Skool vs. MemberPress: An Honest Comparison for Online Community Builders

Skool makes it easy to launch a paid community without touching WordPress. MemberPress gives you a community you actually own, and a better long term ROI. Here's how they really stack up.

Skool is a standalone SaaS platform – community, courses, and events in one dashboard, no WordPress required.

MemberPress is a WordPress plugin with community, courses, coaching, and content restriction built in.

The real difference is that Skool takes a cut of everything you earn, and at the end of the day, your community lives on their servers, not yours.

What Is Skool?

Skool is a paid community platform that bundles three things in one place: a community feed (think private Facebook Group), a course classroom, and a live events calendar.

It was founded by Sam Ovens and gained serious momentum when Alex Hormozi joined as an investor and moved his own communities there.

The appeal is real. You sign up, set a price, and you're live. No hosting account, no plugin stack, no developer. If you want the fastest route from zero to a paid community, Skool delivers.

What Skool doesn't advertise quite as loudly: every plan comes with transaction fees. The $9/month Hobby plan takes 10% of your revenue. The $99/month Pro plan takes 2.9%. As your community grows, those fees grow with it — and they compound fast.

What Is MemberPress?

MemberPress is a WordPress membership plugin that's been running since 2012. It started as an access control tool (gating content behind paid memberships) and has since grown into a full platform for memberships, online courses, coaching programs, and now community.

The piece that changed this comparison: ClubSuite™. With ClubCircles™ (discussion boards), ClubDirectory™ (searchable member profiles), and ClubConnect™ (real-time messaging), MemberPress now covers much of the same community ground as Skool, all while keeping you on infrastructure you own.

The honest caveat: you need WordPress. If you have a site already, MemberPress slots in cleanly. If you're starting from scratch with no WordPress experience, there's a setup curve that Skool doesn't have.

The Key Differences

Rather than a feature checklist, here's the comparison framed around the questions that actually drive the decision:

Skool vs. MemberPress: Pricing

This is where the conversation usually ends for anyone who's done the math.

Skool's plans:

• Hobby: $9/month + 10% transaction fee on all revenue
• Pro: $99/month ($1,188/year) + 2.9% transaction fee on all revenue

MemberPress's plans (prices shown are introductory, check memberpress.com/plans/pricing for current rates):

• Launch: From $199.50/year + 4.9% transaction fee (basic memberships and courses, no community features)
• Growth: From $349.50/year + 0% transaction fees (adds ClubSuite™: ClubCircles™ + ClubDirectory™)
• Scale: From $499.50/year + 0% transaction fees (adds ClubConnect™ real-time messaging + CoachKit™)

Note that MemberPress's Launch plan has a 4.9% transaction fee, comparable to Skool's situation. But once you step up to Growth (which is also where the community features live), fees drop to zero.

That's a meaningful jump for anyone doing real revenue.

Here's what the numbers actually look like at $5,000/month in membership revenue:

At $5k/month, MemberPress Growth costs less in a year than Skool Pro costs in a single month. That gap only grows.

Of course, you also need to take into consideration general costs for running a WordPress site, which can be as low as $300 a year for a small business website. Even if you factor that in, you're still saving thousands compared to Skool Hobby.

Bottom line: Skool Hobby makes sense if you're just testing the water and revenue is very low. The moment you're earning consistently, MemberPress Growth pays for itself within weeks compared to Skool Pro.

Skool vs. MemberPress: Community Features

Skool's community is its core product: discussion feeds, threaded replies, member profiles, and a gamification layer where members earn points and climb leaderboards.

That gamification piece is something Skool does better than anyone, and if engagement mechanics are central to your model, it genuinely works.

MemberPress covers core community features well with its ClubSuite™ feature set.

• ClubCircles™ gives members a space to post, share, and collaborate inside your WordPress site.
• ClubDirectory™ creates searchable member profiles.
• ClubConnect™ (Scale plan) adds real-time direct messaging – something Skool doesn't even offer.

The gap: MemberPress doesn't have a native gamification system. No points, no levels, no leaderboard. For some communities, that matters a lot. For most, it doesn't.

You can add gamification mechanics with a third-party plugin and integration like GamiPress, but this can come at an extra cost and set up.

Bottom line: Skool is purpose-built for community engagement and the gamification shows. MemberPress covers the essentials, adds direct messaging on Scale, but doesn't replicate Skool's points system.

Skool vs. MemberPress: Course & Learning Features

Both platforms let you host video courses and structured content.

Skool's Classroom is clean and deliberate. You upload modules, members access them from the same dashboard as the community. It works.

MemberPress gives you more depth. The Courses add-on supports drip content (releasing lessons on a schedule), progress tracking, quizzes, and completion certificates.

If your courses are more than a resource library, MemberPress has the infrastructure for it.

Bottom line: Skool is fine for hosting content. MemberPress is the stronger choice for structured learning programs.

Skool vs. MemberPress: Platform Ownership and Data

This is the argument that tends to land once people think it through.

With Skool, your community exists on Skool's servers under Skool's terms. Your member list, your content library, your discussion history, all of it lives in a system you don't control.

If Skool changes its pricing (it has), pivots its product direction, or gets acquired, you feel that. You can export data, but rebuilding community dynamics isn't a file transfer.

With MemberPress on WordPress, you own the site. Your member database is yours. Your content is yours. Your relationships are yours. You can move hosts, change your stack, extend the platform, all without asking anyone's permission.

The tradeoff: ownership comes with responsibility. Hosting, backups, updates, security. It's not a burden for most people running a serious operation, but it is different from Skool's “we handle everything” model.

