Do you want a community-first platform?
Do you also want to offer courses as part of the subscription?
Then narrow it down to Skool and Circle.
Neither of these platforms will disappoint you.
As an instructional designer and a community builder myself, I’ve used both Skool and Circle.so extensively.
I’ve been comparing them, testing them, and putting them through their paces.
In this post, I’ll be sharing a detailed comparison of Skool and Circle.so.
I’ve got the inside scoop here.
It’s Circle vs Skool!
Let’s dive in.
Overview
Circle is a community-centric platform that was launched in 2019 by Sid Yadav, Teachable’s first designer. The platform is also backed by Ankur Nagpal, the founder of Teachable.
Recently, Circle has been gaining attention in the community space and consistently raising capital from various VC firms. It is currently valued at $200 million.
I have been trying out Circle for the past two years and I must say that the speed of feature implementation, emphasis on automation and integrations, and their alignment with new-age startups like Notion and Slack are commendable.
On the other hand, Skool is a platform founded by Sam Ovens in 2019. It remained in beta mode for 3 years, only available to a select group of users. It was publicly launched in 2022.
I have been following Sam Oven’s work for the past 3 to 4 years and I truly appreciate what he is doing.
I have high conviction in his vision and mission, and that’s why I decided to use it, to begin with.
Through his company consulting.com, he has successfully trained many struggling trainers and consultants to scale their revenue to seven or even 8-figures using his proven system.
One area where Skool stands out is its strategically designed gamification features, which takes tribe building to the next level.
| Features | Skool | Circle |
| Starting price | Only one plan $99/mo | $49/mo (without courses and live streaming) |
| Trial | It provides 14-day free trial | It provides 14-day free trial |
| Any discount available? | No | Save $10/month on a Pro annual subscription |
| Course features | Yes | Yes. Quite better. |
| Mobile apps | Both iOS and Android | Both iOS and Android. More features. |
| Explore more | Explore Skool | Explore Circle |
Quick decision
What do we like about Skool over Circle.so 👍?
- Founded by a community-fanatic: A community platform built by Sam Ovens, who created and sold Consulting.com, a multi-million dollar platform for entrepreneurs. He is now fully committed to Skool. He is big on communities.
- Discover feature: Skool offers a ‘discover’ feature that allows users to explore and join various communities. This feature could potentially drive significant traffic to your community, similar to organic group leads you get on Facebook.
- Gamification: Skool excels in gamification, offering leaderboards, level hierarchies, points, daily activity tracking, rewards, and more. Circle.so lacks these features.
- Rich member Profiles: Skool offers comprehensive member profiles with customization options, level they’re in, and social media links. Circle’s profiles are basic, displaying only name, designation, and tags.
- Integrated Calendar: Skool has an integrated calendar feature that syncs with Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, Yahoo Calendar, Outlook, and more. This provides members with an overview of upcoming programs. On the other hand, Circle.so just integrates with Google Calendar.
What do we like about Circle.so over Skool 👍?
- Backed by Teachable’s founder brains: As I told you, Circle is backed by the initial founders of Teachable, Sid Yadav and Ankur Nagpal, and they will be implementing all their course platform building experience in Circle.
- Built-in video hosting: Circle includes built-in video hosting, although storage limits depend on the pricing plan. Skool, on the other hand, does not have built-in video hosting and requires the use of external tools like Vimeo or Wistia.
- Native live streaming: Circle offers native live streaming capabilities, allowing you to conduct group coaching calls, webinars, masterclasses, and events. It has also recently introduced live spaces, similar to Twitter. Skool does not have native live streaming.
- Effective community moderation: Circle has features like keyword blocklists and flagging comments & posts, which are helpful in preventing spam in large/public communities. Skool, however, lacks these moderation features.
- Marketing tools for sales: Circle offers coupons, discounts, trials, and upsells, which can help you increase sales. Skool currently does not support these marketing features, although they may introduce them in the future.
- Automation Workflows: Circle comes with an automation engine, which lets you automate tasks in your community using triggers and actions. It’s like having Zapier within Circle. This automation saves time by automating repetitive tasks such as sending welcome messages, scheduling reminders, and triggering actions based on member behavior.
Common downsides 👎
- Lack of specialist course features: Both Skool and Circle lack course compliance features, video analytics reports, and course completion certificates.
- Lack of funnels and email marketing: Unlike tools like Kajabi or ClickFunnels, both Skool and Circle lack funnels, automation, and email marketing features. For this, you may need to check out their native integrations and use tools like Zapier.
