GoHighLevel Communities: Build & Monetise Your Group (2026)

By Dr Priya Jaganathan, GoHighLevel Certified Admin · HL Growth Partner, Australia · Updated 4 August 2026 · 9 min read

On this page: What Communities actually is · Communities vs Skool vs Facebook Groups · Setting up your community · Monetising with one-off and recurring pricing · Gamification and engagement · Connecting Workflows · Client portal and agency use · Common mistakes · FAQ

GoHighLevel Communities is one of the most under-used features in the platform, and one of the few that can directly replace a paid subscription you are probably still carrying. I build these for Australian agencies and course creators every week, and the pattern is consistent: people pay USD $99 a month for Skool, or wrestle with a Facebook Group they do not own, while the tool that does both jobs sits unused inside the sub-account they already pay for.

This guide covers what HighLevel Communities actually is, how it stacks up against Skool, Circle and Facebook Groups, how to set up groups, channels and attached Courses properly, how to price free and paid access in a way that makes sense for an Australian audience, and how to wire Workflows around it so the community runs itself. I will also flag the mistakes I see most often when auditing existing builds.

What GoHighLevel Communities actually is

Communities is GoHighLevel's group platform, built on Kollab technology and included in every sub-account on every plan. It gives you branded community spaces with discussion channels, member profiles, events, gamification levels, leaderboards and the ability to attach Courses directly to a group, so a member can move from a discussion thread into a lesson without leaving the portal.

The important architectural point: Communities lives inside the Memberships area and is served through the client portal, the same login your members use for courses, invoices and appointments. Each community group can be free or paid, public or private, and each member who joins becomes a contact in your sub-account, with tags, custom fields and a full activity history. That contact record is what separates Communities from every standalone community tool, because it means your community sits inside your CRM rather than beside it.

What you get out of the box

Every group supports multiple channels (think of them as topic-based feeds, similar to Skool categories or Slack channels), member roles for admins and moderators, join questions for screening, a customisable About page that doubles as a sales page for paid groups, native video and file posts, and a leaderboard driven by points members earn for posting, commenting and completing lessons. You can run several separate groups in one sub-account, each with its own branding, pricing and member list.

Communities vs Skool vs Facebook Groups vs Circle

The honest comparison matters, because Skool in particular has excellent engagement mechanics and a strong discovery marketplace. Here is how they line up for a business that already runs on GoHighLevel.

My practical read: if community is your entire business and you want Skool's discovery marketplace to drive cold members to you, Skool earns its keep, and you can check current pricing at skool.com. If your community supports an agency, coaching offer or course business that already runs on GoHighLevel, paying a second AUD $150 a month for a tool that cannot see your CRM is hard to justify. See the official GoHighLevel pricing page for what is included at each tier; Communities is available on all of them.

Setting up your community step by step

1. Create the group and configure the basics

In your sub-account, go to Memberships, then Communities, and create your first group. Set the group name, upload a cover image and logo, and write the About page as if it were a landing page, because for paid groups it effectively is. Choose private visibility for most business use cases, and add two or three join questions. Answers to join questions are gold: they tell you why people came, and you can push them into custom fields via Workflows later.

2. Structure your channels deliberately

Start with three or four channels, not ten. A typical structure that works: a Start Here channel for onboarding posts, a general discussion channel, a wins channel, and one channel per major topic or module. Empty channels kill communities faster than anything else, so only add a channel once the existing ones are genuinely busy.

3. Attach your Courses

Link your existing Courses (or build new ones under Memberships) to the group so members access lessons through the same community interface. You can gate specific courses behind gamification levels, which means members unlock advanced content by participating rather than just paying. This is the single most effective engagement lever in the whole feature set.

4. Decide free versus paid access

Free groups are lead generation: they feed your pipeline, warm your list and give your Workflows a behavioural signal that a contact is engaged. Paid groups are a product. Many of my clients run both in the same sub-account: a free group as the top of funnel, and a paid group with the full course library, weekly calls and templates as the offer. The free group's pinned posts and channel descriptions then do the selling.

Monetising: one-off and recurring pricing that works in AUD

Communities supports one-off purchases and recurring subscriptions through your own payment integration, so revenue lands in your Stripe account with no platform take beyond normal card fees. That difference compounds: Skool's 2.9% platform fee on a community turning over AUD $5,000 a month is roughly AUD $1,740 a year gone before card processing.

Pricing patterns I see working for Australian audiences in 2026:

• Entry-level membership: AUD $29 to $49 per month for community access plus a core course. Low friction, cancellable, good for volume.
• Flagship program: AUD $99 to $199 per month, or AUD $990 to $1,990 one-off, bundling the community with a structured course, live calls and templates.
• Annual pre-pay: ten months' price for twelve. Communities handles the recurring billing; a Workflow handles the renewal reminders.

If you are weighing this against an all-in-one course platform, the maths usually favours consolidation; I have broken that down line by line in my GoHighLevel vs Kajabi true cost comparison. GST is your responsibility either way: set your prices GST-inclusive and let your accounting stack handle the rest, because the community platform does not.

Gamification and engagement mechanics

The gamification engine mirrors what made Skool sticky. Members earn points when their posts and comments receive likes, points accumulate into levels, and levels can unlock content or simply confer status on the leaderboard. Use it deliberately:

• Gate one genuinely valuable course module behind Level 3 or so. Members who engage enough to reach it are your future case studies and renewals.
• Rename levels to match your brand language rather than leaving defaults. Small touch, outsized effect on how seriously members take it.
• Run a monthly leaderboard shout-out post. Public recognition is the cheapest retention tool you have.
• Seed every channel yourself for the first fortnight. Gamification amplifies activity; it does not create it from zero.

Connecting Workflows: where Communities beats everything else

This is the part no standalone community platform can replicate. Because every member is a contact, you can build automation around community behaviour using standard Workflows, triggers and tags.

Welcome automation

Trigger a Workflow when someone joins the group (community join triggers, or a tag applied at purchase for paid groups). The Workflow applies a tag such as community-member, sends a welcome email pointing to the Start Here channel, waits two days, then sends a nudge to introduce themselves. Members who post in week one retain at several times the rate of those who do not, so this one automation pays for the whole build.

Tag on join, segment forever

Apply tags per group and per tier (free-community, paid-inner-circle) and write join-question answers into custom fields. Now every email campaign, pipeline and report can segment community members from the rest of your database.

Nurture and rescue sequences

Run a nurture sequence for free members that sells the paid tier, and a rescue sequence for paid members: if a subscription payment fails or a member goes quiet, a Workflow can send a personal-feeling check-in from you before churn happens rather than after.

Using Communities in the client portal, and reselling it

Communities is delivered through the client portal on your own domain, alongside Courses, affiliate dashboards and invoices. For agencies this matters twice over. First, your own community lives on your brand, not on skool.com or facebook.com. Second, if you run SaaS Mode, community access becomes a feature you can package into your subscription tiers, and each client sub-account can run its own groups for their customers. I cover how to price that packaging in my SaaS Mode pricing guide, and the domain, branding and portal configuration side in the white-label setup guide.

One configuration note: set up your client portal domain before inviting members. Changing the portal URL after launch means re-educating every member about where to log in, and you will lose people in the move.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Launching with too many channels. Ten quiet channels look like a ghost town; three busy ones look like momentum. Start small and expand on demand.
• No welcome Workflow. If joining your community triggers nothing, you are running a noticeboard, not a funnel. Tag on join and automate the first week at minimum.
• Skipping the client portal domain setup. Members invited to a generic portal URL before your domain is connected will bookmark the wrong address permanently.
• Pricing the paid group as an afterthought. A community bundled with Courses and calls is a product; write the About page like an offer, not a description.
• Ignoring gamification settings. Default levels with nothing gated behind them are decoration. Gate real content and name the levels properly.
• Treating the free group as set-and-forget. A free community with no nurture sequence attached generates goodwill and zero revenue. Wire it to your paid offer.

If you want a community, courses and client portal built properly inside GoHighLevel, book a strategy call with the HL Growth Partner team.

Book Your Strategy Call →

Frequently asked questions

Is GoHighLevel Communities included in every plan?

Yes. Communities is available in every sub-account on all GoHighLevel plans, including the USD $97 Starter plan, with no per-group or per-member fees. You only pay standard card processing on paid group revenue through your own Stripe or PayPal integration.

Can I run both a free and a paid community in the same sub-account?

Yes, and it is the setup I recommend most often. Create separate groups with their own channels, branding and pricing, use the free group as lead generation, and connect a nurture Workflow that promotes the paid group to engaged free members.

How does GoHighLevel Communities compare to Skool?

Feature for feature they are close: both offer channels, courses, gamification and leaderboards, and Skool's engagement mechanics are the benchmark Communities was built to match. Skool adds a discovery marketplace but costs USD $99 per group plus a 2.9% transaction fee, cannot be white-labelled, and has no CRM or automation layer. If you already run GoHighLevel, Communities wins on cost, data ownership and Workflows.

Can members access Courses inside the community?

Yes. Courses built under Memberships attach directly to a community group, so members move between discussions and lessons in one client portal login. You can also gate specific courses behind gamification levels so members unlock content by participating.

Can I resell Communities to my own clients?

Yes. Under SaaS Mode, each client sub-account includes Communities, so you can package branded community and course delivery into your subscription tiers on your own white-labelled domain, something neither Skool nor Circle allows.