Circle

Circle is a community platform for creators and brands: discussions, chat, courses, events and paid memberships on your own domain, sold flat per community.

Circle is a hosted community platform for a creator, coach or brand who wants the community, the course and the checkout in one product rather than a forum bolted to a course tool bolted to a payment link. It runs on your own domain and embeds in your own site. It is built by CircleCo, a fully remote company founded in early 2020. Threaded discussion spaces and chat spaces with direct messages hold the conversation, and private and paid spaces gate it. Courses carry lessons and progress tracking, events come with RSVPs, reminders and replays, and live streams and live rooms bring members together in real time. Points, badges and leaderboards reward contributors, a searchable member directory connects them, and a weekly community digest brings them back. Paid memberships run through Stripe, a website builder and custom domain frame the whole thing, and a moderation queue with flagging and reporting and analytics keep it healthy. Workflows automates the routine, and the Admin API, the Headless Member API and Circle MCP open the community to custom code and AI agents. Custom SSO through Auth0 and OIDC, white-label iOS and Android apps, embeddable widgets, an Email Hub marketing add-on and Circle AI credits complete the platform. Circle suits creators selling courses and memberships, coaches running cohort programs, membership businesses charging for access and brands running a customer community. Teams replacing a Facebook group or a Slack workspace use it as the home base, and product teams build a custom community interface on its API. Circle is sold as a flat subscription per community rather than per seat, on the Professional and Business tiers with annual billing and on Circle Plus by quote, with a card-free trial and a money-back guarantee. A share of member payments goes to Circle alongside the subscription, falling on higher plans, and add-ons such as Email Hub and branded apps are priced separately. Communities on Circle run as paid memberships, as cohort-based and self-paced courses, as live coaching sessions and virtual summits, and as the place where a brand's customers meet each other. Payments go through Stripe, email goes out through Email Hub, and the APIs reach everything else, so a creator's website, payment processor and email tool keep their jobs alongside it.