FluentCommunity Review: Can This Be A Replacement For BuddyBoss?

When it comes to building a membership community on WordPress, we haven’t had the most diverse set of options. We’ve got some forum software such as BBPress and SimplePress. We’ve got BuddyPress for social networking, but that’s tough to use. And, of course, we have BuddyBoss.

BuddyBoss has been the standard for quite some time now. When it comes to building a community site with WordPress, BuddyBoss is the best option.

But, it needed a competitor. And I now think one is coming. It is called FluentCommunity.

What Is FluentCommunity?

FluentCommunity is the latest addition to the “Fluent” family of products which already includes FluentCRM, FluentForms, FluentBooking, etc.

What FluentCommunity does is provides a social networking platform that you own and control – right inside of WordPress. It even has a built-in online course system, allowing you to create a social learning environment for your students.

Features include:

• Unlimited groups (they call them “spaces”).
• Support for mentions, hashtags, polls
• Community leaderboard
• Build online courses
• Member directory
• Member bookmarks
• Member profiles
• Email notifications and digests
• Real-time chatroom
• Private messaging

Right now, the entire interface is very “Facebook-ish”. This makes it pretty familiar to most people and the system is relatively easy to use. More on that in a minute.

Naturally, the platform also integrates with the “Fluent” family. This means, for instance, that the integration with FluentCRM is automatic. You can build an email list with your community members easily. You can also build marketing automations that control a member’s access to your community.

This natural integration makes it super simple to do routinely needed automations, such as:

• Automatically adding a member to a particular Space when they buy a product from you
• Automatically enroll a new customer into a course (and corresponding space, if desired)
• Send a welcome email to somebody after they’ve joined a particular space
• Perform any CRM automation you wish when a person’s status on the leaderboard is upgraded.

What Makes FluentCommunity Better?

I want to be clear: FluentCommunity is currently an early-stage product. For that reason, it does not compare well to the feature set of BuddyBoss. There’s definitely work to do on that front and I’ll cover that more in a minute.

But, how is FluentCommunity already better than BuddyBoss?

One of the big ones is SPEED.

Everything about FluentCommunity is significantly more streamlined than BuddyBoss. You can tell just from the file sizes of the plugins alone. As of this writing, the core plugin ZIP is 3.9MB and the Pro add-on plugin is 3.1MB. If you look at BuddyBoss, the core platform plugin is 15.5MB, the Pro addon is 7.1MB, and the theme is 13.5MB. And don’t forget, with BuddyBoss you need to be using their theme otherwise the platform is quite janky. Oh, and when you use the Buddyboss theme, you pretty much have to use Elementor to easily be able to modify anything.

BuddyBoss is just… heavy. It is quite needy when it comes to server resources.

For reference, see: BuddyBoss Hosting: What’s The Hosting For A Buddyboss Membership Site

Since it was originally forked off of older code, BuddyBoss has just grown into a beast. For that reason alone, some people skip BuddyBoss and try to stick with BuddyPress/BBPress. But, now with FluentCommunity, you don’t need to do that.

FluentCommunity is designed from the ground up to be lightweight.

It doesn’t require a separate theme. You can use any theme you want because your community portal is containerized into it’s own thing and is very simple.

FluentCommunity isn’t trying to do everything. For most people, it is just enough. It is lean and mean and does just what people need and not a lot more than that.

FluentCommunity is fast. It won’t require beefy hosting to run it. It doesn’t require you to re-do your whole site around it and it isn’t an “all or nothing” affair like BuddyBoss is.

Where Is FluentCommunity Lacking?

FluentCommunity is an early-stage product (as of this writing), so as you might expect it is definitely lacking some features that you may actually want.

When you are setting up FluentCommunity, you’ll immediately feel the minimalist nature of it because… it just doesn’t have a whole lot of options. It has the ones that matter, but if you’re used to something like BuddyBoss, FluentCommunity is going to feel really barebones.

A few things I found myself wishing for were:

• More style options so that the community portal could better match existing branding. Right now, it is pretty much just a logo and you can’t control much else.
• Ability to integrate some theme elements. The standalone community portal is nice in some ways, but I think a lot of site owners will not necessarily want such an abrupt interface change between their site and their community. Perhaps some blocks to be able to embed spaces and other components into pages is the way forward here.
• Ability to integrate other LMSs. The built-in course system with FluentCommunity works, but it is highly simplistic. I think being able to tie into other LMS plugins is something that is needed.
• Ability to disable features. For instance, I wouldn’t want private messages turned on. Currently, there doesn’t seem to be a way to disable that.
• I kind of wish the settings for the community were inside of the standard WP-Admin panel and not inside the portal. As an admin, I don’t want to have to switch UIs just to control settings.

The general theme here is that I think FluentCommunity needs to be smoother at integrating into people’s existing websites here. Word is that these items are on the product roadmap, which is good to hear.

Can It Replace BuddyBoss?

Yes and no. 🙂

Most people I’ve worked with that have BuddyBoss didn’t even need BuddyBoss. They simply weren’t using most of what it did, so they were therefore struggling with all the complications that come along with it just for one or two things. For these people, FluentCommunity presents a strong use case.

FluentCommunity doesn’t do everything that BuddyBoss does, but it does the things that most people end up using BuddyBoss for. Yet, unlike BuddyBoss, FluentCommunity doesn’t force you to use any particular theme. It doesn’t force you to have to deal with the hits on performance.

That said, if you’re sure you’re going to need all the extra power of BuddyBoss, you won’t find FluentCommunity to be a viable option yet.

My Final Thoughts On FluentCommunity

I’m very pleased with what I’m seeing so far, yet I can tell that this is an MVP (minimum viable product). As I said, this is an early stage product. This is basically version 1.0 we’re looking at here.

I like what I am seeing, though.

I really like how this enables people to have community functionality without hurting their site performance.

I really like how tightly it already integrates with FluentCRM, enabling some beautiful automations and simplicity.

I don’t have much doubt that this is going to be my top recommendation for people looking for community.

I’m eager to see how this platform continues to develop. And judging from other products I’ve purchased from them, they always do so. I am now a user of almost every plugin they create and they all launched with a similar MVP feel to them. Yet, over time, new releases came out and their tools have become quite robust. I fully expect FluentCommunity to be the same.

I’m happy to see this release. And I’m happy that I am seeing light at the end of the tunnel for being able to never have to recommend BuddyBoss ever again. 😉