Today I am presenting you the review on Skool vs. Circle.so.

Skool and Circle.so are two leading tools for building online communities. Skool is dedicated to gamification and building engaging communities. Circle.so is more focused on monetization.

Both these have an ample set of differences. The final choice depends on your business needs.

Let’s get started with the comparison and see which tool excels in what aspects.

If interested you can refer to my Skool review and Circle.so review posts.

For a quick comparison, refer to the below table.

What do we like about Skool over Circle.so ?

• Skool is a community platform built by Sam Ovens who built and sold Consulting.com which is a multi-million dollar platform for entrepreneurs to grow their training business. Right now, he’s committed fully into this project.
• Skool excels over Circle.so when it comes to gamification. It has leaderboards, level hierarchies, points, daily activity tracking, rewards, and much more. Circle lacks these.
• Its member profiles are richer compared to Circle. Users can add customized text messages and links to social media profiles. It also adds the date when they joined, the number of followers a member has, whom they are following, and also displays their contributions. It’s similar to profiles on Facebook or Instagram. On the other hand, Circle just has a basic profile with name, designation, and tags. That’s it.
• Skool has something unique called a daily activity chart. It tracks all the member activities like likes, comments, polls and displays a visual heatmap of the activities over a year. With this, you can analyze the time range in which members are most active. Circle doesn’t have this feature.
• It has an integrated calendar feature for creating events. It syncs with Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, Yahoo Calendar, Outlook, etc. This gives members an overview of all the programs ahead of time. In the case of Circle, it integrates with Google Calendar.

What do we like about Circle.so over Skool ?

• Circle.so is more of a block-based community builder, which gives more flexibility and freedom over how you design the communities. For example – You can customize how the community feed should appear, and what blocks it should display. Skool lacks this flexibility and you feel quite restricted.
• For Enterprise plan users, Circle gives the flexibility to create customized profile fields. With this, you can collect additional data you need from the users. You can use this data for easier segmentation and marketing.
• For community moderation, Circle has several features like keyword blocklists and flagging comments & posts (you can find these features in Tribe.so as well). If you have large communities, these features help in spam prevention. Skool lacks this.
• For marketing, Circle has coupons, discounts, trials, and upsells. These help you in increasing sales. While Skool as of now doesn’t support these. However, Skool is likely to roll out these features soon!
• Circle.so has both iOS and Android apps (but apps are not completely white labeled unlike Mighty Networks). These apps help students consume the content on the go. They can access communities, courses, live streams, and memberships, all within the apps. On the other hand, Skool lacks mobile apps.
• In Circle, video hosting is built-in. However, storage is limited based on the pricing plan you select. In Skool, video hosting is not built-in and you have to use external tools such as Vimeo or Wistia.
• Unlike Skool, Circle.so has native live streaming. You can use this for group coaching calls, conducting webinars, masterclasses, events, etc. Recently, it has also introduced live spaces as well (like that of Twitter).

Common downsides

• Both these tools lack “Space” templates to create communities. This is not a big downside though. You need to create everything from scratch.
• Their course features are quite restricted. Both lack course compliance features, video analytics reports, course completion certificates, etc. Depending upon your requirements you may still need to use LMS-centric platforms like Teachable.
• Unlike tools like Kajabi or ClickFunnels, these lack funnels, automation, and email marketing features. For this, you may need to check out their native integrations and use tools like Zapier.

Latest product updates

Recently, Skool has introduced –
An improved and updated course panel.
Ability to customize the gamification levels.
Flexibility to redesign the leaderboards as you wish. You can create 7-day leaderboards or 30-day leaderboards.

While Circle.so has released features like –
Live spaces – Similar to Twitter spaces, you can conduct live sessions, host meetings, events, etc.
Community moderation tools – To prevent spam, it provides profanity filters, and the ability to flag abusive posts and comments.
Customized profile fields – You can create your own fields to collect all the data you need. Later you can use this data for segmentation or for creating marketing strategies.

Upfront bottomline

I recommend you go with Skool,

• If you want to create communities that are more focused on members’ engagement.
• If you want members to actively participate in community activities and you have excellent gamification strategies for this.
• If most of your audience are desktop users, the lack of the mobile app is not a major deal breaker for you. And, you trust in their roadmap.

Circle.so is the best bet if you –

• Are more focused on monetizing the community and need live streams, memberships, paywalls to gate access to the content, etc.
• Need excellent marketing strategies like coupons, discounts, and upsells, to increase sales.
• Need mobile apps for Android and iOS to help members connect with your brand and consume the content easily.

The ONE question you need to ask is – “Am I willing to sacrifice the mobile app, other marketing, and customization features, to get the best Community gamification features?”. If the answer is “no”, then go with Circle.so.

Community features compared

Skool is built considering the needs of community creators. Sam Ovens, who is a creator & coach himself, has identified the potential problems and designed community aspects keeping engagement in mind.

On the other side, Circle.so was designed by Teachable’s employees – Sid Yadav and Andrew Guttormsen. Their prior experience in Teachable (read complete review) has helped them a lot in designing Circle for community-specific needs.

