Three Alternatives to Paying for a Ning Community Site

Ning's new pricing plan goes into effect in just a few days.  Have you made your decision whether to pay Ning and attempt to recover your money by advertising, etc. or to migrate to a different platform?  Time is short, but here are three alternatives to consider.

1. Migrate to Grou.ps

Grou.ps is a community website provider whose offerings are very similar to Ning's.  Their service allows you to create your own social network. Features include forums, events, blogs, photo galleries, videos, and a wide selection of widgets to put on MySpace® or Facebook®.

Grou.ps even has three different ways to migrate the users and data from your Ning site.

2. Elgg

Elgg is a powerful open source social networking engine.  The software is free.  It is written in PHP, runs on Apache web server and requires a MySQL database.

Elgg has a very active developer base and there are a number of plugins that add even more flexibility.  Plugins extend your Elgg site by adding additional functionality, languages and themes. They are contributed by members of the Elgg community.

3. Jomsocial

Jomsocial is an extension for the popular Joomla! CMS system.  While it is not free, the software is reasonably priced and is actively supported.

Jomsocial allows your users to customize their profiles, share photos and videos, and create and manage groups. They can post comments on their wall and export their updates using RSS.