Best Group Coaching Platforms in 2026: 9 Compared for Cohorts, Masterminds and Communities

This is written for the coach whose group already exists. Eight people in a mastermind paying $500 a month, forty in a twelve-week cohort who paid $997 once, or a membership of three hundred who mostly lurk. The software question gets interesting once the room holds more people than you can keep in your head.

Every roundup of the best group coaching platforms sells "group coaching platform" as one thing, when it is really two different products, which is why shopping for one feels slippery. One is the room: a feed, live calls, a member directory, somewhere the group talks when you are asleep. The other is the engine: cohorts, weekly modules, tasks, check-ins, a view of who went quiet in week three. Community platforms are excellent rooms with no engine. Most coaching platforms have an engine and a thin room.

Every price, rating and feature claim below was checked on 15 September 2026 against each vendor's own pricing page. Read the transaction fee column harder than the subscription column, because on a group program the fee is the bigger number.

How we judged these nine

Five questions. Answer them about the group you run this quarter, not the one you plan for next year.

1. Does the group exist the moment someone enrolls, or do you build it by hand?

This is the difference that shows up on launch day. On some platforms, enrolling a client in a program puts them in the cohort space with everyone else. On others you sell in one place, invite the buyer to the community in another, then hope they accept. Coachful creates a squad on enrollment and attaches it to the program. upcoach builds cohorts as the primary object. CoachAccountable has groups that share actions, metrics, files and projects. Circle, Mighty Networks and Skool leave the joining-up to you or to Zapier.

2. Does anything happen between the group calls?

A weekly call plus a feed is a book club. Group coaching that changes behavior needs something in the six days between: a task, a habit, a check-in, a worksheet that is due. Four tools here have a real between-session engine: Coachful, upcoach, CoachAccountable and Simply.Coach. Circle and Mighty have course progress and gamification, which is engagement rather than accountability. Skool's points reward posting. Satori has no goal tracking at all.

3. Are you paying per person, per seat, or per sale?

Per active client is the worst shape for groups. CoachAccountable charges $20/mo for 2 clients, $70 for 10, $120 for 20 and $250 for 50, so a forty-person cohort of people who each touch a fraction of the tooling puts you on the $250 tier. Simply.Coach caps at 3, 7 and 30 clients before unlimited arrives on Leap at $69. Satori caps at 10, 50 and 150 active paying clients. upcoach prices by participant band: 25, 100, 250. Coachful caps at 5 on Lite and 20 on Solo, with unlimited on Pro at $99.

Per community with unlimited members looks friendlier until you read the fee line. Circle, Mighty Networks and Skool let in as many people as you like, then take a percentage of everything you sell through them.

4. Can you book the 1:1s and the group calls in the same place?

Almost every group program has 1:1 attached: an onboarding call, a mid-point check, a graduation session. Circle, Mighty Networks and Skool have no 1:1 booking, so you connect Calendly through Zapier or send links by hand. The other six book natively, and if you sell a hybrid offer this question eliminates three tools on its own.

5. What comes out when you leave?

Community data is the least portable data in software. Skool's member export gives you name, email and join date: no posts, no DMs, no course progress. Circle exports members and subscriptions as CSV with no bulk export for posts. Mighty exports the member email list, with fuller insights reportedly needing a higher plan. Kajabi's course content has to be downloaded asset by asset. Three products in this category shut down between April and December 2025, so this is not theoretical.

Community data is the stickiest data there is. Skool's member export is name, email and join date only, with no export of posts, DMs, course progress or leaderboard data.

The nine at a glance

The order follows the five questions, weighted toward the first two, so a tool that creates the cohort and runs the week between calls ranks above one that only hosts the talk. Slots two and three go to community platforms because a coach who already has booking and payments handled gets more from a very good room than from a coaching tool with a weak one. They are ranked as rooms, not as replacements.

