Kajabi Review: Is it the Best Online Course and Membership Platform?

Kajabi is one of the most popular and highly reviewed online course platforms for digital marketers and online entrepreneurs. 

Its track record of more than 10+ years, and helping tens and thousands of online marketers  — make Kajabi a favorable choice for many new course creators. 

But is Kajabi the best online course platform? Is it the best online platform for creating, launching, marketing, and selling your course?

I created this guide to answer these questions. My goal with this Kajabi Review is to help you get a clear understanding of what Kajabi is, what makes it unique, and who it’s ideal for.

I’ll also be covering some of Kajabi’s best features, its pros, and some of its cons. 

Finally, I’ll also be comparing Kajabi to some of the other popular online course creation platforms (Thinkific, Teachable, Kartra, and Podia)

After reading this Kajabi review — you will have the knowledge and confidence to decide if Kajabi is the best platform for your online courses. 

Let’s get started.

An Introduction to Kajabi

Yes, Kajabi is an online course platform that allows you to build and launch courses — but it does way more than that. 

Kajabi is unique compared to other platforms in the niche (Teachable, LearnDash, Thinkfiy, etc.). While others specialize in creating and launching courses — Kajabi provides an end-to-end and an all-in-one platform.

Kajabi enables you to create a website, a blog, create a course, build a marketing funnel, and help market that course with the help of landing pages to email marketing. And yes, you can collect payments too. 

The Kajabi team have thought about everything you need to be successful in the Knowledge Commerce economy:

• Create a course website.
• Create a Blog.
• Create a Course.
• Launch a Course.
• Sell the Course.
• Upsell Offers.
• Payment Systems

Instead of using multiple softwares (email marketing, landing pages, CRM, CMS) — you can get all of this under one roof through Kajabi.

You can also use Kajabi to:

• Create Drip Content.
• Gate or Protect Content.
• Build a membership website.
• Selling Coaching Programs.

Since its launch in 2010 — Kajabi has empowered over 25000-course creators and helped them generate a total of 1.1 billion dollars in system-wide revenue. 

Kajabi has managed to get some successful online marketers and digital entrepreneurs to build their courses. 

Here are just a few that you might recognize:

• Amy Porterfield  — Online Marketing Guru.
• Chalene Johnson —Celebrity Fitness Instructor, and New York Times Best-selling Author.
• Rachel Hollis — 2-times New York Times Best-selling author.
• James Wedmore — Online Business Building Coach and Video Marketing Expert.
• Billy Gene — Social Media Marketing Guru.
• Jordan Cheyenne — Beauty and Lifestyle Vlogger.
• Grant Cardone  — Sales and Business Motivational Guru.
• Brendan Bouchard — Peak Performance Coach and Best-selling Author. 
• Balanced Cents  — Personal Finance Courses.
• Financial Recovery Institute  — Personal and Business Finance Courses. 

Kajabi Pricing

Unlike some of the competing platforms, there’s no free (or freemium version). 

Kajabi offers 3 different pricing packages depending on how many courses (products) you want to launch on the platform

• Basic —— $149/month.
• Growth  —— $199/month.
• Pro —— $399/month.

All these plans also offer a 20% discount if you are purchasing annually.

The pricing breakdown is based on one or more of the following factors:

• Number of Products (course or coaching program or membership or community).
• Number of Contacts (students or customers).
• Number of Websites.
• Number of Marketing Pipelines (or Funnels).
• A number of Admin Users.
• Affiliate Program feature.
• 24/7 Chat (not available in the Basic Plan).

If you are just starting out with a single course — then the Basic Plan would be sufficient.

There is a 14-day free trial for all the Kajabi pricing plans. Kajabi also offers a 30-day money-back guarantee if you are not satisfied with your experience.

Kajabi Support

Kajabi’s support varies on the plan you choose (Basic, Growth, or Pro).

The Basic Plan Chat and Email Support during the following business hours:

• Monday to Wednesday — 7:30 am to 6pm PDT
• Thursday and Friday — 7:30 am-3:30 pm PDT
• Saturday and Sunday — 10 am-6 pm PDT

24/7 Chat Support is only available for Growth and Pro plans.

Kajabi offers Live Q & A Training Twice Daily (5 Days a week)

Once logged in, you can also access the replays of previous sessions.

There is a decent knowledge base or help center, where you can find answers to most questions. There are also in-app training videos and tutorials to help with your course creation.

For new customers, you can find the Kajabi Bootcamp — a structured self-paced onboarding program to help you learn the basics of creating, launching, and marketing an online course or membership program. 

Kajabi Integrations

Kajabi integrates with some of the major email marketing programs.   

