This Kartra vs Kajabi comparison aims to show you, without bias, which platform will be the best for your online business based on your goals, requirements, and budget.
With over 100,000 customers combined, Kajabi and Kartra are among the most popular online business management systems on the internet.
While they’re both competitors in the same field, they both have their individual strong and weak points and are best suited for a slightly different set of customers.
Table of Contents
- Kajabi vs Kartra Comparison Overview
- Pros & Cons of Both Platforms
- What Are Kajabi and Kartra?
- Kajabi vs Kartra Differences & Similarities
- #1. All-in-One Platform User Experience
- #2. Site Design & Blogging Capabilities
- #3. Online Course & Membership Capabilities
- #4. Sales and Marketing Tools
- #5. Customer Support & Training
- Kajabi vs Karta Pricing Plans
- Kartra vs Kajabi Conclusion
Kajabi vs Kartra Comparison Overview
Both Kajabi and Kartra exist as all-in-one platforms, with a suite of all essential tools required for hosting a successful online business.
The main difference is that Kajabi provides a course platform for selling online courses, while Kartra is more focused on marketing and sales funnels for both physical and digital products.
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Ease of Use | ||
Course Creation, Delivery, & Engagement | ||
Web Design & Customization | ||
Sales & Marketing Tools | ||
Cusomter Support | ||
Pricing | ||
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Pros & Cons of Both Platforms
Kajabi Pros
- Very easy to use.
- Offers 24/7 customer support.
- Unlimited video hosting with Wistia.
- Robust course engagement and delivery tools (quizzes, communities, etc.).
- Offers blogging functionality.
- Offers a visual sales funnel (Pipeline) builder.
- Provides an app for iOS and Android users.
Kajabi Cons
- Relatively pricey.
- No features for creating certificates.
- Has a relatively limited library of page-building templates.
- No A/B testing functionality is available for landing pages.
Kartra Pros
- Has a library of 200+ landing page templates.
- Powerful affiliate marketing functionalities.
- Includes a built-in helpdesk and calendar system.
- Offers a conversion-friendly checkout page-building tool.
- Powerful email marketing and automation capabilities.
- It offers a rich knowledge base to help users learn more about the platform.
- More reasonably priced.
- Provides access to done-for-you campaigns.
- Provides a marketplace to offer more visibility to business owners within the community.
Kartra Cons
- Does not offer a visual funnel builder.
- Limited course and membership creation and management system.
- No access to community building tools.
- No blogging functionality.
- Limited video hosting.
What Are Kajabi and Kartra?
Kajabi and Kartra are both all-in-one marketing and business management systems that serve customers with access to everything they need to run successful businesses online.
From email marketing and automation tools to website and sales funnel builders, Kartra and Kajabi allow users to build every infrastructure their businesses need without necessarily knowing a line of code.
While both can be used to sell physical products, they’re mostly used for selling digital products and membership sites.
Kajabi vs Kartra Differences & Similarities
Kartra and Kajabi, as online business management systems, have quite some similarities in the way they behave.
We’ve already touched down on that in the section above, but on a high level, both Kartra and Kajabi allow you to create, host, and sell products (online courses, coaching, membership sites, etc.), build a website, email campaigns, build sales funnels, and more.
That said, both platforms also have some fundamental differences.
For example, Kajabi exists as an online course platform at its core. It was created to serve online course creators, membership site owners, coaches, and everyone in the knowledge business.
So, Kajabi has its strengths in content delivery as it strives to help content creators provide the best learning experiences for their students and online businesses.
Kartra, on the other hand, is a pure marketing platform at its core, but it provides the necessary tools required for selling online courses and hosting memberships as well.
Thus, Kartra’s primary focus lies in providing a robust suite of marketing tools to help business owners achieve their marketing objectives. This includes e-commerce tools integrated natively to the platform to allow people to sell physical products along with digital products.
Kajabi does allow users to sell physical products, but first, you would have to integrate Shopify into your account.
