What is the best tool for building an online community?

Question

I am looking for the best tool to create a community with all the usual social networking tricks (chat, forums, groups etc) I've used NING (years ago) what is the GO-TO these days?

Craig Roh · Accepted Answer

If you're looking to grow a paid community Mighty Networks has many useful features for paid memberships, courses and engagement.

Yashu Mittal · Answer

A community is not just a place for talking with other people, we need a place where conversation can be organized and can we easily accessed for all communities.

sitebuilderstudio · Answer

If you're looking for a community platform that gives you 100% freedom to customize, plus the ability to integrate with a huge variety of extensions, I suggest Joomla with Jomsocial.

Thomas DIDIER · Answer

At Forest (www.forestadmin.com), we use Slack as a direct channel to talk to our customers. There are public groups such as general announcement or issues, and private ones to talk directly to small groups or specific customers.

Guillaume Bardet · Answer

This one seems to be used by quite a lot of communities!

Ben Rohr · Answer

Its designed for this.

Patrick Loonstra · Answer

The most easy and quick way to setup a community.

Jakub Rogalski · Answer

Of all communities I am a member of, I think I like the ones built on Slack the most. Definitely superior to facebook and linkedin groups.

Siva Ilango · Answer

Slack makes communication easier other than any collaboration tool

John Ababseh · Answer

Now a days, reddit is the go-to platform for building any type of community

Answer

No doubt about it!

Daria Zwierz · Answer

My favorite!

Ogochukwu Obiajulu O · Answer

Dicord is awesome for building an online community. The ability to create roles and make certain channels only visible to people with certain roles helps keep things private and ensures order. I have been using it for 2 years now and one of my best features is the Voice Chat.

Sebastian Stehle · Answer

I think the big advantage of a traditional forum is that the knowledge does not get lost. With slack and discord you have to answer the same questions many times. If you take care about your forums you get a nice knowledge base.

Balance and Sun · Answer

I dont know - but I'm guessing.. I'm considering using it as a solid community forum.

Slack is also cool. 
Seems quite different to Discourse though.

And there is also Discord. Another Slack type chat. None seem as thorough as Discourse, which seems a bit more traditional.

Rich Peterson · Answer

For if you're looking for a hosted option for Discourse.