Skool calls community channels “groups” while Circle calls them “spaces”.

You can make these channels either public or keep them private.

In the above screenshots, you can see how the communities look in these tools. Skool displays all the channels one below the other, so you can have a glance at all of them in a single view.

While in Circle, there is a community switcher available to toggle between multiple spaces.

Member directories and profiles:

Skool has a rich member profile feature than Circle. Users can add – Profile photos, bios, and headlines. I felt like I am seeing Instagram or more specifically some Snapchat profiles.

It adds a few more features like –

• Last active time.
• Date when they joined the group.
• The number of contributions, followers, and members they are following.

Along with these, it also displays the level they are in, points earned, and also the course completion percentage.

On the other side, Circle’s profiles are not so feature-rich. Members can just add profile pics, bios, headlines, locations, and links to social media accounts. That’s it.

Circle has a more feature-rich member directory where members can see all who are in the community and connect with them.

You can add filters to see specific directories based on the location, spaces they are in, courses members joined, etc.

This unlocks several use cases like –

• Helps in matchmaking. Members can connect with others who are in the same region.
• Helps to see a list of all members based on the tags added, Like – Founding members, admins, hosts, top affiliates, etc.
• Helps stay connected with members of specific spaces. (Great to connect with members sharing similar interests).

If you are using Kajabi for creating courses and building communities, note that you won’t have all the above community features that Circle comes with. I suggest you go through my comparison of Circle and Kajabi, to know more on how these two differ.

In case of Skool, you can filter the directories based on the levels, and status along with sorting options.

What’s more?

In Skool, there is an online now feature available similar to Whatsapp. It helps members connect with others in real time and chat with them. This is really useful if a member has any queries and needs assistance.

Cool isn’t it?.

Circle lacks this.

Daily activity tracking charts:

Just imagine the ability to track community activities daily and see how members are engaging.

Skool tracks all group activities on a daily basis and gives a visual representation as heatmaps. If you compare Skool with Mighty Networks, the latter lacks this.

With this, you can analyze what days/weeks/months members are engaging more.

The activities it tracks include –

• Post likes.
• Posts published.
• Comments and
• Voting on polls.

Using this chart, you can

1. Schedule the emails to send on the days when the activity is more.
2. Analyze the months on which users are inactive. Conduct live meetings to assist them and provide solutions for their problems.
3. Send cold emails or follow-up sequences when you see members are inactive.
4. Etc.

Live streaming :

Circle.so has a built-in live stream feature, and it eliminates the need for third-party tools like Zoom. With this, you can conduct live events, webinars, masterclasses, group coaching calls, etc. You can even sell them the events for a premium price.

Skool doesn’t have a native live stream. You need to use integrations with Zoom or YouTube Live, at an additional cost.

Winner: Circle.so. Its block-based community design approach, native live streaming, member directories, tags, etc. help in creating powerful communities.

Community customization options

Compared to Skool, Circle has more customization features. It provides color themes and dark mode features if you are on the Pro or Enterprise plans. There are several native themes available that you can customize as you visualize. You can even custom-code the theme to match your requirements.

Skool lacks this type of customization. You can just add thumbnails and logos. That’s it. It doesn’t even have the ability to custom code.

Custom domain and subdomain:

Using Circle.so, you can host your communities under your own custom domain and subdomain, which helps you reflect your brand and allows people to easily connect with you.

Skool lacks this feature. All the community groups you create will be hosted under www.skool.com/[community-name]/.

Winner: Circle.so. It provides custom site themes, allows you to custom code, and hosts your communities on custom domains & subdomains. While Skool is pretty weak at this.

Gamification in community

Are you looking for a platform that allows you to create communities that are fun-based and engaging?

If so, Skool would be the best choice. It provides gamification features that you can combine with community activities to increase members’ engagement. Whereas, other LMS and community tools like Thinkific and Kajabi are poor when it comes to community gamification features.

Both Circle.so and Skool have powerful community features but the former lacks when it comes to gamification.

Skool has various level-based hierarchies, point systems, badges, and leaderboards. By default, there are 9 different levels available to gamify the tasks within Skool.

You can rename the levels as you wish. But the prefixes level 1, level 2, level 3…. cannot be changed.

Based on the points users earn their levels go up. Users earn points when other members like their posts or comments. 1 like=1 point. On the member’s profile, it displays the number of points required to reach the next level.

You can refer to the screenshot above to see how many points meant what levels.

To encourage members to reach higher levels, you can add reward systems. This means,

• You can offer courses free for all members who reach level 3.
• For level 4 members, you can provide 30 mins free coaching calls.
• For level 2, you can unlock product blueprints.
• Etc.

This motivates users to earn more points to reach higher levels and unlock the rewards. This is really a great strategy to increase user engagement.

This type of gamification is lacking in Circle. so. But there is a workaround. (If gamification matters to you the most, you can take a look at some of the Circle alternatives).

