Circle

Tried Circle years ago

Tried Circle years ago, then again recently. It's near perfect now. What isn't perfect—far from it—is allowing me to pay >$200 to upgrade to a business plan, but not telling me that I can't invite more than 5 members a day for the first 3 days. Because I told a class full of people that I'm going to invite them into the new community I've built on Circle, only to have to then later, after realising the bulk tool isn't working, find your docs that describe this rate limit—but only in terms of the bulk tool—so I then invest another hour manually entering everyone one by one, and of course, that route still doesn't work. Great work on the product, but this is such a mind-bendingly asinine oversight. Support? 48 hour wait (via email). Yours truly, the latest (maybe tiredest) and certainly most frustrated member of Circle. Please fix this.

CS is useless to help cancel accounts.

We migrated our fan community to Circle. Then we migrated back.

The interface looked like a genuine upgrade. A few months in, we'd reversed the entire migration and moved everyone back to our original setup. The data loss was the turning point. Hours of custom page work my co-mod had built disappeared without warning, without a backup option, and without any recovery path through support. That kind of loss is unacceptable for a platform communities are expected to trust their content to. The member opt-out issue compounded it — users had no way to leave sub-groups independently and had to message an admin for manual removal. We watched that erode member trust in real time. Support, when we eventually reached someone on a frozen leaderboard issue, asked us to restart the ticket from scratch after weeks of waiting.

Can't leave without contacting admin

For some reason, Circle has given community admins the ability to prevent members from leaving. You have to message the admin and ask them to remove you from the community. If they choose not to, or they're unresponsive, you're just stuck in the community.

Absolutely awful app and terrible customer service

Absolutely awful app. Keeps crashing and for 4 months, my leader board froze and it took them 4 months to look into it, after which they had no idea of the complaint I made and I had to start all over again. Save your users time and patience and don't sell your course or community through them. They're absolutely shocking!

Maturity no barrier.…

Despite being a mature adult and not always that able to find my way easily around online platforms, that wasn't the case this time. I quickly worked out how to get what I needed out of the set up and really enjoyed the 7 week course.

Great app

Great app, easy to find different spaces, to post and comment. It’s very user friendly.

The platform is well organized

The platform is well organized and I can navigate easily around. So much better than Facebook!

Got kicked out of meeting a couple of…

Got kicked out of meeting a couple of times. Tahj wasn’t able to share screen when needed. Approx. date was on or about 2nd or 3rd meeting. On March 6th wasn’t able to share screen.

Solid but basic community platform, weak admin controls, weak Zapier hooks, costs too much

The software is really good. But it's limited in what it can do, and costs more than it should. If you're coming from Discord, like I did, you will like the much more pleasant user interface, but you'll be aghast at the lack of granularity in all areas of admin control and user permissions. Yes, it's got Zapier automation hooks but when you get into it, you can't do a lot of things you want to. It's just highly highly limited, almost to the point of me wanting to not use it. When you throw in how much they charge when Discord offers so much more for free, and even more when you pay a very small monthly, it's discouraging. It's not like it's *expensive*, but anyone charging like $129/month in 2026 for a SaaS product should be giving you a lot more. What you get is more like a $49/month value, so every month it's a slap in the face for the privilege of using a nice product. I also very much disapprove of the way they automatically upgrade you into paid features without notice when you cross a threshold of scale. They'll say this is disclosed somewhere, but look, I don't just scan things and breeze on, I pay attention, and this wasn't obvious. That said, their customer service is great, their resources are awesome, their educational efforts are great. But that's kind of table stakes for this kind of company.

The site will lag and the organization…

The site will lag and the organization is awkward to navigate but I appreciate that is part of the instructors responsibility. Support is excellent.

Geography matters.

I'm a founder of Chanco Geo community, a university in Malawi, few years working with the government, I felt the difference of my old school with other employees schools. I brought the class online, we have shared several links and laughs. I attended a short course from Arizona University offered here in Malawi, focusing about projects. After that certification, I got a comment that it was not enough but Esri. A Year later I got the opportunity to be part of Esri's MOOC. I got exposed to other applications like Prezi, that I was using to share presentations. I thought that required some kind of mentorship. My long journey is simplified with circle.

NO CONSENT VERIFICATION

I cannot believe that there is zero customer support for users. Every support link is for people who want to pay to be a paid business account - it all goes to sales. They do not have a real support team. I also cannot believe that they allow circle community creators to add people to their community who did not agree to join. There's no option to exit a community. I cannot believe that this kind of behavior is allowed by the platform. This is a privacy violation. Just because someone has my email address does not give them the right to add me to their group. I did not consent to this. I hope a privacy law attorney investigates this. This has to be against our rights.

