Skool vs Kajabi: Which One Is Right For You?

If you are a coach, course creator, or online entrepreneur trying to figure out whether to build on Skool or Kajabi, you are not alone. These are the two platforms I get asked about the most, and the answer most people give you online is useless because they only use one of them. I use both. Right now, today, I have an active Skool community and I have built out memberships, group coaching, and digital products on Kajabi. So when I tell you one is better for your situation than the other, I am telling you from real experience, not from a spec sheet.

The reason this comparison matters is that the wrong platform choice will slow you down for months. Choosing Kajabi when you need something simple to launch fast means you spend three weeks learning a funnel builder before you ever serve a single customer. Choosing Skool when you need separate sales pages and complex automations means you are stuck duct-taping three tools together anyway. By the end of this post you will know exactly which one fits where you are right now.

What You’ll Walk Out With

A clear breakdown of what Skool actually is and how its community model works
A tour of every Skool feature worth knowing, including the gamification system and SEO discoverability
The specific drawbacks of Skool that most reviews skip over
A real look at Kajabi’s pricing tiers, feature set, and where it genuinely shines
The honest limitations of Kajabi that cost creators extra money
A side-by-side price breakdown so you can compare the actual monthly cost
A clear decision framework based on where you are in your online business right now, plus a free tool at finder.platformproof.com that matches your skills to the right income model

What Is Skool and Why Everyone Is Talking About It

Skool is an online learning and community platform that launched a few years ago and has been growing fast. The simplest way to describe it is this: imagine Facebook Groups, Kajabi, and ClickFunnels got combined into one tool, then someone removed all of the unnecessary complexity and rebuilt it to be as clean as possible. That is Skool. It is designed to make life easier both for the creator who is selling a product and for the community members who join.

When someone lands on your Skool community, they see a single landing page with a short description, images or a video you have uploaded, and a clear call to action to join. There are no ads. There are no distractions pointing people away from your content. The entire environment is contained, which means your community members stay focused on your material instead of getting pulled into an algorithm feed. That containment is one of the things I appreciated most when I set up my own Skool community, which focuses on side hustles including affiliate marketing, freelancing, digital products, and email marketing.

What Skool Gets Right

Simplicity is the biggest selling point. Setting up a course on Skool is genuinely fast. You click “new course,” give it a name and description, and you are off. Adding a module is one click. Adding a section inside a module is one click. There is no template library to wade through, no funnel steps to connect, no pipeline to configure. If you are launching your first product and you need to be up and running quickly, the simplicity of Skool removes the kind of technical friction that kills momentum before you ever make a sale.

Discoverability is a real advantage that most people overlook. Your Skool community can be found in two ways: inside the Skool platform itself when other members search for communities, and on Google if you set things up correctly. That second one is significant. I built my community categories around side hustle keywords because that is my niche. If you are in, say, underwater basket weaving, you want your community name, your categories, and your descriptions loaded with the actual keywords your audience types into search engines. Set your community to public rather than private, and you give yourself a real shot at organic traffic from people who have never heard of you.

Gamification keeps members coming back. Skool has a built-in points and levels system. Members earn points by engaging with the community, and as they level up they unlock access to different courses. In my community I have nine levels, and certain courses are locked behind specific levels. Level two, for example, is the minimum required to access my “How to Monetize Skool as an Affiliate” course. This structure gives people a reason to stay active, post comments, and participate. It builds the kind of community engagement that you would otherwise have to manually engineer through challenges and check-ins. The leaderboard shows members where they rank, which adds a competitive social element that most paid communities try to create but struggle to sustain.

The membership tier system is flexible. Right now my community is free to join, but I can add a paid tier at any time. Once I set a price, say $10 or $20 per month, everyone who joins after that point pays the fee. Everyone already in the free level stays in the free level. That grandfathering approach is clean. You can also import existing email addresses, which is exactly what I did to seed my Skool community early. Rather than starting from zero, I sent an invite to people already on my mailing list. The auto-DM feature is another tool for monetization: I welcome every new member and send them a message directing them to more help or a paid offer. That is how you turn a free community into a revenue stream without being pushy about it.

Where Skool Falls Short

You cannot host videos natively inside Skool. Every video you add to a course has to live on YouTube, Wistia, or Vimeo first. You then copy and paste the link into Skool. That means you either accept YouTube as a free hosting option (which means your private course content could potentially surface in search), or you pay for Wistia or Vimeo on top of the $99 monthly Skool fee. When I uploaded a course video to my community I had to push it to Vimeo first, copy the embed link, and paste it into Skool. That is an extra step and an extra cost that Kajabi does not have, because Kajabi hosts your video directly on its own infrastructure.

Live training requires a third-party tool. Skool has a calendar feature where you can schedule events for your community. The problem is that if you want to run a live Q and A or a live training session, you cannot broadcast from inside Skool. You have to create a Zoom link and drop it into the calendar event. Members then click the Zoom link, leave the Skool environment, and join the call on a completely separate platform. Zoom is free up to 40-minute calls for basic accounts, but if you have a large community or you run calls longer than 40 minutes, Zoom adds another monthly cost. Kajabi recently launched a live video training feature inside their platform, which Skool has not matched yet.

The $99 per community fee adds up fast if you run multiple communities. Facebook lets you create as many groups as you want at no cost. Skool charges $99 per community per month. If you want to run a basket weaving community and an affiliate marketing community as separate spaces, you are paying $198 a month. The value proposition changes completely when you scale beyond one niche. The upside is that within a single community you can host unlimited courses, which does keep the per-product cost low if you stay focused on one topic.

Post moderation is limited. On Facebook Groups you can require approval before a member’s post goes public. On Skool, members can post freely without approval. That is good for building community energy and getting conversations started without friction. It is bad when you have a growing community and people start dropping affiliate links, Forex promotions, and unsolicited offers into your feed. I have not found a setting inside Skool to require post approval the way you can on Facebook. That is something to factor in if your community is in a high-spam niche.

Email broadcast limits inside the community are restrictive. Skool lets you email notify your community members about new posts, but only once every 72 hours. That is roughly once every three days. If you are building momentum and you want to stay top of mind, that limit can slow you down. Kajabi’s email marketing tool does not have that same restriction, which is one reason some creators use Kajabi’s email system separately even when they run their community on Skool.

What Is Kajabi and Who It Is Built For

Kajabi is an all-in-one platform that has been in the market longer than Skool and has built out a much wider feature set. You can use Kajabi to sell one-on-one coaching, group coaching, memberships, digital products, online courses, and even podcasts. There are multiple pricing tiers, and depending on which plan you choose you get more or less access to features and products. I am currently on the $199-per-month plan, which gives me enough product slots to run multiple offers simultaneously.

The way I think about Kajabi is that it is aimed at creators who already have some experience with online business and who want one platform to handle courses, email marketing, landing pages, and sales funnels without needing to manage separate subscriptions for each. Whether Kajabi fully delivers on that promise is where things get more complicated, which I will get into below.

What Kajabi Gets Right

Self-hosted video is a genuine advantage. When you upload a course video to Kajabi, it lives inside Kajabi. You do not need a Vimeo account or a YouTube channel to host your content. That means one fewer subscription, one fewer platform to manage, and no risk of a broken embed link taking down your course videos. For a paid course where quality and reliability matter, having everything under one roof reduces the surface area for technical problems.

Custom domain support makes your brand look professional. With Kajabi you can point your own domain name at your site. Someone who types in your website address can land on a Kajabi-powered page that looks completely native to your brand. That branding consistency is harder to achieve with Skool, where the community URL lives at skool.com regardless of your customization.

Live events inside the platform are available. Kajabi added a live video training feature inside their community and coaching products. That means you can run a live session without sending your members out to Zoom first. For creators who want their students to stay inside one environment from onboarding through live training, that feature closes a gap that Skool currently has.

Email marketing is built in. Kajabi’s email system lets you send broadcasts, set up sequences, and build automations without a third-party email tool. If you are using Kajabi for your courses and you also want to email your list without paying for something like GetResponse or ConvertKit separately, Kajabi can technically cover that. The $159-per-month plan includes unlimited marketing emails and up to 25,000 contacts.

Multiple products and niches fit better on Kajabi. Because Kajabi charges a flat monthly fee rather than per community, having several different courses targeting different niches is less expensive at scale. The $159 plan allows 15 products and 15 funnels, along with unlimited landing pages. If you are building several separate income streams that each need their own sales page and email sequence, Kajabi handles that without doubling your monthly platform cost the way Skool’s per-community pricing would.

