My Groups and Communities are two Staffbase features that organize people and content center on shared interests, but support different use cases and solve different organizational needs.

My Groups controls what content you receive, while communities give you an area to actively discuss it.

This article explains what each feature does and when to use one over the other.

My Groups

My Groups is a subscription service that allows employees to join an open group and access content published for that group. It is a top-down feature. Administrators create user groups to cluster people by shared attributes such as location, department, or interest.

User groups are a core building block of the platform and support a wide range of use cases. Beyond content targeting, groups can be used to assign permissions, control access to plugins and pages, manage editor roles at scale, and target other platform areas, including emails. This makes My Groups the foundation for structured organization and centralized audience management.

Use My Groups when the goal is to enable administrator-led access and targeting, while still allowing users to join or leave groups based on their preferences. It is a versatile feature that can be used beyond the immediate My Groups use cases.

• Target specific audiences and use analytics to understand how users consume content.
• Use the same open group to manage permissions and assign editor roles at scale, control access to plugins, pages, and other areas of the platform, and target emails to specific audiences.

Communities

Communities gives employees a dedicated area to post, comment, and react with each other around shared interests. Employees choose which communities to join, while administrators control which communities are available. Unlike My Groups, Communities is built for ongoing discussion within the area itself, not just content delivery. This makes it a bottom-up feature.

Use Communities when the goal is employee-led connection, not just content delivery:

• Give employees an area to gather around shared interests or topics, and let them join, post, comment, and react.
• Support discovery of comment threads without having to click to open them.
• Have community managers edit posts to moderate content within a community.