Group coaching communities are growing in popularity, both for creators and for members. They’re a great way to gather people around a niche, foster new relationships, and inspire creative problem-solving.
For creators, building a community is a unique side hustle that has a large scope for scaling, it’s flexible and can help establish your authority within a particular domain. Even more so if you organise your community around a course or courses.
Unsurprisingly, with the growth and appeal of these online communities, a number of platforms have sprung up to cater to the demand. If you’re a budding coach looking to spread your knowledge, below are the best platforms you can use to build your business.
1. Skool
Launched in 2019 by Sam Ovens, who had previously founded Consulting.com. It remained in beta until 2022, but today hosts many courses across wide-ranging domains like health, tech, music, money, and more.
Your Skool group will have four main features: the community, classroom, calendar, and gamification. Members can earn points and compete on leaderboards for added motivation and participation.
You can also set different access levels for your courses, offering flexibility in content delivery. Then there’s the Skool games, a voluntary 30-day intensive challenge designed to help you get your business running quickly.
Skool doesn’t offer video hosting so you’ll need to rely on other services like Youtube or Vimeo. There’s also no native testing or quiz function, so again you’ll need to turn to another service such as Typeform.
After a 14-day free trial, there’s a single type of account that comes with a monthly $99 fee, and a 2.9% transaction fee on your sales, this lets you create unlimited courses and host unlimited members.
2. MightyNetworks
Mighty Networks is a comprehensive community platform with a wide selection of tools and features to help you create and maximise your business.
You have a lot of control over the look and feel of your community, making it easy to tailor and align your community’s appearance with your brand. To begin, you can use the Mighty Co-Host AI to generate an initial landing page and community based on a quick pitch.
There’s a no-code design interface where you can add and arrange the features you want to include within containers called Spaces—features include news feeds, group chat, courses, events, or select members.
You can then sell different levels of access to the different Spaces, giving you plenty of options for memberships and pricing tiers. You can also create a branded app to market your community over mobile.
Pricing starts at $41 per month for a community with events, $99 per month to add courses, and a Business ($179) and Path-to-Pro plan ($360) with white labelling and other more advanced features.
3. Circle.so
Circle is a great all-around community platform, widely recognised for its intuitive interface which makes it easy to set up your community and start selling memberships and courses.
You organise your Circle community around Spaces and Space Groups. Spaces are the building blocks, they come in 6 types: posts, events, chats, courses, members, and images. These can then be grouped, and set to Open, Private, or Secret.
Circle also has AI agents that can help you run your business by responding to members’ questions, with conversations intelligently organised in an AI Inbox. There are also a bunch of integrations and workflows that further increase the flexibility and functionality of your platform.
Plans start at $89 per month, which includes 2% transaction fees, and comes with 20 Spaces. The Business plan ($199 per month) lowers the transaction fee to 1% while increasing the number of Spaces to 30. Enterprise ($360 per month) has 0.5% transaction fees and 100 Spaces.
4. Kajabi
For creators, Kajabi has it all. With tools to help you build a website, release a course, provide coaching, run a newsletter, launch a podcast, and maintain memberships within a community.
It essentially helps centralise your business requirements, making it less likely you need to subscribe or buy extra platforms and apps.
The large feature set could make Kajabi complex, but the interface and design are quite intuitive. There’s also Kajabi University, which can help you set up and run your business, with courses on everything from course analytics to finding your niche.
Plans start at $71 per month, which gets you one website, product, and community. The Basic account ($119 per month) increases to 3 products, Growth ($159 per month) ups that to 15 products as well as extra features like custom branding and domain, then the Pro plan ($319) gives you 3 websites and 100 products.
5. HighLevel
HighLevel is an all-in-one marketing and customer relationship management (CRM) platform. It consolidates various tools—such as email marketing, SMS campaigns, sales funnels, and appointment scheduling—into a single interface.
While the focus is on generating leads and staying in touch with customers, HighLevel also has membership and community functions. You can offer unlimited free or paid courses, with unlimited members, and no limit on video uploads.
You have options with course types: Sprint for short courses, Marathon for long courses, Membership for ongoing content, or Custom Product when you need something that doesn’t fit the other categories.
However, HighLevel might not be quite as comprehensive as a course creator as more dedicated platforms like Kajabi or Thinkific. Some also find it has a steep learning curve, so it might take some time to understand and take full advantage of the many features.
There are two pricing options: Starter ($97 per month) contains most of the features you would want as a community manager, with the Unlimited plan ($297 per month) adding API access, unlimited sub-accounts, and a branded desktop app.
6. Thinkific
Thinkific is a platform dedicated to creating and selling courses. It offers a range of tools to facilitate course creation, run a coaching community, and increase student engagement.
There are course templates and an AI outline generator to help you get on your way, and an intuitive drag-and-drop editor makes it easy to design and arrange the course the way you want. You can also create quizzes, offer certificates, and run live lessons and seminars.
There’s also plenty to help you manage your coaching community—sell memberships or package them with courses, let members personalise their profiles, assign moderators, and with a Growth Plan you get community analytics.
The Basic account starts at $36 per month, which includes one community with unlimited courses, 5 digital downloads and 5 coaching sessions, but no paid memberships. The Start account ($74 per month) gives you paid memberships and unlimited downloads and coaching sessions. The Grow plan ($149 per month) gives you 3 communities.
7. Upcoach
Upcoach helps coaches, consultants, and educators manage programs, clients, and content all in one place. You can build courses and manage your coaching community easily, but it really shines with group programs and 1-on-1 coaching.
To keep members engaged and making progress, Upcoach gives you unique tools like habit tracking, task lists, interactive worksheets and action plans, which are difficult to find on other platforms.
However, you are likely going to need other platforms and services to help with other features, as there is no native video hosting and limited tools for marketing your program. There are also limits on the number of clients you can have, so this is a better option for small cohorts and 1-on-1 coaching.
The Starter Plan ($49 per month) grants 3 courses and 15 clients, and has 4% transaction fees. The Pro Plan ($99 per month) has up to 100 clients and 10 courses, and a 2% transaction fee. The Business Plan ($199 per month) allows up to 250 clients and 15 courses, and has a 1% transaction fee.
Building Your Group Coaching Community
Group coaching has flourished online with the development of all these new platforms. Creators, coaches, consultants, and anyone with a valuable skill to pass on, now have a wealth of options to structure and monetise their knowledge.
These platforms have made it easy to build the type of program you want, whether you’re offering a self-paced course, an intensive week-long program, running live sessions or simply trying to foster an active community.
Take the time to find your niche and consider how you want to build your coaching business. That should help you identify which platform is right for you, and from there, it’s time to get stuck in and build it.
I built DIY Genius to help entrepreneurial people find their sweet spot for deep focus and flow states where passion meets purpose and profitability.
I believe the future of education starts with helping people find their "zone of genius" so they can develop their uniquely human ability to create meaning, connection and community (that A.I. can't replicate).
- The 10 Best Pomodoro Timer Apps For Remote Workers - April 11, 2025
- Hacking The Flow Cycle: Brainwaves, Creativity and Flow States - April 11, 2025
- 100 Best iPhone Education Apps For Self-Directed Learning - April 10, 2025
This website uses cookies to improve your web experience.