I’ve been trying to decide on where to host my community for sometime. Seems everywhere has some major drawback that I’m not crazy about.

I didn’t want to do any of the large social platforms like FB, LinkedIn, etc. Slack runs the risk of people not using threads correctly. Also tried out Discord, UUKI, NOYSI, and a handful of others.

Thus far, Heartbeat chat seems like the winner.

Pros

- Magic Link - I like this for community. Makes it feel less disconnected from my training program
- Audio rooms like Clubhouse is a win
- Great tutorials within on how to use the product and best practices for keeping your community from feeling like a ghost town
- Customize each channel differently (traditional chat, threaded convos, and media rooms)
- GIFs, images, etc
- Desktop, mobile, and web versions all work well. I did most of my setup from the mobile without problems.
- Solid matching feature to keep your community engaging and building relationships
- Tagging users
- Reporting and community metrics
- Ability to see who is online
- Auto-generated intros in their own channel
- Ability to restrict access to channels
- Awesome automation abilities through Zapier
- Onboarding experience was smooth
- Ability to import from Slack
- Generous deal limits

Honestly, there’s a lot more.

Cons

- we are on AppSumo right? Where is the Pabbly integration?
- not crazy about the name but that’s hardly a big deal

I hope their platform ends up being massively successful because my community platform search is finally over.