Beyond Facebook: 12 Top Free Alternatives to Facebook Groups Compared
Facebook groups used to be the go-to option for building online communities, but times have changed. While it's true that the platform has an impressive user base of nearly 2.9 billion, many of those users are no longer as engaged as they used to be in the golden times of Facebook.
Also, there is a growing concern over Facebook's privacy issues and uncertain algorithm changes. Because of that people have started losing trust in the platform. After data scandals such as Cambridge Analytica community owners are now inclined to completely owning the data and privacy guidelines.
The secret to engagement, retention, and scale?
Top brands already know it.
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However, some small business owners stick to Facebook groups as the groups completely free and they're afraid that building a custom community space might cost them a lot. But that doesn't have to be the case!
Keep reading to discover the top free alternatives to Facebook groups with better engagement, greater flexibility and more advanced features.
What are Facebook groups?
Facebook groups are community spaces for Facebook users who gather there based on shared interests and goals. They are used to communicate, share content and collaborate.
Facebook groups can be public, private or hidden (so that only members can see them, they don't appear in search results).
Their main feature are posts, where group members can post content, photos, and links and other users can add comments and participate in discussions.
In 2022, Facebook introduced community chats for group members, allowing them to chat in real time using Facebook Messenger. However, this feature didn't become very popular, especially for large groups as there is no way to filter messages, making it easy to get lost in a flood of constant chatter.
Why are companies looking for alternatives to Facebook groups?
Although at first, it might seem that building a community on Facebook might be a good starting point as your audiences are already available there, you need to consider that Facebook can be very distracting.
While your community members are having discussions and building connections with your brand, Facebook would be consistently sending notifications from friends, showing ads, and delivering suggestions for similar Groups.
Also, you have not as much control over your community as you'd have with a dedicated community platform and that's why brands are increasingly moving to other platforms.
Here is an overview of Pros and Cons of using Facebook Groups:
The secret to engagement, retention, and scale?
Top brands already know it.
Reason 1: Decreasing reach
It is continuously becoming difficult to reach the target audience via Facebook. The flagship newsfeed of Facebook has become more and more cluttered with distractions, fake news, and clickbaity articles.
Also, the algorithm behind this newsfeed changes quite frequently, thereby affecting the visibility of the content pushed by different brands. This essentially means that the messages sent to the Group might not come across to the right audience at the right time.
A dedicated community platform delivers several ways to reach members – right from activity-specific contextual notifications and manual messaging to emails and powerful integration with third-party communication tools.
Reason 2: Lack of organic growth via the web
If one of the goals of your community is to raise awareness of your business, build brand leadership, acquire new users by getting in front of as many people as possible, Facebook Groups will not be useful. Although you can use their advertising solution to increase the visibility of your company, the very nature of the "closed space" for Facebook Groups restricts the community from organic growth.
Since Facebook Groups are completely confined to the platform and search engines are not allowed to crawl the content posted in your community, there is no way for the search engine bots to discover content, index them, and send traffic organically. Also, note that none of the third-party sites (e.g., a blog or news portal) will be able to link to any valuable content posted in the Group.
For this type of use case, Facebook Groups disregard the very essence of the web and knowledge discovery.
Reason 3: No customization
Facebook Groups can be set up swiftly, but they are equally rigid when it comes to customizing it based on your business or brand. For example, you cannot keep the group under your custom domain (e.g., community.domain.com). Also, you are not allowed to change the look and feel, color combinations to better reflect your brand guidelines. Apart from this, it is not possible to merge the group in your site's header and footer for seamless navigation.
Above all, you as a community owner should be able to organize and showcase the specific elements of the community exactly based on your requirements and user needs. It is not possible to keep one generic group template and use the same to represent millions of communities.
Reason 4: No subcommunities or subgroups
It is imperative for any community manager to build small subcommunities inside the community to bring people with a shared passion closer and build another channel for member and knowledge discovery. For example, you might want to bring the super users of your product or service together for ideation on a certain topic. This is absolutely not possible with Facebook Groups.
Reason 5: Lack of control
On Facebook, all of the control lies with Facebook alone – both the community owner and the members are subject go in the direction that Facebook deems appropriate.
When you don't get the ownership of the platform, you will always remain dependent on the platform owner.
Facebook doesn't give you ownership of the members' data. All you receive after getting more than 250 members is an aggregated report which showcases new members, top content, etc. in a pre-defined format. So, you cannot run your own analytics on member behavior, user-generated content, etc.
The data lives in a silo – for instance, you can neither use Google Analytics to understand how community visitors are interacting with the community nor use advanced analytics solutions such as Amplitude to measure key metrics (e.g., retention, lifecycle, etc.) at a granular level.
This also means that you cannot take the audience data and push them to your newsletter list or communication solutions such as MailChimp, HubSpot, and Intercom.
To learn more about different types of member communities and options available, check out our guide to customer engagement platforms.
What are the top alternatives to Facebook groups?
Disclaimer: This post contains information that was publicly available as of October 2024. We encourage readers to also conduct their own research to determine which platform best fits their needs.
The landscape of online community platforms is changing fast, offering a variety of alternatives to Facebook Groups. Here we explore the key platforms that can serve as effective substitutes for your group chats and community spaces.
1. Bettermode
Bettermode is a no-code website builder focused on creating community spaces tailored to your needs. It comes with plenty of ready-to-use templates that can be fully customized and branded. Its other features include built-in CMS, advanced analytics, moderation tools and integrations with the most popular business tools.
Browse Templates
One of our most popular templates is a Facebook-like template called Basebook, which allows you to create your own social network that looks similar to Facebook’s familiar interface.
You can also create groups and communities on Basebook where people can post, comment, react and share user-generated content, just like in Facebook groups.
The only difference compared to Facebook groups is that you have data ownership and full control over your community. Also, you can add your custom branding and get more advanced moderation and analytics features.
Summary of key features:
Forget the days of cobbling together disjointed tools – Bettermode is the customizable digital hub for your thriving online community. Right out of the gate, Bettermode empowers members to actively engage through discussions, polls, Q&As, and content sharing. And gives your community managers robust moderation capabilities, branding tools, customization options, and effortless integrations.
And if you're looking to expand capabilities Bettermode plays nice with your other tools like Google Analytics, Salesforce, and HubSpot. Bettermode also helps you engage international and multilingual audiences with support for 20+ languages.
Essentially, Bettermode brings all the essential features into one intuitive, integrated powerhouse.
Pros
- Robust customization - Build a completely tailored community with customizable templates, branding, design tools, widgets, and more.
- Unique design - Tailor the visual experience through the Design Studio and theming options.
- Professional templates - Hit the ground running with premade community templates.
- Seamless integrations - Embed options and a comprehensive API enables frictionless connections with your existing tech stack.
- Embeddable - Integrate the community into your existing mobile app, web app, and website to improve engagement.
- Highly intuitive interface - The modern, user-friendly design drives adoption and seamlessly engages members.
- Powerful moderation - Proactively manage your community with advanced moderation tools and filters.
- Actionable analytics - Gain data-driven insights into member behavior and community growth to optimize efforts.
- Gamification - Create a community engagement plan and drive participation and loyalty with points, badges and rewards for the most valuable audience members, leaderboards, and other fun gamification elements.
- Integrated messaging - Enable private messaging between members to facilitate personal connections.
- Scalable capacity - Support large and rapidly growing communities with flexible plans and enterprise-grade infrastructure.
- Open ecosystem - Expand capabilities via integrations from the Bettermode App Marketplace ecosystem.
- Secure data ownership - Maintain full control and ownership over your community data.
- Admin controls - Comprehensive controls and management capabilities for complete community oversight.
Pricing:
Bettermode is free for up to 20 Spaces. If you need more, we have 1 paid scale as you grow plan:
- Free – 100 members, 20 spaces, 5 collaborators, and 5 GB of storage, $24/month
- Pro – Unlimited members, 20 spaces, 5 collaborators, custome domain and 25 GB of storage, starting at 49/month and scale as you grow
- Enterprise – Book a free demo meeting
👉 You can take a quick look at a G2 rating here
The secret to engagement, retention, and scale?
Top brands already know it.
2. Slack Communities
Famed more for team collaboration initially, Slack has evolved over time hosting numerous small groups connected by shared interests or professional fields, and it's more commonly used within B2B environments.
Summary of key features:
Slack is an instant-messaging platform that supports real-time text-based conversations within private groups, public channels, and direct messages.
Slack's key feature is its capacity to combine a range of external applications, which allows code creation, project management, chat functions, data protection, and a collaborative work platform across devices and regions. Click here to learn more on how to use Slack for community building and engagement.
However, without proper organization, channels may become cluttered, leading to information overload.