• Payment Gateways — Stripe, PayPal.
• Email Marketing — Aweber, MailChimp, Drip, ConvertKit, ActiveCampaign.
• Analytics — Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, Segment. 
• Miscellaneous — ClickFunnels, Zapier.

Now you know all about Kajabi prices, support and integrations let’s look at Kajabi’s features in this Kajabi review. 

Kajabi Features

Kajabi’s Knowledge Commerce platform allows you to do multiple things all under one roof. Let’s just briefly review of the most common use cases or features:

Create Online Courses:

One of the most evident and widespread use cases of the platform is creating online courses.  

Kajabi’s easy-to-use and intuitive visual course builder enables you to add, edit, and customize content. The platform is built so that a newbie/novice course creator can get started within minutes, and start uploading or creating their course content. 

The Kajabi Assistance guides you step-by-step in creating a course or making any changes within the platform. 

You have the option to customize the course to match your branding guidelines. All of this can be done without any need for coding or hiring a developer.

Here are a few things that you can customize:

• Header.
• Footer.
• Typography.
• Color Schemes.
• Sidebar.
• Search Bar.
• Alignment.

The Course Builder has ready-made course templates which makes it easier and simpler to create your course. You only need to edit the contents of your course lessons because of the ready-made templates.

The CMS or Course Builder is user-friendly with a text editor that enables you to add, edit, update the content of each course. It also allows you to format the text, and also add links and media (vides) to enrich your course experience.

There’s also an option to add automation to each of your course pages. 

The following automation options are available by default:

• Offer  — Grant or Revoke an Offer.
• Email sequence — Subscribe/unsubscribe from a particular sequence.
• Event — Register for an event
• Tag — Add/remove tags
• Email — Send an automated email.
• Coupon — Send a single-use coupon.

Automation conditions can be set, so you can and control who specifically on a granular level to whom or when it’s triggered.  

For example, you might have a membership program, and you only want to offer a single-use coupon for VIP members (and not all students). Or you want to grant an offer only to a student who has purchased in the last week. 

At any point, you can easily preview how the front-end of your course content will look for your students.

Sell Online Courses:

Once you have created a course, Kajabi allows you to market and sell the course all within its platform. You can create a dedicated checkout page(s) for each of your courses. You can create custom offers for your courses. 

A sales page helps you sell the course. It’s usually the last page of your prospective students before they are ready to purchase your course. This feature is also available within your Kajabi subscription.

Kajabi integrates directly with PayPal and Stripe. 

Kajabi themselves don’t charge any transaction fees; however, you will still be paying transaction fees to PayPal or Stripe.

Once you complete your integration — you can also customize the sales page (or checkout page). 

You have the option to include and edit the following to make your checkout page more compelling:

• Information on the Offer (or the course).
• Service agreements/disclaimers.
• Testimonials.
• Color.
• Add an Order Bump 

Here’s an example of a simple sales checkout page from a Kajabi customer. 

Image Source: Kajabi (How to Create an Amazing Sales Page Today) 

We mentioned that Kajabi is an all-in-one Knowledge Commerce platform that expands beyond just creating and selling courses.

Without having to purchase additional software, you can do the following within the Kajabi dashboard:

• Create a Marketing funnel or pipeline.
• Create an Email Campaign.
• Create Forms. 
• Create landing pages.

We will cover more on these features in the upcoming sections.

Create and Sell Membership Programs:

Creating a membership program is as easy and intuitive as creating a course on Kajabi — allowing you to customize every aspect of your membership site’s contents and design. 

Perhaps you have a course for all your current students. And you have premium or VIP students who want to pay for exclusive content — then the membership site will allow you to do that.

Other course platforms, such as LearnDash, requires additional plugin or software to create a membership site. 

The  CMS/editor for creating the membership site is organized in the same format as for creating a course, and you have extensive customization options.

There’s also an option to create multiple custom membership levels and customize the contents of each membership.

For example, your bronze membership might be $29 and displays two pieces of content; your Gold membership is $99 and includes 20 pieces of content. Kajabi allows you to create and set up multiple membership levels. 

Once the membership packages or levels are created — you can also customize your offer or landing page for each package. 

Create a Website (and a Blog):

Many creators host their online courses on platforms like Udemy, Skillshare, LinkedIn Learning, SkillShare, etc. Then they also have their websites and blogs on a separate CMS (WordPress Wix,etc.). 

It can be hectic to manage multiple platforms. Kajabi takes away that challenge — especially for startups or digital entrepreneurs with a few courses who don’t want to go through the hassle of creating a dedicated website. 

The Kajabi Website builder allows you to host, create, and launch a website (and a blog) all through the Kajabi platform. 

