What are the Differences Between Mighty Networks and Skool? (2024)

What are the differences between Skool and Mighty Networks? Both platforms allow you to build a community, offer courses and host events, but they go about this very differently. Skool is a community platform for creators with a mission to help 1 billion people find community. Mighty Networks is a platform built around the idea that communities should run themselves. It's where you can bring together content, courses, memberships, events and challenges all in one place. In this video, we'll be comparing Skool versus Mighty Networks to to help you decide which platform would be best for you and your community. Let's get started. First, let's take a look at the navigation and interface of these platforms so you can get an idea of what your community would look like. A school community comes with six default tabs. Community is where you and your members can create and like posts, leave comments, and have threaded conversations. Classroom is where you can offer one or multiple courses. Calendar is where you can add links to an externally hosted live stream or group. Call. Members is a member directory, and each member can upload a photo and a bio Leaderboard shows your members progress with School's built in gamification features, which I'll talk more about in a bit. And then there's about, which is a description about your school group that can serve as a landing page for private groups. Now, with Mighty Networks, you can create something that looks very similar to School. So here we have a space that has a Community tab where you and your members can do posts and comments, a Classroom tab where you can create an online course, a Calendar tab where you can add events, a member directory, a leaderboard tab that shows your top members, and then an about tab. However, one of the biggest differences when it comes to Skool and Mighty Networks is that with Mighty, you have complete control when it comes to designing the navigation of your community. There's also a lot more customization overall, so let me show you what I mean. For example, this space can be your main community that all of your members would have access to, but you can also create a separate space for a private Mastermind group, which would have its own event calendars that only members of this group would be able to access. And instead of having a feed with posts and comments, you can enable the Chat feature where your Mastermind group members would be able to chat together in real time. If you wanted to do this in school, you would have to create a separate school group. So with Mighty, your building blocks are called spaces and each space can be customized with up to nine native features. Here are all the features you can enable in each space. First, there's a chat feature where your members can chat in real time through text as well as share images, attachments and links. You can also enable a feed where you and your members can share posts with rich formatting as well as interactive polls and questions. There's also a discovery feature where you can highlight and feature posts. This is great for helping your members find important content within each space. Next, if you're on Mighty's business plan, you can enable the Table of Contents feature. This is Mighty's course feature which allows you to build and sell courses, create quizzes, have a course curriculum, and upload all kinds of content for each lesson. You can also have a single event, which is great if you want to create a space around a signature event like a summit. Or you can enable an event series space where members can browse an RSVP to multiple events. Next, you can enable a member directory which displays the profiles of the members that are part of this space. You can also have highlighted hashtags. You can add hashtags to improve searchability for your quick posts, articles, course lessons, chat events, or polls and questions like the ones we've renamed here to Topics. Lastly, you can have a standalone webpage, which is great if you'd like to include something like an introduction page, a page describing a new offering you want to sell, or anything that's more about delivering a single piece of content. All of these features are natively built into Mighty Networks, and for each space you create, you decide which of these features to turn on or off. You can have a space that only has one of these features or all of them. You could also rename each of these tabs so you can rename this calendar tab to be Events, Coaching Calls or Live Streams. Or you can rename your classroom to be the name of your course, Knowledge Base, resource center, replays, etc. And even though there's a lot of customization with Mighty Networks, it's also really easy to get started. And there are plenty of features to help you get your Mighty network up and running in minutes. For example, Mighty lets you take an idea and turn it into a ready to start community with its AI community builder, Mighty Co Host. There are also templates to help you get started based on what you're trying to build, like a feed space or a cohort based course. And every Mighty plan comes with unlimited spaces so you can really create an experience that works best for you and your brand. Next, let's talk about courses. Both Skool and Mighty Networks allow you to Create Unlimited Courses School uses a combination of video embedding, a rich text description, body, resource attachments and transcripts. One thing to note is that Skool does not have native video upload. You would have to upload your course videos to something like YouTube or Vimeo and embed your videos into your courses. If you're on Mighty's business plan, you can create an unlimited number of courses and dedicated course communities. You can create a live cohort based course, a content only course, or build a community based course that puts the emphasis on member challenges, events