Membership Site Platforms: Skool, Circle, Kajabi, Mighty

AdvLaunch is the AI agency for coaches and consultants. In our paid community program, we send cold traffic from Meta ads into paid communities on Skool, Circle, Kajabi and Mighty Networks, so we see which platform features matter once real members arrive. We sell member acquisition, not software, so weigh our opinions with that stake in mind.

This guide compares the four platforms on content hosting, courses, community tools, apps, payments, integrations and data ownership, using each vendor's own documentation. Every platform gets one line on price here and a link to its full breakdown. Ad tracking and custom domains have their own guide, and so do coaching models.

How Do You Compare Membership Site Platforms Feature by Feature?

Compare membership site platforms on seven features in one fixed order: content hosting, courses, community tools, mobile apps, payments, integrations and data ownership. The first three decide what members experience each week. The last four decide what you can sell, automate and take with you if you leave.

• Content hosting: where video and files live, upload limits and storage caps.
• Courses: drip schedules, cohorts, quizzes and one-time course sales.
• Community tools: feed, chat, events, live calls and engagement mechanics such as points.
• Apps: whether members get a mobile app and whether you can brand it.
• Payments: who processes cards, who is the merchant of record and which fees stack on top.
• Integrations: Zapier, webhooks, API, email and ad-pixel support, and the plan that includes each.
• Ownership: member exports, content exports and whether payments sit in your own Stripe account.

What Does Each Membership Platform Cost in One Line?

Each line below is the entry price plus the fee that matters, checked on October 8, 2026. Full plan tables live on our pricing pages, so this section stays short.

• Skool: Hobby is $9 a month with a 10% + $0.30 fee per payment; Pro is $99 a month with 2.9% + $0.30 (3.9% on payments above $900). Zapier, webhooks and AutoDM are Pro-only plugins.
• Circle: Professional is $89 a month, Business $199 and Scale $419 on annual billing, with a 2%, 1% and 1% Circle fee on paywall sales plus Stripe's fees. Circle Plus is custom-priced.
• Kajabi: Basic is $179 a month ($143 on annual billing), Growth $249 ($199) and Pro $499 ($399). Kajabi Payments costs 2.9%, 2.8% or 2.7% + $0.30.
• Mighty Networks: Launch is $79 a month on annual billing ($95 monthly), Scale $179 ($215) and Growth $354 ($425), with a 2%, 1% or 0.5% transaction fee. Mighty Pro is custom-priced.

Deciding between Skool's $9 and $99 plans? Our Skool pricing breakdown shows where the fee crossover sits →

How Does Skool Compare to Mighty Networks on Features?

Skool and Mighty Networks overlap on community and courses but are built differently: Skool is one group with a Classroom, points and levels, while Mighty Networks offers spaces, cohort courses, a native app on every plan and a ladder of higher caps. The table uses each vendor's own documentation.

Read the table by job. A room that members return to daily is simpler to run on Skool, where points and levels come built in and a course can be level-locked. A structured programme with cohorts, quizzes and an app on members' phones has more built in on Mighty Networks. The payments row matters most when you leave: Skool is the merchant of record and pays you out through Stripe Express, so subscriptions live in Skool's merchant account rather than your own.

Weighing Mighty's three tiers? See Mighty Networks pricing, plan by plan, with the annual-versus-monthly gap →

How Do Circle and Kajabi Compare on Features?

Circle is a community platform that added courses, a website and email, while Kajabi is a course-and-funnel suite that added a community, and that origin shows in the feature lists. Circle's entry plan carries the deeper community toolset; Kajabi's carries the broader business toolset.

Pricing Kajabi's three tiers? Our Kajabi pricing breakdown covers contacts, admin seats and the processing-fee tiers →

The cap people hit first on Kajabi is usually contacts. Basic stops at 2,500, and Kajabi's own contact-limit article suggests deleting non-customers and unsubscribed contacts to make room, which tells you every contact record counts, not only paying members. At 100% usage you have 30 days to remove contacts or upgrade. On Circle the caps that bite are spaces, admins and live hours, because the entry plan allows 20 spaces, 3 admins and 10 live hours a month.

