There are so many factors to consider when choosing a platform for launching and selling your online courses.
You need something suitable for your business type, goals, and skills.
For this comparison article, I picked two top-performing platforms – Kajabi and AccessAlly.
Let’s compare Kajabi vs AccessAlly, see what each tool offers, and determine which platform you should invest in.
Table of Contents
- Kajabi and AccessAlly – Similarities
- Kajabi vs AccessAlly – Key Differences
- Kajabi vs AccessAlly – Ease of Use and Convenience
- Kajabi vs AccessAlly – Membership and Course Creation
- Kajabi vs AccessAlly – Student Engagement Features
- Kajabi vs AccessAlly – Website Customization & Themes
- Kajabi vs AccessAlly – Sales and Marketing Tools
- Customer Support
- Pricing
- Conclusion
Kajabi and AccessAlly – Similarities
Both platforms offer fantastic tools to help you scale your knowledge-centered business. Here are some of their similar features:
- Robust Membership and Course Creation Tools – Kajabi and AccessAlly have all the necessary tools to help you quickly build and manage high-quality online courses and membership programs. You can use the drag-and-drop editor and customizable course themes to create a professional learning experience.
- Member Directory – Let your members see each others’ profiles and connect with the right people to establish good relationships.
- Built-in Payment Integrations – Easily collect payments from anywhere globally with PayPal and Stripe.
- Useful Sales Tools – Increase your average order value by offering 1-click upsells, order bumps, and coupons.
- Affiliate Program – Promote your courses better by letting your loyal customers do it in exchange for a commission.
Kajabi and AccessAlly are practically identical in the core components of an all-in-one course platform.
But there are also some differences which can significantly affect your decision on which one to go with.
Kajabi vs AccessAlly – Key Differences
- Plugin vs Platform – AccessAlly is a WordPress plugin, so it’s dependent on a website host. Meanwhile, Kajabi is standalone and doesn’t require other platforms for it to work.
- Flexibility vs Convenience – Kajabi focuses on simplifying the process of launching, marketing, and selling digital products. In contrast, AccessAlly wants to provide users with limited but more advanced tools.
- Marketing Tools – Kajabi has built-in email marketing, sales funnels, and automation tools that help users promote their online business. For AccessAlly, you need to subscribe to third-party applications to have these tools.
- Pricing and Limitations – AccessAlly is cheaper than Kajabi. It fits the budget of small businesses and large ones. It also offers unlimited members and product creation. Meanwhile, Kajabi’s highest plan still puts a quota on the number of active members and digital products.
- Free trial – Kajabi provides a 14-day free trial for those who want to try the platform and aren’t yet ready to pay. AccessAlly, however, doesn’t give any.
Kajabi vs AccessAlly – Ease of Use and Convenience
Kajabi offers an intuitive and straightforward interface for its users.
It’s most suitable for course creators, beginners, and non-techie business owners who hate spending time learning complicated systems.
You can have a more unified, organized, and less stressful place to manage everything since it offers all the crucial features.
Although it strongly values user-friendliness and convenience, the platform ensures you get the best tools.
For example, you can create email campaigns to nurture your leads and publish SEO-optimized blogs without much effort.
You can also develop products and sales funnels quickly, even without any experience in making them.
Meanwhile, AccessAlly is also easy to use because of its minimalistic and well-structured design. It can compete with most online course platforms regarding flexibility and power.
Its dependency, however, can cause problems for those unfamiliar with using a WordPress site. It can also be overwhelming and scary for those who can’t code.
Winner – Kajabi. Both software is great, but Kajabi is more straightforward and user-friendly.
Kajabi vs AccessAlly – Membership and Course Creation
Kajabi and AccessAlly claim to be the leading tool in online course creation.
And although they both offer excellent tools like video hosting and drag-and-drop, there’s one software that provides more.
AccessAlly has a bulk courses enrollment feature that allows you to simultaneously deliver your courses to multiple users.
It benefits schools, organizations, and training institutions that handle many students.
This feature doesn’t give them the authority to change your course content. But you can offer course licensing so they can access, use and share your courses with their students.
Additionally, you can set up team members and leaders who can monitor and track their student’s progress and add new students.
For example, if a school assigns admins as team members, they can have access to the data and other features connected with the course.
Winner – AccessAlly. The Kajabi platform doesn’t have a bulk enrollment feature, so you’ll need to add all the students individually. Moreover, unlike in AccessAlly, where you can create teams, you can only add admin users and assign them roles.
Kajabi vs AccessAlly – Student Engagement Features
Lessons can quickly become boring to students. That’s why you need tools to help engage them and create a fun learning experience.
The common methods are online quizzes, certificates, badges, and gamification.
Kajabi has a robust quiz builder that lets you prepare multiple-choice, true or false, and essay quizzes to test your students.
