In this Uuki review, I’m going to tell you everything I know about the community platform based on my own experience with it.
By the end, you should be able to make an informed decision about whether or not Uuki can help you grow your online business or if you need an alternative.
If you’re interested in starting or migrating a community then Uuki is one of your options. It’s a good option but with so many other platforms, you may want to know just how good it is.
Uuki lets you get started with a 14-day free trial so don’t just take my word, sign up and try it out for yourself.
What Is Uuki?
Uuki describes itself as a “community platform for creators, brands and products”. It is a place where you can build a following around your brand or product by creating content, discussions, events and more.
It also serves as an alternative to social media community platforms like Facebook Groups. With Uuki, you can own your platform, make your own rules and benefit from monetization.
On Uuki, creators can offer memberships, courses and live events as you can with most community platforms. There are spaces that are designed for discussions where you can interact with others and connect around a common interest.
Uuki offers a 14-day free trial if you want to try out their community platform. You don’t need to input your credit card details so it’s quick and easy to get started.
Who is Uuki For?
There are many different types of people or businesses who can benefit from using Uuki. If you have followers and can benefit from gathering them all in one place, then Uuki is for you.
“Creators, brands and products” are the three main target markets that Uuki mention on their homepage and these encompasses a lot of potential users.
Creators can be:
- YouTubers
- Bloggers
- Course creators
- Social media influencers
- Marketers
- Designers
- Writers/Authors
- Filmmakers
- Coaches
- Musicians
Brands include personal brands and businesses who want to engage their fans. Product owners can also benefit from Uuki if their products have a strong fan-base or they want to increase their reach.
If you already have a community and would like to migrate for whatever reason, Uuki is one of many options that you can choose from.
How To Create Your Community in Uuki
Creating your community in Uuki is as simple a process as it should be. No technical knowledge is needed and you can get it done in no time at all.
Here’s how it’s done, step by step.
1. Add the title of your community
After clicking on the “create” a community button, you’ll be given a field to add your community title.
If you need help coming up with a title, Uuki has some tools that include a community name generator. You can find it here.
Once you’ve entered the best name you can find to describe your community, click on the save and continue button.
2. Onboarding and basic set up
Uuki introduces you to the framework of your community right after you’re done creating and submitting a community name.
The onboarding process has six steps where you complete tasks towards the setup of your community. These include adding branding images and colors and setting up your profile among other things.
You have the option of skipping any step as you will be able to complete them later through the settings. You can also choose to skip the onboarding process entirely.
In the first of six steps, you get to start with the basics which include:
- Setting up your profile
- Updating your branding
- Setting your access to either a public or private community
3. Set up spaces, memberships and more
Step 2 of the onboarding process gets you to set up your spaces which can hep you organize your content throughout the community.
You can also check out the integrations available to you. These include Discord, Telegram, Twitter, Zoom and Metatask.
Finally, you can set up how you would like to manage memberships to your community.
Again, adding them here is totally optional and you can either skip the section or skip the entire onboarding process. You will be able to do any of these tasks later in the settings.
4. Add your welcome message
Next, you can add a welcome message to be displayed as a post whenever someone joins your community.
5. Invite people to your community
The 4th step is to start growing your community by inviting people. There are two ways you can do this – add individual email addresses or you can upload a .csv with the list of email addresses for people you want to invite.
6. Interact with members
If you’re just getting started and just sent out invites in the previous step then this could be a skippable section since you probably don’t have members as yet.
The point of the onboarding process though is to get you familiar with the various features available through Uuki and to get the basic framework of your community set up.
This step allows you to see the various ways in which you can interact with your community members. The tasks here include:
- Checking your members’ list and assigning moderators to help manage your community
- Using the chat platform for either community-wide chat or private chat with members
- Creating a new space to host events and configuring your Zoom integration
- Keeping up with your community by tagging members and checking your analytics
7. Follow Uuki by joining their community
The Uuki community is the place for Uuki creators to gather and learn more about community building with the Uuki platform, get help, and check out the latest product updates.
You will need to visit the community page, click join and fill out your profile. This is an essential step to effectively using the Uuki platform.
After checking off this final step of the onboarding process, you’ll be sent to your community start page where you can start adding posts and doing more to build and grow your community.
Uuki Features
The features included in the Uuki platform are essential features that should be a part of any community platform.
