Outpost Community Demo

Just migrated from Circle — here's how it went

By lisabuilds ·

We were paying $89/mo on Circle for our SaaS customer community (~400 members). The lack of API and embed support was killing us. Migrated to Outpost last week and wanted to share the experience.

What went well

  • Data import — Circle's export was nonexistent, so we ended up scraping our own content. Outpost's import API made the ingest side easy though.
  • Embed SSO with our NextAuth setup took about 20 minutes. The JWT flow is clean.
  • Performance — our members actually noticed the speed difference. Pages load noticeably faster.

What was tricky

  • Had to remap our category structure. Circle's "Spaces" don't map 1:1 to categories.
  • Some custom CSS we had doesn't carry over (obviously), but the theming system covers ~90% of what we needed.

Overall: very happy with the move. Saving $89/mo and getting way more functionality.

5 replies

marcusd ·

This is super helpful, Lisa. We're evaluating the same move. Did you have any downtime during migration? Our community is pretty active and I'm worried about the gap.

lisabuilds ·

Zero downtime! We set up the Outpost community in parallel, imported everything, then just swapped the DNS. Took maybe 2 hours total. The embed approach helps too — we just changed the script tag src.

top-outpost-ninja ·

Really glad to hear the migration went smoothly! We're actually working on a dedicated Circle import tool that will handle the category mapping automatically. Should be ready in a few weeks.

codewitch ·

Would love to see a write-up on the embed SSO setup with NextAuth specifically. I'm using NextAuth + Prisma and the docs cover the general JWT flow but not the NextAuth-specific bits.

lisabuilds ·

I can write that up! The key insight is you create a custom API route in NextAuth that calls the Outpost SSO endpoint and returns the token. Then pass it to the embed via data-sso-token. Will post in the API & Integrations category.