#1. All-in-One Platform User Experience
One of the most crucial elements of any online business management platform is user experience.
Nobody wants to run their business on a platform with a steep learning curve. Thus an easy-to-use platform will always trump a more technical one.
This is even more critical when you’re considering all-in-one platforms like Kartra and Kajabi because they’re bringing all the tools you need under one umbrella.
Let’s start with Kajabi.
Kajabi has one of the smoothest interfaces in the industry. Upon signing into your account, the first thing you’ll see is your account’s dashboard.
Here, you’ll get access to a brief overview of your analytics along with the tools you need for your business.
Kajabi’s tools are grouped into four categories: website, products, marketing, and people. Each category has a bunch of relevant tools nested within it.
On top of that, using each tool is pretty easy to use, as Kajabi adopts a drag-and-drop approach to help you complete tasks more conveniently.
In general, Kajabi’s interface takes a clean, minimalistic, newbie-friendly approach.
On the other hand, Kartra vs Kajabi does not quite impress with its usability.
When you log into your account, you’ll find a slightly crowded interface with account stats taking the bulk of the space in the center and Kartra tools arranged on the left side of the screen.
The first issue with its usability is that there are many configuration steps required for each Kartra tool, which could be overwhelming and time-consuming for both newbies and veterans.
For example, if you’d like to create a membership site, you’d need to start from Basic Info and work your way up to Automations.
In all, there are nine steps required to complete a membership setup using the platform, and you must follow the steps sequentially.
#2. Site Design & Blogging Capabilities
This section of our Kartra vs Kajabi comparison will consider both platforms’ features for website design and blogging.
All websites hosted on both platforms are guaranteed free hosting and SSL certificates, along with technical routines such as backups, security, updates, and maintenance.
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All users can also use a custom domain while being offered a free subdomain (yoursitename.kartra.com or yoursitename.kajabi.com) for their websites. With that out of the way, let’s get into the main details!
Site Themes
The site themes are responsible for the overall look and feel of your website. Kajabi provides a library of six site themes. It also allows you to import and design your website with a custom theme on its more expensive plan.
Once you’ve installed your chosen theme, you can customize your website with the platform’s page builder.
Kartra, on its part, has no site theme features available. You would have to rely on the page builder to design your website. Don’t fret, though. In the next subsection, you’ll see why Kartra’s builder is not to be underestimated.
Web Page Builder and Editor
Let’s start with Kajabi’s website-building features.
When you’ve chosen your desired site theme, Kajabi allows you to customize it with its page builder. The page builder comes with over 20 templates you can use for different types of landing pages.
Once you choose your template, you’ll head straight to its drag-and-drop editor, where you can customize the template or create a full design from scratch.
The page editor also comes with over 40 prebuilt sections available for different purposes.
The editor allows you to make changes to any section or completely delete them. Kajabi’s editor is a live editor. Thus every change you make reflects on the page in real time.
In general, Kajabi’s page builder and editor are super intuitive and offer impressive flexibility for building any type of website.
Kartra comes with a powerful page builder as well. Its builder comes loaded with a vast library of over 200 templates for any type of page you can imagine.
To edit these templates, you’ll use its drag-and-drop editor. Like Kajabi’s editor, Kartra’s editor is a live editor as well.
Another impressive thing about Kartra’s editor is that it comes with different types of sections such as hero, testimonials, FAQs, pricing table, etc., and each section has several templates available. This is not available on Kajabi.
Also, Kartra’s editor has a feature known as sites. This feature allows you to create and share global elements, such as custom styles, headers, footers, etc., across several landing/sales pages, so you don’t have to make new ones for every individual page.
As far as blogging goes, Kajabi allows its customers to create fully functional, search-engine-optimized blogs for their businesses.
If you own a blog on Kajabi, the platform automatically creates an index page for all your blog posts, which you can also customize.
James Wedmore is one famous blogger who uses Kajabi to host his blog.
