Skool vs Circle
The community-first showdown.
Skool and Circle both put a community feed at the center, then charge for it in opposite ways. Skool is deliberately minimal and cheap to start, and it funds itself with a steep fee on member payments that is heaviest on the entry plan. Circle is polished and feature-deep, funded by a higher subscription plus a smaller cut and a menu of paid add-ons. Disclosure: we make Drry, a third community platform, and we cover it honestly at the end; most of this page is about which of these two fits you.
The honest recommendation.
Pick Skool
Pick Skool if you want a dead-simple, gamified feed with courses and a calendar and nothing to configure. It suits a creator with an already-engaged audience who values momentum over customization, as long as you keep an eye on the entry-plan fee as revenue grows.
Pick Circle
Pick Circle if you want a refined, brandable space with structured spaces, automations, and deep integrations, and your budget can absorb the higher subscription plus add-ons. It suits established communities and teams who need polish and structure more than they need the lowest starting price.
Where Drry fits.
Both take a cut of every member payment, and neither has a genuinely free tier to start on. If those are the two things you are trying to avoid, that is the gap Drry was built for.
- Keep 100% of member payments. Only Stripe's standard processing fee applies, we take nothing on top.
- Payments run through your own Stripe account, so your customers and subscriptions belong to you, not the platform. No payment lock-in.
- Funnels built in: fast landing pages on your domain with views, joins, and revenue attributed per page. Standalone funnel tools charge $49 to $97 a month for less.
- A genuinely free tier: 100 members, 5 GB storage, unlimited courses, and the community feed, with no card required.
- Courses, a community feed, members, and payments in one branded space you own.
- Your own address like grace.drry.com out of the box, with custom domain and site white label on paid tiers, and white-label email from your own domain on Growth.
- Member analytics on the $29 Creator plan: who is showing up, what is landing, and who is quietly drifting away. The kind of insight other platforms save for their priciest plans.
- Get paid for 1:1s and packages: send a client a one-time or installment link with an agreement they sign before paying. Built in, free on every plan, and no platform fee. Other platforms make you bolt on a separate contract tool, and most never reach 0%.
- Email your whole community, built in on every plan, even free (100 sends a month free, unlimited on paid), no add-on and no second tool to wire up. Creator adds email automations: welcome journeys, lead-magnet delivery, and win-backs that run on their own. And on Growth, Spark drafts your emails AND your funnel pages for you, pulling from your own courses and writing in your voice, so you start from a finished draft instead of a blank page. Tweak it and send.
Skool vs Circle, common questions
Is Skool or Circle cheaper?
It depends on your revenue. Skool starts far cheaper, but its entry-plan transaction fee climbs with your income, so past a certain monthly revenue it can cost more than Circle despite the lower sticker. Circle's fee is smaller, but its paid add-ons for email and extra seats stack up. The fact boxes above show each platform's current numbers so you can run your own case.
Does Skool or Circle take a bigger cut of member payments?
Skool's entry plan takes the bigger cut by a wide margin, and its upper plan drops to roughly card-processing territory. Circle's platform fee is smaller on every plan. On both, that platform fee sits on top of the standard payment-processing fee, so read the two fact boxes above together rather than either number alone.
Which is better for courses, Skool or Circle?
Both include courses, but neither is a dedicated course platform. Skool's courses are simple and linear; Circle's are more structured and support richer content. If a polished course library is your main product rather than the community around it, weigh a course-first tool too, not just these two.
Can I move my community from Skool to Circle?
Yes, but there is no one-click migration between them. You recreate your content and re-invite your members on the new platform. Because both host everything on their own domain, your public address changes when you switch either way, which is worth planning for before you announce a move.
Try Drry free. Bring your people.
Courses and community together in your own branded space, and you keep 100% of what your members pay you.