Skool vs Kajabi (2026): $99 for a Community, $179 for a Marketing Suite
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These are not competing products at the same job. Skool Pro is $99/month, Kajabi starts at $179/month, and the gap is a marketing stack. Checked 30 August 2026.
By Jack Gandolfo · Reviewed
Last updated
Pricing verified Aug 30, 2026 — prices, fees and feature counts were read by hand from skool.com/pricing and kajabi.com/pricing on 30 August 2026. They are reported figures, not captures from our marketplace collectors.
Disclosure of bias, up front: we hold an affiliate relationship with Skool and none with Kajabi. This recommendation is one-sided and we are telling you so rather than performing neutrality. Read the comparison table — every figure in it comes from the two vendors' own pricing pages and you can check them yourself.
Direct answer: Choose Skool if what you want is a community with courses inside it and you are happy to run email elsewhere. Choose Kajabi if the course, the funnel, the email sequence and the checkout are the business and the community is a feature of that. Skool Pro is $99/month. Kajabi's cheapest plan, Basic, is $179/month billed monthly or $143/month billed annually.
How do Skool and Kajabi compare?
Read from skool.com/pricing and kajabi.com/pricing on 30 August 2026.
| Skool Hobby | Skool Pro | Kajabi Basic | Kajabi Growth | Kajabi Pro | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly price | $9 | $99 | $179 | $249 | $499 |
| Billed annually | 2 months free | 2 months free | $143/mo | $199/mo | $399/mo |
| Platform fee on member payments | 10% | 2.9% | — | — | — |
| Card processing (Kajabi Payments, US) | not stated on pricing page | not stated on pricing page | 2.9% + $0.30 | 2.8% + $0.30 | 2.7% + $0.30 |
| Extra fee for third-party processor | — | — | 2% | 1% | 0.5% |
| Members / contacts | Unlimited members | Unlimited members | 2,500 contacts | 25,000 contacts | 100,000 contacts |
| Courses | Unlimited | Unlimited | 5 products | 50 products | Unlimited |
| Communities | the product itself | the product itself | 1 | 1 | 3 |
| Marketing email | not on feature list | not on feature list | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Landing pages and funnels | not on feature list | not on feature list | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Admin users | not stated | not stated | 2 | 11 | 26 |
| Branded mobile app | not stated | not stated | — | — | Included ($199/mo value) |
| Free trial | offered, length at sign-up | offered, length at sign-up | 30 days | 30 days | 30 days |
Is Skool cheaper than Kajabi?
Yes, at every comparison point. Skool Pro is $99/month against Kajabi Basic at $179/month, and Skool's cheapest real plan is $9. But Kajabi's price includes unlimited marketing email, landing pages, funnels and automations, none of which appear on Skool's feature list. If you buy Skool and then buy an email platform, the gap narrows and may close entirely.
The comparison that actually matters is Skool plus your email tool, versus Kajabi alone.
Which is better for selling courses?
Kajabi, on its published feature set. It gives you five products on Basic, unlimited funnels, unlimited landing pages, a checkout with affiliate programs, and contact-level automation. Skool has courses but no funnel, no landing page builder and no email — you would be selling into it from somewhere else.
Which is better for a community?
Skool, on shape rather than a feature checklist. Skool is a community product with courses attached; Kajabi caps you at one community on Basic and Growth and three on Pro, which tells you where the community sits in Kajabi's priorities.
Can you use both?
Yes, and plenty of people do — Kajabi for the course funnel and checkout, Skool for the membership itself. It costs more than either and it is a real answer rather than a fence-sit.
The verdict
Choose Skool if the community is the product; choose Kajabi if the funnel is. There is no middle answer worth giving. If you are starting a paid community and running email from anywhere else, start on Skool Hobby at $9 this week — it is a twentieth of Kajabi Basic and the feature you would be paying Kajabi for is one you are not going to use yet.
If you already have a course, a launch sequence and a checkout that need to live in one place, Skool cannot do that and buying it will not change your mind later. Buy Kajabi.
