
The creators and brands who spent a decade renting attention on other people's feeds are now buying software to build private homes instead. Skool, Patreon, Podia and a stack of quieter forum companies are all fighting to be the front door.

Uscreen, Bevy, Almabase, Personify, Zendesk and Gradual are all selling the same promise - a place to gather your people - and quietly disagreeing about who those people actually belong to.

Gravyty, Podia, Khoros, Bevy, Personify and a crowd of rivals all sell the same promise - that your audience is an asset you control. The platforms making that promise keep getting bought, merged and switched off.

Open Social and CMNTY are both Dutch, both say they build community, and both are right - one hands you a network you own, the other turns a crowd's opinions into research data. Here is why the same word points at two very different businesses.

Skool, Circle, Discourse, Gainsight, Salesforce and Gravyty are all selling the same thing - a place for your people to gather. The difference is who keeps the keys.

Six platforms - from open-source Discourse to enterprise Khoros and Salesforce - are quietly fighting over the same thing: the conversations your customers have about you. Building that crowd turns out to be the easy part. Owning it is where it gets expensive.

Zendesk, Khoros, Thinkific, Disciple and a pack of rivals are betting that organizations will pay to own the audiences they once rented from Facebook. Here is how the community software scramble is shaking out.

Almabase, Hivebrite, Gravyty, Zapnito, Threado, Khoros and a pack of forum-software veterans are all selling one promise - a place your people gather that you actually own. The market got crowded, then it started eating itself.

Zapnito, Almabase, Disciple, XenForo, Gainsight and CMNTY are quietly selling brands a way to own their audience instead of renting it from a feed. Here is how one market splits into six very different bets.

Personify, ToucanTech, Discourse and Forumbee all promise to gather your people in one place - but they pick very different people. Here is how the community-software field splits, and how to read it before you sign anything.
The San Francisco community software company has spent more than a decade on a quiet bet: the best help desk is a crowd of customers answering each other in the open.