Pensil, a powerful alternative to inSided

What’s the difference between Pensil and inSided?

inSided is one of the older software companies in the community solutions space that is primarily suitable for Telecom and B2B software firms. The subscription fee starts from $10.8k/year and goes up to $150k/year for 10m users (additional fees for integration).

Pensil is a modern and fully customizable community platform designed to help SaaS companies build thriving customer communities. Tribe’s Premium pricing starts from $540/year and the Enterprise pricing is customized based on exact business needs.

Should you build a community with Pensil or inSided?

• Modern design

The design elements of the Pensil Platform are inspired by modern social networks. Primarily because in the last decade the new-age internet users’ networking and content consumption pattern has been largely influenced by social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Quora, etc.

Since Pensil brings the best practices and engagement tools such as activity feed offered by social media sites, it becomes quite familiar for the members to interact in the community. This improves the adoption and success of the community.

Insided’s design patterns are very similar to the older discussion forums.

• Customizability

Pensil is a community platform — consider this as a solution that offers you different building blocks so you can arrange and configure them to create different types of community pages. This helps businesses create unique brand-led communities since every community is different.

Apart from that, community admins have access to carefully crafted color palletes, themes, and templates to get started easily with best practices. These can be further customized exactly based on the business needs. Spaces in Tribe communities support different views so you can also customize the way posts are presented.

Insided’s can also be customized arranging and modifying different components of the community.

• Embeddability

Communities powered by Pensil can be easily embedded into website, mobile apps, and web apps. When combined with SSO, this becomes a powerful way to seamlessly add community experience into apps.

Community admins have different configurations for the embeddable widgets. For example, in the case of embedding a Space you can make it ready only and choose to show or hide header, post editor, about section, etc.

With Pensil’s SDK, it becomes easy to fully integrate the community into React apps and completely customize the user interface.

Insided’s embed tool is a widget can allows your customers to search the community content.

• App Store

Pensil’s App Store includes a growing number of apps that can be installed to unlock additional functionalities, enhance your community, and integrate the community with tools you already use.

With inSided, there is no concept of modular apps that can be installed to enhance your community.

• Developer portal

If you are looking to build custom functionalities for your community, Pensil’s Developer Portal can help you with API, webhooks, and a Liquid Template engine. These custom enhancements are available in your community App Store as custom apps.

While inSided gives you access to API and Webhooks, there is no dedicated developer platform to enhance your community based on your unique needs.

• Advanced security

Large businesses often required advanced security to add an additional layer of protection to the community. That’s why Pensil offers a custom security header, SSL certificate, and hosts data in a SOC II certified server.

• Reporting and analytics

Pensil offers powerful analytics and reporting suite with a combination of native community analytics and third-party integration with solutions such as Amplitude Analytics, Mixpanel, and Google Analytics.

This allows community admins to have a granular view of the member activities and properties. Amplitude integration makes it easy to measure member stickiness, retention, member lifecycle, Space-specific engagement, and more.

Insided offers integration with Google Analytics and Mixpanel.

• Pricing

Pensil offers Start, Grow, Premium, Advanced, and Enterprise subscription plans. The Start plan ($45/mo with an annual subscription) is free for up to 100 members. The Grow plan costs $85/mo with an annual subscription. The Enterprise plan requires custom pricing and Pensil’s sales team can help with that.

Insided’s pricing starts from $900/mo. There are additional costs based on different add-ons and integrations

The Final Verdict

Whether you’re just starting out and learning about community building or you’re looking for a new community platform, you can see that inSided is a good choice in only several cases.

To have a more versatile solution, you need to turn to some of the best inSided alternatives and competitors. If you want everything covered, the best option out there is Pensil, the all-in-one platform that helps you build and grow your community and earn money at the same time.

Why would you host your courses on one platform and have your community on another one when you can keep them together? Why choose a platform that’s tricky to navigate when your community members can have a familiar-looking and easy-to-use platform and enjoy every second spent using it?

Running a business as an online creator can be challenging enough. Do yourself a favor and make it run seamlessly by relying on a community platform such as Pensil. Join Pensil and start creating your community for free!

Create a free Pensil account