Circles are created by admins to assign permissions or classify specific groups of people in the community. There are certain default circles - All Members and Super Admins, for instance.

Custom Circles allow Super Admins to create new Circles, which is important if you want to assign different sets of permissions to specific groups of people or apply unique badges/labels for certain people.

By default, Crowdstack sites are set up on our own ".mycrowdstack.com" domain. For instance, "acmecompany.mycrowdstack.com".

With a Custom Domain, however, you can run your Crowdstack site on a domain/subdomain that you own. For instance, "community.mydomain.com" or simply "mydomain.com".

By default, Crowdstack includes two themes for you to choose from for your site, but you may not make any changes to those themes. When Custom Themes are supported, you can customize any existing themes, as well as create brand new ones.

If your organization has brand guidelines that must be met, this may be a critical feature. Note that you may also customize the email theme when Custom Themes are supported.

With Custom CSS & Code support, you are able to apply your own custom CSS to really customize the look and feel of your Crowdstack community. In addition, you are able to add code to the HEAD area of the HTML for all pages, apply "end of page HTML" custom code, and apply code to registration landing pages (for tracking conversions, for instance). You can also completely customize the header of your pages with your own custom HTML.

Groups are sub-sites within your Crowdstack community that can have their own administrators. A group may be public, private, or hidden. Each group can be configured independently, in terms of the types of content to support, permissions, and membership.

This is private web space you can use for storing images and other files that you can use in your Site Header and in other custom code areas. The files in this space are not publicly listed to your community. They are intended for internal use by your administrators.

Create your own web pages, containing any content you like, to extend the content in your community. This can be useful if you want a custom landing page for your community, for instance.

Crowdstack utilizes a "Wordlets" system that allows you to customize any wording used on publicly-facing pages. This does not include the administrative control panel, however.

Crowdstack supports chat for live, text-based conversation. Chat Events are scheduled, usually moderated, and embeddable. Chat Rooms, on the other hand are designed to be available anytime on your community.

Crowdstack awards points to members based on specific actions they take on your community. These points can be used to measure activity levels overall and are key part of the Community Rank system. If your plan supports Custom Community Point Formula, then you can change the point values associated with each supported member action.

All Crowdstack plans allow members to embed videos from other sources (like YouTube), but if you want to allow your members to upload their own videos, you'll need the Video Uploads feature.

With Crowdstack, you can create configurable databases that can be used to store and display information of all types. This could be used for recipes, collectibles, or any other specific type of information that has a consistent set of properties.

Allow your members to sign in using their logins from social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and LinkedIn.

Use SSO to have login controlled by your own membership database. We support SAML 2.0 for SSO.

While you should expect outstanding performance regardless of the plan you select, if you require a guaranteed Service Level Agreement with penalties for substandard uptime, you'll need to choose the Complete plan.

With our RightStart consultation, a Crowdstack team member will be available to ensure that your new community is set up properly, per your requirements.

Want to change the wording in our Terms of Service in some way? We can work with you, but only if your plan supports Negotiable Contract Language. If your plan does not support this, you won't be able to change any of our standard terms.

If you know you have a legal team that will be required to review the terms, then you'll probably require this (because we all know lawyers always want to make changes). 😃

With this optional add-on, all data stored on our servers for your community will be encrypted at rest. This mitigates risks in the event of data breach of some kind. And this option may be very important if your community posts sensitive information of any kind.

Your Crowdstack community will be in its own dedicated environment, sandboxed from our other customers.

Choose from our list of available data centers, including the United States, Germany, England, Singapore, Canada, and Australia.

If your community needs to adhere to HIPAA regulations, you'll require this optional add-on. Note that Premium Security includes Total Data Encryption and Isolated Firewalls (which are available as separate add-ons), but also adds active cyber defense and DDoS mitigation. Only required if security is critically important.

We include a small "powered by Crowdstack" image at the bottom of all Crowdstack pages. If you'd like to remove that branding, you'll want to pay for this optional add-on.

Need more than one community? Our Multisite add-on allows you to add additional community sites under the same account, while also aggregating usage across the sites in your portfolio.

With the optional Recommendation Engine, the system uses machine learning to display related/recommended content to users.

Us the Crowdstack API to integrate the community with your other systems.

Create widgets that you can embed on your main site to promote community content/activity.

Crowdstack has everything you need to ensure that your community complies with GDPR regulations, including settings to allow members to delete their own accounts, revoke agreement to your terms, and download/export their personal data.

Crowdstack has a built-in premium membership system called FeePod. If you enable it, you can set your own fee, and determine the specific features and/or content that you want to reserve for paying members. We handle all payment transactions and charge a 7.5% fee on all transactions.