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Whether you’re a creator, a life coach, or a digital creator, creating a course is one of the best ways to grow your online business. Kajabi and Teachable are major course platforms in the space, but both have pros and cons.
Kajabi and Teachable are major course platforms in the space with tens of thousands of users. Both have their advantages and disadvantages, depending on the use case you need them.
Kajabi is an all-around marketing & business platform, able to deliver in many circumstances, while Teachable is more suited to creators and coaches just starting with online courses.
We tested Teachable and Kajabi to determine the best platform for your courses and compared the features you’ll need as a course creator.
This comparison guide of Teachable vs. Kajabi provides a detailed overview of each tool, making it easier to get your online course business off the ground.
⚠️Disclosure: Information on pricing, customer support, and customization options comes from public-facing pages on the Kajabi and Teachable websites. Some features mentioned in this review may only be available if you purchase a top-tier paid plan.
The review and screenshots were created by subscribing to the lowest level of each software for a month and extensively testing the software. It also includes comments and opinions created with years of experience as a competitor in the elearning ed-tech market.
LearnWorlds is a direct competitor with both Teachable and Kajabi. LearnWorlds is the superior software for creating, marketing, and selling online courses. It is the choice of entrepreneurs, educators, and businesses who genuinely care about delivering a better experience for their learners, employees, and customers.
Our Top Choice: LearnWorlds
Kajabi and Teachable both possess commendable qualities, but if your goal is to provide the ultimate learning experience to your students, LearnWorlds stands out as the ideal choice!
LearnWorlds has everything you need to create, manage, and sell online courses on any topic.
It has more advanced elearning features like SCORM support, in-depth reporting & analytics, full website-building capabilities, a robust course builder and AI course creator, and learning & marketing automations.
Also, LearnWorlds puts its customers on a pedestal with industry-leading support.
When you sign up for LearnWorlds, you’ll get the best online course platform available in the market, freeing you from technical complications as you focus on growing your business.
Try LearnWorlds with a free 30-day trial; no credit card is required:
Your professional looking Academy in a few clicks
Start FREE TrialIn a Nutshell
Teachable is an online course platform that allows you to create courses and offer one-on-one coaching.
In contrast, Kajabi is an all-in-one marketing platform for course creation, podcasts, group coaching, individual coaching, and membership sites.
In our review, Kajabi scored better in marketing, and website-building capabilities, while Teachable has better course authoring, is easier to use, and is cheaper to start with.
LearnWorlds wins by far in Course Authoring, Features, Customer Service, and Value for Money.
In-Depth Comparison of Kajabi vs. Teachable
Starting from pricing, Kajabi is more expensive than Teachable which offers a free plan that supports unlimited students. Teachable’s free plan is a budget-friendly option to create a single course with just a few videos.
Kajabi offers a free 14-day trial with a required credit card 🛑 but no free plans. If you like the platform and want to keep using it after the trial expires, you must sign up for a Kajabi subscription.
Both platforms check off the following:
Lastly, Teachable started focusing on education and shifted towards coaching, making it more educator-friendly with more options when creating educational courses, quizzes, and assessments.
On the other hand, Kajabi offers the basics for a video course structure with knowledge checks, however, it lacks advanced learning features and analytics that more demanding educators are looking for.
Kajabi or Teachable: which is better?
It depends on whether you’re looking for a proper learning management system or a course creation tool packed with marketing features. Teachable is the better option for coaching products, while Kajabi is ideal for users who focus on sales and digital products rather than courses.
But, if you are serious about education, LearnWorlds is a better choice than both.
Kajabi Overview
Pros
- Easy to use
- Features an AI Creator Hub
- Offers robust sales and marketing tools
- Integrates with popular software packages
- Comes with tools for building sales funnels/pipelines
- Access to a built-in community (purchased Vibely, a community platform, in 2022)
- Has ready-made templates
Cons
- No free plan once the trial expires
- Few design customization options
- Course authoring tools aren’t as advanced as they could be
- Limited learning features
- Emphasizes product sales (not the learning experience)
- Lack of elearning reporting & analytics
Kajabi Pricing
Kajabi is the most expensive course platform at $149 per month. All prices below are for monthly plans, but you can save 20% if you pay annually:
Kickstarter plan: $69/month
Basic plan: $149/month
Growth plan: $199/month
Pro plan: $399/month
*Pricing retrieved in May 2024 from Kajabi’s pricing page.
Who Is It For?
Kajabi is for digital entrepreneurs, business owners, and online course creators who want access to a full suite of digital marketing tools. The platform is ideal for “non-techy” users interested in scalability.
💁 Read Kajabi vs. LearnWorlds to see how Kajabi stacks up against our top choice for eLearning software.
Teachable Overview
Pros
- Free plan with limited features
- Features an AI Curriculum Generator
- Includes all the basics you need to get started
- It comes with a landing page builder
- Loaded with sales and marketing tools
- Third-party integrations available
- Provides 24/7 customer support
Cons
- Very high transaction fees for the free plan
- Limited website customization
- Doesn’t include advanced course authoring features
- No live chat support
- Emphasizes sales features instead of learning
- Doesn’t support TinCan, SCORM, or AICC
Teachable Pricing
Teachable offers a free plan with some feature limitations allowing only up to one product per category – course, coaching, and downloads. Similarly to Teachable’s basic plan, the free plan also comes with transaction fees.
Free plan: $0/month ($1 + 10% transaction fees)
Basic plan: $59/month (+ 5% transaction fees)
Pro plan: $159/month (0% transaction fees)
Pro+ plan: $249/month (0% transaction fees)
Business plan: $665/month (0% transaction fees)
*Pricing retrieved in May 2024 from Teachable’s pricing page.
Who Is It For?
Teachable is ideal for new course creators. It’s also a good option for coaches, solopreneurs, and creative professionals who want simple video courses and booking-style coaching features.
Teachable isn’t a feature-packed platform, and it’s simple to use, so it’s great for users with basic tech skills. However, if you have extensive experience with course creation, you may find it lacking in educational capabilities.
💁 Read Teachable vs. LearnWorlds to understand why LearnWorlds is a better option for course creators.
Ease of Use
Both Kajabi and Teachable are easy to use and do not require any special skills. Teachable’s interface is slightly better and more friendly than Kajabi’s.
Once you log into Teachable, you see the steps to get started and the support resources. Kajabi shows a long list of feature categories, which might be overwhelming for a new course creator.
Building a course in Kajabi seems intimidating, but you can easily get the hang of it. Kajabi uses the wording “products” referring to a downloadable ebook, single video, or even podcast.
Teachable offers an easier course creation interface, and the addition of the AI course outline generator makes it a breeze to create the learning units for your first course.
All that said, Teachable is a better choice for new course creators who may not have fully fleshed out their courses yet, while Kajabi is geared more toward experienced creators who know what they are doing.
Then, building your website and landing pages and setting up your marketing emails and sales follows a similar approach, with both platforms having easy-to-use simple interfaces and point-and-click or drag-and-drop features around.
The best part is that both come with site templates. The only downside is that creating a beautiful website requires some design skills, and if you want to customize the code on Teachable you will need to purchase the higher plan.
Course Creation (Authoring)
Both Kajabi and Teachable promote themselves as course platforms where you create and sell online courses as their primary functionality.
Below is a review of both platforms’ course creation functionality and a more in-depth look at some of the features.
Kajabi’s Course Creation
Kajabi comes with course creation templates based on different product types:
It also allows several content formats, files, and activities to be uploaded, such as video, audio, PDF, quizzes, community posts, leaderboards, and more.
The downside of Kajabi is that those features sound great but need to be more complex. Quizzes are great if you offer a video course with some knowledge checks.
For advanced users creating serious training courses though, Kajabi lacks educational features like advanced assessments, question banks, SCORM, and interactivity features.
Teachable’s Course Creation
Teachable has more authoring features than Kajabi, which is why we recommend it for users who want to focus on teaching and coaching over selling digital products.
What makes Teachable such a great platform for beginners is that it has an intuitive interface, making it as easy as possible to get your course up and running.
Teachable allows you to create rules regarding quiz completion, video watching, and lecture order. This is a more advanced feature than Kajabi’s category lock, which offers a linear progression path.
The platform also offers several templates for course completion certificates, making it easy to recognize and award your learners’ achievements.
Assessments
The platform also supports multiple question types as assessments, including open-ended, multiple-choice, and fill-in-the-blank. You can give a passing score and see the quiz score at the reporting of the assessments.
You can also manually grade assessments for open-ended questions.
The platform allows you to create graded and ungraded quizzes, but graded quizzes are only available with the Pro and Business plans.
Additionally, the platform doesn’t support many question types. If you don’t want to use multiple-choice questions, you’ll have to ask learners to submit their responses in HTML or rich text.
Community Features
Kajabi recently bought the community platform Vibely and has integrated it with their software, offering more advanced community-building features.
In the community, your members can create posts, answer comments, add photos, create discussions, send private messages, and challenges, and you can schedule meetups or live events.
Teachable does not have a built-in community but has native integration with Circle.so. Circle was co-founded by the ex-VP of Product and ex-VP of Growth of Teachable, but it’s a different product, and you will need to pay extra for the community features it offers.
Analytics & Reporting
Kajabi offers in-depth analytics to help you identify your most profitable courses and keep track of enrollments. The Analytics Dashboard shows you how many people have enrolled in your courses and how much revenue you’ve earned.
Kajabi also has a sidebar showing your recent activity, such as net revenue, opt-ins, subscription metrics, page views, product progress, and offers sold.
It also offers video and audio engagement reports to monitor the progress of your students, but not much in terms of learning analytics.
Teachable, on the other hand, offers four course reports, helping you better understand your learners:
It also includes revenue reports, and stats, and integrates with Google Analytics and Mixpanel to get a better view of how your school is performing.
Sales & Marketing Features
Kajabi’s funnels are one of its most powerful features in marketing and sales. You can create email marketing automations and combine it with trigger events such as a webinar, a landing page, or a checkout.
Kajabi comes with everything you need to build a marketing engine, such as lead capture forms, email sequences, a checkout system, various payment methods, landing page building, thank you pages, etc.
Kajabi is the undisputed winner in this category, and it’s often categorized as a marketing platform over a course platform because of these great features.
On the other hand, Teachable allows you to create an affiliate program, encouraging current learners to refer other people to your courses, offers built-in tools to track referrals, and ensures affiliates get paid on time.
Teachable also allows you to create a dedicated page for each course and send mass emails.
The power of Teachable is its order bumps feature. While you can achieve a similar effect with Kajabi, on Teachable, you can offer a suggested “upsell” to your customer right on the checkout page, thus increasing your sales at the last moment.
Email Marketing, Funnels, & Automations
Kajabi has built-in email marketing, eliminating the need to purchase and learn to use a separate tool. The visual editor comes with hundreds of templates, making it easy to create custom courses, preview them, and make updates.
The platform also offers advanced email analytics allowing you to see how many subscribers you have, what percentage of emails are delivered, and what percentage of recipients opened each email.
Kajabi subscribers can access automations that use if-then logic to streamline and trigger specific actions. For example, you can use automation to send a certificate of completion once a student completes a course.
Teachable is more limited, as it only allows sending one-time emails to students. For email marketing campaigns you’ll need to use a separate email marketing tool. While it lacks many built-in automation tools, you can also use Zapier to automate tasks between the course platform and other apps.
Kajabi comes with ready-made funnels, taking the guesswork out of nurturing leads and persuading them to sign up for a course, community, or membership site. It has templates for common tasks like product launches, giveaways, and webinars, and you can even create a custom sales page for the programs you create.
Teachable doesn’t have built-in funnel features. This makes it more difficult to generate leads, nurture and turn them into paying customers. Again, you can use another tool like ClickFunnels to complete these tasks.
Payments & Memberships
Teachable offers a number of payment options as well as its payment gateway: Teachable:Pay.
With Teachable, you can have four pricing options:
These options give you flexibility on how to price and sell your products, and with subscriptions you can offer a membership option for your students – if you are selling a community.
Membership sites with different subscription levels are ideal for course creators who teach students at different skill levels.
For example, if you’re a clarinetist, you can set up a membership that includes every beginner, intermediate, and advanced course you’ve produced.
Teachable offers its own payment gateway, however, it’s not available in every country and comes with pretty high fees, especially if you are not in the U.S. (retrieved from Teachable’s support pages):
| Payment method/type | Fee |
|---|---|
| US Card fee | 2.9% + 30¢ |
| US PayPal fee | 3.49% + 49¢ |
| International card fee | 3.9% + 30¢ |
| International PayPal fee | 4.99% + 49¢ |
Kajabi has released a beta version of its own payment gateway this year, Kajabi Payments, but it also integrates with Stripe and PayPal for payments.
Kajabi Payments is available only to selected customers in the U.S. and costs 2.9% + 30¢ per transaction, and adds additional fees as:
Kajabi also offers similar features to Teachable where you can set one-off payments, installments, or subscriptions. Combining the subscriptions with its new community features, makes it easy to offer memberships.
Kajabi vs Teachable on Building a Website
Both platforms offer a website builder to create landing pages, login screens, and checkouts for your online courses. You can customize your theme, images, logo, fonts, color, and content.
Neither site builder is very advanced though, and are rather limited by their templates.
You will find all the features you will need to create your website:
To truly customize your website, you will need the highest plan in both Teachable and Kajabi, costing you $665 and $399 per month respectively.
While building a basic site with templates and a few drag-and-drop zones is easy on both platforms, creating a stunning branded website will require HTML/CSS coding skills and a higher plan to unlock it.
Removing the branding for both plans would require at least the $159/m plan.
But beware! Teachable is never white-labeled. The reality is that every login and checkout screen goes through a Teachable subdomain.
Whichever plan you have, you can’t truly white-label Teachable; it only removes the branding below.
💁 You can compare the white-labeling options of each platform in this article.
Mobile App
Both platforms have mobile apps for instructors and students, but neither offers a white-label version of their app only for your school. Both apps act as marketplaces including the company’s brand and are used to access courses from all instructors using the software.
Your learners can download the app and access your courses from a smartphone with either platform. However, the Teachable app is only available on iOS devices (Apple), whereas Kajabi’s app works on iOS and Android.
So, if you have an Android device or don’t want to exclude several students from enrolling in your courses, consider choosing Kajabi.
A marketplace app means that your courses are under Kajabi’s or Teachable’s brand and are shown side-by-side with your competitors.
💡 Only LearnWorlds offers a truly white-labeled mobile app.
Build the perfect branded mobile app for your academy. Instantly.
Integrations
Integrations allow you to use third-party websites and applications in conjunction with an online course platform.
Kajabi doesn’t have many integrations, but that’s because it’s an all-in-one platform with many built-in functions. As of May 2023, you can use the following tools with Kajabi:
Teachable has even fewer integrations than Kajabi. You can use the course platform with these tools:
The good news is that both platforms integrate with Zapier as an intermediary, which allows you to connect thousands of other software with your course platforms.
Customer Service
Kajabi wins Teachable in terms of customer service, as the platform offers 24/7 live chat support with its Growth and Pro plans. Teachable offers email support between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. EST daily and priority support only to Business plan subscribers.
Teachable’s customer support receives a lot of negative comments on review sites, while Kajabi seems to offer decent support.
**I have to note here that Kajabi’s plans start at higher prices, and it makes sense to have better support for the software you are paying more for.
Both platforms have knowledge bases, videos, blogs, and courses filled with answers to FAQs and tips related to online course creation. You will find a lot of useful material to grow your business and how to use the platform.
Pricing Plan Comparison
Kajabi offers four paid plans and an option for custom pricing for enterprise users. Teachable also offers four paid plans and a free-forever plan, while Kajabi does not have any. However, Teachable’s free and basic plans come with steep transaction fees.
Kajabi offers a 14-day trial but requires a credit card as well. You need to be confident you want to use Kajabi to try it.
For the pricing table below, we are comparing the pricing of each software based on their monthly plans.
Which Platform Is the Best: Teachable or Kajabi?
Answering this question depends on how you plan to use the platform. If you are new to the market and building up your first business, Teachable is a better choice.
Signing up for a free-forever plan and being able to quickly set up payments with Teachable:Pay is great for beginners.
Kajabi is the best option if you want to scale your business. You can start with an online course, expand into a membership site, and then create a community of people eager to buy every time you release something new.
The downside of Kajabi is that it’s expensive. If you are not already making some money, Kajabi might not be a good choice.
But our preferred choice is LearnWorlds. Our course platform beats both over price, quality, support, and learning features. Take LearnWorlds for a 30-day trial spin today.
Your professional looking Academy in a few clicks
Start FREE TrialAlternatives for Kajabi and Teachable
If you’re not sold on Kajabi or Teachable, you have a few other options.
💡 Compare Kajabi Vs. Teachable Vs. Thinkific Vs. LearnWorlds.
FAQs
What’s the difference between Teachable and Kajabi?
Teachable focuses on educational and coaching features and less on marketing automations than Kajabi. You can use Teachable to create unlimited courses and provide 1:1 coaching, but it isn’t designed for memberships or online communities.
Teachable has some third-party integrations but fewer marketing features. Kajabi is a better choice for business owners needing scalability. Teachable offers a user-friendly experience to those new to course creation, and want to focus on learning management rather than marketing.
Which one is better, Kajabi or Teachable?
It depends on your needs. Teachable is ideal if you’re just getting started with course creation and don’t have much experience creating learning modules, setting course compliance requirements, or handling enrollments.
Kajabi is the better option for online course creation to grow your business. To sign up for Kajabi, you should feel ready to create marketing campaigns, work with email marketing tools, and move potential customers through your sales funnel. Kajabi is also a good choice for those who want to launch online communities, create membership sites, or offer group coaching.
Does Kajabi own your content?
No. You retain ownership of everything you create, so you can update or delete your content at any time. Kajabi doesn’t own any of your course content.
What are Kajabi’s competitors?
Some of Kajabi’s top competitors include LearnWorlds, Thinkific, Teachable, and Karta. Out of these options, LearnWorlds is the most robust. The cloud-based LMS platform comes with a suite of tools to help you create courses and market them to members of your target audience. LearnWorlds also has a site builder that makes it possible to create custom course designs instead of recycling the same few templates.
Does Kajabi offer hosting?
Yes, Kajabi offers hosting. Before you launch your website, you’ll need to purchase a custom domain from GoDaddy, Name.com, or another registrar.
Is Teachable cheaper than Kajabi?
In most cases, Teachable is cheaper than Kajabi. How much it costs depends on which plan you choose. The free plan has no monthly fee, but you’ll pay transaction fees of $1 plus 10% of every sale. If you upgrade to a paid plan, you’ll pay $59 to $665 per month to access the platform. The transaction fees drop to 5% once you’re enrolled in a paid plan.
Kajabi doesn’t offer a free plan, and its cheapest paid option is $69 per month. However, its top-tier plan is $399 per month compared to $665 per month for Teachable’s business plan. Kajabi doesn’t charge any transaction fees.
Nick Malekos is a Senior Digital Marketer in LearnWorlds. He is a results based and well-rounded Digital Marketer with years of experience in the education industry, writer and digital literacy trainer.
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