Heartbeat vs Skool
An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.
The short answer
Both sides assessedHeartbeat compared with Skool
Skool costs $9 or $99 with no member limits at all, but gives you one fixed layout and permanent Skool branding. Heartbeat costs $49 to $849, bands you by member count, and gives you channels, threads, voice rooms, documents, workflows, and your own domain from the entry plan. Choose Skool if cost and simplicity dominate and you do not mind being a tenant; choose Heartbeat if you want real structure, automation, and a community that lives at your own address.
Skool compared with Heartbeat
Heartbeat is the more flexible product, with channels, threads, courses, docs, video rooms, workflows, and a custom domain from $49 a month, but it caps Build at 350 members and charges a 5 percent transaction fee there. Skool has no member cap at all and charges $9. Take Heartbeat if you want a Discord-shaped community with real structure and white-label emails; take Skool if you want the cheapest possible route to a paid community and will trade every configuration option to get it.
Choose Heartbeat if
Coaches, cohort operators, and creators running a chat-heavy paid community of a few hundred to a few thousand members who want Discord's conversational feel with a paywall, a course builder, automation, and their own domain, and who value real-time energy over threaded permanence.
Choose Skool if
Coaches, course sellers, and creators who want a paid community generating revenue this week rather than a perfectly branded one next month, and who will actually use gamification to drive daily participation rather than treating it as a gimmick.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Heartbeat | Skool |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Community | Community |
| Starting price | $49 per month, or $40 per month billed annually (Build) (14 days trial) | $9 per month (Hobby) (14 days trial) |
| Pricing model | Flat monthly subscription banded by member count, with a separate percentage transaction fee on everything sold through Heartbeat's checkout that falls as you move up tiers. | Two flat monthly plans with unlimited members, courses, and calls, monetized primarily through a transaction fee on everything sold through Skool checkout. |
| Free plan | No | No |
| Free trial | 14 days, no credit card required | 14 days, with a credit card required at signup; the account converts to your chosen paid plan on day 15 unless you cancel |
| Best for | Coaches, cohort operators, and creators running a chat-heavy paid community of a few hundred to a few thousand members who want Discord's conversational feel with a paywall, a course builder, automation, and their own domain, and who value real-time energy over threaded permanence. | Coaches, course sellers, and creators who want a paid community generating revenue this week rather than a perfectly branded one next month, and who will actually use gamification to drive daily participation rather than treating it as a gimmick. |
| Setup time | A live community in an afternoon. Channel structure, a course outline, a landing page, and Stripe connection are all self-serve, and the custom domain is included from the entry tier so you are not deferring that step. | Thirty minutes to a live community, and that figure is not marketing. There is no theme to choose, no spaces to plan, and no permission matrix. Connecting payments and writing an About section is most of the work. |
| Learning curve | Low for anyone who has used Discord or Slack, which is most of the target market, and that familiarity is the main argument for the chat-first model. Automation workflows are the one area with a real learning curve, and they are also where most of the operational value sits. | Almost none for admins and members alike. The constraint that frustrates power users is the same constraint that removes the learning curve. The only genuinely strategic decision is how to configure gamification levels and what to gate behind them. |
| Platforms | Web app, Native iOS app, Native Android app, Branded iOS and Android apps on Scale, Custom domain hosting | Web app, Native iOS app, Native Android app |
| Compliance | GDPR, Payment processing handled through Stripe | GDPR, Payment processing handled through a third-party processor |
| Founded | 2020 | 2019 |
| Headquarters | New York, New York, United States | Los Angeles, California, United States |
| Ownership | Venture-backed, angel and seed stage | Privately held, founder-controlled with a major stake held by Alex Hormozi via Acquisition.com |
Strengths and limitations
Heartbeat
Strengths
- The chat-first structure genuinely produces a different community feel from forum-shaped competitors, and voice and video rooms create spontaneous conversation that scheduled events cannot.
- A custom domain on the $49 entry tier, which almost nothing else in this category offers at that price.
- Unlimited channels, courses, events, and documents on every plan, so the entry tier is feature-complete rather than crippled.
- Native iOS and Android apps included from the entry tier, which is a meaningful engagement advantage over web-only platforms like Bettermode and Discourse.
Limitations
- Member-count pricing bands are the wrong shape for free communities, since 5,000 members costs $149 a month whether or not any of them pay you anything.