In our Kartra vs Kajabi blogging round, Kartra does not have full blogging capabilities. It does have a few templates for blog posts, but it won’t be good enough if you’re a serious blogger.
With that said, Kartra and Kajabi are impressive with their site design and building capabilities. So, if you’d just like to focus on building pages for sales and lead generation, Kartra has more to offer with its stellar page builder and a vast library of templates.
On the flip side, if you’d like to build a blog along with sales-oriented pages and a course platform, then Kajabi is a better option.
Which Has the Better User Experience?
When it comes to overall user experience, Kajabi is hands down the better rival. The platform is significantly easier to navigate, and its tools are super-easy to use.
#3. Online Course & Membership Capabilities
In this section, we’ll consider how both Kajabi and Kartra stack up against each other in the areas of online courses and membership sites. The features to consider include course builders, content delivery, and student engagement tools.
Course and Membership Creation
With Kajabi, the process of creating courses is relatively straightforward. It all starts with launching a course or membership with their Product blueprint.
When you use a Product blueprint, Kajabi provides you with a couple of options for structuring your digital product and adding content to it. You’ll also be able to choose from different course theme layouts, which we’ll cover in the next section.
In Kajabi, products are structured into Categories (Modules) and Posts (lessons). You can either create Categories and Posts and add content to them individually, or you can use the bulk uploader to upload multiple files at once and allow Kajabi to create posts with them automatically.
Kajabi also allows you to reorder your content by simply dragging and dropping. And you can edit any lessons, add downloadable content, set comments, etc.
Furthermore, Kajabi offers cloud import functionality, which lets you upload content from Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.
Kajabi also provides unlimited hosting for your videos via Wistia and allows unlimited hosting for all files, from PDFs to audio.
The platform allows you to own a membership site and even run coaching services (see this Kajabi membership guide for more details). It allows you to own your community where you can connect better with your students/customers.
As for Kartra, the platform offers membership features and can also be used for hosting courses.
However, in this Kartra vs Kajabi round, Karta is not quite impressive as a course and membership builder. It doesn’t support bulk uploading and cloud import, for instance.
Furthermore, Kartra limits the video bandwidth you can use from 50 GB on the lowest plan to 400 GB on the highest plan.
On a positive note, Kartra has an impressive level of flexibility and allows you to add content to individual posts. The platform supports over 15 element types that you can add and show in any order you like.
Content Delivery and Member Experience
Content delivery tools are responsible for helping members of your school or community consume your content. For content delivery, Kartra and Kajabi make use of a course player.
Your members will spend the bulk of their time within your course player environment, and their experience heavily relies on the course player’s design flexibility.
Kajabi offers a vast library of 10+ themes for different product types within its course player.
The most popular theme in this library is the Premier Theme. Everybody just loves its refreshing design.
Following closely behind is the Momentum Theme.
This one has a more traditional design with menus vertically arranged on the left and content sitting on the right.
As far as Kartra is concerned, there are six course player templates along with several color presets.
Kartra’s themes have a clean design that gives you a refreshing, modern design on the front end.
That said, all of Kartra’s themes have similar designs and are more suitable for memberships than online courses.
Kartra’s course player has a less user-friendly design. For instance, there are no buttons for “Previous” or “Next,” thus, it is not easy to navigate through lessons.
To make up for this, you’d have to manually add these buttons to every post and link them to the appropriate lessons.
The themes on both platforms are mobile responsive. Thus, your customers can view your content on mobile devices. However, Kajabi takes things a notch higher by providing a mobile app for iOS and Android users.
Student Learning & Engagement Tools
Every good course provider has a set of tools for engaging students and fostering better learning experiences.
An engagement feature on Kajabi is called Assessments. This tool allows you to create graded quizzes, assignments, and surveys for your courses.
Another tool you’d find useful is the Kajabi Community tool. This makes it possible to hold discussions and build a community around your product. The Community tool is also accessible on the mobile app, and users can get push notifications.
