AccessAlly vs. Mighty Networks: a comparison

Our fans tell us AccessAlly allows them to earn more from their online courses and membership sites. We think you’ll love AccessAlly’s power features, along with its’ sophisticated interface.

If you’re curious to see how AccessAlly really stacks up to Mighty Networks, read on!

Mighty Networks allows you to collect and process payments from those signing up to join your network. However, in addition to the monthly fee you pay for the platform, Mighty Networks also withholds 2%-3% of your sales on top of the transactional fees from Stripe. (If you choose to use Mighty Networks to create an iOS app, Apple will take 15% of the cost of the app.) Mighty Networks does not offer PayPal or other payment integration at this time, though you can choose to integrate with a third-party payment processor through Zapier.

AccessAlly never takes a cut of your sales. You pay for the plugin, plus your standard transactional fees withheld by your payment processor only.

With Mighty Networks, your selling options are limited to subscriptions and individual courses. You’ll also have the ability to offer upsells, coupons, and free trials, but note that upsells can only appear within your Mighty Network, which means that potential customers will have to be a part of your network before they’d be able to purchase your upsells. This can present some limitations to your growth.

Mighty Networks lacks abandoned cart automation, so you could also be leaving money on the table when you host your courses on this platform.

With AccessAlly you’re in control of the look and feel of your order forms and you can offer multiple currencies, payment plans, and trials.

You can also design cross-selling dashboards that link to 1-click upsells, offer individual coupons that expire after a given time period for each member, and truly create a personal sales experience.

Thanks to AccessAlly’s early contact creation, you can easily create a follow-up abandoned cart email sequence to help re-capture those potential sales.

You can also pre-sell courses and memberships, and you’re not giving your members’ information to Mighty Networks. They just join your email list and database, so no one else is going to market to them down the line.

With AccessAlly as your Learning Management System (LMS plugin) and membership platform, you’ve got a learning environment designed for focus.

As a member of a few Mighty Networks, we quickly realized that the environment is truly designed to focus on the social aspects. This creates a constant distraction for members while they are trying to read and learn.

Distractions are everywhere: with the Ping! Ping! of notifications taking you out of the flow of learning and completing courses.

With AccessAlly, you can set up a social area that is separate from your learning area (either through a forum or other social platform) so that students can decide whether they are logging on to learn or connect.

Social networks are not the best platforms for people to go to learn, and that’s the biggest downside of Mighty Networks for those who want to offer online courses inside their designated community space. AccessAlly is designed for online learning, and it shows.

With AccessAlly, you decide how you want to structure your site… from your dashboard having an easy “continue where you left off” button to what courses and content is displayed on login.

Then, based on which tags someone has, whether they’ve just completed an onboarding quiz or clicked links in email or within your membership site, you can navigate them to and display different content based on their actions and permissions.

In AccessAlly, you’re in full control of the user experience, and when paired with your choice of WordPress theme you can also fully customize the look and feel of your site, keeping it on-brand with your business.

With Mighty Networks, you are forced to conform your course design and flow to fit within the framework that is dictated to you by the platform. You can’t personalize the site for each member based on their previous interactions, and you also can’t design the type of gamification and rewards systems you can with AccessAlly creating a truly engaging, and personalized customer experience.

The most often cited reason that people choose to set up a membership site on WordPress is that you’re building on land that you own. You own your site and content, and you control the hosting of it.

When you use AccessAlly on WordPress, you’re also getting an open-source platform that allows you to add additional plugins and extensions as your needs change over time.

With Mighty Networks, you’re on a closed system, without access to the source code or the ability to add features and integrations. You’re also at the mercy of the Mighty Networks company and their servers: if they go down, so does your site and business.

You also don’t have the ability to take backups of your content or to move off the platform easily if you decide to change things down the line.

Trust us: membership migrations can be expensive and time-consuming.

Mighty Networks offers a built-in directory feature, but everything is behind the login so you can’t use the directory on your public-facing site.

With AccessAlly, you can create beautiful, searchable member directories, sorted by marketing automation tags. This allows members to opt-in or out of your member directory. It even makes it possible for them to purchase a premium listing.

You decide what to display in your public or private member directory – like a biography, gamification points earned, and even course progress.

Plus, with AccessAlly’s profile editing functionality, a member can update their name, email, address, and password… or any other custom field inside of your email automation platform.

Mighty Networks started off as a social network, but in recent years they’ve started to add on a lot of different features. From online courses to events, email, and mobile apps.

This often leads to the features not being fully developed to include all of the functionality you’d expect to be there. And, it can be confusing for participants to keep track of all of the different things going on.

With AccessAlly, the core of the software is designed to help you sell more, teach better, and engage longer – on your terms.

That means you have more flexibility in how you do things, and you’re not getting a solution that tries to do it all without succeeding.

AccessAlly also focuses on integrating with tools you already use, like your email marketing automation platform, so you have all of the functionality you can expect from best-in-breed software.

• • You want to host your own social network, and manage the constant barrage of questions and topics yourself or by hiring a community manager to help
  • You need to get something simple up and running (and you don’t plan on adding more functionality to your site down the line)
  • You enjoy duct-taping solutions together, and using Zapier and 3rd party tools to integrate all of your client data

• • You want everything to work seamlessly from one end to the other (payments, courses, and memberships) with as few custom coded or Zapier integrations as possible
  • You’re looking to create an amazing customer experience, that’s functional, profitable, and helps you stand out in the marketplace
  • You know keeping your client information centralized inside your CRM will help you scale
  • You can sell individual courses, or license your courses to groups and organizations