Kajabi vs Teachable 2024: Which Course Platform Is Best?

Kajabi and Teachable are two big names in the world of online course platforms and with good reason. Both offer robust tools to help you create and sell your online courses.

But what are the differences between these two platforms, and which is a better fit for your specific needs?

In this Kajabi vs Teachable guide, we’ll explore every aspect of creating and selling courses on these two platforms, helping you decide which is best for your business.

Below, you’ll find a breakdown of the key features of each platform, along with what we like and don’t like about them.

What Are Kajabi and Teachable? 

Kajabi and Teachable are both cloud-based platforms that provide you with the infrastructure and tools to build your course website and deliver engaging online courses.

You can host all your content, organize it into modules and lessons, create sales pages, accept online payments, deliver content via the course player, and further engage your students.

And you can do all of this on your own, with no technical knowledge or coding skills. Their team handles hosting, security, and maintenance, allowing you to focus on creating content and selling courses.

Moreover, they aren’t online course marketplaces, so you have complete control over course pricing and student data.

However, there are some fundamental differences between Teachable vs Kajabi.

Kajabi is an all-in-one solution where you can run your entire online course business, including marketing on the platform. Besides course creation and selling tools, it comes with a website builder, blogging tools, email marketing, and sales funnel builder.

The idea is to have everything under one roof so that you don’t need to hack together or learn to use several different tools.

On the other hand, Teachable is a standalone course platform that mainly offers core features for course creation and selling.

It lacks the capability to create sales funnels or do email marketing, which isn’t necessarily a drawback. Instead, its focus lies elsewhere.

We’ll dive deeper into the specific features and differences between the two platforms in the following sections.

Ease of Use

Kajabi and Teachable are both user-friendly. The admin interface is clean and intuitive, with features and tools easily accessible from the side menu.

Individual tools, such as the course builder and website builder, are easy to use with drag-and-drop functionality.

What we like about Teachable is that when you create a course, the platform automatically creates sales, checkout, and thank you pages that are dynamically linked, making the entire process seamless.

A walkthrough of Teachable’s user interface

In contrast, with Kajabi, you need to create a sales page separately and then link it to an offer (pricing plan) that includes access to the course.

It’s not a huge difference, and you get more flexibility, but more steps are involved in setting up a course on Kajabi.

Kajabi also offers more tools and features, which can lead to a higher learning curve.

However, the platform does an excellent job of integrating these tools together for a smoother user experience.

For instance, Kajabi has a separate section for managing automations. They are also available inside individual tools, such as course builder, offers, and email campaigns, letting you create automations specific to those areas without switching between different sections.

A walkthrough of Kajabi’s user interface

Overall, both course platforms are easy to use, though Kajabi may require more time to familiarize yourself with all its features.

Course Creation and Engagement

The core job of an online course platform is to let you create an online course, deliver it to your students, and engage them. In this chapter, we’ll look at how Kajabi vs Teachable handles course creation and student engagement.

Course Builder

Kajabi and Teachable allow you to add videos, audio, PDFs, text, and quizzes to your courses. They also offer unlimited video hosting on all their plans, so they are similar in supported content.

Both have an easy-to-use course builder that lets you upload your content and structure it into an online course. You can add modules and lessons and arrange them by dragging and dropping.

They also support bulk uploading, so you can upload multiple files simultaneously, and the platform will automatically create lessons for you.

When it comes to the lesson editor, Teachable gives you more flexibility. It lets you add multiple content types to the lesson and arrange them in any order.

On the other hand, Kajabi’s lesson editor is simpler. It requires a primary content type that is either a video or an audio. You can then add text content and downloadables to go along with it.

So, you can’t add multiple videos or a quiz and a video in the same lesson in Kajabi, while it’s possible in Teachable. While this isn’t a huge deal, having this option is good if you need it.

Teachable’s course builder also makes it easier to manage your curriculum. It lets you bulk select lessons/modules in the curriculum area and modify preview and publishing settings or even delete them.

In the case of Kajabi, you’ll need to do it individually.

Otherwise, both course builders are intuitive and user-friendly, making the course creation process on the two platforms really simple.

Learning and Engagement

Teachable and Kajabi have a variety of features aimed at enhancing the learning experience for students. Let’s start with quizzes.

Quizzes and Certificates

The quizzing capabilities of both platforms are pretty similar. They both offer the ability to create multiple-choice and multiple-select quizzes.

You can add text and images to your questions, while Kajabi also lets you add images to your question responses.

Moreover, you can set a passing grade for your students and let the tool automatically evaluate their responses.

At this time, neither platform supports advanced quizzing features like the ability to import questions and question banks.

However, both platforms let you create assignments. You can ask students to upload a file or provide a text response.

While Kajabi also supports manual grading and student feedback, Teachable doesn’t currently have these features.

Regarding certificates, both Teachable and Kajabi allow you to create them natively on the platform. You can add a certificate to a specific course, and your students will automatically receive it upon completing that course.

Teachable has three certificate templates, and you can modify the template design and personalize it further. You can also build a custom template from scratch if you know liquid/html coding.

Kajabi, on the other hand, has one default template, but unlike Teachable, lets you add a custom certificate field. You can easily create a certificate and make minor design modifications.

Content Dripping and Locking

Content dripping works pretty similarly on both platforms. Both let you drip your content based on student enrollment or a specific date.

You can also set up emails to automatically go out to your students when new content is available. The only difference is that Kajabi lets you customize the default time for dripping your content.

Regarding content locking, Kajabi lets you set pre-requisite lessons for a module, and unless users complete the lesson, they can’t access that module.

If the pre-requisite lesson has a quiz, the student must pass the quiz before he/she can access the module.

Teachable also allows you to lock your content, but it works pretty differently. Compliance is enforced at a course level, and you’ll need to choose from one of the three options.

For example, if you select Enforce Lecture Order, users must progress through all the lectures in the course in order.

Teachable also offers an Enforce Video Watching option, which mandates students to watch at least 90% of a video to mark the lesson complete.

However, the course compliance in Teachable can be a bit too restrictive. So, when you enable video watching or quiz completion compliance, the lecture order one is automatically enforced.

Live Classes

Live classes are an important tool for creating interactive learning experiences and delivering cohort courses.

Kajabi does a better job in this area. The platform has native live video functionality with features for sharing your screen, creating breakout rooms, and chatting with your students.

You can also record live sessions and add them to your course lessons.

Teachable, on the other hand, relies on its Zoom integration for live classes. You can schedule a Zoom meeting from the course builder, but it requires a separate Zoom account and students need to download the Zoom software.

Online Community

Both Teachable and Kajabi allow you to add a community area for your students to interact with each other and with you.

The communities look good out of the box and can be organized into spaces where you and your members can create discussion posts. You can also control access to specific community spaces based on students’ purchases.

However, the similarities end there, as Kajabi Communities offers more advanced features such as events and livestreaming, direct messaging, challenges, and leaderboards. They also support native video uploads and are accessible through the mobile apps.

Kajabi’s community feature is great for building membership communities or any community that goes beyond simple support groups.

Teachable’s community feature, on the other hand, is ideal for basic course discussions and support. For a more robust and interactive community, you’ll need a specialized community builder.

Online Coaching

Apart from courses and communities, both platforms also support coaching products.

Teachable lets you create one-on-one coaching sessions. You can set a price and add an intake form for clients to fill out before booking a session.

It also integrates with Calendly for scheduling. There’s no native live video support, so you’ll have to use a third-party tool like Zoom for your sessions. However, it supports private messaging for client communication.

On the other hand, Kajabi Coaching has a lot more native features. You can offer single sessions and coaching packages, create agendas, add resources for your clients, and take notes during sessions.

It also offers a native scheduling tool to enable clients to book sessions with you and a native live video feature to conduct sessions directly on the platform.

Finally, Kajabi supports both 1:1 and group coaching, which makes it a more robust online coaching platform.

Content Delivery

Teachable and Kajabi differ quite significantly in course delivery.

Kajabi offers several templates to customize the look and feel of your course player. The templates are suitable for a variety of products, such as self-paced courses, signature cohort programs, and membership sites.

A walkthrough of Kajabi’s course player themes

Our personal favorite is the Premier theme, which is the best-designed course player we’ve seen on any course platform.

The design is pretty clean, and you can show these video thumbnails in the player (looks elegant), giving a premium look and feel to your courses.

