We build Prolaud, so we're not a neutral referee. Everything below is checkable against Skool's own pricing page, and the section on where Skool wins is not a throwaway — for a large slice of creators it is the honest answer.
Skool is the one competitor we won't hand-wave: the group feed is genuinely sticky, the gamification works, and Skool Call now hosts live sessions natively instead of pushing you to Zoom. If your product is a community, Skool is a fair answer and we'll say so. What sends teachers our way is what sits underneath: Skool processes your payments and keeps a percentage of every single sale — 10% on Hobby, 2.9% on the $99 Pro plan — with no option to plug in your own gateway. For an Indian teacher that means no UPI, no GST invoice, no INR settlement, and a permanent tax on revenue. It also means one group rather than a storefront, and a feed rather than a classroom: no whiteboard, no exam-prep quizzes, no attendance feeding an at-risk score.
Skool
Today
Prolaud
From day one
The honest verdict
Prolaud is the stronger Skool alternative if you teach in India or your product is a class rather than a community. Skool is genuinely good at what it does — one simple group, native live calls, a gamified feed that keeps people coming back — and it is the harder product to beat on community. But Skool processes your payments itself and keeps a slice of every sale: 10% + $0.30 on the $9 Hobby plan, 2.9% + $0.30 on the $99 Pro plan. There is no bring-your-own-gateway option, which in practice means no UPI, no GST invoice and no INR settlement to an Indian bank. We take 0% on every plan including the free tier, settle from your own Razorpay in ₹ or Stripe in $ straight to your bank, and add the teaching depth a community tool doesn't carry — a multiplayer whiteboard, exam-prep quizzes, and attendance that actually weights a student's score so you see who's slipping. Skool remains the better choice when your product genuinely is the community rather than the curriculum.
Cost example
Numbers below use public pricing. Plug in your own revenue on the pricing page to see your specific math.
Your Skool bill
Today₹25,700
per month
Scales linearly with your sales
Double your revenue → roughly double the bill.
Your Big Class bill
After switch₹2,500
per month, Studio plan · flat
Stays flat regardless of sales
Hit ₹50 lakh / month → still the same bill.
Your monthly swing
+₹23,200
≈ ₹2,78,400 back in your pocket every year — at this revenue level.
See full pricingWhy teachers and creators move on
We've onboarded teachers from every category of platform. These are the same complaints, again and again.
Skool processes payments itself, so its cut is unavoidable: 10% + $0.30 per transaction on the $9 Hobby plan, 2.9% + $0.30 on $99 Pro. That's all-in rather than stacked on top of Stripe, which is fair — but there is no plan at any price where Skool takes nothing.
Because Skool is the processor, you can't connect Razorpay. In practice that rules out native UPI checkout, GST-compliant invoices with the right CGST/SGST/IGST split, and settlement in rupees to an Indian bank. Your buyers pay in USD on a card.
Skool's model is a single community with courses inside it. Selling a 1:1 coaching slot, a webinar seat, a digital download, a licence key or a bundle — separately priced, separately discoverable — isn't the shape of the product.
Skool Call handles the live session well. What isn't there is the teaching surface around it: a multiplayer whiteboard with grade-band scaffolds, entrance-prep quiz templates with auto-grading, or attendance that feeds a weighted score and surfaces who is about to churn.
There's no certificate designer and no public verification URL an employer can check. For skills teaching where the credential is part of what the student is buying, that's a gap they'll feel at the end of the cohort, not the start.
What you get instead
Skool is deliberately one thing done simply: a group with courses and calls in it. We're the teaching business around the class — storefront with eight product types, live room with a whiteboard, quizzes, certificates with a public verifier, engagement analytics, CRM and marketing automation, all against one student record.
Skool is USD-first and processes payments itself, so UPI, GST invoicing and INR settlement simply aren't available. We're built on Indian rails: your own Razorpay for UPI/cards/netbanking/EMI, GST-compliant invoices, WhatsApp notifications, and portals in ten languages — plus Stripe in USD when you sell abroad.
Your students, courses, orders and certificates export to CSV or JSON in one click on every plan, free tier included. No upgrade-to-export gate.