Pros
- A flexible way to work with people and partners in one space
- Dedicated spaces built around specific projects
- Huddles let teams chat over audio instantly
- Video and screen sharing
- Clips allow audio and video recording
- Users can work alongside external partners in Slack channels
- Integrates with apps
- Turns tasks into automated workflows
- File tracking
- Scheduling
- Mobile app
- Chat
- Image and audio files
- Document files
- Audio conferencing and video conferencing
Cons
- Lack of scalability
- Free plan has only 10000 searchable messages, 10 app integrations and 1 to 1 video calls
- Conversations get deleted after 90 days
- Minimum file storage
Pricing:
There are four plans:
- Free plan: limited to only 90 days of message history
- Pro plan: $8.75/month
- Business Plus: $15/month
- Enterprise Grid: custom price available upon request
The secret to engagement, retention, and scale?
Top brands already know it.
3. Circle.so
Circle is another promising platform specifically designed for creators looking to build thriving communities. And it allows community builders to create spaces, engage with customers, monetize through memberships, and manage integrations.
Summary of key features:
It integrates seamlessly with popular services like Zapier, giving users the flexibility to extend functionalities according to their needs.
Pros
- Rich member profiles
- Discussions and group chat
- Direct messaging
- Events, live streaming, and live rooms
- Courses and course builder
- Paywall for memberships
- Public and private spaces
- Knowledge base
- White label option available
- An iOS app
Cons
- Lack of powerful customization and design tools
- Usage caps on all pricing plans
- Transaction fees on all paid plans
- No live chat support
Pricing:
There are three packages:
- Professional: $99/month
- Business: $219/month
- Enterprise: $399/month
All packages come with a 14-day free trial.
The secret to engagement, retention, and scale?
Top brands already know it.
4. Forj.ai (Formerly Mobilize)
Forj offers a comprehensive set of tools to manage and grow an engaged member base while providing valuable insights and performance metrics to help optimize efforts. It is geared towards larger organizations and may prove costly for small businesses.
Summary of key features:
Forj's vision is to engage members to learn in modern communities of practice by combining members' expertise to facilitate networking, generate conversations and generate learning content.
Pros
- Technology to enable members to learn from each other
- Knowledge sharing
- Insights and automation to drive personalized learning paths
- Mobile app and desktop options
- Intuitive interface
- Flexible and scalable learning management system
- Comprehensive analytics
- Multi-media rich content
- Automated learner enrollment and progress tracking
- Personalized learner profiles
- Branding and design with customization
- Seamless community management
Cons
- There is no pricing information, but reviews suggest pricing is expensive.
Pricing:
All prices are custom-made, you can request a demo to get a custom quote.
The secret to engagement, retention, and scale?
Top brands already know it.
5. Reddit
Reddit is one of the most popular online forum websites with over 430 million monthly active users. The vast majority of people use it for chatting, news, or entertainment purposes, and business professionals use it as an advertising platform.
Summary of key features:
Reddit is a simple user-friendly tool allowing you to create communities focused on different topics and promote open discussion. Its biggest benefit is the ability to build traffic easily and rank your pages on search engines. Many professionals use it to stay up to date with what's going on in their industry.
Pros
- Subreddits allow you to subscribe to your interests or find new ones
- Users can vote content up or down and higher voted content ranks higher
- Can be used to promote products and services through sponsored ads
- Can engage in conversations with users about products and services
- Reddit provides free traffic for your website
- If your content goes viral, people worldwide will tune into your website
- Can share your content with Reddit members only free from censorship
Cons
- Reddit is often touted as a time sink
- It lacks reliable sources
- Some subreddits are not moderated at all
- Items are poorly organized
- Can be confrontational
- Businesses need to be creative, original, and unique with high-quality content
- Hard to navigate
Pricing:
Free for users and free for businesses to create a subreddit. Ads are paid for and you have to contact sales for prices.
The secret to engagement, retention, and scale?
Top brands already know it.
6. Discourse
Discourse is an online forum discussion platform. It's 100% open source and can be used as a mailing list, discussion forum, chat room and more.
Summary of key features:
Discourse is an open-source community management and moderation tool. Businesses have the ability to define groups and have private categories so that members can have discussions around topics.