Review samples run from 8 to 617, so a 4.9 from eight people is not a stronger signal than a 4.5 from five hundred. And the three tools with unlimited members are the three that take a percentage of every sale.

1. Coachful: the cohort appears when someone enrolls, and the week between calls is already built

Coachful treats the group as a property of the program rather than a separate product you also happen to own. Enroll someone in a group program and a squad exists with them in it, linked to that program, alongside the other people on the same week. No second invitation, no separate community login, no spreadsheet reconciling who bought with who joined.

Underneath, the program is structured: weekly goals, daily tasks, habits with morning and evening check-ins, courses if the material is video. The client sees the week they are on; you see who did the work and who is slipping, across the whole cohort, on one screen. The admin half shares the subscription: booking pages with availability rules, two-way calendar sync with Google, Apple and Outlook, built-in video or auto-created Zoom, Meet and Teams links, e-signature agreements, and Stripe Connect or Razorpay.

Price, checked 15 September 2026: Lite $29/mo for up to 5 clients, or $19/mo annually. Solo $49/mo for up to 20, or $39/mo annually. Pro $99/mo for unlimited clients, or $79/mo annually. Studio $199/mo with 3 coach seats, Agency $299/mo with 6. The platform fee is 0% on every plan. The trial is 7 days, a card is required, no charge during the trial, cancel in one click. There is no free plan.

Ratings: Trustpilot 4.5 from 21 reviews. The whole reviews wall is public if you would rather read it than take a number.

What stands out

• The squad is created by the enrollment, not by you. On a forty-person launch that removes forty invitations and the four people who never accept them.
• 0% platform fee. Circle, Mighty and upcoach all take 2% at entry. On a $39,880 cohort that gap is $797.60, more than eight months of Pro.
• Group and 1:1 on one calendar, with the same reminders, and every session lands on a client record.
• The between-session engine is the default. Weekly goals, daily tasks, habits and morning and evening check-ins ship with the program, and completion rolls up across the cohort.
• One client app for all of it: feed, group chat, program week, habits and next session behind a single login carrying your branding, inside the Coachful listing rather than a separate App Store app.

The honest catch

• Client caps below Pro. Lite holds 5 and Solo holds 20, so a cohort larger than twenty puts you on Pro at $99/mo. Cheaper than Circle's entry tier before fees, but not a $29 answer.
• Built around coaching relationships. If you run a three-thousand-person membership where nobody is individually coached and the room is the product, a community platform is the cheaper shape.

Best for: cohorts and masterminds where results depend on what people do between calls. Detail at group coaching software and what Coachful includes.

Join Coachful now

2. Circle: the best-rated room you can buy, with no back office attached

Circle is a community platform first and honest about it. Spaces, posts, chat, DMs, a member directory, native live rooms and live streams, courses in self-paced, structured and scheduled modes, events, paywalls. Coaches whose value is the conversation tend to like it more than any coaching tool.

Where it stops is the back office. No 1:1 booking, no invoicing, no contracts, no habit tracking. You connect Calendly through Zapier and keep your existing scheduling and payments stack. Fine if that stack already works, expensive if you assumed the $129 covered it.

Price, checked 15 September 2026: Professional $129/mo, or $89/mo annually at $1,068 a year, with unlimited members, 3 admins, 10 moderators, courses, events and live streams. Business $219/mo, or $199/mo annually at $2,388, adding 5 admins, 15 moderators, workflows and the API. Enterprise is reported by third parties at $419/mo and is not confirmed on the pricing page; Circle Plus, where branded apps live, is custom priced. The platform fee is 2%, 1% and 0.5% by tier, on top of Stripe processing. The trial is 14 days.

Ratings: G2 4.5 from 501 reviews, Capterra 4.7 from 48, Trustpilot 3.9 from 73. The largest credible sample of any community tool here.

What stands out

• Live rooms and live streams are native, so the group call happens inside the community rather than on a Zoom link pasted into a post.
• Unlimited members on every plan. Growth does not trigger an upgrade; only admin and moderator seats are capped.
• Courses ship on all plans, including scheduled mode, which covers cohort-style release.

