If you are trying to grow a successful online course business, you’re going to need the right tools for the job.
Kajabi and LearnDash are both popular online course creation platforms that you can use to build, market, and sell online courses — but which is best?
That’s what we’re going to be finding out in this in-depth comparison of Kajabi vs LearnDash.
We’ll be trying out both platforms, revealing what they have in common and what their differences are, and reviewing all their main features.
We’ll also be comparing their pricing, customer support, and integrations in order to figure out which offers the best value for money.
By the end of this post, you’ll know which online course tool is the best choice for your business. Let’s start with an overview of each company.
Table of Contents
Kajabi Versus LearnDash Overview
Kajabi is an all-in-one online course creation platform and one of the most popular tools in the eLearning industry.
Launched in 2010, Kajabi can help you to create, manage and market everything from online courses to podcasts, membership sites, and more.
Kajabi is extremely popular with businesses that want flexibility and advanced functionality when it comes to course creation.
LearnDash, on the other hand, is a learning management system for WordPress. This WordPress plugin can help you to build e-learning materials and deploy them on your existing WordPress site.
Although it doesn’t offer the same all-in-one features that Kajabi does, it provides an affordable and useful option for WordPress users looking to add e-learning elements to their site.
Let’s take a deeper look at some of the features and key differences between Kajabi and LearnDash to establish which tool is better and what type of businesses each one is suitable for.
Key Differences Between Kajabi and LearnDash
At their core, both Kajabi and LearnDash are designed to help you create and sell online courses.
However, each tool takes a different approach to course creation, and therefore, there are tons of differences that are worth noting. Here are some of the most important differences between Kajabi and LearnDash.
LearnDash is a WordPress Plugin; While Kajabi Is An All-In-One Tool
As we mentioned above, the biggest difference between Kajabi and LearnDash is that LearnDash is a WordPress plugin, and Kajabi is an all-in-one tool.
Kajabi can be used to manage every step in the course creation process, from website building to managing sales and marketing funnels.
LearnDash focuses solely on course creation for WordPress sites and can be integrated with the rest of your WordPress tool stack to help you manage and market your courses.
LearnDash Is More Affordable
The price difference between LearnDash and Kajabi is striking.
Kajabi plans start from $119/month, whereas you can purchase the LearnDash plugin for a whole year for as little as $199.
Note: Learn how to save 20% on your Kajabi subscription.
Kajabi Has More Marketing Tools
Kajabi is a true all-in-one tool and can be used to market your courses long after they have been launched.
The platform is complete with a wide range of marketing tools and unique funnel-building options.
Kajabi vs LearnDash Features Compared
Now we have a rough idea of what Kajabi and LearnDash have to offer, let’s compare some key features in-depth, starting with the most important one…
Course Creation Tools
Both LearnDash and Kajabi offer powerful course creation solutions that allow you to build and deliver complex courses. Let’s start with the things they both have in common.
Both support three different course ‘levels’ to help make it easier to structure your courses.
With Kajabi, you can split courses segmented into categories, subcategories, and posts. With LearnDash, you can divide them into sections, lessons, and topics.
Many other course builders only let you split courses into two levels (Podia, we’re looking at you), but having that extra level is helpful when building out larger courses.
LearnDash and Kajabi also both support many different content formats like video, text, audio, PDFs and more—and both allow for unlimited hosting of your course materials
The main difference between them is the course builder interface itself.
Kajabi provides its own dedicated course builder interface, which is designed to be as easy to use as possible.
LearnDash, on the other hand, integrates with WordPress, so course creation takes place inside the WordPress page editor.
If you’re comfortable using WordPress, you should find the block-building format intuitive enough, but on the whole, we still found Kajabi’s visual interface easier to work with.
Another area Kajabi stood out in is its Product Blueprints, which provide pre-designed course templates for you to use, so you don’t have to start from scratch each time.
LearnDash doesn’t provide templates out of the box, so the course creation process takes longer. However, while it might not be as easy to use, it offers unparalleled control and flexibility.
Student Engagement Tools
LearnDash wins when it comes to student engagement. With LearnDash, you have a wealth of tools at your disposal to keep students interested in their lessons.