Pros
- Ability to define groups and have private categories
- Ability to import/export data via API
- You can see detailed metrics on user activity
- Easy for members to have discussions
- Easy to administer and moderate discussions
- Good product support services
- User-friendly UI
- Gamification options
- Dynamic notifications
- Chat in real time
- Mobile app
- Single sign-on
- Spam blocking
Cons
- No live chat
- Requires engineering help for customizaation
Pricing:
- Starter: $20/month
- Standard: $100/month
- Business: $300/month
- Enterprise: custom price available upon request
The secret to engagement, retention, and scale?
Top brands already know it.
7. Flarum
Flarum is a simple discussion platform that is free and easy to use, with all the features required to run a community. It is also customizable.
Summary of key features:
The platform stands out for its advanced customization options, themes and custom CSS. It also has hundreds of integrations allowing you to connect with community members both on public and private channels.
Pros
- Open source and free to download and run on your preferred VPS hosting provider
- Accessible
- Fast and user friendly
- Customizable
- Extendable
Cons
- Limited core feature set
- Lack of support options
- Better suited to community builders with development knowledge
- Hard to install
Pricing:
Open source and free to access
The secret to engagement, retention, and scale?
Top brands already know it.
8. Vanilla Forums
Vanilla Forums is a cloud-based open-source community forum platform that gives you the ability to create interactive online forums.
Summary of key features:
It includes good engagement management, user-generated content, and help desk management with social media
Pros
- Robust moderation tools
- Built-in gamification engine
- Doesn't require in-depth technical knowledge to set up
- Some analytics and reporting insight
Cons
- Enterprise cloud pricing is costly
- Customer support doesn't include live chat
- Currently no native mobile app
- No searchable member directory
- Limited embedding options
- Limited personalization
- Limited customization options
Pricing:
Open source and free. The pricing for the cloud-hosted plan is not available on the website.
The secret to engagement, retention, and scale?
Top brands already know it.
9. Gainsight Digital Hub (formerly inSided)
InSided – now known as Gainsight Digital Hub – is a purpose-built all in one, self-service destination to engage and retain customers.
Summary of key features:
Gainsight Digital Hub offers no-code widget builders, and an intuitive UI and powerful integrations.
Pros
- API, plus access controls/permissions
- Activity dashboard and activity tracking
- Alerts
- Collaboration tools
- Appointment management
- Auto responders
- Calendar management
- Call center management
- Call routing
Cons
- A one size fits all solution
- Difficult to customize
- Lacking analytics
- Some batch processing features lacking for large communities
- Limitations on email campaigns
Pricing:
There are three plans for community spaces, but the pricing is not specified:
- Professional: 3 admin seats
- Business: 5 admin seats
- Enterprise: 10 admin seats
The secret to engagement, retention, and scale?
Top brands already know it.
10. Khoros
Khoros communities is a brand community platform that allows businesses to host and manage peer-to-peer spaces for customers to find answers, and share experiences. Organizations can host and manage forums, blogs, contests and quizzes.
Summary of key features:
Features include content moderation, customizable branding, reports, analytics, gamification, and content syndication.
Pros
- API
- Chat/messaging
- Communication management and community management
- Content creation and content management
- Customer experience management
- Customizable branding
- Discussion\Forums
- Engagement tracking and feedback management
- Gamification
- Knowledge base management
- Live chat
- Personalization
- Reporting and statistics
- Search/Filter
- Website management
Cons
- Analytics can be skewed
- Customization is not very flexible
- Difficult to navigate
Pricing: A demo can be booked, but no pricing available
The secret to engagement, retention, and scale?
Top brands already know it.
11. Heartbeat
Heartbeat is a home for online communities. It allows users to create a space for communities to chat, create threads, and use voice and video. It works for online schools, paid communities, innovation hubs, support groups etc.
Summary of key features:
Heartbeat allows you to host chats, threads, documents, and live events. You can also direct message community members if personal one-to-one support or communication is needed. You can link up a Zoom account and provide a Zoom link to host an event and connect to an external calendar like Google or Outlook.
Pros
- Neat and intuitive user interface
- Single tool to host threads, events and documents
- Mobile apps for both IOS and Android
- Good level of customization
Cons
- Limited if you want to build a membership program or course
- Stripe is the only payment gateway integration available
- The starter plan is limited to 1000 members
- Live chat support is available on the main website but not inside the app
Pricing:
- Starter plan: $49/month
- Growth plan: $129/month
- Custom plan: custom price available upon request
The secret to engagement, retention, and scale?
Top brands already know it.
12. Discord
Discord is designed to connect users with communities over voice, video and text chat via Discord servers. It is a gaming and game industry oriented app for growing communities around video games. However, the app may be used for business communications of other kinds.
Summary of key features:
Discord's key features are project management, communication, file sharing and management.
Pros
- Task management
- Workflow automation
- Search and scheduling
- Mobile access
- Visual planning tools
- Chat and discussions
- Internal knowledge base
- Integrations
- Notifications
- Surveys
- Audio and video files
- Access control
- Advanced security features
- Device sync
- HD video streaming
- No setup fee
Cons
- No notification customization
- No premium consulting/integration services
- Server limit on the free version
- Limited free themes
- Limited support
- Very low file transfer limits
- Shareable file size limit
- Lacks aesthetics
- Speech detection is delayed
- Limited search function
Pricing:
The basic version is free, but you can unlock features like larger file uploads with Discord Nitro whose price may vary depending on your region.
The secret to engagement, retention, and scale?
Top brands already know it.
The best Facebook group alternative – recap and comparison
Here's a quick overview of the best Facebook group alternatives, their features and pricing to help you choose the right solution for you.
Why choose an all-in-one customer community platform over Facebook Groups?
As you've already seen, Facebook groups have some limitations that are making it harder to build and manage a thriving community online. Here are four good reasons to opt for a community-building platform like Bettermode instead:
Customizable templates
With Bettermode community website templates, you can create your own online community in a few seconds. Our templates are highly customizable and allow you to brand your personal community platform in a way you can't do with Facebook groups.
Browse Templates
Everything is based on the drag-and-drop principle and you can add any functionalities that you want like forum, messaging, etc. You can add your branding and colors, your logo, use a custom font, and many more things.
Here are some of the most popular templates:
- Startup community platform
- Non-profit community platform
- Collaboration community platform
- Community engagement platform
- E-learning community, ideal for those who are selling online courses
What's more, you can even create your own social media platform that looks like Facebook, using our Basebook template Facebook clone.
Moderation tools
As your community grows, moderation becomes more important to keep the community healthy and engaged and avoid spam and hate speech. Moderating Facebook groups or forums can be time-consuming and overwhelming, but Bettermode offers you advanced moderation features to help automate the process.
Here are some of them:
- Keyword block list
- AI spam detector
- Flagging inappropriate material and members who broke the rules
- Age-based moderation
Check out our five-step framework for moderating a community that will save you a lot of time and help avoid potential problems.
Advanced analytics
If you want to improve your community, you should first be aware of its current performance. That's why it's a good option to choose an all-in-one platform like Bettermode that has built-in analytics tools.
You can track metrics like member enrollment, engagement rates, content popularity, churn risk, ROI and many others.
What's more, Bettermode also integrates with Google Analytics providing you with even more details on user behavior.
Integrations with other tools
Unlike Facebook groups that can't be connected to other tools, community platform solutions come up with many integrations allowing you to standardize your communication across all channels and touchpoints.
Bettermode integrates with messaging platforms like Slack, CRM platforms like Zendesk, email marketing tools like Mailchimp and many, many more tools. You can add dozens of integrations through Zapier, with only a few clicks.
Customer Showcase & Success Story
The search for the ultimate Facebook Groups alternative
Many people are stuck with Facebook groups because they believe other options are either expensive or complicated to figure out. But that doesn't have to be the case.
Bettermode can be an excellent alternative to Facebook groups, as it offers more customization and flexibility and more control over your community. It allows you to build your own branded website within minutes.
Apart from communities and customer portals, you can also use it to create knowledge bases, forums and many other things for your website. Just choose a template and customize it according to your needs, without any coding.
Get started for free and see why so many businesses are switching to Bettermode.
The secret to engagement, retention, and scale?
Top brands already know it.
This article was originally published on August 13th, 2019, and was updated on October 18th, 2024.
FAQs
What is replacing Facebook groups?
Today there are many community-building tools and platforms that are quickly replacing Facebook. To name just a few: community portals like Bettermode, chat tools like Discord or workplace communication tool like Slack.
Is there a free alternative for Facebook?
Yes, there are plenty of simple free community platforms. Bettermode is one of the best Facebook group alternatives as it offers more customization and more advanced community features in general.
Are Facebook groups still a thing?
Yes, people are still using Facebook groups but not as much as they used to. Facebook users are less active and engaged and they're increasingly switching to other platforms and social networks.
What is the downside of Facebook groups?
Some of the things that people complain about the most are distractive interface, lack of customization, difficulties in organizing and moderating content and concerns on user data and privacy.
