Skool vs Circle: Which Platform Is the Best in 2026?

Looking for a community-first platform for your course? In case you’ve done a bit of googling, you might consider signing up for Skool or Circle.

But, between the two, which is the most suitable for you?

I have used both and Circle. So, I intend to give you an extensive review of the two to help you make an easy choice. Let’s dive right in!

At face value, here is a brief summary of Skool and Circle.

While the summary above can help you make a quick decision on the platform to use, it can be misleading.

Why should you select Skool over Circle?

• Founder with a strong background: Skool is the brainchild of serial entrepreneur Sam Ovens, creater of Consulting.com. After selling Consulting.com, Sam now fully works with Skool.
• Superior gamification: Skool has an intuitive gamification that directly aids community growth. Although Circle 3.0 now has some gamification features, Skool stands out for being game-first.
• Enhanced member profiles: Skool’s comprehensive user profiles display social media links, level in the leaderboard, and customization options. With Circle, you can only view your name, tags, and designation.
• Versatile calendar integration: The Skool calendar features easily integrates with Google Calendar, Yahoo Calendar, Apple Calendar, Outlook, and so on. Not so for Circle, which only integrates with Google Calendar.
• Community discovery: On Skool, you will get a feature that lets you explore and join additional groups. There’s no better way to drive more traffic to your community.

Why should you select Circle over Skool?

• Support for automation: Circle’s powerful automation engine saves you time by enabling the automation of routine tasks like scheduling reminders, sending welcome messages, and so on.
• Geared for advanced marketing: On Circle, you can entice target audiences with free trials, discounts, coupons, and upsells. This isn’t the case with Skool.
• Moderation tools: It’s easier to prevent spam on Circle by flagging comments & posts and activating keyword blocklists.
• Reliable tech backing: Ankur Nagpal and Sid Yadav, the founders of Teachable are the brains behind Circle. Expect them to know their staff.

Skool vs Circle: User Experience

Having looked at the unique features of Skool and Circle, I now take you to how it feels working on both of these platforms.

Firstly, the interfaces of Skool and Circle are user-friendly. They are cleanly designed and are easy to navigate through the tabs.

While using both platforms, I didn’t encounter malfunctions and both platforms worked well on Brave, Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and other web browsers.

However, Skool’s clean user interface and straightforward course creation workflow makes it easier to use. In my estimation, it is comparable to or even easier than the experience you have when setting up a Facebook group.

While it is easier to use Skool’s interface, the design looks outdated with its core tools on the top navigation bar. Additional settings are on the right sidebar. You can see everything you need without sifting through multiple tabs to reach essential settings and tools.

However, Skool’s minimal UI feels cheap and outdated. It lacks the warmth, sleekness, and modern look that are characteristic of high-quality products.

More modern, organized, and visually-appealing, Circle’s interface has its main tools on the left sidebar. The top navigation bar has additional quick-access links.

Although, some of Circle’s tools (Moderation and Workflow) are tucked behind a nearly invisible drop-down menu. If you are a new user, you may completely miss these critical tools.

I saw Circle’s robustness in the many features and nifty features in its various tabs. But I thought this would feel a little daunting to new users.

Verdict: If you’re looking for simplicity and ease of use, stick with Skool’s straightforward setup. But if you want a welcoming, modern design, and are willing to trade-off intuitiveness, pick Circle.

Circle vs Skool: Online Community Building, Engagement, and Management

On both platforms, you can build private communities for your coaching programs, courses, and membership businesses.

Skool is strong on gamification and community engagement tools but falls short in event hosting, community organization, and moderation.

Circle introduced leaderboards only recently

On both platforms, you can interact with other members through community posts and direct messaging. Circle also features group chats.

While using the platforms, I assessed them on how well they keep communities active, value-packed, organized, and safe for members.

Circle has ‘Spaces’ and ‘Space Groups’ while Skool has ‘Categories’ for organizing discussions.

In Circle, you can organize your community courses, events, discussions, and chats in smaller Spaces and Space Groups. Thus, it is easier for your members to navigate to the right groups.

Spaces are like Slack channels. Here, you can build dedicated areas based on specific topics. Space Groups enable you to put together Spaces with similar themes.

For example, if your course is on how to use AI for digital marketing, you can have spaces on ‘generating emails’, ‘generating effective blog posts’, and ‘generating social media posts’. You can then put all these Spaces together as one Space Group called ‘digital marketing’.

But Circle does not restrict you to create Spaces and Space Groups only in community fora and discussions. Spaces can also help you organize events, resources, courses, and group chats.

Do they offer segments

Skool doesn’t currently have enough tools to help you segment your community. You can use Categories to organize your discussion fora into specific topics to help your members to directly go to the relevant posts.

However, Skool only allows you to create one community forum, making it difficult to organize courses and events. You also cannot grant access to only a few select members.

