If I could get back every hour I’ve spent building and rebuilding my tech stack, I’d have about a month of work time back. I like trying the shiny new thing. It has paid off. It has also cost me.
You’re probably somewhere in the middle of that right now. Circle is set up, the welcome email lives somewhere else, the sales page is in a third place, and you have four logins open just to get one new member through the door.
So which community building tools are actually worth the setup time?
Here are the nine I use on client builds after more than six years of building communities: what each one is for, and where each one falls short, so you can build your stack once instead of three times.
What Community Building Tools Do You Actually Need?
Three cover most of it: a community platform, a design tool, and an email tool. For me that’s Circle, Canva, and Flodesk, and every client conversation I have starts there.
The other six exist because of specific gaps. Almost all of them trace back to something the platform doesn’t do the way I need it to, which is why I pick the platform first and build outward from there.
When I sit down with a new client, the first three questions are always the same:
- Are you already on a platform? If not, let’s look at Circle.
- Are you using Canva? (Most small business owners already are, in some form.)
- What’s handling your email? If nothing yet, Flodesk.
Everything after that depends on how the membership is structured and who’s running it.
Why Is Circle the Platform I Build On?
For price and functionality together, Circle gives you the most for the money. I’ve tried Mighty Networks and Bettermode too, and Circle is where I keep landing.
It’s modern, it makes the core job of hosting a community easy, and the company builds from its users’ feedback. The roadmap reads like a list of what community builders have been asking for.
The point of a platform like Circle is to take the audience you’re already gathering on Facebook or Instagram and bring them somewhere you own. Your space, your rules, your members talking to each other instead of to an algorithm. There’s more on the different ways to build that in the Community At Heart episode archive.
It isn’t perfect, and the gaps I’ve worked around shape the rest of this list:
- Its native emails don’t carry your branding
- The lock screen on paid spaces is hard to customize
- I wanted a different checkout experience than the built-in payment gateways
- There’s no dashboard where members land, outside of the home feed
- Integrations still need help from outside tools
Circle ships new features constantly, so check where each of these stands in your own account before you add a tool to cover it.
How Do You Fill the Gaps Circle Leaves?
Branded email goes through Flodesk, connected by Zapier. Sales pages live on your own website. Checkout and membership tiers can run through MemberSpace when Circle’s payments don’t fit.
Flodesk for branded email
Circle sends notifications, but they don’t look like your brand, and branding matters in community. Flodesk is the patch on that hole.
What that looks like:
- Send every new member into Flodesk the moment they join
- Trigger a welcome and nurture sequence from day one
- Keep your newsletter and your community emails in one branded place
I use it for every client but one. She has a very large list and needs integrations Flodesk doesn’t support, so her newsletter lives in Mailchimp, which has the features and a price to match. For nearly everyone else, Flodesk’s price makes it the easy call. If you’re still on the fence about email at all, start with why building an email list is crucial for community building.
Zapier to connect it all
Zapier is how a new Circle member ends up in Flodesk. It’s one of the first things I set up for anyone we work with, because a welcome sequence isn’t optional. Welcoming and nurturing people from day one is how community gets built.
I’ll be honest: I’ve stumbled my way through a lot of zaps, and I know I’m only using a fraction of what it can do. It also costs money, so I try to do as much as I can before adding it. For one client, we built an entire ticketed events setup with Zapier and Circle.
Showit for your website and landing pages
I built my own site on Showit and use it for most clients, with Squarespace for some. Showit is flexible, and it runs its blog on WordPress, so you get both without being a coder.
Circle’s lock screen is the reason this matters. We built a Canva lock screen template to make it more on brand, and it’s still clunky. The fix is a real landing page on your own website:
- Build static landing pages on your site, not on Leadpages or similar
- Match your branding fully, because you control the design
- Send people to your site, where they can find everything else you’ve made
Every visitor to your own site helps your SEO, and a rabbit hole of your own content is a good place for a future member to get lost.
On templates: I bought mine from Tonic. Their lower-end templates start around $1,200, and I paid more to get a sales page and extras. It was worth it, because designing from scratch would have taken far longer. Showit also offers free templates, so you can pick your budget.
MemberSpace for checkout and tiers
I don’t use Circle’s payment gateways. I use MemberSpace and its Circle integration.