and activity. Within your course you can add all kinds of content types including images, videos and media and file attachments. You can also offer quizzes which you can't do with school. Now let's talk about engagement and the different ways that both of these platforms allow you and your members to connect with each other. Both platforms offer direct messaging between you and your members. Mighty does take things a step further with group messaging, so up to 10 members can chat with each other. There's also chat spaces where all of the members of a space can chat with each other in real time. Both platforms have an iOS and Android app so so that your members can access your community courses and messages and receive push notifications. Mighty does have an additional enterprise plan where you can create your own branded app and I'll talk more about that in the pricing section. When it comes to events, both platforms have an event calendar where you can schedule both digital or in person events. With Mighty though, you can collect RSVPs, have a comment section under each event, and you can livestream natively within any space in your Mighty network. One unique feature to Skool is the Leaderboard, which is a gamification feature that incentivizes engagement. Each member in your community can earn a point by liking posts, comments and replies, where one like equals one point for the author. After a member earns a certain amount of points, they can level up and as the admin you can set a reward to unlock at certain tiers, but the rewards can only be accessed to your locked courses. Mighty has a Top Member feature that highlights the members who are most active in your community. A top member is determined based on their total contributions, including engagement and posts, articles, polls, courses, events and chat. One unique feature to Mighty is an interactive welcome Checklist which is a customizable way to introduce members to your community. It's a really effective way to help your new members find their way around your community and start participating. Next, let's talk about payments and the different ways you can charge your members with school, you can set up a free plan or a monthly subscription for access to your community and courses. However, if you wanted to create a separate community for a higher tier with its own course content, you would have to create and pay for another school group. There's also no way to offer free trials. Also, in order to charge different prices for access to different courses, you would have to use Zapier to integrate with a CRM like ActiveCampaign or a checkout like ThriveCart. With Mighty, payment options are a lot more robust. First, you can charge for access to any of your spaces or a bundle of spaces. When it comes to charging your members, you can offer one time payments, subscriptions both monthly and annual, token gating and free plans. Lastly, you can charge in 135 different currencies. Now let's talk about Analytics. If you're curious about the analytics for your community, school can offer you a basic look at your total members, active members and daily activity. On Mighty, you get access to Mighty Insights, which is a comprehensive analytics suite that lets you dive deep into growth, engagement, revenue metrics and more across your entire network or individual spaces of native features within each space. Next up, let's talk about pricing and how much it costs to build on these platforms. School only has one price which is $99 a month and that includes one group, all the features, unlimited courses and unlimited members. This can make things simple for you since you don't have to compare plans and you would get access to all of the features right away. However, as I mentioned before, if you wanted to create an upsell group or a higher tier group, you might still need to utilize additional tools and pay for other subscriptions to do what Mighty already has built in. For Mighty Networks, there are three paid plans. When billed annually, there's a community plan at $33 a month and and the business plan at $99 a month. There's also Mighty Pro, which is an enterprise type of plan where you can white label the whole experience and have your own branded app in the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store. All of Mighty's plans come with unlimited spaces, hosts, admins and members. If you want to be able to create and sell courses, you have to be on the business plan, but from there you'll be able to have an unlimited number of students, courses, instructors, moderators and dedicated course communities. So as the host of a Mighty network, you're not being charged based on how much you scale or grow or how many members you have. It's just a flat fee tier depending on the features that you want. So both Skool and Mighty Networks allow you to build a community where your members can connect, learn and grow together, but they are very different platforms. Skool has a clean interface and keeps things simple. It also focuses on gamification as a way to encourage engagement. Overall, though, school does feel limiting. With Mighty, you get the flexibility to design an experience where your clients and customers can learn from you while also creating profound connections with other members. This community focus takes your offer beyond just a transaction to long lasting impact for each one of your members. Mighty is also a platform that can grow and scale with you, allowing you to charge and create bundles for a variety of memberships, club courses, content or communities. With Mighty, you'll have robust customization, a variety of built in native features that you can easily turn on or off, and the ability to create unlimited courses and communities. So if you're building a business and brand around your community, Mighty Networks is the way to go. Now, if you want to learn more about building on Mighty, check out this video next.