For example, the LearnDash Achievements add-on allows you to add gamification to your courses and provide them with positive reinforcement after they complete certain tasks.
You can give out badges and certificates to encourage course progression, set up a point system, and implement a leaderboard to create a healthy sense of competition between students.
LearnDash also claims to offer ‘the most powerful quizzing engine in the industry—and they’re probably right.
You can create really engaging quizzes with eight different types of questions (and add any type of media) to test your students. You can also set up graduation levels, automation sequences, and more.
Kajabi also offers quizzes and assessments, but they’re pretty limited compared to LearnDash.
It’s also more difficult to implement badges and certificates without integrating Kajabi with a third-party plugin like Accredible.
Marketing Tools
Kajabi wins when it comes to marketing. As an all-in-one platform, it comes with a bunch of features to help you market your online courses.
This includes a built-in email marketing solution that lets you build stunning emails using high-converting templates, a powerful visual email editor, a drag-and-drop landing page builder, A/B testing tools, and a pipeline builder.
The pipeline builder is particularly impressive and allows you to set up whole sales funnels and automate your customer journeys.
LearnDash can’t really compete with Kajabi in the marketing category—but it isn’t supposed to.
It’s not an all-in-one platform; it’s a learning management system. The only marketing features it comes with out of the box are email notifications and drip content.
For anything else, you’ll need to use third-party integrations. Fortunately, LearnDash is built on WordPress, so there are tons of marketing plugins you can install in a few clicks.
Website Building Tools
Building a website with Kajabi is super easy as they provide site themes. They have an intuitive point and click builder that can help you create professional web designs in just a few minutes.
You don’t need to have any previous web design skills to build a website with Kajabi, so it’s the perfect choice for beginners. Here are a few landing page examples.
If you want to customize your website a little more, then you can use the code editor feature to make changes to the themes provided by Kajabi. However, this feature is only included in the Pro plan.
LearnDash doesn’t provide a website builder, but it integrates with your WordPress theme.
So if you’re using a theme like Divi, for example, you can use Divi Builder to build your website pages. LearnDash also includes a free demo site template with all plans.
Themes
Kajabi uses themes as the basis of its website and course builder. To get started, you choose a theme, or ‘Blueprint,’ and then customize it to create your desired site.
You can choose from a wide array of new themes, plus legacy themes, which the company is no longer updating but can still be used.
You can also import themes from outside Kajabi if you wish.
Editing the layout of your template is super-easy, and you can customize all your font settings and colors in one easy-to-use dashboard.
LearnDash, on the other hand, doesn’t come with any themes; however, it will integrate easily with popular WordPress themes like Astra, Divi, and OceanWP.
Overall, Kajabi is a good choice if you want premium themes included in the price of your tool.
With LearnDash, you’ll have to purchase a WordPress theme if you don’t want to use a free option.
Integrations
Kajabi can be used right out of the box, and additional integrations aren’t really necessary to get started. However, if you want to hook up other tools from your stack, you have many options.
Kajabi easily integrates with popular marketing tools, including ConvertKit, MailChimp, Aweber, and Google Analytics.
It also integrates with Zapier, which means you can integrate with thousands of other tools that also support Zapier.
As LearnDash is a plugin and not an all-in-one tool, you’ll need to integrate a range of other marketing tools to track and market your online courses.
LearnDash offers add-ons for popular sales and payment gateways apps like WooCommerce and Stripe.
You can also add on Zapier integration. Some of the add-ons are free, but some are premium and require an additional payment.
Be sure to check through the add-ons and find out how much each one costs before you make your final purchase of the plugin.
Customer Support
When it comes to support, Kajabi provides a lot of different options. First off, they offer 24/7 chat support for customers experiencing issues.
In addition to this, they have an in-depth knowledge center known as Kajabi University that can help you learn more about the software and what it does.
Kajabi University includes tons of in-depth video tutorials, blogs, and more that can help you make the most of the product and troubleshoot issues.
Kajabi also has a very active community of users, and they regularly host webinars and in-person events. They even hold a yearly impact summit for users.
Compared to Kajabi, LearnDash’s support options are a little more basic but still quite useful.
They offer help desk ticket support, as well as resources like blogs, webinars, and videos. LearnDash also has an active Facebook group that you can use to interact with other users and get support and help.
As you can see, Kajabi’s support offerings are much more extensive, but LearnDash also provides a lot of useful resources and support options.
Pricing
Kajabi and LearnDash differ greatly in price, and LearnDash is a lot more affordable.
Here’s a breakdown of LearnDash’s pricing plans and what’s included in each:
- Basic Plan ($199/year) – 1 site license, unlimited courses, unlimited users, course content protection, drip-feed lessons, advanced quizzing, certificates & badges, course forums, email notifications, free integrations, 1-year support and updates, demo site template.
- Plus Package ($229/year) – Up to 10 site licenses, unlimited courses, unlimited users, course content protection, drip-feed lessons, advanced quizzing, certificates & badges, course forums, email notifications, free integrations, 1-year support and updates, demo site template and ProPanel included.
- Pro Package ($369/year) – Up to 25 site licenses, unlimited courses, unlimited users, course content protection, drip-feed lessons, advanced quizzing, certificates & badges, course forums, email notifications, free integrations, 1-year support, and updates, demo site template, and ProPanel included.
The main difference between the pricing plans is how many site licenses are included. If you only need to create courses for 1 site, the Basic Plan may suit you.
The other key difference is that only the Pro and Plus plans include access to the LearnDash Pro Panel.
Pro Panel provides you analytics and reporting data about your courses and students. If this is something you need, then it’s worth choosing one of the more expensive plans.
With Kajabi, there are also 3 plans to choose from. Here’s what’s included in each:
- Basic (Starts from $119/month billed annually) – 3 products, 3 pipelines, unlimited landing pages, unlimited marketing emails,10,000 contacts, 1,000 active members, 1 website, 1 admin user, Kajabi University, 0% Transaction Fee, webinars, and events, ready to use templates, assessments (quizzes and surveys), 1 customer success activation call, chat support and automation.
- Growth (Starts from $159/month billed annually) – 15 products, 15 pipelines, unlimited landing pages, unlimited marketing emails,25,000 contacts, 10,000 active members, 1 website, 10 admin users, Kajabi University, 0% Transaction Fee, webinars, and events, ready to use templates, assessments (quizzes and surveys), 1 customer success activation call, 24/7 chat support, advanced automations, ability to remove Kajabi branding and affiliate program tools.
- Pro (Starts from $319/month billed annually) – 100 products, 100 pipelines, unlimited landing pages, unlimited marketing emails,100,000 contacts, 20,000 active members, 3 websites, 25 admin users, Kajabi University, 0% Transaction Fee, webinars, and events, ready to use templates, assessments (quizzes and surveys), 1 customer success activation call, 24/7 chat support, advanced automations, ability to remove Kajabi branding, affiliate program tools and code editor
Editor’s Note: Kajabi introduced the Kickstarter plan, which now starts at $69/month – check it out here.
Although there is a lot included with the Kajabi packages, there are a lot of limitations too.
For example, you can only create up to 3 digital products with the most basic package. This includes courses, podcasts, and membership sites.
There are also limits to the number of sites, users, and members you can have, which can be quite problematic when you’re trying to scale.
Also, you can only remove Kajabi branding from your products with the Growth and Pro plans.
Overall, LearnDash is the most affordable option if you’re simply looking to build online courses and you already have a website.
If you need all the extra functions that Kajabi offers, it might be worth the money, but it might be out of the price range of many small businesses and solopreneurs.
LearnDash vs Kajabi – Which Tool is Better?
Although Kajabi and LearnDash are fantastic online course platforms, they’re very different, so choosing which one is better is no easy feat. It all depends on what your business needs.
If you’re planning on selling online courses through your existing WordPress site, then LearnDash is the best choice. It’s the most affordable WordPress plugin for creating courses.
However, if you’re looking to start an online course/digital products business from the ground up and need to build a new website and market your products, then Kajabi is your best option.
It has a higher price tag but comes with all the tools you need to create, market, and sell courses online.
The good news is that Kajabi offers a free trial up to 30 days, so if you still can’t decide between Kajabi vs. LearnDash, why not try Kajabi out for yourself?
If you’re still not convinced it’s worth the money after the 14 days are up, then LearnDash may be the right choice for you.
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