Last Updated on January 22, 2022
As an online entrepreneur, one of the best ways to earn more recurring income is by creating and selling your online course. It is a fantastic way to promote your business via online marketing, and it’s pretty simple to set up once everything has been prepared correctly.
Two of the most popular e-learning platform providers globally are Teachable and Kajabi. They both offer a wide variety of similar tools, but they also have some differences you should be aware of before making your purchase decision.
This blog will go through a detailed comparison between the two platforms so that you can make the right choice for your business.
Kajabi vs Teachable: Key Differences
Here are a few key differences between the Teachable and Kajabi platforms:
- Kajabi only offers paid plans, while Teachable provides a free plan.
- Kajabi is an all-in-one solution for creating, selling, and delivering courses, whereas Teachable is primarily an online course creation tool.
- On all Teachable plans (including the free one), you can create and sell unlimited courses, whereas, on Kajabi, the number of products/courses you can have is limited.
Kajabi vs Teachable: Overview
Kajabi and Teachable are two cloud-based online course creation platforms that provide various tools to make it simple to develop and sell your online courses. Neither requires any code, making it ideal for anybody from all backgrounds.
Teachable is almost three times cheaper than Kajabi, making it the best choice for beginners. The only drawback Teachable has is that it is available only on iOS, whereas Kajabi is available both for iOS and Android devices.
There is a free plan with Teachable, but a fee of 10% per transaction. On the other hand, Kajabi does not offer free plans.
Pros of Kajabi
- You can easily create beautiful and automated emails with Kajabi’s built-in email marketing, so you don’t need to use separate software.
- Through Kajabi’s page builder, you can create a landing page for your products and a sales funnel.
- With an extensive template library available, you can quickly build stunning websites, pages, and marketing funnels that go with your brand.
- The content can be drip-fed over time in a membership site.
- You can grade your students using quizzes and assessments at the end of each course.
- Do not pay transaction fees on your courses or products.
- You can add notes to customer profiles and assign tags to leads and customers to help you send more targeted emails.
Cons of Kajabi
- Even in their higher plans, Kajabi does not allow you to have unlimited students and courses
- Kajabi does not offer a free plan.
- The basic plan also excludes affiliate marketing, so if you must sell through affiliates, you should get a Growth plan.
Pros of Teachable
- You can try Teachable out for free before deciding whether to upgrade to a paid plan.
- The paid plans at Teachable are incredibly affordable so that anyone can use them.
- As an engaging and educational tool, quizzes can be included within a course.
- With Teachable, both beginners and advanced users can benefit from the simple user interface.
- Using affiliates will help you scale your online business by allowing you to sell your products and courses.
- You can build unlimited courses with all plans, even the free ones.
Cons of Teachable
- Unlike some other marketing platforms, Teachable does not include email marketing software.
- Lecture-specific automation is not available in Teachable.
- Teachable offers a free plan, but a transaction fee of 10% applies.
- Unlike Kajabi, Teachable does not have an Android app.
Pricing
Teachable offers three paid plans. The basic plan costs $29/month, the professional plan costs $79/month, and the business plan costs $399/month.
The company offers unlimited courses and students in all of its plans. As a result, Teachable has a considerable advantage over Kajabi.
On the other hand, Kajabi pricing plans are higher compared to Teachable. The basic plan of Kajabi costs $119/month, the growth plan costs $159/month, and the pro plan costs $319/month. However, all these plans have limitations on pipelines and product creations.
Teachable is the winner in terms of pricing as it provides affordable plans and unlimited course creation. Also, Teachable has a free plan which is not present in Kajabi.
Interface
These tools were designed with easy-to-use interfaces and rich user experiences in mind.
You can find all Teachable’s features in the sidebar. There are also sub-items under each item in the sidebar to explore additional features.
You can access almost all of Kajabi’s features from the sidebar as well. Due to Kajabi’s nested and complex UI/UX, its assistant is a huge help. However, both of these platforms do not have many differences in terms of the interface.
Both platforms score equally as they are user-friendly in terms of the interface. If there is no option for a Kajabi assistant, it will lag due to the complex functionality.
Online course creation
Creating extensive content and splitting it into sections and subsections is easy with Teachable. Additionally, you can easily add exciting and engaging materials to every section and subsection of your courses. This program allows you to bulk upload content structured into your courses automatically.
To provide the most significant level of flexibility, Kajabi allows you to upload courses individually or in bulk. A maximum of 3 sub-levels are supported in the course, and you can also import content directly from Google Drive or Dropbox.
Kajabi and Teachable both outperform each other in some areas. Kajabi offers three levels of subcategories, whereas Teachable has just two. In contrast, Teachable allows you to include different types of content in the same lesson, which isn’t possible with Kajabi.
Membership creation
You can create membership packages on both platforms and build recurring income streams.
To hack your way to memberships on Teachable, you need to take advantage of bundles and subscription pricing. Each membership plan requires a separate bundle of courses, with subscription pricing attached. In addition, each membership plan has access to all course options.
Kajabi gives you the option to create a membership separately. In this case, you will have to create different products for every membership plan.
For membership creation as well, both of these platforms offer similar features. Hence, it is a tie for both these platforms.
Design and Customization
Site Level Customization
The site-level customization features in Teachable are pretty good. With Access to Power Editor, you can customize the default theme, create pages, navigation, etc., and add code snippets.
This Power Editor included in the Teachable professional plan is an extremely powerful tool that allows you to customize your website without coding knowledge.
On the other hand, Kajabi’s visual editor also offers impressive features. Kajabi provides a few themes in its visual editor option. You will see the visual builder when you begin customizing your landing page.
