Founded around 2019 in New York, Circle delivers a hosted paid community that puts spaces, courses, events, and memberships in one admin, aimed at creators and small teams with an existing audience and no server work.
CATEGORY · 👥
Community & Forum providers
Community and forum services for webmasters, covering forum software, community platforms, comment systems and membership communities.
All categories
⚡ Automation · 70
☁️ Cloud Server · 355
🚀 CDN Acceleration · 74
✅ Productivity · 99
🌐 Domain Registration · 147
📝 CMS · 114
💳 Payment Platform · 275
🛡️ Security · 111
📊 Analytics · 54
🤖 AI Platform · 71
💬 Communication · 196
🎨 Design Assets · 94
💰 Ad & Affiliate Monetization · 6
🗄️ Backend & Database (BaaS) · 1
📧 Email Service · 98
🔍 SEO & Marketing · 48
🛠️ Developer Tools · 64
📈 Monitoring & Observability · 63
⚖️ Compliance & Legal · 6
💾 Backup & Migration · 6
👥 Community & Forum · 6
🧪 Testing & Optimization · 6
📋 Form & Survey · 6
🤝 Freelance Marketplace · 6
🔤 Web Fonts · 6
🖼️ Media Optimization · 6
📉 Data Visualization & BI · 6
Community & Forum
Started in 2013 in San Francisco by Stack Overflow co-founder Jeff Atwood and others, Discourse rebuilds the forum experience on Ruby on Rails with trust-level mechanics and a plugin ecosystem, available self-hosted or managed.
Built by Invision Power Services, founded in 2002, Invision Community bundles forums, blogs, galleries, downloads, and a Commerce module into one suite, letting paid resource sites and membership communities monetize directly.
Maintained since 2000 on PHP and MySQL, phpBB combines low resource use with a mature extension ecosystem, a classic open-source choice for cheap long-running discussion boards, though mobile experience and automated governance lag.
Launched in 2010 by former vBulletin core developers in the UK, XenForo is commercially licensed with a mature add-on market, where paid downloads, user upgrades, and permission groups anchor its fit for resource and membership communities.
Started around 2014 by Australian developer Toby Zerner, Flarum pairs a PHP backend with a single-page front end for a lightweight modern forum under MIT, with a minimal core and on-demand extensions for small communities.