Circle vs Khoros Communities

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.

Khoros Communities is enterprise online community software from Khoros, the company formed in 2019 by the merger of Lithium Technologies and Spredfast. The community product descends from Lithium, which ran some of the largest brand communities and support forums on the web, and it sits within a broader Khoros suite that also covers social media management and customer care. Khoros itself was acquired by IgniteTech in 2025.

The platform powers branded support forums, product user groups, idea exchanges and knowledge bases with deep moderation tools, role-based permissions, gamification through ranks, badges and kudos, and superuser programs that recognize the most helpful members. Content is designed to rank in search and deflect support tickets, and analytics measure engagement, solution rates and deflection. Integrations connect communities with CRMs, help desks and single sign-on. Pricing is not published and is negotiated as an enterprise contract that typically includes implementation services.

Khoros Communities fits large enterprises, especially in technology, telecom, consumer electronics and financial services, that need proven scale, security and moderation for communities with millions of visitors. It is expensive, implementation takes months, and parts of the interface and admin experience feel dated next to newer tools. Startups and mid-size companies get more for less with Discourse, Bettermode (formerly Tribe) or Circle, while inSided (now part of Gainsight) and Higher Logic are common alternatives for customer and association communities.