Hey, Karl again. How ya doing?
Welcome to my Mighty Networks review.
After using Teachable, Kartra, and a few other platforms for online courses as well as testing pretty much every online community platform out there, I want to give my detailed opinion on Mighty Networks after taking the deep dive.
Mighty Networks is the best online community platform, but it has some serious flaws for online course creators.
Once you choose a platform, there’s no going back (trust me, I’m still dealing with issues 3 years later), so you need carefully consider before building your business on this one.
In this Might Networks review, I’ll cover everything you need to know to make an informed decision. Including:
- Who Mighty Networks is and isn’t for
- The pros and cons of Mighty Networks
- Insight into key course and community features
- How it compares to other course platforms
- My thoughts on Mighty Networks' pricing
- My advice to you after creating a successful online course and mistakes to avoid
I've just updated our full round-up of the best community platforms in 2024 so all the info you see here is up to date as well as my real world experiences with them (and other tools).
Let’s get to it…
Mighty Networks Review: Quick Verdict
As soon as I signed up for Mighty Networks, I was legit blown away by the community platform.
Mighty Networks is outstanding. Like, 9-out-of-10 outstanding. And it’s way cheaper than other community platforms like Kajabi.
I’ve never seen another tool that brings you this close to your community. There are chats, events, videos, badges, location services, icebreakers, and more. It’s also super simple to interact with and navigate.
Most online community platforms just host your community. It’s on YOU to do all the work. Mighty Networks helps you grow that community with engaging features and simplified interactions.
It’s like a Facebook Group on steroids. Delicious Mighty Network-flavored growth hormone.
BUT…
I definitely don’t recommend Mighty Networks as a standalone online course platform. Online courses feel kinda like an afterthought. You need 3rd-party plugins to integrate even basic features like quizzes. That’s a non-starter for me.
As soon as I saw that Mighty Networks didn’t even host videos for you, I got a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach (that could be the Thai food, though).
I’ll sum it up for you this way:
If you want to grow a thriving online community with articles, videos, chats, and events—and THEN offer a course, Mighty Networks is perfect. It’s probably the best platform ever made for that purpose.
If you want to build a standalone masterclass course and market it to the public, Mighty Networks IS NOT for you. At least not alone.
In simpler terms, Mighty Networks is all about building a community and offering smaller courses to that community. It’s not for making an online course and trying to sell it to randos. If you’re interested in why that’s true, then read on.
Who Is Mighty Networks for and Not For?
Mighty Networks Is Perfect For….
- Entrepreneurs with an in-demand skill who want to build a thriving community of students
- Social media influencers with a following who want to level up their community
- Course solopreneurs with Facebook groups who want to level up their community
- Brands that want to white-label their community via an app
- Companies who want to level up from Whatsapp, Telegram, or Facebook groups to a platform with real features
Might Networks Is NOT Ideal For…
- Skilled solopreneurs looking to build an authority course (e.g. tons of videos, quizzes, progress reports, analytics, etc.)
- Entrepreneurs looking to offer services, consulting, or courses without an existing community
- High-level entrepreneurs selling expensive courses
- Anyone NOT INTERESTED in building a large, interactive, complex community
Mighty Networks Overview
Mighty Networks is one of the largest, most popular, and most feature-rich community platforms ever created.
The whole idea is to give you a place to bring your courses, community, and memberships together under one roof.
With Mighty Networks, you can stay small with a free community and eventually grow it to an empire complete with your own website, a full course, paid live-streaming events, and even a fully branded mobile app.
Mighty Networks Pros
- Beginner-friendly
- Grow an online community fast
- More community features than any other platform
- Free plan available
- More ways to monetize a community than competitors
Mighty Networks Cons
- Lacks high-end course features
- No native video hosting
- Many integrations needed
- Does not support PayPal
- Limited design options
What Is Mighty Networks and Why Is It the Best Online Community Builder?
Imagine being in control of your own social media platform completely dedicated to you.
Now imagine this platform came with a course builder, an online learning portal, features like events, and the ability to build a membership site dedicated to you (or your company).
That’s Mighty Networks in a nutshell.