Which Membership Software Works Best for Digital Creatives?

Kajabi usually fits digital creatives best when they sell files and lessons together, because downloadable files, courses, coaching and a community can all be products in one account. The answer shifts if your product is feedback rather than files, or cohorts rather than a library. Match your product mix first, then read only the table rows that apply.

Size your media library before you commit. Circle and Mighty Networks publish storage caps (200 GB on their entry plans), Skool's pricing page lists unlimited videos, and Kajabi publishes maximum file sizes by upload type, such as 1 GB for a community video. A library that outgrows its cap costs you either an upgrade or an outside video host.

What Can You Take With You if You Leave a Platform?

Member data leaves Circle, Mighty Networks and Kajabi as downloadable files, Skool exports only membership-question answers, and payment relationships and content move least easily on all four. Check three things before you build: who is the merchant of record, what the member export contains, and whether content leaves in a usable file.

• Payments: Circle and Mighty Networks charge through your own Stripe account, and Circle's fee appears as an application fee on each Stripe charge. Kajabi offers Kajabi Payments or a third-party processor you connect, which adds a 2%, 1% or 0.5% Kajabi fee on top of the processor's own. Skool processes on its own merchant account and pays you weekly; it cannot connect an existing Stripe account.
• Members: Circle includes bulk import and export on every plan. Mighty Networks downloads member data as .xlsx from Launch up. Kajabi exports contacts as CSV. Skool documents an Export button on the Members tab that exports members' answers to your membership questions.
• Content: Kajabi exports course templates as .zip files but documents no bulk export of full product data. For Skool, Circle and Mighty Networks, the pages we reviewed describe no one-click full-content export, so keep original video and file masters.

Run one export on a trial account with real data in it before you commit. A platform you cannot leave cleanly deserves a higher price in your comparison.

Picked a platform but still no members? See what the Launch Pack and Scale Program include →

Our Take: When the Platform Is Not the Real Problem

Often the real question behind 'which platform?' is 'why are members not arriving?' A platform changes the checkout and the room, not the size of your audience. If your problem is members, growth or revenue, that is the problem we work on. If your problem is features, this page and the vendors' free trials are cheaper than we are.

AdvLaunch fits when your offer already sells, you like your platform and you have no repeatable way to fill it. We are the wrong choice when community revenue is under about $20,000 a year, because the Scale Program is probably premature there. A 45-minute strategy call checks fit first, and we decline projects with no fit signal. We also do not manage communities, write your content or build your courses.

Credit where it is due: Skool's discovery and points system suit a simple, active room, Circle puts a custom domain, gamification, a member directory and apps on its entry plan, Kajabi replaces the most separate tools, and Mighty Networks puts cohort courses and an app on every plan.

How AdvLaunch Fills a Membership Site: The Community Flywheel™

Whichever platform you choose, none of them brings strangers in. We run The Community Flywheel™ on top of the platform you already have, in four steps.

1. Hook: a Meta ad points to a paid challenge, webinar or masterclass we control, not to your Skool, Circle, Kajabi or Mighty Networks signup page.
2. Result delivered: over 7 days or one live event, your method produces a real outcome before anyone pays.
3. Community upsell: graduates are offered the paid community at a founder rate, and the platform you chose stays exactly as it is.
4. Retention compounds: members arrive already bought in, and we measure retention and lifetime value against the campaign cohort instead of a generic benchmark.

The Launch Pack works as a test: if the numbers work, you scale; if they don't, you walk away. Because ad spend runs through your own Meta Business Manager, you keep the spend, attribution and retargeting data.

Weighing a link-in-bio storefront against a real membership site? See our Stan Store alternatives breakdown for when a storefront stops being enough and which of these four platforms fits the move.

Comparing a membership-billing plugin instead of a full platform? See Memberful vs Patreon for the flat-fee-vs-percentage-cut breakdown between the two.