LifterLMS vs Kajabi (2024): Plugin vs. Platform Comparison

Creating a digital course has been more accessible than ever, thanks to the e-learning platforms available today.

However, because of the sheer number of online software, finding and researching the best one can be quite challenging.

To help you decide, we’ve created an ultimate comparison of two of the most comprehensive course platforms: LifterLMS and Kajabi.

If you’ve been stuck choosing between these two online learning systems, this article is for you.

What is LifterLMS?

LifterLMS is a WordPress site plugin that helps you create and sell courses. With this powerful learning management system (LMS), you can turn your existing WordPress website into a complete eLearning platform.

Although it’s a plugin, it gives you much control and flexibility over your courses and digital products.

Who is it for?

• Web developers and IT professionals who want complete control over their course platform;
• eLearning businesses that need a comprehensive and robust solution on top of their WordPress website;
• Online course creators who are looking for an LMS plugin with many advanced course features;

What is Kajabi?

Kajabi is a popular all-in-one platform that lets you produce, promote, and deliver courses. With Kajabi, you can quickly turn your ideas and skills into digital products or services.

In addition, it has complete CRM and marketing features that allows you to build a solid business from scratch.

Who is it for?

• Users who don’t have any technical skills and want a platform that has a minimal learning curve;
• Busy course creators and entrepreneurs who don’t have time to learn design and coding;
• Businesses who wish to use an all-in-one solution, including web hosting, email campaigns, sales, checkout carts, etc.;

LifterLMS vs. Kajabi: Key Differences at a Glance

To give you a better overview of the LifterLMS and Kajabi, here are three significant differences:

• LifterLMS is a plugin, while Kajabi is a standalone course platform.
• Kajabi offers monthly and yearly billing, while LifterLMS only provides annual plans.
• LifterLMS has more advanced tools in course creation, while Kajabi offers better features for running an online business.

Pricing

Lifter LMS

Lifter LMS offers individual purchases and two bundle options:

• Individual Add-Ons – Starts with $120/year
• Universe Bundle – $360/ year
• Infinity Bundle – $1200/year

The plugin is free, so you can download and create unlimited courses without buying anything. However, it lacks the necessary features to create a solid digital product.

If you’re someone who values flexibility and wants to choose only the features you need, the a la carte option is for you. Depending on your preferred tool, you must pay $120/year or $240/year.

If you want to save money and get a better deal, this WordPress plugin provides Universe Bundle and Infinity Bundle.

The Universe Bundle is their most popular plan, and you’ll get a decent amount of add-ons and integrations for only $360/year.

With this bundle, you can:

• Design your LMS to match your WordPress theme
• Set up a checkout cart and receive payments via credit card or PayPal
• Connect your LMS with email marketing and CRM software to better engage with your students

For more advanced features and better customer support, you can go for the Infinity Bundle.

This bundle gives you access to weekly mastermind sessions, a private FB group, and up to three tech supports.

You’ll also get all features under Universe Bundle plus additional ones that will make your offer more engaging for your students. That includes:

• manual grading for quizzes and assignments
• private community and coaching features
• group enrollment option and management

LifterLMS bundles are pretty jampacked, and they are cheaper compared to Kajabi’s. However, they don’t have a monthly payment option, so you’ll need to pay upfront for the whole year.

Kajabi

The following are Kajabi’s monthly pricing plans.

Kajabi’s pricing plans are:

• Kickstarter – $69/month (New)
• Basic – $149/month
• Growth – $199/month
• Pro – $399/month

Unlike LifterLMS, you’ll get all the necessary tools for each plan. That includes:

• Web hosting and design
• Unlimited landing pages and emails
• Payment integrations
• Templates, themes, and blueprints for digital products and pages
• Unlimited quizzes, assessments, and forms for your students
• Basic automation
• Chat support and access to Kajabi University
• Welcome call and check-in call with a Kajabi expert

You don’t need to pay extra for all of these.

Additionally, you can opt for monthly or annual payments. You’ll get a 20% discount if you choose the latter option.

The difference between the three plans is the limitations. That includes the number of products, sales funnels, contacts, and websites you can create.