Upfront bottomline 🎈
Skool, though a relative newcomer, has shown impressive growth. It was founded by Sam Ovens, who brings a wealth of knowledge in community building, and is recently backed by Alex Hormozi, a go-to figure for digital marketers.
In fact, I personally faced a dilemma about whether to use Skool or Circle. I decided to go with Skool as it’s backed by the world’s two best marketers.
On the other hand, Circle is backed by the founding team of Teachable, known for their strength in development and the ability to roll out highly customizable features.
At the end of the day, the choice comes down to this: Would you rather invest in founders who excel at marketing their product, like Skool? Or would you prefer founders with a strong development team, like Circle?
While Skool has gained popularity due to its exceptional marketing, Circle is a more robust platform, also catering to corporate clients.
Community organization
When you first join a Skool community as a member, you immediately feel at home.
There are six different tabs available to you.
- Community: Engage with members
- Classroom: Access all your courses.
- Calendar: Stay updated on upcoming events or webinars.
- Members directory: Find and connect with other community members.
- Leaderboards: Showcases highly engaging members.
- About: Provides a brief highlight about the community you are browsing.
👉 Based on my experience and that of countless others, Skool has excellent user engagement (compared to Circle), primarily due to its incredibly easy and intuitive user interface. This enhances community engagement, a critical factor that can make or break your community.
And I also really liked how the different topics or channels are presented right underneath the “Write something” section without a lot of clutter.
Now, to Circle.
It allows you to create multiple spaces of different types, such as posts, events, chat, and courses.
All the groups and spaces are displayed in the sidebar, which can make it overwhelming for new members!
Without a clear course community structure, your sidebar may become cluttered as your course scales up.
Recently, a feature called “Topics” was introduced, allowing for the creation of multiple topics within each space. This could potentially reduce clutter, although the interface could be optimized for better user experience.
🏆 Winner: Skool. Members feel right at home, increasing engagement!
Community post creation
Now, let’s review the different options that each of these platforms provides for creating content in the community.
Circle has a blog-based editor, similar to Notion, which allows you to create content, which I miss in Skool (so much!) as a Notion fanboy.
Overall, Circle’s editor encourages community members to create long-form content.
Also, they have recently rolled out AI co-pilot functionality to help people make use of AI for brainstorming the ideas and how they can contribute in community.
But is this feature really necessary?
Because people want authenticity and it may interfere with the content in the community.
On the other hand, Skool has a straightforward content editor that allows you to include links, YouTube videos, conduct polls, GIFs, and more.
When creating a post in the community, you can also select a specific space or category to keep the conversations organized.
Also, I don’t foresee an AI-enhanced content editor from Skool in the near future. Having followed Sam Ovens’ principles for the last couple of years, I’m confident that he will only implement AI for purposeful needs, not just fancy it.
🏆 Winner: Circle, feature-rich editor.
Online courses 📚
Both these platforms have native course features.
Skool calls courses as classrooms.
Its course curriculum consists of Folders and Pages.
Skool supports the following for lesson content:
- Text
- Audio/video
- Link embeds
- Files
👎 One major downside with Skool is it lacks inbuilt video hosting; so you have to use third-party services like Vimeo/Wistia/Bunny.net. But it’s coming up soon!
On the other hand:
Circle’s course curriculum consists of sections and lessons inside it.
When it comes to course content types, Circle supports:
- Text
- Audio/video
- Embed codes
Similar to Skool, Circle also doesn’t come with quizzes and assessment features.
Compared to any other dedicated course platforms, both Skool and Circle are lacking many features like assessments, quizzess, course compliance, etc.
If you are more concerned about students’ course completion rates and need more advanced LMS-centric features, I suggest you host courses on tools like Teachable.
🏆 Winner: Tie. But in the near future, I have high conviction with Circle when it comes to advanced LMS features.
Gamification in community
Skool has points, levels, and leaderboards.
Users earn points when other members like their posts or comments. 1 like=1 point. On the member’s profile, it displays the number of points required to reach the next level.
To encourage members to reach higher levels, you can add reward systems.
This means:
- You can offer courses free for all members who reach level 3.
- For level 4 members, you can provide 30 mins free coaching calls.
- For level 2, you can unlock product blueprints.
- Etc.
Apart from unlocking courses, you can also unlock them access to various community events. That will be displayed in the community calendar.
For gamification, Skool would be the best choice.
When creating courses, you can set a course to be unlocked only when the member accumulates a specific number of points and levels up.
