Community is one of the best businesses out there. Communities bring people together to master something interesting, and along the way, you can add things like courses and events to keep your members engaged. Communities have the power to turn strangers into friends, and also create a successful business around recurring revenue.
So in this article, we’re going to talk about two different platform options for hosting your community. We’ll compare Mighty Networks vs. Skool, showing you what each one gives you and helping you decide which one is right for you.
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1. Mighty Networks vs. Skool: What are they?
Mighty Networks is a cultural software platform that lets you bring together content, courses, community, and commerce. As an all-in-one, Mighty gives you a powerful business engine and replaces a total tech stack to let you sell and host in the same place. You can divide content into Spaces, charging for each or bundling, and you can monetize with 135 different currencies or token-gating.
Skool was started by the internet figure, Sam Ovens, to be a platform for courses and coaching. It was designed to include a forum feature, a basic course platform, and a calendar device to help you schedule events. We’ll dive deeper into each of these options below.
2. Mighty Networks vs. Skool: Comparison chart
Feature | Mighty Networks | Skool |
|---|---|---|
Community Platform |  | |
Course Builder (LMS) | | |
Cohort Courses | |  |
AI Community Building | | |
Native Video Hosting | | |
Event Calendar | | |
Native Events | | |
Native Live Streaming | | |
Monetization Options | | |
Apps | | |
Starts From | $41/mo | $99/mo |
3. Mighty Networks vs. Skool: Comparison features
- Community platform
- Courses
- Events
- Monetization
- Apps & Access
4. Mighty Networks vs. Skool: Community platform
Mighty Networks
Like we said above, Mighty is an all-in-one community engine. It lets you create an amazing community centered around the things that matter to you and your members. Each Mighty Network has features like discussions, content creation, events, live streaming, and courses.
With the content, you can post hashtags, tag other members with an @, and report content if need be, not to mention adding emojis, links, attachments, videos, polls, and GIFs. Members can create profiles and you can message members – either 1:1 or in groups.
But Mighty is more than just one community. It lets you harness the power of cultural software to custom-build the community you want. And the building block of a great community is Spaces. On Mighty, each Space is totally customizable, and you can add features like courses, events, and discussions to your spaces as you see fit. The Spaces approach means that, in a larger community, you can create the intimacy of small groups. But it also means you can build dedicated subcommunities for courses, coaching, or special interests.
Finally, Mighty Co-Host™ is changing the game when it comes to community AI. Co-Host™ will also instantly generate an entire brand identity for you.
With the power of ChatGPT-4, it will build you:
- A Landing Page
- A Tagline
- Social Announcements
- Invitations
- A Welcome Post
- Starting Community Questions
Skool
Skool offers a basic community platform that’s built like a simple forum. It gives you the option to post content, adding links, attachments, videos, polls, and GIFs. Members can “like” posts and comment on them, or “watch” posts that are interesting to them. You can include categories for your posts, to help members organize them a bit, as well as “rules” that let you lay out the standards of behavior for the forum.
One interesting feature that we should mention is that there is some level of gamification to reward those who are active in your community with a “leaderboard.” You could, for example, unlock courses for those who reach a certain level. This is a neat feature but doesn’t make up for the limited features overall. Otherwise, the forum is pretty basic.
Skool doesn’t give you any way to organize or subdivide larger communities. It simply gives you a real-time list of posts.
5. Mighty Networks vs. Skool: Courses
Mighty Networks
Mighty gives you a lot of different ways to approach courses, with features like native video, dripping content, conversation after each lesson, and more. Because you have a ton of flexibility when creating course spaces, you could opt for different designs. So, for example, you might choose to try an asynchronous (pre-recorded) course, building it into our powerful LMS, adding everything you need there, and releasing it to the world. You might choose to add discussions and events to that course Space – even people going through a pre-recorded course need some accountability and encouragement.
OR, you might choose to forget pre-recording and create a totally live, cohort course. You can presell it with Mighty, then use our awesome native live streaming to deliver the course. And, don’t forget, you can add the recording for those who couldn’t make it live or want to watch it again. OR, of course, you can also chop up a live course video and create a structured asynchronous course.