Platform Deletes Your Work, Dangerous for your business and community

Here's a shorter, clearer review: 1 Star - Too Many Bugs, Deletes Your Work, Slow Performance The Good: Great structure and service concept. The Bad: So many bugs it's dangerous for my business. Platform is extremely slow—clients constantly complain about speed Videos don't load properly for clients System randomly DELETED my checkout pages (hours of detailed work gone) No proper backups or warnings before deleting customer content Support Response: When their system deleted my work, I spent 4 hours (7AM-11AM) restoring everything myself. Support added a basic link and marked it "resolved"—taking credit for work THEY didn't do while I rebuilt everything. Bottom Line: Having your work randomly deleted is harassment and a serious business risk. The constant bugs and slow performance hurt my client experience. I can't trust a platform that destroys my content without warning and can't track its own support tickets. Fix the bugs. Stop deleting customer work. Actually restore what you break instead of pretending you did. Not recommended until these critical issues are resolved.

Very frustrating mobile experience…

Very frustrating mobile video experience The video playback on the Circle app is extremely inconsistent on mobile phones. Videos frequently won’t load or play, even with a strong internet connection. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t, with no clear pattern. It’s incredibly frustrating, especially for an app that relies so heavily on video content. This seriously impacts usability and makes it hard to engage with the platform. Please prioritize fixing mobile video playback reliability.

You cannot leave

You cannot leave! I joined a community and now want to leave. I can't. I unsubbed from messages from that community twice .I looked for settings and clicks all the icons on the top. I downloaded the app thinking it was easier. Nothing. I went to their sorry website and there is NO help area for members. When I went to contact customer service, i had to contact the community itself (not circle) asking them to remove me! This is crap! Pathetic company. I went online looking for forums and those did not work.

Unauthorized Charge After Cancellation

I cancelled my Circle subscription weeks before the renewal date. The dashboard confirmed the cancellation. Despite this, Circle charged my card anyway, for a completely new billing cycle that begins after the cancellation date. To make matters worse, they charged me again even after I cancelled a second time. No warning. No explanation. Just another invoice for $214.97. I've checked everything on my end, the subscription was cancelled, confirmed, and inactive. Their system still pushed through a full-priced renewal. That is not an accident. That is unauthorized recurring billing. For a platform charging over $200/month, this level of instability and billing failure is unacceptable. If you value transparency or reliable subscription management, avoid Circle. Their system rebills even after cancellation, and you’re stuck fighting charges you never agreed to. I am now disputing the transaction with my bank. Not recommended.

A Big Disappointment with Circle.so

A Big Disappointment with Circle.so Circle.so looked fantastic, a platform with great usability and a lot of promise. I had high expectations after using it for quite some time. However, out of nowhere, my plan price was increased from $89 to $129 per month, with no prior notice or explanation. I’ve been trying to contact their support for three days, but no one replies, and the chat assistance is clearly poor and unhelpful. It’s a real shame, because this platform is crucial for many creators who have invested time, money, and trust in it. After more than two years as a paying customer, this experience feels deeply disappointing. A clear example of how not to treat loyal users.

Some hackers fraudsters creating user…

Some hackers fraudsters creating user ID which belongs to me using my email address and now this merchant website keep asking for subscription renewal. I dont know what platform even this is from Somalia. I am not even from Somalia . Lmao.

Terrible customer support and processes

Terrible customer support and processed for resolving issues. After working solid for 2 months to create a program where i would have a private community to bring my clients in - i have just spent 3 solid days trying to get support for the Stripe integration. They first created a link that assumed i was an American based business and linked me to a form i was unable to enter as it requires a business Following that i did get the screen to enter my Canadian banking information. All went well and I created Payment screens and discounts code easily. However somehow with one email they created multiple communities. As I only needed one i requested the other two be deleted as I had paid for a full year on the first community. The next day i found that all my work on the invoicing and discounts was gone. After communiicating with someone on chat i reentered everythings and update my website so that people could pay for my offering. I asked for help getting rid of the USD account that i was unable to use. The support person was not helpful so i went directly to Stripe to find how to delete the USD account. Following Stripe clear instructions i found the Circle Stripe account linked to the USD request and deleted it to clear up the screen. I came back to Circle and to my dismay deleting the non funtional USD account actually removed all of the information i had entered earlier that allowed people to pay and enter discounts. i am now left with 2 Circle Stripe links and have no sense that entering my payment and coupon information will actually work> As well on my website the payment link that i tested this morning opens a screen to circle asking them to set up a circle account. I just spent almost 1,500 Canadian for the year and not one person on staff has offered to call to work through the issues. A disaster decision. An email detailing the sequence of things was replied to with the message to check the help bot. My program launches Sep 2 and i have no support to get things running so that clients can pay.