Sculpting Online Ecosystems: Community Website Builders Demystified
Building an online community from scratch and maintaining it isn't easy. The process can require a lot of time, effort, and even hiring a developer.
Fortunately, there's an alternative: using a community website builder.
A community website builder is a great tool for brands that want to build their own standalone community without any coding knowledge.
They offer many features, including discussion boards, private messaging, and integrations. These make it possible for communities to host conversations, build customer relationships, and grow their audience all in one place.
Additionally, a community website builder comes with customizations that enable brands to design the look and feel of their community website in a few clicks.
At the same time, it's difficult to know which website builder is right for your community. Studies show that 79% of customers search for another site if the one they visit doesn't live up to expectations, so you don't want to choose the wrong one.
After reading this guide, you'll be able to choose the right community website builder with all the features and customization options you need to build and maintain a thriving community.
Let's get started.
The benefits of a community website builder
Before we discuss the benefits of using a website builder to create a branded community, check out this article to learn about online communities, their types, and how they can help your company.
A community website builder is a powerhouse for any brand that wants to build its own website. Here's why:
Ease of use
A good community website removes unnecessary steps, so companies can quickly create a clean, professional-looking online community.
For example, you can add elements and interactive community features to your website in just a few clicks. These can include a forum, knowledge base, FAQ page, events page, document page, job board, or other web pages — without writing a single line of code.
At the same time, a community site builder makes coding accessible if you want to build custom functionalities.
Good community website builders also include great beginner guides and extensive documentation, making the tool easy to understand and implement.
Customization options
Delivering a customized experience your community members will love is essential. Studies show that 59% of global consumers crave a beautiful website design over simplicity. And a community website builder with a long list of customizations makes this possible.
Here's some of the typical elements you can customize using a website community builder:
- Layout: Publish your community website in different layouts. This can range from changing the main navigation sidebar, header, content area, top bar, and more.
- Colors and typography: When it comes to typography and colors, most community website builders support various options enabling you to create a branded community space. These can range from contemporary sans-serif fonts to bold colors — allowing you to choose what works best for your brand.
- Explore page: Design and arrange a collection of your posts and other components of your community and display them on a landing page. This will allow users to discover parts of your community they have missed.
- Domain: Have the ability to move your community website to a custom domain or subdomain that has your company's branded name.
- Images: Upload your own images throughout your community website. Additionally, you can crop, delete, duplicate, and resize them.
- Profile fields: Add or remove profile fields that make sense to your audience, like location, birthday, bio, skill level, phone number, job title, and more. This helps your members better understand and connect with one another.
Increased engagement and interaction
Data shows that only 25% of members actively engage with their online community. At the same time, the most active members add 12 times more value than average members. This means it's worthwhile for brands to invest in a community website builder since they offer the tools to boost user engagement and interaction.
For example, a community website builder makes it possible for users to interact with one another by facilitating and creating discussions, content organization, and member connections. At the same time, it encourages engagement by offering features like reactions, comments, private messaging, group chats, and much more.
Additionally, an explore page allows them to engage with different types of personalized content you want to promote, like popular or related posts they usually interact with. Indeed, 99% of marketing professionals said personalization helps advance customer relationships.
Likewise, the help of a search bar allows members to use keywords to find the information they're looking for. This boosts engagement since customers can trust your brand as the go-to source for finding the information they need.
If you want to boost engagement on your existing website, check out this community engagement plan where we also touch upon some member retention strategies.
Improved organization and management
Community website builders have several tools that simplify and automate community management activities — allowing you to support and manage your members effectively. An invaluable feature, since 16% of communities have no full-time community management staff and 33% only have one full-time team member in charge of community moderation.
A community website builder allows managers to run their community on a tight ship. This is done by using moderation tools like a keyword blocklist, profanity filter, moderation panel, and moderation rules — making your community a safe place for members to thrive.
Likewise, using a community builder's features that keep your online community well organized makes it easy for members to discover topics, comment on posts, view content, submit information, and contact other members of the community.
A good website builder will also offer analytics so managers can monitor their community's performance. These insights help businesses make data-informed decisions about how to continue managing and organizing their community in the future.
If you want to learn more about community content curation and moderation, make sure to check our five-step framework for moderating a community.
