PeerBoard was my (Succesful) Facebook Alternative

What are the best aspects of this product?

PeerBoard’s WordPress forum plugin — Embed PeerBoard as a fully customizable page in your WordPress configuration in under 20 minutes. I was genuinely surprised how quickly I was able to set PeerBoard up with my WordPress site. While it takes longer to fine tune all the group and category settings, the initial setup was a breeze. If you have experience connecting software to your website via WordPress plugin, you will easily be able to set up your own site

What aspects are problematic or could work better?

No real problems, but as with any online community management platform there can always be more features included in the free version

What features/services would you like to see in future versions of this product?

I wish that there was the ability to collect payments from your group members, although I've seen this on the future product roadmap

What specific problems in your company were solved by this product?

Over the past year, I’ve worked hard to transform a series of valuable, yet disconnected posts, guides, comments, discussions, and newsletter issues into a true online community.

While I had figured out my CMS (WordPress), my main content marketing platform (Medium), and my newsletter delivery tool (Substack), I had not successfully incorporated a private forum or chat.

Sure, I run a large group of Medium writers, built on Facebook. But not everyone uses Facebook, and it is very hard to follow the various conversations as a group gets larger.
The main requirements in my search for a community building platform were:

The community must not be part of or reliant upon a major social media platform for distribution of content;
It must have the ability for users to write posts, share media, and display profile bio information, which is then displayed in an organized manner;
It must be software that can easily integrate with my existing website (BloggingGuide.org). Ideally, it would be a WordPress plugin, since I didn’t want an overly technical or complex addition to my website;
Although I am using it as a private community, I wanted the ability to create public facing content which can be easily partitioned from the premium content at some point in the future;
The software must be user friendly and minimalist in design, so that community members don’t feel overwhelmed and actually use the forum/discussion features.

These requirements led me down a rabbit hole investigating the latest online community management systems. There are many options that meet some of these requirements, but there was only one platform that truly checked all of the boxes — PeerBoard.

Are you a current user of this product?

Yes