# Drry vs the alternatives

> Drry makes this comparison, so we are biased. Every competitor claim is kept qualitative; every Drry figure comes from our own pricing. Verify a competitor's current terms on their site.

## Why coaches choose Drry

- Keep 100% of member payments. Only Stripe's standard processing fee applies, we take nothing on top.
- Payments run through your own Stripe account, so your customers and subscriptions belong to you, not the platform. No payment lock-in.
- Funnels built in: fast landing pages on your domain with views, joins, and revenue attributed per page. Standalone funnel tools charge $49 to $97 a month for less.
- A genuinely free tier: 100 members, 5 GB storage, unlimited courses, and the community feed, with no card required.
- Courses, a community feed, members, and payments in one branded space you own.
- Step-by-step guides built in and free on every plan, with no cap: rich-text steps with images and native video, a what-you-need list members tick off, on a tab you can rename to Recipes, Workouts, or Protocols. Flip any one of them public and it becomes a shareable, search-indexable how-to page with a QR code, a lead-capture form, and your call to action, so the same guide serves your members and brings you new ones.
- Your own address like grace.drry.com out of the box, with custom domain and site white label on paid tiers, and white-label email from your own domain on Growth.
- Member analytics on the $29 Creator plan: who is showing up, what is landing, and who is quietly drifting away. The kind of insight other platforms save for their priciest plans.
- Get paid for 1:1s and packages: send a client a one-time or installment link with an agreement they sign before paying. Built in, free on every plan, and no platform fee. Other platforms make you bolt on a separate contract tool, and most never reach 0%.
- Let clients book you without a second subscription: publish your session types and share one link, free on every plan (2 session types on free, unlimited from Creator). A booked time becomes a real session on the same calendar your classes run on, so the invite, the reminders, and cancellation come with it, and anything already on that calendar closes its own slot. From Creator the call can happen in a room of your own instead of on someone else's link, and either way the person who booked becomes a contact you can follow up, by hand or automatically. Standalone schedulers hand you a time and an email address and stop there.
- Bring your list with you, and take it back out whenever you want. Import your contacts from a CSV in the browser (we check every address before it lands, so a bad list never touches your sending reputation), and export the whole audience on any plan including free. Most platforms make leaving quietly difficult; we would rather you stay because it is working.
- Audio your members can actually take with them: the library is free on every plan, with a player that does speed, a sleep timer, resume, and lock-screen controls, and Growth adds a private, revocable podcast feed per member so the same library plays in Apple Podcasts or Overcast, offline and listed in no directory. Most platforms cap audio or send you to a second paid product to do this, and the ones that do have feeds cannot tell you who actually listened. We can, because the web player stays primary and the feed is additive.
- Email your whole community, built in on every plan, even free (700 sends a month on free, 60,000 on Creator, 500,000 on Growth), no add-on and no second tool to wire up. Creator adds email automations: welcome journeys, lead-magnet delivery, and win-backs that run on their own.
- Give a journey a goal, and it stops chasing people who already did the thing. Set the goal to paying, or active in the community, or holds a tag, and every enrolled person is re-checked against it each time the journey comes back to them, instead of marching to the end of a script written weeks ago. It also applies to people who are already partway through: the goal is read fresh every time, not frozen into their journey the day they entered, so one you add today reaches them at their next step rather than only catching people who start after you.
- Members can message each other and you, 1:1 or in a group you or an admin starts, on every plan including free. Images and files, reactions, unsend your own message, blocking. Your side is a real inbox rather than a notification list: saved replies you fire with a slash, and beside a one-to-one thread that person's lifetime revenue, tags, join date, and your private notes. On Growth you can switch on optional AI screening that flags a worrying message into your moderation queue for you to judge.
- Lifetime revenue per member, free on every plan, so you can see what each person is actually worth: every membership charge, payment link, and product sale they have settled adds up on their row in your members list, on their profile, beside their name in your inbox, and in your CSV export. Not a report you go and run, and not a feature saved for a top tier: just a number next to their name, so you know who to look after.
- Drip, prerequisites, and graded quizzes, free on every plan and enforced on the SERVER rather than hidden in the interface. Release a lesson a set number of days after someone joins, on a fixed date, or a set number of days after they finish what comes before it; gate whole modules and whole courses the same way; set the pass mark on a quiz yourself. A locked lesson's video, transcript, attachments, and body are refused by the routes that serve them, so there is no URL to guess your way past. Most platforms put course release controls on a paid tier, if they have them at all.
- Captions and transcripts written for you, free on every plan including the free one, and never metered. Publish a lesson video, an audio lesson or an audio track and we transcribe it: captions on the video player's CC button, and for audio a panel members can search where every line is a tap to that second, next to chapters you named yourself. Correct the machine's wording once in the editor and we never overwrite it. Where the bigger suites have this, it tends to arrive on an upper plan or against a monthly allowance of AI credits you top up.
- Sell more than one membership level out of ONE community, on Growth: a Basic, a Pro and a VIP, with per-course, per-room, per-session and per-collection control over who each is for. Everything you leave open stays open to everyone. A lower tier still sees what it does not have, marked with what unlocks it, so your own library does the upselling; a genuinely private room can be hidden outright instead. Your email audiences split the same way, so "VIP and up" is a rule rather than a list you maintain by hand. The usual alternative is running a second community, with its own members, its own posts and its own bill.

## Head to head

### Drry vs Skool (a free, fee-free alternative)

Skool pairs a community with simple courses behind a monthly fee, and its cheap plan takes a percentage of every member payment on top. Its upper plan drops that platform cut on ordinary payments, and the way you get there is to pay Skool's much higher monthly price before your first member joins. Drry gives you the same combination plus a real free plan to start, and takes 0% on every plan.

| Dimension | Drry | Skool |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Free plan | Yes. 100 members, 5 GB, unlimited courses, and the community feed. No card. | Paid membership only, no free plan. |
| Fee on your member payments | 0%. You keep 100%, only Stripe's standard processing fee applies. | Its cheap plan takes a percentage of every member payment, on top of the monthly fee. Its upper plan drops the platform cut on ordinary payments, and a percentage returns above a high per-payment threshold. Getting to the plan without the cut means paying Skool's top monthly price before your first member. |
| Courses + community together | Both built in, in one branded space you own. | Community and courses together. |
| Step-by-step guides and how-tos | Built in and free on every plan, with no cap on how many: build a guide from rich-text steps with images and video you upload to Drry and stream, a what-you-need list with real amounts and units members tick off as they go, and chips like prep time or servings, all on a tab you can rename to Recipes, Workouts, or Protocols. Because the amounts are structured, a member can scale a recipe to a different serving count or switch between metric and US, and they can keep the screen awake while they follow it or print the whole thing. Flip any guide public and it gets one shareable link, published with recipe details a search engine can read, plus a QR code, a lead-capture form and your own call to action, and you can hold the last steps back behind an email if you want it to work as a lead magnet too. | A classroom lesson or a community post can carry a written how-to, but there is no step-by-step format with a supplies list, quantities, and check-off, and no way to publish one piece as its own search-indexed page with a lead-capture form and your call to action. |
| Funnels + landing pages | Built in: compose landing pages from proven sections, capture leads with email boxes and embeddable forms, and see views, joins, and revenue per funnel. 1 free, unlimited on paid plans. | An About page per group; no landing pages or funnel analytics, so users bolt on external page builders. |
| Your own brand and domain | Your own address like grace.drry.com on free; connect your own domain plus site white label (no Drry branding, the site is 100% yours) on paid plans, and on Growth your email sends from your own domain too. | Everything lives on skool.com; no custom domain or white label. |
| Knowing who is showing up | See who is showing up, who is drifting away, which content people love, and how many finish each course. Included on Creator ($29/mo). | Basic built-in stats. |
| Where pricing starts | Free, then $29/mo (Creator), $99/mo (Growth). | A monthly fee from day one, and the cheap plan carries a percentage of every member payment on top. The plan without that cut is the expensive one. |
| Getting paid for 1:1s and packages | Send any client a one-time or installment link with an agreement they sign before they pay, built in, free on every plan, 0% platform fee. Most platforms make you bolt on a separate contract tool. | Tier and community paywalls, not per-client invoices: no installments and no signed agreement, and on the cheap plan a percentage on top of Stripe. |
| Email your members | Built in on every plan: send a broadcast to your whole community or to an audience your forms captured (700 sends a month on free, 60,000 on Creator, 500,000 on Growth, and new-content emails to members unmetered on top). Creator adds automations: a library of ready-made journeys that welcome new signups, deliver a lead magnet, fill an event, and win back quiet members on their own. | One-click email broadcast to all members, but it is a single post blast capped at once every 72 hours, with no segmenting or sequences. |
| Selling digital downloads | Built in on every plan, free up to 10 products and unlimited from Creator: sell any file (PDF, video, audio, zip) straight from your bio link, keep 100% of it, and buyers get an instant download plus a receipt with the link. You keep their email, so a one-off buyer becomes someone you can actually reach again. | No digital storefront. Everything lives behind the membership, so a one-off download is not something you can sell. |
| Audio and private podcast feeds | An audio library on every plan including free: upload a track and members get a real player with 0.75x to 2x speed, a sleep timer, resume, and lock-screen controls. Growth adds a private, revocable podcast feed per member, which you switch on if you want it, so your library also plays in Apple Podcasts, Overcast, or Pocket Casts, downloaded for offline and unlisted in every directory. And you still see which members listened and which finished, which a podcast feed on its own can never report. | No audio feature at all: a recording lands as a video post or an attachment, so there is nothing to listen to on a walk and no podcast feed to subscribe to. |
| Letting clients book a call with you | Built in and free on every plan (2 session types on free, unlimited from Creator): publish your session types, share one link, and a booked time becomes a real private session on the same calendar your classes run on, with the invite, the reminders, the joining link, and cancellation all handled. Availability is yours to shape (weekly hours with split ranges, a buffer after, minimum notice, how far ahead, caps per day and per week, days off), anything already on your calendar closes its own slot, intake can be one of your real forms, and the person who booked becomes a contact you can email or drop into an automation. From Creator the call can happen in your own branded room, recorded when you press record, instead of on someone else's link. | No booking or scheduling feature. Coaches paste a link to an outside scheduler, so the time gets picked somewhere else, the call happens somewhere else again, and neither ever lands on a calendar inside the community. |
| Members messaging each other, and you | Direct messages built in on every plan including free, 1:1 and in groups: images and files, reactions, unsend your own message, and blocking. Group threads are yours and your admins' to start. Your side is a real inbox, not a notification list: saved replies you fire with a slash, and beside a one-to-one thread that person's lifetime revenue, tags, join date, and your own private notes about them. On Growth you can switch on optional AI screening that flags a worrying message into your moderation queue for you to judge. Messages are a switch in your Studio, on by default for new communities. | Members can message each other and you, and Skool does that part well. What is not wrapped around it is a coach-side inbox with saved replies and, beside the thread, what that person has actually paid you. |
| What each member is worth to you | Lifetime revenue per person, free on every plan including free: every membership charge, payment link, and product sale that person has settled adds up on their row in your members list, on their profile, beside their name in your message inbox, and in the CSV you export. Refunded product orders and unsettled payment links are left out. It is not a report you have to go and run, and it is not saved for a top tier: it is just there, next to their name. | Revenue here is a group-level number, and on the cheap plan a percentage comes out of it before it reaches you. A lifetime figure sitting on one member's row, telling you who to look after, is the report we put on the free plan. |
| Drip, prerequisites, and quizzes | Drip release, prerequisites, and graded quizzes, all three free on every plan including free, and enforced on the SERVER rather than hidden in the interface. Release a lesson a set number of days after someone joins, on a fixed date, or a set number of days after they finish what comes before it, and gate whole modules and whole courses the same way. Add multiple-choice quizzes with a pass mark you choose, and make a lesson wait on the prerequisites it depends on. A locked lesson's video, transcript, attachments, and body are not merely hidden: the routes that serve them refuse, so there is no URL to guess your way past. | Its classroom holds courses, and the whole classroom sits behind a paid plan, so there is no free tier to run a released-over-time course on at all. |
| Selling more than one membership level | Membership tiers on Growth ($99/mo): run a Basic, a Pro and a VIP out of one community, and decide per course, per room, per session and per collection of audio or guides who each one is for. Everything you leave open stays open to everyone. A lower tier still SEES what it does not have, marked with what unlocks it, because a locked card is what sells the upgrade; genuinely private rooms can be hidden outright instead. Your email audiences split the same way, so you can write to "VIP and up" without keeping the list by hand. | One membership price per group. To sell a second level you run a second group, with its own members, its own posts and its own bill. |
| Captions and transcripts, unmetered | Every lesson video and every audio track is transcribed for you automatically, free on every plan including the free one, with no AI credits to buy and no add-on to switch on. On a video the captions are one tap away on the player's CC button; an audio track gets a panel members can search, where every line is a tap to that second, next to chapters you named yourself. The machine mishears your own vocabulary the same way every time, so you correct it once in the editor, and a corrected transcript is never overwritten by a later machine pass. | English captions are generated for you on video you upload to Skool, which is a real answer and better than several platforms here. What we cannot find is a transcript that STAYS: nothing to read alongside, nothing to search, and nothing for you to correct when it mishears the words you use most. And there is no audio surface for one to sit under. |
| Keeping the space safe | On Growth, an AI screen reads a post before your members do and holds anything that trips the policy YOU set: eight categories you switch on or off one at a time, a strictness you choose, and your own house rules in your own words, all landing in a review queue where you approve or remove. It fails open on purpose, so an outage at the model never stops your community talking. Growth can screen direct messages the same way, into the same queue. On every plan, free included, you still get the ordinary controls: your own categories, inline moderation for you and your admins, and members deleting their own posts. | Reports, removal, and a moderator who reads everything. An AI screen that holds a post before it appears is not something we can find in Skool, so the reading stays yours to do, and there is more of it every month the community grows. |

Full comparison: https://drry.com/vs/skool

### Drry vs Kajabi (a simpler, lower-cost alternative)

Kajabi is a broad course-and-marketing suite with a higher monthly cost, and its own pricing page now sets the terms coaches complain about: no free plan, a contact allowance on the entry tier that is a fraction of the tiers above it, and card processing charged at a rate that only improves as you climb, plus an extra platform percentage if you bring your own processor. Drry focuses on the essentials creators actually use, courses, community, and payments, starts free, and takes 0% however you get paid.

