Skool Review 2025

This is a complete review of Skool, together with a detailed explanation of how it can potentially help you grow your online business.

Skool is great for course creators, especially those looking to combine course hosting with community building.

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Skool review 2024

An In-Depth Skool.com Review

This is an in-depth review of Skool. We recommend Skool based on our positive experience. This article contains affiliate links, and if you sign up via these links, we may earn a commission, at no extra cost to you.

✔️ Skool Pros

  • Community-Centric Focus: Skool excels in building engaged online communities, allowing students to interact with each other and the course creator, which enhances the learning experience.
  • Gamification Features: The platform offers leaderboards, points, and levels to keep members motivated and engaged, making learning more interactive and enjoyable.
  • Simple and Clean Interface: Skool’s user-friendly and clean design makes it easy to navigate for both course creators and students, reducing the learning curve for new users.
  • All-in-One Platform: Skool combines course hosting, community management, and event scheduling in one place, eliminating the need for multiple tools.
  • Affordable Pricing: At $99 per month with unlimited members and courses, Skool offers a cost-effective solution compared to other platforms like Kajabi or Teachable.

❌ Skool Cons

  • No Native Video Hosting: Skool lacks inbuilt video hosting for courses, requiring users to embed videos from external platforms like YouTube or Vimeo.
  • Limited Customization: Unlike some competitors, Skool does not offer advanced customization options, which may be limiting for creators looking for more control over the design.
  • Basic Course Management Features: Skool offers fewer advanced course management features, which may include things like advanced tracking and grading options.
  • No Funnel Builder: Skool lacks built-in marketing tools like funnel builders, which can be a downside for creators who want an all-in-one solution for their business.
  • Limited Analytics: While Skool provides basic metrics for community health and engagement, it does not offer in-depth analytics, which could be a drawback for users needing detailed insights into student progress and engagement.

Full Skool Community Review

Skool Alex Hormozi

What is Skool?

Skool is a groundbreaking platform aiming at merging community and learning into a user-friendly and engaging environment.

Founded by Sam Ovens, Skool is combining the best from Social Media, LMS (learning management system), and other learning tools into one platform where users can learn, engage, and grow together inside of dedicated communities.

skool review

The Vision Behind Skool

Skool was created from Sam Ovens’s vision to create a more interactive and social way of learning. A place where education can be a social, interactive, and fun experience – built on community. As this is something lacking in today’s online education, where the experience tends to be more isolating and pressuring.

What Makes Skool Unique?

Skool is not just a learning management system or a social media platform. It is a hybrid combining them both, focusing on both community and course building.

According to us, this is what makes Skool unique:

  • Community-based learning: Skool allows users to engage with other members inside of the “Community” parallel to learning inside the “Classroom”.
  • Gamification: A Skool community allows users to track their engagement progress inside of the “Leaderboard”. This creates a fun incentive to engage with other members. Through this, active members can unlock potential perks and achievements.
  • All-in-one Platform: Compared to other platforms, where you can find either a strong learning platform or a strong community – Skool is combining both in a very seamless way. Members can simply tab between the different sections effortlessly.

How Does Skool Work?

Skool is created for both content creators and learners alike:

Skool for Creators

Skool allows someone with a vision to create a community around a topic of education. A typical Skool-community hosts both a community, a calendar for regular online meet-ups as well as a dedicated section for course material, provided by the community creator.

No idea is too big or too small to be turned into a Skool community. If you are an expert in digital marketing, a gym enthusiast, a music producer, or someone looking to create a safe space for self-improvement, it can all be done through Skool. We have a full guide on how to start a Skool community.

Skool for Students

Students can sign up for communities of various subjects in order to interact with its course content, creator and members. Every community is unique in its own way and is tailored according to the vision of its creator.

Students can use the community section, just as you would a Facebook group, to ask questions or raise relevant topics for discussion.

Students can also make use of the “Classroom” in order to take part in the course content provided by the community creator. This can be both video or written content.

In the “Calendar” tab, the course creator can invite students to join scheduled online events, such as Q&As or weekly coaching calls.

