Kajabi vs Teachable: Which Online Course Platform Is Best?

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Kajabi and Teachable are two of the most popular online course platforms and they are both market leaders in their own right. So, almost every course creator searching for an online course platform needs to answer the Kajabi vs Teachable question.

The two platforms differ a lot in terms of what they have to offer and how they are priced. As a result, there is no simple answer to which is the better course platform of the two and the best option for you will really depend on your business needs.

You can find a lot of Teachable vs Kajabi articles on the web. But then most of them either share why they prefer one over the other or they include just a comparison chart which isn’t very helpful in making the right decision.

So, I decided to leverage my experience of working with hundreds of instructors on both the platforms and create the most comprehensive comparison guide out there.

In this review, I’ll do an in-depth evaluation of the two platforms based on every aspect of creating and selling online courses. I will also share my experience of using the two platforms along with what I like and what I don’t like about them.

Kajabi vs Teachable Summary

Kajabi vs Teachable Summary

The main difference between these two popular online platforms is that while Kajabi is an all-in-one solution where you can run your entire online course business including marketing, Teachable, on the other hand, has been designed to offer mainly the core features for creating and selling an online course.


Kajabi Logo
Teachable Logo

Course Creation & Engagement
Site Design & Customization
Sales & Marketing
Customer Support

What I like about Kajabi vs Teachable?

  • All-in-one, so you won’t have to patch together or learn multiple tools.
  • Offers 10+ well-designed themes and a lot of customization options for the course player.
  • Offers powerful engagement tools like community, assessments and assignments, Automations, etc.
  • Has an iOS/Android app.
  • Ability to build a fully-fledged website as well as a blog.
  • Has inbuilt sales pipeline builder and email marketing tools.
  • Offers 24/7 Live Chat Support.

What I like about Teachable vs Kajabi?

  • Allows you to create certificates natively.
  • Supports 1:1 Coaching product.
  • Handles EU Digital Goods VAT tax.
  • Supports Apple Pay and Google Pay on the native gateways.
  • Offers services like automated affiliate and author payouts.
  • Unlimited courses and students on all pricing plans.

This has been an epic battle to follow and I am really excited to see where this goes. So, I plan to update this post on a regular basis as these platforms release new features and upgrades.

Now, let’s take a deeper look to find out whether Kajabi or Teachable is a superior online course platform and a better fit for your business needs.

What are Kajabi and Teachable? 

Kajabi and Teachable are both cloud-based platforms that allow you to create and sell an online course under your own brand. They provide you with the infrastructure and all the essential tools required to build your course website and deliver engaging online courses.

So, you can host all your content including videos, pdf, quizzes etc., you can easily structure your content into modules and lessons, sell your course, accept payments online, deliver the content through the inbuilt course player and further engage your students

The best part, though, is that you can do all of this on your own even if you don’t have any technical knowledge or coding skills. 

It’s their team that takes care of the techy stuff like hosting, maintenance, security and updates so that you can focus on the more important things like creating content and selling courses.

Teachable vs Kajabi Quote

Another important thing about Kajabi and Teachable that you should be aware of is that they aren’t online course marketplaces. So, unlike Udemy and SkillShare, you’ll have complete control over pricing, student data as well as your policies (e.g. refund policy).

Despite all the similarities, there are some fundamental differences between Teachable vs Kajabi.

While Kajabi is an all-in-one solution where you can run your entire online course business including marketing on the platform, Teachable is a standalone course platform that offers mainly the core features for creating and selling an online course.

So, Kajabi doesn’t just allow you to create and sell online courses but you can also build your website and handle your entire marketing on the platform.

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

This makes it easier for creators to get started and saves them hundreds of hours which are also the biggest selling point of Kajabi.

What is Kajabi?

On the other hand, Teachable’s focus is on providing you just the tools you need to create and deliver an engaging online course to your students.

It doesn’t have the ability to create sales funnels or do email marketing which isn’t necessarily a weakness. It’s just that their focus is different.

What is Teachable?

We’ll discuss in detail how the two platforms differ in terms of specific features and which will work better for you in the subsequent chapters in this guide.

Course Creation & 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’re going to look at all the important features that Teachable vs Kajabi has to offer when it comes to course creation and student engagement.

Let’s start with the process of content uploading and course structuring.

Content Uploading & Structuring

Both Kajabi and Teachable allow you to add video, audio, pdf, text, quizzes etc. to your courses. They also offer unlimited video hosting via Wistia on all their plans and so, they are very similar in terms of the content types that they support on the platform.

With Kajabi, you can easily upload your content and structure it into an online course using the course builder. It allows you to add lessons (Posts) and modules (Categories) to your online course (Products) and you can easily reorder them by simply dragging and dropping. 

Product Outline in Kajabi
Curriculum Area on Kajabi

You can also add a third level, sub-categories which gives you more flexibility in structuring your course.

When it comes to adding content to your lessons, you can either do it one-by-one or you can bulk upload all your content at once. Plus you can upload content either from your computer or you can import it directly from Dropbox or Google Drive.

