How to Choose the Right Community Platform for Your Niche Audience

The choice of the right community platform is crucial in building a thriving community that attracts audience and keeps them engaged. With the wide variety of community platforms in the market, it could be overwhelming and confusing to pick the right platform for your community.

In this guide, we’ll talk about the process of finding the right platform that works for your audience and in your niche.

TL;DR

The choice of community platform depends on two factors: type of community (open, closed), size (small, medium, large) and specific community needs (post-types, scalability, performance, organic growth) etc.

In order to gain clarity - it’s important to start with clearly defining community objectives. It helps us decide whether we want to build an open or closed community; the size of the community we want to build and the specific needs of the community members.

Step 1: Define Community Objectives

Before exploring various features of community platforms, it’s important to define the purpose of your community. It will help you in every decision you’ll make about the platform selection.

Take a look at following examples:

• Customer Support Community: A space for customers to seek help from experts and company officials. This helps reduce the support overhead.

• Educational Community: Provides learning materials, structured courses, expert interactions etc.

• Networking Community: Allows professionals to connect, form network and share expertise and opportunities.

• P2P Learning Community: Peer-to-Peer communities allow learning from each other, share experiences and real-life examples.

• Niche Community: Popular with SaaS companies. These communities are centered around problems in a specific niche. This could be around specialised topics or interest.

Answer: What is the main reason our community should exist?

To make the things easy for you, here’s an AI prompt that you can use with AI models like ChatGPT, Grok or Gemini -

Prompt:

"I'm building an online community. Ask me a series of questions to help define its main purpose. Include:

Who is my target audience?

What problem or need does this community solve?

What kind of value or transformation should members experience?

Should the community be open or closed?

What kind of content or interaction will best serve the members?

What is the long-term vision for this community?"

This will help clarify the intent and direction before choosing a platform.

Step 2: Identify Essential Platform Features

Let’s start by looking at the broader range of community platform options available in the market.

A. Open Or Closed Community

Is your community a special group that will have exclusive content available to limited number of people who you invite?

For example - an internal community of startup employees, a family group, students of a paid course etc. These are typically mini or medium sized communities for up to 50-100 active members. Read - Open Vs. Closed Community Platforms.

Note: Active members are the members who post daily or weekly.

If yes - you need a closed community platform.

Following are your choices:

1. Slack: Chat-based platform loved by startups and small teams

2. Discord: Popular for communities dedicated to gaming

3. WhatsApp: Great for family and friend groups

4. Telegram: Similar to WhatsApp; but mostly used as ‘broadcast’

5. Circle: Popular with course creators offering paid courses

A lot of people argue that Discord has large communities. I agree. However, chat-based communities work the best for gaming and communities where real-time updates are more important than evergreen content.

Read - Slack vs. Discord - The Uneasy Choice

B. Small, Medium or Large Community

There are several options based on the size of your community you wish to build.

1. Small: WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, Circle, Discourse, Discord, Bettermode

2. Medium: Jatra, Circle, Discourse, Discord, Mighty Networks, Bettermode, Flarum, XenForo, phpBB

3. Large: Jatra, Circle, Discourse, Khoros Atlas

C. Specific Community Needs

Some of the communities need course and marketing automation, while some need strong SEO focus and a few act act as ‘all-in-one’ community platforms. Most of the platforms mentioned above offer a mix set of features.

In the following section - let’s look at the most important features you should consider

• SEO Capabilities: Medium and large communities that want organic user growth should focus on community platform that has strong SEO capabilities. Two platforms are known for their SEO focus: Jatra and Discourse.

• Customization Options: If you want to match your brand identity and want a lot of customization options, you may pick Bettermode or Mighty Networks

• Mobile Friendly Design: A community platform needs to work on mobile devices without requiring special app downloads. Jatra stands out in this section.

• Ease of Use: Most platforms in the market are in the race to build features. This has resulted into feature-bloat that makes the community interface complex for most of the users. For example, Discourse and XenForo have complex admin-panels and settings section that make it confusing for new users.

• Post Types: This is an underrated feature. Most platforms only focus on ‘Discussions’ and ‘Events’ for their community. However, modern communities need Discussions, Articles, Chats, Events, Jobs, Feedback, Changelog, Quizzes and more to keep audience engaged.

• Scalability and Performance: Community platforms need to scale as the community grows. If you are self-hosting the community, you will have to manage servers and upgrades yourself.

Step 3: Determine Chat-based or Structured Content

It’s important to determine whether your community needs evergreen content that can attract users on autopilot OR it needs real-time, short-lived content.

For example, platforms like Slack, Discord, Telegram and WhatsApp focus on short-lived, chat-based content.

The chats, by nature, are short-lived and are often low-value content pieces.

Structured content is preferred by communities that want to preserve their content for long-term value. For example, this article on Jatra community platform is an example of evergreen content that attracts traffic.

At Jatra - we focus on both real-time chat and structured content for long-term SEO value. We are building a ‘Chat’ post-type that will allow users to hold real-time discussions while the regular structured content can attract traffic for a long time.

Determine what type of content is prefered by your community and then make the choice.

Step 4: Content Hub or Discussion-Focused

Modern communities need more than simple discussions. It’s one of the reasons we build Jatra as a community content hub.

That is - you can now have discussions, articles, chats, events, quizzes, jobs, changelog, feedback, group-chats and more natively supported by the platform.

It opens up new opportunities for you to create content for your users and keep them engaged.

Ask!

If you need help picking the right platform for your community, ask below or start a new discussion.