# The Online Community Software Market

> A field guide to the companies building the software behind private online communities. On one side sit the creator-first platforms - Skool, Patreon, Podia and GroupApp - that bundle a feed, a course player and a payment button so an individual can own the room their fans meet in. On the other sit the legacy forum vendors like vBulletin (MH Sub I) and Invision Community, plus support-focused newcomers like Forumbee and AI layers like Threado. The shared bet: after a decade of renting attention on social feeds, creators and brands want to own the place their audience actually shows up.

## Achievements

- Turned the online forum, a format written off as dead, into a paid, recurring-revenue business model.
- Patreon has paid out billions of dollars to creators since 2013, proving fans will fund work directly.
- Skool combined a Facebook-style feed, a course classroom and a leaderboard into one deliberately minimal product that operators can set up in minutes.
- vBulletin and Invision Community kept large forums running for over two decades, long after social feeds were declared their replacement.
- GroupApp and Podia collapsed the creator stack - community, courses, memberships and payments - into single dashboards.

## Latest updates

- **2024-01** — Alex Hormozi partners with Skool and invests, with an a16z-backed round implying a valuation above 1 billion dollars.
- **2025-01** — AI moves from novelty to baseline across the category - co-pilots, auto-moderation and engagement scoring ship in most major platforms.

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Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-08-10