| Dimension | Drry | Kajabi |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Free plan | Yes. 100 members, 5 GB, unlimited courses, and the community feed. No card. | Free trial only, no free plan. |
| Fee on your member payments | 0%. You keep 100%, only Stripe's standard processing fee applies. | Its 0% headline runs through Kajabi's own processor, which keeps your billing inside Kajabi, and its pricing page still charges card processing at a rate that only improves as you climb the tiers. Bring your own processor instead and a platform percentage is added on top of that provider's fees, largest on the entry plan and shrinking only as you pay more. |
| Courses + community together | Both built in, in one branded space you own. | Courses and marketing, community is limited. |
| Step-by-step guides and how-tos | Built in and free on every plan, with no cap on how many: build a guide from rich-text steps with images and video you upload to Drry and stream, a what-you-need list with real amounts and units members tick off as they go, and chips like prep time or servings, all on a tab you can rename to Recipes, Workouts, or Protocols. Because the amounts are structured, a member can scale a recipe to a different serving count or switch between metric and US, and they can keep the screen awake while they follow it or print the whole thing. Flip any guide public and it gets one shareable link, published with recipe details a search engine can read, plus a QR code, a lead-capture form and your own call to action, and you can hold the last steps back behind an email if you want it to work as a lead magnet too. | You can publish a lesson or a blog post and put a call to action on it, and the page builder is capable, but nothing is purpose-built as a step-by-step with a supplies list, quantities, and check-off, and it all sits inside a pricier suite with no free plan. |
| Funnels + landing pages | Built in: compose landing pages from proven sections, capture leads with email boxes and embeddable forms, and see views, joins, and revenue per funnel. 1 free, unlimited on paid plans. | Yes, funnels and landing pages on every plan, inside a considerably pricier suite with no free plan under any of it. |
| Your own brand and domain | Your own address like grace.drry.com on free; connect your own domain plus site white label (no Drry branding, the site is 100% yours) on paid plans, and on Growth your email sends from your own domain too. | Custom domain on paid plans. |
| Knowing who is showing up | See who is showing up, who is drifting away, which content people love, and how many finish each course. Included on Creator ($29/mo). | Advanced analytics reserved for the highest tiers. |
| Where pricing starts | Free, then $29/mo (Creator), $99/mo (Growth). | A higher monthly fee. |
| Getting paid for 1:1s and packages | Send any client a one-time or installment link with an agreement they sign before they pay, built in, free on every plan, 0% platform fee. Most platforms make you bolt on a separate contract tool. | One-time and installment checkout links, even invoices, but the signed agreement is a bolt-on (DocuSign), and processing fees or an added platform cut apply. |
| Email your members | Built in on every plan: send a broadcast to your whole community or to an audience your forms captured (700 sends a month on free, 60,000 on Creator, 500,000 on Growth, and new-content emails to members unmetered on top). Creator adds automations: a library of ready-made journeys that welcome new signups, deliver a lead magnet, fill an event, and win back quiet members on their own. | A real email suite: broadcasts, automated sequences, and an assistant that helps write copy. But it lives inside a pricier suite with no free plan. |
| Selling digital downloads | Built in on every plan, free up to 10 products and unlimited from Creator: sell any file (PDF, video, audio, zip) straight from your bio link, keep 100% of it, and buyers get an instant download plus a receipt with the link. You keep their email, so a one-off buyer becomes someone you can actually reach again. | Yes, digital products are supported, on plans that start well above Drry's. |
| Audio and private podcast feeds | An audio library on every plan including free: upload a track and members get a real player with 0.75x to 2x speed, a sleep timer, resume, and lock-screen controls. Growth adds a private, revocable podcast feed per member, which you switch on if you want it, so your library also plays in Apple Podcasts, Overcast, or Pocket Casts, downloaded for offline and unlisted in every directory. And you still see which members listened and which finished, which a podcast feed on its own can never report. | Private podcasts are genuinely built in here, and good, on plans that start well above Drry's and with no free plan to try them on. |
| Letting clients book a call with you | Built in and free on every plan (2 session types on free, unlimited from Creator): publish your session types, share one link, and a booked time becomes a real private session on the same calendar your classes run on, with the invite, the reminders, the joining link, and cancellation all handled. Availability is yours to shape (weekly hours with split ranges, a buffer after, minimum notice, how far ahead, caps per day and per week, days off), anything already on your calendar closes its own slot, intake can be one of your real forms, and the person who booked becomes a contact you can email or drop into an automation. From Creator the call can happen in your own branded room, recorded when you press record, instead of on someone else's link. | Coaching products and appointment scheduling do exist inside the suite, on plans that start well above Drry's and with no free plan to try them on, and the call itself still happens on an outside video link. |
| Members messaging each other, and you | Direct messages built in on every plan including free, 1:1 and in groups: images and files, reactions, unsend your own message, and blocking. Group threads are yours and your admins' to start. Your side is a real inbox, not a notification list: saved replies you fire with a slash, and beside a one-to-one thread that person's lifetime revenue, tags, join date, and your own private notes about them. On Growth you can switch on optional AI screening that flags a worrying message into your moderation queue for you to judge. Messages are a switch in your Studio, on by default for new communities. | A community product exists in the suite, so people can talk. The coach side of it is not an inbox with saved replies and that person's lifetime revenue in the same panel, and none of it is reachable without a plan that starts well above ours. |
| What each member is worth to you | Lifetime revenue per person, free on every plan including free: every membership charge, payment link, and product sale that person has settled adds up on their row in your members list, on their profile, beside their name in your message inbox, and in the CSV you export. Refunded product orders and unsettled payment links are left out. It is not a report you have to go and run, and it is not saved for a top tier: it is just there, next to their name. | Its reporting is genuinely deep, and its deepest reporting is reserved for the higher tiers. On Drry, a member's lifetime figure is every membership charge, payment link, and product sale they have settled, added up on their row on every plan, including free. |
| Drip, prerequisites, and quizzes | Drip release, prerequisites, and graded quizzes, all three free on every plan including free, and enforced on the SERVER rather than hidden in the interface. Release a lesson a set number of days after someone joins, on a fixed date, or a set number of days after they finish what comes before it, and gate whole modules and whole courses the same way. Add multiple-choice quizzes with a pass mark you choose, and make a lesson wait on the prerequisites it depends on. A locked lesson's video, transcript, attachments, and body are not merely hidden: the routes that serve them refuse, so there is no URL to guess your way past. | Course delivery is real here and always has been. The difference is the bill and the floor: it arrives inside a pricier suite with no free plan under it, where on Drry release scheduling, prerequisites, and graded quizzes are in from the free tier and enforced on the server. |
| Selling more than one membership level | Membership tiers on Growth ($99/mo): run a Basic, a Pro and a VIP out of one community, and decide per course, per room, per session and per collection of audio or guides who each one is for. Everything you leave open stays open to everyone. A lower tier still SEES what it does not have, marked with what unlocks it, because a locked card is what sells the upgrade; genuinely private rooms can be hidden outright instead. Your email audiences split the same way, so you can write to "VIP and up" without keeping the list by hand. | Yes, multiple membership offers with their own pricing and their own content, on a platform priced well above this one. |
| Captions and transcripts, unmetered | Every lesson video and every audio track is transcribed for you automatically, free on every plan including the free one, with no AI credits to buy and no add-on to switch on. On a video the captions are one tap away on the player's CC button; an audio track gets a panel members can search, where every line is a tap to that second, next to chapters you named yourself. The machine mishears your own vocabulary the same way every time, so you correct it once in the editor, and a corrected transcript is never overwritten by a later machine pass. | Transcripts and translations are in the box, on its upper plans, and they draw down a monthly allowance of AI credits that you top up when it runs out. On Drry the transcript is on every plan including free, and nothing about it is metered. |
| Keeping the space safe | On Growth, an AI screen reads a post before your members do and holds anything that trips the policy YOU set: eight categories you switch on or off one at a time, a strictness you choose, and your own house rules in your own words, all landing in a review queue where you approve or remove. It fails open on purpose, so an outage at the model never stops your community talking. Growth can screen direct messages the same way, into the same queue. On every plan, free included, you still get the ordinary controls: your own categories, inline moderation for you and your admins, and members deleting their own posts. | Community is the lighter half of this suite, and an AI screen that holds a post before it reaches the feed is not something we can find in it. Moderation is manual where it exists. |

Full comparison: https://drry.com/vs/kajabi

### Drry vs Circle (a free, all-in-one alternative)

Circle is a refined community platform. Drry offers a similar community experience with courses built in and a free plan to start, and you keep all of your member payments.

| Dimension | Drry | Circle |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Free plan | Yes. 100 members, 5 GB, unlimited courses, and the community feed. No card. | Trial, then paid plans. |
| Fee on your member payments | 0%. You keep 100%, only Stripe's standard processing fee applies. | A platform transaction fee on every plan, smaller on pricier tiers. |
| Courses + community together | Both built in, in one branded space you own. | Community-first, courses available. |
| Step-by-step guides and how-tos | Built in and free on every plan, with no cap on how many: build a guide from rich-text steps with images and video you upload to Drry and stream, a what-you-need list with real amounts and units members tick off as they go, and chips like prep time or servings, all on a tab you can rename to Recipes, Workouts, or Protocols. Because the amounts are structured, a member can scale a recipe to a different serving count or switch between metric and US, and they can keep the screen awake while they follow it or print the whole thing. Flip any guide public and it gets one shareable link, published with recipe details a search engine can read, plus a QR code, a lead-capture form and your own call to action, and you can hold the last steps back behind an email if you want it to work as a lead magnet too. | Posts and course lessons cover written how-tos, and a public space can be found by search, but nothing is purpose-built as a step-by-step with a supplies list, quantities, and check-off, and turning one piece into a lead-magnet page with its own form and call to action means building it yourself in the website builder. |
| Funnels + landing pages | Built in: compose landing pages from proven sections, capture leads with email boxes and embeddable forms, and see views, joins, and revenue per funnel. 1 free, unlimited on paid plans. | A website builder for pages; no funnel analytics. |
| Your own brand and domain | Your own address like grace.drry.com on free; connect your own domain plus site white label (no Drry branding, the site is 100% yours) on paid plans, and on Growth your email sends from your own domain too. | Custom domain on paid plans. |
| Knowing who is showing up | See who is showing up, who is drifting away, which content people love, and how many finish each course. Included on Creator ($29/mo). | Seeing each member's activity is only on Circle's Business plan. |
| Where pricing starts | Free, then $29/mo (Creator), $99/mo (Growth). | A monthly fee. |
| Getting paid for 1:1s and packages | Send any client a one-time or installment link with an agreement they sign before they pay, built in, free on every plan, 0% platform fee. Most platforms make you bolt on a separate contract tool. | One-time and installment paywalls for space access, not a 1:1 invoice: no signed agreement, and a platform fee on top of Stripe. |
| Email your members | Built in on every plan: send a broadcast to your whole community or to an audience your forms captured (700 sends a month on free, 60,000 on Creator, 500,000 on Growth, and new-content emails to members unmetered on top). Creator adds automations: a library of ready-made journeys that welcome new signups, deliver a lead magnet, fill an event, and win back quiet members on their own. | Broadcasts, automations, and segmentation are solid, but email is a paid add-on on top of your plan, and its assistant is workflow automation on the top tiers, rather than email tooling. |
| Selling digital downloads | Built in on every plan, free up to 10 products and unlimited from Creator: sell any file (PDF, video, audio, zip) straight from your bio link, keep 100% of it, and buyers get an instant download plus a receipt with the link. You keep their email, so a one-off buyer becomes someone you can actually reach again. | Paid spaces and courses, but no storefront for selling a single file to someone who is not a member. |
| Audio and private podcast feeds | An audio library on every plan including free: upload a track and members get a real player with 0.75x to 2x speed, a sleep timer, resume, and lock-screen controls. Growth adds a private, revocable podcast feed per member, which you switch on if you want it, so your library also plays in Apple Podcasts, Overcast, or Pocket Casts, downloaded for offline and unlisted in every directory. And you still see which members listened and which finished, which a podcast feed on its own can never report. | Audio posts play in the browser, but there is no private podcast feed, and nothing your members can take offline on the phone in their pocket. |
| Letting clients book a call with you | Built in and free on every plan (2 session types on free, unlimited from Creator): publish your session types, share one link, and a booked time becomes a real private session on the same calendar your classes run on, with the invite, the reminders, the joining link, and cancellation all handled. Availability is yours to shape (weekly hours with split ranges, a buffer after, minimum notice, how far ahead, caps per day and per week, days off), anything already on your calendar closes its own slot, intake can be one of your real forms, and the person who booked becomes a contact you can email or drop into an automation. From Creator the call can happen in your own branded room, recorded when you press record, instead of on someone else's link. | Built around the space and its group events, not around one client picking a slot with you, so coaches bolt a separate scheduler on and paste the link. |
| Members messaging each other, and you | Direct messages built in on every plan including free, 1:1 and in groups: images and files, reactions, unsend your own message, and blocking. Group threads are yours and your admins' to start. Your side is a real inbox, not a notification list: saved replies you fire with a slash, and beside a one-to-one thread that person's lifetime revenue, tags, join date, and your own private notes about them. On Growth you can switch on optional AI screening that flags a worrying message into your moderation queue for you to judge. Messages are a switch in your Studio, on by default for new communities. | Members can message each other and you, and it is a polished implementation. What sits beside your side of the thread is not saved replies and what that person has paid you; those are member-management tools, and seeing an individual member's activity here is already reserved for a higher tier. |
| What each member is worth to you | Lifetime revenue per person, free on every plan including free: every membership charge, payment link, and product sale that person has settled adds up on their row in your members list, on their profile, beside their name in your message inbox, and in the CSV you export. Refunded product orders and unsettled payment links are left out. It is not a report you have to go and run, and it is not saved for a top tier: it is just there, next to their name. | Seeing an individual member's activity is reserved for a higher tier, and a platform fee comes out of every payment before you see any of it. Drry puts lifetime revenue per person on every plan including free, and takes 0%. |
| Drip, prerequisites, and quizzes | Drip release, prerequisites, and graded quizzes, all three free on every plan including free, and enforced on the SERVER rather than hidden in the interface. Release a lesson a set number of days after someone joins, on a fixed date, or a set number of days after they finish what comes before it, and gate whole modules and whole courses the same way. Add multiple-choice quizzes with a pass mark you choose, and make a lesson wait on the prerequisites it depends on. A locked lesson's video, transcript, attachments, and body are not merely hidden: the routes that serve them refuse, so there is no URL to guess your way past. | Courses are available alongside the community, on paid plans only. On Drry the release schedule, the prerequisites, and the graded quizzes are all in from the free tier, and a locked lesson is refused by the server rather than hidden. |
| Selling more than one membership level | Membership tiers on Growth ($99/mo): run a Basic, a Pro and a VIP out of one community, and decide per course, per room, per session and per collection of audio or guides who each one is for. Everything you leave open stays open to everyone. A lower tier still SEES what it does not have, marked with what unlocks it, because a locked card is what sells the upgrade; genuinely private rooms can be hidden outright instead. Your email audiences split the same way, so you can write to "VIP and up" without keeping the list by hand. | Yes, paywalled spaces per plan, on their higher tiers. |
| Captions and transcripts, unmetered | Every lesson video and every audio track is transcribed for you automatically, free on every plan including the free one, with no AI credits to buy and no add-on to switch on. On a video the captions are one tap away on the player's CC button; an audio track gets a panel members can search, where every line is a tap to that second, next to chapters you named yourself. The machine mishears your own vocabulary the same way every time, so you correct it once in the editor, and a corrected transcript is never overwritten by a later machine pass. | Video is transcribed automatically and the transcript is searchable, and Circle does this well. The difference is the floor rather than the feature: there is no free plan to get it on, and the AI helpers around it sit on the top tier. |
| Keeping the space safe | On Growth, an AI screen reads a post before your members do and holds anything that trips the policy YOU set: eight categories you switch on or off one at a time, a strictness you choose, and your own house rules in your own words, all landing in a review queue where you approve or remove. It fails open on purpose, so an outage at the model never stops your community talking. Growth can screen direct messages the same way, into the same queue. On every plan, free included, you still get the ordinary controls: your own categories, inline moderation for you and your admins, and members deleting their own posts. | The strongest answer here besides ours: a word blocklist that pulls a matching post into a review queue before it appears, and AI helpers that moderate, on the top tier. What it does not have underneath any of it is a free plan. |

Full comparison: https://drry.com/vs/circle

### Drry vs Mighty Networks (a focused, free-to-start alternative)

Mighty Networks bundles communities, courses, and events. Drry keeps the toolset focused on courses, community, and payments, with a free plan and no card to begin.

| Dimension | Drry | Mighty Networks |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Free plan | Yes. 100 members, 5 GB, unlimited courses, and the community feed. No card. | Trial, then paid plans. |
| Fee on your member payments | 0%. You keep 100%, only Stripe's standard processing fee applies. | A platform transaction fee on every plan, smaller on pricier tiers. |
| Courses + community together | Both built in, in one branded space you own. | Community, courses, and events. |
| Step-by-step guides and how-tos | Built in and free on every plan, with no cap on how many: build a guide from rich-text steps with images and video you upload to Drry and stream, a what-you-need list with real amounts and units members tick off as they go, and chips like prep time or servings, all on a tab you can rename to Recipes, Workouts, or Protocols. Because the amounts are structured, a member can scale a recipe to a different serving count or switch between metric and US, and they can keep the screen awake while they follow it or print the whole thing. Flip any guide public and it gets one shareable link, published with recipe details a search engine can read, plus a QR code, a lead-capture form and your own call to action, and you can hold the last steps back behind an email if you want it to work as a lead magnet too. | Articles and course lessons handle a written how-to, but there is no step-by-step format with a supplies list, quantities, and check-off, and a single one is not something you publish as its own search-indexed page with a lead-capture form and your call to action. |
| Funnels + landing pages | Built in: compose landing pages from proven sections, capture leads with email boxes and embeddable forms, and see views, joins, and revenue per funnel. 1 free, unlimited on paid plans. | Templated per-plan landing pages; no funnel analytics. |
| Your own brand and domain | Your own address like grace.drry.com on free; connect your own domain plus site white label (no Drry branding, the site is 100% yours) on paid plans, and on Growth your email sends from your own domain too. | Custom domain on paid plans. |
| Knowing who is showing up | See who is showing up, who is drifting away, which content people love, and how many finish each course. Included on Creator ($29/mo). | Deeper analytics on higher plans. |
| Where pricing starts | Free, then $29/mo (Creator), $99/mo (Growth). | A monthly fee. |
| Getting paid for 1:1s and packages | Send any client a one-time or installment link with an agreement they sign before they pay, built in, free on every plan, 0% platform fee. Most platforms make you bolt on a separate contract tool. | One-time and installment plans you can share by link, but no signed agreement, and a transaction fee on every tier. |
| Email your members | Built in on every plan: send a broadcast to your whole community or to an audience your forms captured (700 sends a month on free, 60,000 on Creator, 500,000 on Growth, and new-content emails to members unmetered on top). Creator adds automations: a library of ready-made journeys that welcome new signups, deliver a lead magnet, fill an event, and win back quiet members on their own. | No fully native broadcasts: member emails run through a built-in Kit (ConvertKit) integration on higher plans, so you are managing a second tool. |
| Selling digital downloads | Built in on every plan, free up to 10 products and unlimited from Creator: sell any file (PDF, video, audio, zip) straight from your bio link, keep 100% of it, and buyers get an instant download plus a receipt with the link. You keep their email, so a one-off buyer becomes someone you can actually reach again. | Built around paid memberships and courses; a standalone digital download is not the shape it sells. |
| Audio and private podcast feeds | An audio library on every plan including free: upload a track and members get a real player with 0.75x to 2x speed, a sleep timer, resume, and lock-screen controls. Growth adds a private, revocable podcast feed per member, which you switch on if you want it, so your library also plays in Apple Podcasts, Overcast, or Pocket Casts, downloaded for offline and unlisted in every directory. And you still see which members listened and which finished, which a podcast feed on its own can never report. | Native audio, but no private podcast feed, no offline listening, no playlists, and no listen analytics: video progress is tracked and the audio equivalent deliberately is not. |
| Letting clients book a call with you | Built in and free on every plan (2 session types on free, unlimited from Creator): publish your session types, share one link, and a booked time becomes a real private session on the same calendar your classes run on, with the invite, the reminders, the joining link, and cancellation all handled. Availability is yours to shape (weekly hours with split ranges, a buffer after, minimum notice, how far ahead, caps per day and per week, days off), anything already on your calendar closes its own slot, intake can be one of your real forms, and the person who booked becomes a contact you can email or drop into an automation. From Creator the call can happen in your own branded room, recorded when you press record, instead of on someone else's link. | There is no booking page a client picks a time on, so one-to-ones get arranged in chat or through a scheduler you pay for separately. |
| Members messaging each other, and you | Direct messages built in on every plan including free, 1:1 and in groups: images and files, reactions, unsend your own message, and blocking. Group threads are yours and your admins' to start. Your side is a real inbox, not a notification list: saved replies you fire with a slash, and beside a one-to-one thread that person's lifetime revenue, tags, join date, and your own private notes about them. On Growth you can switch on optional AI screening that flags a worrying message into your moderation queue for you to judge. Messages are a switch in your Studio, on by default for new communities. | Members can message each other and you, which works. The coach side is a chat list rather than an inbox with saved replies and that person's lifetime revenue in view while you answer. |
| What each member is worth to you | Lifetime revenue per person, free on every plan including free: every membership charge, payment link, and product sale that person has settled adds up on their row in your members list, on their profile, beside their name in your message inbox, and in the CSV you export. Refunded product orders and unsettled payment links are left out. It is not a report you have to go and run, and it is not saved for a top tier: it is just there, next to their name. | Deeper analytics arrive on higher plans, and a transaction fee comes out of every payment on every tier. Lifetime revenue per member, on their row, on the free plan, is a different stance. |
| Drip, prerequisites, and quizzes | Drip release, prerequisites, and graded quizzes, all three free on every plan including free, and enforced on the SERVER rather than hidden in the interface. Release a lesson a set number of days after someone joins, on a fixed date, or a set number of days after they finish what comes before it, and gate whole modules and whole courses the same way. Add multiple-choice quizzes with a pass mark you choose, and make a lesson wait on the prerequisites it depends on. A locked lesson's video, transcript, attachments, and body are not merely hidden: the routes that serve them refuse, so there is no URL to guess your way past. | Courses sit alongside the community and events on paid plans. Drry's release scheduling, prerequisites, and graded quizzes are free on every plan and enforced on the server, so a locked lesson's video simply is not served. |
| Selling more than one membership level | Membership tiers on Growth ($99/mo): run a Basic, a Pro and a VIP out of one community, and decide per course, per room, per session and per collection of audio or guides who each one is for. Everything you leave open stays open to everyone. A lower tier still SEES what it does not have, marked with what unlocks it, because a locked card is what sells the upgrade; genuinely private rooms can be hidden outright instead. Your email audiences split the same way, so you can write to "VIP and up" without keeping the list by hand. | Yes, multiple plans with different access, though which content each one opens is set space by space. |
| Captions and transcripts, unmetered | Every lesson video and every audio track is transcribed for you automatically, free on every plan including the free one, with no AI credits to buy and no add-on to switch on. On a video the captions are one tap away on the player's CC button; an audio track gets a panel members can search, where every line is a tap to that second, next to chapters you named yourself. The machine mishears your own vocabulary the same way every time, so you correct it once in the editor, and a corrected transcript is never overwritten by a later machine pass. | Transcripts for video are part of the product, so this is a real answer too. The floor is the same story as the rest of the table: paid plans only, after a trial, and no free tier the feature reaches. |
| Keeping the space safe | On Growth, an AI screen reads a post before your members do and holds anything that trips the policy YOU set: eight categories you switch on or off one at a time, a strictness you choose, and your own house rules in your own words, all landing in a review queue where you approve or remove. It fails open on purpose, so an outage at the model never stops your community talking. Growth can screen direct messages the same way, into the same queue. On every plan, free included, you still get the ordinary controls: your own categories, inline moderation for you and your admins, and members deleting their own posts. | Manual moderation, and thinner than its peers: we could not find even a word filter, so a moderator reads and removes by hand. |