What we could not verify
Skool's pricing page does not state card processing rates, storage, video limits or admin seat counts, so several cells above read "not stated" rather than a number we invented. Kajabi's AI credit pricing is marked on its own page as to be determined.
Read next
- Full Skool review
- Skool pricing and break-even maths
- Is Skool worth it?
- Skool vs Circle
- Skool alternatives — six platforms priced against Skool
- Skool vs Discord — free chat server against a $9 classroom
- Skool vs Teachable — where the 10% and the 7.5% bite
Questions
Is Skool cheaper than Kajabi?
Yes. Skool Pro is $99 a month and Skool Hobby is $9, against Kajabi's cheapest plan at $179 a month billed monthly or $143 billed annually. Kajabi's price includes marketing email, landing pages and funnels, which Skool's feature list does not.
Should I use Skool or Kajabi for selling courses?
Kajabi, on its published feature set. It includes unlimited funnels, landing pages and marketing email, and Skool has none of those, so with Skool you would sell into the community from another tool.
Should I use Skool or Kajabi for a community?
Skool. It is a community product with courses attached, whereas Kajabi allows one community on its Basic and Growth plans and three on Pro.
What fees does each platform take?
Skool takes 10 percent of member payments on Hobby and 2.9 percent on Pro. Kajabi charges card processing of 2.9 percent plus 30 cents on Basic through Kajabi Payments, and adds 2 percent on Basic if you use a third-party payment provider.
Can you use Skool and Kajabi together?
Yes. A common setup is Kajabi for the course funnel and checkout with Skool for the membership community itself, at the cost of paying for both.
Does this comparison have a bias?
Yes, and it is stated at the top of the page. We hold an affiliate relationship with Skool and none with Kajabi. Every figure in the comparison table is taken from the two vendors' own pricing pages so you can verify it independently.
What real users are saying — updated Aug 31, 2026
Source: Trustpilot · observed external data
51 of 51 reviews on the Trustpilot profile, pulled Aug 31, 2026, covering Feb 2, 2024 to Aug 25, 2026. This is a small sample, so treat the percentages as indicative rather than precise.
Trustpilot rating: 1.7 / 5 (mean of the retrieved reviews: 1.59)
- 5★ — 6 reviews (12%)
- 3★ — 1 review (2%)
- 2★ — 4 reviews (8%)
- 1★ — 40 reviews (78%)
Most-mentioned themes, counted across the 51 retrieved reviews
- Support slow, unhelpful or silent — 16 reviews (31%)
- Hard to cancel or unsubscribe — 12 reviews (24%)
- Refund refused or unresolved — 11 reviews (22%)
- Dispute with the community owner, not the platform itself — 10 reviews (20%)
- Charges the reviewer says they did not authorise — 9 reviews (18%)
Themes are matched by keyword against the stored review text. Each count is a count of specific reviews, not a summary of them, and the matched reviews are stored so every figure here can be checked.
I paid $19.00 for a membership in a community hosted on Skool ("%1 YouTube Kulübü") on August 6, 2026. After finding the course quality unsatisfactory, I requested a refund directly from the community owner. Instead of responding, the owner cancelled my membership and removed me from the group — without issuing any ref
— 1★ on Trustpilot, Aug 25, 2026
Cult-ish. Poor customer service. Public humiliation. A Black Hole. The CEO does not acknowledge Skool community owners as paying customers = so they don't have any quality customer service skills either. Skool does not allow us to leave reviews, but they recently forced a review feature onto our communities. Althoug
— 1★ on Trustpilot, Aug 13, 2026
Excelente oportunidad, tengo una comunidad llamada Skool David Mentoría y esta espectacilar su plataforma de skool, buenas herramientas muy sencillas.
— 5★ on Trustpilot, Apr 5, 2026
Important context: many of these reviews appear to come from members of paid communities rather than community owners, so the reviewer population may not represent Skool's primary customer base. That selection effect could influence the rating, but it does not invalidate the complaints themselves. Trustpilot's own profile count for www.skool.com was also 51 at the time of the pull.