Skool Alternatives: Six Platforms Priced Against Skool's $9 and $99

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Circle, Kajabi, Mighty Networks, Teachable, Whop and Discord, each with the price on its own pricing page. Competitor prices read 9 September 2026; Skool's read 30 August 2026.

By Jack Gandolfo · Reviewed Sep 9, 2026

Last updated Sep 9, 2026

Pricing verified Sep 9, 2026 — Competitor plan prices and published fees were read by hand from circle.so/pricing, kajabi.com/pricing, mightynetworks.com/pricing, teachable.com/pricing, whop.com/network/pricing and discord.com on 9 September 2026. Skool's own $9/$99 prices and 10%/2.9% fees were read from skool.com/pricing on 30 August 2026. All reported figures, not collector captures.

Direct answer: most people looking for a Skool alternative are reacting to one of three things — the 10% fee on the $9 plan, the missing marketing tools, or the fact that Skool has one layout and you cannot change it. Which alternative is right depends entirely on which of the three sent you looking.

Every price below was read from the vendor's own pricing page on the date given. Nothing here is estimated.

Skool alternatives compared

Where a cell says "not stated on the pricing page", that is exactly what it means: we did not find the figure printed there, so we are not printing one either.

If you are leaving because of the 10% fee

Skool Hobby is $9 with a 10% cut of member payments. On $1,000 a month of member payments that is $109 all-in. Two platforms beat that arithmetic in different ways:

• Skool Pro itself. $99 + 2.9% = $128 at that volume, and it wins above roughly $1,270/month in member payments. The break-even is worked through on our Skool pricing page. Moving platform to escape a fee you can escape with an upgrade is a lot of work for nothing.
• Whop. No monthly fee at all, 2.7% + $0.30 per transaction on its published standard pricing. On $1,000 across 20 sales that is $33. It is a marketplace-and-checkout product rather than a classroom-first one, which is a real difference in what you get, not just what you pay.

If you are leaving because Skool has no email or funnels

Skool's published feature list has no marketing email, landing pages, funnels or automation builder. If that is the gap, a community tool will not fix it — you need a suite:

• Kajabi ($179/mo) puts courses, email, landing pages and checkout in one place. It costs roughly twenty times Skool Hobby, and that is the honest trade.
• Teachable ($39/mo Starter, $89/mo Builder) is course-first with checkout and upsells. Note the 7.5% transaction fee printed on the Starter plan — at any real sales volume Builder is the cheaper plan despite the higher sticker.
• Or keep Skool and run a separate marketing tool alongside it. We priced that combination on our all-in-one platform page.

If you are leaving because you want control over the layout

• Circle ($89/mo Professional, $199/mo Business) is the closest like-for-like swap and the one people actually compare Skool against. Circle's Business tier lists workflows, custom profile fields and an admin API — the configurability Skool deliberately does not offer. Full comparison: Skool vs Circle.
• Mighty Networks ($79/mo entry) sits between the two: more structure than Skool, less assembly than Circle.

If you want free

Discord costs nothing to run a server and is where a large share of free communities already live. It has no built-in classroom in the sense Skool means it, and Discord's own pricing page sells Nitro at $9.99/month as a personal perk rather than a creator plan. Free is a real answer if you are not charging anyone yet — and if you are not charging anyone yet, paying $99/month for a community platform is the wrong problem to be solving.

What actually decides it

Skool is one feed, one classroom, one calendar, one members list, and no way to change that. That is either the reason you like it or the reason you are here. Every alternative above trades that simplicity for something — configurability, marketing tools, or a lower cut — and every one of those trades costs either money or setup time.

What we could not verify

We did not find published transaction-fee figures on Circle's, Kajabi's or Mighty Networks' pricing pages, and we are not repeating third-party numbers for them. Plan features change frequently; treat each vendor's own pricing page as authoritative over this one, including over the prices we printed above with dates.

Read next

• Skool review — what the product actually is
• Skool pricing — the $9 vs $99 break-even maths
• Is Skool worth it?
• Skool vs Circle — the closest direct comparison
• Skool vs Kajabi — community platform against a full suite
• Skool vs Discord — free chat server against a $9 classroom
• Skool vs Teachable — where the 10% and the 7.5% bite