Kajabi vs Thinkific 2024: Which Is Best for Your Courses?

Kajabi and Thinkific are two of the leading online course platforms in the market right now, and no wonder they are often compared.

What are the differences between Kajabi and Thinkific? And most importantly, which one is the best for your courses?

In this Kajabi vs Thinkific comparison guide, we’ll evaluate the two platforms in terms of features, usability, and pricing. We’ll highlight their pros and cons and also share our experience of using the two platforms.

By the end of this guide, you’ll have a clear understanding of which platform is a better fit for your needs. Let’s dive in!

What Are Kajabi and Thinkific?

Kajabi and Thinkific are cloud-based platforms that allow you to create and sell online courses and memberships. Both are top-shelf solutions used by some of the biggest course creators and entrepreneurs to run their knowledge businesses.

Kajabi is an all-in-one platform that provides tools to manage all aspects of your business, including course creation and delivery, website building, blogging, sales funnels, and email marketing.

The idea behind Kajabi is to have everything under one roof so that you don’t need to stitch together various apps or learn to use them. This approach makes it much easier and quicker for you to get started.

On the other hand, Thinkific is a standalone platform with a focus on course creation and delivery. So you can create awesome online courses, deliver them professionally, and engage your learners.

It does offer built-in eCommerce functionality and some marketing features as well, but you won’t get tools for blogging, funnels, and email marketing that can match specialized solutions in these areas.

So, there’s a great overlap as well as some key differences in their capabilities. Let’s discuss the specific feature differences between Thinkific vs Kajabi.

Ease of Use

An important aspect to consider when selecting an online course platform is how easy it is to use.

Both Kajabi and Thinkific are straightforward to use, and you’ll have a gentle learning curve.

On both platforms, the interface is clean and modern, and the navigation is kind of similar—individual tools are grouped into different sections, present on the left panel. When you click on an item here, the tool and its features appear on the right.

From this point, it’s all about getting familiar with the individual tools, available options, and how they work.

And the good thing is that all the platforms’ tools, such as the page builder and the course builder, use drag-and-drop functionality, making them pretty simple to use.

A quick walkthrough of Kajabi’s user interface

A quick walkthrough of Thinkific’s user interface

Having said that, Kajabi has a slightly higher learning curve. And the reason is simple: it offers way more features than Thinkific.

Kajabi overcomes this challenge by tightly integrating the tools. For instance, it has a dedicated section for creating and managing automations, but the automations option is also available inside various other tools, such as courses, offers, and funnels.

It also has a smart search bar on your dashboard, which you can use to find relevant help articles, and search specific features and jump to that section of the platform.

Overall, both platforms are easy to use, and you need not worry about the learning curve or user-friendliness.

Course Creation and Engagement

In this section, we’ll take a deeper look at how the two platforms perform when creating courses and engaging your students.

Let’s start with the course builder.

Course Builder

Regarding course creation, both Kajabi and Thinkific allow you to quickly create your course structure and add content to your lessons. Both platforms offer:

• Unlimited video and content hosting for your courses
• A drag-and-drop course builder to add lessons and modules to your courses
• The ability to bulk upload your content and turn it into lessons
• An AI outline generator to quickly create a course structure

What’s great is that both course builders support various content types natively, including videos, audio, text, quizzes, PDFs, and embeds.

However, Thinkific’s third-party apps enable you to add advanced lesson types to your course. 

For example, you can use the ThingLink app to add interactive videos. Or, you can use the Adaptive SimpleSim app to add test preparation simulations.

For adding content, you can do it one by one or bulk upload all your content at once. If you use the bulk upload feature, the platforms will automatically turn each file into a lesson.

Both platforms also allow you to reuse an existing video or copy content from another lesson.

One advantage that Thinkific has over Kajabi is that it’s more flexible in adding multiple content formats to the same lesson. For example, you can add multiple videos or a quiz and a video in the same lesson.

Learning and Engagement

Keeping your students engaged is essential for a successful online course. On this front, both Kajabi and Thinkific have the necessary tools to foster learning and engagement.