You can create multiple sections on your home page, and edit them based on your branding guidelines.  It’s relatively simpler and easier to edit every aspect of the website. 

In addition to the home page, you can create multiple pages for different sections of the website. 

Finally, there’s an option to create a dedicated blog for your course website. 

Setting up a blog, creating posts, and optimizing them for SEO and social media is all available within the CMS/editor.

At any point, you can see how your webpages and blog posts are performing with their in-built analytics and reporting.

Kajabi (Pros)

All-in-one-Platform

I have covered this a few times already in this article. But it’s worth repeating!

Kajabi’s key differentiator is the fact that you have everything you need to create, launch, and market your courses — CMS, email marketing, marketing funnel builder, landing pages, checkout pages, payment options.  

There’s no pressing requirement to install or integrate with other 3rd party softwares. Kajabi has an extensive feature list.

No Website or Hosting Required

Kajabi also helps you host your course or membership program on their platform. 

You can create a simple website and blog to host all your course-related content — all on Kajabi.

You don’t need to register a new domain, pay hosting fees, and also set up a dedicated CMS like WordPress, SquareSpace, or Wix.

No Coding Required

As you can see in my description of the features above — the back-end (Kajabi Assitant) is built in such a way that you can create, market, and launch your course in record time.

The CMS also allows you to customize your branding for every page (course pages, library, checkout pages,etc.) without requiring the help of a developer. 

This is a drawback of an LMS like Learnash, which often requires heavy coding and customization.

Marketing Automation 

Course creators typically need additional software to market their online course — to create a funnel, landing pages, forms, etc. These costs could potentially add up and can be a challenge to keep track of and manage multiple platforms. 

Kajabi has an extensive marketing funnel builder with ready-made templates and workflows — so you can turn your course into an full-blown and automated marketing machine. 

You can choose one of the pipelines — and the platform will provide you with a step-by-step workflow to automate your next campaign. The Funnel Builder automatically creates all the necessary steps (workflow, sequences,etc.), and all you have to do is to edit the context of each step. 

(There’s also a video tutorial available for every marketing pipeline that you choose to build). 

You don’t have to hire a marketing or conversion rate optimization (CRO) specialist to launch your online course. 

Email Marketing

Kajabi enables you to choose and create different types of email campaigns to communicate with your students —  automated (triggered emails), email broadcasts, or email sequences. 

At the time of this writing, there are 19 different templates that you can choose from to send out mass emails to your customers and students. The email broadcasts can be used for announcing new products, or for email newsletters, or for sharing an announcement.

The Email Campaign feature allows you to set up and launch an automated email sequence. There’s a library of pre-made templates that you can choose as well. Editing the contents of each email is simple, and you can set the delivery time for each email in your sequences. 

The email campaign features eliminate the need for a 3rd party email marketing software such as MailChimp or ConvertKit, however, integrations are available to connect both Kajabi and the email marketing platforms.

There’s also a Cart Abandonment feature, which can be set up to send an email to those who still haven’t made the purchase.

You can automate email notifications to your students based on the action they take within their course (finishing a course page or course completion).

Trigger an automation – send an email or notification, also trigger affiliate slaes commissions. 

Payment Processing

Easily connect Kajabi with your Stripe and PayPal account. There’s no need to create a 3rd party payment system or shopping cart. Creating offers is simple using the Kajabi Assistant. 

Once your product (course/coaching/membership program) is created — you can set up multiple payment options for your students to choose from:

• Free.
• One-time payment.
• Multiple payments
• Recurring subscriptions. 

Create More Than Just Online Courses

Kajabi allows you to create a variety of digital products (membership programs, online community, or coaching programs). The CMS and the ready-made templates make it easier to crate and launch these programs.

Perhaps, you want to create a unique course for your VIP members — you can do that using Kajabi. 

Or you want to offer a private community (similar to Facebook groups) — you can do that using Kajabi. 

Or you want to offer a dedicated one-on-one coaching session to a few of your students— you can do that using Kajabi. 

Mobile Responsiveness

The Kajai Assistant allows you to edit and preview any of your course content or website pages on all devices (desktop, tablet, mobile).  

Your students can access your courses using the Kajabi app on both iOS or Android devices. 

Please note, you will not be getting a dedicated mobile app, but, instead, your students will access your course on the universal Kajabi Mobile App.

Kajabi (Cons)

Price

The entry point of $149 per month (Basic package) is high for most solopreneurs and startups. If you are starting out and only have one or two courses — it’s hard to justify the price tag. There’s no free or freemium version.

There isn’t an a-la-carte option where you can only pick and choose the features you want — you get the entire package (marketing, email campaigns, website, blog).