Kajabi also lets you create your landing pages with the visual builder.
Course Level Customization
Teachable allows you to customize the look and feel of the checkout page, thank you page, and sales page. The only other option you have is to customize the modules and text within the course itself. You cannot change the theme or design.
On the other hand, Kajabi’s landing page builder allows you to customize product-specific pages. However, when you customize your product pages, you cannot access the modules in their landing page builder.
As Kajabi provides unique themes, layout, and visual editor to edit the basic landing pages, it outranks Teachable in terms of customization. Teachable’s visual editor is best suited only for developers.
Automation
Except for integrations and webhooks, Teachable doesn’t offer much automation, and Email sequences are unavailable either. However, Teachable’s Zapier integration and webhook system are more robust.
On the other hand, Kajabi offers impressive automation features:
You can add the following triggers and actions to Kajabi automation:
Emails: Select what should happen if a user receives, opens, or clicks your emails.
Offers: These actions are added when the user makes a payment, cancels their subscription, or when their subscription is successful or unsuccessful.
Forms: These actions are added when the form is submitted.
Kajabi is the winner in automation as it offers full-fledged automation compared to Teachable, and Teachable only supports Zapier integration and basic webhooks.
Upselling
Teachable requires you to include upselling functionality in the course thank you page. You will present the upsell offer to your students as soon as they complete their payment. When creating an upsell, you need to decide which course to offer for the upsell and which pricing plan to offer.
Upselling is a one-click process, and Teachable uses the user’s credit card details previously used to complete the payment.
On the other hand, you need to navigate to the offers section in Kajabi and create an offer you are planning to upsell. Now, go to the offer you created previously for which you want to add an upsell.
Both Kajabi and Teachable have their own set of advantages in terms of upselling. Hence, it is a tie.
Pipelines/Funnels
There is no visual pipeline builder in Teachable. In contrast, Kajabi is a complete platform that includes a pipeline builder, and it comes with several pipelines that you can implement right away. To get started with your pipeline, you can choose a blank pipeline.
You can customize any of the pages in the pipeline by clicking the page builder, reducing the dependency on third-party tools like Unbounce and Leadpages.
Kajabi is a clear winner in funnel and pipeline building as it provides a visual builder. Moreover, it reduces the dependency on third-party landing page builders.
Completion Certificates
You can send completion certificates to your students directly through Teachable. You can customize any of the three templates to suit your course’s needs. If you know HTML coding, you can personalize the template even more.
Kajabi does not support the creation and sending of certificates natively. Teachable is the clear choice for third-party tools, such as Accredible.
Hence, in this area, Teachable is a clear winner.
Payment Processing
Stripe and PayPal are easily integrated into both platforms, but the key difference is that teachable only accepts PayPal for one-time payments in US dollars.
In contrast, Kajabi supports PayPal payments for all currencies, so Kajabi is the winner of payment processing.
Quizzes
Because Kajabi quizzes are comprehensive and include quizzes and surveys, they are called assessments. The quizzes can consist of multiple-choice, multiple-options, sentence-like questions, and paragraph-like questions.
This flexibility allows you to use quizzes as surveys or collect marketing information, including leads. Adding images to your quizzes and formatting them your way is one of Kajabi’s major selling points.
Each quiz can also have a passing grade, and the platform will automatically evaluate students’ performance.
This flexibility isn’t available in Teachable, and the only information you can collect from it is multiple-choice and multiple-option questions.
Considering the limitations in Teachable, Kajabi is a clear winner in terms of quizzes.
Integrations
Email marketing software and Google Analytics are both integrated with Teachable. Additionally, Teachable supports Zapier and webhooks. Teachable’s webhook functionality is robust, offering a wide range of options.
Likewise, you can access integrations in Kajabi under settings, as you can in Teachable. In addition to email marketing software, Kajabi integrates with other apps, and it also lets you integrate with thousands of other apps through Zapier integration.
Kajabi is a clear winner in integrations as Teachable lacks an important inbound webhooks feature. You can integrate Kajabi with any other app without using Zapier.
Analytics and Reporting
Using Teachable, you can view detailed information about students’ progress, such as video engagements, quiz scores, and more, so that you can monitor their completion rates.
Additionally, you can view your upsell rates, total sales, affiliate earnings, and other financial information through the sales analytics feature.
Kajabi provides extensive analytics, such as completion rates, engagement levels, drop-off rates, etc. Additionally, you can analyze your marketing efforts in sales analytics, which can be pretty comprehensive.
Comparatively to Kajabi, Teachable offers more detailed information on student performance at the lecture level. Teachable also lets you track a video’s performance and drop rate on one page, while Kajabi requires you to navigate each video to see its stats.
Hence, Teachable is the clear winner in terms of analytics and reporting.
Customer Support
With the free or beginner plans, Teachable offers email-online support. Teachable’s professional plan or higher is required for live chat.
On all paid plans, Kajabi offers email support and 24-hour chat support.
Teachable and Kajabi provide excellent documentation and support tutorials to ensure you can immediately find solutions to your problems.
Kajabi provides better customer support than most other platforms, and Teachable lacks live chat support for all its customers. Hence, Kajabi is the clear winner in terms of customer support.
Which Online Course Platform is Best?
With Kajabi, you get an all-in-one platform at a premium price. Meanwhile, Teachable is solely a membership and online course platform. Pricing is the main factor to consider, and the cost of Kajabi is 2.5 times that of Teachable.
If you already have autoresponders and a system set in place, then it is recommended to pick Teachable. Otherwise, Kajabi will be the right fit for your marketing needs.