When starting a new community, you’ll have to choose between a self-hosted and a fully-managed community platform.

In my career spanning 20 years as an entrepreneur and community builder, I’ve managed self-hosted communities and also fully-managed communities. In this article, I’ll make the choice easy for you.

TL;DR

In general, fully-managed community platforms are the smarter choice for most people. They handle the technical heavy-lifting so you can focus on community building instead of wrestling with server infrastructure. Self-hosted platforms still make sense if you want tight control over your servers, data, and custom features.

I’ve spent 20 years as an entrepreneur and community builder on both self-hosted and managed platforms.

Fully-managed solutions save you time, cut stress, and free you up to engage with members on a deeper level. Server management rarely justifies the extra work and cost, which is why I strongly recommend fully-managed community platforms to most teams.

Those of you curious to dive deeper in this topic, tighten your seatbelts.

What is a community platform?

A community platform is a software that lets you create an online community for your users. It’s a software that manages user-accounts, profiles and conversational community content. But that’s not all. Community platforms will also include moderation tools, analytics and white-labeling (branding) features.

Community platform is a complex piece of software. For example, Jatra is a fully-managed community platform. It boasts simple and intuitive user-interface (UI) for an overall better user-experience (UX), but it’s complex yet beautiful on the inside.

Community Platforms Vs. Social Media Sites

A community platform is different from social media sites. Community platforms let you own 100% of your data, while social media sites (Facebook, X, LinkedIn) will give you no ownership of your community and data. In addition, they offer very limited customizability of the platform.

Self-Hosted Community Platforms

A self-hosted community platform lives on your own servers or hosting service. As community owner, you are 100% responsible for server configuration, software updates, bandwidth and environment.

Most of the self-hosted communities run on servers managed by IT departments or rented from popular cloud providers like AWS, GCP, Digital Ocean, Microsoft Azure etc.

Popular self-hosted platforms:

In early 2000s, when communities began taking over the Internet, only self-hosted platforms existed. Some of the these old platforms still exist. Take a look:

1. Discourse: Open-source and built with Ruby On Rails.

2. Flarum: Lightweight, fast and can be customized using plugins

3. NodeBB: Uses Node.js technology and offers real-time updates. Has robust plugin system.

4. phpBB: Once very popular hosted community software. Still exists.

5. vBulletin: This was one of the #1 community platforms and powered a large number of online forums

6. Buddy Press: It’s a plugin for your WordPress powered website.

7. XenForo: Very popular software and I’ve used it to run CrazyEngineers for almost a decade.

8. Question2Answer: Open sourced QnA platform. Good option if you want to build QnA site

How does self-hosted platform work?

In most of the cases, you will have to download the community software and install it on the server. This is a straightforward process; but you have to be careful. It’s essential to plan your server environment based on a number of factors like: number of users, bandwidth, database size etc.

Pros of self-hosted community platforms:

The main reasons why big corporations choose self-hosted platform for their community is the tight control and ownership of their data. Here are some of the pros -

1. Full ownership: You get 100% ownership of your data and control over community environment

2. Flexibility: Most community software will let you customize the community to your needs

3. Lower entry-fees: Self-hosted platforms typically have lower entry-fees. Open source community platforms are free to download and use, even for commercial purpose.

Cons of self-hosted community platforms:

Over the years, we observed that self-hosted platforms are not as lucrative as they look when starting out. If you are looking to build your community on self-hosted platform, be aware of the following cons:

1. Technical expertise: Installing, administration, security, backup and regular software updates require technical expertise. For example, if you choose ‘Discourse’, your IT team will require knowledge of Ruby on Rails.

2. Continuous maintenance: Community platforms are not ‘install once and forget’. They require continuous monitoring and maintenance from experts. Installing updates and security patches need to be done in time to prevent data theft and malicious attacks on the community.

3. Hidden costs: While the cost of the community platform itself might be low or even free - the real cost of running the community are often much larger. For example, if your community gets traffic spikes - you will have to upscale and downscale the servers to handle the bandwidth

4. Limited technical support: With self-hosted community platform; you’re pretty much on your own to build the community. You will receive limited technical support through the makers.

Summary:

The self-hosted community platforms are typically used by large corporations with access to resources or the technical people who love to have full control over things.

Be aware of the resources a self-hosted community platform demands; which otherwise can be put into community-building efforts.

Fully Managed Community Platforms

A fully-managed community platform is the software rented from the makers for a subscription fee. Almost all fully-managed community platforms are offered as SaaS aka Software as a Service.

You pay a subscription fee and in exchange you receive access to the platform as the owner; where you can customize different aspects of your community.

The makers or service providers of the platform will handle hosting, feature-development, security, backups, bandwidth and performance for you.

Popular fully-managed platforms:

Fully managed community platforms have been around for nearly two decades and are a popular choice among the community builders.

If you are looking for a fully-managed community platform, you have a wide range of options:

1. Jatra: This platform! It’s a result of my own frustrations with existing community platforms.

2. Circle: Aimed at course creators, Circle is a heavily funded community platform.

3. Might Networks: Optimised for courses and offers membership tools.

4. Tribe / BetterMode: Offers heavy customization and templates for communities

5. Heartbeat: Combines group chats, events and discussion boards

6. Khoros: Mostly an enterprise community software

7. Vanilla Forums: Community out-of-the-box solution, now owned by Higher Logic

8. XenForo: Offers cloud-hosted solution; same features as the self-hosted version

How does fully-managed community platform work?

Think of fully-managed community platform as self-hosted platform without technical debt.

Once you have subscribed, you will get an ‘admin’ or ‘owner’ account on the platform with full rights to customize channels, look, feel and enhanced moderation rights. The sign-up process is straightforward.

Pros of fully-managed community platforms:

The main reason why most startups, marketers and community managers prefer fully-managed community platform is because of the convenience they offer.

If you are looking to build a community, it’s recommended to go with fully-managed solution. Following are some of the advantages:

1. Easy and quick setup: No server installs. Just fill the form and your community is ready.

2. No technical hassle: No stress of server issues, backups or updates. Perfect for most teams

3. Support: You get full technical support. At Jatra, we go a step ahead and work with you to build your community.

4. Feature updates: Hosted community platforms are frequently updated, receive new features and security updates.

Cons of fully-managed community platforms:

While fully-managed platform may look like ‘the best’ way to host and build your community, there are some disadvantages you should be aware of.

1. Recurring costs: You will pay monthly, quarterly or annual recurring fees to run your community. These costs typically get bigger with the size of your community.

2. Limited customization: Typically, you will have lesser customization options with a fully-managed community solution.

3. Lesser data control: Your data resides on the provider’s servers. You are bound by their policies, uptime and security measures.

4. Vendor lock-in: It’s not easy (and not recommended) to switch community platforms. Exporting user-data, content and media can be complicated.

Summary:

Fully managed community platforms are a very popular choice these days. They allow you to focus on what matters more: onboarding new users, interacting with users, creating content and building community engagement activities.

Self Hosted Vs. Fully Managed - Decision Making Matrix

Finally, the choice is easy. If you want full control over data, customization and also have the resources; self-hosted platform may look appealing. Otherwise, a fully-managed community platform is the recommended choice for most of the community builders.

Next Steps

If you need help making the right choice for your community, we are available to help. Feel free to schedule a call with us OR ask your question below.