Full comparison: https://drry.com/vs/mighty-networks

### Drry vs Patreon (a fee-free, course-ready alternative)

Patreon is great for membership posts, but it takes a percentage of your earnings and lives on its own pages. Drry gives you a branded space with real courses and a community feed, and you keep 100% of what members pay.

| Dimension | Drry | Patreon |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Free plan | Yes. 100 members, 5 GB, unlimited courses, and the community feed. No card. | Free to start, but a percentage comes out of every payment. |
| Fee on your member payments | 0%. You keep 100%, only Stripe's standard processing fee applies. | Takes a percentage of your earnings. |
| Courses + community together | Both built in, in one branded space you own. | Membership posts, limited courses. |
| Step-by-step guides and how-tos | Built in and free on every plan, with no cap on how many: build a guide from rich-text steps with images and video you upload to Drry and stream, a what-you-need list with real amounts and units members tick off as they go, and chips like prep time or servings, all on a tab you can rename to Recipes, Workouts, or Protocols. Because the amounts are structured, a member can scale a recipe to a different serving count or switch between metric and US, and they can keep the screen awake while they follow it or print the whole thing. Flip any guide public and it gets one shareable link, published with recipe details a search engine can read, plus a QR code, a lead-capture form and your own call to action, and you can hold the last steps back behind an email if you want it to work as a lead magnet too. | A public post can carry a how-to and be found by search, which genuinely works, but it is a post rather than a step-by-step with a supplies list, quantities, and check-off, it lives on Patreon's pages, and it carries no lead-capture form or call to action of your own. |
| Funnels + landing pages | Built in: compose landing pages from proven sections, capture leads with email boxes and embeddable forms, and see views, joins, and revenue per funnel. 1 free, unlimited on paid plans. | Your Patreon page is the landing page; no custom pages or funnel analytics. |
| Your own brand and domain | Your own address like grace.drry.com on free; connect your own domain plus site white label (no Drry branding, the site is 100% yours) on paid plans, and on Growth your email sends from your own domain too. | Patreon-hosted page, limited branding. |
| Knowing who is showing up | See who is showing up, who is drifting away, which content people love, and how many finish each course. Included on Creator ($29/mo). | Earnings and membership stats. |
| Where pricing starts | Free, then $29/mo (Creator), $99/mo (Growth). | Percentage-based pricing. |
| Getting paid for 1:1s and packages | Send any client a one-time or installment link with an agreement they sign before they pay, built in, free on every plan, 0% platform fee. Most platforms make you bolt on a separate contract tool. | One-time sales are a public storefront, not a per-client link: no installments, no signed agreement, and a cut of every payment. |
| Email your members | Built in on every plan: send a broadcast to your whole community or to an audience your forms captured (700 sends a month on free, 60,000 on Creator, 500,000 on Growth, and new-content emails to members unmetered on top). Creator adds automations: a library of ready-made journeys that welcome new signups, deliver a lead magnet, fill an event, and win back quiet members on their own. | A native newsletter you can email to your fans for free, but it sends from Patreon's pages rather than your own branded space. |
| Selling digital downloads | Built in on every plan, free up to 10 products and unlimited from Creator: sell any file (PDF, video, audio, zip) straight from your bio link, keep 100% of it, and buyers get an instant download plus a receipt with the link. You keep their email, so a one-off buyer becomes someone you can actually reach again. | Yes, a shop for digital products, with a platform cut on top of processing. |
| Audio and private podcast feeds | An audio library on every plan including free: upload a track and members get a real player with 0.75x to 2x speed, a sleep timer, resume, and lock-screen controls. Growth adds a private, revocable podcast feed per member, which you switch on if you want it, so your library also plays in Apple Podcasts, Overcast, or Pocket Casts, downloaded for offline and unlisted in every directory. And you still see which members listened and which finished, which a podcast feed on its own can never report. | Genuinely strong here: audio posts are native, and patrons can take a private feed into their own podcast app. What you give up is that the show and its listeners live on Patreon's brand, and the percentage cut applies to everything paying for it. |
| Letting clients book a call with you | Built in and free on every plan (2 session types on free, unlimited from Creator): publish your session types, share one link, and a booked time becomes a real private session on the same calendar your classes run on, with the invite, the reminders, the joining link, and cancellation all handled. Availability is yours to shape (weekly hours with split ranges, a buffer after, minimum notice, how far ahead, caps per day and per week, days off), anything already on your calendar closes its own slot, intake can be one of your real forms, and the person who booked becomes a contact you can email or drop into an automation. From Creator the call can happen in your own branded room, recorded when you press record, instead of on someone else's link. | Nothing for it. Patreon is a pledge page, so a one-to-one with a patron is something you arrange yourself, in messages, on your own calendar, with your own scheduler. |
| Members messaging each other, and you | Direct messages built in on every plan including free, 1:1 and in groups: images and files, reactions, unsend your own message, and blocking. Group threads are yours and your admins' to start. Your side is a real inbox, not a notification list: saved replies you fire with a slash, and beside a one-to-one thread that person's lifetime revenue, tags, join date, and your own private notes about them. On Growth you can switch on optional AI screening that flags a worrying message into your moderation queue for you to judge. Messages are a switch in your Studio, on by default for new communities. | You can message patrons, and that is genuinely part of how creators use it. What is not around it is a coach inbox with saved replies, group threads you and your admins start, or what that patron has paid you beside the conversation. |
| What each member is worth to you | Lifetime revenue per person, free on every plan including free: every membership charge, payment link, and product sale that person has settled adds up on their row in your members list, on their profile, beside their name in your message inbox, and in the CSV you export. Refunded product orders and unsettled payment links are left out. It is not a report you have to go and run, and it is not saved for a top tier: it is just there, next to their name. | It shows you earnings and membership stats, and a percentage of all of it goes to Patreon before it reaches you. Drry shows a member's lifetime figure instead, every membership charge, payment link, and product sale they have settled, on their row, on every plan, and takes 0%. |
| Drip, prerequisites, and quizzes | Drip release, prerequisites, and graded quizzes, all three free on every plan including free, and enforced on the SERVER rather than hidden in the interface. Release a lesson a set number of days after someone joins, on a fixed date, or a set number of days after they finish what comes before it, and gate whole modules and whole courses the same way. Add multiple-choice quizzes with a pass mark you choose, and make a lesson wait on the prerequisites it depends on. A locked lesson's video, transcript, attachments, and body are not merely hidden: the routes that serve them refuse, so there is no URL to guess your way past. | There are no structured courses here to release on a schedule, gate, or quiz: posts go out to tiers. On Drry all three are in, free on every plan, and enforced on the server. |
| Selling more than one membership level | Membership tiers on Growth ($99/mo): run a Basic, a Pro and a VIP out of one community, and decide per course, per room, per session and per collection of audio or guides who each one is for. Everything you leave open stays open to everyone. A lower tier still SEES what it does not have, marked with what unlocks it, because a locked card is what sells the upgrade; genuinely private rooms can be hidden outright instead. Your email audiences split the same way, so you can write to "VIP and up" without keeping the list by hand. | Yes, this is what Patreon is for: tiers with their own price and their own perks. It is a creator-support model on their domain, not a community you own. |
| Captions and transcripts, unmetered | Every lesson video and every audio track is transcribed for you automatically, free on every plan including the free one, with no AI credits to buy and no add-on to switch on. On a video the captions are one tap away on the player's CC button; an audio track gets a panel members can search, where every line is a tap to that second, next to chapters you named yourself. The machine mishears your own vocabulary the same way every time, so you correct it once in the editor, and a corrected transcript is never overwritten by a later machine pass. | Video lives on posts rather than in lessons, so there is no lesson transcript to search and no audio library for one to sit under. What its player captions is worth checking on Patreon's own help centre before you count on it. |
| Keeping the space safe | On Growth, an AI screen reads a post before your members do and holds anything that trips the policy YOU set: eight categories you switch on or off one at a time, a strictness you choose, and your own house rules in your own words, all landing in a review queue where you approve or remove. It fails open on purpose, so an outage at the model never stops your community talking. Growth can screen direct messages the same way, into the same queue. On every plan, free included, you still get the ordinary controls: your own categories, inline moderation for you and your admins, and members deleting their own posts. | Comment moderation on posts. The relationship is one to many rather than many to many, so there is far less to police, and no community feed to hold a post out of in the first place. |

Full comparison: https://drry.com/vs/patreon

### Drry vs Teachable (an alternative with community built in)

Teachable is built for selling courses. Drry adds a community feed in the same space and does not charge a platform fee on your member payments.

| Dimension | Drry | Teachable |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Free plan | Yes. 100 members, 5 GB, unlimited courses, and the community feed. No card. | Free or low tier with limits. |
| Fee on your member payments | 0%. You keep 100%, only Stripe's standard processing fee applies. | Transaction fees may apply on lower plans. |
| Courses + community together | Both built in, in one branded space you own. | Courses-focused, limited community. |
| Step-by-step guides and how-tos | Built in and free on every plan, with no cap on how many: build a guide from rich-text steps with images and video you upload to Drry and stream, a what-you-need list with real amounts and units members tick off as they go, and chips like prep time or servings, all on a tab you can rename to Recipes, Workouts, or Protocols. Because the amounts are structured, a member can scale a recipe to a different serving count or switch between metric and US, and they can keep the screen awake while they follow it or print the whole thing. Flip any guide public and it gets one shareable link, published with recipe details a search engine can read, plus a QR code, a lead-capture form and your own call to action, and you can hold the last steps back behind an email if you want it to work as a lead magnet too. | Text lessons cover a written how-to and you can leave one open as a preview, but it is a lesson inside a course, not a step-by-step with a supplies list, quantities, and check-off, and the public face of it is a course sales page rather than a how-to page with its own form and call to action. |
| Funnels + landing pages | Built in: compose landing pages from proven sections, capture leads with email boxes and embeddable forms, and see views, joins, and revenue per funnel. 1 free, unlimited on paid plans. | Course sales pages; no funnel analytics. |
| Your own brand and domain | Your own address like grace.drry.com on free; connect your own domain plus site white label (no Drry branding, the site is 100% yours) on paid plans, and on Growth your email sends from your own domain too. | Custom domain on paid plans. |
| Knowing who is showing up | See who is showing up, who is drifting away, which content people love, and how many finish each course. Included on Creator ($29/mo). | Course reporting; deeper insight on higher plans. |
| Where pricing starts | Free, then $29/mo (Creator), $99/mo (Growth). | Free to start, fees apply. |
| Getting paid for 1:1s and packages | Send any client a one-time or installment link with an agreement they sign before they pay, built in, free on every plan, 0% platform fee. Most platforms make you bolt on a separate contract tool. | One-time and installment links with a coaching product, but the signed agreement is a bolt-on, and 0% fees only from the mid tier up (no free plan). |
| Email your members | Built in on every plan: send a broadcast to your whole community or to an audience your forms captured (700 sends a month on free, 60,000 on Creator, 500,000 on Growth, and new-content emails to members unmetered on top). Creator adds automations: a library of ready-made journeys that welcome new signups, deliver a lead magnet, fill an event, and win back quiet members on their own. | A basic Compose tab emails your students with filters, but for real campaigns Teachable points you to an outside email service. |
| Selling digital downloads | Built in on every plan, free up to 10 products and unlimited from Creator: sell any file (PDF, video, audio, zip) straight from your bio link, keep 100% of it, and buyers get an instant download plus a receipt with the link. You keep their email, so a one-off buyer becomes someone you can actually reach again. | Yes, digital downloads are supported, with a transaction fee on the lower tiers. |
| Audio and private podcast feeds | An audio library on every plan including free: upload a track and members get a real player with 0.75x to 2x speed, a sleep timer, resume, and lock-screen controls. Growth adds a private, revocable podcast feed per member, which you switch on if you want it, so your library also plays in Apple Podcasts, Overcast, or Pocket Casts, downloaded for offline and unlisted in every directory. And you still see which members listened and which finished, which a podcast feed on its own can never report. | Audio can sit inside a course lesson, but there is no audio library for members and no private podcast feed they subscribe to in their own app. |
| Letting clients book a call with you | Built in and free on every plan (2 session types on free, unlimited from Creator): publish your session types, share one link, and a booked time becomes a real private session on the same calendar your classes run on, with the invite, the reminders, the joining link, and cancellation all handled. Availability is yours to shape (weekly hours with split ranges, a buffer after, minimum notice, how far ahead, caps per day and per week, days off), anything already on your calendar closes its own slot, intake can be one of your real forms, and the person who booked becomes a contact you can email or drop into an automation. From Creator the call can happen in your own branded room, recorded when you press record, instead of on someone else's link. | Coaching products can hold a one-to-one, but the times come from an outside calendar tool you connect, and there is no community calendar for the booking to land beside. |
| Members messaging each other, and you | Direct messages built in on every plan including free, 1:1 and in groups: images and files, reactions, unsend your own message, and blocking. Group threads are yours and your admins' to start. Your side is a real inbox, not a notification list: saved replies you fire with a slash, and beside a one-to-one thread that person's lifetime revenue, tags, join date, and your own private notes about them. On Growth you can switch on optional AI screening that flags a worrying message into your moderation queue for you to judge. Messages are a switch in your Studio, on by default for new communities. | Community is a listed feature, so members can talk to each other, and it arrives on the middle tier rather than the entry one. What is not built around it is a coach inbox with saved replies and, beside the thread, what that student has paid you. |
| What each member is worth to you | Lifetime revenue per person, free on every plan including free: every membership charge, payment link, and product sale that person has settled adds up on their row in your members list, on their profile, beside their name in your message inbox, and in the CSV you export. Refunded product orders and unsettled payment links are left out. It is not a report you have to go and run, and it is not saved for a top tier: it is just there, next to their name. | Course reporting tells you how a product sold, with deeper insight on higher plans and a transaction fee on the lower ones. Drry's number is the other way round, a per-student lifetime figure: every membership charge, payment link, and product sale they have settled, added up on their row, on the free plan. |
| Drip, prerequisites, and quizzes | Drip release, prerequisites, and graded quizzes, all three free on every plan including free, and enforced on the SERVER rather than hidden in the interface. Release a lesson a set number of days after someone joins, on a fixed date, or a set number of days after they finish what comes before it, and gate whole modules and whole courses the same way. Add multiple-choice quizzes with a pass mark you choose, and make a lesson wait on the prerequisites it depends on. A locked lesson's video, transcript, attachments, and body are not merely hidden: the routes that serve them refuse, so there is no URL to guess your way past. | This is Teachable's home ground: course delivery is what it is for, and it is good at it. What Drry does differently is the floor, all three of release scheduling, prerequisites, and graded quizzes are free on every plan here, with no transaction fee on the tier you can actually afford. |
| Selling more than one membership level | Membership tiers on Growth ($99/mo): run a Basic, a Pro and a VIP out of one community, and decide per course, per room, per session and per collection of audio or guides who each one is for. Everything you leave open stays open to everyone. A lower tier still SEES what it does not have, marked with what unlocks it, because a locked card is what sells the upgrade; genuinely private rooms can be hidden outright instead. Your email audiences split the same way, so you can write to "VIP and up" without keeping the list by hand. | Not really. You sell courses and bundles individually rather than running membership levels over one community. |
| Captions and transcripts, unmetered | Every lesson video and every audio track is transcribed for you automatically, free on every plan including the free one, with no AI credits to buy and no add-on to switch on. On a video the captions are one tap away on the player's CC button; an audio track gets a panel members can search, where every line is a tap to that second, next to chapters you named yourself. The machine mishears your own vocabulary the same way every time, so you correct it once in the editor, and a corrected transcript is never overwritten by a later machine pass. | Auto-generated subtitles exist, and what they cost you depends on the plan: unlimited on the upper tiers, charged by usage on the lower ones. Drry does not meter transcription at all, on any plan, including the free one. |
| Keeping the space safe | On Growth, an AI screen reads a post before your members do and holds anything that trips the policy YOU set: eight categories you switch on or off one at a time, a strictness you choose, and your own house rules in your own words, all landing in a review queue where you approve or remove. It fails open on purpose, so an outage at the model never stops your community talking. Growth can screen direct messages the same way, into the same queue. On every plan, free included, you still get the ordinary controls: your own categories, inline moderation for you and your admins, and members deleting their own posts. | A course platform with light community around it, so there is little feed to moderate, and we can find no AI screening in front of what there is. |