Other tools available on Kajabi include content locking and content dripping. These tools are used for locking access to content and releasing content on a schedule and based on automation triggers.
Kartra, on its part, comes with content dripping and course compliance tools for enforcing student participation. But that’s all it’s got.
There are no quizzing features, and you can’t include a community using the platform without a third-party app.
If you run a large membership or school that requires high-quality support, Kartra provides a tool called Helpdesk for that. This tool allows you to assist your customers through ticketing systems, live chats, and knowledge bases.
Which Does Course Creation & Memberships Better?
Having considered all the features related to course creation and memberships, it is easy to see that Kajabi is hands down the better opponent in this department.
This is simply because Kajabi is mainly an online course platform, and these features are right in their wheelhouse.
#4. Sales and Marketing Tools
Sales and marketing tools are essential for helping entrepreneurs generate income from their hard work. This section analyzes how Kajabi stacks up against Kartra in this regard and what both have to offer.
Product Pricing and Checkout Experience
For product pricing, Kajabi allows you to display your product prices using “Offers.” With Offers, you can create pricing for one-time payments, subscriptions, and even payment plans.
For subscriptions, you can choose to bill weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually. Kajabi also allows you to create free trials and even charge setup fees.
Kartra offers all the features found on Kajabi.
Additionally, it has a feature called Recurring Instalments. This allows you to combine recurring payment and payment plans into a more complex pricing structure.
It is used for payments that reoccur every year but are cleared in installments instead of one lump sum per year.
Kartra also allows you to charge shipping fees separately if you’re selling physical products. Karta automatically handles sales taxes for different regions in Europe, while Kajabi currently doesn’t.
For payment processing, Kajabi integrates with PayPal and Stripe for both one-time fees and recurring payments.
Kartra supports four payment gateways, including PayPal, Stripe, Authorize.net, and Braintree.
When it comes to checkout pages, Kajabi offers just one checkout page template. This template is highly customizable and is designed with conversion in mind. You can add videos, display product details, show testimonials, etc.
Kajabi also supports crucial features like abandoned cart, order bumps, and 1-click upsells. If their checkout pages are not your style, you can integrate with an online checkout platform like SamCart or ThriveCart.
Kartra, on the other hand, has much more to offer with its checkout experience. It has over 30 customizable checkout page templates.
Along with all the essential features covered by Kajabi, Kartra goes a notch further by allowing you to include downsells within your sales funnels.
Lead-Gen Tools
Kajabi and Kartra offer highly intuitive and flexible page builders with a vast library of design options capable of building great lead-generation pages.
Kartra has a more extensive library of design templates vs Kajabi. It has over 200 templates, compared to Kajabi, which has a little over 20 templates.
Moreover, Kartra comes with split testing capabilities. Split testing, also known as A/B testing, is used to determine which landing page performs better.
Kartra allows you to create opt-in forms that can even be embedded on external websites. You can also choose to display the form anytime someone tries to exit your site, or you can have them pop up after a few minutes.
That said, forms on Kajabi are quite basic, with no templates and minimal customizability. Kartra, in contrast, has a ton of templates for its forms and makes them very customizable.
Kajabi allows you to create marketing quizzes on your landing page for lead generation. Kartra doesn’t have this.
There’s also a feature known as Kartra Videos. Kartra allows you to collect leads using videos. Kajabi doesn’t have this feature yet.
Sales Funnel Capabilities
Kajabi comes with a highly intuitive Sales Pipeline Builder for building high converting sales funnels.
To make the process a cakewalk, Kajabi has a group of “Pipeline blueprints” meant to suit your different campaign objectives.
Once you select your desired blueprint, it automatically generates all pages, emails, and offers for that campaign. You can then tweak these pages to suit your taste.
Kajabi’s Pipeline Builder is powerful enough to help you build an entire sales funnel without leaving the builder at all.
Kartra, on the other hand, does not have a sales funnel builder like Kajabi. Thus, to create one for your campaign, you’d need to make your landing pages with the page builder, create your products, set up your email campaigns, and so on, all using individual Kartra tools.
This may not be quite a hassle for simple, two-step funnels meant for basic lead generation. But it does become a headache when you want to create complex funnels for more significant objectives.
Email Marketing Tools
Both Kajabi and Kartra allow you to run email marketing campaigns for your business. You can segment your email list, run broadcasts, set up autoresponders, and more.
Kajabi allows you to create automated email campaigns using the sequence builder. You can also define triggers for when someone should be added to or taken off your email sequence.
With Kajabi’s tagging feature, you can assign your contacts to lists based on the lead magnets or offers they’d signed up for, as well as the courses they completed and more.
Related: 19 Kajabi Email Template Examples
Kajabi’s Automations feature helps you automatically take specific actions based on certain triggers during the campaign.
For instance, when you get a lead through a lead magnet, the system automatically adds a tag to them and subscribes them to your email list.
When a lead purchases your product, the system adds a different tag and takes them off that specific sales campaign.
Vs Kajabi. Kartra has all the essential email marketing features Kajabi has and more.
For example, while Kajabi allows you to delay sending an email by days, Kartra enables you to delay emails by hours and days.
Kartra also has a “Split Step” functionality that allows you to create parallel paths in your emails based on specific conditions.
Kartra also comes with email templates as well as split testing functionality.
As for Kartra automation, you can create simple and complex automation.
A few popular Kartra automation include sending SMSs to your subscribers through Twilio and Plivo.
Affiliate Marketing & Other Tools
Kartra and Kajabi allow you to take advantage of affiliate marketing campaigns to make more sales for your products.
With Kajabi, you can add affiliates, generate affiliate links, set commissions, etc., for your affiliate program.
You can also track your affiliates’ performances from the admin dashboard and export payout reports for payment processing. For information on Kajabi’s official affiliate program, read this guide.
Kartra has more advanced affiliate marketing features, currently missing in Kajabi.
For instance, you can set a minimum sales threshold and even include instant PayPal payments with Kartra.
You can also collect and manage tax forms from your affiliates and lock their payment until they fill the form.
Plus, Kartra offers your affiliate marketers affiliate tracking IDs so they can track where their sales are coming from. A feature Kajabi doesn’t have.
When it boils down to the Kartra vs Kajabi affiliate management round, Karta wins hands down.
There are a few other marketing features we haven’t discussed.
One of them is Kajabi events. This allows you to set an event with a sequence of emails around it. This is handy for webinars, virtual summits, etc., which you can run, all in Kajabi.
Kartra doesn’t have a similar tool natively. Instead, it relies on third-party integrations such as WebinarJam to create events.
Another tool is Kartra Calendars, a complete scheduling tool that helps you set your availability, accept payment, manage appointments, etc. To accomplish this on Kajabi, you’d need to use third-party tools like Book Like A Boss.
3rd-Party Integrations
Both Kartra and Kajabi offer integrations to third-party apps to help you get more out of the platforms.
Kajabi comes natively integrated with email marketing, tracking pixels, and analytics tools.
For email marketing, Kajabi integrates natively with email marketing platforms like:
- ConvertKit,
- Active Campaign,
- AWeber,
- and Drip.
For Analytics and tracking, you get Google Analytics and Segment and Facebook Pixel.
Kartra doesn’t have any native integrations as Kajabi does. However, both platforms have access to Zapier, a tool that allows you to connect your account to any app of your choice.
Which Does Sales and Marketing Better?
In the Kartra vs Kajabi sales & marketing round, Kartra is better as a marketing platform and has more powerful features overall.
It has better email marketing and automation tools and has more capabilities with landing pages and checkout pages.
Kajabi does pack a punch as sales and marketing tools. Its visual Sales Pipeline Builder is still a sales funnel tool Kartra doesn’t have.
