Thanks for sharing your question here with us!

There surely are some differences you have to take into account. It is not easy to make a complete comparison as both work differently in some aspects. In general, community category functionality is more advanced than for groups. I will try to name the most important ones:

Permissions

You cannot set permissions in groups that you can set in categories. This mostly is about rights for viewing, commenting and creating new topics. You can create private groups, but also these groups will be visible in the groups overview page.

Customization

You cannot customize the sidebar of a group page the same way in which you can add widgets to the sidebar.

Badges

You will not be able to limit an automatic Badge to be awarded only based on activity in one group, you can do this for community categories however.

Search

As far as I know, you cannot drill down to certain groups in the advanced search filters, while you can limit the search results to individual community categories.

I think these are the most important ones to mention for now. I would suggest to try out both and test how the user experience is on both sides. Let us know if you have more questions around this!

Update: I actually just learned that you actually can limit Badge rules for groups as well. I simply missed it in the list as groups are sitting at the bottom….

Thanks, @Julian this is helpful. 

I’m curious to know what the features/functionality are that you gain with groups that you don’t have with the community categories. We’re just getting things set up and I’ve been struggling to really understand the differences between the two options in order to make the best decisions in setting up some of our areas as groups or community categories.
The list posted of things you can’t do with groups v. categories is helpful...but what CAN I do with Groups that I can’t do with categories?

Thanks!

@Julia_M @DannyPancratz laid out some tips in this topic that may help: