Skool Alternatives in 2026: Six Options Compared on Fees, Ownership and Courses

Skool puts a discussion feed, a classroom, a calendar and leaderboards behind one login, and it sells that on two plans. Hobby is $9 a month with a 10% transaction fee. Pro is $99 a month with 2.9%. People who start hunting for something else have usually read the smaller print behind those two numbers.

Skool's Payments FAQ, last updated on 29 September 2026, adds 30 cents to every transaction and raises the Pro rate to 3.9% on charges above $900. All prices are in US dollars. Payments go through Skool's own merchant account, and the FAQ says you can't use a Stripe account you already have. Growth Boost is on by default and takes a 30% commission on members Skool sends you, for as long as they keep paying. Your group also sits at a skool.com address, and the pricing page ticks Custom URL for Pro only.

Plenty of groups are happy with that deal. For everyone else there are six other routes below, from rival platforms to software you host yourself, and one of them is our own theme. We opened each option, and Skool's own pages, on 10 October 2026.

At a glance

Circle

Circle is the nearest thing to Skool with the limits taken off. It covers the same ground, with discussion spaces, courses, live events and gamification, and then adds the two things Skool leaves out. The Professional plan lists a custom domain, and it lists iOS, Android and desktop apps.

Professional costs $89 a month with a 2% transaction fee and unlimited members. A footnote on the pricing page says prices are in US dollars and based on annual billing, and the page showed no month-to-month figure when we looked. Business is $199 a month with a 1% fee, and that's the first plan that removes Circle's branding. There's a 14-day trial with no card needed.

It suits a group that has outgrown a skool.com address and wants members to find the community under its own name.

Pros

• Custom domain on the cheapest plan
• Member directory and mobile apps included
• 2% fee against Skool Hobby's 10%

Cons

• No plan under $89 a month
• The listed price assumes you pay for a year
• Circle's branding stays until the $199 plan

Mighty Networks

Mighty Networks leans harder on events than Skool does. Its comparison table lists online and in-person events, private groups and cohorts, chat spaces and courses, and it gives the Launch plan 20 livestreaming hours a month with up to 100 viewers per stream. The page says the product runs on iOS, Android and the web.

Launch costs $95 a month on monthly billing. Switch the toggle to annual and it shows $79 a month, which the page's calculator totals as $950 a year. The transaction fee on Launch is 2%. Scale is $179 a month on annual billing with a 1% fee, and Growth is $354 with 0.5%.

A coach who runs a weekly live session and a cohort or two gets more here than on Skool's calendar. Someone who mainly wants a feed and a course list is paying for a lot they won't touch.

Pros

• Livestreaming hours in every plan
• In-person events alongside online ones
• Fees drop to 0.5% on the top plan

Cons

• Close to Skool Pro's price from the first month
• A busy product with a longer setup
• Your own branded app is a separate, quoted service

Heartbeat

Heartbeat is the cheapest of the three rival platforms to start on. Its Build plan is $49 a month, or $490 if you pay for the year. That buys unlimited channels, courses and events, a member directory, badges, a custom domain and Zoom and Google Calendar connections.

The limits arrive quickly. Build stops at 350 members and carries Heartbeat's branding. It also takes a 5% transaction fee, and the pricing page says that's added on top of Stripe's card fee, which it gives as typically 2.9% plus 30 cents. Grow is $149 a month with a 2.5% fee and room for 5,000 members. Scale is $849 a month.

So Heartbeat makes sense for a small paid group that wants its own domain for half of Skool Pro's price. Past 350 members the jump to $149 is steep.

Pros

• Custom domain at $49 a month
• Courses, events and a directory on every plan
• 14-day trial without a card

Cons

• 350-member cap on the entry plan
• 5% fee plus Stripe's own fee
• A branded mobile app only on the $849 plan

Discord

Discord is the free answer. A server costs nothing to open, and members get text channels, voice rooms and video without anyone paying a platform fee. If your community is mostly conversation, it will feel livelier here than in a feed.

Charging is the weak spot. Discord's own Server Subscriptions pay you 90% and keep 10%, and its creator help pages say the feature is only for owners in the United States with a US bank account and ID. The first payout needs $100 in earnings. Owners elsewhere have to bolt on a separate paywall service that hands out roles after payment.

There's no classroom either. Lessons end up as pinned messages or links to another site, and nobody's progress is tracked.

Pros

• Free to run at any size
• Voice and video rooms built in
• Works on phones, desktops and in a browser

Cons

• Paid subscriptions limited to US owners
• No courses or progress tracking
• Old conversations are hard to find again

PremiumPress (ours)

We make this one, so read it with that in mind. Our Course & Community theme turns a WordPress site you host into a place to sell courses, and each course gets its own small community. We wrote this section from the released 12.0.89 build.