There’s almost everything here that creators want to see in a community platform, even a course builder which at first I didn’t think was included.
Here are the best features available inside the Uuki community platform and some details about how they work.
1. Spaces
Spaces are the building blocks for everything inside your Uuki community. You can use spaces to create:
- posts and discussions
- courses
- events
- embedded content
Each space type can be nested under space groups, which will help form your navigation so members can find the section of your community they’re looking for.
To build your community spaces, you’ll find the setting inside your community settings by clicking on the cog-wheel icon in the top right side of your dashboard. You can then click on the Spaces link to build your spaces.
Click on Space Group to add a new space group which is like a category of spaces. Or Click on “Add a Space” to add a new space.
To set up a space, you choose a name for the space, choose the space type, choose how people can access it and the way you want it to be laid out. Save the space and you’ll be able to start posting content to it.
After creating a space, you can further edit it to change the privacy, hide/show it in the navigation and add SEO title and description.
There’s also a separate setting for re-ordering your spaces.
Spaces are easy to manage and you can have as many as your plan permits. On paid plans this is from 10 spaces on a Basic plan and up to 100 spaces on the Advanced plan.
2. Course Builder
Uuki doesn’t really mention in their feature list that there’s a course builder and I almost missed the fact that they had one.
A course builder is an important feature in community-first learning and most community platforms include one. Most course platforms also include some way for creators to build community around their courses.
The course builder in Uuki is a space which has the settings to create courses. It isn’t as full-featured as other course builders but it gets the job done.
To start building courses, you have to go to your community settings (the cog wheel in the top right hand corner of your dashboard), and click on “Spaces”. You can then click on the “Add a Space” button to begin.
To create a course, give your Space a name, select courses as the content type and select the space privacy. You’ll be able to configure other settings like payment after you save your space.
The next step is to create your course curriculum. You start by adding a section. The “Train with AI” button lets you use AI to help create your lesson content. However, it’s a brand new feature at the time I’m doing this review and there are a couple of hoops you have to jump through before being able to use it.
When you click “Add a Section”, you can name the section which would be like a module in your course. For example, the first section could be your course introduction. I like to add all the sections first and then add the lesson content.
You can click on the “Add content” button to start adding either lessons or quizzes, the two content types supported by this course builder.
The lesson editor allows you to enter a title for your lesson, a video embed and the course content. Uuki does not support native video so you would have to upload your content on external hosting sites like YouTube or Vimeo and then embed it here.
You can then enter the course content in the text editor before saving your lesson. The text editor lets you add a number of blocks such as lists, images, raw HTML, headings and attachments.
The end result after adding your lessons isn’t too bad and you get a rather user-friendly course interface and experience for your members.
The course builder could benefit from having native video but this works if you don’t mind uploading your content externally.
There are other settings available such as re-ordering lessons which is important if you add new lessons after publishing and there are drip settings that let you drip by date or by number of days after a member starts the course.
You can also customize the course by changing the title, adding a description and uploading a cover image.
3. Gamification
Gamification is a key feature in Uuki and one that I like a lot. Communities that have gamification get higher engagement and retention that those that don’t have this feature. Members are incentivized to post and they get rewarded with badges and awards that they can proudly display.
Inside Uuki settings, creators can customize their gamification settings. You can customize how points are given and edit the ranks. You can delete, add or rename the ranks however you want or to fit your brand.
Or you could disable gamification altogether. I don’t see why any creator would want to do that though.
4. Events Builder
Events are an essential feature for any community platform and Uuki uses it’s versatile spaces as an event builder.
Before creating an event, you will first need to create an events space. This will allow you to have the events template from which you can create events and all their settings.
To get started, you can go to settings and select “Spaces” from the menu. Click on “Add Space” and you’re ready to go.
Enter a name for your events space, set the content type to ‘events’, choose your privacy preference, and decide how you want your events to be displayed. You can then save your space.
The “Events” space will be displayed as seen in the screenshot below. You can then use the “create” button to start creating events.
After you click on the “Create Event” button, you will get your event builder which has all the settings for you to create events.
You will be able to add:
- your event name
- an event cover
- your event description (multimedia allowed)
- your event link
- your event time
- the duration of the event
- integration with Zoom
- an event poll
Your events will be displayed in the events space with an attend button members can press to indicate that they will be attending your event.
