Which community platforms let you use your own domain?

We make Drry, and Drry sells a custom domain on its cheapest paid plan, so we are arguing for something we charge for. Take the disclosure and keep reading, because the useful part of this subject is not which vendor to pick. It is that "custom domain" and "white label" are sold as one thing and are two, and almost every pricing page in this market is built to let you confuse them.

The address is the part that outlives the platform. It is what a search engine indexed, what a bookmark points at, what somebody typed into a podcast, what every inbound link on the internet resolves to. Move platforms and you can bring an address with you. You cannot bring a URL on somebody else's domain, and you do not get to redirect it either. That argument in full is own your audience, don't rent it; this page is the practical half.

A custom domain and white label are two purchases

A custom domain is the address. Your community answers at community.yourname.com, or at your apex domain, or on a subdomain of a site you already run. That is all it is: a name in DNS pointing at the servers of whoever hosts you. It says nothing about what a visitor sees once they arrive.

White label is whose name is on the product. The badge in the footer, the From address on every email your members get, the logo on the login screen, the name in the app store if there is an app, the business name on the card statement. A platform can hand you the address and keep its name on all five, and that combination is common enough to be the default rather than the exception.

The reason this matters commercially is that the two are priced separately, so the plan you compare on is rarely the plan that gives you both. Here are three that are stated on the vendors' own pricing pages:

Five places to check before you believe "white label"

Ask about these one at a time, on the plan you actually intend to buy rather than the top one. Every item is something a member sees, which is the only test that counts.

• The footer badge. Is there a powered-by line on member-facing pages, and which plan removes it? This is the one most vendors mean when they say white label, and it is the least consequential of the five.
• The emails. What is the From address on a real notification, a password or sign-in email, a receipt? Which domain signed it? Members judge legitimacy on the sender, and this is the surface most likely to still carry the platform name while everything else carries yours.
• The login screen. Whose logo do members see when they sign in, and is the sign-in page on your address or a redirect to theirs? A redirect out and back is the moment people notice they are not where they thought they were.
• The mobile app. If there is an app, is it your brand in the store or their shared app with your community inside it? A branded app is nearly always the dearest tier on the ladder, and often a quoted price rather than a published one.
• The checkout and the card statement. Whose name does a member see at payment, on the receipt, and on their bank statement? That is the merchant-of-record question, and it decides who your members are legally customers of as well as what brand they remember paying.

The cheap way to run this audit: ask a salesperson for screenshots of those five on the plan you are buying. A vendor who has them says yes in a minute. A vendor who sends you the feature matrix instead has answered a different question.

Which platforms let you use your own domain

Ordered by what the product actually is, because "your own domain" means something different in each group. In the first, the address carries the whole member experience. In the second it carries a course area. In the third it points at a checkout, a store or a publication, with the community, if any, somewhere else.

Community-first platforms.

• Skool. Every community is hosted on skool.com, with no custom domain and no white label on either plan. The address is theirs at any price, which makes it the clearest contrast in this list. Pricing and how it compares.
• Circle. A custom domain on paid plans. White label is a separate rung, and the cheapest paid plan does not carry it, so the entry tier gives you the address without the branding. Pricing and how it compares.
• Mighty Networks. A custom domain on paid plans. A branded iOS and Android app is the enterprise tier, quoted rather than published. Pricing and how it compares.
• Discord. Your server carries your name and icon inside discord.com. There is no custom domain and no white label: both the address and the experience stay Discord's. Pricing and how it compares.

Course platforms with a community tab.

• Kajabi. A custom domain on paid plans. Pricing and how it compares.
• Thinkific. A custom domain, with white label on the higher plans. Pricing and how it compares.
• Teachable. A custom domain on paid plans. Pricing and how it compares.
• Podia. A custom domain on paid plans. Pricing and how it compares.

Stores, paywalls and publications you attach to a site.

• Memberful. A genuine strength here: the paywall sits on your own domain and your own site, so the brand is yours throughout. Pricing and how it compares.
• Squarespace. Your own domain and a site that looks entirely yours, with no platform branding to remove. The community side is the part to pressure-test, not the branding. Pricing and how it compares.
• Substack. A custom domain is supported. The reading experience around it stays recognisably Substack, which for a lot of writers is the point rather than a cost. Pricing and how it compares.
• Gumroad. A custom domain works on the product pages. The buyer still goes through a Gumroad checkout rather than a space of your own. Pricing and how it compares.
• Stan Store. Your store lives on stan.store. Branding is limited and there is no custom domain. Pricing and how it compares.
• GoHighLevel. Custom domains and full white label, because reselling the platform to clients is the business model rather than a feature bolted onto it. Pricing and how it compares.