Here’s how it’s set up. Free members sign up on a landing page on my website and reach a dashboard with access to the community and everything else I want them to see. Paid members go through a MemberSpace gateway on a separate landing page, which gives them access to additional spaces inside Circle.
I manage every tier from one place and add or remove what each one includes. This is expert level. If your membership is a straightforward Circle subscription, you don’t need it. If it’s more than that, look at it.
What Else Belongs in a Community Builder’s Tech Stack?
Canva for graphics, a styled stock library for imagery, ClickUp to stay organized, and Descript for audio and video. None of them fix a Circle gap. They keep the work moving.
Canva for every graphic
I was on the waitlist as one of Canva’s earliest users, and I still use it every day. It’s drag and drop, it’s full of templates, and you don’t need to be a designer.
- Cover images sized to fit each Circle space
- Slide decks and workbooks for courses
- Podcast art and social posts
Haute Stock and Elevate for imagery
I’ve used styled stock libraries for over a decade. Haute Stock and Elevate (formerly Social Squares) are my favorites. Both are relatively low cost and include stock video and Canva social templates. The stock video on my website came from Haute Stock.
The caveat: I mostly work with women in small business, and both libraries lean feminine and modern. For anything outside that look, I also subscribe to Adobe Stock.
ClickUp for organization
If you aren’t organized from the start, stop and get organized. Disorganization will stall your growth before almost anything else does.
I switched from Asana to ClickUp about three years ago. Every piece of community content lives there: posts, videos, courses. My team tracks tasks there too. When a podcast episode is recorded, it moves to the editing team inside ClickUp, and we run tech support and our roadmap from it as well.
It has a real learning curve. It’s worth the time anyway.
Descript for audio and video
My team edits every video and podcast we produce in Descript, including six podcasts a week. You edit the recording by editing its transcript, and the studio sound feature cleans up audio from a less-than-perfect mic.
I found it because a client needed full transcripts. Descript also owns SquadCast now, which is what we use to record guest episodes, so recording and editing happen in one place.
Which Community Building Tools Can You Skip for Now?
ClickUp, MemberSpace, and Zapier are the expert-level tools. If you’re early, start with Circle, Canva, and Flodesk, and add the rest only when a real gap shows up.
Every tool you add is another bill, another login, and another thing that can break between two others. That’s not a reason to avoid them. It’s a reason to add them on purpose.
A good test: can you name the specific thing that’s failing without it? “New members aren’t getting a welcome email” is a reason to add Zapier. “Everyone seems to use it” isn’t. And if you haven’t opened the doors yet, what your community actually needs on day one matters more than any tool on this list.
Try This Prompt
Use this to see where your stack is doing double duty and where it has a hole.
“I run a [type of community] on [platform] for [who it serves]. Here’s my current tech stack and what each tool does: [list]. Here’s how a new member moves from signup to the end of their first week: [describe]. Based on the approach in this post, map where each tool hands off to the next, flag any step that’s manual or missing, and point out any tools that overlap. Give me a table with three columns: the step, the tool handling it, and the gap or overlap.”
Pick the Platform, Then Build Outward
I’ve lost a month to tools. Most of it came from adding something before I knew what problem it was solving.
Your members will never see your stack. They’ll see whether the welcome email showed up, whether the sales page looked like you, whether the checkout made sense. The tools only matter as far as those moments go right.
Start with the platform. Name the gap. Then add the one tool that closes it.
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Tech Savvy: 9 Tools I Swear By for Thriving Communities
More like it on Your Community Strategist, new every Thursday.
More Like This
Listen: 10 Reasons Why Building an Email List is Crucial for Community Building. The case for the email side of your stack, before you pick the tool.
Listen: What Your Community Actually Needs on Day One. What to build first, so the tools have something worth supporting.
Listen: Batch Like a Boss: 10 Strategies to Supercharge Your Workflow. The workflow side of staying organized once your tools are in place.
Keep Going
coCreator Society is where community builders and membership founders work through this together, with the templates, the walkthroughs, and people who are one step ahead of you. Join coCreator Society
If you would rather not do this part alone, Rachel and the team build, migrate, and run communities for founders who need it done properly the first time. Talk to the team
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