If you want a simple community with control of branding and basic features right out of the box, and can afford $500 go for SocialEngine. If you want a more advanced CMS with customization options be WARNED, socialengine is not the right product, go for Joomla or Drupal. SE programmers are smart folk at programming but they have done a PISS POOR job of support, marketing outreach and business development. We spent almost $2,000 on development and kept running into same two issues. (1) There are not enough competent SE developers out there. People claim to know php/mySQL and therefore socialenging. Its not true. Most developers have issues with SE. They competent ones are way to expensive and not avail. (2) Costly upgrades. We are not even done with version 3 and SE version 4 is out. And guess what, we have to pay for an upgrade and pay for upgraded plugins. We were looking at another $2,000 in Dec 2010...and after much consideration, we are throwing the towel in on SE. Again, SE is GREAT for a small online community but for extensive customized network, you need Drupal or Joomla.