I Tried Skool—It’s Overrated: My Skool Review in 2025

Search for anything related to community-building or online coaching platforms, and you’ll have Skool on your radar.
But how good is it?
Well, my quick answer…Skool is overrated.
For the last three months, I’ve been using Skool to see how it measures up in aspects like community building, online course creation, hosting events, live sessions, and gamification.
And honestly, Skool doesn’t live up to the hype. It’s missing many essential features you’d expect from a comprehensive online community platform.
In this Skool review, I’ll be upfront and objective. I’ll share my personal experience with the platform to show you if it’s worth the $99 per month.
Let’s get right into it.
What is Skool?
Skool is an online community platform founded in 2019 by Sam Ovens and Daniel Kang.
Sam Ovens is a successful course creator and consultant. He noticed a major gap in traditional course creation and LMS platforms—most lacked a seamless way to integrate courses with communities. To address this, he teamed up with his friend Daniel Kang, and together they launched Skool.
However, when Alex Hormozi invested $400 million in the platform, Skool’s popularity skyrocketed.
Since then, the platforml has been on a hype ride, enjoying the marketing and exposure for the internet business coach.
To give you a quick overview, Skool is an all-in-one platform that promises to have everything you need to bring an online community and courses all in one place where members can learn, share, and grow together, much like a social learning environment.
Some of its features include:
- Skool games
- Classrooms ( or simply its online course builder)
- A community forum
- Leaderboards
- Events manager
- Email broadcasts
- Messaging
- Community search
- Community marketplace
I’ll explore each of these features to show how effective each one is.
But before that, let’s tackle one aspect that Skool’s fans frequently rave about—the user interface—and see if their claims hold up.
User Experience: Easy to Use but Feels Outdated
If you’ve read online reviews about why some users prefer Skool over other platforms like Circle (read my Skool vs Circle review), it’s because of one reason—Skool’s simplicity.
And it’s true. Skool is incredibly easy to use for both community owners and members. Its minimalistic interface feels familiar, resembling common forum sites and social groups like Facebook Groups.
For community owners, the interface is straightforward. Essential tools are conveniently located in the top navigation bar, while additional features like reporting, plugins, and leaderboards are accessible through the “Settings” menu in the right sidebar.
However, something I didn’t like about Skool is that its UI feels basic and outdated.
Skool also has a mobile app that allows you to connect with your members on the go. The mobile app is clean, loads very fast and it’s easy to navigate. During my testing, I didn’t encounter any bugs or glitches.
Overall, Skool delivers a solid user experience on both web and mobile platforms, but the outdated design can be off-putting for some users.
Online Course Creation: Too Basic for Serious Creators
Skool lets you build online courses which you can offer as part of your community memberships. It lets you structure your course curriculum and add various content formats including text, video embeds, images, and code snippets.
Beyond that, Skool’s online course creation features are underwhelming. It doesn’t allow you to natively host your video lessons or any other course materials. Instead, you’ll need to embed content from platforms like YouTube, Vimeo, Wistia, or Loom.
The reason why you need a platform with course video hosting is that it saves you the money of purchasing storage from premium platforms like Wistia and Vimeo.
I know what you’re thinking…
“ I can use YouTube, which is free, duh!”
Technically, you could, but here’s the problem.
YouTube isn’t designed for hosting gated content. Unlisted videos can still be shared, making your course accessible to unintended users.
Not to mention that your course lessons will end up with that annoying YouTube logo, which will make your brand feel cheap. It’s like having a community on Facebook. Yes, it’s free–but at what cost?
That said, if you need a course platform with built-in video hosting, Skool falls short in this aspect and you’ll be better off with other platforms like Circle, Thinkific, or Kajabi.
Skool also lacks student assessment tools, such as quizzes, assessments, surveys, and the ability to issue a course completion certificate.
While not all creators will need these features, they can be essential for those running certification programs, cohort-based courses, or any type of online learning that benefits from structured accountability and certification.
Skool also doesn’t support embedding supplemental materials like downloadable resources directly into your course. This makes it less practical for educators or creators who want to provide templates, guides, or other materials to enhance learning.
Overall, Skool’s course creation tools feel basic and cobbled together. And honestly, it’s Classroom feature (basically its course builder) is as spectacular as many creators advertise it.
