Today’s guide is a super-comprehensive Kajabi vs Teachable comparison. After reading it, you’ll have insight into which online course platform is best suited for you, depending on your experience and objectives as an online course creator.
Kajabi and Teachable are among the most prominent players in the online course industry, with a combined total of 83 million students so far. So it’s perfectly normal for an online course creator to compare the two thoroughly.
Most Teachable vs Kajabi comparisons get it wrong. They recommend which online course platform is best based on which is more intuitive, has better features, and ultimately more preferable, in their opinion, but this sort of comparison is not as helpful as you may think.
Here’s why:
Teachable and Kajabi look promising on the surface with the reputation they’ve already attained. However, both these platforms are different and designed for different target users.
It isn’t a question of which platform is better because both are powerful in their own rights. It is more about which of the two platforms is more suitable for your business’s needs.
This guide will evaluate each aspect of online course creation and marketing of both course platforms. You’ll get a full grasp of both platforms’ positives, negatives, and in-betweens.
And at the end of this article, I’ll make the decision easy for you based on your particular criteria.
Table of Contents
Kajabi vs. Teachable Summary Overview
The main difference between Kajabi and Teachable is that Kajabi is an all-in-one platform where you can host an entire online business, including a front-end website, courses, memberships, and digital products, while Teachable is a platform that focuses on creating and marketing online courses and coaching programs.
Let’s explore each platform’s core features, highlighting what they do well and where they fall short.
Sounds good? Let’s hop right into it!
What Are Kajabi and Teachable?
Kajabi and Teachable are online course platforms where you can create, publish, and market online courses.
They’re not ‘open’ online learning platforms like Udemy and Coursera. Thus they don’t subject you to the algorithms and rules of open marketplaces, nor do they meddle with your students’ data.
Both give you complete control of your strategies and processes, allowing you to manage and market your online courses as a brand.
They come loaded with tools that you can use to build your course websites, email marketing campaigns, and deliver profitable courses to your students.
Both platforms can host files such as videos, quizzes, PDFs, etc. You can also structure your hosted content into modules and lessons, market them, accept payments, deliver the courses through their course players, and engage with your students.
These features are not difficult to set up as everything is mostly drag and drop. You can set up a fully-fledged system without any coding skills.
All the technical stuff, such as hosting, security, interface, updates, etc., have already been handled by these platforms on the backend. Leaving you to focus on the things that matter, like creating and selling online courses.
That said, there are some fundamental dissimilarities between the two.
Kajabi allows you to create sell courses, memberships, and digital downloads (watch a demo here). And has further macro-capabilities such as creating a full-fledged website for your business, a simple/complex sales page, blogging, and email market to your contact list.
The main idea behind Kajabi is to have a platform where everything you need to create a successful online business is under one roof. It aims to replace ClickFunnels, WordPress, WooCommerce, MailChimp, Samcart, etc.
Going with Kajabi saves time and money because you don’t need to purchase other services or learn new skills to cater to your business needs.
On the flip side, Teachable is not an all-in-one platform. Instead, it puts its focus on helping you create engaging, helpful, and highly profitable online courses with its excellent sales funnel features.
Beyond courses, Teachable also lets you create and sell coaching programs.
Its marketing tools and customizability are not as vast as Kajabi’s, but this isn’t necessarily a weakness. It does an incredible job for experts who just want to sell courses and coaching programs online.
#1. Course Creation, Delivery, and Student Engagement
Course creation, delivery, and engagement are essential features of any online course platform.
In this round of our Kajabi vs Teachable comparison, we’ll take a close look at what both platforms have to offer regarding course creation, delivery, and engagement.
Course Structure and Content Uploading
For course building and structure, both platforms allow you to group your lessons into categories (sometimes referred to as modules). Your students see their lessons grouped into single modules, making it easy to follow through and learn.
Kajabi and Teachable allow you to host different types of files, such as videos, PDFs, plain text, audio, quizzes, etc., for your online courses.
For back-end video hosting, both platforms offer unlimited video hosting with Wistia, a video hosting site that provides adaptive streaming for uninterrupted playback.
Kajabi allows you to upload content and structure it into an online course under its course builder’s products section.