Once you click on a lesson title on the curriculum page, you’ll be taken to the individual lesson page where you can add video/assessment to that lesson, add download files, enable/disable comments area etc.

Add Content to Kajabi Posts
Lesson Editor on Kajabi

Moreover, you can change the publishing settings, define a drip schedule, set pre-requisite lessons etc. within the course builder.

Teachable also has a drag-and-drop course builder that allows you to easily add lessons and modules to your course structure. Unlike Kajabi, you can add only two levels to your course.

Again, you can either add content to your lessons one-by-one or you can bulk upload all your course content.

However, Teachable’s course builder is more user friendly than that of Kajabi. So, you can bulk select various lessons in the curriculum area and modify settings for downloads, publishing, etc. or delete them on the curriculum page itself.

In case of Kajabi, you’ll need to go to the individual lesson pages to modify the settings or even delete the lessons.

Teachable Curriculum Area
Curriculum Area on Teachable

Another thing that I like about Teachable’s course builder is that it offers you a lot of flexibility when it comes to adding multiple content types to individual lessons.

For example, you can add a video and a quiz, embed a pdf, add some text etc. to the same lecture easily and show them in any order you want.

Teachable Lesson Builder
Lesson Editor on Teachable

Kajabi’s course builder doesn’t have this sort of flexibility for adding multiple content types. For example, you can’t add two videos in one lesson or you can’t add a video and a quiz to the same lesson.

That being said, the course builders in both Kajabi and Teachable are intuitive and user-friendly which makes the course creation process on the two platforms really simple.

Course Player & Content Delivery

A very important aspect of course delivery and user engagement is the course player (student area) design and this is one area where Teachable vs Kajabi differ quite significantly from each other.

Let’s talk about Kajabi first. The thing that I like the most about course player design in Kajabi is that it offers 10+ course area themes and you can choose a unique theme depending on the nature of your offering.

So, whether you’re creating an evergreen online course or a membership site or just a library of standalone content, you should find a theme that will meet your requirements.

Course Player Themes
Kajabi Course Area Themes

While all the themes are very well designed, my personal favorite is the Premier Theme which for me is the best designed course player theme of all the online course platforms out there.

The design is pretty clean, you can show these video thumbnails in the curriculum area (looks elegant), users can easily navigate between modules and lessons, and overall it gives a premium look and feel to your courses.

Lesson Comments in Kajabi
Kajabi Premier Theme

Another Kajabi product theme that I like a lot is their Momentum theme which has a more traditional design with navigation on the left and the content area on the right.

Kajabi Momentum Theme
Kajabi Momentum Theme

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.

However, with Teachable, there is just one default theme for the course player which might not work as well if you are building, say, a membership site and you don’t want the same flow as an evergreen online course.

Teachable Course Player-min
Teachable Course Player

Another thing that I like about course area design in Kajabi vs Teachable is that it allows you to further customize any of the elements in these themes. 

For example, you can choose to display/hide the course progress or the instructor bio and you can add a course card in the sidebar to cross-sell other courses.

Teachable doesn’t let you customize any of the elements in the course player theme and you’ll need to code in order to do that.

Customize Course Player
Course Player Customization in Kajabi

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, a major difference between the two platforms is that Kajabi also offers iOS and Android apps for your end-users, resulting in a much better mobile learning experience.

While Teachable has an app for iPhone users, they stopped supporting it a while back and so, it’s not useful.

Overall, Kajabi does a much better job at course delivery than Teachable and for that matter, any other online course platform. It gives you a lot of control and flexibility in terms of course area design and helps deliver a premium learning experience to your students.

Community & Coaching

Both Teachable and Kajabi allow you to add a native comments area to your lessons. The comments area sits nicely below the content in a lesson and your students can ask questions or seek feedback by leaving a comment.

In addition, Kajabi allows you to create a community area. A Community is a separate area on your website that you can sell access to either separately or as part of your membership site.

Your members can access the communities they’re a part of, from their dashboard. By default, a Community has a clean, modern design and it looks great out of the box.

Kajabi Community Frontend-min
A sample Community built on Kajabi

Within a community, members can participate in an existing discussion or they can start a new one. They can also send private messages to the admin or to other members.

As an admin, you can create topics to keep discussions in your community organized and further choose to display either the topics or the feed on your community homepage.

Kajabi Community Backend
Community area backend in Kajabi

You can also pin a post to move it to the top of the community feed or send an announcement to your community members.

So, if you want to build an engaged community around your signature online course or membership site, this can be a really useful feature.

Teachable at this point doesn’t have the ability to create a community area on the platform and you’ll need to use an external solution like Circle which requires students to create new logins and isn’t a great experience.

Before we end this discussion, let’s talk about a unique product type that Teachable supports. So, it lets you create something called a Coaching product which is ideal for creating and selling 1:1 online coaching programs.

The Coaching product allows you to set pricing, build an intake form, create a coaching program with specific milestones as well as communicate with your clients via private messaging.