The honest catch

• The cost stacks. 2% plus Stripe, plus an Email Hub add-on priced by contact count, plus a custom-priced Plus plan for a branded app. The $129 is a floor.
• No scheduling, invoicing or contracts, so a hybrid offer with 1:1 calls needs a second subscription.
• 27% one-star on Trustpilot among 73 reviews, citing video playback lag, frozen leaderboards and laborious account deletion.

Best for: memberships and large cohorts where the room is the product and booking and payments live elsewhere.

3. Mighty Networks: cohort courses, Challenges and a route to your own branded app

Mighty Networks sits beside Circle and leans further toward structured programs. On-demand and cohort-based courses run on every plan, Challenges push daily activity across a group, and live streaming and events are native. For a coach whose group program is really a course with a room around it, the shapes fit.

The differentiator most coaches care about is Mighty Pro, which gives you your own branded iOS and Android apps instead of a community inside someone else's. It is custom priced, with third parties citing figures well north of $17,000 a year.

Price, checked 15 September 2026: Launch shows $79/mo and $950 a year on the official page; a monthly-billed figure of about $95 is cited by third parties and we could not verify it on Mighty's own page. Scale shows $179/mo officially, with roughly $215 monthly-billed cited by third parties and not verified. Mighty Pro is custom priced. The platform fee is 2% on Launch, 1% on Scale and 0.5% on Mighty Pro, plus Stripe processing, and fees are not refunded when you refund a member. The trial is 14 days.

Ratings: G2 4.6 from 617 reviews, Capterra 4.6 from 89, Trustpilot 3.3 from 215.

What stands out

• Challenges are the closest thing here to a daily engine that is not a coaching tool. They will not track a client goal, but they get a group doing something every day.
• Cohort courses on every plan, so a twelve-week program releases on a schedule the whole group shares.
• A real path to your own app, which almost nothing at this price point offers even as an upgrade.

The honest catch

• Trustpilot 3.3 from 215 reviews, with repeated complaints about unexpected auto-renewals and unresolved cancellations. Annual plans auto-renew with no pro-rata refund.
• No 1:1 booking. Events are scheduled group sessions; there is no availability-based scheduler.
• The fee applies to every sale, and email white-labeling and branded apps are both upsells.

Best for: a cohort course with a community around it, where live streaming and a future branded app matter.

4. upcoach: built for cohorts and masterminds before anything else

upcoach exists for the group program. Cohorts, masterminds and bootcamps are the primary object, not a mode attached to a 1:1 product. Programs carry tasks, lessons, events, worksheets, assessments and check-ins, and the progress dashboards answer the only question that matters mid-cohort, which is who is on track.

Reviewers single out the habit and progress tracking, with one Capterra review calling it something they had never seen elsewhere. Admins, facilitators and sponsors come on all plans.

Price, checked 15 September 2026: upcoach publishes annual-billed prices. Starter $49/mo for 25 active participants, 1 seat, 2% fee. Pro $99/mo for 100 participants, 2 seats, 1%. Business+ $199/mo for 250 participants, 5 seats and 0.5%. Scale $399/mo for 500 or more, 10 seats, 0%. GetApp lists monthly-billed figures of $59, $119 and $249, which we could not verify on upcoach's own pricing page. The trial is 14 days with no card, plus a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Ratings: Capterra 4.9 from 8 reviews with a 4.8 support score. There is no Trustpilot profile and the G2 listing is unverified; an AppSumo score of 4.08 across 78 reviews is the larger sample.

What stands out

• Cohorts and masterminds are the default shape, not a group mode bolted onto a 1:1 product.
• Habit tracking and daily check-ins that reviewers rate best in the category.
• Facilitator and sponsor roles on every plan, which matters when you are not the only person running the room.

The honest catch

• The transaction fee runs until $399/mo. 2% on Starter, 1% on Pro, 0.5% on Business+, 0% only on Scale.
• No contracts, no invoicing and no Outlook sync, so the agreement before the first call lives somewhere else.
• Privacy paperwork has lagged. AppSumo reviewers cite a missing DPA and no way to delete client accounts.

Best for: businesses running several concurrent cohorts with facilitators, with contracts handled elsewhere.

5. Kajabi: one storefront for the course, the emails and the group calls

Kajabi is a course and marketing platform that added a coaching product, and for a group business selling a signature program to a list, the shape is good. Website, landing pages, funnels, email sequences, checkout, course and community share one contact record. Nobody else here puts marketing and delivery that close together.

The coaching product is more than most course platforms bother with: a native scheduler, built-in live video for up to 200 participants with 20 breakout rooms, session notes and milestone-based programs. What it lacks is a daily task or habit engine, so between-call accountability is course completion plus whatever you post.

Price, checked 15 September 2026: Basic $179/mo or $143/mo annually, with 5 products, 2,500 contacts, 1 community and 0 AI credits. Growth $249/mo or $199/mo annually, with 50 products, 25,000 contacts, the affiliate program and a branded mobile app. Pro $499/mo or $399/mo annually, with unlimited products, 100,000 contacts and 3 communities. Kickstarter at $89 left the public pricing page in January 2026. There is no platform fee on Kajabi Payments, where processing is 2.9% + 30c on Basic; your own Stripe or PayPal adds a surcharge.

Ratings: Capterra 4.4 from 226 reviews, G2 4.1 from 93, Trustpilot 3.5 from 2,337. That Trustpilot sample is by far the largest here, and 75% of it is five-star.

What stands out

• Marketing and delivery on one contact record. The person who opened the email, bought the program and joined the community is one row, not three.
• Built-in live video for 200 with breakout rooms, more group-call capability than most coaching tools ship.
• 0% platform fee on Kajabi Payments, which on a large launch outweighs the subscription difference.

The honest catch

• The January 2026 restructure. Prices rose 25 to 61%, Basic contacts fell from 10,000 to 2,500, and existing customers were not grandfathered.
• One community on Basic and Growth. Separate cohorts that must not see each other mean juggling spaces or paying $499 for Pro.
• No habits, no daily check-ins, no client goal dashboards. Milestones and course completion are the accountability.

Best for: a group program sold to an email list and delivered mostly as content.

6. CoachAccountable: the deepest accountability tooling, priced the wrong way for groups

CoachAccountable has shipped since 2012 and is the most serious accountability engine in the coaching category. Action items, metrics, worksheets, drip courses, routine tracking, follow-through reports. Groups share actions, metrics, files and projects, so a cohort is not just a mailing list with a chat window, and agreements capture signature, initials, timestamp and IP address.

The problem for group work is structural. It charges by active client, and a cohort participant is an active client. Unlimited coaches and admins make it the most team-friendly pricing in the category and the least group-friendly at once.

Price, checked 15 September 2026: Starter $20/mo for up to 2 clients, Level 1 $40 for 5, Level 2 $70 for 10, Level 3 $120 for 20, Level 3.5 $200 for 35 and Level 4 $250 for 50. Every tier is fully featured with unlimited coach and admin accounts. The trial is 30 days with no card. No platform fee is stated; Stripe, Square and PayPal processor fees apply.

Ratings: Capterra 5.0 from 67 reviews, Trustpilot 4.8 from 46, G2 4.7 from 11. Founder-led support is praised by name across all three.

What stands out

• Follow-through reporting, which tells you what percentage of assigned actions a client actually completed. On a cohort that is the early-warning system.
• Unlimited coaches and admins on every plan, so a three-facilitator program pays for clients, not seats.
• The best export on this page. A per-client Export button pulls the complete coaching history, and the company built an automated Practice importer within days of that shutdown.

The honest catch

• Per-client pricing punishes groups, the most-cited complaint on Capterra. A forty-person cohort sits on Level 4 at $250/mo.
• No native mobile app, only an add-to-home-screen shortcut, which is a hard sell to a group of forty.
• Steep learning curve, with the interface called outdated or overwhelming by reviewers, and it states plainly that it is not HIPAA compliant.

Best for: high-ticket masterminds of eight to twenty people where follow-through matters more than atmosphere. See CoachAccountable alternatives if the client ceiling is the blocker.

Per-client pricing is the group tax. CoachAccountable's ladder puts a forty-person cohort on Level 4 at $250/mo, for people who each use a fraction of the tooling.

7. Simply.Coach: group and team engagements built for a corporate buyer

Simply.Coach is the compliance answer in this category and the right shape when the group is a leadership cohort inside a company rather than twelve strangers from Instagram. Team engagements and group coaching run on all tiers, assessments including 360s sit alongside intake forms, and goals, development plans and reporting form a loop.

The part nobody else ships properly is stakeholder reporting. If an HR sponsor pays for a six-person leadership cohort, they want progress without session content, and the business plans carry sponsor and HR-partner roles, coach matching and scheduled reports for exactly that.

Price, checked 15 September 2026: Starter $9/mo for 3 clients and 1 contract. Essentials $29/mo for 7 clients and 3 programs. Growth $49/mo for 30 clients with recurring sessions and your logo. Leap $69/mo for unlimited clients, white-labelled, on your domain. Business plans price per active coach: CoCreate $79 per coach for 10 clients each, 2 admins and 5 sponsors; Surge $159 per coach for 25 each. The trial is 14 days with no card, capped at 3 clients and 10 sessions. Transaction fees are not stated on the pricing page, so we could not verify them.

Ratings: G2 4.8 from 146 reviews, the highest G2 score with a serious sample here, and Capterra 4.6 from 41 with a 4.9 support score. There is no Trustpilot presence.

What stands out

• Stakeholder and sponsor roles, with scheduled reports and NPS on higher tiers, which is what wins corporate group work.
• SOC 2, HIPAA and GDPR claimed, unusual at a $9 entry price and the practical reason it gets through procurement.
• Native iOS and Android apps in English, Spanish and French, with embedded video plus Zoom, Teams and Google Meet.

The honest catch

• The caps bite early. Contracts are rationed on every solo tier below Leap, and client caps at 3, 7 and 30 force upgrades on a group business fast.
• No community feature at all, so a peer-support cohort will feel thin.
• The trial is capped at 3 clients and 10 sessions, which makes it hard to test the thing you are buying.

Best for: leadership cohorts where a company signs the invoice and asks for a report. Compare at Coachful vs Simply.Coach.

8. Skool: the cheapest room, and the one you can take the least out of

Skool is genuinely good at one thing, which is getting a group to show up and post without anybody reading a manual. A feed, categories, a classroom, a calendar, DMs, points, levels and a leaderboard. Members learn it in minutes, and Discovery brings organic members.

The trade is control and portability, and it is steep. No custom domain, no white label, no website, no funnels, no public API. The member CSV is name, email and join date, and nothing else comes out at all.

Price, checked 15 September 2026: Hobby $9/mo, or $7.50/mo annually at $90 a year, with unlimited members, courses and live calls, a custom URL slug, affiliates and a 10% transaction fee. Pro $99/mo, or $82.50/mo annually at $990, same features, with a 2.9% + 30c fee up to $899 and 3.9% + 30c above. The pricing page advertises two months free and does not state whether a card is required. Payments run through Skool Payments, so those percentages include processing.

Ratings: Trustpilot 1.7 from 51 reviews, 78% one-star, profile unclaimed. Skool is not listed on G2 or Capterra at all. App store ratings are better, at 4.1 from 6,099 on Google Play and 3.8 from 714 on the App Store.