Where Kajabi Falls Short

The learning curve is real. Kajabi is not a beginner platform. The funnel builder, the email automation tool, the page builder, the coaching setup, the community section, the product creation flow, they are all interconnected in ways that take time to understand. If you jump in without experience building landing pages or email sequences, you will spend weeks learning the tool before you start using it to actually sell anything. I would describe Kajabi as an intermediate-to-advanced platform for people who already understand how online funnels work.

The funnel and page builder is not as clean as dedicated tools. My honest assessment is that Kajabi’s page builder is clunky compared to ClickFunnels. The sales funnel setup is not as intuitive. The forms need to be built separately and then connected to a funnel or a sales page, which adds steps that can frustrate people who just want to launch fast. When I started out, I ran ClickFunnels for my sales pages and landing pages, then connected a webhook to deliver buyers into my Kajabi course. That combination worked, but it meant paying for both ClickFunnels and Kajabi at the same time.

The community feature is still catching up. Kajabi has a community product, but in my experience it is still clumsy and slow compared to Skool. The community does not feel as fluid or engaging. And one particular issue I ran into is that the community was not cleanly tied to specific courses. If I had a course called House of Affiliates and I wanted buyers to also access a House of Affiliates community, getting people from the course into the community required them to leave the course environment entirely and enter the community product separately. That kind of friction hurts the experience for new buyers who are already learning a new platform.

Running multiple tools alongside Kajabi gets expensive fast. Here is the real math from my own experience. I used Kajabi for the courses and coaching. I used ClickFunnels for the landing pages and sales funnels because Kajabi’s builder was not clean enough for what I needed. I used GetResponse for email marketing because I wanted more control over my automations than Kajabi offered. Three separate platform subscriptions is a significant monthly cost that adds up before you have even counted your ads spend or other business expenses.

Pricing Breakdown: Skool vs Kajabi Side by Side

Here are the actual numbers. Skool charges $99 per month per community. There is a 14-day free trial available. You get unlimited courses inside each community, unlimited members, and the full gamification and SEO feature set regardless of which tier you are on. There is only one paid tier, which keeps things simple.

Kajabi’s entry plan is $119 per month, which gives you three products and three funnels. The next tier is $159 per month and includes 15 products, 15 funnels, unlimited landing pages, unlimited marketing emails, and up to 25,000 contacts. There is also a higher-end plan above that for larger operations. Kajabi does offer a trial period as well. The important thing to notice is that the $159 Kajabi plan is not that far from $99 Skool once you factor in what you are getting. But if Kajabi forces you to also subscribe to ClickFunnels and a separate email tool because its built-in versions are not good enough, your real monthly cost can easily reach $400 or more.

Not sure which online income model fits your skills and schedule?

Find out in two minutes at finder.platformproof.com. The free quiz matches you to the right starting point based on what you already know how to do.

Honest Drawbacks: What Nobody Tells You About Either Platform

Most comparison articles pick a winner and stick to it. Here is what actually makes each one harder to use than the marketing suggests.

With Skool, the $99 per community model sounds fine until you want to expand. I run one Skool community focused on side hustles, which means everything from affiliate marketing to freelancing to digital products lives in one space. That works because my audience has overlapping interests. But if you are teaching basket weaving and you also want to teach watercolor painting, you cannot mix those audiences cleanly in one community without confusing people. You would need two communities, which is $198 a month. At that price you are approaching Kajabi’s territory without Kajabi’s feature set.

With Kajabi, the “all-in-one” promise is partly true. The course delivery is excellent. The video hosting is solid. The email broadcasting works. But the community product, the funnel builder, and the page builder are all behind where dedicated tools are. So in practice, many Kajabi users end up paying for Kajabi plus ClickFunnels plus an email platform anyway, which defeats the all-in-one pitch. I did exactly that for a long time.

The other honest drawback with Skool is spam. Because posts go live without approval, a fast-growing community will attract people who want to promote their own offers inside yours. On Facebook you can require post approval. On Skool you cannot, at least not as of when I recorded this comparison. You need to be actively moderating or you will find affiliate links and Forex promotions in your feed from members who did not read the community rules.

The Decision Framework: Which One Fits Where You Are Right Now

After using both, here is how I think about the decision. Choose Skool if you are just starting out and you need to launch something fast without a steep learning curve. If you have one clear niche, you want a community at the center of your business, and you do not need a complex sales funnel or a custom-branded website right away, Skool is the right place to begin. The simplicity is not a limitation at the start of your journey, it is an asset.