What We Can Come To Expect From Skool

Since the launch of Skool, there has been an influx of communities created, ranging from both educational topics to hobbies and business.

The need for a platform that combines learning with community has clearly been shown by the engagement and lifetime value of the platform’s users.

Skool is growing with its intuitive ways of optimizing learning and the platform sees new “quality of life” updates regularly.

Skool has positioned itself to leverage the dynamic and progressive direction education has been taking over the last couple of decades. With the rise of social learning trends, more people crave a personalized learning experience. This is where Skool is really succeeding in redefining online education.

Skool Features

Once you have Skool community set up, you’ll find a great amount of functions, created to optimize your students’ experience in both learning and engaging.

Community

Under the community tab, your students can engage in group discussions. Community posts are divided into categories for easier filtering. The community tab works like a Facebook group, where members can post, like, or comment.

In the community tab is where a course creator has the possibility to interact with its members regularly by giving updates, and advice and even creating polls.

Having a community section active and engaged is where the true success of a Skool community lies.

What we like: The community section is easy to navigate, both through the website browser as well as through the Skool app. The filtering function makes it easy to find posts from certain categories.

What we don’t like: It’s hard to keep track of updates on posts you’re following if someone is not tagging your name. As a creator, you cannot move pinned posts up or down, so you need to unpin and repin all the pinned posts to redo the order.

Classroom

In the Classroom is where you as a community creator can upload course content. You can have as many courses as you’d like, and courses can be limited to certain members. Some courses needs to be unlocked and some can be behind a paywall.

Inside of a course, you can create pages/sets of modules where you can add video or text resources such as transcripts and guides.

In the Classroom is where the ture knowledge is provided, which creates a foundation for discussion inside of the “Community” tab.

The Skool Classroom page

What we like: Creating new courses is easy, and structuring the courses has been made easy by simply dragging and dropping the different pages and sets inside of the courses. The progress bar makes it easy for someone to start right where they left off.

What we don’t like: It’s not possible to upload videos straight to Skool, so this has to be done through either YouTube, Vimeo, Wistia or Loom.

Calendar

In the “Calendar” tab, you can schedule events such as weekly Q&As, online meet-ups, and similar get-togethers. It’s very user-friendly, where the events are shown in each member’s selected time zone, and members can easily attend events through video conference apps such as Zoom or Google Meets.

Events can be a one-off, or recurring indefinitely.

Skool review calendar

What we like: It’s made easy to add new events and to notify members before an event takes place. It’s all very automated.

What we don’t like: So far, the calendar tab works exactly like it’s supposed to and I have nothing negative to say.

Gamification

Under the “Leaderboard” tab, members can track their engagement process. Members earn points when other members like their posts or comments.

You can reward members who reaches certain levels by giving them access to certain “Classroom” content, but it could also be a good idea to give them customized rewards as well, such as a free coaching call.

Skool community gamification

What we like: It adds a fun incentive to let members track their progress. It also helps the course creator get an overview of the different member’s engagement levels. It’s a great opportunity to reward engaged members with special perks.

What we don’t like: Some levels are very hard to reach and the level scaling is a bit unproportionate. The numbers can look a bit skewed if someone has a pinned post with a lot of likes.

Email Broadcasts

You can reach every member’s email inbox by creating a post and toggle “Send email to all members”.

This is a very useful function, as this allows you to keep members who are not regularly accessing the community. This can be done only once every 72 hours, as to prevent any problems with email deliverability.

This basically turns your members into an email list where you can keep them updated and retargeted with news, updates, and offers.

Skool email broadcasts

What we like: Broadcasts is a great function if there is something you’d really want all of your members to know about. It could be used either to notify members of a calendar event or as a weekly newsletter. The emails also look very clean and professional.

What we don’t like: You can only send one broadcast every 72 hours.

Private Chat, Notifications and User Profiles

Members can interact with both you as a creator and with other members through a private chat function, just like you’d find on social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. This is great for more sensitive or personal topics members would like to discuss.

The notification center keeps members notified once they recieve a private message, a like or comment on on of their posts, a mention in the community or other important notifications to keep track of.

