Initial thoughts on Circle . So

i just joined one and it's essentially a forum software.

It's pretty though. I have to use this for the next few months, so, I'll get a better idea of it quickly.

Yeah, Circle is nice and have the ability to offer 'spaces' which can be useful if you have a paid community with different tiers or a freemium access. And they now integrate paywalls like MemberSpace or MemberStack which is convenient.

Cons:

The problem for us seems you can't really have rules for DMs: for example, we don't want to allow members to contact each other if they have not participated to the same event (we organise live video convos around love/sex/relationships).

And it does not seem to have a group message feature yet, which can be helpful in our case where we have IRL gatherings organised for/by members.

And they don't have a calendar and RSVP features for our events yet (you can integrate Google Calendar but it's ugly).

Just a side note: Circle's founders and some investors are from Teachable! The product is still young and I think they have a high growth rate of improvement.

I have a small community on Circle and have had it for about 2.5 months now, I think. Here are a few pros and cons (I have never tried anything else as a community builder, so take it with a grain of salt).

Pros:

• Clean design
• Pretty user-friendly to figure out
• Involved founders super responsive to feedback + visible roadmap
• Community members like it a lot compared to options like Slack or FB groups
• Different display options so you can set up visually distinct content in each space

Cons:

• It's a bit quirky (the editor has some issues but they're actively replacing it now)
• No direct way to accept payments, you have to do everything via Zapier
• Some things aren't really realtime, you need to refresh the screen e.g. to see new replies to threads
• People don't really "get" the threading so they often reply to the topic and not an individual person, so notifications get missed (a UX issue)

I think they're actively working on all the Cons so I expect it to get better over time. I'm pretty happy but it's also clearly not a super mature solution yet.

Looks very nice, I know @momoko is using it, and it's been a bless it's like a more non intrusive slack/discord.

I'm also a user and fan of Mighty Networks. I recently joined a community on Circle, and my first impression was: okay. I know there are folks who love it, so maybe I just need to spend more time on it, but I wasn't overwhelmed with excitement. If you just want a forum, it does the trick, but I prefer the activity feed + courses in Mighty Networks.

Is it from the same company that did notion.so? Or are they just copying their design and TLD to target their audience?