Circle Community Exporter

Export a Circle.so community you own or administer to clean, structured data. Members, posts, comments, course content, and your own direct messages, all in one dataset you can download as JSON, CSV, or Excel.

This actor reads only. It never posts, likes, comments, messages, or connects. Use it on communities you own or administer.

Who this is for

You run a Circle community and you want your data out of it. Common reasons:

• Backup. Keep your own copy of everything your members have written.
• Migration. Moving to another platform and you need the member list, the posts, and the course content in a portable format.
• Analysis. Pull the whole community into a spreadsheet or a notebook to see who is active, what gets engagement, and what has gone quiet.

What it exports

• Members: the full directory, with an option to fetch each member's complete profile.
• Posts: every post across all your non-course spaces.
• Comments: the full comment thread on each post.
• Courses: lessons, attached files, and native transcripts from your classroom spaces.
• Your DMs (opt-in): your own direct-message history. This only ever covers your account's conversations. Circle does not expose other members' private messages, and neither does this actor.

Every record has a resource_type field, so one flat dataset holds everything and you can filter it however you like.

How to get your session cookie

The actor signs in as you, using the same session your browser already holds. You copy that session cookie once and paste it into the input.

1. Sign in to your Circle community in your browser as normal.
2. Open your browser developer tools (F12, or right-click and choose Inspect).
3. Go to the Network tab and refresh the page.
4. Click any request to your community domain in the list.
5. In the Request Headers, find the cookie: line and copy its entire value.
6. Paste that value into the Session cookie input field.

Your cookie is stored encrypted and is never written to logs. It expires the same way a normal browser sign-in does, so if a run reports an expired session, repeat these steps to grab a fresh one.

Input

Field	Required	What it does
Community URL	Yes	Your community's base URL, e.g. https://your-community.circle.so or your custom domain.
Session cookie	Yes	Your own logged-in Circle session cookie (see above). Stored encrypted.
Bearer token	No	Advanced. Only needed if course export returns a 401. See below.
Export members	No	On by default.
Full member profiles	No	Off by default. One extra request per member.
Export posts	No	On by default.
Export comments	No	On by default. Applies when Export posts is on.
Export course content	No	Off by default.
Export your own DMs	No	Off by default.
Only activity since	No	ISO date for an incremental export (posts/comments/DMs only).
Download media files	No	Off by default. Fetch the binary assets, not just their URLs.
Max directory pages	No	Safety cap for very large communities.

The optional Bearer token

Leave this blank. Course exports sometimes need a second token, and the actor now detects it automatically from your session cookie, so you no longer have to find it yourself. Only if course export reports that no token was found do you need to supply one: in the Network tab, find a request to /internal_api/, copy the value after authorization: Bearer from its request headers, and paste it into the Bearer token field.

Incremental exports (only new activity)

For a repeat backup you rarely want to pull the whole community again. Set the Only activity since field to a date like 2026-01-31 and the run exports only posts, comments, and DMs created on or after that date. Members and course content are always exported in full, since the roster and curriculum change slowly and are cheap to refresh. Leave the field blank for a complete export.

Downloading media (optional)

By default the export records the URL of every avatar, attachment, and lesson file, which is enough for most uses. Turn on Download media files and the actor also fetches the actual binaries into the run's key-value store as media- records, and lists the stored keys on each record. This is for a full archival copy: it is slower, adds a small per-file charge, and skips any single file over 9 MB. Leave it off unless you need the files themselves.

Output

One dataset row per exported record. Each row includes resource_type (member, post, comment, lesson, or dm_message), the community URL, the parsed fields for that type, and a raw object with the untouched Circle response so nothing is lost. Download the dataset as JSON, CSV, or Excel from the run's Storage tab.

For a tidier result, the run also writes clean per-type CSV files to its key-value store: members.csv, posts.csv, comments.csv, lessons.csv, and dms.csv, plus a SUMMARY.md with the counts. These split the mixed dataset into one file per type, which is what you want when moving a community somewhere else. Turn them off with the Write CSV files option if you only need the JSON.

Long-running exports are safe to leave unattended. If the platform moves the run to another server midway, it resumes where it left off rather than starting over, so nothing is exported or charged twice.

Pricing

This actor charges per record exported, so cost scales with the size of your community and what you choose to export.

Event	Price (USD)
Actor start (flat, per run)	$0.02
Member exported	$0.002
Post exported	$0.003
Comment exported	$0.001
Course lesson exported	$0.005
DM message exported	$0.001
Media file downloaded	$0.005

The media charge applies only when Download media files is on, once per file fetched. As a rough guide, a community with 1,000 members and 2,000 posts costs a few dollars to export in full, well under the cost of doing it by hand. Set a budget cap on the run and the actor stops cleanly when it is reached.

Notes

• Read-only by design. There is no code path in this actor that writes anything to your community.
• Use it only on communities you own or administer.
• Circle publishes no rate limits, so the actor reads at a deliberately gentle pace to stay well within safe bounds.