👉 This type of gamification is lacking in Circle.
However see this:
In Circle, you can use the Automation Workflows feature to assign tags to members based on their behaviors. You can transform these tags into badges by adding emojis.
Circle also provides an activity score that is assigned based on members’ presence, contribution, participation, and connections.
These scores are assigned based important engagement factors, which are benchmarked against the activity data of the members in other communities within Circle.
This metric is highly valuable for evaluating the quality of community members.
🏆 Winner: Skool
Member directories and profiles
Both of these platforms have a dedicated member directory where you can search and filter the members in your community to network.
When displaying a user profile, you can see their current level, how many points they need to level up, and how many courses they have completed, among other things.
Personally, I found it more human and it add some really good human element to your community!
You also have the ability to follow user profiles and chat with them based on your own level.
When it comes to Circle, you also have member directory.
Circle provides various search filters, such as location, headline, biography, and assigned tags (based on automation triggers).
Each user profile displays the headline, biography, location, and assigned tags. It also shows a user’s posts, comments, and the spaces they are part of.
🏆 Winner: Skool. It’s more human.
Community customization options 🎨
When it comes to customizing your community, both Skool and Circle offer different options.
Circle provides more flexibility and customization features compared to Skool.
Circle offers a vast array of customization options.
You have the ability to select from a variety of color themes, enable dark mode (in higher plans), and customize native themes.
It also allows you to host your community under your own custom domain and subdomain, thereby enhancing your brand’s visibility.
On the contrary, Skool provides limited customization options. Your personalization options are restricted to adding thumbnails and logos.
Furthermore, it doesn’t offer custom domains. As a result, all the community groups you create on Skool are hosted under the URL www.skool.com/[community-name]/.
👉 Skool’s lack of custom domain support is really an advantage(atleast for me). Because, Skool is rapidly growing and potentially becoming a go-to brand, having the Skool brand name in the URL could benefit from the familiarity effect.
🏆 Winner: Circle
Automation workflows
Skool entirely relies on Zapier integration to even accomplish certain automations inside the platform.
👉 I really want them to integrate with other platforms like Make.com
However, with Circle, their highest plan offers automation workflows functionality.
This enables you to set triggers and actions for performing various automations directly within your community.
This eliminates the need to heavily rely on external tools like Zapier.
For example, you can:
- For the top performers, you can offer a discount coupon for purchasing other products in your store.
- Upon course completion, you can provide free access to membership content.
- For inactive members, you can send customized email sequences to re-engage them.
- Add tags to people who interact effectively within the community.
Of course, along with that, they have integration with Zapier as well.
🏆 Winner: Circle
Sales and marketing features
To increase sales, Circle.so has features like coupons, discounts, trials, and upsells.
Skool, as of now, lacks these features.
But both lacks marketing features like sales funnels and email marketing
🏆 Winner: Circle. It has generous marketing features like coupons, discounts, trials, and upsells. Skool lacks these marketing features. But they are actively working on them!
Integrations
Neither of these tools has any native integrations.
However, both tools offer only Zapier and Webhooks integrations, allowing them to connect with thousands of external tools and services.
👉 One unique feature of Circle is its single sign-on integration with platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, MemberStack, MemberSpace, WordPress, and even Teachable. This enables members to log in to these platforms using their Circle credentials.
I was both surprised and disappointed by the lack of native integrations offered by Circle, despite it being a more established platform.
It doesn’t even support native integrations with popular email marketing tools, forcing you to rely entirely on Zapier.
Pricing
Skool has only one pricing plan.
It costs $99/mo and includes all the features.
I guess they won’t have any profit maximizing tiers even in the future
Circle has three premium plans with the lowest starting at $49/mo.
🚨 However, the major disadvantage not properly revealed in their pricing plan is that the basic plan, even at $49 per month, can only host up to 100 members, which is very disappointing.
For most people who need courses and live streaming features, they usually choose the Professional plan at $99 per month.
If they require automation workflows, community AI, and many more features, the Business plan would be ideal.
Conclusion
I have high conviction in Skool and using it for my community, as it is spearheaded by founders like Sam Ovens and Alex Hormozi, who have a deep understanding of community building.
If you’re an independent coach, Skool could be an ideal choice for you.
On the other hand, Circle might be a better fit if you prioritize customization.
Also it’s important to note that Circle is not solely focused on content creators, but also caters to large organizations.
Therefore, they may not be as committed to promoting your business growth.
For further exploration of each of these platforms, you can refer to my individual reviews on Circle and Skool.
