Creators and media companies are increasingly turning to paid membership models to monetize their engaged audiences, and there's no shortage of membership platforms to choose from. Each platform has its own features, capabilities, and costs, and making sense of the differences can be difficult without first using them all. Thankfully, we've tried them all. Here's how the top membership platforms compare at a high level, with a full features breakdown at the end.

Patreon

You could argue Patreon is the original membership platform, as it's been a go-to solution for YouTubers and podcasters for over a decade. Patreon's primary benefits are twofold: (1) The platform is free to set up, making it easy to offer a membership product without up-front charges. And (2), because Patreon has been around for so long, people are familiar with it. Most people are familiar with Patreon, why creators use it, and even how to join.

But Patreon isn't without its limitations, depending on your business goals. For starters, while Patreon is free to set up, they charge an 8% platform fee on all memberships, which means a $1MM annual membership business would cost $80,000 a year just to service. The other significant compromise is that Patreon doesn't offer any white label solutions. By using Patreon, you are asking your audience to visit your Patreon page, not your own website, where other brands are competing for your audience's attention and recognition. Another implication of this arrangement is that Patreon owns your connection with your customers. While it's unlikely to happen to most people, there have been examples of creators getting kicked off of Patreon and losing all of their membership revenue.

Mighty Networks and Circle

Other platforms have popped up to offer alternatives to Patreon, including more ownership of customer relationships as well as offering more comprehensive community features. They offer a more professional solution that appeals to more established brands. Mighty Networks and Circle are two examples of these alternatives, and they're similar enough that we can talk about them together.

Mighty Networks and Circle allow you to connect to your own Stripe account, which gives you ownership of the subscriptions and the ability to export data from your members. And because both Mighty and Circle charge up-front to use their platform, their platform fees on membership revenues are much lower than Patreon, ranging between 1-4% depending on which service tier you purchase. Additionally, you serve the membership platforms from your own website domain and brand them with your logos, reducing the need to send your audience to someone else's website.

The other significant advantage to platforms like Mighty and Circle is the plethora of community features, including discussion forums, frameworks for publishing course content, and even getting your own branded mobile app in the Android and iOS app stores.

The downsides to Mighty Networks and Circle as we see them: (1) The platforms are heavily-geared toward offering courses as the core value prop for your memberships, and they do that well. But if you don't plan to offer courses, or don't think courses will be the primary value prop, the rest of the community features feel a bit old-fashioned. (2) Platforms like Mighty and Circle, even if hosted on your own website domain, can feel siloed from your core website. If you have an existing website with content, these platforms don't integrate into it. (3) While customers of these platforms get much more ownership of their audience relationship vs. Patreon, they still charge a platform fee on memberships revenue, and the platforms aren't open source, which locks you into forever sharing a portion of your revenue with the platforms.

A new alternative: Minds Networks

Minds Networks emerges as an open source alternative to membership platforms like Mighty and Circle. Similar to those platforms, Minds Networks can be served on your own website domain and can be white-labeled with your own branding, including your own branded mobile app. But Minds Networks goes beyond to address the three shortcomings of the aforementioned others.

While selling courses is possible on Minds Networks, it's not the focus, so you won't find the same structured course organization tools. Instead, Minds Networks prioritizes community features that will be familiar to anyone who uses common social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, etc. Minds Networks includes tools for automatically creating community posts from your existing RSS feeds, and can optionally integrate with the wider Fediverse of ActivityPub-powered social media sites like Threads and Mastodon (read: What is the Fediverse?).

In addition to integrating with your existing RSS feeds, Minds Networks can integrate with your existing website, adding community features to your pages that syncs seamlessly with the community engagement of your social app. If you already have registered users, you can connect them with your social features through OpenID single sign-on (SSO).

And finally, Minds Networks prioritizes your ownership of the community and customer relationships, and revenues you earn. Your members connect directly with your own Stripe account (or other external payment provider). And Minds charges zero platform fees on memberships, which means you keep 100% of the revenues you earn. And because Minds Networks is open source, should your business outgrow the platform, you can always fork the code and run it yourself.

In summary

All of these membership platforms offer viable ways to build a membership business, and the direction you go should be based on your current priorities and future goals. If you don't have a budget to start with and don't mind sacrificing control of branding and your customer relationships, Patreon is a great option. If owning your branding is important, and you expect your membership business to benefit from lower platform fees and the addition of comprehensive course frameworks, platforms like Mighty and Circle offer a professional alternative. And if even more ownership of customer relationships, zero fees on membership earnings, integration with your existing website, and familiar and engaging social features match your goals, Minds Networks delivers a robust solution that also happens to be the only open source option.

Membership platforms features breakdown

	Minds Networks	Mighty Networks	Circle	Patreon
Customization
Use your domain	✔	✔	✔	🚫
Theme control	✔	✔	Pro only	🚫
White label branding	✔	✔	Pro only	🚫
White label emails	✔	✔	Business only	🚫
White label mobile app	✔	✔	🚫	🚫
Custom navigation	✔	✔	✔	🚫
Custom landing page	✔	✔	🚫	🚫
Social
Text, image, video posts	✔	✔	✔	✔
Groups	✔	✔	✔	🚫
Group chat	✔	✔	✔	🚫
Direct messaging	✔	✔	✔	🚫
Export member data	✔	✔	✔	✔
Automated posting	✔	🚫	🚫	🚫
Reach the Fediverse	✔	🚫	🚫	🚫
Events	🚫	✔	✔	🚫
Custom roles & permission	✔	✔	🚫	🚫
Email digest	✔	✔	✔	🚫
Most similar to	Social media	Intranet	Message boards	Blogs
Monetization
Connect your Stripe	✔	✔	✔	🚫
Social ad platform	✔	🚫	🚫	🚫
Courses	🚫	Courses only	Pro only	🚫
Paid memberships	✔	✔	✔	✔
Memberships
Platform fees	0%	1 - 3%	0.5 - 4%	8%
Membership tiers	✔	✔	✔	✔
Paywalled posts	✔	✔	✔	✔
Paywalled groups	✔	✔	✔	🚫
Monthly memberships	✔	✔	✔	✔
Annual memberships	✔	✔	✔	🚫
One-time payments	✔	✔	✔	🚫
Website integrations
Single sign-on	✔	Business only	Enterprise only	🚫
Comments embeds	✔	🚫	🚫	🚫
RSS sync	✔	🚫	🚫	🚫
Social ad embeds	✔	🚫	🚫	🚫
Mobile app
White label app	$18,000 / year	$40,000 / year	$30,000 / year	🚫
Android & iOS	✔	✔	✔	🚫
Push notifications	✔	✔	✔	🚫
Your own app store accounts	✔	✔	?	🚫

Learn more about Minds Networks