of those users are no longer as engaged as they used to be in the golden times of Facebook.
Also, there is a growing concern over Facebook's privacy issues and uncertain algorithm changes. Because of that people have started losing trust in the platform. After data scandals such as Cambridge Analytica community owners are now inclined to completely owning the data and privacy guidelines.
However, some small business owners stick to Facebook groups as the groups completely free and they're afraid that building a custom community space might cost them a lot. But that doesn't have to be the case!
Keep reading to discover the top free and paid alternatives to Facebook groups with better engagement, greater flexibility and more advanced features.
Facebook groups are community spaces for Facebook users who gather there based on shared interests and goals. They are used to communicate, share content and collaborate.
Facebook groups can be public, private or hidden (so that only members can see them, they don't appear in search results).
Their main feature are posts, where group members can post content, photos, and links and other users can add comments and participate in discussions.
In 2022, Facebook introduced community chats for group members, allowing them to chat in real time using Facebook Messenger. However, this feature didn't become very popular, especially for large groups as there is no way to filter messages, making it easy to get lost in a flood of constant chatter.
Although at first, it might seem that building a community on Facebook might be a good starting point as your audiences are already available there, you need to consider that Facebook can be very distracting.
While your community members are having discussions and building connections with your brand, Facebook would be consistently sending notifications from friends, showing ads, and delivering suggestions for similar Groups.
Also, you have not as much control over your community as you'd have with a dedicated community platform and that's why brands are increasingly moving to other platforms.
Here is an overview of Pros and Cons of using Facebook Groups:
It is continuously becoming difficult to reach the target audience via Facebook. The flagship newsfeed of Facebook has become more and more cluttered with distractions, fake news, and clickbaity articles.
Also, the algorithm behind this newsfeed changes quite frequently, thereby affecting the visibility of the content pushed by different brands. This essentially means that the messages sent to the Group might not come across to the right audience at the right time.
A dedicated community platform delivers several ways to reach members, right from activity-specific contextual notifications and manual messaging to emails and powerful integration with third-party communication tools.
If one of the goals of your community is to raise awareness of your business, build brand leadership, acquire new users by getting in front of as many people as possible, Facebook Groups will not be useful. Although you can use their advertising solution to increase the visibility of your company, the very nature of the "closed space" for Facebook Groups restricts the community from organic growth.
Since Facebook Groups are completely confined to the platform and search engines are not allowed to crawl the content posted in your community, there is no way for the search engine bots to discover content, index them, and send traffic organically. Also, note that none of the third-party sites (e.g., a blog or news portal) will be able to link to any valuable content posted in the Group.
For this type of use case, Facebook Groups disregard the very essence of the web and knowledge discovery.
Facebook Groups can be set up swiftly, but they are equally rigid when it comes to customizing it based on your business or brand. For example, you cannot keep the group under your custom domain (e.g., community.domain.com). Also, you are not allowed to change the look and feel, color combinations to better reflect your brand guidelines. Apart from this, it is not possible to merge the group in your site's header and footer for seamless navigation.
Above all, you as a community owner should be able to organize and showcase the specific elements of the community exactly based on your requirements and user needs. It is not possible to keep one generic group template and use the same to represent millions of communities.
It is imperative for any community manager to build small subcommunities inside the community to bring people with a shared passion closer and build another channel for member and knowledge discovery. For example, you might want to bring the super users of your product or service together for ideation on a certain topic. This is absolutely not possible with Facebook Groups.
On Facebook, all of the control lies with Facebook alone: both the community owner and the members are subject go in the direction that Facebook deems appropriate.
When you don't get the ownership of the platform, you will always remain dependent on the platform owner.
Facebook doesn't give you ownership of the members' data. All you receive is an aggregated report which showcases new members, top content, etc. in a pre-defined format. So, you cannot run your own analytics on member behavior, user-generated content, etc.
The data lives in a silo. For instance, you can neither use Google Analytics to understand how community visitors are interacting with the community nor use advanced analytics solutions such as Amplitude to measure key metrics (e.g., retention, lifecycle, etc.) at a granular level.
This also means that you cannot take the audience data and push them to your newsletter list or communication solutions such as MailChimp, HubSpot, and Intercom.
To learn more about different types of member communities and options available, check out our guide to customer engagement platforms.
Disclaimer: This post contains information that was publicly available as of October 2024. We encourage readers to also conduct their own research to determine which platform best fits their needs.
The landscape of online community platforms is changing fast, offering a variety of alternatives to Facebook Groups. Here we explore the key platforms that can serve as effective substitutes for your group chats and community spaces.
Bettermode is a no-code website builder focused on creating community spaces tailored to your needs. It comes with plenty of ready-to-use templates that can be fully customized and branded. Its other features include built-in CMS, advanced analytics, moderation tools and integrations with the most popular business tools.
One of our most popular templates is a Facebook-like template called Basebook, which allows you to create your own social network that looks similar to Facebook’s familiar interface.
You can also create groups and communities on Basebook where people can post, comment, react and share user-generated content, just like in Facebook groups.
The only difference compared to Facebook groups is that you have data ownership and full control over your community. Also, you can add your custom branding and get more advanced moderation and analytics features.
Summary of key features:
Forget the days of cobbling together disjointed tools: Bettermode is the customizable digital hub for your thriving online community. Right out of the gate, Bettermode empowers members to actively engage through discussions, polls, Q&As, and content sharing. And gives your community managers robust moderation capabilities, branding tools, customization options, and effortless integrations.
And if you're looking to expand capabilities Bettermode plays nice with your other tools like Google Analytics, Salesforce, and HubSpot. Bettermode also helps you engage international and multilingual audiences with support for multiple languages.
Essentially, Bettermode brings all the essential features into one intuitive, integrated powerhouse.
Bettermode has three plans, and each one starts with a 14-day trial (no credit card required):
👉 You can take a quick look at a G2 rating here
Bettermode now includes Toggy, three AI agents that set up the community, keep conversations moving and review every post. Toggy Build reads your website and content and sets up a working community on your domain, and it's free while Build is in early access. Toggy plans start at $750 a month. See Toggy build one for your brand →
Famed more for team collaboration initially, Slack has evolved over time hosting numerous small groups connected by shared interests or professional fields, and it's more commonly used within B2B environments.
Summary of key features:
Slack is an instant-messaging platform that supports real-time text-based conversations within private groups, public channels, and direct messages.
Slack's key feature is its capacity to combine a range of external applications, which allows code creation, project management, chat functions, data protection, and a collaborative work platform across devices and regions. Click here to learn more on how to use Slack for community building and engagement.
However, without proper organization, channels may become cluttered, leading to information overload.
There are four plans:
Circle is another promising platform specifically designed for creators looking to build thriving communities. And it allows community builders to create spaces, engage with customers, monetize through memberships, and manage integrations.
Summary of key features:
It integrates seamlessly with popular services like Zapier, giving users the flexibility to extend functionalities according to their needs.
There are four packages (billed annually):
Professional, Business and Scale come with a 14-day free trial.
Forj offers a comprehensive set of tools to manage and grow an engaged member base while providing valuable insights and performance metrics to help optimize efforts. It is geared towards larger organizations and may prove costly for small businesses.
Summary of key features:
Forj's vision is to engage members to learn in modern communities of practice by combining members' expertise to facilitate networking, generate conversations and generate learning content.
All prices are custom-made, you can request a demo to get a custom quote.
Reddit is one of the most popular online forum websites. The vast majority of people use it for chatting, news, or entertainment purposes, and business professionals use it as an advertising platform.
Summary of key features:
Reddit is a simple user-friendly tool allowing you to create communities focused on different topics and promote open discussion. Its biggest benefit is the ability to build traffic easily and rank your pages on search engines. Many professionals use it to stay up to date with what's going on in their industry.
Free for users and free for businesses to create a subreddit. Ads are paid for and you have to contact sales for prices.
Discourse is an online forum discussion platform. It's 100% open source and can be used as a mailing list, discussion forum, chat room and more.
Summary of key features:
Discourse is an open-source community management and moderation tool. Businesses have the ability to define groups and have private categories so that members can have discussions around topics.
Flarum is a simple discussion platform that is free and easy to use, with all the features required to run a community. It is also customizable.
Summary of key features:
The platform stands out for its advanced customization options, themes and custom CSS. It also has hundreds of integrations allowing you to connect with community members both on public and private channels.
Open source and free to access
Vanilla Forums is a cloud-based open-source community forum platform that gives you the ability to create interactive online forums.
Summary of key features:
It includes good engagement management, user-generated content, and help desk management with social media
Open source and free. The pricing for the cloud-hosted plan is not available on the website.