Although Kajabi doesn’t have a free version, it offers a 14-day free trial. So, you can try out the features before deciding whether to continue using them.

User Interface

One of the main worries of most course creators is the learning curve. They don’t want to spend days or weeks trying to understand how the platform works.

LifterLMS

LifterLMS offers a setup wizard that lets you create the essential pages by simply answering the plugin’s questions.

You can skip it if you want full control of your process. However, you’ll need to set all things up manually.

Once you install the plugin, all the features will show inside your WordPress dashboard. They are organized in tabs, so you won’t have a hard time looking for them.

The platform design is simple and basic, too. It’s easy to see which buttons to click or options to select.

Lifter LMS will only be confusing if you don’t have any prior experience using WordPress. Because it’s an exclusive plugin, you need to be familiar with the basics of WordPress before you can fully utilize its features.

Kajabi

Kajabi, on the other hand, has a very modern interface. The first thing you’ll see is your dashboard which looks more like a website than an online course platform.

What makes Kajabi unique is even without going through the tutorials, you can easily find your way around the platform.

Since its course, web, sales, and marketing features are in one place, you don’t need to learn about other software to build something good from it.

The navigation is easy, too. You can find all the features you need on the left-hand side panel. And there’s a search bar on top so you can go directly to the element you want to use.

LifterLMS vs Kajabi: Course Builder

LifterLMS and Kajabi are both great course builders. You don’t need any coding or design skills. Additionally, you can add sections and lessons in just a few clicks.

They also provide the drag-and-drop course editor. So, moving course elements around is pretty basic.

These two give you full control over how many chapters and content you want to add to each course. There’s no limit on the knowledge you can impart to your students.

Some other similarities between these two tools are:

• Access to drip content
• Allow the usage of multimedia content such as audio, image, video, texts, and files for digital downloads
• Enable a section on courses where students can ask questions or post comments

Although they are the same in most parts, there are some key differences you should know about.

LifterLMS allows importing and exporting courses, so migrating from one platform to another is easy.

For example, if you’re using LearnDash and want to switch to LifterLMS, you can export your course and import it to this site plugin in a few seconds.

This feature isn’t available on Kajabi. So you’ll need to transfer everything manually. In addition to that, you can create unlimited courses with LifterLMS.

In Kajabi, you can only make three courses with the Basic plan, 15 for the Growth plan, and 100 courses with the Pro plan. But, you can still create a draft of the course.

That’s why LifterLMS is much more ideal for course creators and businesses who plan to build a course empire.

On the other hand, Kajabi provides blueprints for different courses. They shorten the time needed to create a course by simply giving a course template that’s easy to follow.

For LifterLMS, you’ll need to think of the course structure and layout on your own. So if you’re not confident with your course-building skills, Kajabi can be a better option.

Membership Site and Other Digital Products

Another great thing about LifterLMS and Kajabi is that they are not limited to online courses. You can also offer other digital products such as:

• Membership sites. A membership site is a fantastic way to get recurring income. You can offer exclusive content like videos or digital downloads and then charge members a monthly or yearly fee.
• Community access. An exclusive community is an excellent value-add for course members. This is where they can interact with fellow students, get support, and discuss course-related topics.
• Coaching programs. You can also use LifterLMS and Kajabi to sell 1-on-1 or group coaching programs. They are ideal for course creators or coaches who want to offer more personalized support to their students.
• Course bundles. You can package different courses and sell them at a discounted price. They are a great way to increase your sales and create irresistible deals.

The process is slightly different, but they are both solid when creating and launching other online products.

For example, if you make a membership site inside LifterLMS, everything connected to it is visible inside the membership editor. That includes the sales page, student management dashboard, and the payment and plan options.

This is great if you’re someone who values convenience over anything else. However, it might feel a little congested for others.

Kajabi, on the other hand, categorizes and provides tabs for each related setting. So it looks cleaner and more organized.

You’ll only see your course outline when you open your membership site dashboard. You won’t be bombarded with other stuff.

Then if you need to customize your theme, change your pricing options, or manage your members, you can simply click the tabs below your membership title.