Courses are built from sections and lessons. A lesson can be a video file, an embed from a video host, or text, and you can flag any lesson as a free preview. Students tick lessons off, watch a progress bar fill and resume at the lesson they left. You can sell a course for a single payment, or bill it monthly or yearly with an optional free trial, or give it away. Coupons and tax are handled at checkout. Inside a course, enrolled students get a Members tab and a Discussion tab, which is a group chat with @mentions that outsiders can't see. Members can also message each other privately, review courses and publish courses of their own.

Now the gaps, and for a Skool user they're big. There's no site-wide feed, so the community exists only inside each course. There are no levels, points or leaderboards. There's no calendar, no events and no live calls. Quizzes, certificates and drip release aren't in the build. A membership plan doesn't open courses, so you can't charge one monthly price for everything the way a Skool group does. There's no mobile app, the chat sends no email alerts, and instructors who sell on your site aren't paid out by the theme.

The money side is different too. The licence is $99 once for every site you own, with six months of updates and then $49 per six months if you want more. We take no cut of sales. You do pay for hosting, and payment gateways such as Stripe are separate plugins with their own card fees. Leaving Skool also means leaving its discovery page, its payment handling and its tax collection behind. Our LMS theme vs LMS plugin post compares this route with LearnDash and Tutor LMS.

Pros

• One payment, no monthly fee and no cut of sales
• Your own domain, design and member list
• Per-course subscriptions with free trials

Cons

• No feed, leaderboards, calendar or live calls
• No single membership covering every course
• You handle hosting, updates, payments and tax

Discourse

For anyone searching for an open-source Skool alternative, Discourse is the serious candidate. Its code is published under the GNU General Public License version 2, and the pricing FAQ says it's free to run on your own servers. The official install guide asks for a server with at least 1 GB of memory and Docker, and says setup takes about ten minutes once you have one.

If you'd sooner not run a server, Discourse hosts it for you. Pro is $100 a month with unlimited members, five staff seats and a custom domain. The pricing page also lists a free hosted plan with two staff seats and ten categories.

Discourse is a forum first. It has categories, tags, chat and trust levels, and its bundled Subscriptions plugin sells one-off or recurring access to a group through your own Stripe account. What it lacks is a course builder, so lessons would live as forum topics or on another tool.

Pros

• Open source and free to self-host
• Searchable threads that hold up for years
• Paid group access through your own Stripe account

Cons

• No courses, lessons or progress
• Self-hosting means running a Docker server
• Hosted Pro costs a dollar more than Skool Pro

Stick with Skool?

Often, yes. Both Skool plans list unlimited members, courses, videos and live calls, and nothing on this page matches that at $9 a month. Skool's sign-up page says communities get discovered by 30 million users. Whatever the real figure for your niche, a hosted rival or your own site starts with none. Skool also acts as merchant of record, so it collects and files EU VAT for you.

The fee gap is smaller than it looks, too. Take 60 members paying $25 a month, which is $1,500 in sales. Skool Hobby costs $177 that month and Skool Pro about $161, card processing included. Circle comes to $119, Mighty Networks to $125 and Heartbeat to $124 in platform charges. Heartbeat's page says Stripe's card fee comes on top, and we'd budget for the same on the other two. Add 2.9% plus 30 cents per payment and all three land above Skool Pro.

If fees are your only complaint, check your plan first. Hobby is cheaper than Pro until sales pass roughly $1,270 a month, and above that Pro wins.

Final thoughts

Move to Circle if the skool.com address and the missing apps are what bother you. It does what Skool does, and the custom domain comes on the first plan. Mighty Networks is the better pick when live sessions and events carry your programme. Heartbeat fits a group that will stay under 350 members and wants a domain for $49.

Discord and Discourse are the free routes, and neither teaches. Use Discord for a chatty group you don't need to charge, or one you can charge from a US account. Self-hosted Discourse is right for a forum you want to own outright, if somebody on the team is comfortable with a server.

Our theme is for the person whose product is the courses. If you sell three or four of them and want students talking inside each one, $99 once on your own domain is hard to beat on cost. If your members come for the feed, the leaderboard and the weekly call, stay on Skool or go to Circle. Anyone weighing a fuller social network on WordPress should read our post on BuddyPress themes and community themes.

FAQ

Sources

• Skool: pricing page, Skool Payments FAQs, last updated 29 September 2026, and How to change my group URL.
• Reddit r/SaaS: Community platforms: Skool or alternatives?
• Reddit r/EntrepreneurRideAlong: Skool or website?
• PremiumPress Course & Community theme. Features are described from the released 12.0.89 build.

Checked on 10 October 2026.