Is your community engagement falling flat?
Juggling different platforms makes it nearly impossible to see what’s working. You’re trying to connect with your audience in a meaningful way.
The real frustration is not being able to prove the ROI of your efforts. It makes it hard to justify your work and scale your community.
Without a unified system, valuable member interactions get lost in the noise. Opportunities to deepen community loyalty and drive growth simply vanish.
But the right software can change all that. It helps you streamline your entire workflow so you can finally get a clear view of your impact.
In this guide, I’ll walk you through my top picks for the best community management software. These are tools that help boost engagement and demonstrate real results.
You’ll discover how to automate tedious tasks, gain actionable insights from your data, and finally prove your community’s value to stakeholders.
Let’s dive in.
Quick Summary:
| # | Software | Rating | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Hivebrite → | Diverse large communities | |
| 2 | Gainsight → | Enterprise customer success | |
| 3 | Bettermode → | Scalable brand communities | |
| 4 | Tradewing → | Professional associations | |
| 5 | Heartbeat → | Community-led businesses |
1. Hivebrite
Struggling to really engage your diverse online community?
Hivebrite offers a powerful, all-in-one solution to boost engagement and manage your community effectively. This means you can create a branded hub with its own URL and mobile app.
It empowers you to structure your user base effectively and automate processes, ensuring your community always feels connected.
It’s time to supercharge your community efforts.
Hivebrite revolutionizes how you connect with your audience, from customers and partners to donors and alumni. Its customizable platform inspires and motivates users, driving engagement by enabling independent networking and sharing.
This versatility helps you foster knowledge sharing, strategically align goals, and cultivate a strong sense of belonging among members, no matter your industry or specific needs. Plus, the robust analytics allow you to track success and demonstrate clear ROI, while easy integrations fit into your existing tech stack. The result is a vibrant community that thrives and grows.
Key features:
- Branded All-in-One Hub: Create a unique digital space with custom URL and mobile app to reinforce your brand and cultural identity, fostering pride and engagement.
- Organize and Automate: Structure your community effectively, automate management processes, and inspire users to drive engagement and enable independent networking.
- Monetize and Measure: Facilitate revenue generation and clearly demonstrate return on investment through robust analytics, helping you track and optimize your community’s financial impact.
Hivebrite features, pricing, & alternatives →
Verdict: Hivebrite is an excellent contender for the best community management software, especially if you need deep customization and a strong focus on monetization and ROI. Its ability to power diverse communities, from commercial enterprises to non-profits and educational institutions, highlights its adaptability and comprehensive feature set for sustained engagement and growth.
2. Gainsight
Struggling to track engagement across multiple platforms?
Gainsight offers a dedicated Customer Communities product, providing a single hub for self-service, connecting directly to your engagement needs. This means you can give your customers a unified experience.
This consolidated approach helps you move away from manual tracking, offering a centralized place where your community can connect, share best practices, and provide feedback to build stronger relationships.
Here’s how to provide a single hub for anytime, anywhere self-service.
Gainsight solves this by giving your customers a single hub for anytime, anywhere, self-service through its Customer Communities product. This allows you to build a modern customer community.
Additionally, the platform includes Product Experience tools to improve user adoption with in-app engagements and meaningful product analytics, helping you proactively guide users to value. You can also scale onboarding, boost adoption, and monetize customer education through Skilljar. This comprehensive system ensures your entire customer journey feels intentional and aligned.
Plus, Gainsight offers real-time, AI-powered customer engagement insights across all conversations through Staircase AI, enabling you to spot risks, surface upsells, and scale personalization without the fluff. This helps identify trends across the customer journey and provides insights that act, not distract, ensuring every touchpoint builds loyalty.
You can truly put customers at the heart of your strategy.
Key features:
- Customer Communities: Provide a central hub for self-service, feedback, and connection, ensuring your customers always have a dedicated place to engage and build stronger relationships.
- Product Experience: Improve user adoption with in-app engagements and product analytics, guiding your users to value and enhancing their journey with your product effectively.
- AI-powered Insights: Leverage Staircase AI for real-time customer engagement insights across all conversations, helping you identify trends, spot risks, and personalize outreach efficiently.
Gainsight features, pricing, & alternatives →
Verdict: If you’re looking for the best community management software that consolidates engagement, adoption, and insights into one system, Gainsight is a powerful choice. Its unified platform and AI capabilities, as demonstrated by customers achieving a ten-fold increase in engagement, help you deliver a seamless customer journey while driving retention and growth.
3. Bettermode
Tired of fragmented community tools and scattered data?
Bettermode unifies your customer engagement, support, and insights into one comprehensive platform.
