Skool vs Kajabi
Simple community vs all-in-one suite.
This is a comparison of two different philosophies more than two similar products. Skool is a lean community-first tool that does a few things and stays cheap to enter. Kajabi is a broad course-and-marketing suite that does almost everything and prices accordingly. Disclosure: we make Drry, and we get to it at the end. The real question here is whether you want the smallest tool that runs a community, or the biggest tool that runs a whole business.
The honest recommendation.
Pick Skool
Pick Skool if the community IS the product and you want to be live this afternoon. It is the better choice for a creator who wants an engaged feed, light courses, and no marketing machinery to learn, and who would rather not pay suite prices for tools they will never open.
Pick Kajabi
Pick Kajabi if you are running a content business where funnels, email automation, websites, and courses all matter and you want them under one roof. It suits an established operator who will actually use the breadth, and for whom the higher monthly cost buys real leverage rather than shelfware.
Where Drry fits.
Skool takes a cut of member payments and Kajabi's headline 0% comes with conditions, and neither starts free. If you want the middle ground, community and courses and the marketing basics, without a platform cut or a suite-sized bill, that is where Drry sits.
- 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 Kajabi, common questions
Is Skool or Kajabi better for a beginner?
Skool is the easier start for most beginners: there is very little to set up and the community goes live almost immediately. Kajabi is more powerful but asks you to learn a marketing suite before you have made a sale. If you are validating an idea, start simple; if you already run a content business, Kajabi's breadth may earn its keep.
Does Kajabi really have no transaction fee?
Kajabi advertises 0%, but the claim depends on using its own payment processor, which keeps your billing inside Kajabi, and subscriptions still carry a small recurring-payment fee. Skool charges a straightforward platform fee that is steepest on its entry plan. The two fact boxes above lay out the current terms for each.
Which costs more, Skool or Kajabi?
Kajabi costs more up front by a wide margin, since even its entry plan is many times Skool's starting price. Skool can close some of that gap through its transaction fee as your revenue grows. For a small or new community Skool is far cheaper; for a large operation using Kajabi's full suite the comparison gets closer.
Do I need Kajabi if I mainly want a community?
Usually not. Kajabi's price reflects a full marketing suite, and a community-first creator pays for a lot of tools that sit idle. If the community is the point, a community-first platform does that one job for a fraction of the cost. Run an honest inventory of what you would actually use before paying suite prices.
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.