Skool vs Kajabi (2026): Pricing, Fees, and Which to Pick

Skool and Kajabi both let you sell what you know, but they're built for different businesses. Skool is a community app with courses attached. Kajabi is a course and marketing platform with a community attached.

Skool looks and works like a social feed. Members post, comment and like each other's posts, and every like earns the author a point. Courses sit in a Classroom tab next to the feed.

Kajabi runs the rest of an online education business: a website, landing pages, email campaigns, checkout, courses and coaching. The community is one product among those. It has points and badges too, but most Kajabi customers buy it for the selling tools.

The short answer

Choose Skool if members are paying mainly to be in the group. Discussions, courses, events and live calls all happen inside one community, and the points system gives members a reason to keep posting.

Choose Kajabi if you sell courses, coaching and digital products and want your website, email list and sales funnels in the same account. Its community supports those products rather than carrying the business.

Skool costs far less and takes less time to set up. Kajabi costs more because it replaces several tools you would otherwise pay for separately. If you want Skool's active feed and also want your own website, email and checkout, neither platform covers all of it, which is why some creators run both.

Pricing and fees side by side

On plan price alone, Kajabi looks far more expensive than Skool. The plan price leaves out two things: what each plan includes, and what each platform takes from every sale.

To match Kajabi Basic on Skool, you would need to add and pay for separate tools for email, funnels and a website. In the other direction, Skool Hobby's 10% + 30¢ fee on every transaction grows with your sales, so the cheap plan stops being cheap once you sell a few thousand dollars a month.

Skool has no built-in email marketing, sales funnels or affiliate program for selling your own products. The "Affiliates" line on Skool's pricing page is a program that pays you for referring other creators to Skool. Separately, community owners can turn on member referrals, which pay members a commission for bringing new people into your group.

Skool runs every payment through Skool Payments, so there is no third-party processor option. Kajabi takes no cut of your sales on any plan. It adds the extra fee in the table only if you use another processor where Kajabi Payments is available. Kajabi's rates shown are for US businesses.

Total cost at $1,000, $5,000 and $20,000 a month in sales

The table below adds the plan price (billed yearly) to the payment fees for each plan at three monthly revenue levels. It assumes a $100 average sale, so 10, 50 and 200 transactions a month, and that every member is one you brought in yourself (see Growth Boost below).

Hobby's $7.50 plan price is small next to its fees: at $5,000 a month, $515 of the $522.50 total is the 10% fee. Above about $1,050 a month in sales, Pro costs less than Hobby, and at $5,000 Hobby costs more than twice as much as Pro. At $5,000 Hobby also costs more than Kajabi Basic, even with Basic's $143 plan price. From $5,000 a month up, Skool Pro is the cheapest plan in the table.

Skool's Growth Boost is on by default. If Skool's own off-site ads bring you a paying member, Skool keeps 30% of that member's recurring payments for as long as they stay, on top of the normal fees. You can switch it off under Settings > Discovery.

Community features

Skool organizes discussions in one feed, sorted by categories so members can find the topics they care about. Members can message each other directly, see scheduled events on the group calendar and join live calls held inside Skool. Admins and moderators can approve new members and remove posts or comments.

Skool's points system is the main reason people choose it. Every like a member gets on a post or comment earns one point. Points move members through nine levels, monthly leaderboards rank the most active people, and owners can lock courses until a member reaches a set level. Because the leaderboard is visible to the whole group, members who want to climb it keep posting and replying.

Kajabi organizes a community into topic channels, with meetups, live events and challenges scheduled inside it. Channels can be limited to certain members. Moderation tools include post approval, hiding or locking conversations, and assigning moderators to individual channels.

Kajabi's gamification has more settings than Skool's. Members earn points, titles and badges for posting, commenting, completing lessons and quizzes, and attending events, and owners can offer real-world prizes. Still, the community is one part of a much larger product.

A Kajabi community can sit inside a course, or a course can sit inside a community. You can also use Offer Blocks to show other products to community members.

Courses and cohorts

Courses are central to Kajabi. On Growth and Pro you can build cohort courses, where a group of students starts on the same date and moves through the material on a set schedule, with live sessions along the way. Self-paced courses and coaching products are available on every plan. That makes Kajabi a better fit for businesses whose income comes mainly from the products rather than from community membership.

Skool's Classroom holds courses, guides, workout plans, templates and other resources for the group. Owners can open a course to everyone, lock it until a member reaches a set level, or restrict it to certain members. Skool has no cohort course type, so there is no built-in way to give a group of students a shared start date and schedule.