What stands out

• Nine dollars, unlimited members, unlimited courses, unlimited live calls. Nothing else here is close on entry price.
• Gamification that works. Points, levels and leaderboards drive posting, and classroom content can open at a given level.
• Discovery brings members you did not pay for, which no coaching platform on this page attempts.

The honest catch

• Trustpilot 1.7 from 51 reviews, citing unauthorized charges, a hidden cancellation flow, unresponsive support and scam communities on Discovery.
• The highest fee here for anyone selling volume. 10% on Hobby, and 3.9% + 30c on Pro above $899, which is most high-ticket group programs.
• The export is name, email and join date. Three years of group conversation stays where it was written.

Best for: a low-ticket community or first paid group where speed beats ownership.

9. Satori: clean enrollment for small groups, thin everywhere else

Satori does one part of this job beautifully. A single link takes a prospect through a questionnaire, an agreement, a payment and a booking without you touching anything, and clients find it easy to use. For a coach selling a six-person group with a real contract and a real payment plan, that removes more friction than any community platform can.

The rest is thin for group work. Coaching groups arrive on Pro and above. There is no community, no courses, no goal tracking and no mobile app, and reviewers call the calendar sync one-directional and cumbersome.

Price, checked 15 September 2026: Scholar is free and limited to pro-bono, unpaid clients. Essentials $33/mo, or $27.50/mo annually, for up to 10 active paying clients and 60 bookings. Pro $49/mo, or $40.83/mo annually, for 50 active clients, 120 bookings, group coaching and custom branding. Leader $124/mo, or $103.33/mo annually, for 150 active clients. The trial is 15 days with no card, plus a 30-day money-back guarantee. There are no charges on client payments; standard Stripe and PayPal fees apply.

Ratings: Capterra 4.5 from 13 reviews, with founder-level support praised. One reviewer calls the interface unappealing.

What stands out

• The one-link enrollment flow: questionnaire, agreement, payment and booking in a single pass, rare below $50/mo.
• You pay only for active clients, so a finished cohort stops costing money.
• Contracts and billing schedules included, which upcoach, Circle, Mighty and Skool all lack.

The honest catch

• Group coaching starts at Pro, so the $33 tier is not a group plan.
• No community, no courses and no goal tracking, which removes most of what a cohort does between calls.
• A general client-data export was not verified, only ICF coaching log exports.

Best for: one small paid group alongside 1:1 work, where you want the enrollment and the agreement handled and nothing else.

What a 40-person cohort actually costs on each platform

Feature tables hide the number that decides this, so here is one scenario run through all nine. You sell a twelve-week cohort at $997 and forty people buy: $39,880 across 40 transactions, with three months of subscription. Caps decide which tier you land on.

Add roughly $1,169 in card processing to every row except Skool, where the percentage already includes it.

The spread between the cheapest and dearest way to run the same cohort is about $1,700 on one launch, none of it a feature difference. Skool's $9 plan looks like the bargain of the page until you put a high-ticket product through it: 10% of $39,880 is $3,988, more than four years of Coachful Pro.

The fee is the real price. On one 40-person cohort at $997, a 2% platform fee costs $797.60, more than eight months of an unlimited-client coaching plan.

Run the same maths on a membership and it flips. Three hundred members at $29 a month is $8,700, and 2% of that is $174, while a coaching platform priced per client would not hold three hundred people at all. The question is which pricing shape matches your offer.

Group coaching hours and your ICF credential

If you are building hours toward ACC, PCC or MCC, group work raises a question 1:1 coaches never face, which is what counts. Your software has to record who was in the room, how long it ran, and whether it was paid or pro bono. A calendar of recurring group events answers none of that a year later.