Circle has a more robust post editor, allowing you to enrich your community posts using H2 and H3 headers, bullet points, numbered lists, and blockquotes. You can also add call-to-action buttons and insert links from relevant community posts.

In Circle, you can also embed content from more than 700 apps and formats, including code snippets, templates, presentations, and forms.

For example, I embedded a form into Circle and saw it previewed almost immediately for users to access it without clicking an external link.

You wouldn’t find such features in Skool. In its post editor, there is only one headline and there are no buttons, blockquotes, bullets, italics, and bold. You would be able to directly link to relevant previous blog posts.

In Skool, you can share videos, images, text, and GIFs, and embed videos from YouTube and Vimeo. However, you cannot embed other file formats.

For example, when I tried embedding a presentation in Skool, the platform could not preview it. Instead, it also showed it as an external link that directs users to another platform. With that, you may easily lose your users’ attention.

Circle’s gamification includes an option to award custom badges to members

On both platforms, you will find gamification tools to encourage participation and engagement within the communities.

In the leaderboard in Skool, you can award points to members for others liking their posts or comments. This can encourage users to create more helpful posts and comment on others’ posts. As they keep accumulating points, they keep rising up the leaderboard.

Skool also makes it possible to create links to your courses in the leaderboard. When members reach specific levels, they can access certain course materials.

With this, you can encourage your members to participate more in the hope of accessing more course materials.

Circle has similar gamification features with a leaderboard that helps your users to improve their rankings by earning points for likes on posts and comments.

However, in Circle, you can award your members with custom badges that are displayed on their profile cards and pages to signify their achievements.

Circle’s community moderation tools are stronger than Skool’s

Circle allows you to assign moderators to specific spaces or whole communities. Your moderators can remove community posts, review flagged content, and approve content for members.

It also offers built-in profanity filters, automatic flagging of suspicious content, and reporting tools. Using these tools, you can save lots of time while easily moderating your communities.

On the other hand, Skool has limited moderation capabilities. While it allows you to assign moderators and ban errant members, it doesn’t provide automated profanity filters and content flagging. You will need to be more manually vigilant to ensure your members uphold community standards.

Circle has built-in livestreaming while Skool utilizes Zoom

In Circle, you can schedule and hold live events without the need to use third-party platforms like Zoom. All you need is to click Go Live to create a live room of 30 people or less for group calls, one-on-one coaching, and live cohorts.

A livestream on Circle can have 100 to 2,000 participants based on your plan. In a typical livestream, you can only view co-hosts on video and hear them on audio.

Circle also allows you to record your live sessions and later repurpose them as course materials.

Meanwhile, there are no built-in tools in Skool to livestream coaching sessions or community events. Instead, you have to integrate it with Google Meet or Zoom.

Both Google Meet and Zoom are free but require upgrading into the paid plans if you want to host more members. For example, the free account on Zoom allows you to hold 40-minute sessions for up to 100 participants. Beyond that, you will pay $15.99 per month to upgrade to the paid plans.

The verdict: Circle is obviously much better than Skool in community building, management, and engagement. Its superior features (Spaces and Space Groups) make it possible for you to organize your communities. You can also host live events and moderate your community members.

Skool vs Circle: Online Course Creation Tools

Both Skool and Circle have tools for building and selling online courses as standalone products or as part of community offers. After building courses on both platforms, I discovered that Circle far much outperforms Skool.

Circle enables you to create more types of course and natively host learning materials

In Circle, there are better course building and management tools, enabling easy course structuring, student assessment, and community engagement.

Circle has a more straightforward course creation workflow, which starts with creating a course space before selecting any of three course types. Course creation is self-paced, structured in sections and lessons, and easy to schedule.

As part of the course lessons, you can upload videos to the available storage of 10 GB to 1 TB, depending on your plan. Alternatively, you may embed videos from Vimeo, YouTube, or Wista.

In Circle, you can also add other content formats, including audio, PDF files, images, presentations, and templates to meet the needs of your learners.

You can also configure video lessons to enable your learners to leave comments, ensure they watch at least 70% of the lessons, and auto-advance them to the next lessons.

Skool, on the other hand, has a simple and streamlined course creation process. You only need to name your course, add a description, and set access levels (open access, one-time payment, specific member access, time-locked content, and member-level-based access.

From there, you can customize Folders to create Modules and Pages to create Lessons.

In Skool, you cannot directly upload video recordings. Instead, you have to embed videos from YouTube and other external platforms.

Circle allows student assessment via quizzes. Skool doesn’t.

Circle makes it possible for you to create quizzes and use them to evaluate your students. This helps you gauge how effectively you are teaching. You can set multiple choice questions for your quizzes, determine the passing grade, and only advance students who pass.

There are no native quiz creation tools in Skool. Instead, you can only assess your learners by integrating third party platforms such a Zapier.

