Skool vs Mighty Networks is a comparison of 7 plans: Skool sells 2 of them, Mighty Networks sells 5. Only 3 of those 7 are ever the cheapest way to run a paid community, and 2 of the 3 are Skool’s. Mighty Networks wins on other things, just not on what leaves your bank account.
The sticker prices mislead because the 2 companies charge in opposite directions. Skool runs its own payment processing, so the percentage you see is the whole percentage. Mighty Networks charges its cut on top of Stripe, so its 2% plan really costs 4.9%. Every price and fee below was read from the 2 companies’ own pricing pages and payment docs.
I priced all 7 plans on the 2 companies’ own pages, then ran a real membership through every one of them.
Page 1 is in worse shape than I expected. Of the 6 guides ranking here, 4 quote at least 1 price or fee that is not what the vendor charges.
The 5th is Mighty Networks’ own page, which never names its cheapest plan. The 6th quotes no prices at all.
Some of the misses are small. 1 guide says Skool has no tiers and no annual discount, when it has both.
Others are not small. Another invents 2 Mighty Networks plans that do not exist, and puts Skool’s transaction fee at 2% when the real rate is either 10% or 2.9% depending on which plan you are on.
Below is the whole field, cut down 1 rule at a time, with the arithmetic shown.
Key Takeaways
- Skool has 2 plans and Mighty Networks has 5, so the real choice is 7 ways to pay, not 2.
- Mighty Networks charges its cut on top of Stripe. Skool’s cut replaces Stripe entirely, because Skool is its own payment processor.
- Mighty Launch, Scale and Growth are never the cheapest option at any revenue level up to $200,000 a month.
- Skool’s cheapest plan is the cheapest overall until about $1,238 a month in member payments, then its 10% cut starts to hurt.
- The 2 pricing pages open on opposite billing toggles, so a quick look tells you $9 against $79 when the real month-to-month gap is $9 against $95.
Skool vs Mighty Networks: the 7 ways you can actually pay
The honest field is 7 plans, and no guide on page 1 lists all 7. Skool publishes Hobby and Pro. Mighty Networks publishes Launch, Scale, Growth and a quote-only Mighty Pro tier, plus a fifth plan called Explore that has no pricing card anywhere on its pricing page.
Getting the venue right will not rescue an offer nobody wanted in the first place, which is the part the Online Selling Mistakes Challenge works through over 5 free days.
Explore is real. It sits in a dropdown inside the return-on-investment calculator further down that page, and it gets named once more in an FAQ answer about a private group for hosts. That is the whole of its appearance. 5 of the 6 guides ranking for this comparison drop it completely, including Mighty Networks’ own comparison page, which opens its price row at $79 a month and never names the cheaper tier the company sells.
Before the table, the thing that makes it readable. Mighty Networks bills through your own Stripe account, so Stripe’s published 2.9% plus 30 cents lands on top of whatever Mighty takes. Skool processes payments itself, so the rate you see is the only rate there is.
Skool Pro takes 2.9% of a member payment and Mighty Networks’ cheapest plan takes 7.9% once Stripe is counted, which reverses the order the sticker prices put them in.
| Plan | A month | A year | Its own cut | All in, with card fees |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Skool Hobby | $9 | $90 | 10% + 30c | 10% + 30c |
| Skool Pro | $99 | $990 | 2.9% + 30c | 2.9% + 30c |
| Mighty Explore | $35 | $350 | 5% | 7.9% + 30c |
| Mighty Launch | $95 | $950 | 2% | 4.9% + 30c |
| Mighty Scale | $215 | $2,150 | 1% | 3.9% + 30c |
| Mighty Growth | $425 | $4,250 | 0.5% | 3.4% + 30c |
| Mighty Pro | Quote only | Quote only | 0.5% | 3.4% + 30c |
Both companies give 2 months free on yearly billing, so every annual figure above is 10 times the monthly one.
One more thing worth knowing before the cuts start, because it changes which column you should be reading. Skool’s pricing page opens on monthly billing. Mighty Networks’ pricing page opens on annual billing.
Land on both without touching either toggle and you come away thinking the choice is $9 against $79. Month to month, it is $9 against $95.
Cut 1: anything you cannot price without talking to sales
Here is the whole route in 1 picture, then the reasoning for each step.
Mighty Pro is out. It has no published number, and buying it starts with a quote request.
That is a fair cut rather than a snide one. Mighty Pro exists for organisations that want their own branded apps and a community strategist assigned to them, and for that buyer a conversation is the normal way to buy. For 1 person deciding between 2 subscriptions on a Tuesday afternoon, a plan with no price is not a plan you can compare.
6 left.
Cut 2: any plan that is never the cheapest, whatever you earn
Mighty Launch, Mighty Scale and Mighty Growth are all out, which makes this the cut that does the real work.
Run every remaining plan across every revenue level from zero to $200,000 a month in member payments, and those 3 never come out cheapest at any point on that range. Not once.
The reason is that Mighty Networks’ plans only ever compete with each other. Launch is cheaper than Explore above $2,000 a month in member payments. Scale is cheaper than Launch above $12,000 a month. Growth is cheaper than Scale above $42,000 a month.
Each of those crossovers is real. By the time you reach any of them, Skool Pro is already cheaper than the plan you just upgraded to.
Skool Pro costs $99 a month and takes 2.9% of a payment. Mighty Growth costs $425 a month and takes 3.4% once Stripe is counted. The expensive plan has the higher rate, so no amount of volume closes that gap.
Mighty Networks says its hosts charge $48 a month on average. Here is 50 of them, so $2,400 a month coming in.
On identical revenue, Skool Pro costs $183.60 a month and Mighty Growth costs $521.60, a difference of $338 for hosting the same 50 people.
| Plan | All-in rate | Costs you a month | You keep |
|---|---|---|---|
| Skool Pro | 2.9% + 30c | $183.60 | $2,216.40 |
| Mighty Launch | 4.9% + 30c | $227.60 | $2,172.40 |
| Mighty Explore | 7.9% + 30c | $239.60 | $2,160.40 |
| Skool Hobby | 10% + 30c | $264.00 | $2,136.00 |
| Mighty Scale | 3.9% + 30c | $323.60 | $2,076.40 |
| Mighty Growth | 3.4% + 30c | $521.60 | $1,878.40 |
There is 1 wrinkle here, and it matters if you sell anything expensive. Skool’s 2.9% applies to transactions up to $899. Above $900 the rate becomes 3.9%. That is per sale, not per month, so a $997 cohort seat is charged at the higher rate even if it is the only thing you sold all month.
Even then the answer holds. At 3.9%, Skool Pro stays cheaper than Mighty Growth until you are taking $65,200 a month in member payments, which is $782,400 a year.
3 left: Skool Hobby, Skool Pro, Mighty Explore.
Cut 3: the plan that is cheapest for a $42 window
Mighty Explore is out, and the reason is oddly specific.
Explore is genuinely the cheapest of every plan you can put a price on, for a while. That while is 42 dollars wide. Between $1,238 and $1,280 a month in member payments, Explore costs less than anything else on the list. Below $1,238, Skool Hobby is cheaper. Above $1,280, Skool Pro is cheaper.
I would like to say that window is a rounding artefact, but it is not. It is what happens when a $35 plan carrying a 7.9% all-in rate is squeezed between a $9 plan at 10% and a $99 plan at 2.9%. There is a moment where the middle option wins, and the moment is about the width of 1 member’s monthly payment.
If your revenue happens to land there, buy Explore. If it does not, and for almost everybody it will not, the plan is a trap dressed as a bargain. It is also the only plan Mighty Networks leaves off its own price cards.
2 left.
What is left, and where the line between them sits
Both survivors are Skool plans, which was not the result I expected when I started pricing this.
Skool Pro costs $99 a month and takes 2.9% of every member payment. Skool Hobby costs $9 a month and takes 10%. Those 2 lines cross at $1,268 a month in member payments. Below that number Hobby costs you less overall. Above it, Pro does, and the gap widens fast because the 7.1 percentage points between the 2 rates compound on every sale.
At 10 members paying $48, which is $480 a month, Hobby costs $60 and Pro costs $115.92. At 50 members it flips: Pro costs $183.60 and Hobby costs $264.
Skool Hobby and Skool Pro are the only 2 plans of the 7 that survive a pure cost comparison, split at $1,268 a month in member payments.
| Survivor | The cut it cleared | What it costs | What it still cannot do |
|---|---|---|---|
| Skool Hobby | The cheaper of the 2 below $1,268 a month in member payments | $9 a month, $90 a year, 10% + 30c per payment | No custom URL, no affiliate tools, and the 10% overtakes Pro’s $99 above $1,268 a month |
| Skool Pro | The cheaper of the 2 above $1,268 a month in member payments | $99 a month, $990 a year, 2.9% + 30c per payment | Rate rises to 3.9% on any single sale over $900, and every extra community you run is a separate $99 subscription |
That last cell is worth pausing on. Skool bills per community, not per account. 3 paid groups on Pro is $297 a month, not $99.
What Mighty Networks does better than Skool
Mighty Networks beats Skool on 4 things a community owner cares about, and none of them is price. Everything above this point measured cost alone, and if cost were the only axis this comparison would have ended 2 sections ago.
You keep your own payment account. Mighty Networks connects to your Stripe account, and in its own words, “you’ll get paid directly through Stripe”. Skool cannot do this. Skool’s help centre is blunt about it: “you cannot use your existing Stripe account”. Skool is the merchant of record, which means the card relationship with every one of your members belongs to Skool rather than to you.
Your members can pay in their own currency. Mighty Networks settles in yours and charges in theirs. Skool does not offer this at all, and says so plainly: “All subscription prices on Skool are in USD. Members pay in USD.” If half your audience is outside the United States, that is a conversion cost that never shows up in a fee table.
The course side is deeper, with cohort-based courses, dripped content, quizzes, certifications and SCORM support. Skool’s classroom is deliberately simple.
You can make the place look like yours, with your own domain, your own colours, multiple subgroups and, on Mighty Pro, your own branded apps in the app stores.
There is 1 thing both platforms are equally unable to do, and it is the claim page 1 gets wrong most often. Neither takes PayPal. Skool runs its own processor, and Mighty Networks is Stripe only.
That last point is worth showing rather than asserting, because the search results say otherwise. The number 2 result for this exact comparison tells readers that “Mighty Networks allows for a standard Stripe and Paypal connection”, and Google’s own summary at the top of the page repeats it.
Read the second result.
Mighty Networks’ own documentation contradicts it in 3 separate places, including the flat sentence “We do not currently support PayPal or other payment processors.”
Still weighing whether a community is even the right product to build? What community platforms really cost prices 6 of them side by side, and the membership platform comparison at 100 members does the same for the subscription side.
The cut most people get wrong
Nearly every guide on this search results page, mine included so far, cuts on price. I want to argue against my own 6 sections before you go and buy something.
Both platforms make leaving costly, in different ways. Skool archives your group. Mighty Networks leaves your subscriptions in your own Stripe account and then puts conditions on how you touch them.
Cancel Skool and this is what its payment terms say happens: “At the end of the billing period, the group will be archived, and the current content will be available read-only; no new content may be added.” Every thread, every win a member posted, every answer you wrote at 11pm, frozen. And because Skool is the merchant of record, the subscriptions were never in an account you control, so there is nothing to move.
Mighty Networks is better here, and still not simple. Your members’ subscriptions do sit in your own Stripe account. But Mighty tells you never to touch them there, warning that changes made in Stripe “can cause serious issues, including loss of subscribed members and deletion of Plans”. Disconnecting Stripe is not something you can do yourself, you message support. And if you switch payments off and later switch them back on, you cannot reuse the same Stripe account.
The people who have actually done this are the ones worth listening to. In a thread on switching community platforms, a community manager makes the point that comparing features is the easy part: “a chunk of your members just don’t follow you to the new platform. Doesn’t matter how clear the migration email is, some percentage stays behind out of pure inertia.”
Another commenter describes a move off Discord that did work, carrying about 90% of active members across. It took 45 days of calls, demos and hand holding.
The original poster’s reply says it plainly. Somebody running a community alone does not have 45 days.
I have paid for the version of this lesson that comes before the platform decision. My first business ran motivational seminars with 2 partners, and we branched into supplying speakers to companies for a training fee.
Those pitches got zero signups. The companies we were calling did not have the budget we were asking for, and we had built the whole offer before we checked that.
Same mistake, 1 step later. Find out what people will pay for before you commit to the room you are going to put them in, and pick one you could walk out of.
Skool holds the card relationship and keeps 10% or 2.9% of every payment, Mighty Networks lets you hold it in your own Stripe and takes 0.5% to 5% on top of Stripe’s cut, and CartMango takes no percentage of a member payment at all.
| Platform | Whose payment account | What it takes per payment | If you leave |
|---|---|---|---|
| Skool | Skool’s own, you cannot connect yours | 10% + 30c on Hobby, 2.9% + 30c on Pro | Group archived, read-only. Subscriptions were never yours to move |
| Mighty Networks | Your own Stripe, no PayPal | 0.5% to 5% on top of Stripe’s 2.9% + 30c | Subscriptions stay in your Stripe, but disconnecting goes through support |
| CartMango | Your own Stripe or PayPal | No platform cut, you pay Stripe or PayPal directly | Your recurring payments keep running |
CartMango is mine, so read that last row as a disclosure as much as a comparison. It is also a narrower tool than the other 2 rows, and the difference matters here: CartMango is a checkout, not a community. It does not host posts or a classroom today. Community and courses are being built now and are planned for the $30 a year Platinum plan in October 2026, and until they ship, anyone who wants a community needs one of the platforms above.
What CartMango does today, on every plan including the $10 a year one, is take one-time and subscription payments through your own Stripe or PayPal with no platform commission, and leave your recurring payments running if you ever walk away.
One payment route does not appear in that table at all, and only Mighty Networks has it. When a member buys inside the Mighty Networks iOS app, Apple takes 15% under its small business programme and Mighty Networks adds nothing on top. Mighty Networks says that money takes 8 to 12 weeks to reach you, because it waits on Apple’s payout schedule.
FAQ
Is Skool really worth it?
On cost, yes, and by a wider margin than the sticker prices suggest. Skool Pro’s 2.9% is the lowest all-in rate of the 7 plans in this comparison, because it replaces Stripe rather than stacking on it. Skool Hobby at $9 a month costs less than Skool Pro below roughly $1,268 a month in member payments. What you give up is your own payment account, USD-only pricing for members, and a much simpler course builder.
Is Mighty Networks good?
It is the stronger product on almost everything except price. You connect your own Stripe account, your members pay in their local currency, the course tools handle cohorts, drips, quizzes and certifications, and you can run subgroups under your own domain. The cost of that is real: its cheapest plan takes 7.9% of every payment once Stripe’s share is counted.
Who are Mighty Networks’ main competitors?
Skool and Circle are the 2 it comes up against most often, with Kajabi and Heartbeat close behind. We have priced 8 Circle competitors by which buyer each one serves and 5 Skool alternatives on their real monthly rates if you want the wider field.
Which is better, Circle or Mighty Networks?
Different answer depending on what you are charging for. Circle sits between the 2 platforms in this post on both price and complexity, and it keeps a percentage of member payments on its lower plans in the same way Mighty Networks does. The Skool and Circle head-to-head works through the crossover points, and Heartbeat’s pricing covers the other platform that keeps coming up in the same shortlist.
Can I pay with PayPal on either one?
No. Skool processes payments itself and does not offer PayPal. Mighty Networks runs on Stripe and states plainly that PayPal and other processors are not supported. Several guides ranking for this comparison say otherwise, and they are wrong.
Can I move my members from one platform to the other?
You can invite them, and some will not come. Neither platform can transfer an active subscription to the other, so every member has to enter their card again on the new one. Budget for losing a share of them, and for rebuilding anything automated that was wired to the old platform’s structure.
Pick the venue last
Skool vs Mighty Networks is genuinely close on features and not close at all on money. Skool Hobby under about $1,268 a month in member payments, Skool Pro above it, and Mighty Networks when its own Stripe account, local currency pricing and deeper course tools are worth paying between 3.4% and 7.9% of every payment for.
Whichever you land on, that decision covers the community. It does not cover the one-time products most community owners end up selling next to it, the templates, the workshops, the recordings, and that is a separate checkout either way.
Detailed Skool pricing and the full Mighty Networks plan breakdown go deeper on each platform than a Skool vs Mighty Networks comparison has room for.
If the part you want fixed is keeping more of each sale and not losing your subscribers to a platform you might leave, CartMango is free until October 2026 and starts at $10 a year after that, with no cut of anything you sell.
About the Author
👋 I’m Welly, founder of CartMango (the site you’re on), a checkout platform for digital product sellers. We’ve previously processed $179M+. I also run BirdSend (email marketing tool, 3.1B+ emails sent). On the side I show other non-techie digital sellers how I use AI workflows to automate 50%+ of my operations. Find me on LinkedIn.