Circle vs Guild

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.

Guild was a community and messaging platform for professional groups, built in the UK as a privacy-first alternative to running business communities on WhatsApp, Slack or Facebook groups. Associations, membership organizations, B2B brands, alumni networks and professional services firms used it to host private groups where members discussed topics, shared content and met at events.

The app offered group conversations and direct messaging, member profiles and a directory, events, content sharing and moderation tools for hosts, on both web and mobile, and organizations could run several branded groups for different cohorts or regions. It was ad-free, did not monetize member data and was designed around GDPR. Guild closed on 1 October 2024; the service is no longer available to new or existing users, and there is no plan to buy or sign up for.

This page remains as a record and to help former hosts choose a replacement. Circle is the closest fit for branded professional communities with events and courses, Mighty Networks combines community with paid memberships and branded apps, and Slack suits groups whose members already work in it. Bettermode serves companies running customer communities, and Discord is a free option for less formal groups.