Skool is a platform for online communities. It brings a group's discussions, its courses, its calendar of live calls, and its payments together in one place. There are free communities and paid ones: you can join as many as you like with a single account, or start your own and charge people to get in.
If you're joining, a Skool community feels like a small social network without the noise: a feed of posts, a set of organized courses, and a calendar with the next calls. If you're the one running it, it's your whole business in one browser tab. That simplicity is why it has caught on with teachers, coaches, creators, and hobbyists of almost every kind.
This guide covers how it works on the inside, whether you're about to join a community or want to build your own. Everything we say about Skool was checked on its website, in its help center, and in the app stores on October 23, 2026. Skool changes things often. If something doesn't match what you see, it may have moved.
What is Skool, in a nutshell
Skool describes itself as a community platform: you can discover communities or create your own. The idea behind it is that everything a community needs lives in one place, with no tools to connect: the group, the courses, the events, and the payments. According to its own website, you can set up a community in under 30 minutes.
It was founded in 2019 by Sam Ovens, its CEO, and Daniel Kang, its CTO. It's a small company: according to its about page, it has 30 employees and is based in Los Angeles. In 2024, Alex Hormozi partnered with Skool to create the Skool Games, a competition between community owners. If that side of it interests you, we cover it in Alex Hormozi and Skool.
One detail says a lot about its size: Sam Ovens's own community for community owners, Skoolers, had more than 150,000 members on the day we wrote this. Skool isn't a program you install. It's a network: you have one profile and one search across every community you belong to.
What's inside a Skool community
Every Skool community has the same parts. What each owner puts inside them varies, but everything always lives in the same place, so by the time you join your second community, you already know your way around.
| Part | What it's for |
|---|---|
| Community | The feed: posts, comments, categories, likes, mentions, photos, videos, GIFs, and polls |
| Classroom (the courses) | Courses with video or text lessons, downloadable resources, searchable transcripts, and each member's progress |
| Calendar | Live calls and events, shown in each member's time zone, with email reminders |
| Members and map | Who's in the community and, if they choose to share it, where they are |
| Leaderboards | Each member's points and level, and who participates the most |
| About | The community's public page: what it is, who runs it, how many members it has, whether it's public or private, its price, and member reviews |
| Chat | Private messages with anyone from any of your communities |
On top of that, there's a single search that finds posts, comments, course content, and members all at once. Search for “yoga” and you'll get the conversations, the lessons, and the people who've mentioned it.
The community feed
This is the liveliest part. The owner creates categories (for example, “Introductions,” “Questions,” and “Wins”), and members post and comment in them. You can follow the posts you care about so Skool lets you know when someone replies.
The Classroom: courses inside the community
Courses don't live on some other website. They live in the community itself. Each course has its modules and lessons, and Skool keeps track of what you've completed. The owner decides who can see each course: every member, only members who've reached a certain level, only members on a certain plan, or people who buy it separately. That's why it's common to see some courses with a lock on them.
The calendar and live calls
This is where you'll find the weekly calls, the Q&A sessions, and the challenges with a set date. Every member sees the time in their own time zone and gets an email reminder. Skool has its own video calls, Skool Call, though the owner can also use Zoom or Google Meet.
Points and levels: why Skool keeps people coming back
Skool turns participation into a small game. Every time someone likes one of your posts or comments, you earn a point. Points move you up levels, and your level shows next to your name everywhere in the community.
There are nine levels, and each one takes quite a few more points than the last:
| Level | Points needed |
|---|---|
| 1 | 0 |
| 2 | 5 |
| 3 | 20 |
| 4 | 65 |
| 5 | 155 |
| 6 | 515 |
| 7 | 2,015 |
| 8 | 8,015 |
| 9 | 33,015 |
Levels belong to each community. If you're level 5 in one and you join another, you start at level 1 there, like everyone else.
What makes this work is what the owner does with the levels. They can give them custom names (in a cooking community, from “Prep Cook” up to “Head Chef”) and, above all, unlock courses when members reach a certain level. That way, participating pays off: people who help others and share what they learn end up with access to more content. The community leaderboard shows who's been most active this week, this month, and of all time.
How Skool works for members
Creating your account and joining a community
Opening a Skool account is free. With it, you can join as many communities as you want, all with the same profile.
Before you join a community, you see its About page: what it's about, who runs it, how many members it has, whether it's private, and what it costs. Private communities don't show their content until you're in. Many ask a few membership questions before accepting you, and some review every request by hand, so it might take a few hours before you're in.