Members can also customize and visit other members’ profiles, adding a layer of personalization to the community.

What we like: Especially for those using the Skool app, notifications turns into push notifications just like with any other social media platform. The private chat is great for keeping private conversations between the course creator and its members.

What we don’t like: Notifications store your notifications from all your communities, so it can become a bit overwhelming, and the notification amount is often showing “99+”.

What Is Skool App? The Mobile App for iOS and Android

Skool has conveniently created an app to make it easier to interact with both the community and the course content.

The app is just as easy to use as any other social media app and it allows users to get push notifications on messages and other notifications that increases the engagement of members.

What we like: The Skool app is great to use both for the community section and also for the Classroom, as members can just as easily watch and follow course content through their phones.

What we don’t like: There is nothing bad to be said about the Skool app for now.

Stats & Metrics

One thing you’ll come to appreciate running a Skool community is the readily available metrics on everything that is going on inside of your community.

You can easily track your Conversion Rates, Monthly Recurring Revenue, members’ churn rates, and engagement. You can even track how far individual members have progressed inside of the classroom.

All of these metrics are important in order to continuously improve and optimize your community to give your members a better learning experience.

Customize Your Community

There are a lot of aspects and angles you can go for with your community.

For example, you can have a free-to-join community where you can charge a one-time fee for course content, or you can decide to charge a monthly subscription fee of up to $999/month.

You can customize your course content in any way you’d like and you can emphasize on if you want a content-heavy community, a community that focuses more on scheduled live events or a community that focuses more on member interactions.

The About Page

Customize your about page to make potential members interested in joining your community.

Your About page will work as the landing page for your community and is the first thing that someone will see before they join your community. It’s also easy to integrate Meta Ads to drive traffic to your Skool community’s about page.

The About page is a very important step in the conversion process in order to persuade people in joining your community.

An example of a well-converting about page.

Use the about page in order to show people what they’ll get if they decide to join your community, and what they might miss out on in case they decide not to.

Is Skool Free?

If you’re interested in creating a Skool community, you’ll automatically start with a free 14-day trial before you have to start paying the $99/month subscription fee.

In order to get started with the free 14-day trial, you still have to put in your credit card information.

So remember to cancel the free trial before it’s up in case you come to realize creating a Skool community wasn’t for you.

Keep in mind, that Skool decided to take a flat monthly subscription fee rather than taking a bigger cut of your monthly revenue you’ll make from your paying members. So just by getting a few paying members, you’ll cover this monthly fee pretty quickly. This makes the Skool pricing model very affordable.

Skool Payment Integrations

Handling payments in Skool is very straightforward. When you create your Skool community, you’re forced to put in your credit card information. This is the card that gets charged every month.

In order to get paid from Skool, you simply connect a bank account through a secure Stripe integration and you’ll get paid automatically on a weekly basis.

Is Skool The Best Course Platform?

Something you can find on other platforms is a well-integrated course platform. Something you can find on other platforms is established community building.

What you cannot find anywhere else outside of Skool is a platform that combines both community building with a well-integrated platform. This, together with all the other functions that make Skool such a great platform, leaves me with little to no choice but to choose Skool over any other similar learning platform out there.

Although Skool requires a bit of a learning curve, this is no real difference from other platforms that also need some time to get used to. All the preparations we do before having a successful Skool community up and running are only the essentials needed.

With this being said, there is no need to do any custom coding, editing, or third-party payment solutions that you need to integrate. Everything is very conveniently packaged in one place.

Skool or Kajabi

Kajabi is like that multitool you keep in your drawer. It can do a lot of things, ranging from course creation to e-mail marketing and a bunch of other useful things that might come in handy when creating an online course.

However, my own experience with Kajabi is that it’s just way too much. Too many things that you need to learn before you can actually spend time on the stuff that matters. Too many settings and steps are needed before you have full control of the platform.

With Skool, however, you have an easy step-by-step setup that guides you in focusing on only the most important aspects of what needs to get done before you can successfully invite members to your platform.

