What sets crowd.dev apart from Orbit, Common Room & other community tools

In recent years, there has been a lot of hype about communities and their potential for companies. While most agree that having a thriving community is desirable for any business, only a few have figured out how to build one in a sustainable way. 

We've talked to 100s of community builders and heard the same problems over and over again: “I want to build a community, but I don’t know how to get started.” “I can’t find the right members for my community.” “It’s super hard to keep members in our Slack community engaged.” “I have to prove the ROI of our community to other stakeholders.”

Like crowd.dev, a number of companies have set out to solve these problems in recent years, including Orbit.love, Common Room, Commsor, Threado, and a few others. This may make it difficult for you to decide which tool is right for your needs. In the case of crowd.dev it’s  straightforward: If the typical member of your community is a developer, crowd.dev is built for you. If not, we recommend taking a look at one of the general community data platforms (e.g., Orbit or Common Room).

In this blog, we will look at 5 things that make crowd.dev tailored to developer communities and set it apart from all other community data platforms on the market.

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1) Data enrichment tailored to developers

crowd.dev is the only community data platform that offers an enrichment feature tailored to developers. With as little as a GitHub profile or an email address, you can enrich any profile with up to 20 attributes, including work experience, skills, preferred programming languages, open-source contributions, and much more. Read more about the attributes we can enrich.

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2) Apps to grow your developer community (and business)

Our answer to how communities and companies should grow are “apps” that we build on top of the core product. With Community Help Center, you can sync your community’s Q&A conversations with Google-friendly landing pages and effortlessly create top-of-funnel traffic. With Eagle Eye, you can find and engage with content in your niche across all relevant platforms, including GitHub, Twitter, Reddit, DEV, HackerNews, Medium, Stack Overflow, YouTube, ProductHunt, Kaggle, and Hashnode.

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3) Opinionated Reports

Many companies find it difficult to create community reports. Measuring community is a challenge, even when you know what you should be measuring. That's why crowd.dev comes with opinionated reports that include metrics that truly matter to developer communities, e.g., Monthly Active Contributors to determine Product-Community-Fit for your open-source product. Based on your community data, reports also recommend actions to take.

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4) API-first

We believe that people with technical backgrounds appreciate when a product gives them full flexibility and control. That’s why the crowd.dev API allows you to import and export pretty much everything, including members, organizations, activities, conversations, tags, and automation workflows. You can learn more in our API docs.

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5) Open-source

crowd.dev is the only community data platform on the market that is open-source. This enables you to self-host your community data and enjoy benefits like data privacy, customizability, product longevity, and avoiding vendor lock-in.

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Conclusion

If you want to manage and grow a developer community, crowd.dev is the tool built for your needs. Compared to tools like Orbit, Common Room or Commsor, crowd.dev comes with several unique advantages for developer-first companies, including data enrichment for developers, growth apps, opinionated reports, a comprehensive API, and an open-source code base. Moreover, crowd.dev's Growth Plan ($150/month) is affordable even for small and medium-sized businesses, while other tools ask for a 5-digit sum.

To get started, you can simply create a free account for our hosted version (which comes with a 14-day trial of our Growth plan). If you are already using another platform and are afraid to migrate your data, just email me at jonathan@crowd.dev, and I’ll set you up with a free premium onboarding including data migration.