A course on Kajabi comes with three basic structures:
- Categories (Modules or Chapters)
- Posts (Lessons) and
- Subcategories
You can easily reorder the elements in your course by dragging them around. Kajabi boasts superior course structuring capabilities as you can nest subcategories under categories to give it a more organized feel.
Subcategories are particularly useful when you have a lot of content within your categories.
Too much content can make your course look too large and intimidating. But with a simple subcategory, you organize everything into smaller groups, making it easier for your students to follow through.
When it comes to course uploading, Kajabi comes with a bulk uploading feature, which allows you to upload multiple files at once.
It also allows you to upload content from the cloud-like Google Drive and Dropbox, making it easy to upload them to your lessons on the platform directly.
Upon clicking on a lesson title within your course page, you will be provided with options for developing that lesson. You can add a video or an assessment, include details for the lesson, enable/disable comments, etc.
Teachable does boast of a smooth bulk uploader, which gives you the option of uploading multiple contents at once when you don’t want to do that one by one.
If you have your files stored in Google Drive, Dropbox, etc., Teachable’s cloud import functionality allows you to directly upload your files.
In general, Teachable’s course builder is more user-friendly than Kajabi’s.
For instance, when you need to apply the same settings to multiple lessons, Teachable allows you to select the required lessons and apply your settings at once. With Kajabi, customizing appearance settings of one lessons apply them to all your lessons.
You can also select multiple lessons and delete them at once using Teachable. If you use Kajabi, you won’t be able to do that.
Teachable also has a drag-and-drop course structuring feature, but unlike Kajabi, it does not have a subcategory feature.
As you can see, Teachable is also more flexible in the type of content you add to individual lessons and how you arrange them.
For example, you can include a video and a quiz, embed a PDF, etc., to the same lesson, and display them in any order.
Kajabi’s course builder is not as flexible. You can either add a video or a quiz, but not both.
That said, both platforms come with very intuitive course builders. Kajabi allows you to structure your online courses efficiently, but Teachable is a bit more flexible.
Course Themes and Content Delivery
Content delivery is a big part of course platforms because students will get a quick perception of your course’s quality, and people are most likely to complete your course if it’s easy to consume your content.
Both platforms deliver your course content through their course players, and this is where both platforms differ.
Let’s start with Kajabi.
One of the most impressive things about Kajabi is that it offers over ten-course area themes so you can build upon a unique theme that resonates with the product you’re offering.
Whether you’re selling online courses, digital downloads, or memberships, there is a theme that fits your requirements.
The most loved theme on Kajabi is the Premier theme. This course theme has a simple yet elegant design that gives your online courses a premium vibe while offering your students one of the best user experience.
Another widely used course theme on Kajabi is the Momentum theme. This theme has a more traditional design, showing navigation on the left and course content on the right.
Teachable also comes with an intuitive course delivery system.
However, it comes with the traditional outlay that shows your content on the right side of the screen while the left side of the screen shows student progress and navigation options.
Teachable locks you to its default course player, and while it’s simple and easy to use, a little variety could be a game-changer.
Another impressive thing about Kajabi’s course player is that it is very customizable.
For example, you can display/hide the instructor’s bio or course progress, and you can even include a card within the sidebar to cross-sell other products.
To do any of that on Teachable, you’d need custom coding.
Both course players are mobile responsive. Thus your students can access your courses through a mobile web browser.
Both platforms also offer mobile apps. However, Teachable only provides mobile apps to iPhone users, while Kajabi serves Android and iPhone users.
Overall, Kajabi edges out Teachable in course delivery. It has the best course delivery. It is more flexible overall, elegant, and user-friendly than any course player available at the moment.
Content Locking & Dripping
Content locking and content dripping are advanced engagement features that top course platforms tend to offer.
Content locking locks your lessons and only makes them available when your students go through prerequisite lessons.
On the other hand, content dripping releases your content at a specific time or date after the student has enrolled in your course.
With Kajabi, you can set an assessment and even add a passing grade to your prerequisite lesson. Thus, a student has to ‘pass’ the assessment associated with the prerequisite lesson to access the following locked content.
Content locking works quite differently on Teachable.
It comes with an Enforce Lecture Order, which forces students to take lectures in a specific order. You can also make sure they pass a quiz before progressing by using its Enforce Graded Quiz Completion option.