This makes it easier for course creators to focus on one task at a time without feeling overwhelmed.

Another advantage of using Kajabi is offering coaching programs and community access to any plans.

If you want to do the same for LifterLMS, you need to buy the Social Learning (community) and the Private Areas (coaching) features as add-ons or go for the Infinity Bundle.

However, LifterLMS also has the edge over Kajabi regarding advanced enrollment features.

This WordPress plugin allows bulk course enrollment, so you can easily add existing students or members to your new course in one go.

Additionally, you can automatically enroll someone who registers or signs up for a form on your website. There’s a third-party app needed for this, but this feature is handy.

Web Design

Having a beautiful and unified web design is vital for course creators. It represents your brand and reflects how professional you are.

Both LifterLMS and Kajabi offer themes you can use for your pages, course, and whole website.

The difference is that Kajabi provides a great variety of built-in and customizable templates. Since it’s an all-in-one platform, you don’t need to install any third-party tool or pay extra money.

Additionally, Kajabi allows you to upload your own theme, so you get complete freedom when it comes to customization.

With Kajabi, you can use different themes for your website, landing pages, and digital products.

For example, you chose “Kim” as your site theme. This theme will apply to basic pages like home, about, contact, etc.

However, when you create your landing page, Kajabi will give you a new selection of templates.

Then, you can select and customize another theme for your digital products, such as your course or membership site.

LifterLMS, on the other hand, doesn’t have its own templates, but there are many WordPress themes you can integrate with it. They are more customizable yet might require some design skills.

Some of the plugins compatible with LifterLMS are:

• Astra
• OceanWP
• Ventura
• LaunchPad
• ConsultPress

Your chosen theme will apply to your whole WordPress site and courses. It’s great because you’ll have a consistent look throughout your website.

However, you can’t change the course theme without changing your WordPress theme.

So if you want more freedom and flexibility regarding course design, Kajabi is the one for you.

The learning curve will also depend on the plugin you choose, so it might be steeper for some course creators.

And although some of them are free, like Astra and Ocean WP, you’ll need to subscribe to their plans to get full access to all the features and customization.

Student’s Learning Experience

Online learning is very different from traditional face-to-face learning in a classroom.

Although it’s more accessible, keeping students engaged and ensuring they learn the course materials is harder.

That’s why course builders need features that support and enhance the students’ learning experience.

LifterLMS and Kajabi provide course creators with progress tracking, quizzes, and assignment features.

With course progress tracking, you can see where your student is at in the course. It helps you identify whether they are struggling with certain concepts and need more support.

The quizzes and assignment feature allows you to test your students’ understanding. It’s a great way to measure whether your materials are effective or not.

In most parts, these two are the same. However, LifterLMS offers more advanced features than Kajabi.

For example, with LifterLMS, you can create picture choices for quizzes and check the score of a group of students.

You can create multiple choices, essay, true or false, and upload your file on Kajabi, but you can only provide text choices.

Besides advanced quizzes, LifterLMS lets your students see their progress on the front-end.

Additionally, you can create certificates and give badges to your students.

These two features are excellent for increasing transparency and student motivation.

But here’s the catch. If you want graphic badges and access to the advanced quizzes features, you’ll need to get the Infinity Bundle. That means these great tools are only available for those course creators ready to invest more money.

On the other hand, if you choose the all-in-one platform Kajabi, you can create quizzes at any plan.

LifterLMS vs. Kajabi: Integrations

Since Kajabi is an all-in-one platform, it has all the tools you need to run your business. From building a website, creating email campaigns, managing your students, and course creation– it’s all under one roof.

There’s no need to integrate it with other software.

However, Kajabi still provides some third-party integrations with:

• PayPal and Stripe to process your student’s payments
• Zapier to connect Kajabi with over 1,000 other systems and apps for better workflows
• ConvertKit, Aweber, MailChimp, and other email providers to help you with your course marketing
• Calendly to help you schedule appointments
• Google Analytics and Segment to track your users’ online behavior and gather data for your business

LifterLMS, on the other hand, is a WordPress plugin. It only provides course creation features and needs to be integrated with other software.

