Skool Review — Is Sam Ovens’ Community Platform Worth It?

Skool is a community and course platform built by Sam Ovens, who sold Consulting.com to Iman Gadzhi in July 2025 to focus on it full time. The platform has grown significantly over the past two years and is now the default hosting environment for dozens of the coaching programmes reviewed on this site, from Imperium Academy to AI Automation Society to Maker School to Her Influence Academy.

This review is a little different from the others on this site. Skool is not a make money online programme. It’s a platform. But it appears so frequently across reviews here that understanding what it is and whether building on it is the right choice deserves proper coverage.

First — This Is Important

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Key Takeaways

• Skool is a community and online course platform founded by Sam Ovens, priced at $99/month for course creators
• It combines a community forum, structured course modules, a calendar for live events, and a gamification system (points, levels, leaderboards) into one interface
• The Skool Games competition, where creators compete for prizes based on monthly revenue growth, has become a major marketing engine for the platform itself
• Skool takes no revenue cut from course sales, which compares favourably to Teachable (5%) and Kajabi (no cut but higher monthly fees)
• The mobile experience and search functionality are consistently cited as weak spots
• As a place to buy or join a programme: assess the specific community quality, not just whether it runs on Skool
• As a platform to build on: straightforward to launch, good community mechanics, but limited in terms of advanced marketing automation compared to Kajabi or Teachable
• Verdict: A solid, straightforward platform for community-based learning. Neither as magical as its advocates suggest nor as limited as its critics claim.

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What Skool Is

Skool launched in 2019 and was relatively niche until Sam Ovens took it over and began actively promoting it around 2022. Growth has accelerated substantially since, driven partly by the Skool Games, a monthly competition where community creators compete for prizes based on member growth and revenue, with results tracked publicly on the platform.

The platform combines four core components: a community forum (similar to a private Facebook Group but cleaner), course modules (structured video and text content), a calendar for scheduling live events, and a gamification layer where members earn points for engagement, unlock levels, and appear on leaderboards. This combination makes Skool more engaging for members than a standard course platform and more structured than a pure forum.

For course creators, Skool charges $99/month with no percentage cut from sales. You keep 100% of revenue from your community, which compares well against platforms that take 5% or more of every transaction.

What Works Well

The community mechanics are Skool’s strongest feature. The gamification system, points, levels, unlocks, creates genuine engagement incentives that make members more likely to post, comment, and stay active than in equivalent Facebook Groups. The interface is cleaner and less distracting than Facebook, which matters for focused learning environments.

For course creators, the setup is straightforward. Launching a basic community with course content doesn’t require technical skill. The platform handles payments, access control, and community management in one place.

The Skool Games has proven effective as a growth engine, the competitive leaderboard creates genuine urgency for creators to grow their communities, and the public nature of the competition exposes winning communities to new potential members.

What the Weaknesses Are

The mobile app experience is consistently described as clunky. If your members primarily access content on mobile, this is a real limitation worth factoring in, multiple community creators and reviewers note that the mobile app hasn’t kept pace with the desktop experience.

Search functionality within communities is weak. Finding specific content, past discussions, or course materials requires more manual navigation than modern platforms should require.

Advanced marketing automation is limited compared to Kajabi or even Teachable. If you need sophisticated email sequences, tagging, or behavioural triggers connected to your community, you’ll need to integrate external tools. This adds cost and complexity.

There’s no native affiliate management system, which matters for creators who want to run affiliate programmes for their community memberships.

Skool as a Consumer: What to Look For

Because so many programmes reviewed on this site run on Skool, it’s worth knowing how to evaluate a Skool-based community before joining one.

The platform quality is consistent, everyone gets the same interface. What varies enormously is the community quality, the creator’s engagement, and whether the free tier (when it exists) gives you a genuine preview of what paid access provides.

The best Skool communities have active daily posting from members and the creator, well-structured course content that gets updated rather than left static, and live events that actually run on schedule. The worst are ghost towns where the creator launched, collected subscriptions, and stopped showing up. The platform won’t tell you which you’re joining, that requires research through independent reviews and, ideally, a free tier preview.

Is Building on Skool the Right Choice?

If you want to launch a community-based education business, Skool is a reasonable starting point. The $99/month with no revenue cut is genuinely competitive. The community mechanics drive engagement better than most alternatives.

But if you need sophisticated email marketing, advanced funnel automation, or a platform that handles complex membership tiers, Skool is not the right tool. It’s a focused community and course platform, not a complete business operating system. Many serious creators run Skool alongside a separate email platform and CRM rather than expecting Skool to replace them.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is Skool? A community and online course platform founded by Sam Ovens. Combines a community forum, structured course modules, live event calendar, and gamification system. Costs $99/month for creators with no revenue cut from sales.

Is Skool a scam? No. It’s a legitimate platform used by thousands of creators and hundreds of thousands of members. Sam Ovens is a verified entrepreneur with a documented background.

Why does Skool appear in so many programme reviews? Because it’s become the default hosting platform for a large portion of the coaching and community-based education market. The platform’s growth since 2022 has made it ubiquitous in the MMO and online business education space.

What are the main weaknesses? Mobile app experience, search functionality within communities, and limited marketing automation compared to alternatives like Kajabi.

Is it expensive? $99/month with no revenue cut is competitive. Kajabi charges more monthly and takes no cut. Teachable has lower tiers but takes 5% of sales at entry level. For a creator with meaningful revenue, Skool’s model is often the most cost-effective.

What should I look for when joining a Skool community? Active daily posting from members and creator, regularly updated course content, live events that run on schedule, and ideally a free tier or trial before committing to a paid subscription.