Another template we like a lot is the Momentum theme which has a more traditional design with navigation on the left and the content area on the right.

Kajabi lets you further customize these themes. For example, you can choose to display/hide the course progress or the instructor’s bio, and you can add a card to link to the community area.

Now, Teachable’s course player is user-friendly as well; the users can see their progress and navigate through the course on the left, and the actual content appears on the right.

A walkthrough of Teachable’s course player

However, with Teachable, there is just one default theme for the course player. Plus, you can’t customize the course player beyond changing the colors and adding a logo.

One unique feature that Teachable offers is the ability for students to take private notes in the video player itself, which can be helpful for retaining information.

Meanwhile, Teachable has three themes available for the course curriculum page.

Finally, the course player on both platforms is mobile responsive and your users can easily take the course in a web browser on their mobile phones.

However, Kajabi also offers free iOS and Android apps for your end users, allowing them to access the courses on the go.

It also gives you the option to get white-label mobile apps for an additional cost, which is a great feature for established creators and businesses.

Teachable, in contrast, only offers an iOS app for students. It lacks an Android app and doesn’t provide an option for white-label apps.

Site Design and Customization

Both Teachable and Kajabi allow you to build a website on the platform, even though their capabilities differ significantly.

But before that, let’s talk about some of the basics:

• Both platforms provide free hosting and SSL for your website.
• Your site is on a free subdomain by default, with an option to connect a custom domain. However, certain pages (login, signup, and checkout) still use the Teachable subdomain.
• You can remove the platform branding from your website and course area, allowing you to white-label your course platform.
• In Kajabi, you can change the site language by selecting a different option, while in Teachable, you must manually translate the site text.

Now, let’s explore the differences in terms of site-building tools.

Website Themes

Kajabi has a library of themes you can use to design your website. There are 10+ site themes available, with each having a different style.

Moreover, you can completely customize any of the themes using the page builder, which allows you to make your website your own in terms of look and feel.

Contrarily, Teachable doesn’t have any site themes. It just has a default template that is enabled on all Teachable websites.

You do get a theme area where you can upload your logo and define the typography and color settings for your website. But you can’t customize your website’s look and feel at the theme level.

Regarding advanced customizations, both platforms allow you to modify the theme code from the backend.

In addition, Kajabi allows you to import and use custom themes for your website, which isn’t possible on Teachable.

Page Builder

Kajabi has an easy-to-use page builder that allows you to customize your website completely. The page builder is a visual, drag-and-drop editor where you can see the changes you make on your website in real-time.

The page builder has 40+ prebuilt sections available, which makes building pages even easier.

So, you can create a hero section with a background image or a video, add pricing tables, list your courses, show your blog posts, show a countdown timer, add an optin form, create multi-column layouts, and much more.

Moreover, Kajabi is super flexible in letting you modify section layouts. You can add new blocks, change their position and order, and do additional settings for color, spacing, and animations. You can even show/hide elements on mobile or desktop.

Modifying a page section in Kajabi

Teachable also has a drag-and-drop page builder that is super easy to use. It also has pre-built sections even though their number is much less.

Moreover, you have minimal customization options for these page sections. For example, you can’t add additional elements, change the layouts, modify column widths, or add animations.

Modifying a page section in Teachable

Overall, Kajabi’s page builder is much more powerful and allows more customization options than Teachable’s.

Blogging and Podcasts

Kajabi has a native blogging feature that allows you to create a fully functional blog on the platform itself.

You can easily create blog posts and add content using the text editor. You can further add a featured image/video, define SEO settings for them, and group them into different categories.

Kajabi also allows you to design your blog page and single post page using their page builder, giving you complete control over the layout and design.

Besides blogging, Kajabi has a built-in podcast functionality that allows you to host and publish your podcasts directly on the platform. You can distribute your podcasts to popular platforms like Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

You can also create a private podcast and offer it alongside your courses and community to your members.

Teachable doesn’t have a native blogging or podcasting feature. It does have an integration with DropInBlog for adding a blog, but it comes at an additional cost.

Sales and Marketing

While both Kajabi and Teachable have sales and marketing tools, this sets Kajabi apart from Teachable and many other online course platforms.

While Teachable offers essential selling tools, Kajabi also has advanced marketing features. We’ll discuss all of them in this section.

Product Pricing Options

Both platforms let you price your products in different ways. You can charge a one-time price, a recurring fee, or a payment plan, and even price in multiple currencies.

Regarding subscription pricing, both let you charge your customers weekly, monthly, yearly, or anywhere between. Plus, you can create a free trial for your subscription.

However, Kajabi also lets you charge a custom upfront payment, which is currently not possible with Teachable.

Kajabi has a couple of other unique pricing options:

• You can create installment plans with weekly, monthly, and yearly payment intervals. Teachable only supports monthly payment plans.
• You can let users choose to pay what they want for your product. This is great for donations or fan-based models.

Otherwise, both let you create multiple tiers for your course or membership with different content and pricing options. However, Teachable lets users upgrade and downgrade their tiers in a single click.

Finally, both platforms let you create coupon codes and offer discounts to your customers.

Payments and Checkouts

Teachable and Kajabi offer managed payment gateways called Kajabi Payments and Teachable Payments. Both are powered by Stripe and charge similar fees.

Apart from the ability to accept card payments, they offer additional benefits:

• Accept payments via digital wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay
• Enable buy now, pay later options for your customers
• Charge sales taxes automatically based on your customer’s location

In Kajabi’s case, you’re the merchant of record, giving you control over whether to charge sales taxes. On the other hand, Teachable is the merchant of record, so it will mandatorily collect and remit taxes based on the customer’s location.

Besides the managed gateway, Kajabi lets you use your Stripe or PayPal account to process payments, giving you more options.

With Teachable, you can’t use your own Stripe account if Teachable Payments is available in your location.

To use PayPal, you must subscribe to the platform’s BackOffice service, which has an additional fee of 2% to 2.8%.

BackOffice also includes admin services, where they collect tax forms from your authors and affiliates and automatically pay them out. This is convenient if you work with multiple authors and affiliates.

However, the additional fee for using PayPal and the inability to use your own Stripe account can be a deal-breaker for some.

Regarding the checkout process, both platforms have a 1-step checkout process where users enter their personal information and complete the payment on the same page. They need to create an account only after the payment.

Kajabi makes it easy to create high-converting checkout pages. You can customize the checkout page design using the page builder and add your logo, intro video, offer details, testimonials, and guarantee badges.

You can also customize the payment form and ask for additional details like phone number, address, or tax ID.

Apart from checkout pages, Kajabi also supports popup checkout forms, where users can complete their purchase without leaving the current page they are on.

Teachable also has a well-optimized checkout page design out of the box. It also lets you add custom elements to your checkout page—testimonials, bullet points for features/benefits, and a money-back guarantee badge.

However, it doesn’t offer you flexibility like Kajabi. For example, you can’t add a promo video or product image to a checkout page on Teachable.

Moreover, you have no control over what information to collect from customers. For instance, it collects the full billing address by default, and you can’t change it.

Besides checkout pages, both platforms have useful checkout features, including order bumps, 1-click upsells, and abandoned cart tracking. Kajabi also lets you add downsells to your checkout process, which isn’t available on Teachable.

Teachable has a feature for course gifting, allowing users to purchase a course as a gift for someone else. Kajabi, on the other hand, enables this through its Automations feature.

Finally, Kajabi allows users to buy multiple quantities of a product at once, which is helpful in selling multiple seats for a course or workshop.

Overall, Kajabi gives you much more flexibility when creating checkout pages and accepting payments.

Marketing Funnels

Kajabi Funnels is a powerful feature that allows for the easy creation of end-to-end marketing funnels.

You can select from different templates available, and Kajabi will automatically create different steps in that funnel, including the landing pages and email campaigns.

For example, if you want to create a simple lead magnet funnel, you can use the Freebie blueprint. It will automatically generate a landing page, a thank you page, and the lead magnet delivery email.

Similarly, if you want to use webinars to market your courses, you can select the Zoom Webinar blueprint. It will create the registration, confirmation pages, and reminder emails.

You can further customize these pages using the page builder or add more steps to your funnel.

Kajabi’s funnel builder is very well designed from a user experience point of view, and it’s super easy to use. We love that everything happens inline—so you can modify landing pages, email campaigns, etc., within the builder itself.

Kajabi’s funnel builder in action

Apart from funnels, Kajabi lets you create standalone landing pages. There are 45+ landing page templates available in the library, which you can further customize using the page builder.

You can also create optin forms, which you can either embed in your website or use as standalone popups to capture leads.

Finally, Kajabi Assessments lets you create marketing quizzes to collect leads and segment your audience.

At this point, Teachable doesn’t have the capability to build sales funnels or landing pages. You’ll need to use a specialized solution like Kartra.

Email Marketing

Teachable and Kajabi handle the default transactional emails, such as course enrollment and password reset. Both also let you send broadcast emails to your users.

However, Kajabi goes beyond that by providing a powerful email marketing tool.

First, it lets you tag your users and add them to different segments, which is useful for managing your email list and moving them through your email funnel.

Second, you can create automated email sequences and set the emails to go out as per a predefined schedule.

Third and most important, you can use the Automations feature to automate your email marketing completely.

Automations are when/then rules you can use to add/remove tags, trigger a new email sequence or remove them from one, send your users a unique offer, etc.

For example, you can send a welcome campaign when subscribers join your email list. Once they complete that, you can add them to a sales sequence. When someone purchases your offer, you can remove them from the sales campaign.

Overall, Kajabi’s email marketing functionality is solid and easy to use, making it possible to run your entire marketing on a single platform.

You can still use an external email marketing solution like ActiveCampaign with Kajabi. Many Kajabi users do this, especially if they don’t want to move their list or prefer a specialized email tool.

Affiliate Marketing

Both platforms let you create an affiliate program and add affiliates to promote your products in exchange for a commission. You can add affiliates manually or allow them to apply through an application form.

The affiliates get a private dashboard to access links and track their performance.

However, Kajabi has a couple of advantages over Teachable:

• You can set different commission rates for different products.
• You can create personalized coupon codes that credit an affiliate regardless of the link used.
• You can also track form submissions on your website.

Finally, Teachable offers a referral marketing feature, allowing students to earn discounts by recommending your courses to their friends.

Reporting and Administration

Kajabi and Teachable give you a lot of options for tracking course progress and sales. They also provide tools for managing your platform and students. We’ll focus on these aspects in this section.

Reporting and Analytics

Both platforms allow you to track student progress and performance, but they work differently.

Teachable’s reporting tools are available inside individual courses. You can see the progress of individual students as well as the overall completion rate of your courses. Here, you also have reports for video analytics and quiz scores.

To see a breakdown of students’ progress by lessons, you’ll need to go to their profile pages.

In Kajabi, you have a centralized product progress report where you can see the progress of all students for a specific course. You can click a student’s name to see their progress by lessons and quiz scores.

However, Kajabi doesn’t let you completion rates at the course level. Also, the video analytics can only be accessed from the lessons where the videos are added.

Regarding sales reporting, both platforms let you track your transactions and manage them, though Kajabi does a much better job here.

It lets you analyze your sales performance. For example, you can compare your daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly sales, and you can even compare your sales by offers.

Secondly, Kajabi has more powerful subscription reporting tools. For example, you can track metrics like Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR), Average Revenue Per User (ARPU), and Churn Rate, which isn’t possible on Teachable.

Finally, Kajabi lets you track your page views, something which isn’t possible in Teachable natively, and you’ll need a tool like Google Analytics for the same.

People Management

Regarding student management, both platforms allow you to easily add new students individually or in bulk.

Both have a dedicated section for accessing your student list. You can filter the list by name, email, tags, and more to find specific students. You can also perform bulk actions such as adding tags, enrolling or removing students from courses, emailing them, or even deleting them.

Additionally, you can open a student’s profile to view their purchases and progress, modify their information, email them, manage their subscriptions, or issue a refund.

User Roles

Finally, both Kajabi and Teachable let you add admin users to your site, though there are a couple of differences.

Teachable allows you to add course authors and set a revenue-sharing percentage on specific courses, while Kajabi doesn’t have a feature for revenue sharing built-in.

However, Kajabi offers more flexibility in assigning user roles. Apart from site admins, you can also add site assistants and support specialists, giving them access only to specific parts of the site.

While Teachable only supports site admins out of the box, you can set up custom user roles on higher plans.

Third-Party Integrations

Both platforms make it easy to integrate with analytics and tracking tools like Google Analytics, Meta Pixel, and Segment.

You can also integrate popup solutions (e.g., ConvertBox) or other solutions like Deadline Funnel that require you to add a script to your website.

The two platforms also integrate with several third-party email marketing solutions, including ActiveCampaign, ConvertKit, MailChimp, and Aweber.

Additionally, they have Zapier integrations, which allow you to connect 1,000s of other marketing tools and services.

However, Teachable has a few noteworthy integrations to extend the platform functionality:

• Circle.so for community building
• DropInBlog for blogging purposes
• Wobo for interactive workbooks

Teachable also gives you access to its API, which unlocks even more possibilities for custom integrations.

Lastly, it supports SSO integrations, so you can allow students to log in to other platforms with their Teachable credentials.

Kajabi doesn’t have public APIs or SSO support, which may limit your options for custom integrations.

Customer Support

Both Teachable and Kajabi provide several support options. Apart from email support, they also offer live chat support.

However, Kajabi offers 24/7 live chat support, while Teachable offers live chat only from Monday to Friday, 10 AM to 5 PM ET.

Nothing beats 24/7 chat support, especially when you’re in a different timezone from the support team.

Also, Teachable’s live chat support is available only on the $159/month plan and above. On the lower tiers, you get support via email, which can be pretty slow at times.

Kajabi, on the other hand, offers 24/7 chat support on the $199/month plan and above. The lower tiers offer live chat support but only during business hours.

If you prefer exploring things yourself, both platforms have a comprehensive knowledge base with how-to articles and videos for every feature.

Both platforms also have their user communities where you can hang out with like-minded creators, ask your questions, or get advice on anything related to online courses. However, Kajabi’s community is more active.

Pricing Plans

We’ve covered a lot in this review, and we’re sure you would be wondering how much does Kajabi and Teachable cost. So, let’s take a look at the Kajabi vs Teachable pricing.

Regarding Kajabi pricing, it has four plans. They don’t charge any transaction fee and provide most of the platform features. The difference is in the number of products and members.

The lowest tier, the Kickstarter plan, costs $69/month. It lets you create one product, one funnel, and have up to 50 active members.

While this is a good option for beginners, the limits are quite low for serious course creators or businesses. Hence, most users opt for the Basic or Growth plan, which costs $149/month and $199/month.

The Basic plan includes three products and 1,000 active members, while the Growth plan offers 15 products and 10,000 active members.

Teachable pricing works a bit differently. They offer a free plan (10% fee), which lets you create one course with up to ten videos and ten students.

The next tier, the Basic plan, costs $59/month (+5% fee). You can create five courses and have unlimited students.

However, many important features, such as graded quizzes, certificates, and affiliates, are only available in the Pro plan, which costs $159/month (+0% fee). It also lets you create 50 courses.

While Teachable has a more beginner-friendly pricing, its most popular plan (Pro plan) is priced similarly to Kajabi’s Growth plan.

Considering Kajabi combines multiple tools into one platform and eliminates the need for a separate website, email marketing tool, and livestreaming solution, you’ll find the Growth plan offers better value for money.

If you need just a course hosting solution, Teachable’s pricing will be more suitable for you. But if you want an all-in-one platform, Kajabi’s pricing plans are worth the investment.

Kajabi vs Teachable: Final Thoughts

We have covered the key features, pros and cons, and pricing plans of Kajabi and Teachable. So which platform should you choose?

The answer depends on your needs and budget. If you want everything under one roof, Kajabi is the clear winner. Beyond courses, you can run your website, blog, funnels, and email marketing all in one place.

Even without these features, Kajabi is a superior solution for hosting your courses and memberships. It has multiple course player themes, free and branded mobile apps, a more powerful community builder, and native live classes.

So, unless you have a budget constraint, we suggest going for Kajabi. You can start a free trial to give the platform a try.

On the other hand, Teachable is a more affordable option if you primarily need a course hosting solution with essential selling tools.

It’s a solid option in its own right, with a user-friendly interface and excellent course creation features, and will work for course creators and businesses alike.

It doesn’t offer a free trial, but you can create a free account to explore the platform’s features.

We hope this Teachable vs Kajabi guide helped you make a decision. Which platform do you think will work best for you and why? Let us know in the comments below.

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