5. Integrations
Uuki has several integrations for connecting external apps. The integrations are mainly for SSO, event and other tasks you may want.
The main integrations list has:
- Discord
- Telegram
- Zoom (for events)
For SSO, you have:
- WordPress
- JSON Web Tokens
Stripe is used to collect payment. Not having Zapier surprised me because every other community and course platform includes Zapier for when they don’t have a native integration.
Finally, I must mention that the AI tutor used to help create courses if you decide to go with that option is powered by ChatGPT. In the main community settings, there is a field where you can insert your OpenAI key so you can connect your ChatGPT account with Uuki.
6. Memberships
You can make money with your Uuki community by selling memberships. Uuki allows you to charge a one-time or a recurring fee to members willing to pay for special access to dedicated spaces.
For example, you can charge for access to a course, events or community space by creating a membership and adding the space or spaces paying members can access.
You’ll need to set up your Stripe account to start accepting payments. Alternatively, you can allow users to pay using NFTs.
To create a membership, you can go to your settings and scroll all the way to the bottom where you’ll find the Membership menu item. You can then fill out the setup form to create a membership.
On the form, you’ll be asked to create a name for your membership, add a description of your membership, add spaces members will have access to and more. Save your form and start selling memberships to your Uuki community.
This is an easy and straightforward setup for an essential feature available to you in Uuki.
What’s Missing
Uuki is a great community platform that is always adding new and innovative features. They’ve added AI for course creation in between the time I signed up and when I finished writing this review.
Still there are some features that I found missing that could really make this platform much better.
They don’t have native video which would give course creation a much better experience for creators who don’t want to host their content on YouTube or Vimeo. Native video could also be used for events and more.
There are some platforms that have native video and these can make for a better alternative for creators who want to move away from Facebook communities and groups.
Another surprising absentee is Zapier. Nearly all other community platforms offer Zapier integrations so that you can connect with external apps that you already use. I didn’t see Zapier available inside Uuki at all.
Webhooks are available so if you know how to use this to connect to your app then this is the only option that you have until they decide to add Zapier integration.
Uuki Help and Support
All of the support and help you need can be found through the Uuki official community which is also hosted on the platform.
You’re prompted to join the community on signup. This is where you’ll find support spaces where you can post for help and check other posts for similar problems you may encounter.
The community also has some other support and help spaces where you can check to improve your knowledge of the platform or troubleshoot.
- Uuki Blog – keep up-to-date on what’s happening at Uuki
- Courses – there’s a community building course and other courses that can help you get the most out of Uuki
- Knowledge Base – trouble shoot and learn about the platform by going through the Uuki knowledge base which includes dedicated spaces for integrations, SEO and general help documents.
- Feature Requests – If there is a feature that you would like added, you can request it here.
A community chat is also available if you would like to chat with real people including the founder Ankur Singh who is always helpful. You can find the community chat by clicking on the speech bubble icon in the header bar.
Uuki Plans and Pricing
Uuki is competitively priced when compared to other community platforms and features three premium pricing tiers.
There’s also a free trial of 14-days to get started and that eventually goes to a very limited free plan which you can use until you decide to upgrade.
The three plans, which can be paid monthly or annually, are:
- Starter – $19/month ($15/month billed annually)
- Pro – $79/month ($65/month billed annually)
- Advanced – $259/month ($205/month billed annually)
The Starter plan offers the core features available on Uuki. There are some things to consider if you decide to go with this plan.
While you can have unlimited members on all plans, there are limits on each plan. On the Starter plan, you can only have 1 admin, 1 moderator, and up to 10 spaces. If you decide to take payments, you can expect to pay 8% in transaction fees.
The Pro plan increases the resources to 3 admins, 10 moderators, and up to 20 spaces while reducing transaction fees to 5%.
All of the features from the Starter plan are included and the plan adds the ability to remove Uuki branding, advanced reporting, API access, custom SSO, and more.
The most expensive plan offered is the Advanced plan. This is for power users and has the most resources. You can have up to 10 admins, 100 moderators, and 100 spaces. Transaction fees are lowered to 1%.
Everything in Pro is available plus you get a dedicated account manager, priority support, email white-labeling and more.
Which plan you decide to go depends on your needs as a creator or brand. You can get started with a 14-day free trial to check out the core features and you can even schedule a demo call before you upgrade.
Uuki Pros and Cons
Uuki isn’t perfect. There are some things that can be improved but it’s generally a well-rounded platform that you can use to build a community following around your brand or business.
Here are some of the things I liked about Uuki and some of the things I didn’t like about it.
Uuki Pros
Uuki Cons
Uuki is always adding more features so there can always be more things to like about the platform and the cons mentioned here may become non-existent with time.
Uuki Alternatives
Although a solid community platform, Uuki falls short on some things which they may iron out in the future. You know what’s best for your business and you may take a look at Uuki and decide that they’re not the best platform for you.
Luckily, these is no shortage of alternatives available that you can try out. Many of these have free trials or a free plan. Here are 4 of the best community platform alternatives to Uuki.
1. Mighty Networks
Mighty Networks is a community and course platform where you can do pretty much everything Uuki can do and more.
They offer a community first approach to selling courses and there are some rather powerful features available to creators. I was so impressed that I put Mighty Networks at #1 on my list of best community platforms here on TrialBear.
In comparison, Uuki is much cheaper than Mighty Networks. While Uuki starts at $19/month, Mighty Networks’ entry plan starts at $39/month. From there, Uuki’s mid-tier plan is $79/month while Mighty Networks’ jumps to $119. With the value offered, both networks appear to be fairly priced.
Mighty Networks has native video that is used to host course content and also, as a true Facebook groups alternative, to run live streaming content right inside the platform.
You can also create unlimited events inside Mighty Networks with their robust event creation system and automatically send notifications to users who RSVP.
Mighty Networks also gives you a 14-day free trial so that you can sign up and experience their platform without commitment and without even entering any credit card details.
If you need more advanced features such as native video and a stronger course product then this is a good alternative to Uuki.
2. Circle
Circle is another community platform that also lets you create courses. It is one of the most popular community platforms and even integrates with existing course platforms like Teachable and Thinkific.
Circle does not have a free plan and their entry plan is more expensive than Uuki’s at $49/month.
Circle lets you organize your community with spaces which include templates for posts, chats, events and courses. Course spaces are very powerful and you can gate it how you like and charge for courses separate from access to your community.
Circle has some very powerful community features which includes live streaming experiences, group chats, private messaging, engaging discussions with inline images and more.
Circle also lets you try their platform with a 14-day free trial before you commit and no credit card is necessary to begin.
3. Thinkific Communities
Thinkific is one of the top course platforms available on the internet in 2023. They certainly have a better course product than Uuki but this is because that is their main focus as a platform.
Thinkific also has Thinkific communities which (along with courses) makes it a powerful alternative to Uuki.
Features available include rich member profiles and @ mentions, live events that turn your community into a classroom with coaching, workshops, and more, reactions, threaded conversations, and lots more.
You can get started on Thinkific with either a free plan or a full 30-day free trial of one of their most popular paid plans.
4. GroupApp
GroupApp is mainly a community platform but lets you create courses as well which makes it a powerful alternative to Uuki.
They have everything that Uuki offers including events creation and calendar, profiles, support, Zapier integration, and more. They also have everything that Uuki doesn’t have including native video that you can use for hosting course content or for live streams or even video chat.
Uuki is relatively cheaper than GroupApp as the latter starts at $39/month compared to Uuki’s $19/month. GroupApp also has a $99/month plan in addition to a free forever plan. You can start building courses on the $39/month plan though, in addition to community so there’s no real need to go for the $99/month plan in the beginning.
The real catch is that while Uuki allows you to have unlimited members, GroupApp limits members depending on the pricing plan you’re subscribed to. If you’re on the $39/month plan then you can only have up to 1000 members while the $99/month plan allows up to 10,000 members.
There are two ways to try GroupApp. You can sign up for free to the free-forever account or you can go the suggested way and use their 14-day free trial to sign up for one of their paid plans.
Conclusion
Your decision on whether or not to use Uuki as your community platform of choice depends on your needs for your business.
For example, if you need to have unlimited members on the lowest tier plan without having to upgrade then Uuki may be a better choice than any platform where they have a cap on the number of members you can have before you need to upgrade.
If native video is absolutely necessary then Uuki may not be what you’re looking for. One of the alternatives mentioned in this review may be a better choice.
That said, I highly recommend Uuki as it has a lot of great features that will allow you to build a thriving community and help you connect with your audience.
You can easily try it out for yourself with their 14-day free trial that they offer and start building community around your brand or business.