This page contains affiliate links — if you click through and sign up or buy, I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. I only ever recommend tools and programs I actually use.
Skool vs. Kajabi vs. Mighty Networks
All three host paid communities and courses, but they’re built for different priorities: Skool for simplicity and price, Kajabi for full marketing and funnels, Mighty Networks for community-first design. Here’s how they actually stack up.
Skool
Kajabi
Mighty Networks
Skool vs. Kajabi vs. Mighty Networks: Quick Take
I get some version of this question from coaching students almost every week, so here is the short version before we go deep. Skool is the cheapest and fastest platform to launch on, starting at $9 a month with a 10% transaction fee (or $99 a month with a 2.9% fee on the Pro plan). Kajabi is the most expensive and the most full-featured, starting around $179 a month with real marketing automation built in. Mighty Networks sits in the middle, starting around $79 a month billed annually, and it has the deepest dedicated community design tools of the three. All of these numbers are the platforms’ current advertised rates as of this update, and pricing on all three changes often enough that I recommend double checking the live pricing page before you buy.
| Platform | Starting Price | Transaction Fee | Community | Courses | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Skool | $9/mo | 10% (2.9% on Pro) | Core feature | Unlimited, simple | Coaches wanting one simple, cheap paid community |
| Kajabi | $179/mo | ~2.7–2.9% + $0.30 (or a 0.5–2% surcharge if you use your own Stripe) | Add-on | Unlimited, advanced | Established businesses wanting full marketing automation |
| Mighty Networks | $79/mo (annual) | 1–2% | Core feature, deepest design | Included | Community-first brands wanting more customization than Skool |
A word on those transaction fees, because they matter more than the sticker price. If you sell a $100 a month membership to 200 people, Skool’s Hobby plan takes $10 per member per month in fees, which is $2,000 a month. Move to Skool Pro at $99 a month and the fee drops to 2.9%, so you keep almost all of it. Kajabi and Mighty Networks both have lower percentage fees at their entry tiers than Skool’s cheapest plan, but their base subscription costs so much more that Skool is usually still cheaper until you are doing meaningful revenue. Do the math for your own numbers before you decide on price alone.
Skool vs. Kajabi
Price Gap
Skool starts at $9/mo. Kajabi’s cheapest plan runs about $179/mo, roughly 20x more before you’ve sold a single course.
Community vs. Marketing
Kajabi is a marketing-first platform (funnels, email automation, landing pages) with community bolted on. Skool is community-first with courses built in.
Who Wins
If you need serious marketing automation and can afford it, Kajabi. If you want a paid community live today for $9, Skool.
Here is the honest way to think about it. Kajabi was built for a business that already has an audience and needs to sell courses, memberships, and coaching through automated funnels, email sequences, and a real website. That is a lot of machinery, and it is genuinely useful once you need it. But most people starting a paid community do not need it on day one. They need a place for members to show up, post, and get value fast. That is what Skool does, and it does it for a fraction of the price. I have watched students spend months building out a Kajabi funnel before they had a single paying member. With Skool, you can have people inside a paid community the same afternoon you sign up.
Skool vs. Mighty Networks
Design & customization
Mighty Networks gives you more control over branding, custom apps on its higher Mighty Pro tier, and community structure. Skool keeps everyone in the same simple, gamified layout by design, which is part of why it is so easy to learn.
Price at scale
Mighty Networks starts higher, around $79 to $95/mo, versus Skool’s $9/mo, but its transaction fee drops to about 1% on its Scale plan, compared to Skool’s 2.9% on Pro. If you are processing a high volume of sales, that difference is worth running the numbers on.
Who wins
If brand customization matters more than price, Mighty Networks. If you want the lowest possible cost to start and a proven gamification system that keeps members coming back, Skool.
Skool vs. Circle
Circle is not in the headline of this page, but I would be doing you a disservice if I left it out, because it comes up in almost every search for this comparison. Circle is a polished, all-in-one community platform that sits price-wise between Skool and Kajabi, roughly $89 to $199 a month on its Professional and Business plans, billed annually.
Design & Ownership
Circle looks more custom out of the box than Skool. You can use your own domain and build a more branded experience. Circle also leans hard on owning your data instead of living on a skool.com subdomain.
Gamification
Circle has added points, badges, and leaderboards, but it treats gamification as one feature among many rather than the center of the product. Skool built its entire member experience around the leaderboard and levels system.
Fees
Circle charges a transaction fee on its lower tiers too, around 2% on Professional and 1% on Business, so it is not fee-free either. It is simply a different price and feature trade-off than Skool.
