Founders ask me to compare these constantly, usually expecting me to trash everything except the thing I run. I will not, because I have paid for all four and each one earned its keep at a specific stage. The mistake is buying the right tool at the wrong time.
Courses: buy information, early
A course is frozen knowledge. When you genuinely do not know how something works, paid ads, hiring basics, financial statements, a good course is the cheapest education available. Under $500K, courses punch above their weight. The ceiling: a course cannot look at your company. Once your questions start with "in my situation," frozen knowledge stops helping.
Coaches: buy attention, at inflection points
A good coach gives you an hour that is entirely about you, and there are moments worth paying $200 to $500 an hour for that, big transitions, a confidence collapse, a decision with no clean answer. Two honest limits. Coaching quality varies wildly and credentials tell you almost nothing. And a coach who has never operated at your next level is guessing right along with you, just more confidently.
Masterminds: buy intensity, in bursts
The classic mastermind, a small curated group with a facilitator and a big price tag, delivers real concentration of attention. The structural risk is the guru model: one person's framework applied to every business in the room, whether it fits or not. If you consider one, weigh the peers more than the leader. You are mostly buying the other chairs.
Peer groups: buy proximity, for the long haul
A peer community is a different bet. Lower intensity than a mastermind weekend, massively more surface area: always on, stage matched, and compounding, because the people around you accumulate context on your business over months. By $1M, most of your hard problems are judgment calls where the answer is "depends on the specifics," and pattern matching from people who lived those specifics becomes the most valuable input you can buy. Proximity is also the only tool on this list that catches problems you did not know to ask about.
My honest sequencing: courses early, coach at inflection points, mastermind for a burst when cash allows, and a peer room as the operating system from about $500K on. If you are shopping the last category, ask these twelve questions first, including of us.