I paid Kajabi $143 a month before moving everything to Skool, where my communities now hold 8,600+ members. This is not a spec-sheet comparison: it is what actually changes when you run the same business on each platform.
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Kajabi is a marketing and sales suite (funnels, email automation, landing pages) with courses and a community module attached. Skool is a community platform with courses built in. They overlap on paper, but their centers of gravity are opposite.
That difference decides everything downstream. On Kajabi you spend your time building pipelines: pages, sequences, offers. On Skool you spend your time in the community itself, because the feed, the gamification, and the member experience are the product. Neither focus is wrong, but you should pick the one your business actually revolves around.
Skool costs $9 or $99 a month with unlimited members on both plans, while Kajabi runs $179 to $499 a month with contact caps at every tier. The entry costs are not in the same universe.
| Skool Hobby | Skool Pro | Kajabi Basic | Kajabi Growth | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price | $9/mo | $99/mo | $179/mo | $249/mo |
| Members / contacts | Unlimited | Unlimited | 2,500 contacts | 25,000 contacts |
| Communities included | 1 group | 1 group | 1 | 1 |
| Transaction fee | 10% | 2.9% | 2.9% + $0.30 | 2.8% + $0.30 |
| Email marketing | No | No | Yes | Yes |
Prices from each platform's official pricing page as of July 2026. Kajabi's Pro tier ($499 a month) raises the caps to 100,000 contacts and 3 communities, which tells you how differently the two companies think about community: what Skool includes for $9, Kajabi treats as an enterprise limit.
A note on my own bill: I was paying Kajabi $143 a month on the plan I was on at the time. My free Skool community with 8,000+ members would blow past Kajabi Basic's current 2,500-contact cap more than three times over.
The selling machinery. Kajabi's email automation, visual funnels, and landing pages are genuinely good, and Skool has nothing like them built in. Kajabi also handles video products and its course tooling runs deeper than Skool's Classroom.
If your model is cold traffic into a sales page, an email nurture sequence, and a high-ticket course at the end, Kajabi handles that whole pipeline natively and Skool simply does not. You would need external email and funnel tools alongside Skool to replicate it.
The community. My honest summary after paying for both: Kajabi felt cold and complicated, a system I administered. Skool feels alive, a place my members actually hang out. That is not a feature-list difference, it is what the product is.
The mechanics behind that feeling are real: the feed, the points and levels, the leaderboard that keeps members posting. And Skool keeps improving fast, with the CEO publicly sharing what is shipping and why. Two years after switching, my communities hold 8,600+ members and added $4,105 in new monthly recurring revenue in the last 30 days, numbers I never approached on Kajabi.
Pick Skool if your business is audience-led: people find you through content, join your community, and upgrade because they want more of you and the group. Pick Kajabi if your business is funnel-led: paid traffic, email sequences, and automated selling of standalone courses.
I was the first kind pretending to be the second, and switching fixed it. If that sounds familiar, start a free Skool trial and rebuild your community there before deciding anything about courses. For the full picture of what you would be moving to, read my two-year Skool review and the Skool pricing math.
Kajabi has a community feature, but it is one module inside a marketing suite, and its plans cap how many communities and contacts you get. If community is the heart of your business, that difference shows up fast.
Yes, Skool's Classroom hosts video courses organized in modules, with unlimited courses on every plan. Kajabi's course tooling is deeper, but for course-plus-community businesses Skool covers what most creators actually use.
Usually, yes. Skool starts at $9 a month with unlimited members, while Kajabi starts at $179 a month with a 2,500-contact cap, so the entry costs are not close.
Some creators run Kajabi for funnels and email while hosting their community on Skool. It works, but you are paying for two platforms, so most people eventually consolidate around whichever side their business lives on.
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