Community is one of the best businesses out there. Communities bring people together to master something interesting, and along the way, you can add things like courses and events to keep your members engaged. Communities have the power to turn strangers into friends, and also create a successful business around recurring revenue.
So in this article, we’re going to talk about two different platform options for hosting your community.
We’ll compare Mighty Networks vs. Skool, showing you what each one gives you and helping you decide which one is right for you.
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Mighty Networks vs. Skool: What are they?
Mighty Networks is a community platform that lets you bring together content, courses, community, and commerce. As an all-in-one, Mighty gives you a powerful business engine and replaces a total tech stack to let you sell and host in the same place. You can divide content into Spaces, charging for each or bundling, and you can monetize with 135 different currencies or token-gating.
Skool was started by the internet figure, Sam Ovens, to be a platform for courses and coaching. It was designed to include a forum feature, a basic course platform, and a calendar device to help you schedule events. We’ll dive deeper into each of these options below.
Mighty Networks vs. Skool: Comparison chart
Mighty Networks vs. Skool
We'll compare these two platforms on the following features:
- Community platform
- Courses
- Events
- Monetization
- Apps & Access
Community platform
Mighty Networks
Mighty is an all-in-one community engine, ranked as #1 by the review site G2. It's home to more $1 million communities than any other platform.
Mighty creates amazing communities around the things that matter to you and your members. Each Mighty Network has features like discussions, content creation, events, live streaming, and courses.
Organize conversations with hashtags, tag other members, moderate content, and automate community management. Or create any kind of content you can imagine with emojis, links, attachments, videos, polls, and GIFs. Members can create profiles and you can message members – either 1:1 or in groups.
AI-Driven Engagement
Mighty's community engine is the only software designed for engagement. This means smart AI features for instant profile building, finding cool members, and starting a convo with one-click.
Mighty adds gamification too, with streaks, rankings, points, and awards. You can build automations, run challenges with instant unlocks, or customize beautiful new member sequences.
Mighty's Spaces are the building block for any community you can imagine. Any Space can be customized to hold Discussions, People Explorer, Chat, Courses, Livestreaming, Resources, Events, and more. And this feature is perfect for building dedicated groups around courses, coaching or special interests.
Community-building on Mighty is instant. With the power of ChatGPT-4, Mighty can generate a community with brand identity for you from scratch, in the next minute. This means:
- A Landing Page
- A Tagline
- Social Announcements
- Invitations
- A Welcome Post
- Starting Community Questions
Try it! There's nothing else like this on the market.
Skool
Skool offers a basic community platform that’s built like a simple forum. It gives you the option to post content, adding links, attachments, videos, polls, and GIFs. Members can “like” posts and comment on them, or “watch” posts that are interesting to them. You can include categories for your posts, to help members organize them a bit, as well as “rules” that let you lay out the standards of behavior for the forum.
One interesting feature that we should mention is that there is some level of gamification to reward those who are active in your community with a “leaderboard.” You could, for example, unlock courses for those who reach a certain level. This is a neat feature but doesn’t make up for the limited features overall. Otherwise, the forum is pretty basic.
Skool doesn’t give you any way to organize or subdivide larger communities. It simply gives you a real-time list of posts. And this means it's missing the power of a dedicated community platform.
Courses
Mighty Networks
Mighty gives you a lot of different ways to approach courses, with features like native video, dripping content, conversation after each lesson, and more.
Because you have a ton of flexibility when creating course spaces, you could opt for different designs. So, for example, you might choose to try an asynchronous (pre-recorded) course, building it into our powerful LMS, adding everything you need there, and releasing it to the world.
You might choose to add discussions and events to that course Space – even people going through a pre-recorded course need some accountability and encouragement.
OR, you might choose to forget pre-recording and create a totally live, cohort course. You can presell it with Mighty, then use our awesome native live streaming to deliver the course.
And, don’t forget, you can add the recording for those who couldn’t make it live or want to watch it again. OR, of course, you can also chop up a live course video and create a structured asynchronous course.
There are so many options! But no matter what you decide, you have the flexibility to create and sell a course your members can access – you can even learn what works as you go!
Skool
School has a basic LMS platform built into it. It lets you build course modules and sub-lessons. You can add text to teach lessons, or you can embed a video hosted on a third party like YouTube or Vimeo. They’ve included a transcript box, and the option to toggle discussion or dripping content on individual lessons.
The course platform works okay for organizing content, but it’s very limited in terms of features and the UX isn’t great for trying to build a course.
Unlike with Mighty, you can’t teach a course live on Skool. It’s not a platform that would work for cohort courses – you’d have to live stream on other platforms and then create a course with links to the recordings in the settings section.
Events
Mighty Networks
The foundation of live events with Mighty is the built-in live streaming, which gives you a way to reach all your members – live streaming can be done AND watched from either a web app or from the iOS or Android Mighty Networks apps. You can even get a custom-built, white-label app and have branded live streaming.
On top of native live streaming, Mighty also has a 1-click Zoom integration, meaning that you can connect your Zoom account and it automatically takes care of the scheduling for Zoom meetings or webinars.
Every Mighty Network comes with an events tab built in where you can schedule events, see what’s coming up, collect RSVPs from members, and send out event notifications (notifications are also built-in).
Skool
The Skool platform does let you schedule events and gives you an events calendar, but events aren’t native. It would work best for in-person meetups so you can add meeting details to each calendar entry. But otherwise, you just have to put all the event details in the “Discussion” section, which could include a link to live streaming or a meeting that’s hosted somewhere else. Any virtual event would need to take place on another platform since there are no native event or live streaming capabilities.
Once your event is scheduled, it lives on a “Calendar” tab in your Skool community. One good feature about events is that you can set it to automatically email members a reminder about an upcoming event or set an event to recurring. There are no RSVPs for events and no way to add member questions.
Monetization
Mighty Networks
Mighty Networks doesn’t just give you tools to create your community. You can also build a monetization machine with it – without having to resort to any third-party apps. With Mighty, you can create plans and bundles, selling access to community, Spaces, events, courses, or any combination of these. This makes it incredibly easy to build a business with recurring revenue.
You can also build landing pages for your community or for courses, which you can’t do with Skool. Add to this the fact that you can charge in 135 different currencies, OR let members pay with crypto or hold a community token, and Mighty gives you a ton of options to make your business successful.
Skool
Skool recently added a payment feature so that Hosts can sell monthly memberships. All sales are in USD. It's a start. But Skool is extremely limited in the business you can build. You can't add bundles or complex payments or landing pages or different currencies.
And Skool's affiliate program is primarily for signing up other users to start their own Skool communities. However, in spring 2025 Skool announced it was adding an affiliate program for Skool members to recruit people to sell courses for them.
Mobile Apps
Mighty Networks
Mighty comes with an amazing app for every device that does all the things that the web app does. That means courses, community, events – anything that happens in the individual Spaces – happens natively on the apps too.
Add to this that we also build totally custom, white-label apps for established brands with Mighty Pro. This means that you get your app in the app store, not ours. You can schedule a call with us to learn more.
Skool
Skool launched a simple mobile app last year that replicates its web features. They don't currently offer branded apps.
Pricing
Could a superior platform also be a better financial investment? You be the judge.
Conclusion
Mighty Networks gives you a ton of features, everything you need to build a community, course and/or event business – and all in one place. Skool gives you a limited, basic course and community platform, with no options for monetization and no apps. But when you compare the cost, Mighty starts from $41/mo. Skool starts from $99/mo. That means Skool actually costs much more and you get less features.
Mighty is the cultural software that will build you the community you’ve been dreaming about, and actually help you earn with it. And you can try it for yourself, totally free for 14 days – no credit card required.