The pricing of Kajabi starts at $149/month while Skool’s pricing keeps it at a flat $99/month with no need to ever pay more.

The biggest upside with Kajabi is that they have a built-in function for hosting videos, whereas at Skool you need to use a third-party service for this, such as YouTube, Vimeo, or Loom.

Read our full guide on Skool vs Kajabi.

Skool or Private Facebook Group

Here, i am not even going to argue why a Facebook Group might be better than a Skool Community. First of, hosting any type of course content on Facebook is a nightmare.

Secondly, even if you manage to get people inside of a Facebook Group, you still have a limited reach to these members, unless you decide to monetize your posts through a “post boost”.

Don’t get fooled by the big name of “Facebook” or that a Facebook Group is free, you simply won’t be able to get the job done with a Facebook Group, and you’ll thank me later for not wasting your time trying to do so.

Skool or Circle

Circle is a platform where you can create your own virtual island as a place of communication and engagement. Circle is actually a great platform for those with a vision of connecting like-minded people.

With Circle, you have an almost unlimited amount of ways to customize your community and how it works. While this could be a good thing, Skool is allowing you to get down to business by focusing on the functionality that actually seem to matter.

Although Circle is more open-source in terms of how you can integrate payment methods and other integrations, Skool has decided to streamline the process of effectively launching and running an online community.

With Circle, you start by paying $39/month for up to 1000 members and is then paying based on how many members you have.

Read our full guide on Skool vs Circle.

Skool or Thinkific

Thinkific is a great platform for hosting online courses. It comes with a page builder and a course platform with a bunch of customization features. You can create quizzes, add advanced course features, and even reward your course members with a certification of completion.

However, the experience as a member of a Thinkific course could feel very isolating, as there is no way to interact with other students, and even interacting with the course creator could seem challenging.

Thinkific offers a lot of different payment plans and options for course members, but even here, it might feel a bit harder to navigate.

What Thinkific lacks compared to Skool is the simple user interface, the ease of following the course content on the fly from an application, and the overall quality of interaction.

Pricewise, Thinkific, and Skool are pretty much the same. However, Thinkific has paywalls on certain functions, just like Kajabi. With Skool you only have to worry about one payment that allows you to do everything you want without having to worry about that there are functions you might not have access to.

Read our full guide on Thinkific and Skool.

Is Skool Legit?

Skool is backed by a dedicated team and is already trusted by many online entrepreneurs. Skool has already shown its legitimacy through the constant transparency of the evolution of the platform. Skool has clear privacy policy terms explaining how both creators and users data is protected.

discover skool homepage image

All Skool payments are secured through Stripe and users and creators do not need to rely on unaffiliated third-party payment providers to use Skool.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Skool good for course creators?

Skool is great for course creators, especially those looking to combine course hosting with community building. Together with its user-friendly interface, gamification, and focus on social learning make it ideal for engaging students and growing an online community.

How does Skool work?

Skool works as a hybrid LMS (learning management system) where course creators can host video lessons, manage discussions, and engage with students – all in one place. It’s designed for seamless interaction, while also integrating gamification to make learning more engaging.

Is Skool better than Facebook Groups for building communities?

Yes, Skool is better than Facebook Groups for building engaged communities. Unlike Facebook, which is full of distractions and algorithm changes, Skool provides a focused, ad-free environment that fosters better engagement and interaction within your community.

Is Skool better than Kajabi for online courses?

Skool is better than Kajabi if your focus is on community engagement and simplicity. Kajabi offers more features, such as email marketing and funnels, but can be overwhelming. Skool is simpler, more affordable, and emphasizes community-driven learning.

What is Skool platform used for?

Skool is used for creating online courses, while also building interactive communities. It combines the functionalities of a learning management system together with social engagement tools to help course creators manage both content and community in one place.

Laura Moser

About the author

Laura Moser - Author

Laura Moser is a community builder, a digital strategist and has a passion helping creators grow their online business. With many years of experience in E-learning and content creation, she specializes in innovative monetization strategies for online community platforms. Laura has been writing content for platforms such as Thinkific and Kajabi and is now an avid Skool enthusiast.

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