Teachable Coaching Milestone
Coaching Milestones in Teachable

So, apart from online courses, if you also sell 1:1 coaching, you’ll find this Teachable feature pretty handy.

Quizzes & Certificates

Kajabi has what it calls Assessments that allows you to create quizzes and surveys for your online courses. 

With an Assessment, you can have different question types including multiple-choice, multiple-option as well as paragraph style questions etc. It also has a file upload question type that can be used to accept assignments from your students.

What I like about Assessments in Kajabi is that you can add images to your questions and do some basic formatting as well which us great.

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

Kajabi quiz editor
Kajabi quiz editor
Create a Quiz with Kajabi Assessments
This is how a Kajabi quiz looks on the frontend

You can also use the Assessments feature to create marketing quizzes which can then be used to collect leads and segment your website visitors.

Overall, Assessments are pretty flexible and it can be used to create quizzes for your course as well as for marketing, survey your students and even enable them to submit an assignment.

As far as Teachable is concerned, it also offers the ability to create quizzes and automatically grade your students.

However, it allows you to only add multiple-choice and multiple-option questions to your quizzes which means you can’t use it to accept assignments from your students or survey them.

Another limitation is that you can only add text to your questions and can’t do any formatting in Teachable while Kajabi also allows you to add images.

Edit quiz questions in Teachable
Teachable quiz editor
Teachable Quiz
This is how a Teachable quiz looks on the frontend

At this point, both platforms don’t support more advanced quizzing features like ability to import questions, randomization etc. and you should be aware of that.

That being said, Kajabi Assessments are more flexible and powerful compared to Teachable quizzes and in my opinion, they also look more elegant compared to the latter.

When it comes to creating certificates of completion, Teachable allows you to do that 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 currently has 3 certificate templates, all of which have a professional design. Moreover, you can modify most of the elements on the certificate template and personalize it.

You can also build a custom template from scratch if you know liquid/html coding.

Teachable Certificates
Teachable Certificates

Kajabi at this point doesn’t allow you to create and send certificates to your students natively.

If you want to send certificates of completion, you’ll need to use an external solution like Google Slides or Accredible to create a certificate and then you can automate the entire process using Zapier.

Drip/Lock Course Content

An important feature for ensuring course compliance is content locking. With Kajabi, you can set pre-requisite lesson for a module and unless a user completes that specific lesson, the user can’t access that module.

If the pre-requisite lesson has an Assessment that requires a passing grade, the student must pass the quiz before he/she can access the module.

Create a Learning Path in Kajabi
Kajabi Course Compliance

Teachable also allows you to lock your content but it works pretty differently. So, 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’, the user must progress through all the lectures in the course in order. Similarly, you can also enforce a quiz completion compliance.

But the most interesting thing is that Teachable offers a ‘Enforce Video Watching’ option which requires your students to watch at least 90% of your videos before they’re marked complete.

Teachable Course Compliance
Teachable Course Compliance

Having said that, the course compliance in Teachable can be a bit too restrictive. So, when you enable the Video Watching or Quiz Completion compliance, the Lecture Order one is automatically enforced. 

When it comes to content dripping, it works pretty similarly on both the platforms. With both Teachable and Kajabi, you can drip your content either based on student enrollment or based on a specific date.

You can also set up emails to automatically go out to your students when the new content is available. The only difference is that Kajabi lets you customize the default time for dripping your content while Teachable doesn’t have that option.

Course Reporting and Analytics

Both platforms allow you to track your students’ progress and the performance of course videos. So, you can track metrics like course completion rates, quiz scores, video engagement, play rate etc.

However, Teachable has more extensive course reporting tools as compared to Kajabi. For example, you can see the completion rates at the course level, the lecture level as well as the student level while Kajabi lets you track this only at the lecture level or the student level.

Course Completion Report
Completion Rate Report in Teachable

Similarly, Teachable allows you to track the performance of all your videos on a single page while with Kajabi, you need to go to individual videos and then see the stats.

With Teachable, you can also see aggregated video stats for the entire course which is currently not possible with Kajabi.

Video Stats Report
Video Stats in Teachable
Kajabi Video Stats
Individual Video Stats in Kajabi

Plus, there is one single place within your course dashboard in Teachable where you can see all the available reports. On the other hand, you’ll need to go to different areas in your dashboard in Kajabi in order to see different information.

Overall, I find it much easier to analyze different course metrics and see insights on Teachable vs Kajabi.

Kajabi Automations

Kajabi has what it calls Automations which allows you to create When/Then rules to automate tasks within your membership site.

While Automations have a lot of applications in sales and marketing (and we’ll discuss that later), it can also be used to boost student engagement.

For example, if your student has been inactive for a certain number of days, you can send him/her an email automatically and check why they haven’t logged in to the members’ area and if you could help them.

Create an Automation in Kajabi

This type of automated follow ups can be really handy if you run a membership site and bill your customers on a recurring basis.

Similarly, if a student doesn’t pass an Assessment, you can send them an email automatically and point them to specific content that they should watch before taking the quiz again.

