I love the Circle platform for hosting my community and courses. It takes time to learn the admin part of it, but has great features once you get the hang of it. My favorite part is their support system using their community and attending Weekly Office Hours to ask questions and get unstuck. They also use their community to gather feedback and request features. They keep releasing new features and some are very helpful. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It's difficult at times to navigate the admin and have a full understanding of connecting all the dots on the backend. They have many updates which is great, but often makes it a challenge to stay up to date with everything. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The most helpful thing about Circle is that I can integrate almost everything in one place, from creating a forum for users to uploading course materials. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The least helpful thing is that the sign-up process makes it hard to create new users, which in turn makes onboarding difficult. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We moved onto Circle after trying many platforms to be able to have our course content and community space in one space that was ours (vs a social media site or multiple platforms). It is great for our team and our customers to have access to our full set of offers in one place. They are constantly updating things- we have been on Circle for 2+ years now and many of the features we were missing when we signed up are now on Circle. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There are some limits to customizing things like your course. We really liked the way our course looked visually on our previous platform. Circles courses are a new-er offering of theirs and they have released some visuals to go along with, but I would love to be able to style the courses. I also wish we could edit peoples email addresses for typos- it is a common issue we have when people sign up. Analytics is new-er, could be better and easier to use. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Circle is awesome! I love how it allows me to structure my community so we all know where different conversations are going on. Its course space allows me to upload onboarding materials like a tour of Circle and how members can navigate my community. Circle's new web builder has also made it possible for me to create a website and sales page for my community without paying for extra software or needing to mirror the look on a different site. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I feel like Circle nickels-and-dimes you for functionality. I have under 100 members, but as soon as I go over 100 members, I'll need to pay $20/month if I want to use their email feature. I also found that to make use of the automated workflows they advertise, I quickly needed to upgrade to a business account. I love the platform, but it is very expensive at the end of the day. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I use Circle for a couple of different communities I'm part of, and I like how it creates a space to have Q&A forums that feel professional. The ability to post courses and have questions and support associated with them in an organized way is a big plus for me. It's less chaotic for people who aren't used to course, chat, and forum software. I think Circle's biggest strengths are the way it hosts and formats courses and its forum capability. It provides a more structured, professional, and academic feeling experience. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Live chats aren't good. You can't select someone's message and reply to it without opening a hidden thread. Every other chatting app will simply show the message above, and publicly post the response to the chat. This is good for engagement. The way Circle's chats are designed makes them clunky and slow to navigate. It seems like they're designed to slow down and focus the communication rather than encourage others to join in. The live call feature is also glitchy on mobile. I think it would benefit from updating its chats to a style similar to Discord, Telegram, WhatsApp, iMessage, and other messaging apps. Everybody is familiar with them, and I think the way it is now prevents people from building connections with people in real time. The way it is now also makes the chats work more like a loosely structured customer support chat versus a community chat or group chat. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What I like the most is that it's a centralized platform for everything I want + has integrations to almost any other tool I would need to use (Zapier, Stripe). I also feel like the data is mine since I pay Circle, unlike Substack, which kept spamming my subscribers with marketing emails and auto-subscribing to newsletters they didn't want through dark UX patterns.

The interface is easy to use, and I managed to learn things quickly despite the depth of features.

The pricing is quite high but it's worth the upside once I start the monetization. I dislike that the email hub/contacts is not included in the $2.5k I pay yearly, that feels like a basic feature that should be included in a business plan.

No complaints about performance. It's always working when I need it and emails get delivered fast.

Onboarding was extremely smooth. The checklist was helpful and you have so many useful guides/videos on your site to get started.

As for AI features, I honestly haven't used them so far because I didn't really need them. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

While I love the templates for some spaces, I think the Courses are placed oddly in the overall experience. Why does each course have to be its own space? In my case, I want to create one space with specific courses related to that space's topic which is impossible to do.

The more courses you have, the spaces become harder to navigate.

The other controls that are helpful would be paywalls on specific posts, rather than entire spaces. Sometimes, you want to give people a preview of what to expect in the paywalled space, and it's hard to do with the current structure.

Finally, I'm not a fan of the AI chatbot. It's helpful for basic questions, but I was trying so hard to connect to an actual person and it never re-routed my request after saying it would multiple times so I gave up. It was incredibly frustrating to get an answer and I still haven't gotten it. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Circle is a robust, well-supported community software that makes it easy to engage with people I care about. Their suite of offerings is a perfect fit for engagement and connection without friction. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

While Circle is constantly improving, there are many slow-moving development cycles. Certain features that seem to be obvious and simple are not able to be implemented without considerable work. Their backend architecture is good, but seems like they've had to do work-arounds as needs have developed. This isn't uncommon, just frustrating at times. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Circle has transformed our community. We moved from a free platform to Circle in 2025 and we kept all the things we liked about the old platform and ditched everything we hated and GOT SO MUCH MORE! We are able to monetize, prioritize, create new content, search easily, tag posts in a split second ... it's made our community even more special than it was before. Customer support is also great, cannot be beat! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Our biggest challenge has been getting folks to adopt a new platform/app/account. Many people have signed up but then do not engage or log back in. That is something we are working on but is just a challenge inherent in moving away from a free platform that folks have used for over a decade. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I find Circle to be really useful for getting ambassadors together and onboarding them to run an online community. The social element, especially the events side, is incredibly handy. It's great that it changes depending on the location, which lets us set up events that people can easily understand in their specific part of the world. I also like the different spaces and the way they are laid out. It makes it easy to have personalized groups for different localities within our global community, which is quite valuable. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I don't think the workflow is very user friendly. I don't like the fact that, a lot of the gamification side of things, they're not particularly adept at rewarding points easily either. So, I think the rewarding of points is also quite limited, making a lot of it more of a manual task than it needs to be. Also, the lack of ability to sort of video call within messages isn't ideal either because it'd be really nice to have a sort of meeting feature within Circle, opposed to having to set up an event and give people specific access, which is just more of a hassle than it needs to be. So, we'd have to go off Circle and using, like, Zoom or Google Meet or something where, if that was in built within the app, that would have been much easier. On top of this, the leaderboards - why are you limited to seeing the top 10 members. You should have a more complete gameification offering showing you more in-depth details about the levelling up of community members. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like how easy it is to create different content sections within Circle. The ability to monitor who is engaging with the content based on my settings is really helpful. It informs us which content is performing best and which type we should focus on more. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

With a recent project, we created sections for each learning module but participants had to join each space to activate the content. I'd prefer that to be automatically turned on. Also, there needs to be more flexibility in stacking content as layers upon layers in the left-hand nav. Currently you can only go 2 layers deep. Going 3 would be great. Going 4 or more would be fantastic. We built and coded ads within our communities but they're not as seamlessly integrated as I would like. Making this a built-in feature would be appreciated. If you're not familiar with these types of platforms, I imagine people would get frustrated with some of the setup process—especially when you get into deeper things like setting up AI agents. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.