When it comes to choosing the right WordPress theme to make your business stand out, design and functionality are extremely important. The BuddyBoss theme has become increasingly more popular for a variety of reasons. With the rise of online communities, membership sites, and eLearning, BuddyBoss is helping digital entrepreneurs and organizations thrive with their businesses.
The BuddyBoss Theme is compatible with both membership and learning management systems. It provides flexibility, is customizable, and seamlessly integrates with hundreds of plugins including LearnDash, LifterLMS, Paid Memberships Pro, and many page builders. You can use it straight out of the box and utilize its pre-built powerful social and community features or customize it to your specific needs.
BuddyBoss is ideal for a variety of applications:
- Selling Online Courses
Easily build your course online with this online learning platform. If you sell online BuddyBoss is a great platform for structured training, social learning, discussions, and selling your courses & programs. - Building Online Social Communities
Online communities help brand recognition. Buddyboss is ideal for keeping your audience connected and building trust by sharing information within your market and about your business. - Creating Online Membership Programs
Keep your customers engaged with an online membership site. BuddyBoss integrates with a membership solution that enables you to build professional-looking membership sites to interact with your customers and increase brand value. - Effectively Training Employees By integrating with learning management systems like LearnDash and incorporating community features, you can easily use BuddyBoss for training and tracking your employee’s onboarding process from a central hub. It has never been easier to stay connected with your workforce.
How Much Does BuddyBoss Cost?
Buddyboss theme is not free, but it is an affordable option for medium to small businesses. And far cheaper than hiring a web designer to build your site from scratch.
When you invest in the Buddyboss theme you also get the ability to get and build your own social network without the need to purchase individual plugins.
They offer multiple tiers pricing structure:
- 1 Site: $228 per year: Includes license for 1 site, fully-featured theme and plugin, 1-year priority support, and 1 year of ongoing updates as they are released.
- 5 Sites: $288 per year: Includes license for 5 sites, fully-featured theme and plugin, 1-year priority support, and 1 year of ongoing updates as they are released.
- 10 Sites: $388 per year: Includes license for 10 sites, fully-featured theme and plugin, 1-year priority support, and 1 year of ongoing updates as they are released.
It is also great to note that Buddyboss has a 100% no questions asked, money-back guarantee within 14 days of your purchase.
Creating a Design That Sets You Apart
Buddyboss allows you to customize your website’s look so that it fully adapts to your branding and style. You can choose your own color palette and the typography to be applied throughout your site. Additionally, you can customize headers and footers with dropdown or hamburger menus, social buttons, sticky scroll, etc.
You can easily customize your site using any of the most popular drag-and-drop page builders since the theme is fully compatible with Gutenberg, Elementor, WPBakery, Beaver Builder, and Thrive Architect.
Using Elementor, you can choose from a variety of fully-customizable widgets such as the LearnDash courses widget, the photo gallery widget, activity widget, profile completion widget, tabbed content widget, and more.
Alternatively, you can also work with BuddyBoss experts to customize the BuddyBoss theme according to your specific needs and implement a unique design for your site.
BuddyBoss Plug & Play Sections and sites for Elementor
Another option to easily set up your BuddyBoss site is to use BuddyBoss’s Plug and Play pre-made sections and sites for Elementor. These allow you to create your website using ready-made templates or build your pages using premade sections including pricing sections, gallery sections, contact form sections, comparison tables, testimonials, and many more.
With pre-made options at your disposal building, a beautifully designed and professional-looking website is simple. Each section and site is fully customizable, making it easy for you to add your own content.
BuddyBoss Theme Features
The BuddyBoss theme offers an all-in-one integrated solution. Here are the main features you’ll get by using this theme:
User-friendly Design Options
You don’t need to know how to write code to build a beautiful website. You’re able to add new logos and graphics, insert pre-made sections, change page layouts and add text and media in the location of your choice. Plus, Buddyboss provides you with a complete frontend editing solution that integrates with many page builders such as Elementor and Beaver Builder.