Full comparison: https://drry.com/vs/teachable

### Drry vs Podia (a community-first, fee-free alternative)

Podia makes selling courses and digital downloads feel simple, but its entry plan adds a transaction fee and community is not the focus. Drry puts the community feed at the center, starts genuinely free, and never takes a cut of your member payments.

| Dimension | Drry | Podia |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Free plan | Yes. 100 members, 5 GB, unlimited courses, and the community feed. No card. | Free trial only, no free plan. |
| Fee on your member payments | 0%. You keep 100%, only Stripe's standard processing fee applies. | A transaction fee on the entry plan; 0% starts on pricier tiers. |
| Courses + community together | Both built in, in one branded space you own. | Courses and downloads first; community is light. |
| Step-by-step guides and how-tos | Built in and free on every plan, with no cap on how many: build a guide from rich-text steps with images and video you upload to Drry and stream, a what-you-need list with real amounts and units members tick off as they go, and chips like prep time or servings, all on a tab you can rename to Recipes, Workouts, or Protocols. Because the amounts are structured, a member can scale a recipe to a different serving count or switch between metric and US, and they can keep the screen awake while they follow it or print the whole thing. Flip any guide public and it gets one shareable link, published with recipe details a search engine can read, plus a QR code, a lead-capture form and your own call to action, and you can hold the last steps back behind an email if you want it to work as a lead magnet too. | Podia can publish a public page or post with an email signup and a call to action, which is the closest equivalent in this list. What it does not have is a purpose-built step-by-step format with a supplies list, quantities, and check-off, or a free plan to run one from. |
| Funnels + landing pages | Built in: compose landing pages from proven sections, capture leads with email boxes and embeddable forms, and see views, joins, and revenue per funnel. 1 free, unlimited on paid plans. | A website builder with pages; no funnel analytics. |
| Your own brand and domain | Your own address like grace.drry.com on free; connect your own domain plus site white label (no Drry branding, the site is 100% yours) on paid plans, and on Growth your email sends from your own domain too. | Custom domain on paid plans. |
| Knowing who is showing up | See who is showing up, who is drifting away, which content people love, and how many finish each course. Included on Creator ($29/mo). | Sales and email stats. |
| Where pricing starts | Free, then $29/mo (Creator), $99/mo (Growth). | A monthly fee after the trial. |
| Getting paid for 1:1s and packages | Send any client a one-time or installment link with an agreement they sign before they pay, built in, free on every plan, 0% platform fee. Most platforms make you bolt on a separate contract tool. | One-time and installment pricing on public product pages, not a per-client invoice: no signed agreement, and a transaction fee on the entry plan. |
| Email your members | Built in on every plan: send a broadcast to your whole community or to an audience your forms captured (700 sends a month on free, 60,000 on Creator, 500,000 on Growth, and new-content emails to members unmetered on top). Creator adds automations: a library of ready-made journeys that welcome new signups, deliver a lead magnet, fill an event, and win back quiet members on their own. | A genuinely strong native email tool: broadcasts, automations, segmenting, and analytics. But there is no free community plan to send from. |
| Selling digital downloads | Built in on every plan, free up to 10 products and unlimited from Creator: sell any file (PDF, video, audio, zip) straight from your bio link, keep 100% of it, and buyers get an instant download plus a receipt with the link. You keep their email, so a one-off buyer becomes someone you can actually reach again. | Yes, this is one of its core strengths, on paid plans only. |
| Audio and private podcast feeds | An audio library on every plan including free: upload a track and members get a real player with 0.75x to 2x speed, a sleep timer, resume, and lock-screen controls. Growth adds a private, revocable podcast feed per member, which you switch on if you want it, so your library also plays in Apple Podcasts, Overcast, or Pocket Casts, downloaded for offline and unlisted in every directory. And you still see which members listened and which finished, which a podcast feed on its own can never report. | Audio is a file you sell or attach, played on a product page. A private podcast feed your members subscribe to is not part of it. |
| Letting clients book a call with you | Built in and free on every plan (2 session types on free, unlimited from Creator): publish your session types, share one link, and a booked time becomes a real private session on the same calendar your classes run on, with the invite, the reminders, the joining link, and cancellation all handled. Availability is yours to shape (weekly hours with split ranges, a buffer after, minimum notice, how far ahead, caps per day and per week, days off), anything already on your calendar closes its own slot, intake can be one of your real forms, and the person who booked becomes a contact you can email or drop into an automation. From Creator the call can happen in your own branded room, recorded when you press record, instead of on someone else's link. | Coaching and one-to-one sessions are supported, with the scheduling itself leaning on an outside calendar tool, so the booking lives in that tool rather than on one calendar beside everything else you run. |
| Members messaging each other, and you | Direct messages built in on every plan including free, 1:1 and in groups: images and files, reactions, unsend your own message, and blocking. Group threads are yours and your admins' to start. Your side is a real inbox, not a notification list: saved replies you fire with a slash, and beside a one-to-one thread that person's lifetime revenue, tags, join date, and your own private notes about them. On Growth you can switch on optional AI screening that flags a worrying message into your moderation queue for you to judge. Messages are a switch in your Studio, on by default for new communities. | Genuinely covered: its own pricing page describes topic-based spaces, group chats, and DMs, included on every plan. What is not built around them is a coach inbox with saved replies and, beside the thread, what that person has paid you. |
| What each member is worth to you | Lifetime revenue per person, free on every plan including free: every membership charge, payment link, and product sale that person has settled adds up on their row in your members list, on their profile, beside their name in your message inbox, and in the CSV you export. Refunded product orders and unsettled payment links are left out. It is not a report you have to go and run, and it is not saved for a top tier: it is just there, next to their name. | Sales and email stats are good. A per-person lifetime figure on the member row, free, is a membership report, and the membership is the part Podia keeps light. |
| Drip, prerequisites, and quizzes | Drip release, prerequisites, and graded quizzes, all three free on every plan including free, and enforced on the SERVER rather than hidden in the interface. Release a lesson a set number of days after someone joins, on a fixed date, or a set number of days after they finish what comes before it, and gate whole modules and whole courses the same way. Add multiple-choice quizzes with a pass mark you choose, and make a lesson wait on the prerequisites it depends on. A locked lesson's video, transcript, attachments, and body are not merely hidden: the routes that serve them refuse, so there is no URL to guess your way past. | Courses are a core strength, on paid plans after a trial. Drry's difference is that release scheduling, prerequisites, and graded quizzes are all free on every plan, and a locked lesson is refused by the server rather than hidden. |
| Selling more than one membership level | Membership tiers on Growth ($99/mo): run a Basic, a Pro and a VIP out of one community, and decide per course, per room, per session and per collection of audio or guides who each one is for. Everything you leave open stays open to everyone. A lower tier still SEES what it does not have, marked with what unlocks it, because a locked card is what sells the upgrade; genuinely private rooms can be hidden outright instead. Your email audiences split the same way, so you can write to "VIP and up" without keeping the list by hand. | Yes, multiple membership plans with different content, though the community around them is light. |
| Captions and transcripts, unmetered | Every lesson video and every audio track is transcribed for you automatically, free on every plan including the free one, with no AI credits to buy and no add-on to switch on. On a video the captions are one tap away on the player's CC button; an audio track gets a panel members can search, where every line is a tap to that second, next to chapters you named yourself. The machine mishears your own vocabulary the same way every time, so you correct it once in the editor, and a corrected transcript is never overwritten by a later machine pass. | Subtitles are supported, but you supply them: Podia takes a .VTT file you made somewhere else rather than transcribing the video for you. So there is nothing generated, and nothing to search. |
| Keeping the space safe | On Growth, an AI screen reads a post before your members do and holds anything that trips the policy YOU set: eight categories you switch on or off one at a time, a strictness you choose, and your own house rules in your own words, all landing in a review queue where you approve or remove. It fails open on purpose, so an outage at the model never stops your community talking. Growth can screen direct messages the same way, into the same queue. On every plan, free included, you still get the ordinary controls: your own categories, inline moderation for you and your admins, and members deleting their own posts. | Community is light here, and moderation with it: removal and blocking rather than anything that reads a post before your members do. |

Full comparison: https://drry.com/vs/podia

### Drry vs Whop (a flat-price alternative with no cut of your sales)

Whop is a marketplace: fast to start, but it takes a percentage of every sale, and a much larger share of sales that come through its marketplace. Drry charges one flat price, takes 0% of member payments, and sells your digital products from YOUR bio link on YOUR brand, not from a storefront inside someone else's marketplace.

| Dimension | Drry | Whop |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Free plan | Yes. 100 members, 5 GB, unlimited courses, and the community feed. No card. | Free to start; the fees are the price. |
| Fee on your member payments | 0%. You keep 100%, only Stripe's standard processing fee applies. | A percentage of every sale, plus a much larger share on marketplace-driven sales. |
| Courses + community together | Both built in, in one branded space you own. | Storefront and access passes; community lives in bolted-on apps. |
| Step-by-step guides and how-tos | Built in and free on every plan, with no cap on how many: build a guide from rich-text steps with images and video you upload to Drry and stream, a what-you-need list with real amounts and units members tick off as they go, and chips like prep time or servings, all on a tab you can rename to Recipes, Workouts, or Protocols. Because the amounts are structured, a member can scale a recipe to a different serving count or switch between metric and US, and they can keep the screen awake while they follow it or print the whole thing. Flip any guide public and it gets one shareable link, published with recipe details a search engine can read, plus a QR code, a lead-capture form and your own call to action, and you can hold the last steps back behind an email if you want it to work as a lead magnet too. | Written content lives in whichever app you bolt on, so a how-to is possible, but there is no step-by-step format with a supplies list, quantities, and check-off, and the public version of it is a storefront page inside their marketplace rather than a how-to page on a domain you own. |
| Funnels + landing pages | Built in: compose landing pages from proven sections, capture leads with email boxes and embeddable forms, and see views, joins, and revenue per funnel. 1 free, unlimited on paid plans. | A storefront page inside the Whop marketplace; no funnel analytics on a domain you own. |
| Your own brand and domain | Your own address like grace.drry.com on free; connect your own domain plus site white label (no Drry branding, the site is 100% yours) on paid plans, and on Growth your email sends from your own domain too. | A whop.com storefront inside their marketplace. |
| Knowing who is showing up | See who is showing up, who is drifting away, which content people love, and how many finish each course. Included on Creator ($29/mo). | Sales dashboards. |
| Where pricing starts | Free, then $29/mo (Creator), $99/mo (Growth). | No monthly fee, but a cut of everything you earn. |
| Getting paid for 1:1s and packages | Send any client a one-time or installment link with an agreement they sign before they pay, built in, free on every plan, 0% platform fee. Most platforms make you bolt on a separate contract tool. | Checkout links for one-time payments, but creator-billed installments are recurring-only (one-time uses third-party financing), no signed agreement, and a per-sale cut. |
| Email your members | Built in on every plan: send a broadcast to your whole community or to an audience your forms captured (700 sends a month on free, 60,000 on Creator, 500,000 on Growth, and new-content emails to members unmetered on top). Creator adds automations: a library of ready-made journeys that welcome new signups, deliver a lead magnet, fill an event, and win back quiet members on their own. | No native email: you install a third-party email app from the Whop marketplace and pay for it separately. |
| Selling digital downloads | Built in on every plan, free up to 10 products and unlimited from Creator: sell any file (PDF, video, audio, zip) straight from your bio link, keep 100% of it, and buyers get an instant download plus a receipt with the link. You keep their email, so a one-off buyer becomes someone you can actually reach again. | Yes, and it takes a percentage of every sale, more when the buyer comes through its marketplace. |
| Audio and private podcast feeds | An audio library on every plan including free: upload a track and members get a real player with 0.75x to 2x speed, a sleep timer, resume, and lock-screen controls. Growth adds a private, revocable podcast feed per member, which you switch on if you want it, so your library also plays in Apple Podcasts, Overcast, or Pocket Casts, downloaded for offline and unlisted in every directory. And you still see which members listened and which finished, which a podcast feed on its own can never report. | Its own course lessons are text, video, PDF, and quizzes, so audio comes along as a video file or an attachment rather than something built for listening. An audio library members browse, or a private podcast feed, is not a feature its documentation describes, and what you do build sits inside their marketplace. |
| Letting clients book a call with you | Built in and free on every plan (2 session types on free, unlimited from Creator): publish your session types, share one link, and a booked time becomes a real private session on the same calendar your classes run on, with the invite, the reminders, the joining link, and cancellation all handled. Availability is yours to shape (weekly hours with split ranges, a buffer after, minimum notice, how far ahead, caps per day and per week, days off), anything already on your calendar closes its own slot, intake can be one of your real forms, and the person who booked becomes a contact you can email or drop into an automation. From Creator the call can happen in your own branded room, recorded when you press record, instead of on someone else's link. | A call is sold as a product and then arranged over a link, rather than picked from hours you published, and the whole thing sits inside their marketplace. |
| Members messaging each other, and you | Direct messages built in on every plan including free, 1:1 and in groups: images and files, reactions, unsend your own message, and blocking. Group threads are yours and your admins' to start. Your side is a real inbox, not a notification list: saved replies you fire with a slash, and beside a one-to-one thread that person's lifetime revenue, tags, join date, and your own private notes about them. On Growth you can switch on optional AI screening that flags a worrying message into your moderation queue for you to judge. Messages are a switch in your Studio, on by default for new communities. | Chat comes from whichever app you bolt on, so what your members get depends on that app, and it happens inside their marketplace rather than in a space on your own domain. |
| What each member is worth to you | Lifetime revenue per person, free on every plan including free: every membership charge, payment link, and product sale that person has settled adds up on their row in your members list, on their profile, beside their name in your message inbox, and in the CSV you export. Refunded product orders and unsettled payment links are left out. It is not a report you have to go and run, and it is not saved for a top tier: it is just there, next to their name. | Sales dashboards tell you what sold, and a percentage of every sale is gone before it reaches you, more when the buyer came through their marketplace. Drry shows a member's lifetime figure, every membership charge, payment link, and product sale they have settled, and takes 0%. |
| Drip, prerequisites, and quizzes | Drip release, prerequisites, and graded quizzes, all three free on every plan including free, and enforced on the SERVER rather than hidden in the interface. Release a lesson a set number of days after someone joins, on a fixed date, or a set number of days after they finish what comes before it, and gate whole modules and whole courses the same way. Add multiple-choice quizzes with a pass mark you choose, and make a lesson wait on the prerequisites it depends on. A locked lesson's video, transcript, attachments, and body are not merely hidden: the routes that serve them refuse, so there is no URL to guess your way past. | Quizzes are genuinely a lesson type here, its own documentation lists them, so credit where it is due. What surrounds them is a per-sale cut and a storefront inside their marketplace, where Drry's quizzes, drip release, and prerequisites are free on every plan on a domain you own. |
| Selling more than one membership level | Membership tiers on Growth ($99/mo): run a Basic, a Pro and a VIP out of one community, and decide per course, per room, per session and per collection of audio or guides who each one is for. Everything you leave open stays open to everyone. A lower tier still SEES what it does not have, marked with what unlocks it, because a locked card is what sells the upgrade; genuinely private rooms can be hidden outright instead. Your email audiences split the same way, so you can write to "VIP and up" without keeping the list by hand. | Yes, multiple pricing plans per whop, on a marketplace where your buyers are also being shown other people's offers. |
| Captions and transcripts, unmetered | Every lesson video and every audio track is transcribed for you automatically, free on every plan including the free one, with no AI credits to buy and no add-on to switch on. On a video the captions are one tap away on the player's CC button; an audio track gets a panel members can search, where every line is a tap to that second, next to chapters you named yourself. The machine mishears your own vocabulary the same way every time, so you correct it once in the editor, and a corrected transcript is never overwritten by a later machine pass. | Whop is an access and checkout layer over content, so captions are whatever the place your video actually lives gives you rather than something the platform writes for you. |
| Keeping the space safe | On Growth, an AI screen reads a post before your members do and holds anything that trips the policy YOU set: eight categories you switch on or off one at a time, a strictness you choose, and your own house rules in your own words, all landing in a review queue where you approve or remove. It fails open on purpose, so an outage at the model never stops your community talking. Growth can screen direct messages the same way, into the same queue. On every plan, free included, you still get the ordinary controls: your own categories, inline moderation for you and your admins, and members deleting their own posts. | Community arrives through bolted-on apps, so moderation is whatever the app you added provides, and it is not one queue you work through. |