My take: Circle is a strong choice once you have outgrown Skool’s simplicity and need more branding control, but it costs meaningfully more to get started, and it does not have Skool’s addictive, game-like member experience. For a brand-new paid community, I still start people on Skool.
Which Platform Should You Choose?
Skip the feature lists for a second. Here is how I would actually decide, based on what you are trying to do right now, not someday. I have coached enough people through this exact decision to know that overthinking it costs more than picking wrong, because you can always switch platforms later once you know more about what your community actually needs.
If you want the cheapest way to test a paid community idea
Pick Skool. At $9/mo you can validate whether people will pay to be in a community with you before you invest real money in a platform. This is the single biggest reason I recommend it to coaching students.
If you already have an audience and need deep email and funnel automation
Pick Kajabi. If you are selling courses through email sequences, landing pages, and evergreen funnels, Kajabi’s marketing tools will save you from stitching together three or four separate tools.
If brand customization and a polished look matter most
Pick Mighty Networks or Circle. Both give you more control over how your community looks and feels than Skool does, and both let you use your own domain in a more native way.
If retention and daily engagement are your biggest worry
Pick Skool. The points, levels, and leaderboard system is genuinely effective at getting people to log in and post. I have seen it work on my own community, and it is the feature I get asked about most.
If you are migrating an existing Facebook group and want the least friction
Pick Skool or Circle. Both have a simpler setup process than Kajabi, which was built primarily for course sales, not for importing an existing community.
If you are running a high-ticket program with complex pricing tiers and upsells
Pick Kajabi. It was built for exactly this kind of business model, with pipelines, checkout pages, and automations Skool and Mighty Networks do not attempt to match.
Completion Rates and How Each Platform Keeps Members Engaged
A community or course platform is only worth paying for if people actually show up and stay. This is where the four platforms take genuinely different approaches, and it is worth understanding before you pick one.
Skool: Gamification First
Skool’s entire design is built around points, levels, and a public leaderboard. Members earn points for posting, commenting, and finishing lessons, and those points move them up levels that unlock perks you control. It is simple, and it works because people like to see their name climb a leaderboard.
Kajabi: Traditional Progress Tracking
Kajabi tracks course completion the way most learning platforms do, with progress bars and checkmarks per lesson. It is functional and gives you good data, but it does not create the same social pressure to keep showing up that a public leaderboard does.
Mighty Networks & Circle: Member-Led Engagement
Mighty Networks leans on member-generated content, streaks, and badges, and reports that the majority of activity on the platform is created by members rather than the host. Circle offers its own points and badges system but treats it as one tool among many rather than the core loop.
Published, independently verified completion-rate numbers are hard to find for any of these platforms, and I would treat any specific percentage you read online, including comparisons that quote exact figures for each platform, as an estimate rather than a guarantee. What I can tell you from running my own Skool community is that gamification changes behavior. When members can see their rank and points total, they log in more often than they do in a plain course library. If retention is your top priority, that is the strongest argument for Skool over the other three.
How Hard Is It to Move Your Existing Group or Course?
Most people reading this are not starting from zero. You probably already have a Facebook group, an email list, or a course sitting somewhere else. Here is what moving actually looks like on each platform.
Moving a Facebook group to Skool
This is the most common migration I see, and it is fairly painless. You create your Skool community, invite your existing group members by link or email, and manually recreate your pinned posts and rules. There is no automatic import tool, so plan on a weekend of setup, not months.
Moving a course to Kajabi
Kajabi has the most robust import tooling of the three for course content, including bulk video uploads and course-builder templates, because course delivery is its core product. Expect a longer setup if you are also building out funnels and email sequences at the same time.
Moving to Mighty Networks or Circle
Both platforms support CSV member imports and course content uploads, and both have support teams that will help with larger migrations on higher-tier plans. The tradeoff is a steeper initial setup than Skool because there are more customization options to configure before you launch.
What about your email list?
None of these four platforms replace your email marketing tool the way you might expect. Kajabi has the most built-in email functionality of the group. Skool, Mighty Networks, and Circle expect you to keep using a dedicated email platform for anything beyond in-platform announcements, so plan to keep that piece of your stack separate no matter which community platform you choose.
My honest advice
Do not let migration complexity be the reason you stay on Facebook groups, where you do not own your audience and the algorithm decides who sees your posts. Whichever platform you choose, budget one focused week to move your content and members over, and treat it as a one-time cost of finally owning your community instead of renting space on someone else’s platform.
Login Friction, Notifications, and Browser vs. App
A platform can have every feature in the world, but if members find it annoying to check in, they will not come back. This is the part of the decision most people skip, and it is the part that affects your community’s actual daily activity the most.
