360Learning vs Circle

360Learning is a corporate learning platform from Paris, founded in 2013 and led by co-founder and CEO Nicolas Hernandez. It raised a $200 million round in 2021 co-led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2. Its core idea is collaborative learning: instead of a small L&D team producing every course, subject-matter experts across the company write and update content while L&D keeps oversight, and learners can comment and request courses.

The product combines an LMS, an LXP layer, customer and partner academies, skills management and AI tools. The AI Content Builder turns existing documents into interactive courses, AI translation localizes them, and recommendations connect learners with courses and internal experts. The Team plan costs $8 per user per month for up to 100 users with no annual commitment; Business and Enterprise are quoted and add flexible user models, advanced integrations and dedicated support. A 30-day trial is available.

It suits mid-sized and large companies with knowledge spread across teams: onboarding, sales enablement, compliance and frontline training. It is not built for selling courses to the public. Docebo is the closest enterprise rival with broader extended-enterprise options, TalentLMS is cheaper and simpler for SMBs, and Thinkific or LearnWorlds fit creators selling courses.

In October 2025 360Learning launched AI Companion, an in-platform assistant that starts with a search mode answering questions from company knowledge. Buying tip: pilot one use case on the monthly Team plan before negotiating a Business contract with HRIS integrations.

Circle is a community platform from a US company founded in 2019 by people who previously built creator tools, and it has become one of the most popular homes for paid communities, cohort courses and B2B customer communities. It brings discussion spaces, chat, events, live streams, courses and memberships into one branded space on web, iOS and Android.

Communities are organized into spaces, each of which can be a post feed, a chat channel, an event calendar or a course. Paywalls, tiers and gated spaces handle monetization with Stripe, and the platform adds its own transaction fee on top of Stripe's charges, a percentage that shrinks on higher plans. Business adds workflows that automate onboarding and member journeys, custom profile fields and API access; AI features help with moderation, summaries and an AI agent that answers members. Fully branded iOS and Android apps are a separate Plus offering with a significant extra price.

Circle fits creators and companies who want a polished, premium community and are willing to pay for it. It is less suited to tight budgets and to knowledge-heavy communities where search and threaded discussion matter most. Skool is simpler and cheaper with gamification built in, Mighty Networks offers a similar all-in-one bundle, Discord is free but noisy and hard to monetize, and Discourse is the open-source choice for searchable forums.