InSided (now known as Gainsight Digital Hub) is a purpose-built all in one, self-service destination to engage and retain customers.
Summary of key features:
Gainsight Digital Hub offers no-code widget builders, and an intuitive UI and powerful integrations.
There are three plans for community spaces, but the pricing is not specified:
Khoros communities is a brand community platform that allows businesses to host and manage peer-to-peer spaces for customers to find answers, and share experiences. Organizations can host and manage forums, blogs, contests and quizzes.
Summary of key features:
Features include content moderation, customizable branding, reports, analytics, gamification, and content syndication.
Pricing: A demo can be booked, but no pricing available
Heartbeat is a home for online communities. It allows users to create a space for communities to chat, create threads, and use voice and video. It works for online schools, paid communities, innovation hubs, support groups etc.
Summary of key features:
Heartbeat allows you to host chats, threads, documents, and live events. You can also direct message community members if personal one-to-one support or communication is needed. You can link up a Zoom account and provide a Zoom link to host an event and connect to an external calendar like Google or Outlook.
Discord is designed to connect users with communities over voice, video and text chat via Discord servers. It is a gaming and game industry oriented app for growing communities around video games. However, the app may be used for business communications of other kinds.
Summary of key features:
Discord's key features are project management, communication, file sharing and management.
The basic version is free, but you can unlock features like larger file uploads with Discord Nitro whose price may vary depending on your region.
Here's a quick overview of the best Facebook group alternatives, their features and pricing to help you choose the right solution for you.
As you've already seen, Facebook groups have some limitations that are making it harder to build and manage a thriving community online. Here are four good reasons to opt for a community-building platform like Bettermode instead:
With Bettermode community website templates, you can create your own online community in a few seconds. Our templates are highly customizable and allow you to brand your personal community platform in a way you can't do with Facebook groups.
Everything is based on the drag-and-drop principle and you can add any functionalities that you want like forum, messaging, etc. You can add your branding and colors, your logo, use a custom font, and many more things.
Here are some of the most popular templates:
What's more, you can even create your own social media platform that looks like Facebook, using our Basebook template Facebook clone.
As your community grows, moderation becomes more important to keep the community healthy and engaged and avoid spam and hate speech. Moderating Facebook groups or forums can be time-consuming and overwhelming, but Bettermode offers you advanced moderation features to help automate the process.
Here are some of them:
Check out our five-step framework for moderating a community that will save you a lot of time and help avoid potential problems.
Toggy Moderate reviews every post and comment against baseline safety rules and your own guidelines, reading the thread around it. Each call comes with reasoning your team can read, and one click overturns it. Watch it review your real posts in simulation mode →
If you want to improve your community, you should first be aware of its current performance. That's why it's a good option to choose an all-in-one platform like Bettermode that has built-in analytics tools.
You can track metrics like member enrollment, engagement rates, content popularity, churn risk, ROI and many others.
What's more, Bettermode also integrates with Google Analytics providing you with even more details on user behavior.
Unlike Facebook groups that can't be connected to other tools, community platform solutions come up with many integrations allowing you to standardize your communication across all channels and touchpoints.
Bettermode integrates with messaging platforms like Slack, CRM platforms like Zendesk, email marketing tools like Mailchimp and many, many more tools. You can add dozens of integrations through Zapier, with only a few clicks.
Many people are stuck with Facebook groups because they believe other options are either expensive or complicated to figure out. But that doesn't have to be the case.
Bettermode can be an excellent alternative to Facebook groups, as it offers more customization and flexibility and more control over your community. It allows you to build your own branded website within minutes.
Apart from communities and customer portals, you can also use it to create knowledge bases, forums and many other things for your website. Just choose a template and customize it according to your needs, without any coding.
Book a demo and see why so many businesses are switching to Bettermode.
This article was originally published on August 13th, 2019, and was updated on October 18th, 2024.
Today there are many community-building tools and platforms that are quickly replacing Facebook. To name just a few: community portals like Bettermode, chat tools like Discord or workplace communication tool like Slack.
Yes, there are plenty of simple free community platforms. Bettermode, a paid platform with a 14-day trial, is one of the best Facebook group alternatives as it offers more customization and more advanced community features in general.
Yes, people are still using Facebook groups but not as much as they used to. Facebook users are less active and engaged and they're increasingly switching to other platforms and social networks.
Some of the things that people complain about the most are distractive interface, lack of customization, difficulties in organizing and moderating content and concerns on user data and privacy.