Another exciting course compliance feature is the Enforce Video Watching functionality. This tool will only allow students access to the next lectures if they watch your videos to at least 90%.
When it comes to content dripping, both platforms work similarly.
With both platforms, you can set your content to be released when a student enrolls, or you can set them to be released at a specific date after the enrollment date.
Both platforms allow you to set automatic emails that get sent out to your students once the content gets ‘dripped.’
The only difference is that Kajabi allows you to customize the default time for releasing your content, while Teachable doesn’t give you that flexibility.
With that said, Kajabi beats Teachable on this bout with just a narrow margin, thanks to its customizability.
Kajabi Assessment vs Teachable Quizzes
Most course creators want to make sure that their students understand their lectures. One way of doing this is through assessments or quizzes.
Great course platforms offer these tools to help course creators gauge their students’ understanding of their lectures and further digest the lessons.
Kajabi lets you create quizzes and surveys for your students using its Assessment functionality.
Its Assessment lets you create different types of questions, including open-ended questions, multiple-choice questions, fill-in-the-blank statements, and you can even use images as questions.
You can also have your students upload files as they complete their assessments. Such files can include video, audio, PDF, etc.
For every pricing plan you choose, Kajabi automatically grades your students’ responses and passes them according to your selected passing grade.
Kajabi’s assessment features can even be used as one of your email marketing tools!
For example, you can automatically subscribe your students to an email list upon completion of your assessment.
You can even email them with the link to their test results. You can automatically send them emails any time your students complete an assessment.
Teachable, on its end, offers great quizzing features and also automatically grades your students’ answers. However, what you get with Teachable’s quiz feature depends on the pricing plan you’re on.
If you’re on Teachable’s lowest plan, you only get access to basic quizzing features without automatic grading. The higher plans allow you to grade quizzes, track scores, and set passing grades automatically.
Teachable only offers multiple-choice questions. Thus, you can’t be as flexible with the type of answers you want, and you can’t have students upload files to answer questions within the course.
Additionally, there are no advanced quizzing tools that allow you to import, reuse, and randomize questions.
When it comes to quizzing and assessments, Kajabi wins. Its tools are more flexible and elegant.
Student Community Discussions
Teachable and Kajabi allow you to add a default comment area to your lessons to foster your students’ engagement and interaction.
The comments area is cleanly arranged below the course content, and your student can ask questions or provide feedback in real-time.
Kajabi takes things a notch further by having a community forum feature. This feature allows you to create an exclusive group on your website where your members can interact with each other.
Within your community forum, members can take part in discussions or even start new ones. They’re also able to send private messages to other users, including the admin.
You can create topics to keep the community organized and set either topic or feeds to be displayed on your community homepage.
If you have an announcement or want a post to be on top of the community feed, you can simply pin it.
Ultimately, if you want to build a loyal, engaged community around your online course or school, the community feature is pretty useful.
At the moment, Teachable doesn’t have a dedicated tool for creating community forums. To do this on Teachable, you would need a third-party app like Mighty Networks.
However, this will require your students to go through another sign-up process, and it’s not the best experience.
Certificates of Completion
Certificates of completion are important because they don’t just give your courses a final professional touch and make your students feel rewarded for their efforts and even encourage them to come back for more of what your online business offers.
Kajabi does not offer certificates at the moment. To create certificates of completion for your students using Kajabi, you’d need a third-party solution such as Accredible, or Google Slides, which you would then automate with Zapier.
On the other hand, Teachable offers tools for creating elegant certificates of completion.
It allows you to add a certificate of completion template to your course so that anytime a student completes your course; it automatically generates a certificate for them.
Teachable currently has three professionally designed templates for certificates of completion. Additionally, you can modify most of the elements on the templates to suit your taste.
This round is a complete walkover for Teachable because while Kajabi overlooked this simple feature, Teachable took advantage of it.
Membership Automation
Kajabi offers an automation feature that allows you to automate tasks within your membership site.
Automation is used quite a lot in marketing, but Kajabi allows you to use this feature for student engagement.
For instance, if you have a student who has been inactive for a while, you can set up automated messages that would be sent out to them to know why they’ve been absent.
This feature comes in pretty handy if you run a membership site and bill your users regularly.
Additional examples include when a student fails an assessment, you can send them an automated email, pointing them where they can get the right answers.