There are so many options! But no matter what you decide, you have the flexibility to create and sell a course your members can access – you can even learn what works as you go!
Skool
School has a basic LMS platform built into it. It lets you build course modules and sub-lessons. You can add text to teach lessons, or you can embed a video hosted on a third party like YouTube or Vimeo. They’ve included a transcript box, and the option to toggle discussion or dripping content on individual lessons.
The course platform works okay for organizing content, but it’s very limited in terms of features and the UX isn’t great for trying to build a course. For example, the courses aren’t edited under the “classroom” tabs, to access the editor you have to go into the “settings” function. This isn’t a dealbreaker, but it makes it more difficult to edit your course.
Unlike with Mighty, you can’t teach a course live on Skool. It’s not a platform that would work for cohort courses – you’d have to live stream on other platforms and then create a course with links to the recordings in the settings section.
6. Mighty Networks vs. Skool: Events
Mighty Networks
The foundation of live events with Mighty is the built-in live streaming, which gives you a way to reach all your members – live streaming can be done AND watched from either a web app or from the iOS or Android Mighty Networks apps. You can even get a custom-built, white-label app and have branded live streaming. On top of native live streaming, Mighty also has a 1-click Zoom integration, meaning that you can connect your Zoom account and it automatically takes care of the scheduling for Zoom meetings or webinars.
Every Mighty Network comes with an events tab built in where you can schedule events, see what’s coming up, collect RSVPs from members, and send out event notifications (notifications are also built-in).
Skool
The Skool platform does let you schedule events and gives you an events calendar, but events aren’t native. It would work best for in-person meetups so you can add meeting details to each calendar entry. But otherwise, you just have to put all the event details in the “Discussion” section, which could include a link to live streaming or a meeting that’s hosted somewhere else. Any virtual event would need to take place on another platform since there are no native event or live streaming capabilities.
Once your event is scheduled, it lives on a “Calendar” tab in your Skool community. One good feature about events is that you can set it to automatically email members a reminder about an upcoming event or set an event to recurring. There are no RSVPs for events and no way to add member questions.
7. Mighty Networks vs. Skool: Monetization
Mighty Networks
Mighty Networks doesn’t just give you tools to create your community. You can also build a monetization machine with it – without having to resort to any third-party apps. With Mighty, you can create plans and bundles, selling access to community, Spaces, events, courses, or any combination of these. This makes it incredibly easy to build a business with recurring revenue.
You can also build landing pages for your community or for courses, which you can’t do with Skool. Add to this the fact that you can charge in 135 different currencies, OR let members pay with crypto or hold a community token, and Mighty gives you a ton of options to make your business successful.
Skool
The only way to monetize a community natively on Skool is to invite other paying users to Skool. Note that this doesn’t mean adding members to your community or charging for membership. It means referring paying users to start their own paid communities. This is Skool’s affiliate program – you can only get paid by signing up other Skool hosts to start their own communities.
Otherwise, there is no way to charge for anything. If you want to sell community or courses, you’d need to use a different platform to make the transactions.
8. Mighty Networks vs. Skool: Mobile app
Mighty Networks
Mighty comes with an amazing app for every device that does all the things that the web app does. That means courses, community, events – anything that happens in the individual Spaces – happens natively on the apps too.
Add to this that we also build totally custom, white-label apps for established brands with Mighty Pro. This means that you get your app in the app store, not ours. You can schedule a call with us to learn more.
Skool
Skool doesn’t have a mobile app and apparently doesn’t have any plans to develop one anytime soon.
Conclusion
Mighty Networks gives you a ton of features, everything you need to build a community, course and/or event business – and all in one place. Skool gives you a limited, basic course and community platform, with no options for monetization and no apps. But when you compare the cost, Mighty starts from $41/mo. Skool starts from $99/mo. That means Skool actually costs much more and you get less features.
Mighty is the cultural software that will build you the community you’ve been dreaming about, and actually help you earn with it. And you can try it for yourself, totally free for 14 days – no credit card required.