Lessons can hold videos, files such as PDFs and spreadsheets, links and transcripts. Skool hosts video directly and also takes links from YouTube, Vimeo, Loom and Wistia. Both platforms run live sessions natively: Skool through Skool Call, Kajabi through live events in the community and cohort courses.

Payments, offers and memberships

Kajabi Payments is the cheapest way to take payments on Kajabi. If you use a third-party processor where Kajabi Payments is available, you pay that processor's rate plus 2% on Basic, 1% on Growth or 0.5% on Pro.

Kajabi also gives you customizable checkout pages, upsells and abandoned-cart emails. Kajabi Sales Tax calculates and collects US sales tax, VAT and GST at checkout, but it does not file or pay the tax for you. You remain responsible for that.

Payouts can be daily, weekly or monthly, depending on what Kajabi makes available to your account, and more schedules can open up after your first sale. Funds can take up to seven business days to become available, whatever schedule you pick. Instant payouts are available for a service fee shown before you confirm.

Skool handles checkout and payments itself through Skool Payments, as the merchant of record. On Hobby the fee is 10% + 30¢ per transaction. Pro drops it to 2.9% + 30¢ for charges up to $899, and 3.9% + 30¢ for charges above $900. Those rates include card processing.

Skool adds EU VAT on top of your price and pays it to the tax authorities, and handles US sales tax too. Payouts go out every Wednesday in your local currency. The first one can take up to 14 days while Skool runs its checks.

Mobile app and branding

Skool's iOS and Android apps mirror the desktop feed. Members can post, comment, chat, check the calendar and work through courses, and owners can keep up with the feed and moderate from their phone. There is no branded app, and Skool communities live on skool.com rather than on your own domain.

Kajabi offers a customer app for members and a separate creator app for managing parts of your business, both on iOS and Android. In the customer app, members can browse and write posts, comment, react, search, send direct messages, take quizzes and play audio and video from their products.

Kajabi's branded app puts your business in the App Store and Google Play under your own name. It's included on Pro and costs $199 a month as an add-on to Basic or Growth. Kajabi also hosts your website on your own domain on every plan.

Where Skool wins. Where Kajabi wins

Skool beats Kajabi on community, simplicity and price:

• Community first. Members spend their time in the feed, and courses, events and points all live inside the group.
• Lower plan price. Hobby costs $9 a month against $179 for Kajabi Basic, or $7.50 and $143 billed yearly.
• A simpler setup. If you don't need a website, email marketing or a funnel builder, you don't pay for them.
• Member participation. Points, levels, leaderboards and level-locked courses give members a reason to post and come back.

Kajabi beats Skool on marketing, products and branding:

• Built-in marketing. Landing pages, funnels, email broadcasts, sequences and automations sit next to your courses and community.
• More product types. Courses, cohort courses, coaching, digital downloads, podcasts and memberships, all sold through Kajabi's checkout.
• Your own brand. Your own website and domain on every plan, and a branded app on Pro or as an add-on.
• Selling from first signup to purchase. Opt-in pages, email sequences, upsells and abandoned-cart emails all run in the same account.

The third option

Skool's community is active, but you can't put it on your own domain, run cohort courses or email your list from it. Kajabi has the selling tools, but its community is one menu among many. Some creators end up paying for Kajabi to sell and running their community on a separate app.

Heartbeat is built around the community itself. Members talk in thread, chat and voice channels, meet at events held in the community or on Zoom, and take courses together, including cohort courses where each cohort gets its own dates and its own member group. Badges and gamification, a custom domain and a member app for iOS and Android come with every plan, and on Scale the app can be your own branded app in the App Store and Google Play.

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Verdict by use case

Moving off either platform later means moving your courses yourself and leaving your community's posts behind, so decide based on what you expect to be selling a year from now.

A fast, cheap launch. Choose Skool. Hobby costs $7.50 a month billed yearly, and a Skool group needs no website, email setup or funnel before you open it. Once you pass about $1,050 a month in sales, switch to Pro, because the 10% fee costs more than Pro's plan price from there.

Courses, coaching and cohorts. Choose Kajabi. It has more tools for selling self-paced and cohort courses, coaching, webinars and digital products, with a community alongside.

A learning business led by its community. Choose Skool if members pay mainly for the discussions, events and each other, and courses are secondary.

A brand with its own website and email list. Choose Kajabi. You get a website, blog, landing pages, email campaigns, funnels and checkout in one account, plus a community.

If you already have a website and email tool, you may be paying Kajabi for things you don't use. And if you like Skool's engagement but want your own domain and app, look past both of them.

Frequently asked questions