Mighty Networks is a complete learning management system (LMS) that lets anyone bring their entire online community presence under one roof across all devices.
You could have your community, course, website, and sales funnel all in one platform with advanced community-building features and analytics for as low as about $30/month.
The main difference between Mighty Networks and other platforms is that it has next-level growth features that other platforms just don’t have.
Instead of just hosting a community, Mighty Networks gives you ways to gamify, interact, and monetize that community PLUS more ways for your community to interact with each other.
This will jump-start the snowball effect in your groups, which helps you grow exponentially quicker.
I was honestly floored during the initial demo. After using Kajabi and Kartra for so long, it’s crazy to see what Mighty Networks is capable of.
Features like icebreaker questions, polls and quizzes, member categories, direct messaging, and live events will be like pouring gasoline on a brushfire (that’s not a nice analogy, is it?).
All of this will help:
- Foster community member interaction
- Each member connects with you and grows faster
- Deliver value faster and more easily
- Delegate responsibility to group and sub-group leaders
- Monetize your community in more ways with events, articles, webinars, private groups, and subgroups
Mighty Networks even has an activity feed for each member when they log in, giving it a Facebook-like feel, so they’ll naturally interact with it without fumbling around and giving up.
Key Online Community Features
I’ve always wanted to start a legit online SEO community (or cult of personality) rather than just the same-ole Facebook groups that every SEO uses. Mighty Networks is probably the first platform I’ve ever seen that makes it feel possible.
All of this costs just $99, and it’s dead simple to set up:
- Personalized activity feed: Each member gets their own custom feed, making it super easy for them to jump into groups, participate in events, vote in polls, or direct-message other members.
- Live streaming: This is a massive value add. You can live stream so that all members see you directly in their feed. Not only do you connect with them better, but it also increases perceived value (so you can charge more money…).
- Live events: Host masterminds, full conferences, local meetups, zoom meetings, or give a live concert—I don’t care what you do. No other platform gives you this many options to connect and monetize your audience directly with events.
- Member connections: Mighty Networks offers your members more ways to connect with each other than any other platform. Ways to connect include profiles, members near you, members like you, top members, member categories, ambassadors, and direct chat. Each of these helps grow your community faster. For example, top member badges create a gamified system that encourages members to interact and accomplish as much as possible. And member categories organize members according to things like goals, profession, or even age group so your community builds stronger connections.
- Content: Video, GIFS, quick posts, articles, images—you can post any type of content you want. There’s way more flexibility than a Facebook group and more detailed ways to instruct and interact.
Online Courses
Mighty Networks’ course builder is very basic, and that’s a huge drawback for me personally.
Competitors like Kajabi and Kartra are advanced course builders that let you create communities for those courses. So, they have community-building features within a course platform.
Mighty Networks is the opposite. This is a community builder that lets you create courses to sell to your community.
Not saying either option is good or bad. That’s just the way it is.
Right away, I noticed some serious dealbreakers for me. In no particular order, they are:
- No video hosting: Sorry, can’t do it. No hosting means you either have to use YouTube, Loom, or another paid 3rd-party service like Vimeo. So, now you’re not only paying extra each month, but it also screws up your analytics, slows the videos down, and makes you look unprofessional (the integrations might cause quality or playback issues).
- No built-in lesson enrichment: If you want to have quizzes inside of your lessons, you’ll need a 3rd-party tool. Again, more money and headaches.
- No bulk upload: Not a massive deal, but it is a massive pain. If you have a longer course with dozens of videos, you’re going to have a bad day.
Everything else about the online course tool is pretty standard from there.
First, you create a Section like “Course Overview.” From there, you create Lessons.
Lessons can be text-based, video-based, or both. Remember, there’s no native hosting, so you’ll have to embed the videos from elsewhere (seems like most people use Vimeo).
That’s really it. Nothing too advanced going on here. Create lessons, add content, make it live, and you’re done.
Let’s cover some of the important course styles since that’s where you’re going to make money.
Cohort Courses
This is like a live training course where a group (cohort) takes the course together. For example, you could do a live-streaming cooking course for 10 students at a time and charge more because it “feels” more valuable.