#5. Customer Support & Training
When it comes to customer support, Kajabi has the best system in place. The platform offers 24/7 live chat support along with email support to its customers.
On the contrary, Kartra only offers customer service through email support tickets. In general, Kartra’s customer service team is responsive, but nothing beats 24/7 live chat support.
Along with customer service systems, both platforms have created comprehensive knowledge bases with information on using their platforms and walk through common challenges.
They also own training portals, Kajabi University and Kartraverse Training Center, where you can get better educated on utilizing their systems.
Both Kartra and Kajabi have their own Facebook groups where users can interact and help each other solve problems.
Kajabi vs Karta Pricing Plans
Let’s consider the pricing plans available on both Kartra and Kajabi.
Editor’s Note: Kajabi introduced the Kickstarter plan, which now starts at $69/month – check it out here.
Kajabi pricing has four structures: The Kickstarter (NEW), Basic, Growth, and Pro Plans.
It charges 0% transaction fees on all plans, and all the main features are available across all three pricing plans. All plans are eligible for unlimited sales pages and marketing emails as well.
The first pricing plan, the Basic Plan, costs $149 per month ($119 per month when billed annually). It allows you to create up to 3 products and 3 Pipelines. You’re also limited to 10,000 contacts and 1,000 active members.
Higher up, we’ve got the Growth Plan, which happens to be the most popular plan on the platform. The Growth plan costs $199 per month ($159 per month when billed annually) and gives you access to 15 products and 15 Pipelines.
You also become eligible for 25,000 contacts and 10,000 active members. Furthermore, you’ll have access to advanced automation and affiliate program.
Next up is the Pro Plan, which costs $399 per month ($319 per month when billed annually). This plan offers 100 products and 100 Pipelines, along with 100,000 contacts and 20,000 active members.
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Kartra’s pricing structure is pretty similar to Kajabi’s pricing.
Starting at $99 per month, Kartra offers four pricing plans and charges no transaction fees on any of the plans.
All the features are the same across all pricing tiers. Each plan is only differentiated by the thresholds placed on the number of contacts, video hosting bandwidth, and the number of emails.
First on the list is the Kartra Starter Plan, which costs $99 per month ($79 per month on annual billing). The Starter Plan gives you access to 2,500 leads, 15,000 emails per month, 50GB video bandwidth, 100 pages, 20 products, 100 automations, and more.
Right after the Kartra Starter Plan, you get the Kartra Silver Plan, which costs $199 per month ($149 per month on annual billing). The Karta Silver Plan makes you eligible for 12,500 leads, 125,000 emails per month, 125GB bandwidth, along with unlimited pages, products, membership sites, and automations.
Next up is the Kartra Gold Plan, which costs $299 per month ($229 per month on annual billing). The Kartra Gold plan gives you access to everything on the Starter Plan plus 25,000 leads, 250,000 emails per month, and 5 custom domains.
The last and highest tier is the Kartra Platinum Plan, which costs $499 per month ($379 per month when billed annually). Everything on the other plans is included here. You still get 50,000 leads, 500,000 monthly emails, 400 GB bandwidth, and 10 custom domains.
One thing to note is that while Kartra appears to be more reasonably priced, the limited video bandwidth could be a turn-off if you have a high number of course or membership video uploads.
Kartra vs Kajabi Conclusion
If you’ve read up to this point, you’ve gotten a fair idea of which platform should work for you. But if you’re still not sure, here are our recommendations.
Choose Kajabi if:
- You’re focused on selling courses or hosting membership sites.
- You prefer unlimited video bandwidth for your content.
- You want a platform with good blogging capabilities.
- You prefer a platform with an efficient funnel builder.
- You prefer a platform with a mobile app your customers can use.
Choose Kartra if:
- You have a relatively lower budget.
- You sell physical products.
- You want a good affiliate management system.
- You’re more concerned about performing marketing tasks more effectively.
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