Kajabi Review Summary
Kajabi is a premium all-in-one course platform that offers everything an online business needs to market and sell online courses, and products.
With 50,000+ users who’ve made over 1.5 billion dollars in sales, chances are you’ve heard of the Kajabi platform.
It’s one of the premium all-in-one online course platforms to start selling online courses and memberships.
In this Kajabi review, I’ll cover common questions, the pros and cons, how some features can improve, and more so you can ultimately decide if Kajabi right for you.
Table of Contents
- What is Kajabi?
- Course Creation & Student Engagement
- Site Design & Customization
- Sales & Marketing Features
- Reporting & Admin Management
- Kajabi Customer Support & Training
- How Much Does Kajabi Cost?
- Limited Time Extended Trial
- Kajabi Pros and Cons
- Kajabi Review – Is it Ultimately Worth Paying For?
- Kajabi Alternatives
What is Kajabi?
Kajabi is an online course platform for users to create & sell online courses, run a membership site, email market, & more.
With Kajabi, you have complete control over your course pricing, student data, checkout, and other key features.
What makes Kajabi different from other online course platforms is that you can run your entire business on the platform without the need for 3rd-party tools.
Kajabi markets itself as the all-in-one course platform to REPLACE tools like:
- Teachable/Thinkific
- WordPress/Wix/Squarespace
- ConvertKit/MailChimp/AWeber
- ClickFunnels/LeadPages/Kartra
- And more.
They do a pretty good job at it, as you’ll soon see. Check out their video before you continue.
To summarize, here are things Kajabi does that creators love:
- You can build a website and blog for your brand.
- You can create engaging experience for students with videos, downloadable files such as PDFs, audio files, CSVs, and quizzes.
- Wistia hosts your course videos.
- Create a community forum for your online business.
- Create marketing funnels, including lead-gen funnels, webinar funnels, product launch funnels, and more.
- Capability of creating checkout pages with order bump capabilities.
- Email marketing features such as autoresponders, automation triggers, tagging, & segmenting.
- Kajabi CRM: Built-in CRM tools.
- Kajabi’s internal team handles all online updates and security maintenance.
The in-depth Kajabi review sections below will analyze how the Kajabi features work.
Course Creation & Student Engagement
This section reviews how Kajabi handles course creation and student engagement.
Course Content Uploading & Organizing Structure
The Kajabi platform makes uploading content and organizing your lessons simple with its feature Product Blueprints.
The Kajabi online course blueprint will build a sample course structure organized by Categories (aka. Modules) and Posts (aka. Lessons) by default when you generate a blueprint.
If you have an in-depth course with multiple topics, Kajabi provides Subcategories for further organization.
With the Kajabi course builder, you can re-organize your course curriculum with drag-and-drop functionality.
Click on the Post you want to edit, and you’ll be taken to its respective edit screen.
Here you can update the lesson name, video, assessments, information text content, PDFs, other downloadable files, and more.
Kajabi hosts all your video media on Wistia (unlimited video hosting), so students will be able to see the sub-sections of videos, speed up the video’s speed, and more.
Some Kajabi reviews have pointed out is that you can’t have multiple videos in a lesson at a time. This is true.
However, what you can do, is embed a video within the body text content editor of the lesson.
If your online course has a lot of video content, Kajabi has a bulk import feature.
You can upload multiple videos from your computer, Google Drive, Dropbox, or via a link.
Lastly, Kajabi lets you send push notifications to your students when you add a new lesson to your course!
In summary, Kajabi makes uploading content and organizing content headache-free and straightforward.
Look, Feel, & Content Delivery
Most course platforms usually offer one theme for their course member area — Kajabi gives you multiple professionally designed themes to choose from.
They offer themes based on traditional courses, membership sites, coaching, and more.
Kajabi themes allow you to streamline your course’s look quickly with customization options.
A common favorite among users is the Premier theme.
The Premier theme looks clean, professional, elegant and has multiple options for course thumbnails, seamless course continuation, and branding.
The Premier theme lesson pages are structured similarly.
This theme’s lesson page provides areas for your:
- Video
- Video playlist (next lessons playlist)
- Content area below the video section
- A sidebar for downloadable files (not shown in the example image above)
- An Instructor box (optional)
- A comment section for student &/or instructor interaction (not seen in the image above)
For an overview of all themes available, read our Kajabi themes article.
Additionally, users can consume courses on the go with the Kajabi mobile app. Kajabi does a phenomenal job with its course creation tools and gives course creators professional-looking course theme options, supported in multiple languages, that look like a pro designer made them.