Another example is Community Design Masterclass that’s currently running at Mighty Networks.
Community Courses
I’ve ONLY seen this on Mighty Networks. It’s a smashing idea.
Community courses are basically courses your community takes together—but not necessarily at the same time.
One example might be a “10-day SEO boot camp.”
So, members sign up for your community, and as soon as they land on their feed, they take the 10-day challenge. They can jump right in and see everyone sharing results, posting screenshots, or giving tips.
It’s awesome for community engagement.
Content Courses
These are your regular old, run-of-the-mill type courses that we all know and love. These include content and videos. No big deal here.
NOTE: You can now drip-feed content
Mighty Networks just recently added this feature, and kudos to them. That proves they’re constantly updating the platform, which is a huge win for you.
Now you can lock lessons for a certain amount of days to allow each student enough time to digest lessons and guide them through the course gently.
Other Features (Marketing, Analytics, Sales, etc.)
Let me just get this out of the way quickly.
Mighty Networks is not a marketing platform, so when they claim you can put your whole sales funnel under one roof, take that with a grain of salt.
Sure, you could theoretically have your whole funnel under “one roof,” but that would require integrations and sacrifice a lot of functionality.
I’ll explain it all in this section. Let’s start with the basics.
Domains
By default, you will have an mn.co domain. It’s not great for branding and marketing, but not the end of the world.
The good news is you can connect a custom domain super easily.
Just navigate to the Domain section in Settings and change your domain name there.
Having your own domain is way better for business in my opinion. Sure, you have to pay for it but remember you’re running a business. That means investing $9 in a name. It’s not much.
Landing Pages
Basic isn’t always a bad thing. Sure, you can’t make the Guernica of landing pages, but if you’re a beginner who just wants a page up and running fast, then not dealing with landing page builder gore is actually a good thing.
You’ll save hundreds or even thousands of dollars by not having to hire a pro to build your landing page.
There are some drawbacks here though.
You can’t really modify the design, and for courses, Mighty Networks will actually prepopulate some sections based on information that you fill in elsewhere (e.g., your course pricing).
It sucks that you can’t really modify anything, but that’s the cost of simplicity.
Choose either the community or the creator template depending on what you’re promoting:
Add your branding such as a logo and colors:
And then fill in the content blocks with pictures, videos, web copy, and testimonials (if you have them).
Is it perfect? No. Will it do for now until you can hire a pro? Yes.
Note: Yes, you can use coupon codes and affiliates to grow your business.
Pricing Options
Mighty Networks gives you a few different pricing and delivery options. For the most part, it’s all pretty industry standard with one little quirk.
You can set communities to private, public, or secret and make them free or paid. And courses can be offered for a one-time payment, a subscription, or free. You can even sell a bundle. All super standard.
One weird thing is that you need to select a price from a pre-selected menu of prices. I think this has to do with how they populate the course landing page.
All of the prices are $179.99, $189, $199.49, etc. So, if I want to make my course a flat $1,000, I can’t. But it’s my course, dang it. Let me price it how I want.
Analytics and Reporting
Mighty Insights, Mighty Networks’ premium analytics, contains tons of useful, actionable data that will help you make better business decisions.
What their team told me was that most creators tend to focus on member behavior analytics like “stickiness.” That’s a measure of how often people come back and interact with you.
You can roughly calculate that by taking the total members and comparing it to your monthly active members.
Once you identify who’s inactive, you can try to hit them with offers or rewards for becoming active again.
The best part about these analytics is that you get a 10,000-foot view of what’s happening in your business, so you can actually see what’s working and double down on it.
Like, if you notice that members are more active after watching a certain course, you’ll know to push that course more or even make more courses to improve engagement.
It’s totally worth upgrading to the Business Plan to gain access to them.
Mighty Networks Pricing: Is It Worth the Money?
~$30 a month for the best community-building software around is a steal. For 99% of entrepreneurs out there, that’s less than 1 subscription.
And here’s the cool thing…
Mighty Networks doesn’t hide critical features in higher-priced plans just so they can advertise “cheap” entry-level plans to get you in the door.