Skool
Skool works cleanly in a browser on desktop or phone, and it also has a mobile app. Notifications are simple: you get an email or push alert when someone replies to you or mentions you. There is not much to configure, which I consider a feature, not a limitation.
Kajabi
Kajabi’s community and course areas live inside its broader app ecosystem, with more granular email and automation settings. That flexibility is powerful for a marketer, but it also means more setup before notifications feel right for your members.
Mighty Networks & Circle
Both have full-featured native apps with their own push notification systems, and both let you customize how often members are pinged. Mighty Networks in particular was built mobile-first, so the app experience tends to feel more polished than logging in on a browser.
In practice, the platform with the least friction between “I got a notification” and “I am now looking at the post that triggered it” wins the most daily logins. From running my own community, I can tell you that simple beats sophisticated here. Members do not read notification settings menus. They either get pinged and click, or they forget the platform exists. Skool’s simplicity works in its favor for this exact reason, though a well-configured Circle or Mighty Networks community can perform just as well once you have tuned the settings.
“I did not wait for the perfect platform. I picked one, signed up, and started building live so I could see the real experience.“
— Lori Ballen
Skool vs. Kajabi vs. Mighty Networks: FAQ
Which platform is cheapest overall?
Skool is the cheapest to start, at $9/mo on its Hobby plan. Once you factor in transaction fees at real revenue levels, run the math for your own numbers, because Skool’s percentage fee is higher than Kajabi’s or Mighty Networks’ at the entry tier, even though its base price is much lower.
Can I switch from Kajabi to Skool later?
Yes, but there is no one-click migration tool. You will need to export your member list and manually recreate your course content and community structure inside Skool. Most people I have coached through this find it takes a few focused days, not weeks.
Does Mighty Networks have a free plan?
No. Mighty Networks does not offer a permanently free plan, though it does offer a free trial so you can test the platform before committing to a paid tier.
Which platform has the best mobile app?
All three have dedicated mobile apps, and Mighty Networks in particular has taken a mobile-first approach to its design. Skool’s app is simple and mirrors the desktop experience closely. Kajabi’s app covers both course consumption and basic community features. I would not choose a platform on app quality alone, since all three are usable day to day.
Do any of these charge a setup fee?
No. None of the three, or Circle, charge a separate setup or onboarding fee on their standard plans. You pay the monthly or annual subscription plus any transaction fees on sales.
Which is best for a free community, not a paid one?
You can run a free community on any of these platforms since the fee is for hosting, not for what you charge members. That said, if the community itself is free, Skool’s $9/mo Hobby plan is the least expensive way to have a dedicated, ad-free space instead of a Facebook group.
Can I use my own custom domain with each platform?
Kajabi and Mighty Networks both support fully custom domains on their standard plans. Skool allows a custom URL path but keeps you on the skool.com domain structure, which is one of the trade-offs for its lower price and simplicity.
Which platform has the most course customization?
Kajabi, by a wide margin. It has the deepest course builder, with flexible content blocks, quizzes, drip scheduling, assessments, and completion certificates. Skool keeps courses intentionally simple, with a straightforward video-and-checkbox format, which is great for ease of use but limiting if you need advanced course logic or gated modules.
Is Circle better than all three?
Not universally better, just different. Circle offers more branding control and ownership than Skool, at a higher starting price, and it is less marketing-automation-heavy than Kajabi. It sits in a middle lane: more polished than Skool, less complex than Kajabi. Whether it is “better” depends entirely on whether design and ownership or price and simplicity matter more to your business right now.
Which platform did Lori actually choose, and why?
I run my own paid community on Skool. I chose it because I wanted to test a paid community idea without a big upfront cost, and because the gamification system does real work keeping members engaged without me having to manually chase people down. It was not a hard decision at $9 to start, and I have stayed because it keeps working as the community has grown.
How long does it take to set up a paid community on any of these platforms?
If you already know your offer and pricing, you can have a Skool community live and accepting members in under an hour. Kajabi, Mighty Networks, and Circle all take longer to set up properly, usually a few days to a couple of weeks, because there is more to configure before launch, including branding, automations, and app settings.
Keep Researching Skool
Hey there! Just a quick heads-up: some of the links on this site are affiliate links, meaning I may earn a small commission if you make a purchase (including through the Amazon Associates program), at no extra cost to you. Occasionally, products featured here are gifted by brands.
I also use AI tools to help research and create content for you! While I love sharing strategies to help you succeed, please remember that everyone's journey is unique—individual results vary, and there are no guarantees. Thanks so much for stopping by!
