Skool alternative for coaches: Replicants vs Skool

Courses are included free with every community on Replicants, so the course builder is part of this comparison, not an extra. The three things Skool does that we do not are listed further down, with the reasons.

What each one costs

Skool charges you a monthly fee and then takes a percentage of everything your members pay you. That percentage is all in: Skool takes the card payment itself, so there is no separate card processing bill on top of it.

We charge you nothing on what your members pay. The money goes straight into your own Stripe account, so we never hold it and there is nothing for us to take a share of. You still pay Stripe's card fees, exactly as any other business does, and the table below shows those so the comparison is a fair one.

Here is the arithmetic for a community of 25 members paying $49 a month, which is $1,225 coming in.

What the free tier includes, now that courses are in it. The community, the course builder, memberships, taking payment through your own Stripe, challenges, and the emails that go to your members. You can build as many courses as you like and charge whatever you like for them. The one thing that is not in it is a full website on your own domain, which is on the $97 a month plan. Sales funnels are on the same plan, and you can build your first funnel page free before you decide.

Which changes the comparison above. Running a classroom on Skool means paying $9 or $99 a month and handing over a share of every sale. Running the same classroom here costs nothing, and you keep everything except Stripe's card fees.

If you are staying on Skool, check which plan you are on. Hobby and Pro cost about the same once your community brings in roughly $1,267 a month. Below that figure Hobby is cheaper, because its higher percentage is still less than the extra $90 a month Pro costs. Anybody advising a small community to start on Pro is costing them money.

Where your community lives, and whose name is on it

On Skool, your community is a page on skool.com. The web address is skool.com followed by your group name. Two things about its appearance are yours to set: your logo, and the picture across the top. The rest is Skool's design, and Skool's name is on the page your members look at every day.

Skool also shows your members other communities. The Discovery page lists communities by subject and price, and suggested communities appear in the sidebar while your members are reading your posts. When nobody has heard of you, that is worth a great deal, because strangers can find you without you spending anything. Once you have members you would rather keep, the same system is showing them communities in your subject that are not yours, and they can join those in a couple of clicks.

Here, your community sits on a web address you own. Something like community.yourname.com. The domain is free for the first year and $29 a year after that, or you can point a domain you already own at it and pay nothing. You choose the logo, the main color, the picture across the top, whether the pages are light or dark, and which of seven designs your emails use. You can also switch off the small line at the bottom that says who built the software.

Nothing else appears on that page. There is no directory, no suggested communities and no way for a member to move sideways into somebody else's group from inside yours. Unless you tell them, a member has no way of knowing which company built what they are using.

Which of those two you want depends on where you are now. If almost nobody knows your community exists, being listed in a public directory is worth more than the risk of losing people from it. If you already have members you would not want to lose, a page that advertises other communities to them costs you more than it brings in. Most coaches move when the second becomes truer than the first.

What Skool offers for the same jobs. Skool can send one automatic direct message when somebody joins. That is the whole of the automation. Nothing reacts to what a member does after that, there is no way to write a post now and have it go out later, and there are no suggested replies. Several separate companies sell AI tools that plug into Skool from outside to fill this gap, which means your members' messages pass through another company on the way.

One rule applies to everything above. The software writes drafts. It does not post, send, message or publish anything until you have read it and pressed the button. There is no setting that lets it talk to your members on its own, and there never has been.

Challenges your members take part in

What a challenge is here. It is a set of tasks with a start date and an end date, run inside your community. Members join it, do the tasks, and earn points for each one they complete. There is a leaderboard showing who is ahead, and badges when somebody reaches a milestone.

How you set one up. You pick one of twelve formats. For example, Daily Streak, where members do the same small thing every day; Build Sprint, where they finish one piece of work over two weeks; Bingo Card, where they choose tasks off a grid; or Showcase and Vote, where they post what they have made and the community votes. You then answer a short set of plain questions: how long it runs, which channel it happens in, what counts as having done a task, and what people get at the end. There is deliberately no AI in those questions, because those are your decisions to make.

What is written for you. Once you have answered, the software writes the whole challenge out: every daily task, the points each is worth, the invitation, the emails that go with it, and the post that closes it at the end. You read all of that, change whatever you want, and publish it.

What happens while it is running. Every morning, everyone taking part receives one email saying what today's task is and where they are on the leaderboard, with a link that signs them in and takes them straight to the task. If somebody stops doing the tasks, they get a separate message and nobody else does. There is a limit on how many of those any one person can receive, so it never becomes nagging.

How this differs from Skool. Skool has points, levels and leaderboards. Points there come from other members liking your posts and comments, so the leaderboard shows who is most popular in the group. Skool has no way to set up a challenge. Here, points come from finishing tasks that you set, so the leaderboard shows who is actually doing the work.

Finding new members: Outreach, a paid add-on

Skool can bring you members through its public directory. We do not have a directory. What we have instead is a tool that goes out and finds people, and it is bought separately from the community.

How it works. You describe the kind of person you want as a member: their job title, their industry, their country. It searches LinkedIn and builds a list. It then connects with those people from your own LinkedIn account, comments on their posts and sends them messages, spread out at a normal human pace rather than all at once. You approve the wording before anything is sent. When somebody connects and gives you their email address, they are added to your email list and to your community as a member, without you copying anything from one place to another.

Two limits worth knowing before you count on it. It works on LinkedIn only at the moment. Instagram and X are being built and are not available yet, so if the people you want are on Instagram, this is not a reason to move today. And it is a paid add-on: the community itself is free, and nothing else on this page depends on buying Outreach.

Ways you can charge your members

Skool supports more ways of charging than most comparison pages admit, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Both platforms let you run a community that is free, one that is paid, a free one with a paid upgrade, several paid levels at different prices, or a single one off payment for permanent access. The table shows where the two are the same and where they differ.

The part that catches people out, so here it is before you start. Paid subscriptions cannot be transferred from Skool to anywhere. This is not a limitation of ours: because Skool takes the payment, your members' card details are held on Skool's account rather than on one you control, and no platform can move them. Every paying member has to subscribe again wherever they go next.

If your community is free, that costs you nothing at all. If it is paid, it is the real work of moving, and it gets harder the longer you leave it, because there are more people to ask each year. Your skool.com address also stops working, and there is no way to redirect anybody from it to your new one.

Trying it without switching anything off

You can build your community here while your Skool group carries on exactly as it is, and move your members when you are ready. Nothing has to be turned off to try it, and the first 100 founding communities are free permanently.

Start free, with your own Stripe account