Best Membership Site Platforms in 2026: Patreon vs Circle vs Mighty Networks vs Skool

Estimated read time: 13 minutes

Every membership platform advertises a monthly price. Almost none of them advertise the number that will actually determine what you pay, which is the percentage they take off the top of every payment your members make. Get that wrong and the cheap platform becomes the expensive one somewhere around your fortieth member, usually right when you are too busy to migrate.

This guide compares the five platforms most small businesses and creators actually consider in 2026: Patreon, Circle, Mighty Networks, Skool, and Kajabi. It runs the real math at three revenue levels, explains what each one is genuinely good at, and flags the mistakes that quietly kill membership businesses in year two.

One note before the numbers. Every platform on this list has changed pricing at least once in the past 18 months, and several changed it twice. Treat the figures here as accurate to the time of writing and verify current pricing on the vendor’s own page before you commit. The framework for evaluating them will outlast the specific dollar amounts.

The only two numbers that matter

A membership platform charges you in two ways, and they behave completely differently as you grow.

The fixed monthly fee is your rent. It is painful when you have five members and irrelevant when you have five hundred. A 99 dollar plan is 20 dollars per member at five members and 20 cents per member at five hundred.

The transaction fee is a tax on success. It never gets cheaper. A 10 percent cut on 500 dollars a month costs you 50 dollars. The same 10 percent on 20,000 dollars a month costs you 2,000 dollars, every month, forever.

Add payment processing on top of both. Stripe’s standard rate in the United States is 2.9 percent plus 30 cents per transaction, and most platforms charge their fee on top of that, not instead of it. So when a platform advertises “2 percent,” the number you are actually paying is closer to 5 percent all in.

The crossover point where a higher fixed fee becomes worth it to escape a percentage is easy to calculate. Take the difference in monthly fees and divide it by the difference in transaction percentages. Skool’s jump from 9 dollars at 10 percent to 99 dollars at 2.9 percent is a 90 dollar increase to save 7.1 percentage points. Ninety divided by 0.071 is about 1,270. So the moment you clear roughly 1,270 dollars a month in membership revenue, the 99 dollar plan is strictly cheaper. Run that calculation for every platform you are considering. It takes two minutes and it is the single most useful thing you can do before signing up.

Patreon: the fastest start, the highest tax

Patreon remains the default for creators with an existing audience, and for good reason. Setup takes an afternoon, your audience already knows what it is, and the billing infrastructure is battle-tested at enormous scale.

The cost is the cost. On the Pro plan you are looking at roughly 8 percent of monthly income to Patreon, plus payment processing that runs about 5 percent plus 10 cents on transactions under 3 dollars and 2.9 percent plus 30 cents above that. All in, call it 11 to 13 percent of every dollar depending on your pledge sizes. If your members pay 3 dollars a month, that small-transaction rate hurts considerably more than the headline number suggests.

Where Patreon genuinely wins: discovery. It is the only platform on this list where a stranger might find you without you doing the work. It also handles a huge amount of tax and compliance complexity on your behalf, which has real value if you are a one-person operation with members in twelve countries.

Where it loses: you do not own the relationship in any deep sense, the community tooling is thin compared to purpose-built platforms, and the percentage never drops. A creator doing 20,000 dollars a month is handing over roughly 2,400 dollars monthly for infrastructure that a 199 dollar plan elsewhere would provide.

Best for: creators launching a paid tier on top of an existing free audience, especially podcasters and video creators, where speed to first dollar beats long-run margin.

Circle: the best community product

Circle is what happens when a team builds a community platform and refuses to bolt anything unrelated onto it. Spaces, threads, live rooms, events, courses, and member profiles all feel like they were designed together, because they were.

Pricing sits at roughly 89 dollars a month for Professional and 199 dollars a month for Business, both billed annually, with transaction fees of 2 percent and 1 percent respectively on top of Stripe processing. That transaction fee is the detail that does not appear on the pricing page in a way most people notice, and it is worth internalizing before you build a revenue model.

Where Circle wins: engagement. If your product is genuinely the community rather than the content, Circle’s interface produces more conversation per member than anything else here. The mobile experience is the best in the category, and members will actually use it rather than treating it as a place they log in to when they get an email.

Where it loses: it is not a marketing platform. You will still need something for email sequences, landing pages, and checkout optimization, and that stack costs money. It is also annual-billing-first, which means the real commitment is around 1,068 dollars up front, not 89.

Best for: cohort programs, mastermind groups, professional networks, and any membership where the members talking to each other is the actual value.

Mighty Networks: the all-in-one that got more expensive

Mighty Networks has spent years positioning itself as the platform where you can run community, courses, events, and paid memberships without stitching five tools together. That pitch is still accurate. What changed is the price of entry.

The 49 dollar community plan was retired in 2025, which pushed entry-level pricing much closer to Circle’s. Current tiers run roughly 79 dollars a month plus 2 percent, then about 179 dollars a month plus 1 percent, then around 354 dollars a month plus 0.5 percent, with the practical entry point landing near 95 dollars once you account for how the plans are structured. As always, confirm on their pricing page.

Where Mighty wins: breadth. Courses, community, events, live streaming, and a native mobile app are all in the box. If you are the kind of operator who will otherwise end up paying for four separate tools and duct-taping them together with Zapier, the consolidated bill is often lower than the sum of the parts.

Where it loses: breadth. Every individual feature is good rather than excellent, and the interface carries the weight of doing many things. Teams that only need community usually prefer Circle. Teams that only need courses usually prefer something cheaper.

Best for: creators running a genuine multi-format business, where courses and community and events all matter and consolidating billing is worth accepting good-not-great in each category.

Skool: cheap to start, punishing to scale

Skool’s pitch is simplicity taken to an extreme. Two plans, identical features, unlimited everything. Hobby is 9 dollars a month with a 10 percent transaction fee. Pro is 99 dollars a month with a 2.9 percent transaction fee. Both include unlimited members, unlimited courses, unlimited video, and a custom URL.

This is the most honest pricing page in the category, and the 9 dollar tier is the single best way to test whether anyone will pay for your community at all. Ninety dollars over ten months to validate an idea is nothing.

Where Skool wins: engagement mechanics and time-to-launch. The gamification, leaderboards, and simple feed structure produce real activity from small groups, which is exactly when most communities die of silence. There is also no feature-gating tax, so you never hit a wall where the thing you need requires a tier upgrade.

Where it loses: the 10 percent Hobby fee is a trap if you leave it running. As shown above, you should switch to Pro the moment you clear roughly 1,270 dollars a month. The 2.9 percent Pro fee is also meaningfully above Circle’s 2 percent and Mighty’s 1 percent at higher tiers, so at 10,000 dollars a month or more, Skool stops being the cheap option. At that level Skool Pro runs close to 389 dollars a month all in, against a flat 143 for a comparable annual Kajabi plan. Customization is also deliberately limited.

Best for: validating a paid community fast, and for coaching and accountability communities where daily engagement matters more than a bespoke look.

Kajabi: a business suite that happens to do communities

Kajabi is not really a membership platform. It is a course and marketing suite with funnels, email, landing pages, and checkout, which has added community features over time.

Starter sits around 71 dollars a month billed annually but charges 5 percent on third-party Stripe payments, which is a bigger deal than it sounds. The full suite starts around 179 dollars a month, or roughly 143 on annual billing, and at that level the percentage problem largely disappears.

Where Kajabi wins: you stop paying for other tools. Email marketing, landing pages, checkout, affiliate management, and courses are all included. Run a real business through it and the flat higher tiers become dramatically cheaper than percentage-based competitors. At 10,000 dollars a month in revenue, the difference between 143 dollars flat and a few hundred in percentage fees compounds into real money over a year.

Where it loses: the community feature is the weakest on this list, the learning curve is steep, and the Starter tier’s 5 percent third-party payment fee makes the cheap plan a poor value for anyone whose primary revenue is memberships.

Best for: course-led businesses where the community is a retention feature rather than the product, and operators who want one bill instead of six.

The real cost at three revenue levels

Here is what each platform costs at three revenue points, including Stripe processing at roughly 2.9 percent plus 30 cents where applicable, assuming an average member payment of about 30 dollars a month. Figures are rounded and illustrative. Your actual numbers will move with pledge size, currency mix, and billing cycle.

Platform	At 2,000 dollars per month	At 5,000 dollars per month	At 20,000 dollars per month
Skool Hobby (9 + 10%)	~209	~509	~2,009
Skool Pro (99 + 2.9%)	~275	~333	~678
Circle Professional (89 + 2%)	~267	~334	~669
Circle Business (199 + 1%)	~357	~404	~599
Mighty Networks entry (~79 + 2%)	~257	~324	~659
Patreon Pro (~8% + processing)	~250	~625	~2,500
Kajabi Growth (flat ~143 + Stripe)	~201	~288	~723

Two things jump out. First, at 2,000 dollars a month the platforms are within about 150 dollars of each other, which means the decision should be made on product fit, not price. Second, at 20,000 dollars a month the spread is enormous. Patreon costs roughly four times what Kajabi Growth or Circle Business costs for the same revenue. That gap is 20,000 dollars a year, which is a hire, or a very good vacation, or your entire marketing budget.

How to actually choose

Skip the feature matrices. Answer four questions honestly.

1. Is the community the product, or a feature of the product? If members are paying to talk to each other and to you, choose Circle or Skool. If they are paying for content and the community is a retention mechanism, choose Kajabi or Mighty Networks.

2. What is your realistic revenue in 12 months? Below 3,000 dollars a month, minimize fixed cost and pick the platform you will actually enjoy logging into. Above it, minimize percentage. The platform you love at 500 dollars a month is not necessarily the one you can afford at 20,000.

3. Do you already have an audience? If yes, Patreon’s discovery advantage matters less than you think, and its percentage matters more. If you are starting from zero, the discovery is worth something and the low absolute dollars make the percentage tolerable while you build.

4. How many other tools are you paying for? Add up your current email, landing page, course, and checkout costs. If that total is over 150 dollars a month, an all-in-one is probably cheaper than it looks. If you are already happy with your email platform and CRM, a focused community tool will serve you better. If you have not settled that stack yet, our guide to the best CRM for solopreneurs is a reasonable place to start.

Migration and the lock-in question

Everyone underestimates this. Moving a membership is not a data export. It is asking every paying member to re-enter a credit card on a new platform, which is the single highest-risk event in a membership business.

Realistic expectations from operators who have done it: you will lose 10 to 25 percent of members in a migration, concentrated among people who were already half-checked-out. Some of that churn was coming anyway. Not all of it.

Three things reduce the damage. Announce it four to six weeks out with a clear reason that benefits members, not you. Offer a small incentive for moving early, such as a locked-in rate or a bonus resource. And run both platforms in parallel for at least 30 days so nobody gets locked out mid-billing-cycle.

The practical takeaway: choose for where you will be in 18 months, not where you are today. The cost of picking wrong is not the price difference. It is the migration.

Five mistakes that kill membership businesses

Pricing too low. A 9 dollar membership needs roughly ten times the members of an 89 dollar one for the same revenue, and ten times the members means ten times the support load and ten times the churn. Most first-time operators price at a third of what the market would bear.

Building the community before validating the demand. Spend a month selling the idea before you spend a month building the space. If forty people will not pre-pay for it, the platform choice is irrelevant.

Ignoring the first ninety days. Membership churn is front-loaded. Most people who quit do so before month four, usually because nothing happened in week one. A structured onboarding sequence is worth more than any platform feature on this list.

Staying on the launch plan too long. Set a calendar reminder to recalculate your crossover point every quarter. Operators routinely lose thousands of dollars a year to a percentage they forgot to renegotiate.

Running it through a personal bank account. Recurring revenue from many members creates a bookkeeping and liability picture that gets ugly fast. If you have not separated the business yet, our walkthrough on setting up an LLC in 30 minutes covers the version that takes an afternoon.

Frequently asked questions

What is the cheapest membership site platform? Skool’s Hobby plan at 9 dollars a month is the lowest fixed cost, but its 10 percent transaction fee makes it the most expensive option once you pass roughly 1,270 dollars in monthly revenue. Cheapest at launch and cheapest at scale are different questions with different answers.

Is Patreon still worth it in 2026? For creators with an existing audience who value speed and hands-off tax handling, yes. For anyone doing meaningful revenue who is comfortable running their own checkout, the roughly 8 percent platform fee plus processing is very expensive compared to flat-fee alternatives.

Circle or Mighty Networks? Circle if community engagement is the product. Mighty Networks if you also need courses, events, and a native app and would rather have one bill than four. Their entry pricing is now close enough that the decision should be made on product fit.

Can I use WordPress instead? Yes, with a membership plugin, and it is the cheapest option at scale since you pay only hosting and payment processing. The tradeoff is that you become responsible for security, updates, mobile experience, and support. Worth it above roughly 50,000 dollars a month in revenue, rarely worth it below that.

How many members do I need to make this work? Depends entirely on price. One hundred members at 50 dollars a month is 5,000 dollars in monthly recurring revenue and a manageable support load. One thousand members at 5 dollars is the same revenue and roughly ten times the work. Price high and serve fewer people well.

Do these platforms handle sales tax and VAT? Coverage varies significantly. Patreon handles the most on your behalf. Most others integrate with a tax service but leave compliance to you. If you expect European members, confirm VAT handling before you launch, not after your first quarterly filing.

Related Coverage

• Best CRM for Solopreneurs: what to run alongside a membership so you actually know who your members are
• How to Set Up an LLC in 30 Minutes: the structure worth having before recurring revenue starts landing
• Side Hustle vs. LLC: When to Make It Official: how to tell when a paid community has become a real business

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