Kajabi’s automation is a powerful tool and can be used creatively to enhance the member experience.
Teachable offers no membership automation. It appears that Kajabi might be the only platform out there offering this feature.
That said, Kajabi has an edge with its membership automation feature.
Course Reporting & Analytics
Both Teachable and Kajabi offer course reporting and analytics tools which help you track your students’ performance and progress. With these tools, you can track quiz scores, course completion rates, play rate, video engagement, sales analytics, etc.
With Kajabi, you can get course reports and analytics at the lecture level or student level.
The platform also allows you to track the performance of your videos. You can see how many times your students watch your videos and even know if they’re watching it to the end.
With Teachable, you can access reports at the course level, lecture level, and even student level.
Also, Teachable allows you to monitor the performance of all your videos on a single page, unlike Kajabi, which requires you to check your videos individually.
Teachable even gives you an aggregated report for the entire course, a feature that’s not available on Kajabi.
Teachable’s reporting tools are also more convenient. You can access all available reports on a single page on your dashboard, whereas, on Kajabi, you need to visit different areas on your dashboard to access different stats.
That said, Teachable has better course reporting tools than Kajabi as its reporting tools are more organized and user-friendly.
Which Does Course Creation Better?
In this section of our Teachable vs Kajabi comparison, we’ve covered all the essential aspects of course creation on both platforms.
Based on our analysis, Kajabi is the better competitor in terms of course creation.
Teachable did not go down without a good fight, though. It trumped Kajabi in a few areas, such as course completion and analytics.
Where Kajabi blew Teachable away is with its course delivery system. Kajabi offers over ten elegant, highly customizable course themes to its users. And, Kajabi has a mobile app for both iPhone and Android users.
Another impressive feature that makes Kajabi stand out is its Community forum, which lets you create a separate group where members can interact with each other.
Lastly, Kajabi’s Automations feature is an incredible tool that can supercharge your members’ engagement.
#2. Website Design and Customization
In 2024, every business owner needs a front-end website for their brand and a platform that allows them to build a back-end website for their course(s).
As a course creator looking to build a brand and sell courses, having both types of websites are assets to your online business.
So, how do they stack up against each other in this regard? First, let’s tackle their similarities.
Each platform offers you free hosting with an SSL certificate on every pricing plan. Thus, you wouldn’t need to buy a separate hosting plan or worry about security, bandwidth, storage, etc.
Furthermore, their teams handle all your updates, backup, maintenance, and all the techy stuff you might think of.
Both offer free subdomains on all plans (e.g., Johndoe.Teachable.com or Janedoe.myKajabi.com). If you want, you can also get a custom domain (Janedoe.com).
With all that said, let’s go a lot deeper and compare their features.
Site Themes
Originally, Kajabi had over ten original themes in its library. But, they’ve recently crafted new themes. Their old themes have been sent to its ‘Legacy Themes’ archive.
You’re allowed to use these archived themes. However, Kajabi has stopped updating them. Thus, it is advisable to use the “Streamlined Home,” “Kim,” “Carl,” or “Emilia” theme instead.
The Streamlined Home theme is one of the most common themes in Kajabi’s site library. All the new themes are super-flexible and can be used to build all types of websites.
If you use Kajabi, you will also be able to import and use custom themes on your website.
On the other hand, Teachable offers only one default theme for all its websites. It allows you to modify basic things such as logo, type font, site thumbnail, colors, etc.
In general, there isn’t much else you can do to customize your theme. Much less your entire site.
As far as advanced customizations go, both Teachable and Kajabi allow you to modify the theme code to add a more personalized touch to it.
However, you need to have coding knowledge and be on the most expensive Kajabi price option to access its code editor. A little much to add custom code if you ask me.
Kajabi is better for creators who want their own website. More specifically, a front-facing website for their brand and a back-end site for their courses.
Teachable can only create sites for courses, while Kajabi offers better website themes and design customizations for front-end and course websites.
Drag-And-Drop Page Builder
Kajabi offers an easy-to-use page builder that lets you fully customize your website. Its page builder is a highly visual, drag-and-drop tool that allows you to see the changes you make in real-time (i.e., a WYSIWYG builder).
There are over 40 pre-built sections in Kajabi’s page builder, making page building way easier.