The good thing is that LifterLMS provides powerful native integrations and use third-party ones so you can create multiple systems.

For instance, you can connect Lifter LMS Custom Fields if you want to customize your order fields and collect more specific information from your audience.

It also offers Private Areas and Social Learning to course creators who want to leverage private discussions and communities.

However, unlike Kajabi, you’ll need to pay a higher bundle price to access all of these.

Additionally, there are specific system requirements for the WordPress and PHP versions. If you don’t meet these requirements, you might face compatibility issues.

For third-party tools, some of LifterLMS’ notable integrations are:

• Stripe, PayPal, and Authorize.Net for payment gateways
• MailChimp and ConvertKit for email marketing
• WooCommerce for building online shops
• WP Forms, Ninja Forms, and Gravity Forms for creating intuitive forms

Marketing

After creating your courses, it’s time to market them. Choosing a tool to help you with your marketing efforts can save you time and energy.

Kajabi has powerful marketing features that help you promote your courses and grow your business.

In contrast, LifterLMS doesn’t have as many marketing features since it’s just a WordPress site plugin. It does allow you to create sales pages, but you’ll need third-party tools for email campaigns and others.

Email Marketing

Kajabi’s email feature is simple yet effective. With its visual editor, you can quickly create beautiful email marketing campaigns without prior experience.

The platform also comes with a wide range of email templates that you can use for newsletters, course announcements, sales, and promotions.

With Kajabi, you can schedule and automate your email campaigns. For instance, you can send a welcome email to new subscribers or course-related emails to your students. 

You can also classify your email list based on leads’ activities and purchase behavior. This way, you can send targeted emails to a certain group and increase your conversion.

You can do many things with Kajabi’s native email features. It also provides continuous updates like the Automated Hygiene List that cleans your email list and removes bounced emails.

It also has improved its spam rules, so your emails have a higher chance of reaching your leads’ inboxes.

Landing Pages

Another solid feature of Kajabi is the landing page builder. Landing pages are essential for driving traffic and conversions. Besides introducing your product, a well-designed landing page can also capture leads and persuade them to take a specific action.

For example, a sales page can persuade visitors to buy your product, while an opt-in page can capture email addresses for your newsletter.

Kajabi’s landing page templates are highly customizable and conversion-optimized. Meaning to say, you can quickly create a landing page that’s beautiful and effective.

Besides an opt-in and sales page, Kajabi offers templates for podcasts, link in bio, coming soon, and thank you pages. Depending on your needs, you can choose from a wide range of page templates.

With LifterLMS, a sales page is the only available landing page. However, it has no pre-built templates, and the editor looks very simple.

So if you want to create a better sales page, you’ll need to use other software like Beaver Builder, Divi Builder, and Elementor, then copy and paste the link on your course or membership editor.

Sales Funnels

You need to have a sales funnel to create a more effective strategy for selling your digital products. It’s a process that helps you guide your visitors from product awareness to purchase.

Usually, you need to hire an expert if you have no idea where to start. But with Kajabi, you can easily create a sales funnel without prior experience.

Kajabi provides customizable blueprints which are tailored to fit depending on your call-to-action. It isn’t only for product launches; but also for Zoom webinars, coaching programs, freebies, and more.

Additionally, you can include automation and add more pages inside your sales process to make it more effective.

LifterLMS doesn’t have a sales funnel feature. Creating a sales process won’t be simple as you need to do everything manually. However, there are some tools that you can integrate, like the Upsell Plugin.

LifterLMS vs Kajabi: Sales & eCommerce

LifterLMS vs Kajabi: Sales & eCommerce

Kajabi has more eCommerce features than the LifterLMS plugin.

Kajabi

First, before accepting payments with Kajabi, you’ll need to sign in to a payment gateway. You can choose between PayPal or Stripe (or both) and easily connect it with your Kajabi dashboard.

Kajabi also provides features that will help you get more students and create alluring deals. That includes:

• secured payment processing
• multiple currencies
• various pricing options like one-time, subscription, or multiple payments.
• free trials
• single or bulk coupons
• built-in checkout carts

You can also take advantage of Kajabi’s one-click upsell and downsell plus order bumps. These three are effective in increasing your average order value and revenue.