Bottom line: If you're building something you want to own long-term, MemberPress is the only option that actually gives you that. Skool is convenient until the platform's interests and yours stop being aligned.

Skool vs. MemberPress: Ease of Setup

Skool wins here. You can go from signup to live paid community in an afternoon, no technical knowledge required. It's the most legitimate argument for Skool and worth being straight about.

MemberPress has gotten easier with ReadyLaunch™ – you get a pre-configured membership site that doesn't require building from scratch.

But you're still working in WordPress, which means a hosting account, a domain, and some comfort with a CMS. If you've never used WordPress and the idea makes you nervous, that's a real barrier.

Bottom line: Skool is faster to launch. MemberPress requires WordPress comfort, but ReadyLaunch™ closes the gap for most people.

Skool vs. MemberPress: Customer Satisfaction

This one isn't close. MemberPress holds a 4.8 out of 5 on Trustpilot. Skool sits at 1.8 out of 5 – one of the lowest scores you'll find for a platform with this level of visibility and marketing spend.

The recurring themes in Skool's negative reviews are worth knowing before you commit: frustration with billing and cancellation processes, customer support that's difficult to reach, and a product roadmap that prioritises growth over resolving existing user complaints.

For a platform you're trusting with your revenue and your community, that's not a minor footnote.

MemberPress reviews consistently highlight responsive support, a stable and well-documented plugin, and a team that's genuinely invested in the product long-term.

That matters when something breaks at 10pm before a launch.

Bottom line: Trustpilot scores can be noisy, but a gap this large (4.8 versus 1.8) is telling you something real.

Skool vs. MemberPress: Integrations

MemberPress connects with virtually everything: Stripe, PayPal, WooCommerce, Mailchimp, ConvertKit, ActiveCampaign, Zapier, Easy Affiliate, PrettyLinks, and hundreds of other apps and plugins.

Because it runs on WordPress, the integration surface is enormous.

Skool is more self-contained, as you'd expect from a closed SaaS platform. Stripe for payments, Zapier for automation, an API for custom builds. But you're working within the Skool ecosystem rather than alongside your existing stack.

Bottom line: If you have existing tools and want them connected, MemberPress wins significantly. Skool is designed to replace your stack, not sit inside it.

Who MemberPress Is Best For

• Course creators and coaches who already run a WordPress site and want to add community without starting over
• Anyone earning $1,500/month or more in community revenue. At that point, Growth plan fees drop to zero and MemberPress pays for itself quickly versus Skool Pro
• Businesses with an existing WooCommerce store who want to add membership tiers alongside their products
• Coaches who need CoachKit™ accountability features alongside paid content and community
• Founders building something they want to own – the member data, the community history, the platform itself
• Organizations needing deep integrations with email providers, affiliate programs, or CRMs

Who Skool Is Best For

• First-time community builders who want to go live fast without learning WordPress
• Creators at the very start, with low revenue, where the simplicity of $9/month outweighs the transaction fee pain
• Communities where gamification is genuinely central to the engagement model – Skool's leaderboard system is hard to replicate elsewhere
• Coaches and creators who want a native mobile app included in the base price, rather than as an add-on
• Anyone who truly doesn't want the responsibility of managing a WordPress site, even with ReadyLaunch™

Switching from Skool to MemberPress

If you're already on Skool and thinking about moving, here's the honest picture. Course content and member lists export cleanly. What doesn't transfer is community discussion history. That stays in Skool.

ReadyLaunch™ means the technical side goes faster than you'd expect. The harder part is always the migration of community dynamics, not the technology.

Reach out to MemberPress's highly-rated customer success team before you make the switch, they can help you map it out.

Frequently Asked Questions

Final Verdict

Skool built its reputation by making paid community genuinely easy to launch, and it earned that reputation. If you want the fastest possible path from idea to live community it's still the quickest route.

But the fees are real. The lock-in is real. The Trustpilot score is 1.8, which, when your entire model depends on that platform working reliably, is worth pausing on.

And with ClubSuite™, the community feature argument for staying on Skool has narrowed considerably.

If you're building something meant to grow, MemberPress is the more defensible choice.

WordPress setup is a one-time investment. Zero transaction fees on Growth and Scale plans are a permanent advantage. A 4.8 Trustpilot score means that when you have a problem, someone will actually help you. And owning your platform means you're never at the mercy of someone else's pricing decisions.

If you're interested in building a monetized community on a WordPress website, we recommend getting started with the MemberPress Growth plan, which has the core community features – ClubDirectory™ and ClubCircles™.

And don't forget, you have a 5 star customer success team ready to help get you set up.

Get MemberPress Today!

Start getting paid for the content you create.

Get MemberPress Now See All Features

If you found this article helpful, follow us on Facebook, X, Instagram, and LinkedIn!

Victoria Lloyd

Victoria has a knack for turning small beginnings into big successes, having elevated her jewelry brand from the vibrant buzz of London's street markets to prestigious spots like the Royal Academy of Arts and Topshop's Oxford Circus flagship store. Her expertise doesn't stop at physical products. Victoria has a proven track record of boosting online engagement for a variety of brands. From dynamic startups to household names like Nokia and Jack Daniels, Victoria has applied her potent mix of wordsmith wizardry, strategic insight, and digital acumen to drive up brand engagement and SEO. At MemberPress, Victoria leverages her diverse experience to simplify and demystify the world of online membership and business growth. She's here to guide readers with her unique insights, helping them to confidently and creatively build their online communities and membership sites.

See Full Bio