Get to know the Circle Developer Platform

Last updated: September 27, 2024

The Circle Developer Platform provides enhanced flexibility, empowering you to build your custom tooling and automation, integrate community features with your own website or app, or integrate community data into your own data warehouse!

To help you build custom integrations, Circle offers a comprehensive suite of APIs:

• Headless

• Admin API

• Data API

If you are a developer or collaborating with developers to create custom solutions, these APIs make it possible to extend the functionality of your community. You can access the full API documentation here to get started.

API access varies based on your plan and the specific type of API:

• Headless and Admin API: Available on the Circle Business plan and above, with specific usage limits that vary by plan.

• Data API: Available on the Circle Plus Platform plan.

In addition to the APIs, you can also create dedicated Zapier tokens to connect the Circle app with Zapier and automate actions using Zaps. If you’re on the Professional plan, you will only have access to a Zapier token.

📚 To learn more about API request limits and tracking your API usage, check out our guide here.

Circle Headless APIs are designed to help you integrate your community with your own website or app—with features like discussions, feeds, notifications, events, and more. For your members, this means one holistic experience that makes your website, app, and community feel fully integrated, so it’s easier to connect and engage.

Headless is currently available in beta and introduces three new platform components:

• Headless Member API: A server-side API with endpoints for building your own member-side experiences in your app or website.

• Headless Auth API: A server-side API to authenticate your website or app’s signed in members with the Member API using a JWT token.

• Headless UI Kit (Alpha): A React-based UI kit that makes it easy for your developers to use off-the-shelf front-end components to build on top of our Member API.

With Headless Member API, your developers have access to building front-end experiences on your website or app with Circle’s backend endpoints for:

• Posts & comments

• Feed

• Events

• Courses

• Notifications

• Direct messages

• Rich profiles

• and more





• A leading parenting platform added Circle events into their dedicated app so members can RSVP and join workshops without the need to leave the main product.

• An educational startup added Circle courses, events, and the news feed into their brand new app to get their MVP into the market even faster.

• A legacy men’s digital media company was able to add new community engagement features into their existing mobile app in just weeks, rather than spending quarters building them from scratch.



ℹ️ Note: The Headless Member API provides only the API endpoints and UI kits — developers on your team will need to design the front-end experience and integrate it into your product. We built Headless so that teams with engineering resources can create a seamless, custom front-end experience while leveraging the power of Circle on the back end.

We’ve revamped our old admin API v1 (previously known as Public API) with the Admin API v2, making it even easier to build developer automations for your community at scale — whether you're performing bulk actions, moving posts, or adjusting members’ access permissions.

Your developers can use the admin API to:

• Automate bulk administrative tasks like updating profiles or removing inactive members.

• Invite members to Circle when they sign up through your software or make a purchase on another platform.

• Sync data between systems like your CRM or marketing automation tool.

• Migrate posts, comments, and user data from other platforms into Circle.



ℹ️ Note: As part of this rollout, we’re freezing and renaming the Public API to Admin API v1. The API v1 will continue to work as expected and receive critical bug fixes, but we’ll no longer add new endpoints to it. We recommend updating your scripts and apps to v2 as soon as your preferred endpoints become available. 

Data API provides real-time, automated access to a data stream of every event or action in your Circle community, which you can integrate with the rest of your data stack. The Data API connects directly to your data warehouse via an ETL tool like Airbyte or Fivetran, or can be ingested into a product analytics platform like Mixpanel.





Once the data is flowing from Circle to your data warehouse, your Data team can create custom reports, integrate your Circle data with other data sources to build more holistic reports and unlock valuable insights you won’t find anywhere else.

If you're interested in the Data API, please reach us out here. To learn more about Data API, see our documentation here.

• Measure your community’s business impact by correlating engagement metrics — like posts, event participation, and member interactions — with revenue data from your CRM or sales platforms.

• Set engagement benchmarks by calculating average and median activity across posts, courses, events, and more to define and measure community success.

• Compare performance across cohorts by breaking down engagement and revenue by different groups or time periods.

• Measure member acquisition, churn, and retention alongside third-party data to evaluate the effectiveness and ROI of your marketing campaigns.

• Analyze the engagement patterns of members who have churned, so you can spot trends and develop targeted intervention strategies to keep at-risk members engaged.



💡 Tip: Circle’s in-product analytics are great for day-to-day monitoring, but they’re built for broad use and standard reports. If you’re after deeper, specific insights, the Data API lets you access your raw community data so you can create custom metrics, perform complex analysis, and uncover findings that truly drive your business forward.