Blogging

The blogging platform is a great start for first-time course creators or a limited number of articles. The feature set is basic and needs a lot of improvements. If you are looking to build an extensive blog and build authority — then WordPress is ideal

Limited Support and Onboarding

There’s an extensive library, support groups, and training videos, etc. However, most of the learning curve is self-serve. There’s no 1-on-1 onboarding process.

The 24/7 chat is only available for Pro and Premium users. 

No Ability to Create Certifications

One of the major drawbacks of Kajabi is that you can’t create and issue certifications. You’ll have to do this manually or use another 3rd party system.

Limited Integrations

They do integrate with the major email marketing platforms; however, you will have to use Zapier for other integrations (CRM, Marketing Automation, Analytics, etc).

You are limited to Stripe and Paypal for payment. If you want to use another shopping cart — it’s not possible. 

Kajabi Alternatives

The online course platform that you’ll choose must fit your requirements and goals. In this kajabi review I showed Kajabi’s best features and room for improvement.

It can be that Kajabi isn’t the best fit for you. That’s why I compare Kajabi with 4 competitors below, so you can make a good decision about what the best online course platform is for your situation.

Kajabi vs Thinkific

Founded in 2012, Thinkific is an online course creation platform that allows entrepreneurs, marketers, and coaches to create, market, and sell their courses.

There are many similarities between Kajabi and Thinkific  —  create courses, sell courses, accept payments, etc.. However, there are a few significant differences as well that make them different. 

Let’s review those in detail:

Kajabi vs Teachable

Founded in 2013, Teachable is an online course creation platform that allows anyone to monetize their experience and expertise into sellable online courses. Even though Teachable is a relatively new player on the block — they have captured significant traction. 

There are many similarities between Kajabi and Teachable —  create courses, sell courses, accept payments, etc.. However, there are a few significant differences as well that make them different. 

Let’s review those in detail:

Want to know more about Teachable? Read my Teachable review.

Kajabi vs Kartra

Kartra is an all-in-one online marketing platform that allows you to create, market, sell, and manage all your digital content (course, digital content, memberships) in one place. 

It’s one of the most extensive platforms out there all under one-roof — website builder, landing pages, email marketing, video hosting, funnels, campaigns, helpdesk, etc. 

Kartra is one of the few platforms that come close to Kajabi’s extensive feature list. 

Let’s review the similarities and difference between Kajabi and Kartra in this table below:

Kajabi vs Podia

Launched in 2014, Podia is an online marketing platform that enables creative entrepreneurs to create, start, and sell digital content (courses, digital products, membership programs, webinars). The platform also allows you to build your website or an online storefront with the tools necessary for success.

There are many similarities between Kajabi and Podia—  create courses, membership programs, build a website, etc.. However, there are a few significant differences as well that make them different. 

Let’s review them in detail:

Want to read more information about Podia? Read my extended Podia review.

FAQs about Kajabi

Does Kajabi Integrate With WordPress?

No, there’s no direct integration between WordPress and Kajabi. 

However, you use Zapier to connect both the platforms, but, the choices are limited.

For example, if you wanted to create a WordPress user from a new Kajabi form submission, — that’s not possible. 

Can I Sell Physical Products on Kajabi?

No.  Kajabi is only ideal  for digital products (course, memberships, coaching, content, etc.) and suitable for physical products.

You can create digital products using Kajabi — online courses, membership programs, coaching programs, etc. 

There is also no direct integration between Kajabi and WordPress/Magento/Shopify/BigCommerce. 

Also, there are no current integrations with shopping carts and checkout softwares. 

Is Kajabi an LMS?

Kajabi is an all-in-one course creation or knowledge commerce platform. They are not completely a Learning Management System (LMS).

An LMS like LearnDash typically has the ability to create certificates, gamification, etc. 

One of the commonly mentioned drawbacks about Kajabi is that it doesn’t allow for certificates to be issued. That might change in the future, as more and more course creators request that particular feature.  

Kajabi review: Conclusion

Kajabi is for more experienced course creators who have developed multiple courses, and want to take them to the next-level — marketing, membership programs, community management, etc. 

As I have mentioned multiple times in this Kajabi review — Kajabi is an all-in-one platform to create, launch, and run your online course business.  

Kajabi clearly distinguishes itself from other course solutions like Teachable and Thinkific, built especially for online course creators.

Kajabi is also one of the most expensive options in the marketplace — which prices out many new course creators, small businesses, and startups. 

In summary, if you are starting out with your very first course — I recommend a Starter platform such as Thinkific or Teachable (available for free). 
On the other hand, if you are an experienced creator who wants to take your online course business to the next level — then Kajabi is an ideal option for you.