Which community and membership stack is best for you? I break them all down and show you what their sales pages won't say out loud!
An agency CRM with a Skool clone inside it, down to the exact points table. $97/mo, 0% platform fee on your own Stripe, unlimited contacts, groups and channels, levels that unlock courses, a Skool importer, and a white-label app for $497/mo on top. Built for agencies, not creators.
HighLevel is a CRM for marketing agencies. Funnels, pipelines, calling, SMS, email, reputation management, booking, invoicing, and a white-label mode so agencies can resell the whole thing as their own software. Somewhere in that list is "Communities."
The community feature is a Skool clone. Not in spirit: in numbers. One like equals one point. Nine levels. Level 2 at 5 points, level 3 at 20, level 4 at 65, level 5 at 155, level 6 at 515, level 7 at 2,015, level 8 at 8,015, level 9 at 33,015. That's Skool's table, copied. There's even a Skool importer.
So why isn't this a Skool alternative for creators? Because the whole thing costs $97 a month, assumes you'll run it for clients, charges by usage for email and SMS, and gives you a CRM when you wanted a community. If you're an agency, it's a bargain. If you're one person with one course, it's a lot of software to carry for a feed.
14-day trial. No free plan.
"Unlimited contacts" is the real difference from Systeme and Kajabi. Nobody meters your list here.
What they meter instead is usage. Email, SMS, calling and every AI feature carry per-use charges on top of the plan, marked with asterisks on the pricing page and priced on a separate page. And the add-ons stack: white-label mobile app $497/mo, branded client portal app $49/mo per sub-account, WhatsApp $10/mo per sub-account, dedicated email IP $59/mo, premium support $500/mo.
0% from HighLevel. You connect your own processor and pay their rate. The usage charges on email and SMS are the fee that matters: a community that sends a lot of notification emails is a community with a bill.
Stripe, PayPal, NMI, Authorize.net, Square, Adyen, Razorpay, and a custom provider framework. Widest choice on this site. Rated "Built in, multiple processors."
Communities contain Groups, and groups contain Channels. Public or private at each level, announcement channels where only admins post, pinned posts, reactions, member roles (Owner, Admin, Member), join approval, and a custom domain. Members who belong to several groups get sent to the one they used last.
Gamification is the Skool system: points from likes, nine preset levels you can rename but not reprice, a leaderboard, and level badges on profiles. The gamification article (March 2026) says rewards can't be tied to levels and must be handled offline. The announcement-channel article (August 2026) describes level-based course unlocks, where reaching a level unlocks a course and triggers an email. The newer article wins, so we've rated it "Leaderboard and levels with unlocks," and noted that HighLevel's own docs disagree with each other.
A full membership and course builder with modules, lessons, drip, time-based and level-based unlocks, quizzes, certificates, and payment. It's built for agencies to sell to clients, so it's more configurable than pretty.
Does it send members a digest? No. There's a long list of event emails you can switch on per group: new comment, reply, like, tag, @everyone, calendar event created, course unlocked, role changed. Each one is a separate email. There's no daily or weekly summary. Rated "Basic notifications." Push and in-app notifications exist for announcements and level-ups.
Can you email your members from inside it? Yes. HighLevel is an email and SMS marketing platform with workflow automation, so broadcasts, sequences and triggers are all here, with the community as a trigger source (member joins, member levels up). Rated "Sequences and automation." Each send costs usage.
Can you get your list out? Yes. Contacts export as CSV from the CRM. Like Systeme, the ESP is the platform, so there's nothing to sync to; the list already lives in the tool. Rated "Native ESP integration" on that basis.
Members in: Contacts → Import Contacts with a CSV and field mapping, then add to a group. And there's a dedicated Skool Importer that brings members and content across, now with multi-group support and content order preserved. Rated "Yes."
Members out: Contacts CSV. Community posts: no export we could find.
Courses in: The Skool importer handles community content. Courses from Skool are a rebuild per HighLevel's own migration guide, which says to download your course materials and recreate them. Rated "From competitor (migration tool)" for the Skool importer, with that caveat.
Three answers. The shared HighLevel app is for you, not your members. A branded client portal app is $49/mo per sub-account. A white-label mobile app is $497/mo, or included on Enterprise. Rated "Your own branded app," because it exists, with the price in the limitation so nobody's surprised.
$97/mo entry with usage-based email, SMS and AI charges on top. Branded app is $49/mo per sub-account or $497/mo white-label. No activity digest. HighLevel's own documentation disagrees with itself on whether levels can unlock rewards.
Checked 16 Oct 2026 against the HighLevel pricing page and these support portal articles: How to Setup, Customize, and Manage Your Communities (modified 17 Sep 2026); Gamification in Communities: Points, Badges and Leaderboards (20 Mar 2026); Communities: Announcement Channel and Notification (4 Aug 2026); Skool to HighLevel Migration Guide (13 Aug 2026).
The free plan that's actually free: 2,000 contacts, unlimited emails, one course, a community, 0% fees on your own Stripe or PayPal. The funnels and email are the point. The course builder and the community are the compromise. We use it, so this one's first person.