- The 5 percent Build transaction fee is the highest published rate among serious platforms here, and stacking it on Stripe means roughly 7.9 percent all-in on the entry plan.
- The branded mobile app requires the $849 Scale tier, which is a very expensive way to get your own icon on a phone.
- The step from Grow to Scale is a 5.7-fold price increase triggered by member count, with no intermediate tier to soften it.
Skool
Strengths
- Fastest time to a live paid community of anything in this category; thirty minutes is a realistic figure because there is nothing to configure.
- Gamification that measurably increases daily participation, implemented well enough that every competitor has since copied a version of it.
- No member limits on either plan, so a community can grow to any size without a pricing cliff.
- The $9 Hobby plan makes testing a community idea essentially free, which is a genuinely different risk profile from Circle's $89 with no free option.
Limitations
- No white labelling at any price. Skool branding is permanently visible to members, which disqualifies the platform for any business that needs the community to be part of its own product experience.
- The 10 percent Hobby fee is punitive for anyone selling high-ticket offers, and the exact fee treatment on large transactions is not fully documented on the pricing page.
- One flat discussion feed with no permissioned sub-spaces, which becomes unmanageable as a community grows past a few thousand active members.
- No SSO, no knowledge base, no ideas or roadmap portal, no support-desk integration, so it is a non-starter as a B2B customer community.
Pricing compared
Heartbeat
Flat monthly subscription banded by member count, with a separate percentage transaction fee on everything sold through Heartbeat's checkout that falls as you move up tiers.
- Build$49
- Grow$149
- Scale$849
Heartbeat is priced well at the bottom and awkwardly at the top. Fifty dollars a month for a custom domain, unlimited courses and events, mobile apps, a member directory, and a real checkout is the best entry-level package in this category, and the 14-day trial with no card required makes it genuinely low-risk to try. The problem is the shape of the curve. Member-count banding punishes free growth, the 5 percent Build fee is steep enough to matter as soon as revenue is real, and the leap from $149 to $849 is severe for a community that has grown members without growing income. The sweet spot is a Grow-tier community: a few thousand members, real revenue, 2.5 percent fees, and unlimited workflows for $149. Either side of that band, a competitor is usually cheaper.
Skool
Two flat monthly plans with unlimited members, courses, and calls, monetized primarily through a transaction fee on everything sold through Skool checkout.
- Hobby$9
- Pro$99
Judged purely on cost per member, Skool is the best value in this category by a wide margin: unlimited members, unlimited courses, unlimited calls, gamification, a mobile app, and a custom URL for $9 a month is not a price anyone else offers. Judged on cost per dollar of revenue, it is more complicated, because the transaction fee is how Skool actually gets paid and a 10 percent haircut on Hobby is severe. The right way to read the pricing is as a two-state system: if you are not selling much, Skool is nearly free and nothing competes; if you are selling a lot, you are on Pro at $99 plus 2.9 percent, which is still competitive with Circle Business but no longer a bargain. What you never get at any price is a community that looks like your company rather than like Skool.
Editorial verdict on each
Heartbeat
Heartbeat is the best answer for a specific and common situation: you have a community that behaves like a Discord server, and you want to charge for it without losing what makes it feel alive. Channels, threads, and voice rooms preserve the real-time energy, while courses, documents, workflows, and a checkout make it a business, and the custom domain on the $49 plan undercuts everyone. The catch is the pricing shape. Member-count bands punish free growth, the 5 percent entry fee is the steepest here, and the $149 to $849 cliff arrives on member count rather than on revenue. Buy it for a paid chat-first community in the few-hundred to few-thousand range, ideally sitting on the Grow tier where the economics are genuinely good. Look elsewhere if your community is free and growing, if you need SSO or public search visibility, or if a lightly funded startup holding your subscription revenue is a risk you would rather not take.
Read the full Heartbeat profileSkool
MomentumSkool is the highest-conviction product in this category: it decided what a community needs, removed everything else, and priced the result at $9. That combination makes it the obvious first stop for a coach or creator testing whether people will pay, and the gamification is not a gimmick, it genuinely changes how often members show up. But the same conviction is the limitation. You cannot remove Skool's branding, you cannot build permissioned spaces, you cannot integrate it into a stack, and on the Hobby plan you hand over a tenth of every sale. Buy it to get a paid community running this week and to keep people coming back daily. Do not buy it if the community has to be part of your own product, because no amount of money on Skool will make it look like yours.
Read the full Skool profileHeartbeat profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Skool last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.