The coaching platforms keep a usable record and the community tools do not. Satori exports coaching logs for ICF. CoachAccountable's appointment and activity reports hold the underlying data. Coachful records sessions against each client and program, and its Coach development panel counts hours and distinct clients against the ACC, PCC and MCC thresholds, with feedback against ICF competencies 3 to 8 as a self-development aid rather than an ICF assessment. Circle, Mighty Networks and Skool record an event, not an engagement. The rules are in how ICF group coaching hours are counted.

Moving a live cohort without losing the group

Nobody switches platforms between cohorts, because there is never a gap. You switch in week five with forty people mid-program, so this deserves a plan.

1. Export everything before you announce anything, while your account is still active. Kajabi reviewers report being asked to pay to retrieve customer data after cancelling, and Kajabi removes data 90 days later.
2. Accept that the posts are not coming. Circle, Mighty and Skool have no bulk export for posts. Copy the three threads that matter into a document, then stop mourning the rest.
3. Rebuild the structure, not the conversation. Weeks, modules, tasks, the call schedule. That is what carries value forward. On Coachful, clients, programs and content are imported for you during onboarding rather than left as a weekend of copy and paste.
4. Move the money deliberately. Live subscriptions do not transfer between processors, so if your group pays monthly you are asking forty people to re-enter a card. Do it at a natural billing date.
5. Run both rooms in parallel for one week. Post in both, hold the call in the new one, close the old one on a named date. Communities die in transit when both doors stay open for a month.

Then check the exit before you settle in. Coachful gives you a full data export as a ZIP, CoachAccountable a per-client export of the complete coaching history, upcoach a client CSV with custom fields, and Simply.Coach states all data exports to spreadsheets. Do it on day one and keep the file on your own disk. A vendor's retention window is not a backup.

Three products in this category closed in eight months. Nudge Coach shut down on 30 April 2025, Practice went offline on 3 November 2025, and Profi ended access on 31 December 2025, and coaches who had not exported lost what they had.

Three setups, and what to buy for each

A twelve-person mastermind at $1,000 a month. A percentage fee would cost you $2,400 a year, so buy a flat price with no fee. Coachful Solo at $49 holds up to 20 clients and includes the squad, the calls, the agreements and the payments. CoachAccountable Level 3 at $120 for 20 clients is the alternative if follow-through reporting is what you care about most.

A forty-person twelve-week cohort at $997. You need the group to exist on day one, weekly structure, somewhere for the calls, and a way to spot the people who stop. Coachful Pro at $99 covers it with unlimited clients and no fee. upcoach Pro at $99 for 100 participants is the closest competitor and costs an extra $398.80 in fees on that launch.

A three-hundred-person membership at $29 a month. Nobody is individually coached, the room is the product, and per-client pricing is the wrong shape. Circle Professional at $129 or Mighty Networks Launch at $79 billed annually are the honest answers, and 2% of $8,700 a month is $174. Skool Pro at $99 is cheaper again if you can live with the export.

The verdict

For most coaches running cohorts or masterminds, Coachful is the pick, for a narrow reason: the squad exists because someone enrolled, the week between calls is already built, group and 1:1 share one calendar, and nothing is taken off the top. On a $39,880 cohort that last point alone is worth $797.60 against a 2% competitor.

The exceptions are real. If the room is the entire product and nobody is individually coached, buy Circle at $129 or Mighty Networks at $79 billed annually and keep your booking tool. If the launch is an email campaign and the delivery is video, Kajabi Basic at $179 puts the funnel and the course in one place. If follow-through is what you lie awake about and the group is small, CoachAccountable at $120 for 20 clients is deeper. If an HR sponsor wants a report, Simply.Coach claims SOC 2, HIPAA and GDPR, and Coachful has no HIPAA answer today.

Whichever way you go, run one test first. Enroll yourself as a client, go through the buy, the join, the first week's task and the first group call, then export the data. The gaps show up in the handoffs, never in the feature list.

Frequently asked questions

What is a group coaching platform?

Software that holds a cohort, a mastermind or a membership in one place: the group space, the shared program or course, the group calls and usually the payments. The category splits into community platforms, which are good rooms with no coaching back office, and coaching platforms, which run the program and the 1:1 work.

