17 April 2010 ~ 36 Comments

Seven sexiest alternatives to Ning

I am going to show you today seven sexiest alternatives to Ning. The leading freemium social networking platform Ning announced yesterday that it was making ground breaking changes which will be forcing existing free networks will have the opportunity to either convert to paying for premium services, or transition off to Ning. What it means was there is no free Ning anymore.

Jason Rosenthal replaced Gina Bianchini as CEO of Ning, was sour for both employees and for many users of the service. Ning will cut 70 jobs and will end free subscriptions to the site. It is big blow to small business groups and organisations, especially educators in particular have found Ning to be useful, as both a tool for classroom collaboration and for professional development. That’s why I decided to put my hand up and on a machine to find alternatives to Ning Network. I was seriously exploring other Ning like platforms for creating personalised and private social networks. This is the list I compiled using my extensive search and interaction with other social geeks.

Groupsite

url : http://www.groupsite.com/ 

demo: http://www.groupsite.com/tour 

groupsite

 

Groupsite ties together social networking and collaboration in an effort to make group communications easier and more efficient. It’s a hosted solution with Pro plans and a free tier for social networks. With the free account, you can add individual premium features at $9/month each. Groupsite has all of the features you would expect to find, including forums, calendars, blogs, file sharing, and member profiles and management. Some have said that Groupsite is to Ning what Facebook is to Myspace. Check out blackweb20.com coverage here and go take it for a spin yourself.

 

BuddyPress

url : http://www.buddypress.org

Demo : http://buddypress.org/demo/

Social networking in a box. Build a social network for your company, school, sports team or niche community all based on the power and flexibility of WordPress. I am big fan of wordpress (wordpress as a CMS) and buddypress is a popular wordpress plugin. If you use it right, it has the capability to compete with Ning. It is free and easy to install.

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SocialGo

(I highly recommended this application. This is one my favourite social web app without a doubt.)

url : http://www.socialgo.com/

demo: http://www.socialgo.com/

SocialGo founded in 2007, is more of a direct competitor to Ning as far as their goals. It is fully loaded with features like profiles, messaging, groups, Events, chat, forums, blogging, media, white labelling, facebook connection. You can fully monetize your socialgo network. There are hundreds of widgets available to plugin. By for this is the closest encounter for Ning. They allow anyone to create a professional-grade social network for their group, business or interest. They are focused on expanding premium services, but do offer a free (forever) account to get your feet wet. If you don’t really feel like setting up your network on your own, you can pay $149 and have a SocialGo Concierge do it for you.

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SecretApp

(If I have to build a social network tomorrow then I will choose this application without a doubt. Highly recommended. A+++++++++)

url : http://github.com/timjdavey/secretapp

demo: http://secretcities.com/london/

Tim and his team built this superb application using Django. This application is very breeze and highly scalable. This amazing application built in 48 hours with £3000 pounds budget. Completely home grown in London.  40 committed geeks had contributed voluntarily and still contributing to make this application more social. By serving 200,000 hits per day, this application proved highly scalable and easy to use. This has all the elements that you need for the next generation social platform. It’s damn free. You have to download and install this.

 

image

 

Grou.ps

url : http://grou.ps/

demo: http://www.sharewik.com/

GROU.PS is a do-it-yourself social networking platform that allows people to come together and form interactive communities around a shared interest or affiliation. The functionality of any online group is limited only by the members’ collective imagination and ambition. The GROU.PS platform is used to create a wide variety of community sites, including online gaming forums, e-learning classrooms, fan clubs, charity fundraising campaigns, college alumni societies, and event planning portals. In short, any organization seeking to aggregate and organize people online can greatly improve its effectiveness, engagement and appeal by migrating to the GROU.PS platform.

Grou.ps is free for first 10gb storage (and first 100gb Bandwidth)

 

image 

 

DevHub

url: http://www.devhub.com/

demo: http://www.devhub.com/gallery/

Make beautiful, search engine-friendly sites with easy-to-use site editor and widget dashboard with NO HTML CODE required. Devhub took the website builder concept and gamifyed it. At it’s core its still a website builder but it’s also a game. With DevHub users can build a web site/blog and when they’re done they’ve got something real, something they can make money with, share with their friends, or their community. Primarily for creating sites focused on niche topics or you can create a site that’s all about you, connect your favourite social media profiles under one site and share content with your friends or create a business website that you can point loyal and new customers or promote products and make money. You can just start in 2 minutes and grow your network that earn $ on the DevHub platform. DevHub is free and no credit card is required! No cost to get started and no cost to earn rewards and make money. There are more than 40 partners hooked in to DevHub platform currently and the list is growing. In addition to its editing tools, you can add videos, products, adverts and social media plugins more from various top-tier partners around the web.