Another use case for Automations can be to send congratulatory emails to your members when they complete specific lessons or modules.

You can use Automations in so many different ways and it’s a really powerful tool to have on the platform.

Teachable at this point doesn’t have any automations feature and in fact, I am not aware of any other hosted online course platform that offers this sort of capability.

Course Creation – The Bottom Line

In this chapter, we discussed all the important course creation features that the two platforms have to offer and based on that, Kajabi has an edge over Teachable.

One area where Kajabi beats Teachable hands down is course delivery. It has 10+ well-designed course player themes plus offers a lot of customization options. In addition, it offers a mobile app for both iPhone and Android users.

So, you can deliver a great learning experience to your members irrespective of the type of digital product you offer or the device that your students use.

Another area where Kajabi really shines is its Community feature which allows you to add a standalone community area to your membership site.

Finally, Kajabi has this Automations feature which can be a game-changer for boosting your student engagement.

Keeping all these differences in mind, we can conclude that Kajabi vs Teachable is better for creating and delivering engaging online courses.

Site Design & Customization

It is really important to have a website for your brand irrespective of your niche or your business model and both Teachable and Kajabi allow you to build a website on the platform.

They do differ quite significantly in terms of their site building capabilities but before that let’s discuss what they have in common.

Firstly, with both platforms, you get free hosting and a SSL certificate as part of your subscription. So, you don’t need to buy a separate hosting package or worry about things like bandwidth and storage limits.

Secondly and most importantly, their team takes care of all the techy stuff, so, you don’t need to worry about backup, security, updates or maintenance as well.

Thirdly, you get a free subdomain for your website (e.g. xxxx.mykajabi.com or xxxx.teachable.com) and you can also use your own domain (e.g. www.mywebsite.com) if you want.

Now, let’s look deeper into the site design capabilities of Teachable vs Kajabi and see how they compare in terms of the important features.

Website Themes

When it comes to actual website creation, Kajabi has this feature called Website Builder which gives you access to a library of themes, you can use to design your website.

Currently, there are 6 pre-designed themes that you can install on your website with a single click. The good thing is that each theme has a different style and they can be used to build all types of websites.

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.

Kajabi also offers six website design themes to get started with. A theme is a premade site with all the most important features for various needs. Pick your favorite for further tweaking and your new site is already halfway there! You can easily edit any of their offered standard features, add page elements, change pages style, update the copy and images, and a lot more.
Kajabi Website Themes

As far as Teachable is concerned, they don’t have any site themes capability. What they have is a default template that is enabled on all Teachable school websites.

They do have a theme area where you can upload your logo and define the typography and the color settings for your website. But you can’t really customize the look and feel of your website at the theme level.

Teachable Theme
Themes Area in Teachable

When it comes to 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 as well which is not possible on Teachable.

Page Builder

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

Kajabi Page Builder
Kajabi page builder

The page builder has 40+ pre-built 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.

Add New Section

Moreover, you can change the color, modify spacing, add animations, etc. for all the elements within the page sections including the header and the footer. Plus Kajabi’s page builder allows you to show/hide specific elements on mobile or desktop.

Teachable also has a drag-and-drop page builder that can be used to create pages on your website. The page builder is super easy to use and it also has pre-built sections even though their number is much less.

Teachable Page Builder
Teachable Page Builder

Moreover, you have very little customization options for these page sections. For example, you can’t add animations, change column width settings, modify padding or even show/hide specific elements on mobile. 

Overall, the Kajabi page builder is much more powerful than Teachable and it lets you build unique and beautiful pages for your website.

Blogging Capability

Both platforms allow you to create a blog. With Teachable, the blogging capability is pretty basic and you can’t customize anything on your blog.

Plus, Teachable hasn’t released a single improvement to their blogging capability since it was launched on the platform and they don’t have any plans to improve it in the near future.

So, if you’re serious about blogging, I will recommend that you stay away from using Teachable for running your blog.

Teachable Blog
A sample blog built on Teachable

Kajabi on the other hand, has a much better blogging functionality and you can create a fully-functional blog on the platform itself.

Apart from creating blog posts and adding content to them, you can define SEO settings for them, group them into different categories, add an opt-in form or you can show different elements in the sidebar.

So, Kajabi vs Teachable certainly has more powerful blogging functionality and you can tell from the fact that quite a few top course creators including James Wedmore use Kajabi to run their blogs.

Blog Example
James Wedmore’s blog built on Kajabi

But do keep in mind that Kajabi still can’t match a specialized blogging platform like WordPress when it comes to design options and SEO settings for your blog. 

White-Labeling

With Kajabi, you can completely white-label your platform. You can remove Kajabi branding from all the places including your website as well as the course area.

Teachable also allows you to remove their branding from your online school. The only problem is that the checkout, signup and login pages on your school use a Teachable subdomain even when you’re using a custom domain.

Teachable_White_Label
Checkout page on Teachable subdomain

On the other hand, all the pages on Kajabi including the checkout and the login pages use your custom domain. Personally, it is a minor thing for me but you should still be aware of it.

