How do you choose the tools to run your community on?
I'm curious to learn how you choose the right tool(s) to use for your community. Especially with the emergence of new tools like Circle, Comradery, Peerboard, ... as well as established tools like MightyNetworks, Discourse, Vanilla, Slack and Discord, it seems pretty hard to figure out which is the right combination of tools for a given community.
Probably there's not one best solution that fits all needs — but how do you find the one that's suitable for your community?
Every time we had to pick one we looked at it through both these angles:
Then, we also had to make peace with the fact that: there is no such thing out there as the 'perfect' tool :)
I chose Slack (at least for now). My main considerations were:
Comfort of my community members with the tool - they already have the app downloaded and use it every day for work.
Cost - many of the other tools either don't have a free tier or the free tier is not nearly as useful. Slack's free tier works well for us.
Automations - Slack connects pretty seamlessly with our other systems/tools
this is a painful issue later down the line though:
https://www.indiehackers.com/product/yen/simple-pricing-shouldnt-be-this-hard--MB_cBzSkixoVxTqew5H
at some point, you won't be able to afford this!
This comment was deleted 5 years ago
Yeah that makes sense — Would you do the testing with a smaller group of existing members, or try it before you announce anything to anyone?
This comment was deleted 5 years ago