Quizzes and Certificates

Both Kajabi and Thinkific allow you to create quizzes, and their capabilities are similar to an extent. Both platforms let you:

• Create graded quizzes with multiple-choice and multiple-select questions
• Add text and images to questions and answers
• Add answer explanations
• Restrict access to the next lesson based on quiz scores

However, Thinkific has a couple of advantages here. It allows you to import questions from Excel files and create randomized quizzes with the same pool of questions.

Additionally, Thinkific integrates with Brillium, a full-blown exam solution supporting more question types, timed exams, and other advanced assessment features.

Apart from quizzes, both platforms also let you create assignments. While Thinkific has a separate lesson type for this, Kajabi includes the feature in their Quiz lesson type.

Both let you add an assignment upload area to the lesson, review student submissions, approve or reject them, and send student feedback.

Lastly, you can create certificates for course completion on both Kajabi and Thinkific. Both let you customize the design and text of the certificates and display student and course information.

However, Thinkific has an edge here, as it offers seven predesigned certificate templates, while Kajabi has just one default template.

Content Dripping and Locking

Both Kajabi and Thinkific allow you to drip your content based on student enrollment and by course start date.

The only difference between the two platforms is that Kajabi allows you to send automated drip emails to announce the release of new content, while Thinkific doesn’t have this feature.

Apart from content dripping, both platforms let you restrict access to certain content based on students’ progress.

Kajabi allows you to specify a lesson as a prerequisite for a specific module. So, unless the student completes that lesson, they won’t be able to access the module.

Additionally, there’s a specific setting for quiz lessons where you can make them mandatory for progress to the next lessons.

Thinkific also lets you mark lessons as prerequisites, but it works differently.

When you mark a lesson as a prerequisite, it locks all the lessons and modules after that lesson. If it’s a quiz, the user must successfully pass it to mark the lesson complete.

One handy feature Thinkific offers is setting a video completion (%) required at the course level. In this case, the lessons can be marked complete only when a student reaches the desired completion percentage.

Live Classes

Live classes are an important feature for any course builder, especially for cohort course platforms.

Thinkific supports a separate lesson type for live classes, where you can schedule a class and have your students join a live session from the course player.

Thinkific doesn’t have native livestreaming capabilities, but it integrates with Zoom for the same.

Kajabi, on the other hand, comes with built-in live video features. You can livestream directly from the platform and record sessions and add them as videos in the course.

The live video experience is excellent, and there’s no extra cost.

Again, your students will see the option to join a live session inside the course player. Kajabi also lets you send a notification when starting the session to remind your students to join.

However, neither platform allows students to register for the sessions and receive automated reminders.

Online Community

Thinkific Communities feature allows you to create online communities that look clean and elegant out of the box.

You can easily organize your community using spaces (topics), and you and your members can create discussion posts with text and images. You can also schedule events, but it doesn’t support native livestreaming.

However, the community builder lacks engagement tools, making it suitable only for basic course support communities.

Kajabi, on the other hand, has a full-fledged community builder. The community looks clean and modern, and you can organize it using access groups and circles (topics) and create rich media posts.

Apart from topics and posts, Kajabi Communities supports:

• Native video uploading in discussion posts
• Live meetups and native livestreaming
• Group chats and private messaging
• Gamification tools like badges and leaderboards
• A members directory and detailed user profiles

So, when it comes to community building, Kajabi has more firepower than Thinkific, and you can use it for creating course support communities, standalone communities, and community memberships.

Online Coaching

Coaching is a suite of features in Kajabi to create and deliver one-on-one and group coaching programs.

Here are the key features of Kajabi Coaching:

• Offer coaching programs with single or multiple sessions
• Use Kajabi’s native scheduler for users to book sessions from their dashboard
• Add an agenda, resources, and notes for each session
• Use Kajabi’s live video feature to conduct face-to-face meetings with your clients
• Sell coaching as on-demand products or add-ons to online courses

So, you can manage all aspects of your coaching programs within Kajabi, making it the obvious choice if you’re looking for a coaching platform. Thinkific doesn’t have any coaching features.

Content Delivery

Course player is where your students will spend the most time, making it one of the most important considerations.

Thinkific’s course player is well-designed, with a sidebar menu for easy navigation and a big content area on the right side. It uses a light color theme by default, but you can also opt for a dark mode.

It also supports a full-screen mode and lets students search through lesson titles, making the overall user experience great.

A walkthrough of Thinkific’s course player

Kajabi, on the other hand, has a library of four course player themes that are suitable for all kinds of courses, including evergreen courses, signature programs, and membership libraries.

A walkthrough Kajabi’s course player

For example, you can use the Momentum theme if you need a traditional style like Thinkific. Or, you can use the Premier theme to give your courses a more premium look and feel.

Lastly, Kajabi allows you to customize the course player design extensively, giving you full control over how your courses look.

Regarding the mobile experience, both Kajabi and Thinkific have free mobile apps that make it easier for students to access their courses on the go.

Additionally, both platforms allow you to get white-label mobile apps published under your brand while their team builds and maintains them. Both branded apps support in-app purchases and cost extra.

Site Design and Customization

Both Kajabi and Thinkific make designing and building a functional website for your brand easy.

Both platforms take care of the essentials:

• Both platforms offer free hosting and SSL certificates for your website.
• They look after the technical aspects of running a website, including security, updates, and maintenance.
• Both provide a free subdomain but allow using a custom domain.
• Both are white-label course platforms, allowing you to remove all visible branding from your website and course areas.
• You can change the site language in both cases.

With the similarities noted, let’s compare and evaluate the actual site building tools.

Website Themes

Both Kajabi and Thinkific have pre-built site themes that you can use to build your website quickly.

Kajabi has a library of 11 website themes, all having a clean, modern design. You can apply the themes to your site in a single click and easily adjust settings to match your brand identity.

Thinkific, on the other hand, has three site themes — Empire, Vogue, and Vision — all well-designed and with multiple sub-styles to choose from. Again, you can customize the settings to make it your own.

However, Kajabi offers more variety in terms of themes’ design and styles.

Both platforms also allow you to customize the themes by editing the theme code. You can also buy themes from third-party providers or design your own themes and import them into your website.

Page Builder

Kajabi and Thinkific have a visual, drag-and-drop page builder for building and customizing pages.

There are several pre-built page sections, including a hero section, course list, pricing tables, countdown timers, and plenty more that you can use on your page.

Moreover, you can specify your pages’ colors, backgrounds, and other aspects, right down to the header and footer.

However, Kajabi’s page builder is more powerful and gives more design options.

It has more page sections available, and you can customize the section layouts as you like. You can add new blocks, change their position and order, and modify the size and number of columns.

You can even create a custom section from scratch by choosing from over 20 available blocks and mixing and matching them to get the desired design.

Kajabi lets you freely customize section layouts

Thinkific, on the other hand, has restrictive section layouts, so you’ll only be able to choose from pre-built sections and can’t customize them as freely. For example, you can’t add additional elements or change the order of existing elements in page sections.

Thinkific has restrictive section layouts

Kajabi’s page builder also supports customization options like changing padding, adding animations, and controlling element visibility on mobile vs desktop, which isn’t possible with Thinkific.

Overall, Kajabi has a more robust page builder, making it more suitable for building full-fledged websites.

Blogging and Podcast

Thinkific doesn’t offer any blogging or podcasting functionality, so you’ll need to connect it to a content management system like Squarespace.

Kajabi, on the other hand, comes with built-in blogging features that allow you to publish and manage blog posts on your website.

You can create blog posts, configure SEO settings, categorize your blog posts, design your blog page, customize your blog sidebar, and show opt-in forms.

The platform also makes it easy to add content to your blog posts. You can add a featured image or video, write the content in the simple text editor, and embed media elements inside your content.

Apart from blogging, Kajabi also allows you to set up a podcast through its integrated podcasting feature.

It enables you to create episodes, host your audio files, and distribute them to major listening apps such as Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.

Finally, you can create a publicly accessible podcast on your website or offer it as part of your membership site on Kajabi.

Sales and Marketing

Regarding sales and marketing, Thinkific focuses primarily on offering payments and selling tools like checkouts and coupons, while Kajabi handles payments and offers complete marketing capabilities.

Let’s explore the specific features the two platforms offer.

Product Pricing Options

Both Kajabi and Thinkific let you charge a one-time price, a recurring fee, or even a payment plan for your products.

Regarding subscription payments, both platforms allow you to charge your customers monthly, yearly, or anywhere in between. In addition, you can offer a free trial or charge a custom payment upfront.

The only difference here is that Kajabi lets you create a weekly or bi-weekly subscription, an option currently unavailable on Thinkific.

Moreover, you can establish multiple pricing plans for your courses and bundles. This flexibility allows you to offer, for example, a one-time price and a payment plan for the same course or multiple tiers for your membership website.

Both platforms also let you create coupons and support course gifting.

However, Kajabi has a few advantages:

• Kajabi supports a pay what you want option, currently unavailable in Thinkific.
• You can choose currency at the pricing plan level, whereas Thinkific only allows you to do this only at the site level.
• It’s easier to create multiple access tiers in Kajabi than in Thinkific.

Payments and Checkouts

Thinkific Payments is the default payment gateway in the US, UK, Canada, EU, and some other countries. It uses Stripe in the backend and charges the same processing fee as Stripe.

However, it gives you benefits, such as additional payment options (Apple Pay, Google Pay, and buy now pay later) and built-in sales tax handling.

You can also use your own Stripe and PayPal, but you’ll need to pay an extra fee of between 5% and 0.5% based on your plan.

Kajabi also has a managed Stripe-powered gateway called Kajabi payments that supports digital wallets and buy now pay later payment options as well as sales tax handling.

However, unlike Thinkific, Kajabi lets you use your Stripe and PayPal without paying any additional fee. Also, PayPal is supported for recurring payments, which is not available in Thinkific.

Now, let’s talk about the checkout page.

Kajabi has a one-step checkout process, meaning that the user enters their personal information and completes the payment process on a single page and only then needs to create an account.

The checkout page is well-designed, and you can completely customize it by adding elements like your logo, a promo video, offer details, testimonials, and a money-back guarantee badge.

The result is a checkout page that doesn’t just look beautiful but also converts really well.

Additionally, Kajabi has a popup checkout option, allowing users to quickly purchase products without leaving the page.

Thinkific also has an optimized one-step checkout process where the user enters all the details and completes the purchase on a single page. The design is also simple and clean, even though you can’t customize it beyond adding your logo and customer testimonials.

Apart from the ability to create checkout pages, both platforms let you add an order bump to the checkout page or include a 1-click upsell offer on the thank you page.

However, Kajabi also has an abandoned cart feature that lets you track customers who don’t complete their purchases and send them an automated follow-up email.

Overall, Kajabi’s checkout tools are more advanced than Thinkific.

Marketing Funnels

Kajabi features a tool called Sales Funnels that enables you to create and automate marketing funnels easily. It’s a powerful feature for creating end-to-end marketing campaigns, and Thinkific has nothing like it.

The funnel builder has premade blueprints that you can select, and it will automatically create all the steps in that funnel, including landing pages and email campaigns.

For example, to launch your course, you can use the Product Launch funnel, and Kajabi will create the optin page, the email sequence, the video pages, and the offer page.

Similarly, you can select the Zoom Webinar blueprint to create webinars, and Kajabi will set up the landing pages, the event, and emails.

You can further customize any step in your pipeline. You can change your landing pages, modify the email sequences, or even add new steps to your funnel.

But the best part is that you can do all this without leaving the funnel builder, so the user experience is amazing.

Kajabi’s funnel builder supports inline editing

Kajabi Funnels is simply a game-changer, and no other course platform has anything close to it in terms of features or ease of use.

Besides entire funnels, you can also create standalone landing pages for lead generation and course marketing. Kajabi’s library has 40+ nicely designed landing page templates, which can be customized using the page builder.

You can also create optin forms for your website or your blog, and you use them either as inline forms or as popups.

Finally, Kajabi’s Assessments feature lets you create marketing quizzes for generating new leads and segmenting website visitors.

Talking about Thinkific, it has recently introduced a feature for creating funnels.

It supports three funnel types—Free Lesson, Free Download, and Sales Page funnels. When you select one, Thinkific generates the landing pages, and you can then customize them with your own branding and content.