Website Creation – The Bottom Line

So, when it comes to site design and customization, Kajabi vs Teachable is hands down the clear winner.

It has powerful site themes and page-building capabilities that allow you to create a fully-fledged website on the platform. 

Teachable, on the other hand, doesn’t have any site themes and its page builder is pretty basic as well which means you don’t have much control over how your website looks.

In addition, Kajabi has much better blogging capabilities than Teachable and so, it is clearly the better platform to build your website and run your blog.

Sales & Marketing

Sales and marketing is an important component of any online course platform and there is a significant amount of commonality between the two in terms of the features that they offer.

For example, both allow you to create coupons, bundle your courses, charge a one-time or a recurring fee, create checkout pages, etc.

Despite everything that they have in common, it is their sales and marketing capabilities that make Teachable vs Kajabi two very different platforms.

While Teachable is focused on offering the essential features for processing payments and selling your courses, Kajabi aims to provide you all the tools you need to market and sell your courses, within a single platform.

Let’s take a look at what all sales and marketing tools these platforms have to offer and how they compare to each other.

Product Pricing Options

With both Kajabi and Teachable, you can price your courses in different ways. You can charge a one-time price, a recurring fee, or a payment plan and you can even price your course in multiple currencies.

Even when it comes to subscription pricing, both platforms let you charge your customers weekly, monthly, yearly, or anywhere in between. Plus, you can create a free trial for your subscription.

The only difference is that Kajabi lets you charge a custom upfront payment in the form of setup fees which is currently not possible with Teachable.

Kajabi Pricing Options
Subscription Pricing in Kajabi

One issue related to pricing options in Teachable is the inability to offer multiple tiers for your online course or membership site. So, you can have different pricing levels for your online course but you can’t include different content in different tiers.

On the other hand, creating multiple tiers for your product on Kajabi is easy and it gives you complete flexibility in terms of what content you can include in each tier.

Another thing I like about Kajabi is that you can use its Automations feature to add a “Gift This Course” pricing option to your courses which is currently not possible to do on Teachable natively.

Payment Processing & Payouts

Let’s first talk about the payment processors that the two platforms support. Both platforms have a direct integration with Stripe and PayPal and your customers can pay either via credit card or via their PayPal account.

However, PayPal is available as an option to your customers on Teachable only if you charge a one-time fee for your course and the currency is US Dollars. So, your customers can’t pay via PayPal for a monthly subscription or if your course is priced in, say, Euro.

Unlike Teachable, Kajabi lets you offer PayPal as an option irrespective of what currency you price your course in and even for a subscription product or a payment plan.

This is a serious limitation and something that you need to consider if you’re planning to build a membership site or if your audience is mostly outside the US.

In terms of the payouts, it is all straightforward with Kajabi. On all Kajabi plans, you get to integrate directly with your own Stripe and PayPal accounts.

The money goes directly into your Stripe/PayPal account and you’ll be responsible for paying out your affiliates and authors.

Kajabi Payment Gateways
Payment Gateways in Kajabi

With Teachable, you have a couple of options and to be honest, it is damn confusing.

The first option (like Kajabi) lets you integrate your own Stripe/PayPal account and get access to the funds immediately. 

With the second option, you use Teachable Gateway and get paid by them after 30-60 days (instant payouts for Stripe payments if you’re in certain countries). While the delayed payouts is an obvious downside, there are certain advantages of using it as well.

Firstly, it allows you to accept credit card (or PayPal) payments even if Stripe (or PayPal) isn’t supported in your country. Secondly, you can enable Google Pay/Apple Pay as payment options on your checkout page.

Another major advantage of using their gateway is that you have the option of using their suite of services called BackOffice where they collect tax forms from your authors and affiliates and automatically pay out to them every month.

This can be a pretty handy feature if you have a business model which involves a large number of authors/affiliates (e.g., online course marketplace).

Enable BackOffice
Teachable BackOffice

Teachable does charge an additional 2% for BackOffice but it is really worth it if you have a lot of authors/affiliates on your platform and obviously, you’re fine with the delay in payouts.

Checkout Pages & Upsells

Both Teachable and Kajabi have a 1-step checkout process where a user enters his/her personal information and completes the payment on a single page.

Let’s talk about checkout pages in Kajabi first! Kajabi makes it really easy to create a high converting checkout page for your online courses.

It offers you a lot of options for building and customizing a checkout page. So, you can add your logo, an intro video, offer details, testimonials, a money back guarantee badge etc. to your checkout page.

Optimized Checkout Page
Brendon Burchard’s Checkout Page on Kajabi

It also gives you complete control over what information to collect from your customers. For example, you can collect your customers’ shipping address on the checkout page which makes it possible to sell physical products (e.g. books) on the platform as well.

Plus, Kajabi has some very handy conversion tools for your checkout pages. So, you can add an order bump to your offer on the checkout page or you can offer a 1-click upsell on the thank you page.

Their abandoned cart feature lets you automatically track and send an automated follow up email to those who leave your checkout page without completing the purchase.

Upsells
Upsells and Cart Abandonment on Kajabi

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 similar flexibility as Kajabi. For example, you can’t add a promo video or your product image to a checkout page on Teachable.

Teachable Checkout Page
Checkout Page on Teachable

Moreover, you have no control over the information that you collect from your customers. So, you don’t have a way to collect their shipping address or their phone number on the checkout page.

While Teachable does allow you to add 1-click upsells to the thank you page, you can’t add an order bump to your offer on the checkout page.

Another important thing that’s missing from their native feature set is the ability to track abandoned carts but you can externally track these with Google Tag Manager.

Overall, Kajabi gives you much more flexibility and power when it comes to creating checkout pages for your products and offers.

EU VAT Handling

Teachable has inbuilt support for handling EU VAT digital taxes. Depending on your customers’ location, it automatically adds the correct VAT % on top of your product price and sends an invoice to them with details about their purchase and the VAT charged.

Teachable EU VAT
EU VAT on Teachable

They also allow you to display the VAT included price on the course sales pages which further helps you become EU VAT compliant.

Plus, if you use Teachable’s gateway, they will even pay the collected EU VAT to the respective tax authorities. 

Kajabi at this point doesn’t have the ability to handle EU VAT on the platform and you’ll need to use an external sales tax management solution like Quaderno for that.

Another option that you have is to use an external checkout page solution like ThriveCart that lets you handle EU VAT and other taxes.

Sales Pipeline Builder

One of the most powerful sales and marketing feature that Kajabi offers is the Sales Pipeline Builder that lets you create entire marketing funnels pretty easily.

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

Sales Pipeline Blueprints
Sales Pipeline Blueprints

For example, if you want to offer a lead magnet for growing your email list, you can choose the Freebie blueprint and Kajabi will create a landing page and a thank you page for your funnel automatically. It also sets up the lead magnet delivery email that goes out immediately.

Similarly, if you want to use webinars to market your courses, you can select the Zoom Webinar blueprint and it will create the registration and confirmation pages for your webinar and will even setup the reminder emails to the registrants.

Create a webinar in Kajabi
Kajabi Webinar Pipeline

You can further customize any of the pages that Kajabi creates using the page builder, or you can add more steps to your funnel if you want.

The best part about the Kajabi Pipeline Builder is that it’s very well designed from a user experience point of view and it’s super easy to use.

What I love about the pipeline builder is the fact that everything happens inline—so you can add/modify landing pages, email campaigns, checkout pages etc. within the builder itself.

Edit a Kajabi Pipeline
Edit Kajabi Pipeline

Overall, this is a really handy feature for running marketing campaigns, especially if you have little or no marketing knowledge.

Apart from building entire funnels in Kajabi, you can also build stand-alone landing pages for lead generation, selling your courses etc.

There are 20+ well designed landing page templates available in the library which you can further customize using the page builder.

Landing Page Themes
Landing page templates

Finally, you also have the ability to create optin forms which you can either embed in your website/blog or you can use them in popups.

Teachable at this point doesn’t have the capability to build sales funnels, landing pages, or opt-in forms, and you will need to use a third-party solution like Leadpages or ClickFunnels for building funnels.

Email Marketing Tools

Apart from the ability to send broadcast emails to your users, Kajabi also offers inbuilt email marketing automation tools.

Firstly, you can tag your users and add them to different list segments which is really handy for managing them and moving them through your email funnel.

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

Kajabi Automated Email Sequence

Thirdly and most importantly, you can use Kajabi Automations to completely automate your email marketing.

You can think of Automations as “When/Then” rules which you an 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 new subscribers join your email list and once they complete that, you can automatically add them to a sales sequence and as soon as someone purchases your offer, you can remove them automatically from the sales campaign.

Kajabi Marketing Automation

Overall, Kajabi’s email marketing functionality is solid, the tools are super intuitive to use and so, it makes it possible to run your entire marketing on a single platform.

Now, it doesn’t mean that you can’t use an external email marketing solution like ConvertKit with Kajabi. In fact, a lot of Kajabi users do that and that makes sense if you don’t want to move your list over or you just prefer using a specialized email marketing tool. 

Now, Teachable has very basic email marketing capabilities. It allows you to send broadcast emails to your students but you don’t have the capability to send automated email campaigns to your users.

Affiliate Marketing Capabilities

Both platforms do a decent job in terms of affiliate marketing features but there are a few important differences between Teachable vs Kajabi.

Firstly, Kajabi lets you create a separate registration page for your affiliates and as soon as someone signs up, you can automatically approve for the affiliate program. You can also disable the registration page and set it to manual approval.

This works a little differently with Teachable. An affiliate first needs to sign up on your school as a student and then you’ll need to manually approve him/her. You don’t have the ability to create a separate registration page or automatically approve affiliates.

Secondly, Kajabi allows you to create affiliate links that can point to your sales pages or checkout pages and you can choose to display those links on affiliates’ dashboard. An affiliate will just need to copy the link from his/her dashboard.

Affiliate Dashboard
Affiliate dashboard in Kajabi

With Teachable you, the owner, can’t create any links for your affiliates. 

The affiliates first need to go to your sales page and copy the link and then they can paste the copied link in the link generator to create their affiliate link. The process isn’t intuitive and requires additional work on affiliates’ part.

Teachable Affiliate Dashboard
Affiliate dashboard in Teachable

Thirdly, Teachable’s affiliate reporting capabilities for school owners aren’t that great. There is no way to compare the performance of various affiliates and even see your top performing affiliates without exporting entire data.

However, there is one specific thing related to affiliate marketing that I like about Teachable. Teachable lets you define a custom cookie period for your affiliates while Kajabi has a default cookie period of 30 days which can’t be changed.

affiliate-custom-cookie
Modify affiliate cookies in Teachable

Third-Party Integrations

Before we end this chapter, let’s briefly talk about how the two platforms fare when it comes to integrating with other popular marketing solutions.

Both platforms make it easy to integrate with analytics and tracking tools like Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, Segment, etc. You can also integrate other marketing tools like ConvertBox, Deadline Funnel, etc.

Both of them also integrate with Zapier which lets you integrate with 1,000s of third-party apps with which they don’t have a direct integration.

The difference in integrations is mainly about third party email marketing solutions. So, Kajabi integrates natively with quite a few email marketing solutions including ConvertKit, MailChimp, Aweber, Active Campaign and Drip.

Kajabi Email Marketing Integrations
Email Marketing Integrations in Kajabi

On the other hand, Teachable integrates directly with only two email marketing solutions – MailChimp and Convertkit and if you want to integrate with any other solution, you’ll need to use Zapier.

Sales & Marketing – The Bottom Line

In this section, we discussed all the sales and marketing features, and based on that, Kajabi has much more to offer than Teachable.

While Kajabi offers an entire suite of sales and marketing tools, Teachable offers only the essential features for accepting payments and selling your courses.

Some of Kajabi’s features like Sales Pipeline Builder and Automations are game-changers and no other major online course platform including Teachable offers these capabilities to course creators at this point.

So, Kajabi is definitely the better choice if you prefer to have all of these capabilities in one place rather than relying on external solutions.

But even when it comes to the essential sales and marketing tools like checkout pagescourse pricing optionsaffiliate marketing etc., Kajabi vs Teachable does a much better job.

Reporting & Administration

With both Kajabi and Teachable, you have a lot of options for tracking student & course performance as well as managing your course website and this is what we’ll focus on in this section.

When it comes to course reporting tools, both platforms allow you to track your students’ progress. For individual courses, you can see all your students’ completion % and you can easily export this data as well.

The only difference here is that with Teachable, you have to go to individual courses in order to access the report while in Kajabi, there is a single report which can be filtered for a specific course.

Moreover, you can filter this report based on user segments which is really handy if you sell to organizations and need to create custom progress reports for them.

Kajabi Course Analytics
Product Progress Report in Kajabi

Apart from that, both let you see your students’s quiz scores and track video metrics like engagement rate, play rate, etc.

As far as sales reporting is concerned, both platforms let you track your transactions and manage them. However, Kajabi does a much better job here.

Teachable Sales Report
Sales Report in Teachable

Firstly, you have better tools for analyzing your sales performance. For example, you can compare your daily, weekly, monthly or yearly sales, and you can even compare your sales by offers.

Net Revenue Report
Net Revenue Report in Kajabi

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

Finally, Kajabi also 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.

When it comes to student management, both platforms allow you to easily add new students to your school or manage the existing students.

Moreover, you can do other things like changing their account information, managing their purchases and enrollments, tracking their progress, managing their subscriptions, etc.

Finally, both Kajabi and Teachable let you add admin users to your site. 

The only major difference between the two platforms in terms of admin roles is the fact that Teachable allows you to add authors and assign them to your courses while Kajabi doesn’t.

You can set a revenue share for your authors and Teachable will do all the calculations for you. If you’re on Teachable gateway, they’ll even make a payout to your authors automatically.

So, if you run a multiple author course platform, this can be a deal-breaker for you.

Customer Support

I have interacted with the support team on both the platforms hundreds of times on behalf of my clients and based on my experience, I have found the customer support at Kajabi to be more responsive and generally speaking, the quality of responses have been better as well.

The most important difference between Teachable vs Kajabi in terms of customer support is their live chat feature. While Teachable offers live chat only from Monday to Friday, 10AM – 5PM EST, Kajabi offers 24×7 live chat support.

I can tell you from experience that nothing beats 24×7 chat support especially when you’re in the middle of a course launch or you’re in a different timezone from where the customer support operates.

Kajabi Chat Support
Kajabi Customer Support
Teachable Help
Teachable Customer Support

The live chat feature on Teachable is available only on certain pricing tiers while on others, you get support via email which can be pretty slow at times. 