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Drip & Locking Course Content
Kajabi offers drip content. It lets you choose how many days after a student’s enrollment a new category will be released.
Content locking ensures students pay attention to what you’re teaching and don’t skip ahead.
The rules for this are up to you!
Community
The Kajabi Community feature can be offered alongside your course or as its own product.
Students can engage on existing topics or start new discussions within the Kajabi dashboard.
Kajabi notifies students when an instructor or fellow student responds to said forum activity they engaged in.
The Community feature by Kajabi is excellent for those who prefer to stay away from Facebook groups.
Quizzes & Certificates
Kajabi lets you offer quizzes with their Assessment feature.
You can use Assessments to create quizzes or tests that have:
- Multiple-choice,
- Paragraph-answer questions,
- Multi-option.
You can grade them automatically based on your answer criteria.
You can add quizzes to any part of your curriculum.
You can also create assessments that accept File Uploads. This comes in handy if you want your students to submit a project.
Additionally, you can use Assessments to take surveys of your students instead of relying on a 3rd-party tools. You can also use them on your Kajabi landing pages.
Related: How Kajabi Quizzes and Assessments Work.
Automation Triggers
Kajabi automation triggers are ideal for creators who want to engage with their students when they take action on specific activities or when they’re inactive.
Automation triggers let you create When & Then Rules. For example, when a student has been inactive for 7 days post-purchase, then send them an email.
Another example is offering a cheat sheet after students have finished a challenging module. You can get creative with Kajabi automation.
Course Creation Features Summary
Kajabi does a fantastic job at course creation.
Whether you’re looking to host your course or create a membership site with Kajabi, it gives you the essential tools for you and your students.
Their Assessment feature can improve, but other than that, Kajabi packs major features for building course architecture, uniqueness, and engagement tools for courses and membership websites.
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Site Design & Customization
Kajabi lets you design a branded website where visitors can check out your company, info, products & services, blog posts, and more.
In this part of our Kajabi review, you’ll see how Kajabi handles site design and customization.
Site Themes
Kajabi offers pre-designed website themes, which will give the framework and style of your website.
Kajabi has 11 current themes and 6 “Legacy” themes.
The themes provide a clean and modern look no matter which style you choose.
When you install a theme, Kajabi builds out your website’s framework, and you can customize it with their page editor.
The new themes are great, but more options would be nice. Compared to website platforms like WordPress, which has countless paid and free themes, Kajabi falls a bit behind.
If you’re a Pro user, you can hire a web developer to create a custom Kajabi theme with the code editor.
Kajabi Website Builder
Once you’ve chosen your site theme, you’ll be able to customize each of your site’s pages with the Kajabi page builder.
The page builder is a standard drag-and-drop editor.
The left-hand side of the editor lets you pick what page level you want to edit.
Removing or adding sections is a breeze, too – as you’d expect with Kajabi. There are over 40 pre-designed sections for all themes, and they’re desktop and mobile responsive.
Editing elements within sections is intuitive as well. Hover over any section of your page and click the edit button, and you can configure said inner section settings.
All your element building blocks are on the left-hand side once you’ve selected the section you want to work on.
You can preview exactly what your page looks like on mobile and tablet from within the same page builder.
Kajabi’s page builder is simple, and it gets the job done.
Overall, Kajabi’s website creation features are superb. The pre-designed frameworks shorten the time it takes to traditionally build websites, and the editor allows for countless customizations.
Related Guide:
Blogging Capabilities
In addition to your front-end website, Kajabi gives you the option of creating a blog.
Kajabi creates a customizable blog index page where your blog posts will be listed when you publish new posts.
Note: If you’ve been wondering about Kajabi’s SEO capabilities, it does perfectly fine with search engine optimization.
Blog posts are written in the blog editor where you can update your thumbnail, insert media, organize with tags, optimize your SEO metadata, add an opt-in form on the sidebar, and more.
Kajabi’s blogging capabilities are good, but they don’t rival blogging platforms like WordPress.
However, this isn’t a big con because most users are not trying to rank for prominent keywords on Google.
Kajabi users use their blogs to share current news and updates about their business or talk about topics their users want to hear.
Below is an example of how James Wedmore uses Kajabi’s blog capabilities for his podcast show notes.
Having everything, including your blog, under one platform is advantageous because you don’t have to manage separate online properties.
Note:
Website Creation Features Summary
With Kajabi, web design has very little friction from start to finish.
For instance, you don’t have to install a page building plugin, an SEO plugin, etc. (although Kajabi has some of its own optional plugins).
With Kajabi, things are simple. You pick a pre-designed theme option, Kajabi builds out the default pages of your site, and you customize the site pages to your brand messaging & content with their tools.
Kajabi handles site design great, but there is an opportunity for them to start offering additional free and paid themes.
The advantages outweigh the disadvantages, as Kajabi gives you everything you need to build a great looking front-end website without having to be a tech expert.
Related:
- Examples of Kajabi Websites
- Examples of Kajabi Membership Sites
- Kajabi Email Templates
- Kajabi Fonts & Styling
Sales & Marketing Features
Some of Kajabi’s competitors provide you with essential sales & marketing tools; Kajabi takes the stance of giving you all the tools.
Pricing Options for Offers
In Kajabi, your course pricing is referred to as an Offer.
You have four options for pricing: Free, One-Time Payments, Multi-Payments, and Recurring Subscriptions.
Note: you can set up multiple currency offers, and Kajabi accepts major currency options such as USD, CAD, AUD, GBP, and more.
If you’re offering a subscription, you can set up a trial period (optional) and set your recurring charges to yearly, monthly, or weekly.
Along with your Offer pricing, you’ll assign which of your Kajabi products your new customer has access to when they purchase your Offer.
Kajabi is flexible when it comes to assigning products to Offers. You can assign single products or multiple within one offer. This is great for creators with numerous products as it allows for bundling products together and creating different levels of a membership website.
Lastly, if you’re a fan of offering discounts for your product, you can create single coupons or bulk coupons for your offers.
I like the charging capabilities Kajabi offers because it unlocks marketing creativity that can ultimately lead to more sales.
Checkout Pages & Payment Processing
By default, Kajabi creates a checkout page for your product(s). Like landing pages, Kajabi allows you to customize your checkout pages.
You can add multiple elements to your checkout pages, such as logos, a video, testimonials, module & lesson details, guarantees, and similar settings & customizations.
Customer input fields are in your control. If sell digital products, you’ll typically need the same inputs (email, name, credit card details).
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Furthermore, Kajabi provides three advanced checkout features that you’d find on 3rd-party online shopping platforms:
- Cart Abandonment: send follow-up emails to people who don’t finish paying at checkout.
- Bump Offers: add an optional add-on product or service to your checkout page.
- 1-Click Upsells: offer an “upsell” product or service to your customer once they’ve purchased your “front-end” product with just a click of a button.
More Kajabi Checkout Page details here.
As for Kajabi payment processing and gateways, Kajabi integrates with Stripe and PayPal — the gold standard payment integrations and Kajabi does not take transaction fees.
That said, Kajabi currently doesn’t handle EU VAT taxes. However, you can use checkout software like ThriveCart or SamCart — two popular software Kajabi integrations that handle VAT.
Alternatively, you can read this guide on how to handle EU VAT taxes with Kajabi.
Other than that, Kajabi does an excellent job at setting your offer pricing. The capabilities of designing a checkout page are good but can be improved.
Marketing Campaigns & Funnels
Kajabi has pre-designed funnels with all the steps mapped out and built for you with one click. They call it Kajabi Funnels (formerly Kajabi Pipelines and referred to as the Sales Pipeline Builder), providing multiple funnel templates/blueprints based on use cases.
Kajabi will build out the required pages to create a funnel for said conversion goal. For instance, if you want to register people for a webinar you’re hosting soon, you can select the Zoom Webinar OVO blueprint, and Kajabi outlines the funnel steps.
Kajabi creates each of the required landing pages (i.e. sales pages, email marketing campaigns) and allows you to edit them to your liking.
Related: How Creating Kajabi Evergreen Webinars Work
In addition to landing pages, Kajabi Funnels builds email campaigns, opt in forms, offers, and it’s all plug-and-chug from there. If you prefer to add more landing pages and/or emails to your funnel, you can.
Moreover, you never have to leave the Sales Pipeline Builder to edit your funnel steps — you can build it all without traversing to different dashboard sections.
Kajabi has over 20 landing page templates in their arsenal, and you can customize them to your liking with their editor too.
Kajabi covers a lot of ground here, leaving many of its competitors behind in this department.
Email Marketing Tools
Most platforms offer the ability to send off broadcast emails to students, but with Kajabi’s email marketing tools, you get an advanced tool.
Here are a few things Kajabi’s built-in email tool can do:
- Tag & segment.
- Email automation.
- Send broadcast emails to new leads and current members.
- Create automated email sequences.
- Send discount codes to new subscribers.
Let’s start with tags, segmenting, and email automation. Here’s an example.
When you get a new subscriber on your list because of a lead magnet, you can configure Kajabi’s email automation to tag them with a label (i.e., X Lead Magnet Subscriber).
When they purchase your digital product, you can set up an automation workflow that tags that subscriber with the label X product customer.
Another example. Imagine you created a Kajabi email sequence, with 7 emails spread out over two weeks, when someone signs up for your lead magnet.
The email sequence aims to nurture new leads and get them to buy your course. They buy your product on email #2. Should this new customer continue to get emails #3-7?
No. If they’ve already purchased your course on email #2, you’d set an automation that takes the new customer out of your email sequence when tagged with a customer tag label.
You can put those new customers into a new sequence — which you’d need automation for. If they never purchase your offer, you can also segment them into another sequence.
Luckily, Kajabi makes it easy for even the least tech-savvy among us to do advanced email marketing.
Aside from email automation, if you like pre-designed templates, Kajabi has professional email templates.
Kajabi’s email tool is not perfect. I noticed you can not set sequences to send out a few hours after one another — for now; it’s only possible to separate email sends with days. This is not a dealbreaker for most, but other platforms can do this.
Third-Party Integrations
Besides Google Analytics, your Facebook pixel, and tracking software like Segment, you can connect to your external email service providers (ESPs). Kajabi has direct integrations with the following ESPs:
- ActiveCampaign,
- AWeber,
- ConvertKit,
- Drip,
- Mailchimp.
If your ESP or other tools are not listed above, you can use Zapier to fulfill the integration.
Affiliate Marketing
If you’d like others to help you promote your course in exchange for an affiliate commission, you can with Kajabi!
Kajabi automatically creates an affiliate registration & login page for your affiliate program. Once affiliates are in their private dashboard, they’ll have access to their unique affiliate link(s) for your respective product(s).
On your end, you’ll see which affiliates are performing best and send them payments.
There are a few improvements I’d like to see Kajabi’s affiliate program improve on (even on their own affiliate program).
For one, Kajabi does not provide affiliate tracking IDs. Secondly, you can’t change the 30-day cookie duration.
Sales & Marketing Features Summary
Kajabi has little competition when it comes to sales and marketing tools.
Their built-in email marketing tool has modern features and isn’t limited to contacting your students but also your new email subscribers.
Kajabi is hands down the leader in this department, and they know it — which is why they charge a pretty penny.
Reporting & Admin Management
How many website visits, sign up for your freebie, purchases of your Kajabi courses and/or membership sites, and student progress are just a few analytics that Kajabi reports.
And then there’s the internal management of students and team members. How does it all work? Let’s dive in.
Analytics & Reporting Tools
Kajabi provides internal website analytics such as page views, email list opt-ins, pages that generated sales, affiliate sales, and more.
Below, you can see an overview report of your revenue & purchases and drill down to specific reports.
You can filter down by offer, dates and see your revenue & refunds by offer.
As for course reporting, Kajabi tracks your students’ progress in the course, individual video performance, and Assessment scores.
Student progress can be analyzed at the Member or Post levels.
Kajabi video analytics provides an in-depth breakdown of which video lessons perform best.
Video metrics include average engagement, total plays, and play rate. Visual video analytics include an engagement viewer and video heatmaps.
Contact Management
Kajabi’s Contacts section of the dashboard is for contact list management.
Managing your member list is simple with Kajabi’s filters. You can segment to people who’ve purchased X offer, engaged members but who aren’t customers yet, used a coupon, etc.
This is the same part of Kajabi you’d use to revoke access from bad actors and add people manually to specific offers.
Furthermore, you can see each member’s lifetime value and cycle by clicking on any member.
You’ll see how they first subscribed to your email list, what messages were opened, when they made a purchase, how much they spent, and more.
User Roles
Whether you have one or multiple team members, you’ll be able to assign the proper user role and privileges.
Kajabi has three user role types:
- Administrators have the same permissions and view as the owner, except for the internal Stripe connection & other payment gateways.
- Assistants can delete and modify site content, but they’re not allowed to view financial reports and most of the analytics.
- Support Specialists can only moderate comments and manage contacts.
How many users you get is based on the Kajabi plan you pay for. More details here.
Kajabi Customer Support & Training
Although Kajabi is easy to use, it’s good knowing your course platform has your back any time of the day with its customer support.