You can use Zapier to gamify this. For example –

• For the top performers, you can offer a discount coupon to purchase other products in your store.
• On the course completion trigger, you can provide free access to the membership content.
• For inactive members, you can send customized email sequences to warm them up.

Winner: Obviously Skool. One of the strong USPs of Skool is its gamification. In this way, you can strategically incentivize people to engage more in your community. For example, you can let people unlock exciting stuff as they level up.

Online courses

Both these platforms have native course features. Circle’s courses are introduced recently in 2022. It is still in the development phase; they are frequently adding features to make it more powerful.

Skool calls courses classrooms. Its course curriculum consists of sets and modules. With just a click of a button, you can rearrange the sets to fit in the correct order.

On the other hand, Circle’s course curriculum consists of sections and lessons inside it. Here also you can just drag and drop the sections and lessons to reorder.

When it comes to course content types, Circle supports –

• Text
• Audio/video
• Embed codes

Skool supports –

• Text
• Audio/video
• Link embeds
• Files

One major difference between Circle and Skool is that the latter lacks video hosting; so you have to use third-party services like Vimeo/Wistia/Bunny.net. (If you want to avoid piracy, Bunny.net would be really helpful).

Based on the pricing plans you choose, Circle has restrictions on the storage it gives. The Basic plan costs 49/mo, it gives 10GB of storage.

With Skool, you can even add video/audio transcripts to help students understand the content easily. (Note: There is no built-in transcription service, you need to use external tools like Descript for this).

To avoid students binge watch the lectures, you can drip schedule the content with both.

If you compare the LMS features of these with dedicated course platforms like Teachable or Thinkific, these are lacking many features.

Like:

• There are no course compliance features available. You can’t enforce –
  • Video watch duration
  • Lessons completion order
  • Quiz completion
• There are no student-level course completion reports.
• Lacks course video analytics and heatmaps.

If you are more concerned about students’ course completion rates and need more advanced LMS-centric features, I suggest you host courses on tools like Teachable.

Winner: Skool. Compared to Circle, Skool has an attractive course interface and a good front-end user experience for students. Also, its integration with Loom and Bunny makes it super flexible to add video content. Its transcripts, action items, and lesson-wise discussion areas help in increasing user engagement.

Sales and marketing features

To increase sales, Circle. so has features like coupons, discounts, trials, and upsells. Skool, as of now, lacks these features.

You can set coupon usage duration as –

• Forever
• Once
• Repeating

Furthermore, you can even offer coupons on Paywalls. You can either make it available for specific Paywalls or for all.

Upsells:

With Circle, you can add as many upsells as you wish to increase sales. You can sell coaching, paid group calls, and memberships, as an upsell to courses.

Checkout features:

Both Circle and Skool lack built-in checkout. To accept the payments, you have to integrate with Stripe. Based on your geographical location, you can even connect with other payment processors using Zapier.

Paywalls:

Circle supports paywalls. You can use this to set up subscriptions or one-time payments for selling communities. You can either gate access to the entire community or set up various membership levels to give access to specific spaces.

Skool doesn’t support Paywalls as of now.

Note: Both of these platforms lack advanced email marketing, sales funnels, and automations. To avail of these features, you need to go with third-party tools, at an additional cost. In case you need an all-in-one platform that includes all these marketing features, you can consider Kajabi. But keep in mind that you still need a community tool on top of it.

Winner: Circle.so. It has generous marketing features like coupons, discounts, trials, and upsells. Skool lacks these marketing features.

Integrations

Circle.so has nearly 15+ native integrations. Some of the integrations include – Sendgrid, Teachable, Memberstack, MemberSpace, Memberful, WordPress, Twitter, etc.

On the other hand, Skool as of now doesn’t offer any native integrations.

Both tools provide Zapier and Webhooks integration to connect with 1000s of external tools and services.

One unique thing about Circle is it provides single sign-on integration with 11 tools. This helps members log in to these platforms using Circle’s credentials.

Pricing

Skool has only one pricing plan. It costs $99/mo and includes all the features.

Circle has three premium plans with the lowest starting at $49/mo. The lowest plan lacks courses, live streams, white labeling, advanced analytics, and custom CSS. To avail of these features, you have to go with the Professional plan at $99/mo. This is an ideal plan suited for all.

If you need a dedicated CSM, custom single sign-on, API access, and customizable profile fields, go with its Enterprise plan which costs $399/mo.

Conclusion

Both Circle and Skool are the best community platforms you can get started with. The final choice depends on your use cases.

Go with Skool, if you –

• Strongly need gamification features to increase members’ engagement.
• Need community features like rich member profiles, leaderboards, daily activity tracking, etc.
• Are okay with a basic course builder.

Go with Circle.so, if you –

• Need mobile apps to help your customers connect with your brand.
• Need native live streaming to host coachings, webinars, events, and masterclasses.
• Have a large community and need community moderation features to prevent spam.
• Need features like bulk actions, custom profile fields (to collect more data), email white labeling, and much more.

Want gamification features over others? Skool!

Need more of an all-round community builder? Circle.so.

I hope you found this post on Skool vs. Circle helpful.