Course platforms › Community memberships guide
Best course platform for community-based memberships
Pricing and community features verified against each platform's official pages · by FinanzaX Decide
Sell a single course and you get paid once. Run a membership (recurring access to a community, ongoing content, live discussion) and you get paid every month, but only if the platform actually supports that shape of business. Three of the four we compare do. One of them, as of this year, will not even let a brand-new creator turn the feature on.
Disclosure. We earn a commission if you sign up to Systeme.io through our link, at no extra cost to you. We earn nothing from Teachable, Thinkific or Podia, and our pick below is one of the three that pays us nothing. Full disclosure.
Why this is a different question than "which platform is best"
A single course is a product: build it once, sell it, done. A membership is a service: you owe your members somewhere to talk to each other and to you, every month, for as long as they pay. That changes what actually matters. A platform can be excellent at hosting video lessons and still be the wrong pick here if its community tool is an afterthought, gated behind an expensive tier, or , in one case below, not available to you at all.
Recurring billing itself is rarely the hard part; all four platforms can charge a monthly price. The real question is whether members have somewhere to actually gather inside the platform you are already paying for, or whether you are quietly paying for a second subscription, usually to Circle, on top of it.
The comparison
Every platform here has some form of native community feature. The differences are in whether it is actually available to a new creator, which plan unlocks paid access to it, and how tightly the capacity is capped once you are running it for real.
| Platform | Native community | Extra tool if you need one | Known limits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Systeme.io | Communities, included even on the Free plan | Not needed | Community and space limits above the Free plan are not officially published; we asked, and could not find a confirmed number. Course tools are basic at every tier. |
| Podia | Community, included on every plan, no add-on | Not needed | Email subscriber caps are low even on the top plan: 100 (Mover), 500 (Shaker), 1,000 (Earthquaker). Space caps: 25 / 100 / unlimited. |
| Thinkific | Communities, but paid memberships are not available on the Basic plan, only from Start upward | Not needed once you are on Start | Start: 1 community, 10 spaces, $82/mo billed annually. Grow: 3 communities, 20 spaces each, $164/mo billed annually. |
| Teachable | Community exists, but is closed to new schools ; Memberships (the billing side) still works | Circle, from $89/mo (verified against circle.so's current pricing) | Per Teachable's own help center: not accepting new communities, no new features, bugs not being fixed. |
The one to rule out first: Teachable
Teachable has a Community feature, and it still has native recurring Memberships billing. But per Teachable's own help center, Community "is no longer available for new schools or for schools that have not previously created a community." Teachable has paused investment in it, is not building new features for it, and is not actively fixing bugs reported in it. If you are starting today, you cannot turn this on, on any plan, at any price. Existing schools keep what they already built; you do not get to build a new one.
That does not rule Teachable out for a course you sell once: its Memberships billing and student app are still genuinely good. It rules it out specifically for a community-based membership, unless you are willing to run your community somewhere else and point students to it manually. Teachable's own support content now suggests exactly that: a Discord or Slack link, or course comments, in place of Community. If you go that route, budget for it: Circle's cheapest current plan is $89/month, verified against its own pricing page, not the older $39–49 figure several 2026 review sites still quote.
Our pick: Podia
Podia is the only one of the four where community is a first-class feature on every single plan, not something you have to earn your way up to. That makes it the platform with the lowest real cost to get a working paid community running: the Mover plan, at … billed annually, includes both the community and the ability to charge for it.
The honest limitation
Podia's email subscriber caps are genuinely low for a growing membership: 100 on Mover, 500 on Shaker, and even the top plan, Earthquaker, tops out at 1,000. A membership with a few hundred paying members can outgrow that fast, and once it does you are paying for a separate email tool anyway, which quietly erodes the "everything in one place" reason to choose Podia over Thinkific in the first place. Its community tool is also intentionally simple: no gamification, no live event rooms, nothing built for a large or highly active group. Fine for a tight community of a few hundred people who mostly want to talk to each other and to you. Not built for one that wants to feel like its own social network.
The Mover-to-Shaker crossover, for a membership specifically
Mover takes a 5% cut of every charge on top of card processing; Shaker takes 0%, for … billed annually instead of …. At 40 members paying $15/month ($600 in monthly revenue), Mover costs … all in and Shaker costs …, so Mover wins. The crossover is at roughly … in membership revenue: below that, stay on Mover; above it, Shaker's flat fee gets cheaper than Mover's percentage every month after. Run your own membership price and expected member count through the calculator below instead of guessing which side of that line you are on.
When Thinkific is the better call
If your community needs to feel more structured (multiple communities for different cohorts or programs, more spaces per community, a platform that was built around serious teaching rather than simplicity), Thinkific is the more complete tool. The catch is the entry price: paid memberships are not available at all on the $40/month Basic plan, only from Start upward at $82/month billed annually. At that price it lands almost exactly where Podia's Shaker does ($82 vs. $84), so the real choice between them is not price: it is whether you want three communities and twenty spaces each (Thinkific Grow, $164/month) or you are fine with Podia's simpler, cheaper single community.
The free way to test the idea first: Systeme.io
Systeme.io includes a community feature even on its permanent free plan: the only one of the four where you can put a paid community in front of real people before spending anything. Its own pricing and features pages do not publish an official cap on how many communities or spaces you get once you move past Free, and we could not find that number verified anywhere else either: we are telling you that gap exists rather than guessing at a figure.
So: what should you do
- If you want to validate the idea before paying anything, start free on Systeme.io.
- If you are ready to charge from day one and want the cheapest real entry point, go straight to Podia Mover: move to Shaker once you cross roughly … in membership revenue.
- If your community needs more structure than a single space, or you are already leaning Thinkific for its teaching tools, Start is the plan that actually unlocks paid memberships ; Basic will not.
- Do not build a new community on Teachable. As of this year, you cannot.
This guide compares one specific capability. Your actual numbers (your price, your expected member count, whether you need email marketing built in) change which of these is genuinely cheapest for you.