You can create your page’s hero section with a background image or video, show a countdown timer, a pricing table, blog posts, and much more.
Every element on the page builder can have its colors, spacing, animation, etc., all modified to your brand. You can even choose to hide or show specific elements on mobile or desktop.
Teachable also has a drag-and-drop page builder for creating pages on your websites. Teachable’s page builder is super easy to use whether you’re starting from scratch or using one of their pre-built pages.
Teachable’s page builder comes with very low customizability. For example, you can’t add animations, modify padding, adjust column width settings, or hide/show specific desktop and mobile elements.
Overall, Kajabi’s page builder wins this Teachable vs Kajabi round and is more powerful, customizable, and ultimately more stylish.
Blogging Capabilities
Kajabi can create a fully-fledged blog for your content marketing needs. The platform enables you to optimize your blog for search engines, create categories for your posts, add an opt-in form, etc.
James Wedmore is one top course creators who hosts his blog on Kajabi.
With Teachable, blogging is quite basic, with minimal customizability. And they don’t seem to care about updating their blogging features anytime soon.
In summary, Kajabi’s blogging capability is better than Teachable’s. Still, even Kajabi is no match for a traditional blogging platform like WordPress.
White-Labeling
As online business owners who want to grow brand recognition, having a course platform’s company branding isn’t ideal.
Kajabi lets you entirely white-label your school. Thus, your course area and your websites will have no Kajabi branding around. However, this is not offered on the Basic plan as you have to be on the Growth plan to unlock this feature.
Teachable also allows you to white-label your school. But, while this may not be a big deal to some, the website checkout, login, and signup pages will contain a .teachable subdomain even if you remove their branding (which requires being on their Pro plan).
With that said, it is fair to say that Kajabi is better at white-labeling and removing their branding. It allows you to own your brand completely, and your custom domains stay the same on all pages.
Which Does Web Design & Customization Best?
In this section, we covered the tools offered by Kajabi & Teachable for website creation and customization.
Kajabi beats Teachable in this aspect decisively. This is because of the high customizability and stylishness of its page builders and site themes. Furthermore, Kajabi has better blogging features.
On the other hand, Teachable has no site themes, and its page builder is basic, giving you very minimal customizability (but gets the job done) – giving you little customization on the look and feel of your course.
#3. Sales and Marketing Tools
Modern course platforms offer sales and marketing tools to help course creators convert their target audience into customers and create successful online businesses.
Kajabi and Teachable are quite similar in terms of the marketing and sales tools they offer.
For instance, both allow you to bundle your courses, create coupons, set up recurring payments, create payment plans, build checkout pages, sales funnels, etc.
While their features are similar, the differences lie in their capabilities.
For instance, while Kajabi provides everything you need to launch your marketing campaigns without needing external 3rd-party services, Teachable gives you the essential features good enough to help you market your courses and process payments.
So, let’s explore these features.
Payment Processing Options and Payouts
Kajabi & Teachable are both natively integrated with PayPal and Stripe and allow your customers to pay using their PayPal accounts or credit cards.
With Kajabi, you can choose PayPal as a payment option and charge in any currency, even if you’re running a subscription-based program or a payment plan. This allows you to target a worldwide audience.
Every plan on Kajabi lets you to integrate directly with Stripe and PayPal. You’ll receive payments directly to your Stripe or PayPal accounts and handle payouts to affiliates and authors.
Overall, Kajabi’s payment processing and payout system are straightforward.
On the other hand, Teachable has a few more payment processing options:
- Teachable Payment
- Monthly Payment Gateway.
Teachable Payment processes all transactions using Stripe Express, allowing you to access payments daily, weekly, or monthly. However, you can only use this fast payout feature in the US, UK, or Canada.
If you’re outside the US, UK, or Canada, you’d have to use the Monthly Payment Gateway. The Monthly Payment Gateway allows Teachable’s users to receive payouts every 30 days with their PayPal accounts.
There is another handy feature called BackOffice on Teachable. BackOffice helps you automatically process authors and affiliate payouts and taxes and even lets you offer PayPal as a payment option for your students.
BackOffice, however, comes at a 2% transaction fee. If you’re okay with transaction fees, perhaps you could do with this nice payment automation feature.
