Ummah vs Circle A Circle alternative for Muslim communities and Islamic organizations
Circle is a polished, powerful community platform: spaces, courses, live rooms, a website builder, an email product, workflows and real APIs, under your own brand. Ummah is the operating system for a Muslim organization: events with tickets and check-in, programs and weekend school, donations with tax receipts, memberships and dues, prayer times, and a member directory you own. Here is the honest split, including the rows where Circle is well ahead of us.
Circle is the better community platform. Ummah is the better platform for a Muslim organization.
That is not a hedge, it is the actual answer. Circle has built things we have not: spaces so conversations do not all land in one feed, a real course product, live streaming and rooms, a website builder, a full email marketing product, automations, a documented API, and branded iOS and Android apps at the top tier. If you are building a large online membership under your own brand and you have budget, Circle is a serious tool and it shows.
But a masjid, an Islamic school or a Muslim non-profit is not a membership business. It takes donations, and it has to be able to hand a donor a year-end receipt with its own EIN on it. It sells tickets to an iftar and scans people in at the door. It runs a weekend school term where the second child is half price and a family pays across three months. It publishes prayer times. Circle does none of those, and none of them are add-ons you can buy.
Then there is the door price. Circle starts at $89 a month billed annually, with no free plan, a 3-admin cap, and a transaction fee that sits on top of Stripe’s. Ummah starts at $0 a month with unlimited members and unlimited admins, and the platform fee on a paid ticket is added at checkout and paid by the attendee, so the organization receives the full amount it set. For a community that is still proving it can fill a room, that gap decides it.
Side by side
Circle's column was read from circle.so/pricing, /payments, /events, /analytics, /email-hub, /branded-app, /courses and /compare on September 19, 2026. Where something is not published on their site, this table says so rather than guessing. Bold is the side that is ahead on that row. Prices move, so check theirs before you act on it.
| Feature | Ummah | Circle |
|---|---|---|
| Free plan | Yes. $0/mo, unlimited members, unlimited events, the member directory and the app. Programs are on Basic ($19/mo, website included) and donations on Advanced | No. A 14-day trial and a 30-day money-back guarantee, then a paid plan |
| Entry price | $0/mo Free, $19/mo Basic, $75/mo Advanced billed annually. A website we design and build is included on Basic and Advanced | Professional $89/mo and Business $199/mo, both billed annually per their own footnote. Circle Plus is quote-only. Month-to-month pricing is not published — the toggle is disabled on their pricing page |
| Who pays the transaction fee | The attendee. It is added on top at checkout, so the organization banks the full face value on every plan | The community owner, out of their own revenue, and it stacks on top of Stripe’s fee. Their own note: "Circle’s transaction fees are in addition to Stripe’s standard processing fees" |
| How much the fee is | 3% on Free, 1.5% on Basic, 0% on Advanced. Free events carry no fee on any plan | 2% on Professional, 1% on Business, 0.5% on Plus — each on top of Stripe |
| Admin and staff seats | Unlimited staff with roles, permissions down to the checkbox, and an audit log | 3 admins and 10 moderators on Professional, 5 and 15 on Business, unlimited on Plus. Extra admins are $10/mo each and moderators $20/mo per 10 |
| Donations and fundraising | Campaigns with goals, recurring giving, a donor directory, refunds, an optional donation on top of a ticket at checkout, embeddable donation widgets and a kiosk app for in-person giving | Not part of the product. Paid memberships, one-time purchases, installments and coupons. Donations and tipping are not listed anywhere |
| Tax receipts for donors | Year-end receipts with your own legal name, EIN and logo, and Ummah branding switchable off | Not part of the product. Stripe payment receipts only, and no donor record to generate a statement from |
| Event ticketing and check-in | Multi-tier tickets, capacity, waitlist, promo codes, a custom registration form, QR check-in from any phone or a kiosk at the door | Events with RSVPs and calendar invites; a paid event goes through a paywall as a purchase. No ticket, no QR code, no check-in |
| Programs, classes and weekend school | Sessions, early-bird price windows, payment plans with a deposit and up to 36 installments, automatic sibling and family discounts, parent and child registration fields, waitlists, attendance and refunds against a policy | Courses with lessons and drip. No sessions with a roster, no attendance, no family pricing, no parent-and-child registration |
| Courses and structured content | Programs carry sessions and materials, but there is no drip-fed course player or completion tracking | A full course product with lessons, drip and progress. Better than ours, on every tier |
| Spaces and conversation structure | One moderated community feed, plus groups and committees | Spaces and space groups — 20 on Professional, 30 on Business — so different conversations get different rooms. Chat, threads and DMs |
| Live streaming and rooms | Online and hybrid events carry a stream or meeting link; the streaming itself is not ours | Built-in live streams and rooms: 100 attendees and 15 participants on Professional, 200 and 20 on Business |
| Email marketing | Broadcasts by email, push, in-app and SMS, to everyone or to a tag, scheduled or now, with delivery stats. Included on the plan | Email Hub is a strong product but a separate paid one: free under 100 contacts, $99/mo at 10,000, charged on top of the community plan |
| Prayer times | Calculated adhan for 2,000+ masajid, 300+ with real iqama schedules, on your community page, on event pages and as a widget on your own site | Not part of the product |
| Your own domain and brand | Copy-paste widgets for events, prayer times, donations and programs that run on your own site and domain, plus a website we design and build, included on Basic and Advanced. Full portal white-labelling is not shipped yet | Custom domain on every tier. Branding removal and white-label from Business. Branded iOS and Android apps on Plus, quote-only |
| Automations and API | Google Sheets and attendee exports. No public API today | Workflows and automations from Business, plus an Admin API, a Headless API and Integrately. Zapier on every tier |
| Discovery | A listing in the Ummah app and web directory that Muslims already use to find what is on near them, plus public event pages indexed by Google | None. A Circle community is a destination you have to drive traffic to yourself |
| Published numbers | 3,000+ communities, 30,000+ Muslims, 15,000+ events, $80K+ processed for organizers | 20,000+ communities, 15 million+ members and $453M+ earned by creators, all published on circle.so/compare |
Where Circle is the better choice
No product wins every row, and a comparison page that pretends otherwise is not worth reading. Here is where we would point you at them instead.
Spaces, courses and live rooms
Three real products we do not have. If your community needs separate rooms for separate conversations, a proper course player, or to stream to a hundred people from inside the platform, Circle has all three today and we have none of them.
White-label, custom domain and branded apps
Circle serves the whole community on your domain under your brand, removes their branding from Business up, and will build you your own iOS and Android apps on Plus. We embed widgets into your site and build you a website; we do not yet serve the whole portal on your domain under your theme.
Automations and a real API
Workflows, an Admin API and a Headless API. We have no public API today. If you want the platform to be a component in a bigger system you are building, Circle is the one that lets you.
Scale and track record
20,000+ communities and $453M+ earned by creators, published on their own site. That is a bigger, more proven business than ours and we are not going to pretend otherwise.