Also, if you're a new community manager who feels a bit lost or overwhelmed, you can join dedicated communities for community managers and connect with like-minded individuals through a peer-to-peer networking platform.
How to choose the right community website builder
There are many community website builders available. To narrow down your search, consider features, user-friendliness, integrations, budget, and costs. Below, we break each of these down into detail.
Features to consider
Data shows that for a customer to feel satisfied with their experience viewing content it should:
- Display well (65%)
- Hold attention (64%)
- Appeals to customers' design sensibilities (54%)
- Personalizes their interests (49%)
- Works across multiple devices (45%)
This means your community website builder needs to have many features to meet these demands and ensure people have a good experience.
Here's some of the features to keep in mind:
- Customization: The platform must empower you to build a brand community with unique layouts and design options. Your community website should be uniquely yours so make sure to choose a tool that allows you to build a white-label community platform if that's important to you.
- Activity feed: Display the newest and most relevant information on your users' feed. This could be a post, article, video, or any other piece of content.
- Moderation: Community moderation tools allow moderators to manage comments and discussions by editing and removing content. Additionally, automatically flag language deemed inappropriate or that contains profanity.
- Analytics: Choose a tool with a comprehensive analytics dashboard so you can easily track and analyze user behavior and content performance. Advanced analytics allows you to identify which posts perform the best, what users are the most active, what content drives the most engagement, and more.
- Gamification: Motivate and incentivize users to engage in your online community by using community gamification tools. This can be done by assigning community badges to members based on their activity level and expertise.
- Sub-group creation: Run multiple sub-groups within your community so users have a space to communicate with each other about different topics.
- Embeddability: Easily embed your entire community or specific parts into your phone app or product.
- Translations: Provide users with the ability to translate content into different languages.
- Advanced search: Help users find the content they're searching for by allowing them to narrow down searches with a granular filter.
- Pre-built templates: Get a head start on the development and design of your community by using templates. Likewise, customize them easily so they match your brand.
- Paid membership: If you want to create a private community choose a website builder that enables you to make elements or your entire online community accessible to only paid members.
- SEO features: If you want to promote your platform on search engines, make sure to choose a community forum software with built-in SEO tools. You can learn more about SEO for online community forums here.
User-friendliness
If your online community is difficult to use, members will leave or become inactive. Indeed, data shows that only 6.1% of SaaS prospects find software easy to use. A community website builder solves this issue, since it can build a community that's easy for members to participate in.
For starters, it can build a website that's easy to use by making sure it has clear navigation. It can also offer helpful information quickly so users don't get lost or frustrated by a lack of guidance or search filters.
These features and others encourage users to explore, engage with, and promote your community, increasing the chances of them becoming loyal members.
Integration with other tools
Choosing a community website builder that integrates with other tools is invaluable when building an online community. It will allow you to:
- Access multiple tools easily
- Add extra functionality to your community
- Eliminate the need to switch between platforms
Moreover, integrating your online community with third-party apps like Google Analytics or the email marketing platform MailChimp provides a holistic view of engagement within your online community. This is because the integrations share data from one system to the next.
Ultimately, integrations allow you to experience an enhanced workflow — while strengthening your community's online presence.
Choose a website builder that already seamlessly integrates with other tools you're using or one that has community integration APIs so you can add your custom integrations.
Budget and cost considerations
When choosing the best website builder, it must fit your budget while having the features you need to build your community. Comparing features and pricing plans is key when searching for a solution, whether you own a membership website, SaaS company, online store, sell online courses, or have a community of entrepreneurs who are searching for exclusive content.
It's important to note that while some free website builders offer a drag-and-drop feature, customer support, membership site, community monetization tools, and even SEO capabilities, they have limitations in terms of functionality, with free plans having limited features.
Spending the time to explore both premium plans can help you strike a balance between features and cost so you get the most value for your money (and credit card).
Five popular community website builders
Here's a list of the five most popular community website builders for you to choose from.
Bettermode
Bettermode is a complete solution for creating and maintaining stunning community-based websites. Its easy-to-use interface allows for a wide range of customization options — and lets brands create a feature-rich community website without any coding knowledge.
Additionally, it offers secure hosting, reliable support, custom SSL, and detailed documentation. The platform also integrates with third-party apps like Intercom, Slack, Zapier, and more.
Overall, Bettermode is a great choice for anyone looking to build an engaging online community.