If you aren’t the one to reach out to customer support for everything and prefer exploring things yourself, both platforms have a comprehensive knowledge base where you can find a how-to article/video for literally every feature on the platforms.

Both platforms also invest significantly into customer training. For example, Kajabi has what it calls Hero University and Teachable has TeachableU where you can find different trainings to help you with course creation and marketing.

They also do weekly webinars and other live events from time to time which are all very helpful.

Kajabi Hero University
Teachable U

Another thing that I like about customer support and training on both Kajabi and Teachable is their user communities where you can hang out with like-minded creators, ask your questions, or get feedback/advice on anything related to online courses.

Pricing Plans

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

As far as Kajabi pricing is concerned, there are three plans and on all of them, you get unlimited hosting and bandwidth, video storage and 0% transaction fees.

Kajabi Pricing: How much does Kajabi cost?
Kajabi Pricing

The lowest tier is called Basic Plan and it costs $149/month. On the Basic Plan, you can create upto 3 Products and 3 Sales Pipelines and have upto 1,000 active members on your website.

Their most popular plan is called the Growth Plan and it costs $199/month. On the Growth Plan, you can have upto 15 products and 15 pipelines and upto 10,000 active members.

The highest tier is called the Pro Plan ($399/month) that lets you increase these limits even further and you can have upto 3 different websites.

If you want further information about Kajabi’s pricing plans, you can check that on their official pricing​​ page.

Teachable has a very different pricing model compared to Kajabi. Apart from unlimited hosting and video storage, you also get unlimited number of students and courses on their pricing plans.

What varies between the pricing tiers is the transaction fees and the features offered.

Teachable Pricing: How much does Teachable cost?
Teachable Pricing

The lowest tier is the Basic Plan that costs $39/month and you pay 5% transaction fees. On the Basic Plan, you’ll get access to features like coupons, dripping, affiliate marketing, the ability to send emails, etc.

Their most popular plan is the Professional Plan which costs $119/month and you pay 0% transaction fees. You’ll also get access to most of the features that Teachable has to offer.

What I like about Teachable pricing is that it is more flexible and the “pay as you grow” model makes it more beginner-friendly even though it should work for just about any course creator. So, you might start on the Basic Plan in the beginning and then upgrade to the Professional Plan as you grow.

On the other hand, Kajabi’s starting price is steep and it won’t work for you if you just want to test waters or if you’re on a tight budget.

Having said that, Kajabi is actually multiple tools combined in a single platform and if you consider everything that it has to offer, you’ll find it to be reasonably priced.

One of my clients moved his entire business to Kajabi last year. Before making the move, he would spend close to $300 every month on various software.

  1. Teachable for course creation and delivery – $99/month
  2. Hosting, theme and plugins for blog – $25/month
  3. ClickFunnels for building sales funnels – $97/month
  4. ConvertKit for email marketing (3,200 subscribers) – $79/month

He invested in Kajabi’s Basic Plan and not just that he is paying less than before but now things are much easier to manage, it saves him a lot of time and the user experience has improved significantly.

So, whether Kajabi pricing will work for you or not depends on what features you need and what’s your budget. 

Kajabi vs Teachable – Final Verdict

By now, you will have a clear idea of what each platform has to offer and how they can be used in your business. If you analyze that with your requirements and your budget, you should be able to pick the best platform for you.

However, if you’re still not able to decide between Kajabi vs Teachable, let me make my recommendation based on the scenarios where I have seen each platform to work better.

So, Kajabi will be a better choice for you if:

#1: You want to have everything under one roof

Kajabi offers you all the tools you need to run your entire online course business on the platform. You can create and deliver online courses, build a fully-fledged website, run a blog, create marketing funnels and even automate email marketing.

#2: You want to build a membership site and sell a subscription

Kajabi offers product themes that are better suited for membership sites, gives you much more flexibility for subscription pricing, allows you to offer PayPal as an option for a recurring subscription and you can even build a community area to go along your membership site.

#3: Budget is not an issue for you

Simply based on features, Kajabi is a better platform compared to Teachable on every front, be it, course creation and delivery, site design, and customization, or sales and marketing and it should be a no-brainer for you in this scenario.

On the other hand, Teachable will be a better choice for you if:

#1: You already have a website and a list building system in place 

If you’re looking for a platform to just host and deliver your online courses, you should go with Teachable. It does a good job at course creation and student engagement and it offers all the tools the majority of creators would need.

#2: You’re building an online course marketplace

Teachable allows you to add authors, share revenue with them and even pays them out automatically if you’re using their gateway. Plus the authors get their own dashboard where they can track sales etc., all of which are handy for building a marketplace.

#3: You’re just getting started with online business or you’re on a tight budget

Teachable’s pricing is pretty flexible and you pay more as you grow which makes it ideal for beginners. So, you can start with one of their lower-priced tiers and then upgrade later.

I hope this Kajabi vs Teachable guide helped you make a decision. Which of these two platforms do you think will work best for you and why? Please let us know in the comments below.

If you have any questions about either platform or have any feedback, let us know that as well and I will respond to it as soon as possible.

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