Verdict: Circle does better than Skool in offering multiple course structures, ability to upload video lessons, and quizzes for student assessment. Thus, Circle goes beyond the barebones in enabling course creation.

Skool vs Circle: Customization and Branding

You should be able to customize your community to reflect your brand to help you stand out from the online courses crowd.

I have used Skool and Circle long enough to confidently vouch for Circle when it comes to ease of customization and branding.

Circle has more customization options and enables community white-labelling

With its extensive customization options, Circle allows you to customize your community and align it with your overall branding needs. For example, you can customize themes, individual spaces, add logos and community icons, and add communities to custom domains to white-label them.

You can further use CSS to customize your community and apply a headless API to integrate your community into your application or website.

Meanwhile, Skool has very limited customization options, allowing you to add a cover banner, a custom icon, and move from light to dark mode and vice versa.

Beyond the basics, your community’s look will be no different from numerous other communities on the platform. This is because Skool doesn’t allow you to modify themes and layouts.

Verdict: Its customizable nature makes Circle ideal for businesses looking to build custom and brand-specific community spaces. With barely any meaningful community customization options, Skool gives a community that looks like a thousand others. So, pick Circle if to want to build highly customized communities.

Skool vs Circle: Pricing Review

You will pay a monthly fee to sign up on both Skool and Circle. But that does not mean paying attention to the things that go into determining the price of each platform.

Circle has tiered pricing plans while Skool has two fixed pricing plans

In Circle, you will get a pricing plan for every budget, making it more scalable as your business grows. In the Basic plan, you will pay at least $89 per month for one administrator, 100 members, and zero access to essential tools.

Its Professional plan costs $89 per month for 3 administrators, 10 moderators, and unlimited members. You can also hold live rooms for a maximum 30 participants and livestreams for a maximum 100 participants. However, you won’t enjoy workflow automations and other advanced features.

The Business plan goes for $199 per month while the Enterprise plan has a customer pricing. With these two, you get unlimited workflows, admin API access, and livestreams with up to 1,000 participants.

On the other hand, Skool has a two pricing plans fixed at $9 and $99 per month. Both of these plans offer a 14 day free trial! With this, you have access to features like course creation, community discovery, and event scheduling. While you can create unlimited courses and enroll as many members as possible, you can only create one community. There is a 2.9% transactional fee which is super low compared to competitors.

In Circle, transactional fees depend on the plan in which you are enrolled. The Basic plan is 4%, Professional plan 2%, Business plan 1%, and Enterprise plan 0.5%. You will also have to pay the Stripe processing fees of 2.9% plus $0.30 per transaction. Extra Stripe charges include 0.5% for subscriptions and 0.4% for one-time products.

Verdict: Skool is more affordable than Circle when it comes to monthly subscriptions and transactional fees. Thus, the cost is more predictable. While Circle has flexible tiered pricing, it has higher transactional fees.

Skool vs Circle: Pros and Cons

Skool Pros and Cons

Pros

• New-user-friendly interface
• Community auto-discovery
• Strong gamification features
• Simple course builder
• Low transactional fees
• Weekly digests and email notifications
• Strong community engagement
• Mobile apps for Android and iOS
• Allows hosting of unlimited courses

Cons

• Limited reporting
• Limited customization
• Lack of native livestreaming
• Lack of built-in marketing tools
• Lack of quizzes and certifications

Circle Pros and Cons

Pros

• Incredibly attractive user interface
• Flexible community spaces
• Availability of course quizzes
• Detailed reporting
• Workflow automation builder
• Allows livestreaming
• Native video hosting
• Mobile apps for Android and iOS
• Robust API, Zapier, and Webhooks integrations

Cons

• Expensive add-ons
• Limited basic plan
• Only supports payment via Stripe
• Basic landing page builder

Skool or Circle: Which One is Good for You?

In this Skool vs Circle review, I have objectively compared the platforms using their strongest features. As you can already see, the platform you pick depends on your specific needs.

Skool is much easier to use compared to Circle. It has an intuitive interface that focuses on courses, discussions, and gamification. After setting up, you can start engaging your community without having to make complex configurations.

In Skool, you won’t find advanced native features and requires third-party tools for video hosting (YouTube), live events (Zoom), and assessments (Typeform). So, it is idea for course creators looking for simplicity, community creators who want to integrate gamification, and small-scale educators who use external tools for assessments, video content, and live streams.

Circle stands out for its flexibility and scalability, offering dedicated spaces for events, courses, and discussions. It also supports leaderboards, polls, group chats, and other advanced engagement tools. Additional tools, including Marketing Hub and Workflow Automation are idea for businesses looking to automate routine tasks like email marketing.

Thus, Circle is the best for you if you want an all-in-one platform without the need for third-party tools. You also need it to host events or workshops directly on the platform. If your business builds white-label communities or seeks to effectively manage members, consider signing up for Circle.