Furthermore, Kajabi has a thorough knowledge base of support articles with video walkthroughs.
You can also use Kajabi’s official Facebook group to get support from fellow users on how to use Kajabi.
As for Kajabi training, they have you covered too. They offer Kajabi University, which teaches the fundamentals of building a course. And if you ever need expert help, hire a Kajabi expert or consultant.
Additionally, Kajabi offers a Hero reward system to incentivize Kajabi users to continue selling courses and increasing revenue.
Related:
How Much Does Kajabi Cost?
Note: Kajabi no longer has a free plan.
Kajabi offers multiple pricing plans as of 2023, and they all include the following:
- Unlimited Landing Pages
- Unlimited Marketing Emails
- Video Hosting by Wistia
- 0% transaction Fees
- A Welcome Call with an Onboarding Specialist
All the paid plan features scale as you upgrade plans.
The Basic Plan starts at $149 per month and allows you to have up to 3 Products, 3 Pipelines (sales funnels), 1 website, and 1 admin user. Additionally, you’re limited to 10,000 contacts and 1,000 active members.
As you upgrade to the Kajabi Growth Plan ($199 per month) or the Pro Plan ($399 per month), the feature limitation counts increase, and you get some new features.
View the Kajabi pricing plans here. There’s also Kajabi Access for more perks alongside any of Kajabi’s plans. Kajabi Access is an additional $99/mo.
Kajabi pricing plans are a bit steep, yet the Kajabi subscription is justifiable with what you get. You can save 20% off Kajabi by choosing to pay annually, which makes the Basic Plan $119 instead of $149 per month.
Limited Time Extended Trial
If you’re an established course creator, you may be interested to sell courses with Kajabi’s full feature set by trying out a free trial.
We’ve secured an extended trial for our readers. Get immediate access to Kajabi’s special trial deal.
Kajabi Pros and Cons
Pros – What I Like About Kajabi
- Business Owner Simplicity: You can build your entire business on Kajabi without integrating other marketing tools.
- 10+ Website Themes: Professionally designed website templates that are customizable.
- 0% Transaction Fee
- Built-In Sales Funnel Software: Get started selling online courses with several pre-designed marketing funnel blueprints.
- Built-In Email Marketing Tools: You’ll no longer need to pay for other email marketing tools.
- Automation: Allows for simple automation rules such as triggering marketing emails based on student engagement, completion, free trial notices, etc.
- Custom Domain (or Subdomain): Kajabi lets you assign a custom domain name.
- Engagement Tools: You get powerful engagement tools like Community, Assessments, and more.
- Mobile Apps: Has both an iOS and Android app.
- 24/7 Customer Support: chat and email support.
Cons – What I Dislike About Kajabi
- No Native Certificates: You’ll have to resort to third party apps, like Accredible, to offer completion certificates.
- Only Offer Payment Processors: Kajabi currently only provides Stripe and Paypal integration.
- Not Ideal to Sell Physical Products.
Kajabi Review – Is it Ultimately Worth Paying For?
Is Kajabi worth it?
In short, yes. It’s a one stop shop on which you can run an entire online business.
The cost of Kajabi is justifiable. Take a typical course creator who uses multiple tools for their business.
A typical online course business tech stack:
- Teachable for course hosting & delivery: $99/month
- Website Hosting & Plugins decent host for front-end brand website & blog: $25+/month
- ClickFunnels for sales funnels: $97/month
- ConvertKit for email marketing: $29+/month
This tech stack added up to $250/month, whereas a Kajabi account offers all the tools above on its Basic Plan for $149/month!
Bottom Line: Kajabi is worth it and the value for money is there.
Is Kajabi right for you? The only way to find out is to take Kajabi for a test drive with a free trial. Click the button below and start your Kajabi journey.
That’s it for my Kajabi review. I recently found ways to get extended trials of Kajabi if you’re interested.
Related Kajabi Reading:
- Kajabi for Nonprofits
- Need to See More? Check Out These Kajabi Demos!
- Is Kajabi a LMS?
- Kajabi Promo Deals
- Kajabi Special Offers
Kajabi Alternatives
Our Kajabi review wouldn’t be complete without addressing Kajabi alternatives. An all in one solution isn’t for everyone. Below are top alternatives to consider.
Teachable
- Read our review of Teachable
- Read our Kajabi vs Teachable comparison guide.
Thinkific
- Read our review of Thinkific
- Read our Kajabi vs Thinkific comparison guide.
Kartra
- Read our review of Kartra
- Read our Kajabi vs Kartra comparison guide
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