Course, Membership, and Event Integrations
The BuddyBoss theme makes running a wide variety of online businesses thanks to its many integrations. BuddyBoss is especially good for selling courses through its seamless integration with LearnDash or selling memberships through its integration with Paid Memberships Pro and Memberpress.
Through BuddyBoss’s integration with The Events Calendar plugin, you can easily create public and private events for your website’s members. Registered members can also create events, send invites, and RSVP to the events you create.
Mobile App Development
You can build awesome mobile apps right from BuddyPress by managing the content from within your website. Your users will be able to interact right from their iPhone and Android Devices.
BuddyBoss for Online Communities
The entire purpose of your website is to interact with the members. Customizing your community to allow your members to have their own online community where they are free to discuss challenges and solutions or simply brainstorm ideas is essential. This is how you improve your business, build relationships and grow your revenue. You can also add additional revenue streams by selling memberships. This can all be done with BuddyBoss.
Buddyboss makes building and launching forums within your Buddyboss social network itself easy. For starters, BuddyBoss supports the use of forums to host online discussions among your website members. Plus, you can easily customize your forums to resemble your theme and branding.
Additionally, much like Facebook and LinkedIn, Buddyboss lets users make connections with other users, such as making friend requests. Furthermore, registered members are able to send email invites to family members, co-workers, and friends, as well as many other options. You can even create social groups or allow your users will create social groups on their own.
Going above and beyond with the social network features, BuddyBoss integrates private messaging through a complete messaging system. This option allows you to send not only text-based messages but also GIFs, emojis, and personal photos to other users.
With the BuddyBoss theme you have everything you need to build an online community and what makes it better is you’ll be able to easily customize it to make it unique. Its fully editable profile fields allow members to share details about themselves and create as many profile types as required.
BuddyBoss for eLearning
BuddyBoss integrates with different LMS plugins for WordPress, most specifically with the LearnDash and LifterLMS. This allows schools, businesses providing employee training, experts, coaches, and other creators to create professional-looking e-learning platforms with ease.
There are plenty of reasons why BuddyBoss is perfect for eLearning sites:
- Integration with LearnDash. BuddyBoss offers seamless integration with LearnDash LMS and was built with online courses in mind, making it one of the top choices for online educators
- Integration with LifterLMS. Additionally, BuddyBoss also integrates with other WordPress-based LMSs like LifterLMS giving course creators maximum flexibility when building their online courses.
- Built-in integration with WooCommerce. If you want to improve and expand monetization options for your online courses, you’ll be glad to find out the Buddyboss theme is optimized to work with both LearnDash and WooCommerce.
- Built-in support for gamification. Buddyboss also works well with gamification plugins for WordPress such as BadgeOS.
Want to see it in action? Take a look at this LearnDash with BuddyBoss site we created! Here’s a sneak peek:
BuddyBoss for Memberships
BuddyBoss supports a wide variety of membership plugins including MemberPress, Paid Memberships Pro, Restrict Content, and Wishlist Member, enabling you to give your online membership the professional look you seek no matter what tool you decide to use.
BuddyBoss Alternatives
BuddyPress is by far one of the best social community-creating themes. With more than hundreds of plugins and extensions that aid in adding more functionality to a website to build social networking, online communities, sell courses, or train your employees on WordPress.
But, it’s certainly not the only option that you have to choose from. You can find hundreds of other themes that will provide you with similar features. Here are some BuddyPress Alternatives that you can consider. While we certainly recommend BuddyBoss as one of the top choices for use cases such as memberships and online learning, you might want to consider other themes depending on your unique requirements.
Vikinger by Odin Design
This social-focused theme has a ton of customization options and makes it easy to create your own social network. Vikinger is well optimized and because of this, it is very reliable with its speed and performance. If e-learning or memberships are not your focus, and you are simply looking to create a social network, this might be a good fit for you.
The key features of the Vikinger theme are listed below:
- It includes HTML, CSS, and Bootstrap files which are essential for web page designing.
- It offers a high-performance platform and is well optimized.
- Vikinger has its plugins which are very useful for customization and designing.
- The templates provided are lovely and fully responsive.
- The interface is very simple and well documented, so users have full knowledge about the templates and designs.