This is the clearest line between us. Skool keeps 2.9% + $0.30 of every sale on its $99 plan and 10% + $0.30 on the $9 plan, because Skool is the payment processor and there's no way to opt out. We take 0% on every plan including the free Starter tier — you connect your own Razorpay or Stripe, and the money settles straight to your bank without passing through us. On ₹6,00,000/month that difference is roughly ₹17,400 a month before you count the FX spread.
Side by side
We checked the rival's current public pricing + feature pages before publishing every cell. Hover any “partial” row for the caveat.
| Feature | Skool | Prolaud |
|---|---|---|
Zero commission on your sales No per-sale cut by the platform, on any plan. | ||
Bring your own payment gateway Your Razorpay/Stripe keys; money settles to your bank. | ||
India-native (UPI + GST + INR) Native UPI checkout, compliant GST invoices, rupee settlement. | ||
Native live room Host the session in-platform, no third-party seat. | ||
Community feed + gamification Posts, leaderboard, member directory. | ||
Multiplayer teaching whiteboard Grade-band scaffolds, multi-cursor, autosaves per class. | ||
Quizzes built for exam prep JEE / NEET / GMAT scaffolds, code review, essay rubrics, auto-graded. | ||
Attendance → weighted score → at-risk list Live attendance is 30% of an overall score that surfaces who is slipping. | ||
Certificates with a public verifier QR resolving to a verification page an employer can check. | ||
Storefront with multiple product types Courses, memberships, 1:1 slots, webinars, downloads, bundles. | ||
Free tier Launch and sell before paying anything. | ||
Simplicity How little you must configure before it works. |
Straight talk
Pick Skool if the community IS the product — a paid group where the daily feed, the gamified leaderboard and the sense of belonging are what people renew for, and the calls are a bonus rather than the curriculum. Skool's simplicity is a real feature: one group, one feed, one price, almost nothing to configure, and members who actually show up. It is also the better answer if your audience is US/global, you bill in USD, and you have no interest in running a storefront with multiple product types. We are built for the opposite shape: a teaching business where the class is the product, the student record matters, and the money is in rupees.
Other options worth a look
We compare honestly against each of these too — so you can hold Skool up against the whole field, not just against us.
How to switch
Most teams are fully migrated inside a weekend. You don't lose your roster, your courses, or your branding.
Step 1
Export your student roster from Skool (most platforms ship a CSV under "Students" or "Members"). Map the columns to name + email + WhatsApp.
Step 2
Bulk-import the CSV into /dashboard/students. We dedupe by email so re-running the import is safe.
Step 3
Recreate your courses — the curriculum builder lets you drag modules + lessons, paste video embed URLs, and upload PDFs without a wizard. Most teams get 5 courses across in an afternoon.
Step 4
Apply your brand — logo, primary colour, custom domain. The portal-template picker has 7 starting points if you want to refresh the look while you're at it.
Step 5
Send a one-shot announcement to your students that you've moved, with the new portal URL. The in-app + email + WhatsApp dispatcher fires once; reminders auto-schedule if you want.
Stuck mid-migration? Email us — we'll walk through the CSV mapping or migration scripts with you on a call. No upsell.
The switching framework
Score each tool yourself, Skool and us included — these are the questions that actually decide it.
Questions to ask before you switch
Does it ship live cohort tooling that respects classroom dynamics?
Is my data exportable on every plan, including the free tier?
Will my bill stay flat as my sales grow, with no per-sale cut?
Does it speak Indian-first (UPI, WhatsApp, INR, vernacular)?
Can I migrate over a weekend without losing my roster?
Start free — keep 100% of what you earn.
Start freeCommon questions
Skool genuinely runs the class — Skool Call hosts live natively, so this isn't the usual "they send you to Zoom" story. The dividing line is what the class costs you and what surrounds it. Skool processes your payments and keeps a slice of every sale (2.9% + $0.30 even on the $99 plan, 10% on the $9 one) with no way to plug in your own gateway, which also rules out UPI, GST invoicing and rupee settlement. And the room is a call, not a classroom: no multiplayer whiteboard, no exam-prep quizzes, no attendance feeding a weighted score that flags who is slipping. We take 0% on every plan, settle from your own Razorpay in ₹ or your own Stripe in $, and build the teaching surface around the call. See the whole loop at prolaud.com/loop. This page also spells out where Skool is genuinely the better buy.