Lastly, the Custom Payment Gateway option allows you to create a custom payment gateway using your Stripe and PayPal accounts. However, to get access to this feature, you’d need to be a Pro Plan user.
In general, Kajabi’s payment processor is preferable because it is straightforward and allows you to get your money faster.
Course Pricing Options
Both platforms let you price your courses in several ways. You can choose to roll with one-time fees, set recurring payments, or create payment plans.
Also, they both allow you to charge in multiple currencies and even offer multi-tiered pricing options.
Kajabi, however, comes with a few twists.
For example, you can set up recurring fees for weekly, monthly, and yearly payments, offer free trials of 1 to 90 days, and even charge a custom upfront payment.
Furthermore, Kajabi lets you set course expiry dates for courses within the one-time payment category and also includes a “Gift this Course” option in its pricing setup.
If you have a membership and want to create different pricing levels for different amounts of content, Kajabi also lets you do that.
Teachable’s pricing features are also impressive as they let you price your courses efficiently.
As for Tiered pricing, Teachable allows you to create course bundles and include pricing levels that correspond with different content amounts.
The only things lacking in its pricing feature are the ‘Gift this Course’ and course expiry options. Every other thing listed in Kajabi above is included in Teachable.
Overall, Kajabi does slightly better than Teachable, owing to the extra options it offers. But while these additional options are nice-to-haves, they’re not mission-critical for success.
EU VAT Support Handling
Quite a few platforms support automated tax handling, and here, we will see how Teachable and Kajabi stack up against each other in this aspect.
Kajabi does not support any form of automatic tax handling. To do this on the platform, you’d need a third-party application, like Quaderno or ThriveCart.
On the other hand, Teachable supports EU VAT handling for creators who have customers from Europe. During purchase, the system automatically adds the VAT value to the student’s invoice, so you don’t have to manually.
Teachable also lets you display the VAT on your sales pages and carts. That way, you become a VAT-compliant brand. Furthermore, if you use the Teachable Gateway, they’ll automatically payout the VATs to the respective authorities on your behalf.
With that said, Teachable outclasses Kajabi in this regard by taking advantage of a helpful feature that’s mostly overlooked.
Sales Pipeline Builder (Funnels and Landing Pages)
The Kajabi Pipeline builder is one of the most powerful features Kajabi has to offer. This tool lets you quickly build marketing funnels, such as a traditional sales funnel, without the need for funnel builders like ClicksFunnels or similar software.
It comes with different Pipeline templates which you can use for your many marketing objectives.
For example, if you’d like to create a lead magnet, you can select the Freebie template, which will enable Kajabi to automatically create landing pages (an opt-in page and a thank you page) for your funnel.
Suppose you’d like to use a free webinar lead magnet. In that case, you can select the Zoom Webinar template, which would automatically generate signup and confirmation pages for your webinar and even set up reminders for the event.
You can tweak the funnels you want and even add more levels to the pipeline.
Apart from sales funnels, Kajabi also lets you create a standalone landing page for your marketing objectives (lead generation, sales, etc.)
It comes with over 20 customizable landing page templates, which you can easily use to create high-converting landing pages.
Lastly, you can create opt-in forms that you can either embed on your website or simply use as popups.
Vs Kajabi, Teachable doesn’t have a pipeline building functionality. You can build sales funnels for your Teachable courses, but it’s not as streamlined as Kajabi.
Email Marketing Tools
Kajabi’s email marketing tools are quite robust. It doesn’t just let you send broadcast emails to users like most email marketing software but also enables you to create user segments and automated email sequences.
Kajabi competes with popular email marketing tools, like AWeber and ConvertKit, as it lets you completely automate your email marketing without needing external services.
Related:
For instance, you can automatically send a welcome email when new subscribers join your list and follow them up with sales emails and the like.
As soon as they complete a purchase, you can automatically segment them as customers and off the sales campaign.
Teachable offers basic email marketing features. It lets you send broadcast emails to your students and also segment them. However, you can’t automate your emails using Teachable.
That said, Kajabi is superior in email marketing functionality as it offers a complete package.
Third-Party Integrations
Third-party applications (aka. other marketing tools) help course creators perform functions that are beyond the scope of their chosen course platform.
Kajabi and Teachable support a wide variety of third-party applications.