Let's take a look at a few more of Bettermode's features in detail.
Community templates
Bettermode has a comprehensive library of community platform templates for different purposes and industries. Whether you want to create an interactive community for your customers or foster collaboration by creating an employee community platform, we've got you covered.
Here are some options to choose from:
- Community hub
- Customer community and resource hub
- Collaboration community template for employees
- Help center and a community hub
- Community engagement and learning hub
- Developer community
Let's see how you can create a brand community using our community hub templates.
- First, sign up and create a free account.
- Then, open the template library and select the template you like. Of course, you can preview each template to see what it looks like.
- For this purpose, we've chosen the BetterHub template. Click on Use template and you're half-way done.
- Click on your profile picture and choose Administration and you'll be redirected to the Bettermode drag-and-drop editor.
- Tap on Collection and Spaces and simply add the elements you want to have on your community portal. There are a lot of pre-built elements to choose from, including:
- Announcements
- Discussions
- Q&A
- Events
- Job postings
- Knowledge base
- Community guidelines
Or, you can build your own community space from scratch. All the elements you add are highly customizable and can be in your brand colors, as you'll see in a second.
But what if we told you there's something even more user-friendly than the standard drag-and-drop editor?
To simplify the process of layout designing, we've added section blocks that enable you to arrange content on your community page much faster and easier with real-time preview.
The new editor is very responsive and intuitive, making creating complex layouts with many elements a breeze.
Customization
Bettermode provides all the necessary customization features to build a community website that stands out from your competitors. This includes different fonts and typography, layout, or adding images of your choice.
When you're done with creating a layout for your community, select Appearance from the left side menu.
- You can remove the Bettermode logo and add your own logo and branding to create a white-label community platform.
- Then, choose a theme using our wide color palette. All themes come in a dark mode, too, if your community prefers that.
3. All themes come in a dark mode too if that's what your community prefers.
- You can also choose your favorite font from the various fonts that Bettermode offers.
- Customize the final details like the size and style of the buttons, icons and avatars, and you're all set!
Analytics
Bettermode's user behavior analytics for communities provide users with comprehensive insights about their community website. It allows you to track over 30 metrics, including:
- New members
- Popular days of the week
- Popular hours of the week
- Active members
- Total posts viewed by a member
- Page views
- Activity by role
Apps and integrations
Connect your community with apps you already use and seamlessly merge workflows. You can even build custom apps for your community to add new functionalities on top of the Bettermode Platform.
Embed tools
Drive engagement and community participation by embedding your community into your website or mobile app in a way that it looks like an integral part of the website.
Multilingual
Bettermode allows its users to host their communities in different or multiple languages. This means you have a variety of languages to choose from as your community default language.
Likewise, members can translate the posts and replies they see in your online community into their preferred language.
Pros
- Plenty of customizable, ready-to-use templates for different industries and purposes
- Super user-friendly and allows non-tech users to create professionally looking websites and community portals without any coding
- A built-in CMS unlike most other website builders, so there is no need for content import or juggling between the tools
Pricing
- Free plan: forever free, up to 10 members and 5 community spaces
- Lite: $19 per month (ideal for small creators and freelancers, it includes unlimited members and custom domain)
- Pro: $49 per month (ideal for startups, small businesses and digital creators who want to scale their products)
- Business: $99 per month (ideal for larger businesses and enterprises)
User rating
Capterra: 4.8
G2: 4.6
Best for
Anyone looking to create engaging community portals and professional websites in a quick and easy way, even those who are completely new to it
Discourse
Discourse is an open-source community website builder. This means it allows you to modify the code so you can customize the look & feel of your website. It's simple and easy to use — while still providing the necessary features for building a functional online community website.
Features
- Widgets for WordPress
- Numerous plugins
- Members-only section
- Community moderation
- Categories, threads, and topics
- Private messaging
Pros
- A mobile-first community builder, with excellent apps for iOS and Android
- AI features to help in moderation and spam blocking
- Excellent customization options
Pricing
- Free: forever free plan but with limited features
- Basic: $50 per month (up to 100 members and 5 staff members)
- Standard: $100 per month (unlimited members, custom domain and themes)
- Business: $300 per month (priority customer support, large data storage)
- Enterprise: custom price available upon request (for large communities, unlimited staff and moderators)
User rating
Capterra: 3
G2: 4
Best for
Developers and tech communities that are passionate about open-source projects
Vanilla Forums
Acquired by Higher Logic in 2021, Vanilla Forums is a popular community website builder. It comes with many features that help companies build loyalty and increase engagement with their members.