The platforms aimed at organisations rather than individual creators, the ones an assistant will name alongside these if you ask the question broadly, tend not to publish a price at all: you get a demo and a quote. We do not carry verified figures for them, so this page will not invent one. Read their own pricing page, and get the white-label specifics for your quoted plan in writing before you sign, because the five surfaces above are exactly where an enterprise quote gets vague.

If you want the fee and plan numbers for the platforms above rather than their branding story, every figure we hold is dated and sourced on the comparison hub and in the membership platform roundup.

What actually happens when you move an address

This is the part most pages on this subject skip, and it is the part that decides whether the move costs you anything. Four things happen, in this order.

• You add one DNS record. For a subdomain like community.yourname.com that is a CNAME pointing at whatever host the platform gives you. For an apex domain, yourname.com with nothing in front of it, a CNAME is not allowed by the DNS specification, so it is an A record pointing at an IP address instead, or an ALIAS or ANAME record if your DNS provider offers one. Any platform that supports apex domains will tell you which.
• A certificate gets issued for you. Once the record resolves, the platform requests an HTTPS certificate for your name. This is usually automatic and usually quick, but it cannot start until DNS has propagated, which is why a domain often sits pending for a while and then starts working with nothing having changed on your side.
• The old URLs need to redirect. Every address that used to work should answer with a 301 to its new equivalent. A 301 is what passes ranking signals and what makes old links, bookmarks and inbound press keep working. A 404 throws all of that away, and so does a page that quietly serves different content at the old URL.
• One address has to be declared canonical. Platforms commonly keep serving your old platform address as well as your new one, which means two URLs holding the same page. That is fine as long as the canonical tag names one of them, so search engines index a single version. If nothing names one, they pick, and they may not pick yours.

Rankings survive a properly redirected move. They usually wobble for a few weeks and settle. What does not survive is a move nobody redirected, and the way to avoid that is to ask the question before you migrate rather than after: when I move, do my old URLs 301, and which address ends up canonical? A platform that cannot answer that has told you something useful.

Email on your own domain is a separate job

The single most common surprise here: your community can be sitting on your own domain while every email it sends still comes from the platform. Those are different verifications, because they prove different things. Pointing a domain at a platform proves you control the name for web traffic. Sending mail as that name has to satisfy the receiving inbox, which asks harder questions.

In practice that means a handful more DNS records, whoever you are with: DKIM keys so a mailbox provider can verify the signature on each message, a return path so bounces and complaints come back somewhere real, an SPF record authorising the sending servers, and a DMARC policy saying what to do when a message fails those checks. Expect a wait for verification, and expect deliverability to be its own subject rather than a checkbox.

The check that takes ten seconds: look at a real email from your community and read the From address, then look at the unsubscribe footer. If either still says the platform, the domain you bought covers the website and not the mail.

How ours works, disclosed

Here is the vendor section, so discount it accordingly. On Drry the address and the branding move together at the same rung, which is a deliberate choice rather than a generous one: selling them separately is what produces the confusion this whole page is about.

• Free gets a subdomain on our root domain (grace.drry.com), up to 100 members, no card. A real address you can send people to, and honestly not one you own.
• Creator at $29 a month adds your own domain and white label together. Connecting it is self-serve: you enter the domain, we register it and hand back the exact DNS record to set, a CNAME for a subdomain or an A record for an apex. Certificates are automatic. White label on the same plan means no Drry badge anywhere your members look, which is why it is the same rung and not the next one.
• Your subdomain keeps working, and the canonical follows your domain. Both addresses serve, and every indexable page you have, your funnels, your public guides, your shop, pins its canonical URL to your custom domain once it is verified, so the duplicate is deduped in your favour rather than ours.
• Sending mail from your own domain is the Growth plan, and it is a separate setup. Also self-serve, also a short list of DNS records to publish: DKIM, a bounce path, SPF, and DMARC. We split it out because it genuinely is a second job, for the reasons in the section above.
• Drop below the plan and nothing gets deleted. Your custom domain stops serving and redirects to your subdomain, and your community carries on. Reconnect it by upgrading again.

Run the five-surface audit on us as readily as on anyone else, and run the two migration questions too. The answers should be specific from whoever you ask, and a vendor who gives you a feature matrix instead of a straight answer about the From address on your members' email has told you which of the two things you would be buying.