Heights Platform vs Skool: The Best Alternative to Skool

Heights Platform is an AI-powered platform for online courses and communities. It gives creators the flexibility and feature depth to build, scale, and energize a thriving business and community.

Heights offers four pricing plans to fit different creative needs, starting at $19/month.

The most complete option is the Pro plan at $99/month. It includes everything needed to grow a profitable business: advanced AI capabilities, course creation, community tools, a website builder, marketing features, and a built-in affiliate program.

Skool is a mainly a community platform with basic course features. It focuses on helping creators build and monetize a community.

How Payments Work in Skool vs Heights

Skool’s pricing is simple: two plans starting at $9/month (with 10% transaction fees!) or $99/month (with 2.9% transaction fees). While the higher plan matches the price of Heights Platform’s Pro plan, the feature sets differ significantly.

Skool acts as a merchant of record, processing all transactions on its platform. It currently charges a 10% transaction fee on their lower plan, for each sale you make. On top of this, because Skool handles the transactions, its fees may change in the future, and at present it does not provide integrations with other payment processors.

Heights Platform does not handle creators’ funds and does not charge any transaction fees. This means that everything you earn in Heights Platform is 100% yours to keep!

You connect your own Stripe or PayPal account—trusted, secure payment services—and funds from each sale go directly to your account. There’s no waiting for a payout from Heights; and standard transactions are processed straight to Stripe or PayPal.

Why Heights Platform is a Better Alternative to Skool

Everything you can do in Skool can also be done in Heights Platform. However, Heights goes far beyond that, offering a wider range of features that empower creators to truly scale their businesses without ever outgrowing the platform.

While Skool is mainly a community platform, Heights Platform is the best choice for creators who want to deliver engaging courses and build thriving online communities under their own brand.

Skool’s structure is more limited when it comes to flexibility in choosing your own business model. It only allows selling memberships that bundle community access with courses. For instance, you can’t sell an online course separately—it must be part of a membership package.

If you start with Skool and later realize you need more flexibility, migrating your community elsewhere can be challenging. You may lose past member messages or end up managing multiple platforms at once: for example, one for your community and another for courses, products, or coaching—which creates unnecessary complexity for you and your members.

Heights Platform, on the other hand, offers a versatile suite of features and advanced AI tools to support every creator’s vision. You can create your own white-labeled branded space and sell courses, digital products, challenges, coaching programs, and community access—either free or paid—at one-time prices, in installments, or through subscriptions. The possibilities are endless.

Heights Platform vs Skool: AI Features

Heights Platform stands out for its advanced artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, while Skool currently does not offer any AI tools. Heights integrates AI across multiple areas to help creators work smarter, save time, and scale their businesses more effectively.

• Automated Online Course Creation: Instantly generate a complete online course, including the title, lesson plans, descriptions, and even a professionally designed cover image. The entire course is automatically added to your account, ready to customize and launch.
• AI Chat & Question Answering: Get instant answers to questions about using Heights Platform, creating courses, and marketing strategies. The AI guides you through every step—from ideation to promotion—to help you connect with your ideal audience.
• AI Business Coach: Receive a personalized business plan created by AI to help you achieve your goals. The virtual coach also sends weekly, customized tasks to keep you on track and focused.
• AI Personal Assistant: Manage your business faster by executing text-based commands. You can adjust course prices, publish content, set up landing pages, and more—simply by telling the AI what to do.
• SEO Optimization Tool: Use AI-driven insights to improve your website’s search engine optimization, helping your pages rank higher on Google and attract more potential students.
• AI Website Builder: Create entire websites in one click. Heights AI understands your vision and creates unlimited personalized web pages that link to your courses and products seamlessly.

Heights Platform delivers a clear advantage over Skool by offering powerful AI-driven tools that simplify course creation, business planning, web design and content optimization.

These AI tools boost productivity and open new growth opportunities, making Heights the leading platform for innovative and efficient online course and business management.

Community Building & Monetization

Let's dive deeper into the specific features of Heights Platform and Skool to see how they compare, starting with community building and monetization.

Both Heights and Skool allow creators to build, manage, and monetize their online communities. However, Skool are quite simple, while Heights provides a more advanced, flexible environment designed to scale with your business.

Skool's Community Features

Skool offers a straightforward community management experience, but its simplicity also limits flexibility. Here’s an overview of Skool’s main community features:

• Gamification: Members earn rewards for engagement, and there’s a leaderboard to showcase top contributors. Heights Platform also includes gamification features.
• Categories: Skool allows unlimited discussion categories within one community per account.
• Private Messaging: Members can message each other one-on-one, and creators can communicate directly with individuals.
• Plug-ins: Skool supports up to three plug-ins - asking member questions before joining, Zapier integration, and automated DMs.
• Single Subscription Model: You can monetize your community using only one payment structure—either free or paid via monthly subscription. Multiple pricing options aren’t supported.

Heights Platform's Community Features

While Skool offers the basics, Heights Platform goes beyond, providing more advanced tools for creators managing small or large online communities and those seeking greater flexibility in how they package and sell their products.