For email marketing, Kajabi natively integrates with the following apps:
- AWeber
- Mailchimp
- Drip
- ConvertKit
- ActiveCampaign
For analytics and tracking, the platform natively integrates with:
- Segment
- Google Analytics and
- Facebook Pixel
Kajabi also integrates with Zapier, which allows you to connect any unlisted third-party application of your choice.
Teachable, on the other hand, has only two email marketing integrations: Mailchimp and ConvertKit.
For Analytics, it integrates with Google Analytics. It also has integrations with Zapier, SumoMe, and Segment.
That said, Kajabi is more plentiful with integrations because it creates several email marketing options, analytics options, and third-party tools.
Affiliate Marketing Capabilities
Running an affiliate program is an excellent way of getting more sales without doing more marketing. Both Kajabi and Teachable are impressive in this aspect as they let you run affiliate programs for your courses.
Kajabi’s affiliate management software allows you to create a separate signup page for affiliates (similar to their affiliate program), and you can choose to automatically or manually approve them once they sign up.
It also allows you to create unique affiliate links pointing to your checkout and sales pages and even choose to display the links on their affiliate profiles.
Kajabi affiliates cookies last for 30 days, and this cannot be adjusted.
Teachable, on the other hand, is less restrictive. However, before anybody signs up as an affiliate, they’d have to sign up as students first, then you can manually approve them.
You can’t create a separate signup page or automatically approve signups.
Teachable does well with its cookies as it allows you to adjust your affiliate cookie’s duration and keep it for as long as you want.
Teachable comes with a basic reporting functionality, and you cannot compare your affiliates’ performances and pick out top-performers on a single dashboard. You’d have to export the data to get access to this information.
Kajabi’s affiliate marketing tool is a bit more robust, but its limitation on cookie duration could hamper an affiliate’s ability to track customers and make better marketing decisions.
On the contrary, Teachable takes advantage of this by giving you the freedom to customize your cookie duration.
With that said, Teachable wins this bout for overall efficiency.
Which Does Sales and Marketing Best?
In this section, we ran through the core sales and marketing features available on both platforms.
As you might’ve already seen, Kajabi goes all out, including as many features as possible, just like any all-in-one platform should do.
Teachable focuses on maximizing the basics, providing the essential tools you’d need to sell your courses with minimal extras.
With that said, I think that Kajabi is superior to Teachable in terms of sales and marketing features. Its sales pipeline builder and automation tools make selling courses online fun and simple. No other top course platform offers these features currently.
This doesn’t discredit Teachable in any way as it gives you everything you need to create a course and sell it effectively too, but with fewer bells and whistles.
Teachable outplays Kajabi when it comes to affiliate marketing and automatic tax handling.
This Kajabi vs Teachable round can be seen as a draw and comes down to what you’re looking for in a course platform.
#4. Customer Support and Training
Both Kajabi and Teachable offer customer support and training to their users, and they do so in a strikingly similar way.
They both offer email and live chat support, and they also have standard knowledge bases where you can find answers to common questions.
Kajabi provides around-the-clock email support to users on all plans.
But only users on Growth and Pro plans have access to 24/7 Live Chat. Basic Plan users also get chat support but only during working days from 6 am to 5 pm Pacific Time (PST). You can find more details on Kajabi’s customer service here.
Teachable, on the other hand, boasts of an award-winning customer support team. The support team is accessible 24/7 via email chat for all plans. The live chat feature is only available on Professional Plan and above.
Another thing to note is that the live chat support is only available on working days from 10 am to 5 pm Eastern Time (EST).
While Teachable’s support team has won an award, many people have confirmed that Kajabi’s support team is more responsive.
Also, the fact that Kajabi offers the chat feature to users on all plans and keeps it 24/7 on its Growth and Pro Plans gives it an edge here.
With that said, Kajabi is the better competitor owing to its responsiveness and more accessible chat feature.
#5. Teachable vs Kajabi Pricing
It all boils down to costs. This is perhaps the biggest deciding factor for many of our Kajabi vs Teachable article readers.
There are four Kajabi pricing plans: the Kickstarter Plan, the Basic Plan, the Growth Plan, and the Pro Plan.
Editor’s Note: Kajabi introduced the Kickstarter plan, which now starts at $69/month – check it out here.
