Kajabi 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
Editorial assessmentKajabi compared with Skool
Skool costs $9 to run a community that is deliberately one room, one classroom, and one leaderboard, and it is better than Kajabi at making people show up daily. Kajabi is twenty times the price and does the entire rest of the business. Many operators run both, using Skool for the community and Kajabi for the funnel, which tells you neither one fully replaces the other.
Choose Kajabi if
Coaches, course sellers, and creator businesses already doing meaningful revenue who want courses, email marketing, a website, checkout, and a community on one bill under one brand, and who value the branded mobile app included at every tier more than they value best in class discussion software.
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 | Kajabi | Skool |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Community | Community |
| Starting price | $179 per month (Basic), or $143 per month billed annually (free trial) | $9 per month (Hobby) (14 days trial) |
| Pricing model | Flat monthly subscription across three published tiers with limits on products, contacts, admins, websites, and communities, plus transaction fees through Kajabi Payments or a surcharge for using your own gateway. | 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 | One month free, self serve, no sales call | 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, course sellers, and creator businesses already doing meaningful revenue who want courses, email marketing, a website, checkout, and a community on one bill under one brand, and who value the branded mobile app included at every tier more than they value best in class discussion software. | 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 weekend for a working store and community, a few weeks for a polished one. The account, domain, first product, checkout, and a community channel can be live in a few hours; the time goes into page design, email sequences, and course content. | 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 | Moderate to steep, because the platform is large. Products, offers, access groups, pipelines, and automations are five separate concepts you have to hold at once, and new users routinely mis-model entitlements on the first attempt. | 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, iOS and Android via the Kajabi app, Branded iOS and Android apps included on all plans | Web app, Native iOS app, Native Android app |
| Compliance | GDPR, PCI DSS handled through Kajabi Payments and Stripe | GDPR, Payment processing handled through a third-party processor |
| Founded | 2010 | 2019 |
| Headquarters | Irvine, California, United States | Los Angeles, California, United States |
| Ownership | Venture-backed and growth equity backed | Privately held, founder-controlled with a major stake held by Alex Hormozi via Acquisition.com |
Strengths and limitations
Kajabi
Strengths
- Genuinely all in one. Courses, coaching, memberships, podcasts, community, website, blog, funnels, email, affiliates, and checkout in one account with one member record, which removes an entire class of integration work.
- Kajabi Payments is close to standard card processing rather than a platform tax, so the effective fee rate falls as revenue rises instead of scaling with it.
- A branded mobile app in the App Store and Google Play is included on every tier, including the $179 entry plan, which no other product in this category does at a published price.
- Custom domain and full white labelling on every plan, so members never see a vendor's brand anywhere in the experience.
Limitations
- The community product is competent but shallow next to a dedicated platform. Space level permissioning, member directory depth, and discussion culture all trail Circle, and the forum experience trails Discourse badly.
- No public search indexed community content. Kajabi communities are gated member areas, so discussion contributes nothing to acquisition and the blog is your only organic surface.
- Expensive floor. $179 a month, or $143 annually, before you have a single member, with no free plan and no lower tier.
- Basic is tighter than it looks: five products, two admins, one community, and 2,500 contacts. Many buyers discover the real price is Growth at $249.
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
Kajabi
Flat monthly subscription across three published tiers with limits on products, contacts, admins, websites, and communities, plus transaction fees through Kajabi Payments or a surcharge for using your own gateway.
- Basic$179
- Growth$249
- Pro$499
Judged as a community platform in isolation, Kajabi is bad value: $179 a month for a discussion product that Circle beats at half the price and Skool beats at a twentieth. Judged as the whole stack, it is often the cheapest option on the page. A creator running courses, email marketing to 20,000 contacts, a website, a checkout, an affiliate program, and a community would spend more than $249 a month assembling that from Teachable, Kit, Webflow, and Circle, and would spend it across four vendors with four sets of member data. The fee structure also favours scale in a way its competitors do not: near raw card processing rather than a platform cut means a business doing $50,000 a month keeps far more here than on Patreon or Podia's entry plan. Buy Kajabi for the bundle, never for the community alone.
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
Kajabi
Kajabi is the wrong purchase if you want a community and the right one if you want a business. The discussion product is decent, with channels, chat, challenges, leaderboards, and native meetups, but Circle is better at it for half the money and Skool is better at engagement for a twentieth. What justifies $179 a month is everything around it: courses, coaching, memberships, private podcasts, a website, funnels, email marketing to tens of thousands of contacts, an affiliate program, near raw card processing, and a branded mobile app included at every tier rather than sold as a $199 add on. The fee model rewards scale, dropping from about 7 percent of revenue all in at $5,000 a month to about 4 percent at $50,000, which is the opposite of Patreon. Buy it when you have stopped assembling tools and want one system with one member record. Do not buy it to host a free community, and do not expect the community to bring you anyone new, because none of it is indexed.
Read the full Kajabi 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 profileKajabi 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.