Skool Review: Community Building and Management
As you know already, community-building tool is Skool’s bread and butter.
But how does it measure up?
Let’s start with community organization.
Unlike well-rounded community platforms like Circle and Mighty Networks, Skool confines you to one group per community.
You can’t create separate spaces or groups to segment your audience or discussions. Instead, all posts, discussions, courses, and events exist within a single space and feed. To add more groups you’ll need to pay an extra $99 per group.
Skool does offer categories to organize discussions by topic, helping members navigate content more easily.
It also includes a search function for finding posts, conversations, or resources.
However, its search functionality still lacks advanced filtering criteria, such as sorting by relevance, recency, or popularity—features available on platforms like Circle and Mighty Networks.
Engagement Tools
Skool provides members engagement features like gamification, discussions, DMs, and live event scheduling.
However, it doesn’t support group chats.
Discussions allow members to share text, images, polls, GIFs and video embeds, giving users multiple ways to interact.
I’ll expand more on gamifation and live events later in this post, so keep reading.
Management and Moderation
Skool provides admins and moderators with simple tools to manage a community. Admins can edit or delete posts, pin important announcements, and control who can create content or comment within the group.
Moderators can be assigned roles to assist in community oversight, helping maintain order in active communities.
Skool simplifies member onboarding with features like invitation links and approval-based enrollment. You can manually add or approve members, making the process secure and controlled.
Once members join, their activity can be tracked through Skool’s built-in insights, which show their participation in discussions, course progress, and overall contribution to the community. Removing members is equally straightforward and can be done quickly via the admin dashboard.
Skool’s moderation capabilities on the other hand are more limited. While you can assign moderators and ban members, it lacks automated content flagging and profanity filters, requiring more manual oversight to uphold community standards.
Gamification: The Leaderboard is Impressive, but Gamification in General Could Be Better.
Gamification is one of Skool’s standout features. The platform offers native tools to incentivize community engagement through a leaderboard system.
Members earn points when others like their posts or leave comments. As they accumulate more points the higher they’ll rank on the leaderboard, creating an incentive for participation.
One thing I love about Skool’s leaderboard is its ability to incentivize learning. You can tie course material access to specific leaderboard levels, encouraging members to engage in discussions to unlock resources.
Although Skool has an impressive leaderboard, it doesn’t have built in tools to issue members badges. Badges can help add recognition to members which they can proudly display on their profile cards to show achievements. For example if a user complets a course you can assign them a badge to acknowledge their milestone.
Skool Games Review: Useful or Just a Clever Marketing Ploy?
The Skool Games is essentially a contest where community owners compete to attract more paying members to their groups.
The objective is to grow their audience, generate revenue, and improve their community-building skills.
Here’s how it works:
- You create a community on Skool and work to bring in paying members.
- You compete with other participants to see who can generate the most revenue each month.
- The top 10 winners get exclusive opportunities to meet with experts like Alex Hormozi.
On paper, this sounds like a win-win. You grow your business, get to meet Alex Harmozi and his team, and more “importantly” earn some “bragging” rights. Shut up! Who wouldn’t want to meet Alex Harmozi and let him coach you.
But here’s the catch though.
First, to join Skool Games, you’ll need to sign up for Skool’s 14-day free trial where you’ll need to submit your credit card information.
But the Skool Games last for one month. This means you still need to pay the $99 per month subscription to continue playing.
Now, call me skeptical, but this feels like a sneaky way to lock you into paying for the subscription.
By the time the trial ends, you’re already invested, and canceling feels like giving up—even if Skool’s platform doesn’t fully meet your needs.
To be fair, there’s a lot to like about Skool Games. It motivates you to grow your community, and the gamification aspect makes it fun.
Here’s where Skool Games loses me.
Its structure encourages relentless competition, where your success depends on out-earning others. For many, this means prioritizing revenue over genuine community-building.
To me, that kinda dilutes the overall purpose of a community—building authentic connections and offering value.
Don’t get me wrong—making money is rewarding. But you have to ask yourselves: Is your community providing genuine value to your members? Because if you win and your members don’t, what’s the point?
My thoughts?
Skool Games is a clever gamification strategy, no doubt.