However, the feature has some major limitations, making it not very useful in its current state:

• You can’t add, remove, or rearrange pages in your funnel; you are restricted to the prebuilt funnel types.
• There is only one default template, and the page editor for modifying landing pages is rudimentary, restricting your design options.

As a result, creating funnels in Thinkific feels more like a basic add-on feature rather than an integral part of the platform, and you’ll be better off using a specialized funnel builder.

Email Marketing

Thinkific has very basic email marketing capabilities, as it just allows you to send broadcast emails to your students and doesn’t support automated email sequences.

Plus, you can’t have your email list on Thinkific, so you’ll need a third-party email marketing solution like ConvertKit.

Kajabi, on the other hand, has a full-blown email marketing suite that lets you do much more than just send one-off emails. You can create automated email sequences to nurture your leads or launch a product.

You can easily define a schedule for your automated emails. For example, you can set your first email to go out immediately, the second email on Day 2, the third email on Day 4, and so on.

Moreover, Kajabi has a tagging system which is a very efficient way to manage your subscribers and run automations.

But best of all, you can use Kajabi Automations rules to trigger actions like adding/removing tags, triggering a new email sequence, and sending users a unique offer.

For example, you can send a nurture campaign to someone when they subscribe to your newsletter. Afterward, you can add them to a sales campaign, and as soon as a purchase is made, you can move them to the onboarding sequence.

Similarly, you can tag users based on the lead magnet they sign up for and send a personalized email campaign to engage them.

As you can see, this combination of tagging and automation makes it possible to automate your email marketing efforts completely.

Overall, Kajabi’s email marketing tools are robust, easy to use, and should work well for a majority of creators.

Affiliate Marketing

Thinkific and Kajabi allow you to create and manage your affiliate program on their platforms. So, you can add affiliates, set a commission %, track sales, and calculate commissions.

The affiliates also get a personalized dashboard where they can see their performance.

However, there are a few things that you can do in Kajabi but not in Thinkific:

• Kajabi lets you create a public registration page for affiliates.
• Affiliates can link to a site outside your Kajabi website.
• Kajabi tracks form submissions, so you can get affiliates to promote lead magnets.
• You can customize the cookie tracking period for your affiliate program.

Reporting and Administration

Both platforms provide extensive reporting and administration tools, which we’ll focus on in this section.

Reporting Tools

Both Kajabi and Thinkific have robust reporting tools. There are several reports available on both platforms that let you track different metrics.

Here are some of the things that both platforms let you track:

• Student progress and course completion rates
• Number of students enrolled
• Revenue earned
• Website visitors and leads
• Video engagement rates
• Subscription metrics, such as MRR and churn rate

Moreover, the individual reports on both platforms are very useful. They include graphs and tables that make data analysis easy. They also support essential features like filtering data, choosing a custom date range, and exporting reports.

People Management

Kajabi and Thinkific have robust tools for managing your users. Both allow you to:

• Filter users based on different criteria, such as their purchases and activity.
• Select multiple users and perform bulk actions like enrolling them in a course or sending a broadcast email.
• See individual users’ detailed profiles and manage their enrollments, subscriptions, and other information.
• Bulk import users from a CSV file and give them access to specific products.

Apart from these, Kajabi lets you add tags to users and create segments, giving you more flexibility and making managing users easier. This functionality is essential in Kajabi, as it is designed to facilitate email list management.

And then, there is the Automations feature that can help automate many administrative tasks. For example, when someone upgrades to a higher tier, you can automatically cancel their original subscription.

Lastly, Thinkific has a feature called Groups that makes it easier to organize users into cohorts and manage their progress. You can also add a Group Analyst to manage the users and pull their reports.

This is a useful feature if you plan to sell courses in bulk to companies or just create cohort courses.

Kajabi doesn’t have a similar feature, and the workaround is to use segments to group users together and manage them. But you can’t add group-specific admins and it’s not as streamlined.

User Roles

Both platforms let you assign different roles to your team members, although access levels are defined differently.

Kajabi’s Administrator role is the same as Thinkific’s Site Admin. Both roles have complete access except for payment integrations.

Kajabi Assistants can handle everything except financial reports, while Support Specialists can moderate comments and manage students. In Thinkific, you have a single role for such activities — Course Admins.