For example, its gamification system uses a points-based reward approach. This gives users a reason to participate in their online community, as they'll receive points for answering questions, receiving reactions to their content, and more.
Features
- Advanced gamification
- Points, badges and rewards
- Product feedback section
- Multi-lingual communities
- Real-time notifications
- Social logins
- Integration with social media and e-commerce platforms
Pros
- It comes with built-in marketing tools and community growth strategies so you can use it both to manage and expand your audience
- It can be used for networking and community event management as it connects people who have been on the same event
- It can be used for running contests and competitions thanks to a built-in reward system and gamification
Pricing
There are three pricing plans for businesses of all sizes:
- Essentials: for small businesses and non-profits
- Corporate: for mid to large businesses
- Enterprise: for very big communities
Pricing is available only upon request, but you can see what each plan includes in the picture below.
User rating
Capterra: 4.4
G2: 4.3
Best for
SaaS companies that are looking for continuous user feedback
Flarum
Flarum is a open-source website community builder. Its simple user interface delivers a good user experience. It allows you to build a customizable online community with a clearn design.
It offers various advanced features such as tags, groups, and permissions to customize different communities based on their use.
It also comes with an easy and quick installation process that enables brands to set up their own community forum site in less than 10 minutes.
Its user-generated content platform and knowledge base offer plenty of resources on how to create a forum and similar topics.
Features
- Quick set-up
- Plenty of forum themes
- Tags, groups, permissions
- Over 1000 free extensions
- Translation in multiple languages
Pros
- It has a very active user community and forum where you can get support and tips
- You can create your own extensions and seek crowdfunding from other users
- You can earn a commission by creating and promoting extensions
Pricing
Flarum has a free plan that allows you to create and manage early-stage communities and access many extensions without any cost. However, payment is required for some extensions and additional features but the price is not available on their website as fees may vary.
User rating
The tool currently doesn’t have any ratings and reviews on third-party user review websites.
Best for
Non-profit organizations or early-stage communities that don't need advanced features
Hivebrite
Hivebrite is a community website builder for education alumni, nonprofits, and professional networks. Its job board feature allows your community members to post jobs. At the same time, it offers management and moderation features like instant notifications and the ability to edit and delete all new publications.
Additionally, you can use their mobile community app builder to create a branded mobile app that can be downloaded on Google Play or the AppStore. The app can be customized to include your brand's colors, logo, name, and more.
Features
- Branded mobile apps
- Real-time notifications
- Membership and subscriptions
- Job boards
- Advanced monetization tools (ticketed events, merchandise sales, donations)
Pros
- The platform provides many ways to monetize your community
- It's great for campus students or hybrid teams as it promotes both virtual and real-life collaboration
- It has a special plan for charities and non-profits that allows donations and funding
Pricing
Hivebrite offers three pricing plans, but you have to reach out to them for a custom quote:
- Connect
- Scale
- Enterprise
User rating
Capterra: 4.4
G2: 4.4
Best for
Educational institutions, charities, non-profits
Community website builders: comparison
Conclusion
All in all, community website builders offer a range of benefits that will supercharge your large or small business.
Everything from easy-to-use templates, integrations, domain names, and customizations that'll help bring the look and feel of your community together — forging customer relationships and loyalty over time.
If you want to create a professionally looking interactive community website, we've got you covered. You don't need any experience in design or coding. All you need is to choose one of Bettermode's customizable community templates and create a custom layout and branding in minutes.
Sounds too good to be true? Try it out and see it firsthand.
FAQs
How do I create a community website?
The fastest and easiest way to create a community website is to use an online community platform software. It's a drag-and-drop tool that enables you to create beautiful and interactive community websites without any previous experience or coding skills.
What is a community builder?
Community builders are tools that allow you to build a website quickly and easily, without any previous knowledge. They're either based on the drag-and-drop principle, or they come with templates you can customize according to your needs.
What is the best community website?
Bettermode is one of the best community websites due to its user-friendly design, variety of templates, ease of use and advanced engagement and customization options.
