Kajabi vs Skool vs Whop (2026): Costs, Features and Which Fits You

Kajabi vs Skool vs Whop at a glance

Kajabi is a marketing suite with courses attached, Skool is a community with a classroom attached, and Whop is a storefront with apps attached. The table shows where that difference lands on price and features.

Prices and features as of October 2026, from each company's public pricing and help pages. Sources at the end of this page.

Kajabi's price buys an all-in-one suite, Skool leads on engagement and tax handling, and Whop has the lowest monthly cost and the most ways to get paid. The rest of this page explains where each difference matters.

What each platform is built for

Each of the three makes most sense for a different kind of business, so start with how you sell before you compare prices.

Kajabi

Kajabi bundles the parts of a course business that usually live in separate tools: courses and coaching products, a community, email marketing, funnels, landing pages and a website. Every plan includes unlimited marketing emails, landing pages and funnels. The tradeoff is price and limits: Basic costs $179 a month and caps you at 5 products, 2,500 contacts, 1 community and 2 admins.

Skool

Skool is a community first. Every group gets one feed, a classroom, a calendar and unlimited live calls, and members earn points from likes that move them up nine levels and onto a leaderboard. It's cheap to start at $9 a month, but Hobby takes 10% + 30¢ of every sale, and every Skool price is in USD.

Whop

Whop is a pay-per-sale storefront. You create products and attach apps such as Courses, Forums, Chat and Events, and you can also sell downloads, 1:1 bookings and Discord or Telegram access. There's no monthly fee; Whop charges 2.7% + 30¢ per domestic card payment plus 0.5% on recurring charges. It has no native gamification.

What you pay at $1,000, $10,000 and $50,000 a month

On a $49 monthly membership, Whop has the lowest fees at $1,000 and $10,000 a month, and Skool Pro edges ahead at $50,000. Kajabi costs the most at low revenue because of its plan fee, while Skool Hobby costs the most at high revenue because of its 10%.

Prices as of October 2026. US cards, $49/month membership, plans billed monthly. Sources at the end of this page.

Fees = plan price + (percentage × sales) + (30¢ × charges), with charges = sales ÷ $49. Kajabi uses Kajabi Payments: 2.9% on Basic or 2.7% on Pro, plus 0.7% on every subscription charge. Skool Hobby is $9 + 10%, Skool Pro is $99 + 2.9%, and Whop is $0 + 2.7% + 0.5% billing on recurring charges. Results are rounded to whole dollars and leave out international cards, payout fees and add-ons.

Two things to keep in mind. Kajabi's price includes email marketing, funnels and a website builder, so if you'd pay separately for any of those on another platform, add that cost to its column. And at about 1,020 members, Kajabi Basic's 2,500-contact cap gets tight once you count leads, which can push you to Growth at $249 a month. The Kajabi pricing breakdown and our Skool pricing guide cover each plan in detail, and the fee calculator runs your own price and volume.

Courses compared

All three host video courses well, so the differences are in packaging and access rules.

Kajabi treats courses as one product type alongside coaching, podcasts and downloads, and its plans cap how many products you can have (5 on Basic, 50 on Growth, unlimited on Pro). Skool's Classroom allows unlimited courses of up to 200 pages each, with native video hosting or embeds from YouTube, Vimeo, Loom and Wistia, and you can keep a course locked until a member reaches a certain level. Whop's Courses app supports video lessons, quizzes, progress tracking and drip schedules, and the same course can sit inside several products.

Bottom line: Skool is simplest, Whop is the most flexible to package, and Kajabi fits best when courses sit alongside coaching, podcasts and downloads in one catalog.

Community compared

Skool is the strongest community product of the three, because the community is the product. Its feed, calendar and leaderboard keep members coming back, and points from likes reward the people who post.

Kajabi includes communities (one on Basic and Growth, three on Pro), but they're one feature among many. In one r/SKOOL thread from December 2025, a creator who started on Kajabi said they found its community hard to use and members didn't engage, moved paying members to a WhatsApp group, and was weighing Skool. That's a single report, not a survey.

Whop splits community into Forums for threaded posts, Chat for real-time talk and Events for live sessions, and it can sell access to an existing Discord or Telegram group. It has no points or leaderboards.

Bottom line: Skool for engagement-driven groups, Whop for flexible structure, Kajabi when the community supports a course rather than the other way round.

Marketing and growth tools

Each platform helps you find and keep customers in a different way, so compare the tools you'd actually use.

Kajabi includes unlimited marketing emails, landing pages and funnels on every plan, plus a website builder, so a launch can run inside one dashboard.

Skool doesn't list funnels, a website builder or email automation among its features (October 2026). Its growth tools are Discovery, Growth Boost (which takes 30% of recurring charges from members Skool brings you) and member affiliates on Pro.

Whop's growth tools include a Discover marketplace with 0% commission, an affiliate program (1.25% processing per affiliate sale) and upsells at checkout. Whop Websites builds a hosted site on a whop.site address with checkout built in, using an AI builder or a ready-made blueprint, and Whop Ads (in beta) runs Meta campaigns from your Whop dashboard.

Payments, payouts and tax

Skool is the simplest of the three to run, Whop accepts the most ways to pay, and Kajabi sits in between.

Kajabi Payments charges US cards 2.9% + 30¢ on Basic (2.7% on Pro), adds 0.7% to every subscription charge and 1.5% on international cards, and supports Apple Pay, Google Pay, Klarna and Afterpay. You can connect your own Stripe instead, but Kajabi adds 2%, 1% or 0.5% depending on your plan. Kajabi isn't the merchant of record; its optional sales tax feature calculates and collects tax for $0.15 per taxed sale, and you file and remit.

Skool is the merchant of record: it prices in USD only, files sales tax and adds EU VAT on top of your price. You can't use your own Stripe or PayPal, and payouts arrive once a week.

Whop takes cards, wallets, PayPal, crypto, ACH and buy-now-pay-later (once approved) in more than 135 currencies, and pays out within 5 business days or instantly for a fee. New accounts go through identity checks, can have part of their balance held in reserve, and are capped at $2,500 per checkout until approved. Tax on direct sales is yours unless you pay 2% for Whop Tax Service.

Which one fits you

Use this as a quick decision guide, then check the numbers for your own price point.

• You want courses, coaching, email marketing and funnels on one Kajabi bill, and $179 a month fits your revenue: Kajabi.
• You run a community where members talk every day and the leaderboard matters: Skool.
• You sell several things (memberships, one-time products, downloads, Discord access) or sell internationally: Whop.
• You're just starting with under $1,000 a month in sales: Whop ($0 a month) or Skool Hobby ($9), not Kajabi.
• You make $50,000 a month from a $49 membership paid mostly with US cards: Skool Pro has the lowest fees, Whop is close, and Kajabi Basic costs about $430 a month more than Skool Pro, with email marketing and funnels included in that price.
• You're also weighing Circle for a deeper community: see Circle compared with Whop.

When Kajabi or Skool beats Whop

Whop isn't the right answer for everyone in this three-way race. Kajabi or Skool is the better pick in these cases:

• You want payments in your own Stripe account. Kajabi lets you connect one (for a 0.5% to 2% fee, depending on plan), while Whop runs every payment through Whop Payments.
• Your community runs on points, levels and level-locked courses. Only Skool has them built in.
• Most of your members are in the EU and you never want to deal with VAT. Skool handles it as merchant of record.
• You want a branded app in the App Store. Kajabi includes one on Pro.
• You run a large Skool Pro group paid mostly with US cards. Above about $33,000 a month, Pro's 2.9% beats Whop's 3.2%.

Whop's own limits are worth stating plainly: no native gamification, no option to use your own Stripe account, identity checks and possible reserves for new accounts, and a $2,500 per-checkout cap until approved. Moving to it also means re-uploading course videos (or embedding them from YouTube or Loom) and, for Skool and Kajabi Payments members, asking everyone to re-subscribe. Our head-to-head pages go deeper: Whop vs Skool and Whop vs Kajabi.

Moving to Whop from Kajabi or Skool

How hard the move is depends mostly on who holds your members' payment details. Courses and community need rebuilding either way.

From Kajabi, it depends on your processor. Subscriptions billed through your own Stripe account can move with Whop's Stripe migration, which keeps renewal dates for active card subscriptions. Kajabi Payments subscriptions can't be transferred, so those members re-subscribe. The Kajabi to Whop guide covers both paths, and the Kajabi alternatives list covers other options if you're not set on Whop.

From Skool, every paying member re-subscribes, because Skool is the merchant of record and has no billing export. You start from the member CSV, rebuild Classroom in Whop Courses, and give members a free trial that lines up with their next Skool charge. The Skool to Whop guide has the full plan, and seven Skool alternatives, compared covers the other routes.

Either way, the Move to Whop wizard creates your products, course outline and community on Whop.

How we compared

We compared Kajabi's, Skool's and Whop's published pricing pages and help-center articles, checked October 2 and 3, 2026. We didn't run a business on all three platforms for this page, so feature notes come from official documentation, and the one community anecdote comes from a public Reddit thread.

Fee examples are calculated, not measured: a $49 monthly membership, US cards, plans billed monthly, no add-ons, no payout fees and no currency conversion, rounded to whole dollars. This page explains published fees and isn't financial or tax advice.

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