Tribe is a community platform — consider this as a solution that offers you different building blocks so you can arrange and configure them to create different types of community pages. This helps businesses create unique brand-led communities since every community is different.

Apart from that, community admins have access to carefully crafted color palletes, themes, and templates to get started easily with best practices. These can be further customized exactly based on the business needs. Spaces in Tribe communities support different views so you can also customize the way posts are presented.

Circle’s customizabiltiy is limited to different views you can use to present posts in a Space.

Communities powered by Tribe can be easily embedded into website, mobile apps, and web apps. When combined with JWT SSO, this becomes a powerful way to seamlessly add community experience into apps.

Community admins have different configurations for the embeddable widgets. For example, in the case of embedding a Space you can make it ready only and choose to show or hide header, post editor, about section, etc.

With Tribe’s React SDK, it becomes easy to fully integrate the community into React apps and completely customize the user interface.

While Circle offers embeddable widgets, they are not as customizable as Tribe’s embedding solutions.

Tribe’s App Store includes a growing number of apps that can be installed to unlock additional functionalities, enhance your community, and integrate the community with tools you already use.

With Circle, there is no concept of modular apps that can be installed to enhance your community.

Large businesses often required advanced security to add additional layer of protection to community. That’s why Tribe offers custom security header, SSL certificate, and hosts data in a SOC II certified server.

These advanced security features are not available with Circle.

If you are looking to build custom functionalities for your community, Tribe’s Developer Portal can help you with API, webhooks, and Liquid Template engine. These custom enhancements are available in your community App Store as custom apps.

While Circle gives you access to API, there is no dedicated developer platform to enhance your community based on your needs.

Community monetization with Tribe is handled through integration with Memberful and Outseta. You can even set up Zapier integration with Stripe to process payments. However, there is no native payment processing functionality that can be utilized to charge membership fee.

Circle offers native payment processing so you can easily monetize your community. If this important for your community, Circle will be good choice.

Tribe doesn’t offer a mobile app that community members can use to log in to the community. However, it is easy to integrate Tribe into mobile apps using widgets and JWT SSO.

In future, Tribe will offer an SDK to help businesses create completely white-label mobile for the community if a standalone mobile app for the community is required.

Circle offers a Circle-branded mobile app to help community members log in.

Live streaming is a great way to engage members with live video feed and chat functionality. Tribe currently doesn’t offer native live streaming capabilty. However, live events from Facebook and YouTube can be easily embedded in Tribe communities.

Circle offers live streaming capability directly inside the community. If this is important for your community, Circle will be a good choice.

GDPR compliance, data residency, audit logs are important to comply with regulatory requirements and governance. Tribe’s Cookie Consent Manager app, data export/import capability, and more enable GDPR compliance. Tribe’s audit log feature is available to all the enteprise customers.

Apart from that Tribe offers data residency to companies looking to host data in Europe (Germany to be specific).

Circle offers GDPR compliance but there is no audit log and data residency capability.

Tribe offers a powerful analytics and reporting suite with a combination of native community analytics and third-party integration with solutions such as Amplitude Analytics and Google Analytics.

This allows community admins to have a granular view of the member activities and properties. Ampltude integration makes in easy to measure member stickiness, retention, member lifecycle, Space-specific engagement, and more.

Circle’s analytics is confined to the native analytics.

Tribe offers Advanced and Enterprise subscription plans. The Advanced plan costs $599/mo with an annual subscription. The Enterprise plan requires custom pricing and Tribe’s sales team can help with that.

Circle offers Basic ($39/mo), Professional ($99/mo), and Enterprise plan ($399/mo). There are additional costs based on different add-ons such as custom OAuth/SSO and additional Spaces.

If you are looking for a cheaper alternative to Tribe, Circle is a good choice.

Tribe is designed to help businesses improve customer success, collect feedback, boost customer engagement, and peer-to-peer support. Because of Tribe’s focus on businesses, there will be tighter integration with business tools such as HubSpot, Intercom, Saleforce, Zendesk, and more.

Tribe’s product roadmap is fully influenced by the needs of businesses building customer communities.

Circle started as a community software for creators. However, recently they changed their focus to cater to both creators and brands. Hence, the solutions offered by Circle may not always appeal to the businesses.