Aardvark
Aardvark was created for online communities and offers specialized features for online course creators and membership sites. While BuddyBoss is especially suited for LearnDash and LifterLMS, this theme offers integration with Sensei LMS. If you are already working with this LMS, then this theme might be a better fit.
It is filled with a ton of pre-built templates, so you can quickly and easily build your site and make it unique with code-free customization, with over 200 theme options to choose from.
The key features of Aardvark are listed below:
- BuddyPress and bbPress compatibility.
- Users get a bundle of customization elements.
- If you also want to create an online store, Aardvark fully integrates with WooCommerce.
- It allows you to add reviews/ratings to posts, pages, and custom post types.
- It includes several premium plugins
KLEO
KLEO allows you to create an online community powered by BuddyPress and present it in an eye-catching, professional way. It is one of the most popular BuddyPress themes and has received a lot of positive feedback from its users. With a large collection of templates to choose from, you’ll easily be able to create a unique look for your pages. However, unlike BuddyBoss, KLEO isn’t optimized for specific use cases, so if you’re looking to build a more general site, this might be a good theme to consider.
Some of the key features of the KLEO theme:
- Interactive and easy-to-navigate interface.
- The multi-language feature helps you to reach a large spectrum of people.
- Optimized for performance.
- It has a wide template library and more than 150 customization elements.
- Integrates with Sensei LMS.
- Support for Facebook login.
- The drag and drop feature simplifies the design process.
Customize BuddyBoss
BuddyBoss can be customized or enhanced with additional features to fully meet the requirements of your online course, membership site, or other online community. BuddyBoss developers can enhance and extend the functionality and design of the BuddyBoss theme to meet your requirements and give your site a unique look. Add-ons and extensions can also be created from scratch or customized to help you best meet all of your requirements.
Is BuddyBossTheme Easy To Use?
One of the most difficult aspects of any new theme is access to quality information to learn the ins and out’s of the theme. There’s no lack of access to BuddyBoss tutorials and guides that help you to build and customize your website. Plus, the theme itself is pretty easy to navigate. You can also use Elementor to create and edit your website’s pages, which makes the process of putting together your site a little easier.
Actually customizing your site, altering the code, or adding specific features to your site does require more technical expertise though. In this regard, it is always better to work with a BuddyBoss expert.
BuddyBoss Theme Pros and Cons
Looking at the pros and cons of the BuddyBoss theme will help determine if this is the best solution for you,
BuddyBoss Pros:
- Has an awesome system for private messaging and forums
- The email notification system comes filled with modern designed templates.
- Can be easily integrated with LearnDash and LifterLMS to create beautiful courses with ease.
- Offers a fully integrated social media platform to help you build a strong online community.
- Its integration with page builders and easy page editing processes makes it perfect for users with all skill levels.
- Members are able to create profiles, connect with each other, and keep track of each others’ activities.
- Integrates with the top membership plugins.
- Allows you to monetize your communities.
- Filled with features for gamifying your members’ experience on your site.
BuddyBoss Cons
- For total beginners, configuring BuddyBoss might be time-consuming.
- Slightly more expensive than some other options (but the quality of the theme makes the expense well worth it in our expert opinion).
Not sure if BuddyBoss is the best option for you? Give our BuddyBoss experts a call today and we’ll help you determine whether BuddyBoss is the best platform for your business.
Final Thoughts
There’s no doubt that BuddyBoss is one of the most dominant membership sites and online community themes for many great reasons. The alternatives don’t provide all of the options that BuddyBoss does when it comes to customization, usability, functionality, and more. It integrates with WordPress plus hundreds of other relevant plugins to build, create and run online courses, online communities, and more.
BuddyBoss Theme is one of the best options for you if you plan on setting up a community site or want to sell online courses or memberships. If you are ready to launch your e-learning BuddyBoss site, check out our Quick Launch BuddyBoss plan, where we’ll take care of the entire process of building you a brand new BuddyBoss site for your online courses for an affordable price. We’ll have you ready to go live in 2-4 weeks and even through in a month of maintenance for your WordPress site.