Besides these, Thinkific has two additional user roles:

• Revenue Partners role is for adding co-authors to courses and sharing revenue with them. Currently, it’s not possible to add multiple instructors in Kajabi.
• Group Analysts role is for managing users in specific groups. Again, Kajabi doesn’t have a similar role.

Third-Party Integrations

Thinkific provides a more comprehensive range of third-party integrations than Kajabi.

With Kajabi, you get native integrations with popular email marketing platforms like ConvertKit, ActiveCampaign, Drip, and more.

You can also integrate with analytics solutions (e.g., Google Analytics), opt-in forms (e.g., OptinMonster), and any other solution that requires a script code.

Lastly, you have a Zapier integration to connect Kajabi to those applications that aren’t natively supported.

On the other hand, Thinkific has a full-fledged app store where you can find 100+ apps and integrations.

Apart from essential integrations like email marketing services and Zapier, you can find apps for adding new features and enhancing user experience.

For instance, Thinkific doesn’t support note-taking, but there’s an app called BeastNotes for that. Similarly, you can use Thinkific’s Shopify app to enable a full-fledged shopping cart.

Besides apps, Thinkific has public API and single sign-on features, giving you even more flexibility.

So, Thinkific is a clear winner when it comes to third-party integrations. In fact, it’s the only hosted course platform to have this kind of ecosystem around it.

Customer Support

Kajabi and Thinkific have excellent customer support, and we found them helpful and responsive in our testing.

The good thing is that both platforms offer email and live chat support so that you can easily reach out for help when needed.

However, Kajabi scores a point for providing 24/7 chat support, while Thinkific’s chat support is available only during US working hours.

For those who prefer to find answers on their own, both platforms have a comprehensive knowledge base, including plenty of how-to info (articles and videos) covering every functionality on their platforms.

They also invest heavily in customer training. You can find plenty of free courses and live trainings to learn about various aspects of course creation and marketing.

Lastly, both platforms have highly engaged Facebook groups you can join for further support and advice from other customers.

Pricing Plans

Kajabi and Thinkific offer multiple pricing plans, but their approaches are different.

Kajabi has four pricing plans ranging from $69/mo to $399/mo. While there’s no transaction fee on any plan, they put a limit on the number of active customers and products allowed on each plan.

For instance, you can create only one product on the Kickstarter plan plan while you can create 3 and 15 on the Basic and Growth plans.

Regarding features, all plans include access to most of the platform features. For instance, all its important features except affiliate marketing are available on the Kickstarter plan.

But because of the limits, the Kickstarter plan is good only for testing the waters. If you’re a serious creator, you’ll need at least the Basic plan.

On the other hand, Thinkific has five plans ranging from free to $499/mo. There’s no transaction fee on any plan. Plus, it doesn’t limit the number of courses or students on any paid plan.

However, Thinkific has a different approach to feature access.

For instance, custom domain and coupons are available on the Basic plan ($49/mo), while features like memberships, live classes, and mobile apps are only available on the Start plan ($99/mo) and above.

And if you want API access or the ability to remove Thinkific branding, you’ll need the Grow plan ($199/mo).

Overall, Thinkific has more affordable and flexible plans that can cater to almost any budget and requirements.

Kajabi, on the other hand, has steeper pricing, but it is good value for money if you want to consolidate multiple aspects of your business on a single platform.

Kajabi vs Thinkific: Final Thoughts

This guide has evaluated the two platforms in terms of features, usability, and pricing. But what’s the final verdict?

Kajabi is a better option if you’re looking for an all-in-one platform for your online course business. Besides course creation and engagement, it has tools for blogging, podcasts, sales funnels, and email marketing.

Additionally, it’s better suited for creating membership sites, online communities, and coaching programs.

On the other hand, Thinkific is a better option if you want a standalone platform primarily for creating and delivering online courses. It has robust course creation tools, a huge library of third-party apps, and more affordable pricing.

Additionally, the platform is better suited for creating online schools with dozens of courses (and even instructors).

We hope you found this Thinkific vs Kajabi guide useful. Which of the two platforms seemed more suitable for you and why? Let us know in the comments below.

Frequently Asked Questions