Full comparison: https://drry.com/vs/whop

### Drry vs ClickFunnels (a community-first alternative with funnels included)

ClickFunnels is built around the funnel: a deep page and checkout builder behind a significant monthly subscription, with no free plan. Drry includes funnels next to the community and courses your members actually stay for, attributes every page to real membership revenue, and starts free.

| Dimension | Drry | ClickFunnels |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Free plan | Yes. 100 members, 5 GB, unlimited courses, and the community feed. No card. | Free trial only, no free plan. |
| Fee on your member payments | 0%. You keep 100%, only Stripe's standard processing fee applies. | No platform cut on your sales; the price is the subscription itself, a three-figure monthly fee on most plans. |
| Courses + community together | Both built in, in one branded space you own. | Courses exist, but community is a bolted-on feature inside a funnel product, not the center of it. |
| Step-by-step guides and how-tos | Built in and free on every plan, with no cap on how many: build a guide from rich-text steps with images and video you upload to Drry and stream, a what-you-need list with real amounts and units members tick off as they go, and chips like prep time or servings, all on a tab you can rename to Recipes, Workouts, or Protocols. Because the amounts are structured, a member can scale a recipe to a different serving count or switch between metric and US, and they can keep the screen awake while they follow it or print the whole thing. Flip any guide public and it gets one shareable link, published with recipe details a search engine can read, plus a QR code, a lead-capture form and your own call to action, and you can hold the last steps back behind an email if you want it to work as a lead magnet too. | Building a public how-to page with an opt-in form and a call to action is exactly what the page builder is for, and it is good at it. What you do not get is a ready-made step-by-step format with a supplies list, quantities, and check-off that your members browse in one place, without designing every page yourself, or a free plan to do it on. |
| Funnels + landing pages | Built in: compose landing pages from proven sections, capture leads with email boxes and embeddable forms, and see views, joins, and revenue per funnel. 1 free, unlimited on paid plans. | Funnels are the whole product: a deep builder with A/B split testing, tuned for launches and one-off sales more than a membership. |
| Your own brand and domain | Your own address like grace.drry.com on free; connect your own domain plus site white label (no Drry branding, the site is 100% yours) on paid plans, and on Growth your email sends from your own domain too. | Custom domains, yes; the funnel is the site. |
| Knowing who is showing up | See who is showing up, who is drifting away, which content people love, and how many finish each course. Included on Creator ($29/mo). | Funnel-centric analytics: pages, opt-ins, and conversions, not which members are showing up or quietly drifting away. |
| Where pricing starts | Free, then $29/mo (Creator), $99/mo (Growth). | A monthly subscription after the trial, priced well above Drry's at the entry tier and climbing steeply from there. |
| Getting paid for 1:1s and packages | Send any client a one-time or installment link with an agreement they sign before they pay, built in, free on every plan, 0% platform fee. Most platforms make you bolt on a separate contract tool. | Checkout pages and order forms built for funnels, but no built-in signed agreement for a 1:1 or a package. |
| Email your members | Built in on every plan: send a broadcast to your whole community or to an audience your forms captured (700 sends a month on free, 60,000 on Creator, 500,000 on Growth, and new-content emails to members unmetered on top). Creator adds automations: a library of ready-made journeys that welcome new signups, deliver a lead magnet, fill an event, and win back quiet members on their own. | Email broadcasts and workflows are built in, strongest on the higher tiers, but they live inside that pricier funnel suite. |
| Selling digital downloads | Built in on every plan, free up to 10 products and unlimited from Creator: sell any file (PDF, video, audio, zip) straight from your bio link, keep 100% of it, and buyers get an instant download plus a receipt with the link. You keep their email, so a one-off buyer becomes someone you can actually reach again. | Yes, through a funnel, once you have built the funnel and pay for the plan that carries it. |
| Audio and private podcast feeds | An audio library on every plan including free: upload a track and members get a real player with 0.75x to 2x speed, a sleep timer, resume, and lock-screen controls. Growth adds a private, revocable podcast feed per member, which you switch on if you want it, so your library also plays in Apple Podcasts, Overcast, or Pocket Casts, downloaded for offline and unlisted in every directory. And you still see which members listened and which finished, which a podcast feed on its own can never report. | A page or a course lesson can carry an audio file, with a plain play, pause, and skip player around it. What is not there is an audio library your members browse, or a private podcast feed: nothing in its help centre describes one. |
| Letting clients book a call with you | Built in and free on every plan (2 session types on free, unlimited from Creator): publish your session types, share one link, and a booked time becomes a real private session on the same calendar your classes run on, with the invite, the reminders, the joining link, and cancellation all handled. Availability is yours to shape (weekly hours with split ranges, a buffer after, minimum notice, how far ahead, caps per day and per week, days off), anything already on your calendar closes its own slot, intake can be one of your real forms, and the person who booked becomes a contact you can email or drop into an automation. From Creator the call can happen in your own branded room, recorded when you press record, instead of on someone else's link. | Appointment booking exists because a funnel needs a call step, and it is capable, but it is sized for a sales team's pipeline rather than a coach's week, there is no free plan, and the person who booked has no member home to land in. |
| Members messaging each other, and you | Direct messages built in on every plan including free, 1:1 and in groups: images and files, reactions, unsend your own message, and blocking. Group threads are yours and your admins' to start. Your side is a real inbox, not a notification list: saved replies you fire with a slash, and beside a one-to-one thread that person's lifetime revenue, tags, join date, and your own private notes about them. On Growth you can switch on optional AI screening that flags a worrying message into your moderation queue for you to judge. Messages are a switch in your Studio, on by default for new communities. | The membership side is a secondary feature of a funnel product, so member-to-member threads are not what it is arranged around, and your side is a contact record in a funnel rather than an inbox with saved replies. |
| What each member is worth to you | Lifetime revenue per person, free on every plan including free: every membership charge, payment link, and product sale that person has settled adds up on their row in your members list, on their profile, beside their name in your message inbox, and in the CSV you export. Refunded product orders and unsettled payment links are left out. It is not a report you have to go and run, and it is not saved for a top tier: it is just there, next to their name. | Its analytics are funnel analytics: pages, opt-ins, and conversions. A per-member lifetime figure, every membership charge, payment link, and product sale they have settled added up on their row on the free plan, is a membership number this product is not shaped to give you. |
| Drip, prerequisites, and quizzes | Drip release, prerequisites, and graded quizzes, all three free on every plan including free, and enforced on the SERVER rather than hidden in the interface. Release a lesson a set number of days after someone joins, on a fixed date, or a set number of days after they finish what comes before it, and gate whole modules and whole courses the same way. Add multiple-choice quizzes with a pass mark you choose, and make a lesson wait on the prerequisites it depends on. A locked lesson's video, transcript, attachments, and body are not merely hidden: the routes that serve them refuse, so there is no URL to guess your way past. | Courses exist inside the funnel product, with the number of them capped by which plan you are on, and no free plan under any of it. Drry's drip release, prerequisites, and graded quizzes are free on every plan and enforced on the server. |
| Selling more than one membership level | Membership tiers on Growth ($99/mo): run a Basic, a Pro and a VIP out of one community, and decide per course, per room, per session and per collection of audio or guides who each one is for. Everything you leave open stays open to everyone. A lower tier still SEES what it does not have, marked with what unlocks it, because a locked card is what sells the upgrade; genuinely private rooms can be hidden outright instead. Your email audiences split the same way, so you can write to "VIP and up" without keeping the list by hand. | Yes, via membership areas you build yourself, which means you are configuring funnels and access rules rather than picking a tier. |
| Captions and transcripts, unmetered | Every lesson video and every audio track is transcribed for you automatically, free on every plan including the free one, with no AI credits to buy and no add-on to switch on. On a video the captions are one tap away on the player's CC button; an audio track gets a panel members can search, where every line is a tap to that second, next to chapters you named yourself. The machine mishears your own vocabulary the same way every time, so you correct it once in the editor, and a corrected transcript is never overwritten by a later machine pass. | A funnel builder with a courses area attached. Transcribing your lesson video is not part of the offer we can find in its own documentation, so check that before you count on it. |
| Keeping the space safe | On Growth, an AI screen reads a post before your members do and holds anything that trips the policy YOU set: eight categories you switch on or off one at a time, a strictness you choose, and your own house rules in your own words, all landing in a review queue where you approve or remove. It fails open on purpose, so an outage at the model never stops your community talking. Growth can screen direct messages the same way, into the same queue. On every plan, free included, you still get the ordinary controls: your own categories, inline moderation for you and your admins, and members deleting their own posts. | Community is a feature inside a funnel product rather than the centre of it, and screening posts is not something its documentation describes. |

Full comparison: https://drry.com/vs/clickfunnels

### Drry vs Stan Store (a free alternative with more than a link in bio)

Stan Store gives creators a fast link-in-bio storefront for digital products and bookings. Drry does that part too, free for your first 10 products, and then keeps going: the people who buy a file from your bio link land in a branded community with your courses, funnels, and email, instead of being a sale you never hear from again.

| Dimension | Drry | Stan Store |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Free plan | Yes. 100 members, 5 GB, unlimited courses, and the community feed. No card. | Free trial only, no free plan. |
| Fee on your member payments | 0%. You keep 100%, only Stripe's standard processing fee applies. | Positions itself around 0% platform fees; the monthly subscription is the price. |
| Courses + community together | Both built in, in one branded space you own. | Neither, really: courses are light digital products to buy and download, and there is no community feed. |
| Step-by-step guides and how-tos | Built in and free on every plan, with no cap on how many: build a guide from rich-text steps with images and video you upload to Drry and stream, a what-you-need list with real amounts and units members tick off as they go, and chips like prep time or servings, all on a tab you can rename to Recipes, Workouts, or Protocols. Because the amounts are structured, a member can scale a recipe to a different serving count or switch between metric and US, and they can keep the screen awake while they follow it or print the whole thing. Flip any guide public and it gets one shareable link, published with recipe details a search engine can read, plus a QR code, a lead-capture form and your own call to action, and you can hold the last steps back behind an email if you want it to work as a lead magnet too. | A how-to here is a file someone downloads, often as a freebie behind an email opt-in, which does capture the lead. What it is not is a step-by-step page with a supplies list, quantities, and check-off that members read on your site, and there is no guides library to browse, because there is no community to hold it. |
| Funnels + landing pages | Built in: compose landing pages from proven sections, capture leads with email boxes and embeddable forms, and see views, joins, and revenue per funnel. 1 free, unlimited on paid plans. | One link-in-bio storefront page, not landing pages or funnels with per-page analytics. |
| Your own brand and domain | Your own address like grace.drry.com on free; connect your own domain plus site white label (no Drry branding, the site is 100% yours) on paid plans, and on Growth your email sends from your own domain too. | Your store lives on stan.store, with limited branding and no custom domain. |
| Knowing who is showing up | See who is showing up, who is drifting away, which content people love, and how many finish each course. Included on Creator ($29/mo). | Basic sales and traffic stats for the storefront, not who in your membership is showing up. |
| Where pricing starts | Free, then $29/mo (Creator), $99/mo (Growth). | A monthly fee after the trial, with no free plan underneath it, and its two tiers land in the same range as Drry's paid ones. So the choice is not really about price: it is a trial against a free plan, and a storefront against a whole community around it. |
| Getting paid for 1:1s and packages | Send any client a one-time or installment link with an agreement they sign before they pay, built in, free on every plan, 0% platform fee. Most platforms make you bolt on a separate contract tool. | One-time sales and bookings, yes, but installment plans are limited and there is no signed agreement. |
| Email your members | Built in on every plan: send a broadcast to your whole community or to an audience your forms captured (700 sends a month on free, 60,000 on Creator, 500,000 on Growth, and new-content emails to members unmetered on top). Creator adds automations: a library of ready-made journeys that welcome new signups, deliver a lead magnet, fill an event, and win back quiet members on their own. | Email marketing is reserved for the pricier tier. |
| Selling digital downloads | Built in on every plan, free up to 10 products and unlimited from Creator: sell any file (PDF, video, audio, zip) straight from your bio link, keep 100% of it, and buyers get an instant download plus a receipt with the link. You keep their email, so a one-off buyer becomes someone you can actually reach again. | Yes, this is what it is for, and it is the reason to look at it. What you do not get is the community, courses, funnels, and email around it, or a free plan to start. |
| Audio and private podcast feeds | An audio library on every plan including free: upload a track and members get a real player with 0.75x to 2x speed, a sleep timer, resume, and lock-screen controls. Growth adds a private, revocable podcast feed per member, which you switch on if you want it, so your library also plays in Apple Podcasts, Overcast, or Pocket Casts, downloaded for offline and unlisted in every directory. And you still see which members listened and which finished, which a podcast feed on its own can never report. | An audio file is something you sell as a download here, a one-off purchase rather than a library members keep coming back to. Its own help centre describes no audio library and no private podcast feed. |
| Letting clients book a call with you | Built in and free on every plan (2 session types on free, unlimited from Creator): publish your session types, share one link, and a booked time becomes a real private session on the same calendar your classes run on, with the invite, the reminders, the joining link, and cancellation all handled. Availability is yours to shape (weekly hours with split ranges, a buffer after, minimum notice, how far ahead, caps per day and per week, days off), anything already on your calendar closes its own slot, intake can be one of your real forms, and the person who booked becomes a contact you can email or drop into an automation. From Creator the call can happen in your own branded room, recorded when you press record, instead of on someone else's link. | Genuinely part of what Stan does, and one of the reasons to look at it. What you do not get around the booking is the community, the courses, the email, a free plan to try it on, or a room of your own to hold the call in. |
| Members messaging each other, and you | Direct messages built in on every plan including free, 1:1 and in groups: images and files, reactions, unsend your own message, and blocking. Group threads are yours and your admins' to start. Your side is a real inbox, not a notification list: saved replies you fire with a slash, and beside a one-to-one thread that person's lifetime revenue, tags, join date, and your own private notes about them. On Growth you can switch on optional AI screening that flags a worrying message into your moderation queue for you to judge. Messages are a switch in your Studio, on by default for new communities. | There is no community here, so there is nobody for your buyers to message and no thread for you to answer in. A sale is a sale, and then it is over. |
| What each member is worth to you | Lifetime revenue per person, free on every plan including free: every membership charge, payment link, and product sale that person has settled adds up on their row in your members list, on their profile, beside their name in your message inbox, and in the CSV you export. Refunded product orders and unsettled payment links are left out. It is not a report you have to go and run, and it is not saved for a top tier: it is just there, next to their name. | Storefront stats tell you what sold. There is no member roster for a lifetime figure to sit on, which is the difference between a store and a membership. |
| Drip, prerequisites, and quizzes | Drip release, prerequisites, and graded quizzes, all three free on every plan including free, and enforced on the SERVER rather than hidden in the interface. Release a lesson a set number of days after someone joins, on a fixed date, or a set number of days after they finish what comes before it, and gate whole modules and whole courses the same way. Add multiple-choice quizzes with a pass mark you choose, and make a lesson wait on the prerequisites it depends on. A locked lesson's video, transcript, attachments, and body are not merely hidden: the routes that serve them refuse, so there is no URL to guess your way past. | An e-course lesson here is a video and its supporting files, sold as a product. Whatever release scheduling it offers arrives on a paid plan with no free tier under it, where Drry's drip, prerequisites, and graded quizzes are free on every plan and refused at the server when locked. |
| Selling more than one membership level | Membership tiers on Growth ($99/mo): run a Basic, a Pro and a VIP out of one community, and decide per course, per room, per session and per collection of audio or guides who each one is for. Everything you leave open stays open to everyone. A lower tier still SEES what it does not have, marked with what unlocks it, because a locked card is what sells the upgrade; genuinely private rooms can be hidden outright instead. Your email audiences split the same way, so you can write to "VIP and up" without keeping the list by hand. | No. It is a link-in-bio storefront: you sell products one by one, not membership levels. |
| Captions and transcripts, unmetered | Every lesson video and every audio track is transcribed for you automatically, free on every plan including the free one, with no AI credits to buy and no add-on to switch on. On a video the captions are one tap away on the player's CC button; an audio track gets a panel members can search, where every line is a tap to that second, next to chapters you named yourself. The machine mishears your own vocabulary the same way every time, so you correct it once in the editor, and a corrected transcript is never overwritten by a later machine pass. | A lesson here is a video and its supporting files, sold as a product. Automatic transcription is not part of the offer we can find, and there is no panel for a transcript to live in, because there is no library or community around the store. |
| Keeping the space safe | On Growth, an AI screen reads a post before your members do and holds anything that trips the policy YOU set: eight categories you switch on or off one at a time, a strictness you choose, and your own house rules in your own words, all landing in a review queue where you approve or remove. It fails open on purpose, so an outage at the model never stops your community talking. Growth can screen direct messages the same way, into the same queue. On every plan, free included, you still get the ordinary controls: your own categories, inline moderation for you and your admins, and members deleting their own posts. | There is no community feed here, so there is nothing to moderate. That is a real answer to this question, and also the reason a buyer never becomes a member. |