You can also use the community feature to add more interactions outside your courses. For example, you can add polls, create forums, and post exciting stories for your members.
However, that’s all you can do with Kajabi.
AccessAlly, on the other hand, lets you create automated certificates, give assignments, and distribute badges.
This WordPress plugin also allows you to have a credit point system, where your students can redeem a prize after accumulating a certain number of points.
Winner – AccessAlly. It has more gamification aspects that are effective in keeping your students motivated.
Kajabi vs AccessAlly – Website Customization & Themes
Since AccessAlly is only a WordPress plugin, it has no control over your website’s design.
But it has the AccessAlly theme that you can connect with a WordPress theme. It then allows you to customize some parts of your membership site.
However, this theme is too simple compared to Kajabi’s website theme.
If you want to build a beautiful site for your online business with WordPress, you can choose from paid and free themes, start from scratch and use coding, or hire someone.
AccessAlly allows you to modify and customize your site however you want. But it will take you more time, money, and effort to do so.
Kajabi, on the other hand, has a lot of pre-made themes that you can use for your website.
These beautiful and fully-customizable templates are designed by experts who know what works for lead generation.
They are also SEO-friendly and responsive, so you can use them on mobile devices.
Aside from website customization, Kajabi has landing pages, email marketing, and sales funnel-building tools that utilize the drag-and-drop feature.
With Kajabi, you can build a complete, modern, and responsive site in just a few seconds.
Winner – Kajabi. It has various websites, web pages, sales funnels, and course creation themes that you can customize to fit your brand’s style.
Kajabi vs AccessAlly – Sales and Marketing Tools
Kajabi and AccessAlly provide essential e-commerce tools, such as a checkout page, abandon cart follow-up, multiple payment options, and multiple currencies.
They both deliver when it comes to sales tools. But how about the marketing features?
The only marketing feature that AccessAlly offers is an affiliate program, which Kajabi also provides.
Affiliate marketing is great, but you need other strategies to promote your business better.
Kajabi lets you have these tools without additional cost.
The platform lets you create, schedule, and track email marketing campaigns. It also ensures high email deliverability and a secure email marketing experience.
Besides email marketing, Kajabi lets you create a complete sales funnel that incorporates sales pages, emails, follow-up sequences, and more.
This allows you to build a solid strategy for selling courses and converting your visitors into buyers.
Winner – Kajabi. Kajabi has a more robust list of marketing tools that aren’t available on AccessAlly.
Customer Support
Kajabi and AccessAlly are quite similar when it comes to customer support.
These two apps have a knowledge base where you can find complete tutorials on using the platform.
They also have a solid FB community and email support where you can ask questions or get support.
However, besides those, Kajabi provides live chat and phone support.
It also has Kajabi University and daily webinars where you can learn business and marketing-related stuff from experts.
The Kajabi University and live webinars are free for all subscribers.
Pricing
Kajabi pricing plans are as follows:
- Kickstarter – $69/month
- Basic – $149/monthÂ
- Growth – $199/month
- Pro – $399/month
Note: You can save 20% with Kajabi’s annual discount.
In comparison, AccessAlly offers more affordable pricing plans than Kajabi:
- AccessAlly Essentials – $99/month
- AccessAlly Pro – $129/month
- In-House Training – $250/month
Besides being cheaper, what makes AccessAlly a challenging competitor for Kajabi is that it allows unlimited courses and members in all its plans.
Kajabi limits them to 3, 15, or 100, depending on your plan. And for massive institutions or schools, this kind of limitation isn’t acceptable.
Additionally, the AccessAlly Pro plan, which is $20 cheaper than Kajabi’s Basic plan, gives access to almost every feature except the team training.
That includes all tools for creating and selling your courses and providing engaging activities.
So what’s the advantage of getting a Kajabi plan if AccessAlly is this generous?
Well, Kajabi provides more features than AccessAlly.
Yes, it is more expensive. But besides the sales and courses tools, you can get website hosting, marketing features, premium themes, and automation in all plans.
It might not be evident initially, but you can save money by opting for Kajabi.
Conclusion
Although Kajabi and Access Ally provide tools for building and selling online courses, they don’t cater to the same market.
Kajabi is for users who want to spend more time scaling than building their course sales, marketing pages, and sales funnels.
Kajabi’s target audience likes having a system or blueprint is better than studying everything by themselves and starting from scratch.
On the other hand, AccessAlly is for those who have the time to tinker with different features and tools.
It is also suitable for more prominent companies that have a team where they can assign specific roles.
They are both excellent. But for me, Kajabi is an all-in-one platform that offers the convenience that business owners and creators crave.
For this reason, I choose Kajabi as the winner.
Which one will you choose?
Related Comparisons: