If you’re planning to build a business around courses and/or community, you might have come across the platform Skool. Maybe you were invited by a friend wanting to earn from Skool’s affiliate program, or maybe you saw a social media ad. Or maybe you’ve already tried Skool and learned the hard way that it’s missing a lot of the features of a proper community platform.
In this article, we’ll talk about what Skool is and the issues many users report with it. Then we’ll share 9 Skool alternatives.
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What is Skool?
Skool is a basic community forum that was started by the internet figure Sam Ovens. They’ve recently launched ads with influencer Alex Hormozi–who partially owns the platform.
Skool’s features center on a search base with discoverable communities, forum conversations, live events, and a basic course platform. For content options, Skool lets you post, add videos, links, polls, or GIFs. It’s got “likes” or “watch” features to upvote or follow interesting posts.
Skool has some gamification features to encourage members to engage–by climbing them up levels as they do. It also has an affiliate program, so users earn from signing up new potential community hosts.
Why look for a Skool alternative?
- The Skool platform is extremely basic. Virtually every community platform on the market contains a ton of features Skool doesn’t have.
- There’s no way to subdivide conversations or grow larger communities. Even the biggest groups on Skool just shows running post list. There’s no content discovery or organization.
- The course UX is unintuitive and the builder is unhelpful–you need to go through the “Settings” features to build a course and it feels more like an admin function than a central feature.
- You can’t teach a live course and there aren’t native live events. The events calendar lets you schedule meetups, but any actual event needs to be hosted on another platform.
- Users earn from inviting new Hosts onto the platform (and getting them to pay). By joining, you might be giving a kick-back to the person who invited you, but that doesn’t mean you’ll have what you need to launch a successful community business.
- The app is glitchy, with users reporting problems accessing courses and content.
The bottom line, Skool just doesn’t measure up to a modern community platform. It’s clunky, missing features, and awkward to use. Most communities would be better served with one of the options below.
Best Skool alternatives
1. Mighty Networks
Best community and course business platform
Mighty Networks is G2’s top-ranked community platform, bringing together communities, courses, and live events in a way that lets you earn.
Here’s how this works in practice.
Communities:
- A community feature set with a customized activity feed, every kind of short and long-form content you could want, member profiles, chat, forums, messaging, polls, and more.
- Built-in community AI, with Mighty Co-Host™– it automates without killing your creativity: think auto profiles, connecting you to similar members, helping you know what to say, and generating questions.
- Sell memberships, packages, coaching, masterminds, and courses and build bundles, choosing from 135 different currencies, or even monetizing with token-gating.
Courses:
- An intuitive and powerful LMS with awesome UX that makes building a course simple–add in all kinds of content, discussions on each module, and customize the feel.
- Teach live with native livestreaming, including discussion and multi-speaker view.
- Flexible course spaces that can hold discussions, member profiles, live events w/ RSVP, assignments, and more
Mighty makes it possible to build and scale a community or course business in a way that you can’t on Skool. Add in awesome native apps for every device or even branded apps with Mighty Pro AND a built-in ConvertKit integration and you’ve got a community platform like no other.
2. Discord
Best free community builder
If you’re looking for a free alternative to Skool for building a free community, Discord is a great option. It has a forum engine that’s way more powerful and better-developed than Skool’s, with a simpler UI.
Discord is good for organizing large discussions with a feature set that includes hashtags and channels (including voice channels), GIFs, stickers, and a bunch of other short and long-form content options.
Discord also has video streaming and events in a way that Skool doesn’t. It was built for gamers, so it comes with a solid integration set for screen-sharing for shared watching or gaming.
If you’re monetizing a community, Discord gets a bit tricky–it’s not really built for memberships–and definitely doesn’t do courses. You can apply for a partner program and–if accepted–you can sell memberships (from which Discord takes a 10% cut). But Discord isn’t the right choice for a paid community.
However, if you’re running a free community and want a free-but-powerful alternative to Skool, Discord is a good choice.
3. Kajabi
Best course marketing platform
We mentioned Skool’s weaknesses with courses above, and Kajabi is another good alternative for course-specific needs.
Course platform
Kajabi has a really good course platform (LMS) for pre-recorded courses. It comes with lots of tools for building an engaging course, including content options and templates, assignments and quizzes, and dripping content.
Marketing funnels
This is where Kajabi really excels. Users can create and customize landing pages, choose from different funnels and opt-in templates and presets.
