Building a community is one of the most rewarding strategies in online marketing. When you foster a network of individuals with similar interests, values, or goals, you create a space to empower users, enhance brand loyalty, and provide valuable insights into audience needs.
While community building may sound simple, choosing the right platform to host that community is essential for success. A community-building platform should be versatile, user-friendly, and tailored to meet the specific needs of your audience.
In this comparison, we explore Skool vs Arena Community, examining each platform’s unique features, benefits, and limitations to help you decide which is best for your community-building efforts.
Overview: Skool vs Arena Community
What is Skool?
Skool is a platform where educators, creators, consultants, and small businesses can upload and share educational content with their audiences. Many consider it an enhanced version of Facebook and LinkedIn groups. Still, it is designed for those who want to build community, host online courses, conduct coaching sessions, or work on team projects.
Furthermore, creators can utilize Skool to create Group Funnels and Masterminds (community programs for coaches and mentors), gather feedback to work on Product Development, and build Support Forums. Although the platform is mainly designed for educational purposes, fan communities might use Skool to connect.
With a simple interface, Skool concentrates all its main features on the same dashboard. There is a community tab where group discussions occur, and users can upload photos, videos, GIFs, polls, and mentions. Educational resources are on the classroom tab, with a calendar feature where members can find live streams and community events.
Like Arena Community, Skool features gamification elements, group chats to enhance participation, and a search tab to help users find what they are looking for. Although Skool offers memberships and one-time purchase features, the platform doesn’t allow creators to unlock other monetization opportunities, such as affiliate links, sponsored content, and CTAs.
What is Arena Community?
Arena Community is an all-in-one engagement platform built to help you seamlessly bring your audience from social media to your own website or app. This no-code solution empowers brands, creators, and organizations to foster deeper connections with their audiences through enriched interaction and engagement.
Arena Community offers a suite of engagement tools that integrate effortlessly into your website. Every feature is designed to drive active participation, from real-time group chat and dynamic live blogs for multimedia updates to interactive polls, Q&As, and forum discussions.
Differently from Skool, Arena Community allows you to streamline your content production by integrating social media content into your live blog. You can post on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram and automatically share these posts on your community content wall, and vice-versa.
In addition to giving brands and creators complete control and ownership of their communities, Arena Community provides AI-powered features like content moderation, a writing assistant, AI feed search, and summaries to help fans quickly access relevant content.
The platform also enhances website revenue by optimizing ad placements, enabling subscription models, and creating opportunities for sponsored content partnerships.
What are the Main Differences Between Arena Community and Skool?
Pricing in Arena Community vs Skool
As the table above shows, while Skool and Arena Community have similar features, they approach their pricing plans differently.
Let’s see the price breakdown of each platform below:
Skool Pricing
Skool does not offer a free plan, but users can try the platform for 14 days before deciding whether to subscribe to the tool. The company has a simple pricing policy with a fixed rate for all:
- Simple Pricing ($99/month): This plan includes all features, allowing customers to create one group with unlimited courses and members. There is a 2.9% transaction fee per membership.
Arena Community Pricing
Arena Community offers three annual billing options:
- Free: This plan is designed for individuals and small teams starting online communities. It includes basic live engagement features, such as a live blog, group chat, and auto RSS feed.
- Starter Plan ($49/month): This plan is perfect for communities with up to 200,000 monthly pageviews. It includes an auto RSS feed, group chat, live blog, social network content stream, AI summary, AI polls, AI search, AI moderation, Q&As, ads monetization, and more.
- Professional Plan ($249/month): Tailored for brands and creators exceeding 2 million monthly pageviews. Includes all Starter plan features, UI customization, conversion cards, revenue share for ads, AI post enhancement, live support from Arena’s team, and additional benefits.
- Enterprise Plan (Custom): Custom pricing based on specific needs. Designed for large communities, brands, and creators. Includes all previous plans’ features, data exportation, white label, full API access, a dedicated Account Manager, private server, and more.
To see Arena Community’s full pricing options, click here.
Skool vs Arena Community: Which Platform Should You Choose?
Skool and Arena Community offer robust toolkits to support creators in implementing their community-building efforts, though they differ in several key aspects.
Skool was built for educational purposes, and therefore, its interface is designed to make e-learning accessible. While it does include real-time community engagement features, Skool is best suited for those who wish to bring students and mentees together rather than create a community from scratch. It is also important to note that while creators can integrate third-party software into the platform, Skool doesn’t offer pre-built AI tools, which could be a downside for customers who wish to streamline their content production.
On the other hand, Arena Community is an all-in-one engagement platform that helps brands and creators integrate their content efforts across platforms and bring communities back from social media to their websites. Tools such as live chat, live blog, forums, and polls ignite real-time conversations and provide up-to-the-minute updates on essential topics for community members. Arena also grants creators API access to customize the platform to suit their needs and communities.
Before making a final decision, it’s worth revising your community-building strategy to determine what resonates most with your goals. Look at our complete guide to learn more about how Arena Community works.
