Circle

Circle is a comprehensive community platform that allows users to build and manage online communities, courses, and events under their own brand. It offers features for discussions, live streams, payments, and email marketing, aligning with several 'other' features of the concept. While it doesn't explicitly mention a 'distribution-and-recommendation-engine' in the same way Medium does, it does have 'search-and-discovery' and 'tags-and-topics' which serve a similar purpose for content discoverability within the community. The platform supports rich media in posts and comments, offers membership monetization through various payment options, provides analytics for engagement, and includes community interaction tools like comments and direct messaging. It also supports user profiles, mobile apps, and email marketing. The core difference is that Circle is a platform for building a private, branded community, whereas Medium is a public publishing platform with a built-in audience and recommendation engine for broader content distribution.