Full comparison: https://drry.com/vs/stan-store

### Drry vs GoHighLevel (the simple alternative for one coach, not an agency)

GoHighLevel is a powerful CRM and marketing suite designed and priced for agencies that resell it to clients. Drry is for one coach: your community, courses, funnels, and email in one simple branded space, with a free plan and no learning curve measured in weeks.

| Dimension | Drry | GoHighLevel |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Free plan | Yes. 100 members, 5 GB, unlimited courses, and the community feed. No card. | Free trial only, no free plan. |
| Fee on your member payments | 0%. You keep 100%, only Stripe's standard processing fee applies. | Depends on your setup: connect your own processor and there is typically no platform cut, but fees vary by plan and payment option. |
| Courses + community together | Both built in, in one branded space you own. | Membership features cover courses and community, but they sit inside an agency toolbox, not one warm member home. |
| Step-by-step guides and how-tos | Built in and free on every plan, with no cap on how many: build a guide from rich-text steps with images and video you upload to Drry and stream, a what-you-need list with real amounts and units members tick off as they go, and chips like prep time or servings, all on a tab you can rename to Recipes, Workouts, or Protocols. Because the amounts are structured, a member can scale a recipe to a different serving count or switch between metric and US, and they can keep the screen awake while they follow it or print the whole thing. Flip any guide public and it gets one shareable link, published with recipe details a search engine can read, plus a QR code, a lead-capture form and your own call to action, and you can hold the last steps back behind an email if you want it to work as a lead magnet too. | Between the blog, the funnel builder, and the membership courses you can assemble something like this, forms and calls to action included. Assembling is the word: there is no ready-made step-by-step format with a supplies list, quantities, and check-off, and no member-facing guides tab that simply works out of the box. |
| Funnels + landing pages | Built in: compose landing pages from proven sections, capture leads with email boxes and embeddable forms, and see views, joins, and revenue per funnel. 1 free, unlimited on paid plans. | Yes, a powerful funnel and page builder, one tool among many in a large CRM suite. |
| Your own brand and domain | Your own address like grace.drry.com on free; connect your own domain plus site white label (no Drry branding, the site is 100% yours) on paid plans, and on Growth your email sends from your own domain too. | Custom domains and full white label, because reselling the platform to clients is the business model. |
| Knowing who is showing up | See who is showing up, who is drifting away, which content people love, and how many finish each course. Included on Creator ($29/mo). | Deep CRM pipelines and campaign reporting, built for tracking leads across client accounts, not a simple view of which members are engaged. |
| Where pricing starts | Free, then $29/mo (Creator), $99/mo (Growth). | Agency-grade monthly pricing, no free plan. |
| Getting paid for 1:1s and packages | Send any client a one-time or installment link with an agreement they sign before they pay, built in, free on every plan, 0% platform fee. Most platforms make you bolt on a separate contract tool. | Invoices, payment links, and document signing all exist in the toolbox, but you assemble the pieces yourself across a steep learning curve. |
| Email your members | Built in on every plan: send a broadcast to your whole community or to an audience your forms captured (700 sends a month on free, 60,000 on Creator, 500,000 on Growth, and new-content emails to members unmetered on top). Creator adds automations: a library of ready-made journeys that welcome new signups, deliver a lead magnet, fill an event, and win back quiet members on their own. | Email, SMS, and workflow automation are all in and genuinely powerful, but sized for agencies running campaigns for clients. |
| Selling digital downloads | Built in on every plan, free up to 10 products and unlimited from Creator: sell any file (PDF, video, audio, zip) straight from your bio link, keep 100% of it, and buyers get an instant download plus a receipt with the link. You keep their email, so a one-off buyer becomes someone you can actually reach again. | Yes, though it is an agency toolbox: powerful, and a lot to assemble before a single file is for sale. |
| Audio and private podcast feeds | An audio library on every plan including free: upload a track and members get a real player with 0.75x to 2x speed, a sleep timer, resume, and lock-screen controls. Growth adds a private, revocable podcast feed per member, which you switch on if you want it, so your library also plays in Apple Podcasts, Overcast, or Pocket Casts, downloaded for offline and unlisted in every directory. And you still see which members listened and which finished, which a podcast feed on its own can never report. | Audio is a genuine lesson type inside a membership course, playback speed included, which is more than most of this list manages. What it is not is a standalone audio library, and the RSS it does have feeds blogs, emails, and social posts, not a private podcast feed for your members. |
| Letting clients book a call with you | Built in and free on every plan (2 session types on free, unlimited from Creator): publish your session types, share one link, and a booked time becomes a real private session on the same calendar your classes run on, with the invite, the reminders, the joining link, and cancellation all handled. Availability is yours to shape (weekly hours with split ranges, a buffer after, minimum notice, how far ahead, caps per day and per week, days off), anything already on your calendar closes its own slot, intake can be one of your real forms, and the person who booked becomes a contact you can email or drop into an automation. From Creator the call can happen in your own branded room, recorded when you press record, instead of on someone else's link. | Calendars, appointment booking, and round-robin team scheduling are all in the toolbox and genuinely powerful, more than Drry's booking does, built for agency sales teams: a lot to assemble, and no free plan. |
| Members messaging each other, and you | Direct messages built in on every plan including free, 1:1 and in groups: images and files, reactions, unsend your own message, and blocking. Group threads are yours and your admins' to start. Your side is a real inbox, not a notification list: saved replies you fire with a slash, and beside a one-to-one thread that person's lifetime revenue, tags, join date, and your own private notes about them. On Growth you can switch on optional AI screening that flags a worrying message into your moderation queue for you to judge. Messages are a switch in your Studio, on by default for new communities. | Conversations are a CRM inbox built for chasing leads across channels, and it is powerful at that. It is not members messaging each other inside a community, and it arrives with agency pricing and a build-out before anyone can say hello. |
| What each member is worth to you | Lifetime revenue per person, free on every plan including free: every membership charge, payment link, and product sale that person has settled adds up on their row in your members list, on their profile, beside their name in your message inbox, and in the CSV you export. Refunded product orders and unsettled payment links are left out. It is not a report you have to go and run, and it is not saved for a top tier: it is just there, next to their name. | Contact records can total what someone spent, once you have wired the pipelines and the products up to produce that. Drry needs no wiring: the payments happened here, so a member's lifetime figure, every membership charge, payment link, and product sale they have settled, is already on their row, on every plan. |
| Drip, prerequisites, and quizzes | Drip release, prerequisites, and graded quizzes, all three free on every plan including free, and enforced on the SERVER rather than hidden in the interface. Release a lesson a set number of days after someone joins, on a fixed date, or a set number of days after they finish what comes before it, and gate whole modules and whole courses the same way. Add multiple-choice quizzes with a pass mark you choose, and make a lesson wait on the prerequisites it depends on. A locked lesson's video, transcript, attachments, and body are not merely hidden: the routes that serve them refuse, so there is no URL to guess your way past. | Membership courses exist inside the toolbox, and so does the assembly. Drry's release scheduling, prerequisites, and graded quizzes are free on every plan, work out of the box, and are enforced on the server. |
| Selling more than one membership level | Membership tiers on Growth ($99/mo): run a Basic, a Pro and a VIP out of one community, and decide per course, per room, per session and per collection of audio or guides who each one is for. Everything you leave open stays open to everyone. A lower tier still SEES what it does not have, marked with what unlocks it, because a locked card is what sells the upgrade; genuinely private rooms can be hidden outright instead. Your email audiences split the same way, so you can write to "VIP and up" without keeping the list by hand. | Yes, memberships with different access, assembled out of an agency toolkit rather than set up in a few clicks. |
| Captions and transcripts, unmetered | Every lesson video and every audio track is transcribed for you automatically, free on every plan including the free one, with no AI credits to buy and no add-on to switch on. On a video the captions are one tap away on the player's CC button; an audio track gets a panel members can search, where every line is a tap to that second, next to chapters you named yourself. The machine mishears your own vocabulary the same way every time, so you correct it once in the editor, and a corrected transcript is never overwritten by a later machine pass. | A large agency toolbox with a memberships area inside it. Automatic lesson transcription is not something we can confirm in its own documentation, so check before you count on it, and either way it arrives inside agency pricing with no free plan. |
| Keeping the space safe | On Growth, an AI screen reads a post before your members do and holds anything that trips the policy YOU set: eight categories you switch on or off one at a time, a strictness you choose, and your own house rules in your own words, all landing in a review queue where you approve or remove. It fails open on purpose, so an outage at the model never stops your community talking. Growth can screen direct messages the same way, into the same queue. On every plan, free included, you still get the ordinary controls: your own categories, inline moderation for you and your admins, and members deleting their own posts. | Membership communities exist in the toolbox, with the moderation controls an agency suite gives you. An AI screen that holds a post before it appears is not something we can confirm in its documentation. |

Full comparison: https://drry.com/vs/gohighlevel

### Drry vs Kit (ConvertKit) (an alternative that is more than an email list)

Kit, formerly ConvertKit, is a very good email platform for creators: forms, landing pages, visual automations, and a commerce feature for selling digital products, paid newsletters, and memberships. Drry does the email side too, on every plan including free, and then gives the people on that list somewhere to go: a branded community with your courses, guides, audio, events, and messages in it.

| Dimension | Drry | Kit (ConvertKit) |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Free plan | Yes. 100 members, 5 GB, unlimited courses, and the community feed. No card. | A genuinely free tier for sending, with the automations limited until you pay. |
| Fee on your member payments | 0%. You keep 100%, only Stripe's standard processing fee applies. | It takes nothing from a membership you run somewhere else, because it does not run one. Selling through its own commerce does carry a transaction fee on every sale, on top of card processing. |
| Courses + community together | Both built in, in one branded space you own. | Neither. Its own help centre has no course section and no community section; the community answer is an integration that syncs your subscribers into someone else's platform, which you also pay for. |
| Step-by-step guides and how-tos | Built in and free on every plan, with no cap on how many: build a guide from rich-text steps with images and video you upload to Drry and stream, a what-you-need list with real amounts and units members tick off as they go, and chips like prep time or servings, all on a tab you can rename to Recipes, Workouts, or Protocols. Because the amounts are structured, a member can scale a recipe to a different serving count or switch between metric and US, and they can keep the screen awake while they follow it or print the whole thing. Flip any guide public and it gets one shareable link, published with recipe details a search engine can read, plus a QR code, a lead-capture form and your own call to action, and you can hold the last steps back behind an email if you want it to work as a lead magnet too. | A how-to goes out as a broadcast or sits on a landing page, and the email craft around that is excellent. What there is no format for is a step-by-step with a supplies list, quantities, and check-off, or a guides tab your members browse them in. |
| Funnels + landing pages | Built in: compose landing pages from proven sections, capture leads with email boxes and embeddable forms, and see views, joins, and revenue per funnel. 1 free, unlimited on paid plans. | Landing pages and unlimited opt-in forms, and they are good ones. What they report is signups, not a page's contribution to a membership's revenue, because the membership is not here. |
| Your own brand and domain | Your own address like grace.drry.com on free; connect your own domain plus site white label (no Drry branding, the site is 100% yours) on paid plans, and on Growth your email sends from your own domain too. | Your emails and pages carry your brand, and a custom domain is supported. There is no member area behind them to put on it. |
| Knowing who is showing up | See who is showing up, who is drifting away, which content people love, and how many finish each course. Included on Creator ($29/mo). | Deep email reporting: opens, clicks, growth, and per-subscriber history. It answers who reads you, which is a real question, and not who is showing up. |
| Where pricing starts | Free, then $29/mo (Creator), $99/mo (Growth). | Free to start, then paid tiers priced on how many subscribers you hold. |
| Getting paid for 1:1s and packages | Send any client a one-time or installment link with an agreement they sign before they pay, built in, free on every plan, 0% platform fee. Most platforms make you bolt on a separate contract tool. | Its commerce sells digital products, paid newsletters, and recurring memberships, so it can charge for a coaching package. What it is not is a per-client one-time or installment link with an agreement the client signs before they pay, and a transaction fee applies to the sale either way. |
| Email your members | Built in on every plan: send a broadcast to your whole community or to an audience your forms captured (700 sends a month on free, 60,000 on Creator, 500,000 on Growth, and new-content emails to members unmetered on top). Creator adds automations: a library of ready-made journeys that welcome new signups, deliver a lead magnet, fill an event, and win back quiet members on their own. | Email is the whole product and this is one of the best at it: sequences, visual automations, and a deliverability reputation people switch for. The catch is that it is only this, so everything the list was meant to lead to lives in tools you also pay for. |
| Selling digital downloads | Built in on every plan, free up to 10 products and unlimited from Creator: sell any file (PDF, video, audio, zip) straight from your bio link, keep 100% of it, and buyers get an instant download plus a receipt with the link. You keep their email, so a one-off buyer becomes someone you can actually reach again. | Yes, digital products are a core feature, with a transaction fee on every sale on top of card processing. |
| Audio and private podcast feeds | An audio library on every plan including free: upload a track and members get a real player with 0.75x to 2x speed, a sleep timer, resume, and lock-screen controls. Growth adds a private, revocable podcast feed per member, which you switch on if you want it, so your library also plays in Apple Podcasts, Overcast, or Pocket Casts, downloaded for offline and unlisted in every directory. And you still see which members listened and which finished, which a podcast feed on its own can never report. | Its help centre describes embedding a podcast you host somewhere else, not hosting one, and there is no audio library your members browse or listen to offline. |
| Letting clients book a call with you | Built in and free on every plan (2 session types on free, unlimited from Creator): publish your session types, share one link, and a booked time becomes a real private session on the same calendar your classes run on, with the invite, the reminders, the joining link, and cancellation all handled. Availability is yours to shape (weekly hours with split ranges, a buffer after, minimum notice, how far ahead, caps per day and per week, days off), anything already on your calendar closes its own slot, intake can be one of your real forms, and the person who booked becomes a contact you can email or drop into an automation. From Creator the call can happen in your own branded room, recorded when you press record, instead of on someone else's link. | Its help centre points you at an outside scheduler like Calendly rather than a booking page of its own, so the time gets picked in that tool and the call happens somewhere else again. |
| Members messaging each other, and you | Direct messages built in on every plan including free, 1:1 and in groups: images and files, reactions, unsend your own message, and blocking. Group threads are yours and your admins' to start. Your side is a real inbox, not a notification list: saved replies you fire with a slash, and beside a one-to-one thread that person's lifetime revenue, tags, join date, and your own private notes about them. On Growth you can switch on optional AI screening that flags a worrying message into your moderation queue for you to judge. Messages are a switch in your Studio, on by default for new communities. | Subscribers on a list, not members with profiles, so there is nobody for them to message and no inbox for you to answer in. |
| What each member is worth to you | Lifetime revenue per person, free on every plan including free: every membership charge, payment link, and product sale that person has settled adds up on their row in your members list, on their profile, beside their name in your message inbox, and in the CSV you export. Refunded product orders and unsettled payment links are left out. It is not a report you have to go and run, and it is not saved for a top tier: it is just there, next to their name. | Its commerce reports what sold. There is no member row for a lifetime figure to sit on, because there is no membership here. |
| Drip, prerequisites, and quizzes | Drip release, prerequisites, and graded quizzes, all three free on every plan including free, and enforced on the SERVER rather than hidden in the interface. Release a lesson a set number of days after someone joins, on a fixed date, or a set number of days after they finish what comes before it, and gate whole modules and whole courses the same way. Add multiple-choice quizzes with a pass mark you choose, and make a lesson wait on the prerequisites it depends on. A locked lesson's video, transcript, attachments, and body are not merely hidden: the routes that serve them refuse, so there is no URL to guess your way past. | There is no course product to release on a schedule, gate, or quiz: its help centre has no course section at all. Sequences drip EMAILS on a schedule, which is a genuinely useful and completely different job. |
| Selling more than one membership level | Membership tiers on Growth ($99/mo): run a Basic, a Pro and a VIP out of one community, and decide per course, per room, per session and per collection of audio or guides who each one is for. Everything you leave open stays open to everyone. A lower tier still SEES what it does not have, marked with what unlocks it, because a locked card is what sells the upgrade; genuinely private rooms can be hidden outright instead. Your email audiences split the same way, so you can write to "VIP and up" without keeping the list by hand. | Its commerce can carry more than one paid offer, including recurring memberships, so a second price is possible. What a membership level cannot do here is open a different set of rooms, courses and sessions, because there is no member area behind the list for it to open. |
| Captions and transcripts, unmetered | Every lesson video and every audio track is transcribed for you automatically, free on every plan including the free one, with no AI credits to buy and no add-on to switch on. On a video the captions are one tap away on the player's CC button; an audio track gets a panel members can search, where every line is a tap to that second, next to chapters you named yourself. The machine mishears your own vocabulary the same way every time, so you correct it once in the editor, and a corrected transcript is never overwritten by a later machine pass. | An email tool. There is no member video or audio hosted here, so there is nothing to caption: you would be pairing it with a separate platform that does the teaching, and paying for both. |
| Keeping the space safe | On Growth, an AI screen reads a post before your members do and holds anything that trips the policy YOU set: eight categories you switch on or off one at a time, a strictness you choose, and your own house rules in your own words, all landing in a review queue where you approve or remove. It fails open on purpose, so an outage at the model never stops your community talking. Growth can screen direct messages the same way, into the same queue. On every plan, free included, you still get the ordinary controls: your own categories, inline moderation for you and your admins, and members deleting their own posts. | There is no community here to keep safe. Your members talk to each other somewhere else, on a platform you also pay for and also have to moderate. |