Most businesses offer a 30-day money-back guarantee to instill confidence in their customers. With Kajabi, you can provide the same without any hassle. Although the refund process is primarily done with Stripe, everything is accessible inside your Kajabi account.

If you’re worried about missing sales because of unfinished transactions, Kajabi has a solution. It has an abandoned cart feature wherein you can send emails to customers who didn’t finish their purchase.

Even with minimal or no integration, there’s much you can do with this tool for your eCommerce business.

LifterLMS

LifterLMS also has some of the features available on Kajabi. You can upsell, provide vouchers, create multiple pricing options, and even offer free products.

However, you can’t accept various currencies, which can be a turn-off for some customers.

If you want more advanced sales features, it’s best to integrate your WordPress site into WooCommerce. That’s available on the Universe or Infinity Bundle.

The challenge here is that, like the other software, you’ll need to know how it works before you can set it up. It will be a piece of cake if you have a background with WooCommerce. But if you’re not tech-savvy, you’ll need to hire someone to help you.

LifterLMS vs Kajabi: Affiliate Program

Besides sending emails and creating ads, affiliate marketing is one of the most common strategies businesses use to increase sales.

It’s the process of letting other people promote your products; in return, they get a commission for every successful referral.

Kajabi

With Kajabi, you don’t need to worry about setting up an affiliate system from scratch. It has a built-in affiliate program that’s easy to use and manage.

You can create links, manage users and transactions, set up your commission, and even send announcements to your affiliates inside Kajabi’s Affiliate dashboard. Everything is within your reach, and you can set it up in just a few minutes.

The only missing feature with Kajabi is the automatic affiliate payment. You’ll need to do it manually, which can take some time. Additionally, this feature is only available on the Growth and Pro plans of Kajabi.

LifterLMS

Currently, LifterLMS doesn’t have an affiliate program feature. However, there are WordPress plugins that you can use to build one. The best one is the AffiliateWP, but the cheapest will be WP Affiliate Manager.

User Support

Last on the list, yet one of the most crucial factors you should consider when choosing a tool is user support.

You can subscribe to the best learning management system, but if it doesn’t have superb customer service, you’ll have headaches when using it. The tool will stress you out more than it can help.

Kajabi has impressive customer support. It provides 24/7 live chat to its higher plans and email support to all of its customers.

It also has many resources like blog posts, video tutorials, and daily webinars. Additionally, Kajabi offers exclusive content access to their Kajabi University, where users can learn everything to use this platform and grow a business.

In comparison, LifterLMS also has excellent customer support. It has a knowledge base where you can find answers to FAQs. Additionally, you can contact them by submitting tickets.

It doesn’t offer live chat support like Kajabi, but you can enjoy a weekly mastermind call and access to a private Facebook group if you opt for the Infinity Bundle.

LifterLMS vs Kajabi Comparison Summary

Based on what you read, which do you think is the best among these course builders?

The truth is they are both fantastic, and you won’t regret getting any of them. However, it is still important to consider what you need and what would benefit you the most.

To help you decide, here’s a quick summary:

Choose Kajabi Over LifterLMS

Kajabi is the best choice if you want a comprehensive solution for your business. It’s feature-packed, powerful, yet beginner friendly. You’ll be getting a fantastic course builder and more with this platform. Additionally, it comes with top-notch user support.

So it’s perfect for anyone who wants to create, sell, and grow their business without worrying about technical details. Kajabi can save you time and money and is an excellent investment.

For more details, read our detailed Kajabi review.

Choose LifterLMS Over Kajabi

LifterLMS, on the other hand, is the better pick if you already have a WordPress site and you’re looking for a cheaper alternative that can still provide you with excellent course and student engagement features.

It doesn’t have a lot of features like Kajabi, but it’s more customizable and flexible. It’s ideal for anyone who wants to be more creative and has the time to tinker with the technical details.

So there you have it! These are the best course builder software you can get for your business. I hope this article helped you make a decision.

If you need more time to check which you should pick, you can claim your 14-day free trial with Kajabi. And download LifterLMS on your WordPress plugin for free.

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