Choose Kajabi if you already have experience with online marketing and you are running multiple products across multiple niches that each need their own landing page, email sequence, and sales funnel. If you need self-hosted video and a custom domain, and if you want live training built into your community rather than a Zoom link, Kajabi has the feature depth to support that. Just be realistic about the learning curve and budget for the possibility that you may still end up using ClickFunnels alongside it.

There is also a middle path. I have seen creators use Skool for the community and gamification, while using a separate simple page builder for their sales funnel and a dedicated email tool for their list. That combination can be cheaper than Kajabi’s full plan depending on which tools you choose. The right answer depends on your specific situation, not on which platform has the longer feature list.

Find Your X

Knowing which platform is right for you is one piece of the puzzle. The more fundamental question is knowing which online income model fits your skills in the first place. If you are not sure whether you should be building a community product, selling coaching, doing affiliate marketing, or something else entirely, the free quiz at finder.platformproof.com will point you in the right direction. It takes about two minutes and matches you to a starting point based on what you already know how to do, rather than what sounds exciting in a YouTube thumbnail.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Skool actually better than Kajabi?

Neither is objectively better. Skool is simpler and easier to launch on, with built-in discoverability and gamification that helps grow a community. Kajabi has more features, self-hosted video, and deeper marketing tools. The right choice depends on where you are in your online business. Beginners will generally find Skool faster to launch on. More experienced creators with multiple products tend to get more value from Kajabi’s feature set.

How much does Skool cost per month?

Skool costs $99 per month per community. There is a 14-day free trial available. Within that $99 you get unlimited courses, unlimited community members, the gamification and leaderboard system, SEO discoverability, and the ability to set paid membership tiers. If you want to run more than one community on separate topics, you pay another $99 for each additional community.

How much does Kajabi cost per month?

Kajabi’s entry plan is $119 per month, which supports three products and three funnels. The next tier is $159 per month and includes 15 products, 15 funnels, unlimited landing pages, unlimited marketing emails, and up to 25,000 contacts. There are higher-tier plans for larger businesses. Keep in mind that many Kajabi users end up paying for additional tools like ClickFunnels or a separate email platform on top of their Kajabi subscription.

Can you host videos directly on Skool?

No, not natively. Videos inside Skool courses must come from YouTube, Wistia, or Vimeo. You upload your video to one of those platforms first, then embed the link inside your Skool classroom. Kajabi does allow direct video uploads to its own hosting, which eliminates the need for a third-party video platform.

Can you run live training sessions on Skool?

Skool has a calendar feature where you can schedule community events, but live video is not hosted inside Skool. You would create a Zoom meeting or a similar live video call and drop the link into your Skool calendar event. Members click the link and join you on Zoom. Kajabi has added live video training inside their community product, so if keeping members inside one environment for live sessions matters to you, that is a point in Kajabi’s favor.

Does Skool have a free trial?

Yes. Skool offers a 14-day free trial. That is enough time to set up your community, add your first course, configure your gamification levels, and test the member experience. If you sign up through an affiliate link from a creator you follow, some affiliates offer bonus resources for new Skool accounts as an added incentive for trying the platform.

What happens if someone spams your Skool community?

Skool does not currently offer a post approval setting that would let you review and approve member posts before they go live. Any member can post freely. In a fast-growing community this means you will likely encounter unsolicited promotions, affiliate link drops, and off-topic content from members who ignore your community rules. You will need to moderate actively or set clear rules and enforce them by removing members who break them. This is different from Facebook Groups, where you can require post approval before anything goes public.

Can Skool rank on Google?

Yes, and this is one of Skool’s underrated advantages. If you set your community to public and optimize your community name, categories, and description with relevant keywords for your niche, your Skool community page has the potential to show up in Google search results. Kajabi pages can also rank, but the Skool discoverability feature means your community can be found both inside the Skool platform and through external search engines, giving you two separate organic traffic sources from one setup.

Sources

Skool pricing and features observed from active community dashboard, $99/month per community
Kajabi pricing page: $119/month (3 products, 3 funnels), $159/month (15 products, 15 funnels, unlimited landing pages, 25,000 contacts)
Skool video hosting limitations: YouTube, Wistia, or Vimeo required; no native upload
Skool live training: Zoom link required; no native live video hosting
Skool community email broadcast limit: once per 72 hours
Kajabi live video training feature: added to coaching and community products

Helping 1 million working adults make their first $3,000 online with the skills they already have. Alston Godbolt, Platform Proof.