I’ll be honest with you.

When I first heard about Skool back in 2023, I was skeptical.

Another community platform? Really?

But then I started noticing something interesting. It’s growing exponentially!

Then Alex Hormozi made his biggest investment ever into Skool.

That got my attention.

So I decided to actually test it myself.

👉 Skool’s growth and hype are real, but some features are still basic compared to full-fledged course platforms – so don’t expect an all‑in‑one platform here!

Features	Skool
Type	Community platform
Pricing	$9/mo
Does it offer a trial?	Yes. It has a 14 days trial
Competitors	Circle, Mighty Networks, Kajabi

Overview

Skool was founded by Sam Ovens in 2019.

Before it, he founded consulting.com to help consultants and coaches up their game.

However, Sam noticed a lack of solid community-building tools in the market. There were Facebook groups and other platforms like Kajabi at that time, but they were not focused on community building.

Now, Sam is full-time into Skool!

I was truly prompted to use Skool when I saw their really good exponential growth rate, which even surpassed more established tools like Circle.

Also recently, Alex Hormozi invested in Skool,stating it was the biggest investment of his life.

Upon closer inspection of the platform, I noticed Sam Ovens implementingnumerous growth flywheels and other mental models, such asnetwork effects and feedback loops, to elevate the platform to the next level.

With online community-centric learning*becoming the next big thing*and academic education declining, I’ve developed a lot of conviction in the platform due to the direction and positioning of the Skool.

👍 I’ve been observing the Skool’s growth for the last 1.5 years and finally started using it more recently. I am using the platform to host my community on how to build systems using Notion – called “Notion Growth Builders”.

Quick decision – Skool Review

👍 What do I like about Skool

• Intuitive interface: The interface is clean and easy to navigate. Your members will engage more because they feel comfortable from day one.
• Discovery feature: Skool has a community discovery feature (like Facebook’s search) that helps you find communities and generate organic leads. I’ve found some great communities to join this way.
• Gamification: You have engagement-boosting features like points, levels, leaderboards, and streaks based on which people can level up and get perks. All with the focus on increasing engagement.
• Unlimited live streaming: Even on the $9/month plan, you get unlimited live streaming for webinars and events.
• Course creation: Create courses with drip functionality and unlock them based on member levels. Also it has built-in video hosting with automatic captions, timestamps, playback speed controls, HD quality, and thumbnail picker on mobile and desktop.
• Calendar: Schedule events and restrict access to specific member levels.
• Mobile apps: Feature-packed iOS and Android apps for learning and interaction on the go, including video recording and uploading.

👎 What I don’t like about Skool

• Limited course features: Missing advanced features like quizzes, certificates, and detailed student progress tracking.
• No marketing features: Lacks checkout customization, order bumps, and upsells.
• No automation: Missing automation workflows for triggers and actions.
• Limited integrations: Doesn’t integrate natively with popular platforms. You’ll need Zapier.

Considering the hype that the Skool has got quite recently, the above downsides are quite big.

However, the platform’s popularity, which can help you grow, and also its gamification features are significant advantages worth considering.

Explore Skool

Upfront bottom line✨

Skool is your best bet if community engagement is your main priority. Sam Ovens built a platform that generates 2-3x higher engagement than competitors like Circle or Mighty Networks. The intuitive interface and gamification features make a real difference.

I believe Skool is the “ClickFunnels moment” for online communities.

Choose Skool if you’re building a coaching or mastermind-style community where engagement matters more than complex course features. It’s perfect for simple course delivery with gamification and member retention at just $9/month.

Don’t expect a lot of advanced features.

In that aspect it’s overhyped.

If you need advanced course tools (quizzes, certificates, detailed tracking), sophisticated marketing funnels, or extensive integrations beyond Zapier – Skip it.

You can also consider Circle for more course depth and customization, or Kajabi for an all-in-one platform with marketing automation and sales funnels.

The platform is still evolving, but its core strength in driving real community growth and engagement is already best-in-class.

👉 My views on Skool’s future features: The entire platform is built around Sam Ovens’ coaching framework, so we can expect more features like challenges, the ability to track habits for community members, and accountability mechanisms for getting results. Overall, the focus on driving real transformations to the community members.

Community – Skool review

User interface

Skool’s user interface is very minimal and intuitive. There is not a lot of clutter.

There are 6 different tabs available:

• Community: Engage with members.
• Classroom: Access all your courses.
• Calendar: Stay updated on upcoming events or webinars.
• Directory: Find and connect with other community members.
• Leaderboards: Showcases highly engaging members.
• About: Provides a brief highlight about the community you are browsing.

These tabs are themed around the five essential aspects of every community: engagement, learning, events, connect, and gamification.

Additionally, discussions within a community can be organized into different topics or channels.

👍 Personally, I and many others found that Skool’s community engagement rates are higher, mainly due to their intuitive interface, unlike platforms like Circle. Which is the ONE THING that makes/breaks your community, and they’ve nailed it.

Among all the filtering and sorting mechanisms, one feature that I really appreciate is the ability to sort content by “Best (this week)”. Helps a lot for irregular members.

👉 Bottomline: Overall, Skool’s interface is really minimal. Whenever new people join your community, they instantly understand the community and it’s organization without thinking much.

Adding members to the community

1. Invite via email: Manually enroll members by email address.
2. Invitation link: Share a link for quick access.
3. Import CSV: Upload member lists from other platforms.
4. Zapier integration: Auto-add members when they purchase (I use Thrivecart).

👎 As of now, when it comes to importing CSV files, only one column of email addresses is accepted. I really hope that they allow us to specify to which course the email address belongs, so that the CSV import process would be more streamlined.

Creating community content

Skool has a simple content editor that offers several features, such as including links, conducting polls, uploading native videos, and embedding external videos.

Their post editor not only has the ability to write content, but also includes attachments, links, native video uploads, and even conducts polls.

You can also upload videos directly to DMs and add them to your about page.

👎 However, the major downside is that their text editor is not a rich editor. This means you can’t bold or italicize text. To circumvent this limitation, people are using Unicode bold and italic tools, like this one here, to make long-form content more readable.

Community gamification

Skool is a gamification-centric platform where members level up by earning points through engagement, and unlock perks.

It’s through interaction with other members’ posts.

1 like = 1 point.

You can also set the courses or products that your community members can unlock as they further engage in the community.

Skool offers the best in class gamification features.

You can see when people reach level 2 and level 3 they will be unlocked in many more products.

Let’s consider the “Synthesizer School” community.

For members at levels 3 & 4, they are offering free weekly accountability calls and Synthesizer profile templates.

Here’s an interesting feature.

As a community owner, you can only set the Chat to be unlocked at a certain level (Say Level 2!)

This helps a ton of avoid spam!

Community member profiles

Skool’s member profile feels like you are viewing an Instagram profile.

You will get data like:

• Member level.
• When they joined.
• Last active time.
• Course completion percentage.
• The number of contributions, followers, and following (with list).

With this, you will already have a lot of context when initiating conversations with any of the community members. Really useful!

And also Skool does the job of community engagement, more habit forming.

Streaks!

There is a unique daily activity chart available in Skool.

💝 I’m recently considering incentivizing people to regularly contribute in my community by rewarding consistent streak holders with some custom t-shirts (which they would feel proud to wear), gift vouchers, or whatnot.

Live streaming, calendar and events

Skool has rolled out a native live streaming functionality that’s now available in their $9/month plan (surprisingly!) and it’s genuinely good.

You can schedule this right from the native calendar feature.

The cool part?

You can now schedule live streams directly through this calendar.

The live streaming feature is surprisingly similar to Google Meet with camera background effects (which is quite distorty than Google Meet, no big deal though!) and all the essential functionalities you’d expect.

They’ve even included a random hangout option for spontaneous live sessions.

The basics are all there like:

• Call recording (for replays)
• Add or remove people during calls
• Disable audio for participants
• Host leaving option – you can actually leave the call but let the live hangout continue among members

This level of functionality makes sense coming from Sam Ovens, who has a solid background in real-life webinar marketing.

And also.

The Skool live streaming can’t 👎:

• Create one-to-one individual private sessions
• Integrate with Calendly (at least not yet)

If you already have a Zoom subscription, Skool’s live streaming isn’t a complete replacement. But for community warm-ups and regular group sessions, it works really well!

But be aware of bandwidth issues you may run into when using advanced features like background replacer.

Online courses – Skool review

Course structuring and uploading

Skool is a platform centered around community and course creation.

While it may not have the extensive features of dedicated course creation platforms, it offers a host of unique capabilities that cater to most users’ needs.

Courses are structured using folders and pages.

Skool calls lessons “pages” – likely because they plan to add interactive elements beyond just videos in the future.

Skool supports native video hosting with impressive features including automatic captions, timestamps, playback speed controls, HD quality up to full resolution, and a thumbnail picker. This works on both the $9 Hobby plan and $99 Pro plan, with a file size limit of 30GB.

You can also embed videos from external hosting solutions if preferred.

For each of the pages, you can add descriptions, action items (for proactive learning), lesson transcripts, and also start or pin/map a lesson-specific discussion thread to a course’s lesson page.

Course access

Here are the different course access levels in Skool:

• All Members: When people join the community, they get instant access to basic courses (like my Notion Starter course and LifeOS video series)
• Level-Based: Some content (like free templates and Core AI prompt library) requires members to interact and level up in the community to unlock
• Buy Now: Members can purchase direct access to specific courses within the community platform
• Private: Restricted access for courses sold through external platforms like ThriveCart, requiring manual or automated enrollment

And also if they need access to my course on Life Blueprint Design, then they need to pay a one-off fee of $97.

Course player (student experience)

Refer to the screenshot below to see how the course (classroom) looks on the front end.

The interface has a clean and neat UI.

👉 Students don’t have the ability to leave standalone comments below the lessons. Instead, you need to assign various threads (pre-existing) related to the course lessons so that users can engage in them. This also keeps old threads evergreen.

Now, let’s talk about course completion.

Also, as students go through the training course and mark the lessons as done, the course completion percentage progress bar will progress.

To sum it up:

Here are the key features of Skool courses:

• Structured course creation with folders and pages
• Flexible course access settings (all members, level-based, or purchase-based)
• Course completion tracking with progress display on user profiles
• Integration of discussion threads with specific lessons
• Clean, intuitive course player interface for students

👉 Other than these features, Skool doesn’t come with other course compliance, assessment, and course certification features.

Design, customization, and landing pages

Compared to other platforms, Skool provides limited customization options for your community.

You can make minor changes like adding thumbnails and logos for personalization.

However, Skool lacks multiple theme choices and does not allow the use of custom CSS code to make your community distinct from others hosted on the platform.

Additionally, Skool does not support the custom domains feature, so all your communities will be hosted under Skool’s subdomain as www.skool.com/[community-name]/.

👍 Skool deliberately keeps design options simple to give users a familiar experience across different communities. Just like Facebook groups, this consistent design helps people feel comfortable navigating any Skool community they join.

For landing pages, you’ll need an external platform likeThriveCart,Kajabi, or Elementor with WordPress for checkout control.

Skool doesn’t offer full landing page functionality. But it gives you enough flexibility to add your branding and let “Skool” (as a brand) do the heavy lifting.

The good news?

According to user experiences, Skool’s community about page converts surprisingly well with cold Facebook ads.

Integrations

Skool does not have any native integrations.

But they provide Zapier and Webhooks to integrate with 1000s of tools and services.

Here are some of the workflows you can create with Zapier + Skool.

• Ask for members’ emails (in membership questions) and directly add them to your CRM.
• Grant access to a member who bought a product on ThriveCart.

You may think that you rely on Zapier for everything, right?

But luckily Skool has webhooks support. 🙌

For example, if you use Thrivecart as your payment solution, its webhooks can automatically add students to Skool upon checkout, eliminating the need for Zapier.

Mobile apps

As I told you, Skool comes with apps for both iOS and Android. They are feature-rich!

The great thing about these apps is that they give you the ability to send push notifications to all your members, further increasing community engagement.

Skool pricing and support

Skool offers 2 simple pricing plans.

The Hobby plan costs just $9/mo and includes almost everything you need.

But there’s a catch – it comes with a 10% transaction fee and you can have exactly one admin account. No extra admins, moderators, or team members for management.

Do you need more than 1 admin as you scale with a team?

Want your own custom URL?

Looking to hide those suggested communities?

Then go for the Pro plan at $99/mo which has a much lower transaction fee of only 2.9%.

And when it comes to support, you can either email them or post in their public community.

My thoughts on Skool Games

I’ve covered the platform thoroughly above, but Skool Games is worth a quick mention since it’s such a big part of the conversation.

Look, if you’re in the community space, you’ve heard about Skool Games.

It’s Alex Hormozi’s monthly competition where builders compete for cash prizes and mentorship. Winners get over $30K plus a Vegas trip with Alex.

Is it worth it?

If you’re an established creator planning to build anyway – yes.

If you’re a beginner without an audience, hey be realistic. Most winners already have 50K+ email lists.

The real benefit isn’t the prizes.

It’s the deadline forcing you to launch instead of planning forever. It makes sense to use it as motivation, but build for long-term growth, not contests.

Skool vs Competitors

• Skool vs Circle: Look, I’ve used both and Skool just gets way better engagement. We’re talking 2-3x higher rates because of that gamification magic. Plus at $9/mo vs Circle’s $89/mo, it’s a no-brainer for your wallet. Circle has more course bells and whistles (even their marketing hub addon), but honestly, most people don’t need all that complexity when starting out as a beginner.
• Skool vs Mighty Networks: Mighty Networks feels clunky after using Skool’s clean interface. Sure, Mighty has more course features and white labeling, but most creators don’t need all that overhead. Skool’s simplicity is actually its superpower – people can focus on building community instead of wrestling with complicated features.
• Skool vs Kajabi: Kajabi is the Swiss Army knife – it does everything but costs a fortune. Skool is laser-focused on community and does it incredibly well for $9/mo vs Kajabi’s $89/mo starting price (you end up going with atleast their $179/mo plan). If you want marketing funnels and specialized course features, go Kajabi. If you want an engaged community that actually talks to each other, choose Skool.
• Skool vs Whop: Whop is great if you’re already living in Discord – the integration is seamless. But here’s the thing: Skool builds real communities while Whop feels more like a fancy storefront. Skool’s gamification beats Whop hands down for keeping people engaged long-term.
• Skool vs Discord: Discord is pure chaos – great for gaming but terrible for structured learning. On the other hand, Skool gives you organization, built-in payments, and actual course features. Discord is free but you get what you pay for. For serious business communities, Skool wins every time.

FAQs on Skool

1. Who is behind Skool? Skool was founded by Sam Ovens, who also established and is the CEO of Consulting.com. This platform aids individuals in launching their consulting businesses.
2. Who is Sam Ovens? Sam Ovens is an entrepreneur hailing from New Zealand. He founded Consulting.com and also SnapInspect.
3. What is The Skool Games? School Games is a competition launched by Alex Hormozi, where you receive detailed guidance on how to build a profitable community. The top 10 participants are selected every month and they get a chance to spend a day with Alex in Las Vegas.
4. Is Skool worth purchasing? Absolutely. Skool possesses excellent community features, particularly for gamification. All these features are accessible for just $9/mo.
5. Does Skool offer any trials? Yes, indeed. Skool provides a 14-day free trial, allowing you to experience the tool firsthand.

Wrap up

After using and reviewing Skool, I’m really optimistic about Skool’s future, especially given it’s a brainchild of Sam Ovens, someone I genuinely respect.

Having following him for 3-4 years, I can tell that his focus is not just on the features, but on driving real results for the people who use the product, so that they spread the word, thus feeding the product’s growth loop.

They are not aiming to be a Swiss Army knife of community building, but their motto is to nail the basics and focus on improving the KPI’s necessary for community owners’ success.

Skool does offer some fantastic features, like promoting community engagement and gamification. Also, it presents an intuitive user interface and user experience.

However, I am waiting for them to implement better course features and also integrations with various email marketing and shopping cart solutions.

Because as of now, you need to use Zapier only.

That wraps up my review on Skool!