Paid communities always show their price in US dollars. It can be a monthly fee, an annual fee, or a one-time payment, depending on what the owner chose. If you pay with a card in another currency, your bank converts it when you're charged.
The Skool app
Skool has a mobile app: “Skool” on Google Play, with more than a million downloads, and “Skool Communities” on the App Store. It has everything the website has (the community, the courses, the calendar, and the chat), plus push notifications on your phone. On a computer, you use Skool in your browser, at skool.com.
Skool in English and other languages
Skool is available in English and ten other languages: Spanish, German, French, Portuguese, Italian, Traditional Chinese, Vietnamese, Turkish, Dutch, and Japanese. By default, it uses your browser's language, and you can change it whenever you want. In the app, it's in your profile settings, under Account and then Language.
The platform's language and a community's language are two different things. The posts, courses, and calls are in whatever language the owner chooses, so switching Skool to Spanish won't turn an English-speaking community into a Spanish one. If you're looking for communities in a particular language, check out the section on how to find them, further down.
Notifications and emails
Skool notifies you on the platform and by email when someone mentions you, replies to you, or posts something you follow, and it can send you a digest of the most popular posts. You can adjust all of it from your profile settings. If you're in a lot of communities, it's worth spending two minutes on this so you only get what you actually care about.
Canceling a paid community and getting a refund
To cancel a paid community, click your profile picture in the top right and go to your settings. In the Communities tab, open the settings for the one you want to leave and choose to manage your subscription. In the app, the same steps are in the community's three-dot menu.
You keep access until the end of the period you've already paid for. Skool recommends canceling at least 24 hours before your renewal so you don't get charged for the next one.
Canceling doesn't get you your money back. Refunds are up to each community's owner, not Skool: if you think you're owed one, message the owner through Skool's chat or email their company's support address. If they approve it, the money goes back to the card you paid with, usually within 7 to 10 business days.
Skool's rules
On top of each community's own rules, Skool has its own, and they're pretty strict about anything that ruins the experience: one account per person, no unsolicited private messages to sell something, no posting offers in other people's communities, and no bots or accounts created to inflate numbers. People who break them can lose content or have their account restricted. These rules are there to keep the chat and the feeds from filling up with spam.
How Skool works for community owners
Creating a community does cost money. Skool has two plans, and both start with a 14-day free trial:
- Hobby: $9/month and a 10% fee on every payment, plus 30¢.
- Pro: $99/month and a 2.9% fee on every payment, plus 30¢.
Both include unlimited members, courses, videos, and live calls. The difference is how much Skool keeps from each payment, plus a few Pro features, like a custom URL or affiliates for your community. All the math is in our guide to Skool pricing.
Everything else works like this:
- Getting paid. You set a monthly price, an annual price, or a one-time payment (you can combine them, too), always in dollars. Skool charges your members and sends the money to your bank through a Stripe connection that Skool sets up itself.
- Emailing all your members. From any post, with one click, you can send it by email to the whole community. No lists, no tags.
- Tracking. A dashboard shows you how fast the community is growing and how much people participate, overall and per member.
- Earning from other people's communities. If one of your members starts their own community on Skool, Skool pays you 40% of their monthly subscription, automatically. You don't have to do anything except use Skool.
Setting it up takes an afternoon if you know what you want. We walk through it step by step in how to create a Skool community, and what comes after that, getting members and keeping them, in how to grow your Skool community.
How to find communities: Skool Discovery and SkoolRank
Skool Discovery
Discovery is Skool's own community search. It sorts communities by category (hobbies, music, money, spirituality, tech, health, sports, self-improvement, and relationships) and by language, and you can search by topic. Within each category, the communities that rise are the ones that grow, stay active, and above all, keep their members coming back. For an owner, it's a source of free members. For anyone looking for a community, it's the first place to look.
SkoolRank
SkoolRank is a ranking of Skool communities, independent of Skool, by category and by language. Every month, communities climb based on the votes they get, and anyone can vote for free once a day. It's a quick way to see which communities in your language are rallying their members.
A few you'll find in the ranking, to give you a sense of how varied Skool is:
- Pottery School, for learning pottery, from touching clay for the first time all the way to advanced decorating techniques.
- Better Chords Academy, where adults learn piano and how to improvise with chords.
- Surf Precision Academy, online surf coaching for everyday surfers.
