What Is BuddyBoss and When Should I Use It?

As a membership and learning site builder, I get a lot of calls from people needing help with BuddyBoss and BuddyBoss App. They often already have a learning environment for their online course. They found BuddyBoss like the features they can add to their site wiht it.

They declare, "Hey! I'm gonna use BuddyBoss," and off they go.

I am a big fan of BuddyBoss. I like that they launched BuddyBoss App. It enables you to make BuddyBoss websites available as a mobile appl. They provide a community and social media features to a learning environment. That means you have members learning, interacting, messaging each other, communicating with the instructor and more. And all this is available as a mobile app too.

A Warning About Selecting BuddyBoss

I have seen a good number of online course site builders come to me asking for help with BuddyBoss. What I wish I didn't see so often is people taking on BuddyBoss and it's not the right solution for them.

This article aims to help you decide if BuddyBoss is right for you. I want to recognize Jeff Cobb and his article “BuddyBoss Theme Review – The Best Online Community Option for Wordpress?” Jeff's article covers a lot of the history and made writing my article a lot easier.

What Exactly is BuddyBoss?

To answer that, let’s start with what came before BuddyBoss.  Before BuddyBoss, there was BuddyPress. It is an open-source Wordpress plugin for adding community features to Wordpress. It enables you to create member profiles, member-to-member messaging and Facebook like activity feeds. BuddyPress was a great first step, but there are things it didn't do.

So a group experienced BuddyPress developers split off and built BuddyBoss.

BuddyBoss provides features like member-to-member messaging, member profiles, social media groups and community forums. It’s built as a WordPress plugin that enables you to add community and interactivity features e-learning websites.

BuddyBoss works with many Wordpress themes, but the BuddyBoss Theme works really well with it. When you originally bought the BuddyBoss Theme, you got the BuddyBoss Platform packaged with it. With these together, you got the following:

• A platform for building your own mini-Facebook site. It includes social media features like member profiles, private groups with their own feeds, member-to-member messaging, like and friending features, etc. (NOTE: If you are building a learning site and you do NOT need these features, don’t go with BuddyBoss. You won’t be using most of what BuddyBoss offers and it will make configuring your environment that much harder.)
• The ability to sell online courses on your membership site.
• Straight-forward gamification features.

BuddyBoss and LearnDash, our preferred learning management system, go well together. When BuddyBoss was launched, they had a release called the BuddyBoss Social Learner for LearnDash. We started our agency as an Keap (then called Infusionsoft) focused team. Early on, we used BuddyBoss and LearnDash to provide highly functioning learning sites. Using Memberium to provide membership feature, the site uses Keap for selling and controlling course and membership access.  In addition, you get powerful marketing automation features. For those that aren’t needing the Keap marketing automation features, we’ve had great success using WooCommerce for e-commerce and MemberPress for controlling access. This is a very useful Wordpress-centric solution that is highly functioning and flexible.

Given this product stack, BuddyBoss can easily be used to build learning sites with e-commerce features for selling all sorts of products in addition to selling memberships and online courses.

Because BuddyBoss integrates so well with LearnDash, the platform is perfect for:

• building online courses from scratch,
• organizing course content,
• giving students assignments and quizzes,
• awarding badges and certificates,
• enabling instructors to interact with students, track student progress in a course or series of courses, and
• a lot more.

In addition, LearnDash has a strong set of vendors providing add-on functions.  Among them are Uncanny Owl and WisdmLabs. They build upon LearnDash’s standard features providing some very useful enhancements.

LearnDash was acquired by StellarWP, the company that brings you Liquid Web. That didn't make many changes. The purchase was mostly unnoticed by teams like ours that work it. I continue to watch them closely to see how it goes.

You can get BuddyBoss for their yearly price of $299. If you are wanting to build a site with the community features, the price is more than worth it given all the BuddyBoss allows you to do.

As a Professional BuddyBoss Expert, I did want to mention that it is not a simple, straight-forward solution to configure. This is especially true if you are new to building online courses and membership sites. I would recommend connecting with a team, and ours is very experienced building these, so you can get the guidance you need to make the most of the platform.You can benefit from the experience they’ve developed to tap into best practices and to keep you from expensive trial and error.

Hope this helps.