Community
Kajabi isn’t as strong on community. For a long time Kajabi simply had a basic discussion forum. They recently acquired a platform called Vibely and launched Community 2.0, which gives chat rooms, video calling, and some other community features. But it exists on a separate platform, requiring a separate log-on and separate app. This can be a bit annoying for UX.
4. Bettermode
Forums for businesses
Bettermode is a white-label community platform built for businesses that want to add customer or brand communities to their websites. It creates a discussion space that can be organized into relevant spaces and members can post content. There’s also a useful “explore” option to help find interesting content.
Like Mighty, Bettermode can be white-labeled (including the community app), with a custom domain and website builder. And it has useful membership management features that help you connect users by common interests, locations, etc.
The downside to Bettermode as a Skool alternative is that it doesn’t have course functions or live events–it’s focused on being a community forum builder.
5. Geneva
Free chat software
For creating a community with a small group of friends, Geneva is a good, free chat app. It has features like forums, chat rooms, video and audio-only rooms–creating options for all different kinds of conversations. If you’re someone who likes writing long-form articles and blog posts, it can do that too.
Geneva can handle virtual events well, too, with RSVP and notifications when a virtual event is starting. And with video calling, it can do 1:1 or group video events.
Geneva would be a good Skool alternative for a small, free community–with no courses. It doesn’t have monetization features, so it’s not the right place to build a community business.
6. Discourse
Closest 1:1 Skool community alternative
If you’re looking for a platform that looks a lot like Skool, Discourse is an option. It has a really basic interface that looks like Skool crossed with reddit, with a scrolling list of posts to organize the action. Like Skool, Discourse shows you a scrolling list of the most recent posts with info on who has posted and how popular the posts are. It also has a simple search function so you can find posts.
Discourse is based on open-source software that’s hosted on GitHub–if you have some programming chops you could technically build it yourself. Most people need to choose a hosted option though–paying Discourse for hosting–which can get pricey.
The downside is that Discourse has some of the same problems that Skool has. It’s extremely dated and basic, missing the engagement features and tools of a modern community platform.
7. Slack
Slack is technically a workplace platform, but some people are choosing to retool it as a community platform–and it has some of the features that make it work. Like Skool, it can host conversations and community activities, but it’s way more powerful–with built-in threads, DMs, mentions, etc. plus integrated file sharing and uploads.
While it doesn’t really have events, Slack does have huddles which work for small groups and 1:1 video and audio conversations.
Slack is familiar, since a lot of people already use it for work. It’s missing some of the complexity of a community platform: for example:
- It has super basic member profiles–work colleagues don’t need to get to know each other the same way community members do.
- It doesn’t have monetization features at all since it’s built for the office.
- Slack doesn’t really do native video or long-form content.
- It gets very expensive if you grow beyond the free plan. It starts from $8.75/mo per user as you grow.
8. Disciple
Disciple is a Skool alternative that comes with community-building features that let you share content. It has activity feeds, Q&As, discussion forums, and the capacity for video, text, and image-based content. And the member-management features are good too, much better than Skool’s–manage subscriptions, host and plan events, and deal with member communications. You can gate content behind a paywall and bundle different benefits too, allowing you to scale a community business.
Like Mighty, it also comes with branded mobile apps so that your community can be deployed on your own brand.
9. Reddit
Finally, reddit is an option for a Skool alternative. Reddit’s features are closer to Skool’s than any community platform, a running conversation. Reddit has the benefit of being much more widely used–communities on reddit can access millions of users. And it has a way to discover communities much like Skool. And if you’re running a free community, it’s probably easier to get people there than on Skool.
The content options are better, with up- and down- voting, and it has more structure for reading text-based content.
The downsides of reddit are that, as a social media platform, monetization is trickier than a dedicated community platform.
Ready to start?
The best Skool alternative is one that actually lets you build a course and community business, without the glitches and issues.
If you’re looking for an awesome platform, come build with Mighty! Here are some of the incredible results we’ve seen:
- An entrepreneur community that made over $30,000 in a 2-week launch.
- An author & speaker’s 4-week promotion led to an extra $30,000 in revenue.
- A podcaster and author sold 5,000 seats to a $997 course in 10 days to existing members.
- A community added $100k in revenue with a 13-week add-on course.
Mighty gives you the tools to build a powerful community business. Try it free for 14 days!