It motivates action, provides resources, and adds a competitive edge to community-building. But, it feels like a sneaky marketing tactic to lock users into the subscription.
Because if it weren’t they’d offer a 30-day trial to match the competition’s duration.
Events Hosting and Management: Relies on Third Parties Like Zoom
Events play a vital role in fostering engagement and collaboration within online communities. You can hold live group calls, workshops, or maybe 1-on-1 coaching sessions to keep members engaged and offer value.
So how does Skool handle event hosting and management?
To start with, Skool has an event scheduling tool called the Calendar. It lets you schedule events in your community and choose a location, either on virtual platforms like Zoom or Google Meet or a physical address.
You can control access to your events by allowing all members, or by controlling access based on member levels or by those who have enrolled in your course.
Skool also allows you to send notifications for events and enables members to RSVP, which helps you keep track of attendees.
However, Skool doesn’t have built-in tools for going live directly within the platform. Instead, it relies on integrations with third-party platforms like Zoom to handle live calls, webinars, and other event formats.
If you already use Zoom or similar platforms and don’t mind the extra steps, Skool’s event management might work for you. But if you’re looking for a platform with seamless, built-in live event hosting, you’ll find Skool’s approach lacking.
Customization and Branding: Virtually Nonexistent
Skool offers limited options for customization and branding. While it is user-friendly, its rigid structure prevents creators from making their community truly unique.
You can add a custom icon, cover banner, and toggle between light and dark modes, but these options barely scratch the surface.
Skool doesn’t allow deeper customization, such as changing color schemes, fonts, or layout, making it difficult to create a distinct branded experience that aligns with your business identity.
Moreover, Skool doesn’t allow you to host your community on a custom domain. Instead, it’s hosted under Skool’s subfolder e.g. skool.com/your-community.
A custom domain, such as “community.yourbrand.com,” enhances your brand’s credibility and cohesiveness.
For example, Ali Abdaal’s community uses a custom domain that reinforces his branding.
Skool Pricing Review: It’s Overpriced
Skool charges $99 per month for its single-tier plan. This plan includes:
- Unlimited courses and members
- One group per community for discussions and content sharing
- Built-in gamification
- An event calendar
- A 2.9% transaction fee on every sale
At first glance, this seems like a reasonable offering for the price. However, compared to other platforms, you can get significantly better value at the same price.
For instance, Circle’s $89/month plan offers everything Skool provides and more. With Circle you can:
- Natively host course materials
- Use a custom domain to align with your branding
- Host live events directly on the platform (up to 100 attendees).
- Fully customize your community’s appearance and layout.
Not to mention that Circle has a slightly lower transaction fee of 2% compared to Skool’s 2.9%.
But James, Skool doesn’t put a cap on the number of courses and members you can have in your community.
Correct.
But here’s the thing though.
How many courses are you realistically going to create? And do you really need a massive, sprawling community?
Instead of unlimited this and that, I think Skool should focus on providing tools and features that actually deliver value. At $99 per month, it just doesn’t offer enough value.
Skool Pros and Cons
Pros
Cons
Skool Review: Is It a Good Choice for Online Community Building?
In this Skool review, I did my best to be objective and share my honest take on Skool as a community software.
Skool deserves credit for a few things:
- It’s incredibly easy to use.
- It’s community focused eliminating the complexity that all-in-one digital businesses like Kajabi struggle with.
- The gamification tools are solid for boosting engagement.
- Its pricing model is simple and transparent, avoiding the confusion of multiple tiers.
However, Skool also has some limitations:
- The course builder is basic.
- Community organization tools are minimal.
- There’s no native livestreaming feature.
- Branding options are extremely limited.
But should you use it to build an online community?
Well, if you’re looking for an easy-to-use platform that allows you to monetize your community, Skool is a good platform.
However, if you need more robust tools—like native livestreaming, better community organization, or full customization—you’ll be better off with platforms like Circle or Mighty Networks.
Compelling Skool Alternatives
- Circle: Offers better customization, tiered memberships, and native live event hosting, making it more versatile but at a higher cost.
- Mighty Networks: Provides mobile apps, robust customization, and scalability for larger communities.
- GroupApp: Affordable choice for community-based courses.
- Kajabi: Combines courses, marketing tools, and analytics but is significantly more expensive.
Also Read: