Online education is a big deal these days.
The Global market for online education will exceed $375 billion in the next five years. It’s no wonder that countless would-be educators are looking for a way to get involved.
Fortunately, building a practical digital course is much simpler than it once was.
Thanks to simple tools like Teachable and Kajabi, anyone can create a course in no time.
The question is, which online course platform is best for you?
Today, we’re going to be looking at two of the most appealing course creators on the market, Teachable, and Kajabi.
Let’s begin.
Kajabi vs. Teachable: An Overview
Teachable and Kajabi are two major contenders in the world of course creation.
Both services, delivered through the cloud, offer a platform where teachers can design and sell lessons for digital students. You get all the infrastructure and tools you need to build an amazing course, from hosting services to quiz creation tools, and so on. You can even set up subscriptions so your customers can pay for your classes, month by month.
What is Kajabi?
Kajabi is an all-in-one educational platform created in 2010. The company currently supports entrepreneurs in more than 120 countries. Rather than just giving you a way to build an online course, Kajabi helps you in designing a website, marketing your platform, and connecting with your community.
Kajabi Pros and Cons
- All-in-one platform for teaching and marketing
- Easy to use environment that doesn’t require coding knowledge
- Lots of branding and marketing features to make you stand out
- Great design, themes, and sales pages
- Fast and reliable support
- Community hosting options
- Can be quite expensive
- VAT can be difficult to calculate
What is Teachable?
Alternatively, Teachable, which launched in 2014, is a little simpler than Kajabi. It allows you to design and launch fantastic online courses, but it doesn’t support the entire sales funnel. You may need to access other software too.
Teachable Pros and Cons
- Easy to use environment with no coding required
- Good mix of course creation and hosting features
- Support for EU VAT payment calculation
- Community and blog full of useful advice
- Low-cost options for affordability
- Not an all-in-one service
- Limited support for marketing and subscriptions
- Not the best for design purposes
Keep in mind as you read through this review that both Teachable and Kajabi have many benefits to offer in their own ways. There’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to course creation. It’s up to you to choose what you need.
1. Course Creation
Probably the most critical factor in choosing a course creation tool is deciding which tool is going to make it easiest for you to design and publish your course.
Both Kajabi and Teachable make it easy to set up and start using your course according to your needs. Of course, there are some major differences.
Kajabi’s course setup design ensures that you can create an entire website, including a blog for content marketing and a community area where your students can interact. There’s a curriculum area on Kajabi where you can upload content, give it structure with the course builder, and add lessons, modules, and other information as you see fit.
The great thing about Kajabi is that the drag-and-drop structure makes it extremely easy to use. You can also upload content one file at a time or bulk import from tools like Dropbox and Google Drive. Kajabi’s course creator and editor include features like:
- Pre-made pipelines for easy course management
- Drip schedules for sending out lessons according to a calendar
- Pre-requisite lessons to determine who can take the course
Teachable is somewhat less feature-rich.
You do get a drag-and-drop course builder with Teachable, like Kajabi, but there’s no way to add multiple levels to your course to make it more immersive for different students. Teachable keeps things as simple as possible, with an easy-to-follow format that allows you to add lessons and modify download options in a straightforward interface.
![How to Create a Mini Course to Build Your Business [Checklist Included]](https://cms.findstack.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/how-to-create-a-mini-course-to-build-your-business.png "Kajabi vs Teachable: Which Is Right for You? (2024) 19")
The curriculum area on Teachable offers a great deal of flexibility. You can upload plenty of different kinds of content, such as videos and quizzes, embed PDFs, and more. Unlike Kajabi, Teachable also makes it possible to add videos and quizzes to the same lessons.
Winner: Tie
If you want to create immersive educational experiences where you can trip course content to your audience over time, Kajabi is the best choice. If you’re looking for highly customizable lessons and curriculum areas that give you the freedom to add various kinds of content to the same lesson, stick with Teachable.
2. Membership and Student Engagement
Having a way to keep your students engaged as part of a wider community is crucial for course creators. Teachable and Kajabi both allow you to add engagement options to your lessons. For instance, you can allow each student to set up an account and start a membership with you. This is a great way to encourage more conversions over time.
With Teachable, you need to use course bundles and subscription pricing to create “memberships”, whereas Kajabi is a little more straightforward. You can simply choose a “membership” option on Kajabi to allow your audience to sign up for your service long-term. This could be ideal for people who want to build communities, as well as lessons.
Kajabi and Teachable both support “comments” within student lessons, so people can ask questions and give feedback. An extra bonus from Kajabi is that you also get a fantastic community feature.
The community area on Kajabi is a separate space that educators can either sell access to or offer as part of the overall membership experience. Members can access the community space to discuss lessons with other students or send private messages.
Admins also have the option to create topics in forum-style posts that encourage discussion between students. This is a great way to keep your followers engaged, even when they’re done with your course. Kajabi supports pinning posts to your community feed, sending bulk announcements, and more. Unfortunately, you don’t get the same functionality with Teachable.
Teachable does integrate with third-party tools like Circle, or you can consider setting up a Facebook page or social media environment where your students can stay connected.
Winner: Kajabi
The obvious winner here is Kajabi, simply because the service allows you to design dedicated community areas for your customers.
3. Themes and Customization
Themes and customization are crucial components of your course builder.
The designs available from tools like Kajabi and Teachable help you to showcase your brand and set yourself apart from the competition. The good news is that both Teachable and Kajabi can help you to design a fantastic image for yourself.
Both platforms support free hosting and SSL certificates to keep your site secure as part of the subscription. You don’t need to set up another website and connect it to your course. You can even get a free subdomain for your website, but we’d recommend getting a dedicated domain if possible.
For creating your website, Kajabi has a Website Builder feature which allows you to choose from a range of themes. There aren’t a huge number of themes, but you should be able to find something that makes your course look great.
Another bonus of Kajabi is that there’s plenty of customization options. You can adjust the look and feel of your website and course to suit the brand you’re trying to build. There’s even the option to upload your logo.
In comparison, Teachable supports “page building” so you can create course landing pages. You’ll also be able to adjust certain aspects of your course with things like brand colors and logos. However, there isn’t a huge degree of customization here.
Fortunately, the designs built into Teachable are pretty modern and clean.
You shouldn’t have trouble creating a professional vibe for your website here. Just keep in mind that your course may look pretty similar to other options from Teachable.
Winner: Kajabi
From a flexibility perspective, Kajabi takes the win. It’s much easier to customize according to your needs.
4. Sales and Marketing
As mentioned above, a major difference between Kajabi and Teachable, is that one is a comprehensive solution for creating and marketing your online course. At the same time, the other is a little more basic. Teachable offers you the essential features required for building your online course.
You can create a sales page for your course, which you can share online and through social media. This could be one of the best ways to market yourself through Teachable. Beyond that, however, there aren’t many marketing options.
You can do things like collecting feedback to improve the social proof you have for other marketing efforts. There’s also an affiliate marketing option for Teachable, but it’s not always the easiest solution to use. Teachable also has the “upsell” feature you can add to your “thank you” pages, when customers buy something.
Kajabi, on the other hand, aims to offer you everything you need to succeed in online education. This includes accessing entire funnels for your sales strategy.
Kajabi offers a selection of pre-made funnels and pipelines to assist you in tracking down and nurturing your leads. You don’t need to be a funnel expert to get started because the playbooks are available for you to access whenever you want. You can use funnels for product launches, lead generation, webinars, and more. The pipelines come with pre-written copy, but you can edit each component according to your needs.
Kajabi supports connections to any marketing tools that you might want to use through immersive integrations, so you can link in your email efforts and social media too. There’s even an email marketing tool built-in to the full service.
Through webhooks and triggers, you can automate your marketing and sales strategy with Kajabi, sending offers when customers make payments, or cancel their subscription. You can even send trigger-based emails to improve conversions. Kajabi also has it’s own affiliate marketing strategy, where you can give your affiliates their own dedicated portal – that’s not the case for Teachable.
Winner: Kajabi
Kajabi is the clear choice for all-in-one marketing and sales here. The pre-made pipelines make it much easier to nurture your customers.
5. Analytics and Reporting
So, what do you do when you need to track which of your sales strategies are driving the best results for your online course? Kajabi and Teachable both come with access to tracking and analytics facilities that allow you to track student progress and determine what’s going on within your courses.
Kajabi and Teachable support integrations to Google Analytics, so you can easily track more information about your students and what they appreciate most about your courses. You can see your completion rates at the course level, check out how many people are attending your lectures, and more.
For every course, you can check different reports, like quiz scores, leader boards, and video engagement. There’s also the ability to track how many paid students are engaged, how much engagement you’re getting from discount students, and so on.
Kajabi’s analytics and reporting functionality is slightly less impressive. You can view things like average engagement, play rate, and how much of each video your audience watches. You’ll need to visit each video individually on Kajabi to check the stats, whereas you can see aggregated video stats for your entire course on Teachable.
If you want to get granular with the data available for each of your courses and lessons, then you can accomplish more with Teachable.
Winner: Teachable
Surprisingly, Teachable comes out ahead of Kajabi for reporting and analytics. You can get more in-depth and specific with your research here.
6. Integrations
Though you should be able do plenty With both Kajabi and Teachable on their own, you’ll unlock far more functionality with a few integrations. Both platforms integrate well with tracking tools like Facebook Pixel and Google Analytics.
There’s also webhook support and Zapier integrations available for both services, so you can connect thousands of third-party apps. The webhook functionality of Teachable and Kajabi is pretty robust, with easy support for those who want to link in things like email marketing software.
Compared to Teachable, Kajabi doesn’t have quite as many scenarios available for triggering webhooks. However, there are inbound webhooks on Kajabi which you can’t access on Teachable. This means that you can pass data from other apps to Kajabi without using Zapier.
You can check out the full list of integrations available for both Kajabi and Teachable on their corresponding websites. Options for Kajabi include Google Analytics, Segment, Drip, ConvertKit, ActiveCampaign and many others.
Teachable offers integrations with everything from Shopify and HubSpot, to ClickFunnels, ActiveCampaign, MailChimp, and many others.
Winner: Tie
Teachable only integrates directly with a few email marketing solutions, but it does offer more webhooks overall. Kajabi has inbound webhooks, which is great for external data.
7. Quizzes and Certification
Quizzes are a common feature in most online teaching tools. Kajabi offers this function in the form of “Assessments”. These assessments allow you to set up different question types for your audience, including paragraph-style questions, and multipole choice. You can add images to questions, set a passing grade, and evaluate student responses.
The Assessments function on Kajabi is fantastic for those who want a straightforward way to track how well their customers are doing in their courses. You can even survey your students when they submit assignments for feedback.
Teachable also offers the opportunity to create quizzes and grade students automatically. Multiple choice and multi-option questions are the only option for quizzes, however. There aren’t any options for student surveys, or assignments.
Kajabi assessments and quizzes are for more flexible and powerful than what you’d get from Teachable. Teachable does have a wide selection of certification options for people who complete your courses, however. There are 3 certificate templates to choose from, and you can modify various elements to make the document more personal.
Kajabi, unfortunately, doesn’t give you the option to create and send certificates natively to customers. Instead, you’ll need to create your accreditation options with a third-party provider.
Winner: Teachable
Kajabi assessment options are far more flexible, but the company falters when it comes to certifications and accreditation.
8. Pricing
So, which service is going to suit your budget best?
Both Teachable and Kajabi are designed to give business owners a way to start small and increase their functionality as their company starts to grow. However, it’s worth noting that Kajabi’s all-in-one design does mean that it’s far more expensive than Teachable.
Kajabi comes with three pricing plans to choose from:
- Basic: The Basic plan, for $119 per month, comes with 3 products, 3 pipelines, endless landing pages, unlimited email marketing for up to 10,000 contacts, 1,000 active users, and a single website and admin.
- Growth: The Growth package, for $159 per month, comes with all the features of Basic, but you get 15 product sand pipelines, support for 10,000 active members, 25,000 contacts, and up to 10 admin users.
- Pro: The Pro plan for $319 per month comes with all the features of Growth, but you get up to 100 products and pipelines. You also get 100,000 contacts, 20,000 active members, 3 websites, and up to 25 admin, users
There is no free trial for Kajabi, but you do get a 14-day free trial.