- CoderCo DevOps Academy, for learning DevOps from zero, with hands-on labs and live sessions.
- Japanese Cooking With Dan, for taking care of your health by learning to cook Japanese food.
If you run a community, adding it to SkoolRank is free and takes a minute.
Is Skool free?
It depends which side you're on. For members, the account is free and there are tons of free communities; paid ones charge whatever their owner decides. For anyone creating a community, Skool costs $9 or $99 a month depending on the plan, with a 14-day free trial. There's no free-forever plan for owners.
Is Skool legit?
Skool is a company based in Los Angeles that has been around since 2019, and community payments go through Stripe, one of the biggest payment companies in the world. Paying for a community on Skool is as safe as paying at any reputable online store.
What's worth checking is the community, not the platform. Each community is run by its owner, who decides what it offers, how much it costs, and what it promises. Before you pay, look at its About page: how many members it has, how long it's been around, exactly what's included, and what its reviews say. Be wary of promises of quick income with specific numbers attached, on Skool or anywhere else. And if something breaks Skool's rules, you can report it right from the post or the profile.
Skool vs a Facebook group, WhatsApp, or Telegram
It's the comparison almost everyone makes before taking the plunge, because so many communities start out in a Facebook group or a WhatsApp group. Those work fine for chatting, but they fall short as soon as the community grows or you want to charge:
| Skool | Facebook group | WhatsApp or Telegram | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Organized courses | Yes, with each member's progress | No | No |
| Calendar of calls | Yes, in each member's time zone | One-off events | No |
| Charging for access | Yes, built in | No | No |
| Finding something from months ago | One search for everything | Hard | Very hard |
| Distractions | Just your community | The rest of Facebook | The rest of your chats |
| Rewarding people who participate | Points, levels, and courses that unlock | No | No |
The real difference is that on Skool, the community is the only thing on the screen. In a Facebook group, you're competing with the rest of the social network for your members' attention, and on WhatsApp, the important stuff gets buried under hundreds of messages. That's why so many communities end up moving to Skool once they get serious about it: not because it's trendy, but because the content gets organized, the calls show up on a calendar, and you can charge without bolting on other tools.
Plenty of Skool communities still use WhatsApp or Telegram on the side, for quick announcements or casual chat, and keep everything that needs to last on Skool: the courses, the recordings, and the discussions people will want to find later.
Who Skool is for
Skool works for almost anyone who wants to bring people together around something they know how to do: a fitness coach, a language teacher, a musician, a marketing expert, a group of chess fans. Its big advantage is that you don't have to build anything. Community, courses, calls, and payments are in the same place from day one, and members already know the platform, because many of them are in other Skool communities.
There are specific cases where another platform might be a better fit, like wanting an app with your own branding or selling courses through elaborate email funnels. We go through them one by one, each compared with Skool, in Skool alternatives. For most people, the short answer is that Skool is still the simplest and most complete option.
Frequently asked questions
What is Skool, in a nutshell?
A platform for online communities that puts a group's discussions, its courses, its calendar of live calls, and its payments in one place. You can join free or paid communities, or create your own.
Is Skool free?
For members, the account is free, and so are lots of communities. Creating a community costs $9/month on the Hobby plan or $99/month on Pro, with a 14-day free trial.
Who created Skool?
Sam Ovens and Daniel Kang founded it in 2019. Ovens is its CEO and Kang is its CTO. Alex Hormozi partnered with the company in 2024 to create the Skool Games.
Does Skool have an app?
Yes: “Skool” on Google Play and “Skool Communities” on the App Store. It includes the community, the courses, the calendar, and the chat, with push notifications.
What languages is Skool available in?
English and ten other languages, including Spanish, French, German, and Portuguese, and it automatically uses your browser's language. Each community's content is in whatever language its owner chooses.
How do I find communities on Skool?
On Skool Discovery, Skool's own community search, by category, language, or topic. You can also use rankings like SkoolRank, where you'll see the communities in each category ranked by that month's votes.
Is it safe to pay for a community on Skool?
Yes. Payments go through Stripe, and canceling is easy from your profile settings. What's worth checking before you pay is the community itself: what it includes, how many members it has, and what its reviews say.
How do I cancel a paid community on Skool?
Click your profile picture, go to your settings, open the Communities tab, then that community's settings, and manage your subscription. You keep access until the end of the period you paid for; cancel at least 24 hours before it renews. Refunds are up to each community's owner.