Full comparison: https://drry.com/vs/kit

### Drry vs beehiiv (an alternative for creators who want a community, not just a newsletter)

beehiiv is a strong newsletter platform, and credit where it is due: a free tier, unlimited sends, a website on your own domain, paid subscriptions it states it takes 0% of, a referral program, and an ad network. What it is built around is the send. Drry is built around the people, so your writing sits beside courses, guides, audio, events, messages, and a community feed they log into.

| Dimension | Drry | beehiiv |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Free plan | Yes. 100 members, 5 GB, unlimited courses, and the community feed. No card. | A free tier that is genuinely free, no card, with the bigger features arriving on the paid plans. |
| Fee on your member payments | 0%. You keep 100%, only Stripe's standard processing fee applies. | 0% of your paid subscription revenue, which it states plainly on its own pricing page, with Stripe's processing fee the only cut. Level with us on this row, and worth saying so. |
| Courses + community together | Both built in, in one branded space you own. | A community feature arrives on its paid tiers, and its digital products can sell a course as something to buy. The COURSE named among the plan features, NewsletterXP, is beehiiv's own newsletter training rather than a builder for yours, so if you need lessons your members work through and get credited for finishing, check that before you commit. |
| Step-by-step guides and how-tos | Built in and free on every plan, with no cap on how many: build a guide from rich-text steps with images and video you upload to Drry and stream, a what-you-need list with real amounts and units members tick off as they go, and chips like prep time or servings, all on a tab you can rename to Recipes, Workouts, or Protocols. Because the amounts are structured, a member can scale a recipe to a different serving count or switch between metric and US, and they can keep the screen awake while they follow it or print the whole thing. Flip any guide public and it gets one shareable link, published with recipe details a search engine can read, plus a QR code, a lead-capture form and your own call to action, and you can hold the last steps back behind an email if you want it to work as a lead magnet too. | A post can be a how-to and its website publishes that where search can find it, which genuinely works. What there is no format for is a step-by-step with a supplies list, quantities, and check-off, or a guides tab of your own to browse them in. |
| Funnels + landing pages | Built in: compose landing pages from proven sections, capture leads with email boxes and embeddable forms, and see views, joins, and revenue per funnel. 1 free, unlimited on paid plans. | Landing pages sit inside a website builder with a custom domain, plus a referral program and a recommendation network, all pointed at growing the LIST. Views, joins, and revenue attributed to a membership is a different report. |
| Your own brand and domain | Your own address like grace.drry.com on free; connect your own domain plus site white label (no Drry branding, the site is 100% yours) on paid plans, and on Growth your email sends from your own domain too. | Yes, a website on your own custom domain. |
| Knowing who is showing up | See who is showing up, who is drifting away, which content people love, and how many finish each course. Included on Creator ($29/mo). | Campaign analytics, polls, surveys, and segmentation, sharp on the send. It tells you who opens; who is showing up, and to what, is a membership question. |
| Where pricing starts | Free, then $29/mo (Creator), $99/mo (Growth). | Free to start, then paid tiers priced on how many subscribers you hold. |
| Getting paid for 1:1s and packages | Send any client a one-time or installment link with an agreement they sign before they pay, built in, free on every plan, 0% platform fee. Most platforms make you bolt on a separate contract tool. | Paid subscriptions and digital products, sold to a list. A per-client one-time or installment link with an agreement signed before payment is a different shape of sale entirely. |
| Email your members | Built in on every plan: send a broadcast to your whole community or to an audience your forms captured (700 sends a month on free, 60,000 on Creator, 500,000 on Growth, and new-content emails to members unmetered on top). Creator adds automations: a library of ready-made journeys that welcome new signups, deliver a lead magnet, fill an event, and win back quiet members on their own. | Excellent, and the reason to be here: unlimited sends on every tier, automations, segmentation, and an ad network and boosts to grow the list on top of it. |
| Selling digital downloads | Built in on every plan, free up to 10 products and unlimited from Creator: sell any file (PDF, video, audio, zip) straight from your bio link, keep 100% of it, and buyers get an instant download plus a receipt with the link. You keep their email, so a one-off buyer becomes someone you can actually reach again. | Yes, digital products are named on its own pricing page. |
| Audio and private podcast feeds | An audio library on every plan including free: upload a track and members get a real player with 0.75x to 2x speed, a sleep timer, resume, and lock-screen controls. Growth adds a private, revocable podcast feed per member, which you switch on if you want it, so your library also plays in Apple Podcasts, Overcast, or Pocket Casts, downloaded for offline and unlisted in every directory. And you still see which members listened and which finished, which a podcast feed on its own can never report. | Genuinely strong: podcasts are a real part of the product with their own section in its support centre. What Drry adds is a library that lives inside your membership, and knowing which members listened and which finished, which a feed on its own can never report. |
| Letting clients book a call with you | Built in and free on every plan (2 session types on free, unlimited from Creator): publish your session types, share one link, and a booked time becomes a real private session on the same calendar your classes run on, with the invite, the reminders, the joining link, and cancellation all handled. Availability is yours to shape (weekly hours with split ranges, a buffer after, minimum notice, how far ahead, caps per day and per week, days off), anything already on your calendar closes its own slot, intake can be one of your real forms, and the person who booked becomes a contact you can email or drop into an automation. From Creator the call can happen in your own branded room, recorded when you press record, instead of on someone else's link. | It is a publishing platform, so picking a time with a client happens in whichever scheduler you already pay for, and the call lands on that tool's calendar rather than beside everything else you run. |
| Members messaging each other, and you | Direct messages built in on every plan including free, 1:1 and in groups: images and files, reactions, unsend your own message, and blocking. Group threads are yours and your admins' to start. Your side is a real inbox, not a notification list: saved replies you fire with a slash, and beside a one-to-one thread that person's lifetime revenue, tags, join date, and your own private notes about them. On Growth you can switch on optional AI screening that flags a worrying message into your moderation queue for you to judge. Messages are a switch in your Studio, on by default for new communities. | Its community on the paid tiers explicitly includes DMs and group chats, so members really can talk to each other; below that your readers are subscribers on a list. Either way your side of it is a publishing dashboard rather than an inbox with saved replies and, beside a one-to-one thread, what that person has paid you. |
| What each member is worth to you | Lifetime revenue per person, free on every plan including free: every membership charge, payment link, and product sale that person has settled adds up on their row in your members list, on their profile, beside their name in your message inbox, and in the CSV you export. Refunded product orders and unsettled payment links are left out. It is not a report you have to go and run, and it is not saved for a top tier: it is just there, next to their name. | It reports subscribers, opens, and revenue for the publication. Lifetime revenue per PERSON, on their row, on the free plan, is a membership number rather than a newsletter one. |
| Drip, prerequisites, and quizzes | Drip release, prerequisites, and graded quizzes, all three free on every plan including free, and enforced on the SERVER rather than hidden in the interface. Release a lesson a set number of days after someone joins, on a fixed date, or a set number of days after they finish what comes before it, and gate whole modules and whole courses the same way. Add multiple-choice quizzes with a pass mark you choose, and make a lesson wait on the prerequisites it depends on. A locked lesson's video, transcript, attachments, and body are not merely hidden: the routes that serve them refuse, so there is no URL to guess your way past. | There is no course of your own here to release on a schedule, gate, or quiz. Its automations drip EMAILS, which is a different job and one it does well. |
| Selling more than one membership level | Membership tiers on Growth ($99/mo): run a Basic, a Pro and a VIP out of one community, and decide per course, per room, per session and per collection of audio or guides who each one is for. Everything you leave open stays open to everyone. A lower tier still SEES what it does not have, marked with what unlocks it, because a locked card is what sells the upgrade; genuinely private rooms can be hidden outright instead. Your email audiences split the same way, so you can write to "VIP and up" without keeping the list by hand. | Paid newsletter tiers are a real feature, and the closest thing on this list to selling more than one level. They gate ISSUES of a newsletter: there is no community, course library or session calendar for a higher tier to unlock. |
| Captions and transcripts, unmetered | Every lesson video and every audio track is transcribed for you automatically, free on every plan including the free one, with no AI credits to buy and no add-on to switch on. On a video the captions are one tap away on the player's CC button; an audio track gets a panel members can search, where every line is a tap to that second, next to chapters you named yourself. The machine mishears your own vocabulary the same way every time, so you correct it once in the editor, and a corrected transcript is never overwritten by a later machine pass. | A newsletter and podcast product. There are no member lessons hosted here to caption, so a transcript is something you would bring from wherever the audio or video actually lives. |
| Keeping the space safe | On Growth, an AI screen reads a post before your members do and holds anything that trips the policy YOU set: eight categories you switch on or off one at a time, a strictness you choose, and your own house rules in your own words, all landing in a review queue where you approve or remove. It fails open on purpose, so an outage at the model never stops your community talking. Growth can screen direct messages the same way, into the same queue. On every plan, free included, you still get the ordinary controls: your own categories, inline moderation for you and your admins, and members deleting their own posts. | Its community feature is a place for readers to talk, moderated by hand. We can find no AI screen in front of it. |

Full comparison: https://drry.com/vs/beehiiv

### Drry vs ActiveCampaign (a simpler, community-first alternative)

ActiveCampaign is one of the most capable marketing-automation and CRM tools there is, sold by contact count with a 14-day trial rather than a free plan. It does not take your members' money, hold your courses, or host your community, because it is the automation layer, not the place your people live. Drry is that place, with email on every plan and automations from Creator.

| Dimension | Drry | ActiveCampaign |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Free plan | Yes. 100 members, 5 GB, unlimited courses, and the community feed. No card. | No free plan. A 14-day trial, no card needed, and then the bill starts. |
| Fee on your member payments | 0%. You keep 100%, only Stripe's standard processing fee applies. | It does not process member payments at all, so there is no cut, and no payments either: taking the money is another tool's job, and reconciling the two is yours. |
| Courses + community together | Both built in, in one branded space you own. | Neither. Its own pricing page names no courses, communities, or memberships; this is email, marketing automation, and a sales CRM. |
| Step-by-step guides and how-tos | Built in and free on every plan, with no cap on how many: build a guide from rich-text steps with images and video you upload to Drry and stream, a what-you-need list with real amounts and units members tick off as they go, and chips like prep time or servings, all on a tab you can rename to Recipes, Workouts, or Protocols. Because the amounts are structured, a member can scale a recipe to a different serving count or switch between metric and US, and they can keep the screen awake while they follow it or print the whole thing. Flip any guide public and it gets one shareable link, published with recipe details a search engine can read, plus a QR code, a lead-capture form and your own call to action, and you can hold the last steps back behind an email if you want it to work as a lead magnet too. | Nothing here is a step-by-step your members read and follow. It is a tool for reaching people, not a place they come to. |
| Funnels + landing pages | Built in: compose landing pages from proven sections, capture leads with email boxes and embeddable forms, and see views, joins, and revenue per funnel. 1 free, unlimited on paid plans. | Landing pages and forms, wired straight into the automation engine, which is the strong part. Attribution runs against deals and contacts rather than a membership's revenue per page. |
| Your own brand and domain | Your own address like grace.drry.com on free; connect your own domain plus site white label (no Drry branding, the site is 100% yours) on paid plans, and on Growth your email sends from your own domain too. | Your emails and pages carry your brand. There is no member-facing site behind them to carry it further. |
| Knowing who is showing up | See who is showing up, who is drifting away, which content people love, and how many finish each course. Included on Creator ($29/mo). | Extremely deep contact-level reporting, engagement scoring, and CRM pipelines, more than most creator tools can touch. What it can see is your MARKETING; who is quietly drifting out of a community is invisible to it, because the community is elsewhere. |
| Where pricing starts | Free, then $29/mo (Creator), $99/mo (Growth). | No free plan, and the price climbs with your contact count, with SMS and transactional email as paid add-ons on top. |
| Getting paid for 1:1s and packages | Send any client a one-time or installment link with an agreement they sign before they pay, built in, free on every plan, 0% platform fee. Most platforms make you bolt on a separate contract tool. | It can automate everything around a sale. Taking the payment, splitting it into installments, and getting an agreement signed first all happen in other tools you connect and maintain. |
| Email your members | Built in on every plan: send a broadcast to your whole community or to an audience your forms captured (700 sends a month on free, 60,000 on Creator, 500,000 on Growth, and new-content emails to members unmetered on top). Creator adds automations: a library of ready-made journeys that welcome new signups, deliver a lead magnet, fill an event, and win back quiet members on their own. | World class, and the reason people pay for it: automations, segmentation, and a CRM built for a business with a marketing team. Also only this layer, so it is one line on a stack of subscriptions rather than the whole thing. |
| Selling digital downloads | Built in on every plan, free up to 10 products and unlimited from Creator: sell any file (PDF, video, audio, zip) straight from your bio link, keep 100% of it, and buyers get an instant download plus a receipt with the link. You keep their email, so a one-off buyer becomes someone you can actually reach again. | Selling a file to a buyer is not something its pricing page describes; a store is another tool in the stack. |
| Audio and private podcast feeds | An audio library on every plan including free: upload a track and members get a real player with 0.75x to 2x speed, a sleep timer, resume, and lock-screen controls. Growth adds a private, revocable podcast feed per member, which you switch on if you want it, so your library also plays in Apple Podcasts, Overcast, or Pocket Casts, downloaded for offline and unlisted in every directory. And you still see which members listened and which finished, which a podcast feed on its own can never report. | There is no audio library or podcast here. Audio lives wherever you already host it, and nothing reports who listened. |
| Letting clients book a call with you | Built in and free on every plan (2 session types on free, unlimited from Creator): publish your session types, share one link, and a booked time becomes a real private session on the same calendar your classes run on, with the invite, the reminders, the joining link, and cancellation all handled. Availability is yours to shape (weekly hours with split ranges, a buffer after, minimum notice, how far ahead, caps per day and per week, days off), anything already on your calendar closes its own slot, intake can be one of your real forms, and the person who booked becomes a contact you can email or drop into an automation. From Creator the call can happen in your own branded room, recorded when you press record, instead of on someone else's link. | Picking a time with a client happens in whichever scheduler you connect to it, and the call happens somewhere else again. |
| Members messaging each other, and you | Direct messages built in on every plan including free, 1:1 and in groups: images and files, reactions, unsend your own message, and blocking. Group threads are yours and your admins' to start. Your side is a real inbox, not a notification list: saved replies you fire with a slash, and beside a one-to-one thread that person's lifetime revenue, tags, join date, and your own private notes about them. On Growth you can switch on optional AI screening that flags a worrying message into your moderation queue for you to judge. Messages are a switch in your Studio, on by default for new communities. | Contacts in a database, not members with profiles, so there is no member surface for anyone to message on and no member-to-member thread to have. |
| What each member is worth to you | Lifetime revenue per person, free on every plan including free: every membership charge, payment link, and product sale that person has settled adds up on their row in your members list, on their profile, beside their name in your message inbox, and in the CSV you export. Refunded product orders and unsettled payment links are left out. It is not a report you have to go and run, and it is not saved for a top tier: it is just there, next to their name. | It can total what a contact has spent, once you have wired the deal or e-commerce data into it from wherever the money actually lives. Drry needs no wiring: the payments happened here, so that member's lifetime figure, every membership charge, payment link, and product sale they have settled, is already on their row, on every plan including free. |
| Drip, prerequisites, and quizzes | Drip release, prerequisites, and graded quizzes, all three free on every plan including free, and enforced on the SERVER rather than hidden in the interface. Release a lesson a set number of days after someone joins, on a fixed date, or a set number of days after they finish what comes before it, and gate whole modules and whole courses the same way. Add multiple-choice quizzes with a pass mark you choose, and make a lesson wait on the prerequisites it depends on. A locked lesson's video, transcript, attachments, and body are not merely hidden: the routes that serve them refuse, so there is no URL to guess your way past. | There is no course product here to release on a schedule, gate, or quiz. Its automations drip EMAILS, extremely well, which is a different job. |
| Selling more than one membership level | Membership tiers on Growth ($99/mo): run a Basic, a Pro and a VIP out of one community, and decide per course, per room, per session and per collection of audio or guides who each one is for. Everything you leave open stays open to everyone. A lower tier still SEES what it does not have, marked with what unlocks it, because a locked card is what sells the upgrade; genuinely private rooms can be hidden outright instead. Your email audiences split the same way, so you can write to "VIP and up" without keeping the list by hand. | Nothing here sells a membership level. It automates the mail around a product hosted somewhere else, so the levels, and the thing they open, both live in a tool you also pay for. |
| Captions and transcripts, unmetered | Every lesson video and every audio track is transcribed for you automatically, free on every plan including the free one, with no AI credits to buy and no add-on to switch on. On a video the captions are one tap away on the player's CC button; an audio track gets a panel members can search, where every line is a tap to that second, next to chapters you named yourself. The machine mishears your own vocabulary the same way every time, so you correct it once in the editor, and a corrected transcript is never overwritten by a later machine pass. | Email, automation, and a sales CRM. No member video or audio is hosted here, so there is nothing to caption; the teaching happens on a platform you buy separately. |
| Keeping the space safe | On Growth, an AI screen reads a post before your members do and holds anything that trips the policy YOU set: eight categories you switch on or off one at a time, a strictness you choose, and your own house rules in your own words, all landing in a review queue where you approve or remove. It fails open on purpose, so an outage at the model never stops your community talking. Growth can screen direct messages the same way, into the same queue. On every plan, free included, you still get the ordinary controls: your own categories, inline moderation for you and your admins, and members deleting their own posts. | There is no community here. It is email, automation, and a CRM, so the question does not arise. |

Full comparison: https://drry.com/vs/activecampaign

### Drry vs Mailchimp (an alternative that hosts the thing you are emailing about)

Mailchimp is where a lot of coaches send their first newsletter, and its free plan is a real one. It is an email marketing tool: campaigns, customer journeys, segmentation, landing pages, and a simple website. What it does not do is hold your members, your courses, or your money. Drry does all three, and sends the email as well, on every plan including free.

| Dimension | Drry | Mailchimp |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Free plan | Yes. 100 members, 5 GB, unlimited courses, and the community feed. No card. | Yes, a real free plan, capped by how many contacts you hold. |
| Fee on your member payments | 0%. You keep 100%, only Stripe's standard processing fee applies. | It does not take member payments, so there is no cut, and no payments either: the money side happens in another tool entirely. |
| Courses + community together | Both built in, in one branded space you own. | Neither. Its help centre has no course topic and no community topic; this is emails, audiences, landing pages, and a website builder. |
| Step-by-step guides and how-tos | Built in and free on every plan, with no cap on how many: build a guide from rich-text steps with images and video you upload to Drry and stream, a what-you-need list with real amounts and units members tick off as they go, and chips like prep time or servings, all on a tab you can rename to Recipes, Workouts, or Protocols. Because the amounts are structured, a member can scale a recipe to a different serving count or switch between metric and US, and they can keep the screen awake while they follow it or print the whole thing. Flip any guide public and it gets one shareable link, published with recipe details a search engine can read, plus a QR code, a lead-capture form and your own call to action, and you can hold the last steps back behind an email if you want it to work as a lead magnet too. | You can write a how-to and put it on a landing page and it will look fine. What it is not is a step-by-step with a supplies list, quantities, and check-off that your members browse in one place. |
| Funnels + landing pages | Built in: compose landing pages from proven sections, capture leads with email boxes and embeddable forms, and see views, joins, and revenue per funnel. 1 free, unlimited on paid plans. | Landing pages, yes, and a simple website builder. What they report is signups and campaign performance rather than a page's contribution to membership revenue. |
| Your own brand and domain | Your own address like grace.drry.com on free; connect your own domain plus site white label (no Drry branding, the site is 100% yours) on paid plans, and on Growth your email sends from your own domain too. | You can buy a domain and build a site on it, and it will carry your brand. |
| Knowing who is showing up | See who is showing up, who is drifting away, which content people love, and how many finish each course. Included on Creator ($29/mo). | Solid campaign reporting and predictive segmentation. It measures the send. Who is showing up, what is landing, and who is drifting is a membership question it is not shaped to answer. |
| Where pricing starts | Free, then $29/mo (Creator), $99/mo (Growth). | Free to start, then priced on BOTH contact count and monthly sends, so the bill moves with two numbers at once. |
| Getting paid for 1:1s and packages | Send any client a one-time or installment link with an agreement they sign before they pay, built in, free on every plan, 0% platform fee. Most platforms make you bolt on a separate contract tool. | Taking a one-time or installment payment from a client, with an agreement signed before they pay, is not something its help centre describes; that happens in another tool. |
| Email your members | Built in on every plan: send a broadcast to your whole community or to an audience your forms captured (700 sends a month on free, 60,000 on Creator, 500,000 on Growth, and new-content emails to members unmetered on top). Creator adds automations: a library of ready-made journeys that welcome new signups, deliver a lead magnet, fill an event, and win back quiet members on their own. | The reason to be here: campaigns, journeys, segmentation, a huge template library, and a genuinely free tier. Also the whole of what you get, so everything you are emailing ABOUT lives somewhere else. |
| Selling digital downloads | Built in on every plan, free up to 10 products and unlimited from Creator: sell any file (PDF, video, audio, zip) straight from your bio link, keep 100% of it, and buyers get an instant download plus a receipt with the link. You keep their email, so a one-off buyer becomes someone you can actually reach again. | Selling a file to a buyer is not part of the marketing plan's help centre; it connects to a store you run elsewhere. |
| Audio and private podcast feeds | An audio library on every plan including free: upload a track and members get a real player with 0.75x to 2x speed, a sleep timer, resume, and lock-screen controls. Growth adds a private, revocable podcast feed per member, which you switch on if you want it, so your library also plays in Apple Podcasts, Overcast, or Pocket Casts, downloaded for offline and unlisted in every directory. And you still see which members listened and which finished, which a podcast feed on its own can never report. | There is no audio library or podcast feed here; audio is something you link out to. |
| Letting clients book a call with you | Built in and free on every plan (2 session types on free, unlimited from Creator): publish your session types, share one link, and a booked time becomes a real private session on the same calendar your classes run on, with the invite, the reminders, the joining link, and cancellation all handled. Availability is yours to shape (weekly hours with split ranges, a buffer after, minimum notice, how far ahead, caps per day and per week, days off), anything already on your calendar closes its own slot, intake can be one of your real forms, and the person who booked becomes a contact you can email or drop into an automation. From Creator the call can happen in your own branded room, recorded when you press record, instead of on someone else's link. | Its help centre lists no booking or scheduling topic, so picking a time with a client happens in a separate scheduler you pay for. |
| Members messaging each other, and you | Direct messages built in on every plan including free, 1:1 and in groups: images and files, reactions, unsend your own message, and blocking. Group threads are yours and your admins' to start. Your side is a real inbox, not a notification list: saved replies you fire with a slash, and beside a one-to-one thread that person's lifetime revenue, tags, join date, and your own private notes about them. On Growth you can switch on optional AI screening that flags a worrying message into your moderation queue for you to judge. Messages are a switch in your Studio, on by default for new communities. | Contacts on a list, not members with profiles, so there is nobody to message and no inbox to answer in. |
| What each member is worth to you | Lifetime revenue per person, free on every plan including free: every membership charge, payment link, and product sale that person has settled adds up on their row in your members list, on their profile, beside their name in your message inbox, and in the CSV you export. Refunded product orders and unsettled payment links are left out. It is not a report you have to go and run, and it is not saved for a top tier: it is just there, next to their name. | It reports on campaigns and audiences. Lifetime revenue per person, on their row, free, is a membership number, and the membership is not here. |
| Drip, prerequisites, and quizzes | Drip release, prerequisites, and graded quizzes, all three free on every plan including free, and enforced on the SERVER rather than hidden in the interface. Release a lesson a set number of days after someone joins, on a fixed date, or a set number of days after they finish what comes before it, and gate whole modules and whole courses the same way. Add multiple-choice quizzes with a pass mark you choose, and make a lesson wait on the prerequisites it depends on. A locked lesson's video, transcript, attachments, and body are not merely hidden: the routes that serve them refuse, so there is no URL to guess your way past. | There is no course to release on a schedule, gate, or quiz. Customer journeys drip EMAILS on a schedule, which is a different job. |
| Selling more than one membership level | Membership tiers on Growth ($99/mo): run a Basic, a Pro and a VIP out of one community, and decide per course, per room, per session and per collection of audio or guides who each one is for. Everything you leave open stays open to everyone. A lower tier still SEES what it does not have, marked with what unlocks it, because a locked card is what sells the upgrade; genuinely private rooms can be hidden outright instead. Your email audiences split the same way, so you can write to "VIP and up" without keeping the list by hand. | There is no membership here to sell one level of, let alone three, and no membership plans to price. It sends the campaign; whatever the campaign is selling is hosted elsewhere. |
| Captions and transcripts, unmetered | Every lesson video and every audio track is transcribed for you automatically, free on every plan including the free one, with no AI credits to buy and no add-on to switch on. On a video the captions are one tap away on the player's CC button; an audio track gets a panel members can search, where every line is a tap to that second, next to chapters you named yourself. The machine mishears your own vocabulary the same way every time, so you correct it once in the editor, and a corrected transcript is never overwritten by a later machine pass. | Emails, audiences, and pages. No member video or audio is hosted here, so there is nothing to caption; the lessons live somewhere else entirely. |
| Keeping the space safe | On Growth, an AI screen reads a post before your members do and holds anything that trips the policy YOU set: eight categories you switch on or off one at a time, a strictness you choose, and your own house rules in your own words, all landing in a review queue where you approve or remove. It fails open on purpose, so an outage at the model never stops your community talking. Growth can screen direct messages the same way, into the same queue. On every plan, free included, you still get the ordinary controls: your own categories, inline moderation for you and your admins, and members deleting their own posts. | There is no community here either. Moderation is a question for whatever platform you run the community on. |

Full comparison: https://drry.com/vs/mailchimp

### Drry vs Systeme.io (a coaching-first alternative with the same free starting point)

Systeme.io is the closest thing on this list to Drry's shape, and it has earned that: a real free plan, sales funnels, email, online courses, communities, a booking calendar, and 0% transaction fees, all stated on its own pricing page. Where the two part company is what a coaching membership runs on day to day: how video and audio reach members, whether those members can message each other and you, and whether you can see what one member is actually worth.

| Dimension | Drry | Systeme.io |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Free plan | Yes. 100 members, 5 GB, unlimited courses, and the community feed. No card. | A genuinely free plan, which is rare on this list and worth saying out loud. |
| Fee on your member payments | 0%. You keep 100%, only Stripe's standard processing fee applies. | 0% transaction fees on every plan, stated plainly on its own pricing page. Level with us here, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. |
| Courses + community together | Both built in, in one branded space you own. | Both, genuinely: online courses and communities are named features on its own pricing page. The difference is what the product is arranged around, funnels first with the rest alongside, rather than a member home the funnels feed. |
| Step-by-step guides and how-tos | Built in and free on every plan, with no cap on how many: build a guide from rich-text steps with images and video you upload to Drry and stream, a what-you-need list with real amounts and units members tick off as they go, and chips like prep time or servings, all on a tab you can rename to Recipes, Workouts, or Protocols. Because the amounts are structured, a member can scale a recipe to a different serving count or switch between metric and US, and they can keep the screen awake while they follow it or print the whole thing. Flip any guide public and it gets one shareable link, published with recipe details a search engine can read, plus a QR code, a lead-capture form and your own call to action, and you can hold the last steps back behind an email if you want it to work as a lead magnet too. | Between the blog, the funnel pages, and course lessons you can assemble a how-to with a form on it. Assembling is the word: there is no ready-made step-by-step with a supplies list, quantities, and check-off, and no guides tab members browse them in. |
| Funnels + landing pages | Built in: compose landing pages from proven sections, capture leads with email boxes and embeddable forms, and see views, joins, and revenue per funnel. 1 free, unlimited on paid plans. | Yes, sales funnels are the heart of the product, with A/B tests and an affiliate program alongside. This is one of its real strengths. |
| Your own brand and domain | Your own address like grace.drry.com on free; connect your own domain plus site white label (no Drry branding, the site is 100% yours) on paid plans, and on Growth your email sends from your own domain too. | Custom domains are a named feature. |
| Knowing who is showing up | See who is showing up, who is drifting away, which content people love, and how many finish each course. Included on Creator ($29/mo). | Contact management and funnel stats. What it reports is the funnel; which members are quietly drifting out of your community is a different question. |
| Where pricing starts | Free, then $29/mo (Creator), $99/mo (Growth). | Free to start, then paid tiers that lift the caps. |
| Getting paid for 1:1s and packages | Send any client a one-time or installment link with an agreement they sign before they pay, built in, free on every plan, 0% platform fee. Most platforms make you bolt on a separate contract tool. | Payments run at 0%, so the money side is fair. A per-client one-time or installment link with an agreement the client signs before they pay is not something its help centre describes. |
| Email your members | Built in on every plan: send a broadcast to your whole community or to an audience your forms captured (700 sends a month on free, 60,000 on Creator, 500,000 on Growth, and new-content emails to members unmetered on top). Creator adds automations: a library of ready-made journeys that welcome new signups, deliver a lead magnet, fill an event, and win back quiet members on their own. | Email marketing is built in on every plan including free, which is genuinely good, and this row is a fair fight. |
| Selling digital downloads | Built in on every plan, free up to 10 products and unlimited from Creator: sell any file (PDF, video, audio, zip) straight from your bio link, keep 100% of it, and buyers get an instant download plus a receipt with the link. You keep their email, so a one-off buyer becomes someone you can actually reach again. | Yes, selling a digital file is part of what its funnels do, at 0%. |
| Audio and private podcast feeds | An audio library on every plan including free: upload a track and members get a real player with 0.75x to 2x speed, a sleep timer, resume, and lock-screen controls. Growth adds a private, revocable podcast feed per member, which you switch on if you want it, so your library also plays in Apple Podcasts, Overcast, or Pocket Casts, downloaded for offline and unlisted in every directory. And you still see which members listened and which finished, which a podcast feed on its own can never report. | Its help centre has no audio or podcast section: an audio file is something you attach or sell, not a library members listen to on a walk, and there is no private podcast feed they subscribe to. |
| Letting clients book a call with you | Built in and free on every plan (2 session types on free, unlimited from Creator): publish your session types, share one link, and a booked time becomes a real private session on the same calendar your classes run on, with the invite, the reminders, the joining link, and cancellation all handled. Availability is yours to shape (weekly hours with split ranges, a buffer after, minimum notice, how far ahead, caps per day and per week, days off), anything already on your calendar closes its own slot, intake can be one of your real forms, and the person who booked becomes a contact you can email or drop into an automation. From Creator the call can happen in your own branded room, recorded when you press record, instead of on someone else's link. | Yes, it has a booking calendar with its own section in the help centre, and that is a real strength. What the booked call does not become is a session on the same calendar your classes and events run on, held in a video room of your own. |
| Members messaging each other, and you | Direct messages built in on every plan including free, 1:1 and in groups: images and files, reactions, unsend your own message, and blocking. Group threads are yours and your admins' to start. Your side is a real inbox, not a notification list: saved replies you fire with a slash, and beside a one-to-one thread that person's lifetime revenue, tags, join date, and your own private notes about them. On Growth you can switch on optional AI screening that flags a worrying message into your moderation queue for you to judge. Messages are a switch in your Studio, on by default for new communities. | Its help centre has no member-messaging section; contact management is the coach's side of a list. 1:1 and group threads between members, with images, reactions, and unsend, are not what it describes. |
| What each member is worth to you | Lifetime revenue per person, free on every plan including free: every membership charge, payment link, and product sale that person has settled adds up on their row in your members list, on their profile, beside their name in your message inbox, and in the CSV you export. Refunded product orders and unsettled payment links are left out. It is not a report you have to go and run, and it is not saved for a top tier: it is just there, next to their name. | Contact management holds what a contact bought. A lifetime figure sitting on every member's row, on the free plan, is not a report its help centre describes. |
| Drip, prerequisites, and quizzes | Drip release, prerequisites, and graded quizzes, all three free on every plan including free, and enforced on the SERVER rather than hidden in the interface. Release a lesson a set number of days after someone joins, on a fixed date, or a set number of days after they finish what comes before it, and gate whole modules and whole courses the same way. Add multiple-choice quizzes with a pass mark you choose, and make a lesson wait on the prerequisites it depends on. A locked lesson's video, transcript, attachments, and body are not merely hidden: the routes that serve them refuse, so there is no URL to guess your way past. | Courses are real here, with a whole help section behind them. Whether release scheduling, prerequisites, and graded quizzes are part of that is worth checking against your own course plan before you commit. On Drry all three are in, free on every plan, and enforced on the server rather than hidden in the interface. |
| Selling more than one membership level | Membership tiers on Growth ($99/mo): run a Basic, a Pro and a VIP out of one community, and decide per course, per room, per session and per collection of audio or guides who each one is for. Everything you leave open stays open to everyone. A lower tier still SEES what it does not have, marked with what unlocks it, because a locked card is what sells the upgrade; genuinely private rooms can be hidden outright instead. Your email audiences split the same way, so you can write to "VIP and up" without keeping the list by hand. | Membership sites with more than one plan are part of the suite, so more than one level is genuinely possible. It is assembled in a builder alongside funnels and courses rather than being a community with rooms, sessions and a calendar that a level opens. |
| Captions and transcripts, unmetered | Every lesson video and every audio track is transcribed for you automatically, free on every plan including the free one, with no AI credits to buy and no add-on to switch on. On a video the captions are one tap away on the player's CC button; an audio track gets a panel members can search, where every line is a tap to that second, next to chapters you named yourself. The machine mishears your own vocabulary the same way every time, so you correct it once in the editor, and a corrected transcript is never overwritten by a later machine pass. | Courses and funnels in one low-cost suite. Automatic transcription is not part of the offer we can find in its own help centre, so check before you count on it. |
| Keeping the space safe | On Growth, an AI screen reads a post before your members do and holds anything that trips the policy YOU set: eight categories you switch on or off one at a time, a strictness you choose, and your own house rules in your own words, all landing in a review queue where you approve or remove. It fails open on purpose, so an outage at the model never stops your community talking. Growth can screen direct messages the same way, into the same queue. On every plan, free included, you still get the ordinary controls: your own categories, inline moderation for you and your admins, and members deleting their own posts. | Communities are a named feature, moderated with the ordinary controls. Screening a post with AI before it appears is not part of what its help centre describes. |

Full comparison: https://drry.com/vs/systeme-io


Comparison hub: https://drry.com/compare