Ummah vs Skool A Skool alternative for Muslim communities
Skool is a paid-membership community: one feed, courses in a classroom, a calendar, and a points leaderboard, sold as a subscription you charge for. Ummah is the operating system for a Muslim community: events with tickets and check-in, programs and weekend school, donations with tax receipts, memberships and dues, prayer times, and a member directory you own. Here is the honest split, including where Skool is the better buy.
Skool sells access. Ummah runs an organization.
If what you are building is a paid membership around your own content — a course, a coaching group, a community people subscribe to — Skool is built for exactly that and it is good at it. One feed so nothing gets lost, a classroom for the course, a calendar with calls, and a leaderboard that genuinely does keep people coming back. It is also a marketplace: people browse skool.com and find communities, which is real distribution that most platforms cannot offer.
What it is not built for is an organization that handles other people’s money on trust. There is no donation product, no donor record, and structurally no tax receipt: Skool is the merchant of record, so when someone pays, they are buying from Skool and the invoice says so. For a masjid, a school or a non-profit, that is not a missing feature, it is the wrong shape. Nor is there event ticketing with a door to scan people in at, a term you can price with a sibling discount, or a prayer time anywhere.
And there is no free plan. Skool starts at $9 a month with a 10% cut of everything you collect, or $99 a month to get that down to 2.9%. Ummah’s free plan is $0 a month, and the platform fee on a paid ticket is added at checkout and paid by the attendee, so you receive the full amount you set. That difference matters most to exactly the person who should be starting: the Qur’an teacher with forty students and no budget.
Side by side
Skool's column was read from skool.com/pricing, skool.com/about and eleven help.skool.com articles on September 19, 2026. Where something is not published on their site, this table says so rather than guessing. Bold is the side that is ahead on that row. Prices move, so check theirs before you act on it.
| Feature | Ummah | Skool |
|---|---|---|
| Free plan | Yes. $0/mo, unlimited events, unlimited members, the member directory and the app. Programs are on Basic ($19/mo, website included) and donations on Advanced | No. Hobby $9/mo or Pro $99/mo, after a 14-day trial. Both are recurring subscriptions |
| Paid plans | Basic $19/mo, Advanced $75/mo billed annually. A website we design and build is included on both | Hobby $9/mo, Pro $99/mo. Annual billing is offered with "2 months free"; the annual dollar figures are not readable on the page |
| Who pays the platform fee | The attendee. It is added on top at checkout, so the organization banks the full face value on every plan | The community owner. It comes out of the payout. Their own example: a $9/month membership pays out $8.40 on Pro, $7.80 on Hobby |
| How much the fee is | 3% on Free, 1.5% on Basic, 0% on Advanced. Free events carry no fee on any plan | Hobby 10% + 30c per transaction. Pro 2.9% + 30c up to $899, and 3.9% + 30c above $900. Non-refundable |
| Payment account | Your own Stripe or PayPal. The money lands in your organization’s account | Skool is the merchant of record and you cannot use your own Stripe account. Payouts are weekly, on Wednesdays |
| Donations and fundraising | Campaigns with goals, recurring giving, a donor directory, refunds, an optional donation on top of a ticket at checkout, embeddable donation widgets and a kiosk app | Not part of the product. Fixed-price subscriptions and one-time purchases only |
| Tax receipts for donors | Year-end receipts with your own legal name, EIN and logo, and Ummah branding switchable off | Not available, and structurally blocked: because Skool is the merchant of record, the giver receives a Skool invoice for a purchase. Skool is registered as a virtual training business and adds VAT on top in the EU |
| Event ticketing and check-in | Multi-tier tickets, capacity, waitlist, promo codes, a custom registration form, QR check-in from any phone or a kiosk at the door | A calendar with events and recurrence. No ticketing, no QR, no check-in |
| Programs, classes and weekend school | Sessions, early-bird price windows, payment plans with a deposit and up to 36 installments, automatic sibling and family discounts, parent and child registration fields, waitlists, attendance and refunds against a policy | Courses in a classroom, sold as a subscription or a one-time purchase. No sessions, no roster, no attendance, no family pricing, no payment plan |
| Courses and structured content | Programs carry sessions and materials, but there is no drip-fed course player or completion tracking | A proper classroom: modules, unlimited courses and video, drip and completion. This is what Skool is for |
| Gamification | None | Points, levels and a leaderboard, with unlockable content by level. Genuinely effective at retention |
| Discovery and distribution | A listing in the Ummah app and web directory that Muslims already use to find what is on near them, plus public event pages indexed by Google | skool.com is a public marketplace people browse. A real lead source, and one most platforms do not have |
| Prayer times | Calculated adhan for 2,000+ masajid, 300+ with real iqama schedules, on your community page, on event pages and as a widget on your own site | Not part of the product |
| Members, tiers and dues | A member directory with tags, tiers, dues, an approval queue, groups and committees, staff roles, an audit log and a full CSV export | Members, four roles (owner, billing manager, admin, moderator) and paid membership tiers. Admin seat caps are not published |
| Reaching members | Email, push, in-app and SMS broadcasts, to everyone or to a tag, scheduled or now, with delivery stats | System notifications, digests and event reminders. No email broadcast tool |
| Your own domain and brand | Copy-paste widgets for events, prayer times, donations and programs that run on your own site and domain, plus a website we design and build, included on Basic and Advanced | A skool.com/yourbrand slug on Pro only, not a custom domain. Changing it later costs $100 each time. No white-label |
| Mobile app | The shared Ummah app on iOS and Android, plus a web app that needs no install | The shared Skool app. No own-brand app |
| Integrations and API | Google Sheets and attendee exports. No public API today | Zapier (Pro only), Meta Pixel, Google Ads, Hyros. No public REST API |
| Things to read the small print on | Platform fee varies by plan; card processing is charged separately by the processor | The Growth Boost affiliate setting defaults ON at 30% commission on members Skool sends you, recurring for the life of that subscription. Subscription payments are non-refundable |
Where Skool is the better choice
No product wins every row, and a comparison page that pretends otherwise is not worth reading. Here is where we would point you at them instead.
A course is the product
If people are paying you for structured content, Skool’s classroom, drip and completion tracking are built for it and ours are not. Programs on Ummah models a term with a roster and attendance, which is a different thing from a self-paced course library.
Gamification that actually works
Points, levels and unlock-by-level keep a community showing up. We have nothing like it, and for a membership whose whole value is engagement, that is a real reason to choose them.
The marketplace
People browse skool.com looking for communities to join. That is distribution you do not have to build. Our equivalent is the Ummah app and directory, which is Muslim-specific and local rather than global and topic-based — better for a masjid, not necessarily for an online membership about, say, trading.
Simplicity
One feed, one classroom, one calendar. If you do not need dues, donations, receipts, tickets or prayer times, Ummah has more product than you need and Skool has exactly enough.