This means you can transform those scattered interactions into actionable insights and thriving communities, feeling like a natural extension of your brand.
Here’s how you can achieve that.
Bettermode offers a fully modular platform that adapts to your needs, allowing you to toggle features and tweak layouts without limitations. This means you can create a truly customized space for customers to connect, engage, and grow.
Additionally, its AI Search provides smart, fast, and personalized results, boosting engagement, while the AI Moderation ensures your community thrives with minimal effort. Plus, with advanced analytics and reports, you gain deep insights to track engagement and optimize your community’s performance.
The platform also supports real-time notifications and a unified inbox to keep your community connected. This is complemented by robust API and Webhooks for seamless integration with your favorite tools, and localization features for global audiences, offering flexible design options for brand consistency.
Imagine transforming your customer interactions.
Speaking of gaining deeper insights from your data, you might also be interested in my guide on best healthcare analytics software.
Key features:
- Unified Customer Engagement: Centralize discussion forums, knowledge bases, job boards, and events, allowing you to manage all customer interactions and support from a single dashboard.
- AI-Powered Community Tools: Leverage intelligent AI search for fast, personalized answers and AI moderation to maintain community health with minimal manual effort and ensure content safety.
- Customizable and Scalable Platform: Design your community with modular features, flexible layouts, and theming options, supporting growth with advanced analytics to optimize engagement.
Bettermode features, pricing, & alternatives →
Verdict: Bettermode is a top choice if you’re looking for the best community management software that consolidates all your customer engagement efforts. Its modular design and AI-powered tools offer unparalleled flexibility and efficiency, empowering your brand to build thriving communities and achieve measurable results like those seen by Lenovo and Mercedes-Benz.
4. Tradewing
Struggling to engage your community effectively across platforms?
Tradewing offers a comprehensive platform specifically for professional and trade associations. It helps you grow membership renewals, non-dues revenue, and overall engagement.
This means you can easily create membership tiers and collect dues, making your system practically run itself with just a few clicks.
Find your community’s engagement solution.
Tradewing provides all the tools you need to expand your community and its impact, from member engagement to sponsor empowerment. Imagine having a LinkedIn exclusively for your industry!
This online community delivers 24/7 engagement through live discussions, content sharing, and groups, providing a focused, vibrant community right on your website. Tradewing’s built-in event management and hosting tools keep your community’s attention exactly where you want it.
Additionally, Tradewing includes integrated email marketing and automation for member retention, a drag-and-drop website builder for stunning branded pages with no coding, and robust event management for in-person, online, or hybrid events, including registration, ticketing, and live streaming.
Grow renewals, revenue, and impact effortlessly.
Key features:
- Comprehensive Member Engagement: Create membership tiers, manage dues collection, and automate engagement systems for increased renewals and non-dues revenue.
- 24/7 Online Community: Foster continuous interaction with live discussions, content sharing, and groups, functioning like a private social network for your industry.
- Integrated Event & Website Tools: Organize and host online, in-person, or hybrid events with full features and build stunning, branded websites effortlessly.
Tradewing features, pricing, & alternatives →
Verdict: Tradewing is an excellent choice for associations seeking the best community management software. Its comprehensive platform automates engagement, streamlines revenue generation, and provides a focused online community, making it ideal for growing membership and impact, as reflected by positive customer feedback.
5. Heartbeat
Struggling to centralize your community engagement efforts?
Heartbeat helps you manage discussions, courses, and events all on your own domain, simplifying your operations. This means you can consolidate your community activities, avoiding the fragmented experience often found across multiple platforms.
This integrated approach helps you efficiently engage diverse online audiences and maintain a consistent brand voice. Plus, you can easily host live events directly within the platform.
The result is a unified community hub.
Heartbeat serves as your comprehensive operating system for community-led businesses, allowing you to create chats, courses, events, and collect payments seamlessly. Here’s how it works: you can design vibrant spaces for members to connect through threads, chats, and direct messages, enhancing interaction. Additionally, you can craft fun and engaging learning journeys with evergreen or cohort-based courses, complete with native video hosting and automated workflows. The platform also offers robust payment tools that integrate across every feature, allowing you to charge for access, upsell products, and manage subscriptions effortlessly, collecting your first payment in under five minutes.
Heartbeat centralizes everything you need for community success.
Key features:
- Comprehensive Engagement Tools: Facilitates vibrant discussions with threads, direct messages, and private/public spaces, supporting image, video, and file sharing for richer interactions.
- Integrated Learning and Events: Enables you to build and deliver engaging online courses with drip lessons and assignments, plus host live, recurring events directly within the platform.