• Unlimited Community Channels & Channel Groups: Heights offers discussion channels similar to Skool but displays them in an organized sidebar and allows you to group related channels together for easier navigation.
• Customizable Branding: Fully customize your entire program, including the community space, to reflect your brand and create a personalized experience.
• Community Management Tools: Moderate discussions, manage user accounts, and control member access with built-in management tools.
• Public Community: Your free community channels are automatically public and indexed by search engines, so that new members can join simply by searching for relevent keywords on Google or ChatGPT.
• Gamification: Heights includes advanced gamification features where members earn points and badges to keep them engaged and active.
• Private Messaging: Members can message each other and the creator directly.
• Locked Channels & Posts: Restrict posting or commenting within specific channels or threads when needed.
• Hidden Channels & Posts: Create exclusive spaces by hiding channels and granting access only to selected members.
• Sell Community Channels Separately: Offer one or more exclusive channels for VIP members or special groups.
• Multiple Memberships Under One Account: Create bundles of products and channels to run several memberships under a single Heights account. Skool only supports one community subscription per account.
• Custom Domain: Use your own domain or a customizable subdomain for a completely white-labeled experience. Skool, by contrast, only allows subdomain customization and no branding options.

Online Course Creation

Heights Platform is a dedicated online course and community software packed with powerful tools and advanced features designed for course creators. In comparison, Skool also offers a simple course builder, which is fairly basic and lacks flexibility.

Let’s break down how the two platforms compare when it comes to online course creation, starting with Skool.

Online Courses in Skool

Skool’s course builder is straightforward. Courses in Skool are made up of “Sets” and “Modules”. A “Set” functions like a module (a group of lessons), while a “Module” is essentially a single lesson.

Inside lessons (modules), you can add videos, text, links, images, and custom HTML. However, Skool does not include built-in video hosting. Instead, you must embed videos from external services like YouTube, Vimeo, Loom, or Wistia. While this works, it can make your courses look less polished if you use free platforms—or require paying extra for third-party video hosting.

Heights Platform solves this issue with unlimited, secure, and fast built-in video hosting included in every plan. Creators can upload as many videos as they want without relying on external services.

Both Heights and Skool support drip-fed lessons, meaning you can release course content gradually based on a custom schedule for each student.

Skool's Pricing Limitations

One of Skool’s biggest drawbacks is that you cannot sell courses individually. Instead, access to courses is tied to community memberships. You can allow free access, restrict courses to certain members, or unlock them when students reach specific levels. However, you cannot offer different pricing options, nor can you sell courses outside your membership structure.

This setup can be limiting for creators who want to sell courses, community access, and other digital products separately or in different combinations.

Online Courses in Heights Platform

Heights Platform takes a different approach, offering more flexibility and scalability for course creators. Its robust set of tools allows you to build online courses and digital products that fit your business model.

Courses in Heights consist of modules (groups of lessons) and lessons themselves. Lessons can include video, text, assignments, downloadable resources, audio, custom HTML, and more. Heights also includes unlimited video hosting with automatic transcoding into multiple resolutions for smooth playback on any device, along with built-in video analytics and timestamp linking.

Assignments and quizzes can be added to lessons, allowing students to upload files and receive feedback in a dedicated review area.

Heights creators can build and sell unlimited courses, challenges, and digital products. Using offers, you can package courses, communities, and digital resources together into one offer, giving you full flexibility in pricing models: one-time payments, installments, monthly or yearly subscriptions, free access, or even pay-what-you-want options.

Heights also allows creators to set launch dates and pre-sell courses—something Skool doesn’t support. You can release a course immediately, schedule its launch for the future, or set rolling launches to enroll students in batches multiple times throughout the year.

For additional customization, you can create hidden courses that are available only to selected students. Heights also automatically generates customizable landing pages and checkout pages for each product. You can add custom messaging, order bumps, refund policies, and more to enhance your sales process.

Heights includes gamification tools where students earn points and badges as they progress, keeping them engaged and motivated throughout the learning experience.

Heights Platform vs Skool: Sell Digital Products

Skool limits creators to selling only courses and community memberships, while Heights Platform offers far more flexibility.

With Heights, you can sell a wide range of digital products such as downloadable resources (PDFs, templates, worksheets), coaching calls, events, live stream recordings, bundles, external links, and more. Products can be sold individually or included in bundles with other courses and community channels, using one-time payments, subscriptions, or installment plans.

Heights also supports Challenges—a special type of timed online course with fixed start and end dates. Lessons are released on a set schedule, disappear after a customizable time, and allow students to progress together. Challenges can be rerun automatically without re-uploading content or changing settings, making them perfect for recurring launches.

Heights Platform empowers creators to sell more than just courses, offering diverse product types, customizable pricing, and flexible monetization strategies. Skool, by contrast, restricts creators to courses and community access, limiting potential revenue streams.

Customer Support

At Heights, creators often highlight our responsive and friendly support team. We’re here to help you succeed.

Heights Platform is The Best Alternative to Skool

So which is the better online course platform?

Ultimately, that is your decision to make!

When comparing Heights Platform and Skool, the difference is clear. Heights delivers a more comprehensive solution for creators, offering advanced course creation tools, flexible digital product options, powerful AI features, and built-in marketing capabilities.

While Skool provides a simpler, more basic approach, Heights is the better choice for creators who want to scale their business, diversify revenue streams, and build a strong, customizable brand.

If you’re looking for a platform that empowers growth and gives you more control, Heights Platform is the clear winner.

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