Some tools say “get started for $30,” but then you realize their cheap plan doesn’t include video, chat, or something super critical, so now you’re stuck upgrading to a $100/month plan.
With Mighty Networks’ Community Plan, you can run your business with key features like video, chat, live streaming, all types of events, and member profiles.
The only drawbacks are:
- No courses: Courses are only on the Business Plan.
- A higher fee: 3% is a bit much, but it’s more or less the same as some of the totally worthless competing platforms out there that don’t even offer decent features. Not going to name names (but it’s Teachable).
- Limited streaming: you only get 5 hours of live streaming per month, but that’s plenty in the beginning.
The Business Plan is $99/month, which is a lot cheaper than Kajabi (which can cost up to hundreds of dollars a month). That’s one of the biggest advantages of Mighty Networks, in my opinion.
You can start your community for cheap, and when you’ve got the cash, upgrade and start churning out courses to level up to six figures and beyond. As you grow, it grows with you at a very affordable price.
Is it worth the money? $33 a month for a platform that’s basically your own social media network with chat, videos, polls, articles, events, live streaming, profiles, a live feed, and group interaction. Yes, it’s worth it.
Note: Mighty Pro is for enterprise-level clients. You’ll need to request a demo.
Mighty Networks Review: Final Verdict
The judgy goat speaks.
Mighty Networks is one of the best places to start, grow, and monetize an online community hands-down. I was really blown away by all of the features.
No other platform gives you this many ways to interact with, divide, educate, and monetize a group, all while staying super user-friendly and affordable.
If you’re looking for the best place to grow a following with community content, it’s Mighty Networks.
If you’re just looking to sell online courses, then maybe it’s not for you. It’s lacking a lot of online course and marketing features, so you’ll either need to integrate with other tools or sacrifice them altogether. Not a good idea.
However, if you want to grow a community and then sell online courses to community members, that’s a great idea.
Just remember that you cannot just sell courses. It’s not possible. If someone wants to buy your online courses, they must be part of your community.
If you have a paid community, this now creates a MASSIVE problem, because now someone must buy your course AND THEN PAY to access your community.
Here’s the bottom line of this Mighty Networks Review…
If you want a tool that specializes in community-building and comes with a ton of features for generating passive income with a following, get Mighty Networks. There’s a free trial. You’ve got nothing to lose.
If you want to build complex masterclass-style courses, get a real course builder like Kajabi.
Mighty Networks F.A.Q
Q: Is Mighty Networks Safe?
A: Yes, Mighty Networks is 100% safe. It’s one of the most popular online learning platforms for online course creation, building a new community, and community payment processing. According to the company, it has 10,000 content creators, and it’s been in business for more than 5 years.
Q: What is Mighty Networks good for?
A: Mighty Networks is good for online courses, its Mighty Networks App, creating your own native mobile apps available on Android and iOS devices, and growing a thriving community. It’s one of the best places to host, grow, and monetize a community.
Q: What is better than Mighty Networks?
A: Some platforms may be better than Mighty Networks for different things. Like, if you want to create online courses, alternatives to Mighty Networks could be Kajabi, Karta, or other social media platforms. However, most are more expensive. Mighty Networks’ Community Plan is only $33 per month and their Business Plan is only $99. That’s a fraction of the cost of competitors.
Q: Can you make money on Mighty Networks?
A: Yes, you can make money on Mighty Networks. There are currently 10,000 content creators who sell various different things to their community members. You can sell online courses, events, videos, articles, or even your own tutorials. All you need to do is create your community content and build a landing page or sales pages. You can start making money from new members right away. It’ll even process payments for you.
Q: Is Mighty Networks free?
A: Yes, Mighty Networks has a Free Plan, but it’s very limited. There’s also a 14-day free trial. No credit card is required. If you want to try Mighty Networks, just sign up today and give it a shot. You’ll have access to all key features for 14 days before you need to make a decision to buy it or not. Mighty Networks' price is really affordable, and with the free trial, it’s easy to decide if you want to upgrade to the Community Plan.