Yes — 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction on the $99/month Pro plan, and 10% + $0.30 on the $9 Hobby plan. To be fair to Skool, that's all-in: Skool is the payment processor, so there isn't a separate Stripe fee stacked on top the way there is elsewhere. The structural difference is that there's no plan where the number reaches zero, and no way to route payments through your own gateway. Confirm the current rates on skool.com/pricing before relying on a figure.
Not natively. Because Skool processes payments itself, you can't connect Razorpay, which is what UPI checkout, GST-compliant invoicing and INR settlement to an Indian bank depend on. Your Indian students pay by card in USD. If most of your revenue is Indian, that's usually the deciding factor rather than the percentage.
For a community call, honestly yes — Skool Call and Webinars host natively now and scale to very large audiences, and we're not going to pretend otherwise. The difference is what surrounds the call. We add a multiplayer whiteboard with teaching scaffolds, in-session polls and a raised-hand queue, auto-chaptered recordings, and attendance that flows into a weighted score and an at-risk list. If you run a community, Skool's call is enough. If you run a class, the surrounding tooling is the point.
When the community is the product. If people pay for the group — the feed, the leaderboard, the people — and the calls are a perk rather than the curriculum, Skool does that better and simpler than we do, and switching would cost you the thing that's working. Move when the class becomes the product, when you need to sell more than one thing, or when Indian payment rails start to matter.
On ₹6,00,000/month of sales, Skool Pro's 2.9% is roughly ₹17,400/month plus the $99 subscription, before FX spread on USD settlement. Here you'd pay ₹1,499/month flat and 0% — your only per-sale cost is Razorpay's standard gateway fee, charged at cost by Razorpay rather than by us. Run your own numbers on the calculator above; the crossover comes early.
Members export as CSV and bulk-import here (we dedupe by email). Posts don't migrate — no community tool exports a portable feed — so most teams treat the move as a fresh start for the feed and carry the roster, the courses and the calendar. Run both in parallel for a month; there's a free tier, so it costs nothing to overlap.
Compare other alternatives
Each comparison is built the same way, so you can hold Skool up against the rest.
All-in-one workspace for live + cohort + community — without per-transaction fees on lower tiers.
See comparisonSame all-in-one promise — now including the marketing automation — without the steep starting price or the missing live-class primitive.
See comparisonSame course-builder polish — with the live cohort room, the whiteboard, and India-native checkout that Thinkific doesn't.
See comparisonSame simplicity — with deeper teaching tooling and India-native payments that Podia doesn't ship.
See comparisonWhen you outgrow the link-in-bio checkout — and need courses, classes, community, and a real student record.
See comparisonSame interactive-learner ambition — with the live cohort, native whiteboard, and India-first plumbing LearnWorlds doesn't quite ship.
See comparisonSame India-built ambition — without the per-transaction commission ladder and with a deeper teaching surface.
See comparisonSame creator-mobile-first focus — with the deeper teaching surface and zero-commission commitment Indian educators ask for.
See comparisonSame India coaching-centre focus — on the open web instead of locked inside a branded app, with transparent flat pricing and 0% commission.
See comparisonSame India roots — but built to TEACH and SELL, not just to administer a school.
See comparisonSame India-built, creator-friendly start — without a fee on your free-plan sales, and with live, community and the whole business in one place.
See comparisonSame India focus — but built around the whole teaching business and zero commission, not just secure, app-first content delivery.
See comparisonBoth India-built. Skolasti is course-hosting with strong content-DRM and a per-coach price; we add live teaching, community, a free tier, broader product types and flat 0%-commission pricing.
See comparisonClassWalla gives coaching institutes a branded Android/iOS app from ₹4,999/mo or revenue-share. We're the open-web alternative: a free tier, flat 0%-commission pricing, a cohort community and 8 product types — no app install to browse or buy.
See comparisonCircle is the best-designed community tool here — but meters live at 10 hours a month and 15 people per room on the $89 plan, plus 2% of sales. Unmetered live teaching, 0% commission, India-native.
See comparisonMaven is built for live cohorts and takes 10% of every enrolment, USD-first, with a marketplace attached. Same cohort machinery, 0% commission, your own Razorpay in ₹ or Stripe in $ — for teachers who already have an audience.
See comparisonFree Starter forever. No credit card. Cancel any day. The export button still works.