On every plan, you’ll get unlimited bandwidth, unlimited video storage, zero transaction fees, and access to Kajabi University.
The lowest plan, Basic, costs $149 per month and gives you access to three products, three pipelines, 10,000 contacts, and 1000 active members.
A step above is the Growth Plan, which costs $199 per month. It gives you access to 15 products, 15 pipelines, 25,000 contacts, and 10,000 active members.
Pro, the final plan costs $199 per month and gives you access to 100 products, 100 pipelines, 100,000 contacts, and 20,000 active members.
Kajabi doesn’t offer a free plan. They usually offer a 14-day free trial, but you double the free trial if you join the 28-Day #KajabiHero Challenge (more details here).
If you’d like to dive deeper into Kajabi Pricing, please refer to their pricing page:
Teachable pricing is a little different in that it’s cheaper and lets you create unlimited courses and have unlimited students.
Teachable has three pricing plans: Basic Plan, Pro Plan, and Business Plan.
Teachable used to have a free plan with transaction fees, but it has since scrapped that and replaced it with a 14-day free trial.
Update: You can now create your first course completely free. Learn more here.
The Basic Plan costs $39 per month. It gives you access to two admin users, content dripping, and integrated email marketing, among others. Note, however, that it comes with transaction fees, 5% for every transaction.
The Professional Plan costs $119 per month and includes no transaction fees.
It stands out as Teachable’s most popular plan because this is where you get some of the essential features on Teachable, including graded quizzes, an unbranded website, course completion certificates, and an affiliate program for your courses, among others.
There is also the Business Plan, which costs $299 per month. This is where you get 100% of all the features Teachable has to offer. It gives you access to 20 admin users, bulk student enrollment, advanced theme customization, etc.
Teachable uses the Pay-As-You-Grow pricing model, enabling you to start with the Basic plan and then upgrade as you get more successful.
You can visit the Teachable pricing page here to see all the paid plans:
=> Visit Teachable.com/pricing
With that said, you’d find that Teachable pricing is more beginner-friendly than Kajabi’s pricing.
But if you consider that Kajabi is an all-in-one platform, you’d see that the pricing is reasonable.
That said, from a pricing standpoint, Teachable has more to offer to course creators at a low price than Kajabi.
Kajabi vs Teachable – Final Recommendations
At this point in our Kajabi vs Teachable comparison, we’ve seen and understood what each platform has to offer.
If you weigh their features and prices against your business objectives, you should know which is best for you.
However, if you’re undecided, here are our final recommendations based on different common scenarios.
Choose Kajabi If:
- You’re not only Planning to Sell Courses.
If you’d like to create a membership site, sell digital downloads, build a front-end website for your business, then Kajabi is a better choice.
Kajabi offers a suite of highly customizable themes suitable for running such businesses. It also lets you offer PayPal as a payment option for recurring fees and even lets you create a community forum to support the membership.
- You Want to Have Every Tool You Need on One Platform
With Kajabi, you wouldn’t need a separate blog, a funnel builder, or a content management system to grow your online business. You only pay for one platform and get all the tools needed to succeed.
- Budget does not sway you.
Judging by features, Kajabi is a better platform than Teachable, but this comes at a relatively steep price. If the price does not sway you, then, by all means, go for it as Kajabi prices are justifiable!
Choose Teachable If:
- You Want to Focus on Selling Your Online Courses.
Many Teachable features are basic, but it generally works great for people who just want to run online schools.
It allows you to add authors and even pay them automatically. If you’re interested in coaching, Teachable also allows you to offer a coaching service, which is a new feature.
- You’re on a Budget.
Mind you; Teachable is not ‘cheap,’ it is just priced a lot lower than Kajabi. Also, if you’re just starting your first online course business, Teachable’s Pay-as-you-Grow model will be perfect for you.
- You Don’t Mind Learning and using External Services.
Owing to its marketing limitations, if you’re using Teachable, you would, at some point, need to use external services to build your email list, run campaigns, build a front-end website, and automated tasks within your school.
If you’re comfortable doing that, then you should stick to Teachable.
This brings us to the end of our Kajabi vs Teachable comparison! I hope you found this insightful. Be sure to take your time to understand both the platforms and what they both have to offer, and also consider your budget before making your final decision. Cheers!
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