 

image 

 

elgg

url : http://www.elgg.org/

demo: http://elgg.com/

It has all the features like regular social networking platform. The beauty about the elgg is, it has a webservices API, expose functionality through the REST API by building a plugin and then either publish the API for other developers to build clients or provide your own. Currently you have to host elgg externally but in the next month (May 2010) elgg is offering hosted services prices ranging from $29.95 – $49.95 per month per network, it really is the smart way to get social.

 

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That’s it. I hope you agree with my choice of seven sexy alternatives to Ning. You just go and explore all these and more. See below for more recommendations. If you like this article or you think I got it wrong or you have more recommendations to share then please feel free to leave a comment below.

 

This is the end of my seven sexiest alternatives to Ning and for you just the beginning of exploration.

Cheers,

Narendra

sidekick it

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  • http://www.articulate.com/forums/members/bronwynjanssen.html Annabelle Windemere

    I absolutely agree. That is precisely how I understand it. Thanks!

  • http://buddygrid.net/?lang=en Olivier Buisson

    BuddyGrid is a BuddyPress community hosting company. Check http://buddygrid.net/?lang=en

  • http://www.condiminds.com Susana Cipriota

    The best option is Elgg! The v1.8 is coming shortly with lots of theming improvements.

  • http://piotr.gabryjeluk.pl/ Piotr Gabryjeluk

    Wikidot is also a nice (for higher-level users) alternative for Ning! http://www.wikidot.com/.

  • http://www.nsfwftw.com/ Bryan Rovelto

    I never thought about it like that.. very insightful. Thanks!

  • http://www.generalcontractorhandyman.com Handyman

    Well, this is my first visit to your blog! We are a group of volunteers and starting a new initiative in a community in the same niche. Your blog provided us valuable information to work on. You have done a marvellous job!

  • AlexChamberlain

    I’ve started using GroupNation (www.groupnation.co.uk) and although it is new, it does seem to offer a load of good things.

    I will port my Ning network across as soon as they have some tools (which apparently they are building).

    Alex

  • http://www.ukdirectoryenquiries.co.uk Mathilde Wardell

    Greetings, your post would make for real decent studying. presently there is not enough blogs outthere that will contain good reading material, large thumbs up from me and i’ll be hanging around quite a bit in the future.

  • http://www.intl-alliance.com/store/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=77 MARTINEZ

    Nice approach. Thank you for your insight.

  • http://www.edweb.net Lisa Schmucki

    Another alternative to Ning is edWeb.net. We are a free professional social network for the education community. If you work in education, please check our out site at http://www.edweb.net.

  • http://www.megastarmedia.com/ning.html Megastarmedia

    Great list of resources. Also, i would like to add custom social networks, where the client owns the code and controls their online business.

    Do you have a list of companies that can help install and integrate a custom web design into these ning alternative networks?

    All the best,
    Sandy

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  • paulitz

    You missed bligoo, it's free and without any limitations

  • http://www.templeofbalance.com Temple of Balance

    Thank you for sharing, this is very helpful to me and the future of my ning groups.

  • http://www.scriptstar.co.uk scriptstar

    Hi Sandy,

    Thank you for your comments. Four of them (socialgo, groupsite, groups and elgg) are Ning like networks so you don't have to worry about hosting them elsewhere. They will do it for you.
    Buddypress is a wordpress plug-in and you need a working installation of WordPress or WordPress MU version 2.9.1 or greater. You need to have your own hosting account to do this. SecretApp is also similar; you have to look after it. But what you get with it is lot of freedom and choice. For example you can monetize the site fully and you expand in your own pace.

    To setup a buddy press, you don't have to be a tech savvy. There are loads of videos in the YouTube where you can grasp quite quickly the basic setup and workarounds. In the other hand setting up a SecretApp is a bit geeky job.

    Having said that, if you need any help, I would lend my hand to set it up a basic buddypress site for you in couple of days. For SecretApp, it takes quite a bit of a time but I am happy to do this as service.

    Cheers,
    Narendra

  • loissez

    Thank you so much! Our definitely free little network for those interested in storytelling here in Michigan, http://michiganstorytelling.ning.com, had just started about 1/2 yr. ago & needs your info & that of the other comments.
    I also appreciated your insight into behind the scenes at Ning. The new CEO will get what he deserves. It's just a shame it will impact so many others.

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  • Richard

    I disagree. Setting up BuddyPress is much like setting up WordPress (which I've done). You still need to be technically savvy. It may be relatively straightforward (assuming nothing goes wrong), but if you're not comfortable getting into the guts of your computer, forget it.

  • reng2010

    I have to disagree with your recommendations. Here's my evaluation of 6 popular (free) social network services.

    As for SecretApp, you have to be a programmer or a technically proficient person to go this route. Most of the hosted services are relatively easy for the non-technical type.

    Also, hosting your own server is expensive.

  • Steve Carroll

    Thanks for this.

    As a freelance teacher building everything around Ning, it's quite blow.

    Steve

  • http://twitter.com/cojadate Nicolas Holzapfel

    If it’s any help to your readers I can suggest http://yoomoot.com as an alternative home for niche communities. It’s quite different to Ning though – it’s basically a wiki/Q&A fusion specifically for long and complex discussions.

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  • http://profiles.yahoo.com/u/NQCUZV5BD3YPJ6GDJXBRKJONX4 Savage

    Thanks for this blog.

    I moved to Grou.ps. They offer very flexible full customization option. If you know some html & css, it means you are holding magic wand in your hands. Grou.ps has many free features.

    On the other side, all your destiny is in Grou.ps’ hands. But I cannot afford hosting costs and manage technical issues on my own now. I’m not an advanced user. So those open-source alternatives are not for me.

    So far so good with Grou.ps. You can see the comparison from here http://grou.ps/move_ning.php
    I also found this today – http://www.emresokullu.com/blogs/item/thoughts-

    Thanks for the blog. I will check others as well.

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  • Mathias Moeller

    May I shamelessly self-promote our platform just for once? The name is Amazee (http://www.amazee.com/), we are based in Switzerland and offer a free migration service for Ning Networks whose members aren't willing or able to pay for the new payment scheme Ning has come up with. You can find all the necessary information and a link to the migrator here: http://blog.amazee.com/welcome-ning-refugees-2/. Don't hesitate to ask questions, if you do have any!

  • Socialnetworkingaddict

    There are two more

    http://www.socialparody.com (For adult social networks)

    http://www.socialparadox.com (NON adult social networks)

  • Ja

    Well! grou.ps is not free.. now is askinf for money! oh well!

  • Spannerboy

    Im am still pursuing my search for better ning alternatives. Here is my argument i posted on some other blog listing aternatives

    Social networking is becoming one of the hottest trends on the web, with everyone not only wanting to be in social networks, but looking to create one. In the end, maybe rather than having large sites like facebook, what ning sort out to do was break this down to “your” own social network! In anycase some people argue that it all comes to the same thing, just a difference in nomenclature, whilst you can achieve almost everything u can with a ning network as you can with a facebook group, the idea of hosting, managing your own network is more exciting!

    There are lots of alternatives coming up and summarising them in a blog post is usually not as effective. WordPress, Drupal, and almost any CMS out there have numerous social networking component. Joomla is promising in this field, though dominated by a few social networking components jomsocial http://jomsocial.com and community builder, http://joomlapolis.com many more interesting options are coming up like Tuiyo http://tuiyo.co.uk which promises better integration with other social network.

    In any case defining one as an alternative to the other is usually quite limiting as most of these are usually commissioned works build to fit the feature set required by the client, whilst one may be doing one thing, the other maybe doing it in a completely different way, or may in fact not do it all. Deciding on an alternative to ning will require purpose, and reason. Nonetheless some people still feel satisfied with using groups on facebook, and that should be considered a serious alternative to ning!

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  • http://www.naijapaddys.socialgo.com/ Abolo_ebo

    Thank you for posting this blog.

    I do have to disagree with the “socialgo” network builder.
    I have been using socialgo sinds 2008 with a premium plan.

    Yes socialgo is easy to use but it is very limited and not that social at all.
    Infact ……. they can not compete  with Ning at all.

    The V1 was very promising but they abandoned it and came out with SGv2.
    That is actually a very poor wordpress platform with not even half of the functions.

    Socialgo is very expensive and have nothing to offer for those who are looking to build a big social network.
    Damn …… they don’t even have a fully integrated post share for FB or twitter.

    I think wordpress and buddypress are the solution for big social networks who want to give there members what they deserve .

  • krysalis2012

    Thanks, very helpful! :)

  • Magician

    100% Free Adult Social Network http://www.whosaroundtown.com

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