Do I need a community platform and a coaching platform, or can one tool do both?

One tool can do both, but only a few try. Coachful, upcoach and Kajabi ship a community alongside program delivery, so a hybrid offer runs on one subscription. Circle, Mighty Networks and Skool are community-only, so pairing one with a coaching tool means two subscriptions and two logins for your clients.

How much does it cost to run a 40-person cohort?

Between about $147 and $1,864 in platform costs for a twelve-week program at $997 a head, checked on 15 September 2026, plus roughly $1,169 in card processing. The subscription is rarely the reason for the spread. A 2% fee on Circle Professional or Mighty Launch is $797.60, and Skool Pro's 3.9% + 30c above $899 is $1,567.20, while Coachful's fee is 0%.

Which group coaching platform has the lowest transaction fees?

Coachful takes 0% on every plan, so you keep everything after Stripe or Razorpay processing. Kajabi takes 0% on Kajabi Payments but adds a surcharge for your own Stripe. CoachAccountable and Satori state no platform fee on client payments. upcoach charges 2% falling to 0% only at $399, Circle and Mighty charge 2% at entry, and Skool is highest at 10% on Hobby.

Can I count group coaching sessions toward my ICF hours?

Group sessions can count, and the recording requirements are stricter than for 1:1 because you need participants, duration and paid or pro bono status. Satori exports coaching logs for ICF, Coachful counts sessions and distinct clients against the ACC, PCC and MCC thresholds, and CoachAccountable's activity reports hold the underlying data. Community platforms record an event, not an engagement. Detail is in how ICF group coaching hours are counted.

Is Skool good for group coaching?

It is the fastest room to start and the hardest to leave. Nine dollars a month buys unlimited members, courses and live calls, and the gamification drives posting. Against that: a 10% fee on Hobby, no custom domain, no 1:1 booking, a members export limited to name, email and join date, and Trustpilot 1.7 from 51 reviews with 78% at one star.

What is the difference between a cohort and a mastermind in software terms?

A cohort moves through a fixed curriculum on a shared clock, so it needs weekly structure, drip release and an end date. A mastermind is ongoing peer work with no curriculum, so it needs a persistent room, session records and accountability between meetings. Cohorts suit program engines like Coachful or upcoach; masterminds suit CoachAccountable at small sizes or a community layer at larger ones.

Can I move an existing community to a new platform?

The people, yes. The conversation, mostly no. Circle, Mighty Networks and Skool all export member lists and none bulk-exports posts, and Kajabi requires course assets one at a time. Plan on rebuilding the structure, saving a handful of threads by hand, running both rooms in parallel for a week and closing the old one on an announced date. Export before you cancel, not after.

Which platform is best for a small mastermind of eight people?

A flat-priced coaching tool, because percentage fees on a high-ticket group cost more than the software. Coachful Solo at $49 holds up to 20 clients with the squad, the calls, the agreements and the payments. CoachAccountable Level 2 at $70 for 10 clients is the choice if follow-through reporting outweighs everything else. A $129 community platform is hard to justify for eight people.

Do any of these give my group a branded mobile app?

Coachful shows your branding on the client app inside the Coachful listing rather than a separate App Store app, on every plan. Kajabi includes a branded app on Growth at $249. Simply.Coach ships native iOS and Android apps. Mighty Networks offers your own apps only on Mighty Pro, and Circle only on Circle Plus. CoachAccountable and Satori have none.

Join Coachful now

If your group program is more than a weekly call, the cohort should exist the moment someone pays, the week between calls should already be built, and nobody should take a percentage of what you sell. Coachful does all three from $49/mo on Solo for up to 20 clients, or $99/mo on Pro with no ceiling.

Start the 7-day trial, enroll yourself in your own program, and watch the squad appear. If it is not better than what you do now, cancel in one click.

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