- Monetization and Automation: Provides powerful payment tools to collect payments, manage subscriptions, and process upsells, while automated workflows reduce administrative busy-work.
Heartbeat features, pricing, & alternatives →
Verdict: If you’re aiming to streamline engagement, offer valuable content, and monetize your community effectively, Heartbeat is a strong contender for the best community management software. It centralizes discussions, courses, and events, while also handling payments, helping over 5,000 communities like No Code Hackers make hundreds of thousands in revenue.
6. Agorapulse
Struggling with social media engagement and proving ROI?
Agorapulse offers an all-in-one platform to efficiently manage your social media, streamlining content management across all major platforms. This means you can save time, stay organized, and handle your social media with ease.
Here’s how it helps: Agorapulse empowers your team with actionable insights, enabling you to measure the metrics that truly matter to your brand.
Simplify your community management today.
Agorapulse centralizes all your social media activities, removing the internal friction of approvals and enhancing team collaboration. This allows you to track and respond to all interactions from one intuitive Inbox, prioritizing and automating responses for better customer experience.
Additionally, the platform lets you plan and schedule content with an intuitive post scheduler and shared calendars, ensuring your content strategy is consistently mastered. You can also monitor brand mentions, industry trends, and competitor activities, uncovering new ideas and protecting your brand reputation. Plus, Agorapulse automatically pulls Google Analytics data to tie social activity to revenue goals, helping you prove the business impact of your campaigns. The result is insightful, presentation-ready reports that don’t take all day to create.
It really boosts efficiency and saves you time.
While we’re discussing various management platforms, my guide on Azure management tools offers further insights into cloud infrastructure.
Key features:
- Unified Inbox: Prioritize and respond to all social interactions efficiently from one centralized place, enhancing engagement and improving customer experience for your brand.
- Content Publishing & Scheduling: Plan and schedule your social media content across all major platforms with an intuitive post scheduler, enabling seamless content management and team collaboration.
- ROI Measurement & Reporting: Automatically connect social media activity to real revenue goals by pulling Google Analytics data and generate actionable reports to prove business impact.
Agorapulse features, pricing, & alternatives →
Verdict: Agorapulse stands out as a leading contender for best community management software by streamlining workflows and providing actionable analytics. Its ability to centralize social media management, enhance team collaboration, and connect social efforts directly to ROI helps you effectively engage diverse audiences and measure true business impact.
7. Sprout Social
Struggling to really engage your online community?
Sprout Social helps you streamline and scale your customer care and community management efforts.
This means you can easily manage diverse audiences across various platforms, ensuring a consistent brand voice for your organization, while also making data-driven decisions that impact your business.
Here’s how to manage every social interaction.
Sprout Social’s unified inbox automates tasks, accelerating response times so you can connect on a human level. You can resolve customer questions faster with AI-enhanced agent replies and control a smarter inbox using automated routing and chatbots. This enables your team to prioritize vital messages with AI-powered message classifications, saving valuable time. Plus, their powerful analytics and listening features uncover trends and insights, helping your team make strategic decisions, leading to a much greater business impact and revenue.
Your community will thrive, and so will your business.
Key features:
- Engagement Tools: Streamline and scale customer care and community management with features like a unified inbox and AI-enhanced agent replies.
- Actionable Analytics: Drive strategic decision-making with robust analytics and listening tools, providing insights from social conversations and performance data.
- Workflow Automation: Accelerate business processes using AI-powered workflows, automated routing, and message classification to save marketers time.
Sprout Social features, pricing, & alternatives →
Verdict: Sprout Social stands out as a best community management software solution, perfect for organizations looking to simplify engagement across multiple platforms. Its all-in-one approach to publishing, analytics, and AI-powered workflows makes it ideal for improving audience targeting and proving social ROI, as demonstrated by Grammarly’s 80%+ reduction in response time.
Conclusion
Ready to unlock community value?
Choosing the right tool is tough. Scattered platforms make it nearly impossible to connect your engagement efforts directly to business growth and proven ROI.
This disconnect is a huge problem for your organization. Without clear, unified metrics, your community’s true value remains invisible to key stakeholders. You’re just guessing instead of growing.
Here’s the tool that fixes this.
From my extensive review, Hivebrite is the top choice. It’s built to link engagement with monetization, giving you clear, measurable results.
Its all-in-one branded hub and robust analytics make it the best community management software for proving value. You can finally show definitive ROI from your community efforts.
If you’re enhancing overall customer experience, my guide on best conversational support software offers valuable insights.
I strongly recommend you book a free demo of Hivebrite to see how this powerful platform can supercharge your community efforts firsthand.
Turn your engagement into measurable growth.