Teachable also has three pricing packages to choose from:
- Basic: For $29 per month, you get the basic package, which supports unlimited students, 2 admin-level users, third-party integrations, coupon codes, course creation training, and custom domain support. You’ll also have a 5% transaction fee.
- Pro: The Pro package for $99 per month comes with everything in Basic. You also get no transaction fees, a members-only community, 5 admin-level users, integrated affiliate marketing, course completion certificates, an unbranded website, advanced reports, graded quizzes, priority support, coaching product and course product, instant pay-outs, and more.
- Business: For $249 per month, Business comes with all the features of Pro, as well as 20 admin-level users, priority product support, group coaching calls, advanced theme customization, custom user roles, bulk enrolment, and manual student import.
Notably, all packages on Teachable come with access to unlimited courses, hosting, and video for your online education system. You get integrated payment processing and student management included, and the system offers VAT calculation, which you can’t get from Kajabi. There are also no fees on free courses.
Winner: Teachable
While Teachable is much cheaper, Kajabi does give you more functionality for your money. Teachable does allow you to calculate VAT, however.
9. Customer Support
Both Teachable and Kajabi are easy-to-use tools, ideal for beginners who want to make their fortune online. However, it’s fair to say that you may need some extra help from time to time. When you’re struggling with a subscription issue, or you can’t upload a video, great customer support is a must-have.
Kajabi offers a very responsive customer service experience, with 24/7 live chat and a fantastic help website where you can find some helpful solutions to common problems. You can also email a support agent directly.
Alternatively, Teachable comes with access to a knowledge base, live chat, and support tickets. The live chat and email function run according to specific time frames. You can email seven days a week between 10 am and 6 pm EST. If you want to live chat with someone, you’ll need to get in touch between 10 am and 5 pm EST.
The Live chat functionality on Teachable is only available for certain pricing tiers, so make sure you can access it before you sign up. On the plus side, you should find that access to plenty of online content makes it simple enough to answer your own questions without having to rely on feedback from the team.
Both Teachable and Kajabi offer their own training solutions, with more training provided depending on how much you’re willing to pay for your package.
Winner: Tie
It’s a tie. Both Teachable and Kajabi come with plenty of documentation to help you solve your own issues. Kajabi edges slightly ahead with 24/7 chat.
Kajabi vs. Teachable – Summary
So, which product should you choose?
By this point, you should have a good idea of the functionality available from both Kajabi and Teachable, and why they might appeal to you. Ultimately, it’s up to you to determine which product is going to deliver the best results for your needs.
Since both products have a free trial option, there’s nothing stopping you from checking the functionality of both before you make your choice.
Check out Kajabi if:
- You want a comprehensive all-in-one solution for creating and selling your online course. Kajabi offers everything from sales pipelines to analytics tools, so you can build an immersive experience for your audience. It also comes with a ton of ways to delight your customers once you attract them.
- You want to build a community: As mentioned above, there’s no community support for Teachable, but with Kajabi it’s easy to build a dedicated tribe of students who can advocate for your brand. You can even design memberships for your customers without having to go through complex workarounds like you do with Teachable.
- You’re committed to high-quality courses: Kajabi ensures that you can design a beautiful course experience for your customers, with branded pages and unique course players that feature your logo. It’s an easy way to build a professional brand online, although you do pay a little extra for the features.
Kajabi is a more comprehensive and capable platform overall than Teachable. This is the product you’ll choose when you’re taking your educational business very seriously. However, it’s not going to be the most affordable option for every customer.
Check out Teachable if:
- You’re low on a budget: Although you should never start a business based entirely on the tool that’s the cheapest to access, Teachable is a more affordable solution for many educators. With Teachable, you can set up a business and start selling your courses in no time. You can also sell subscriptions, though it’s hard to get memberships up and running.
- You already have some of the tools you need for sales pipelines: If you already have tools in place to develop your lead nurturing strategy, then you can rely on Teachable to make selling your classes quick and straightforward.
- You want an easy service: Teachable is extremely easy to use, with a clean page builder experience and a great interface. Teachable also happens to have some of the best analytics functionality around. The analytics you get here is much more in-depth than those available from Kajabi
Teachable is an easy-to-use service with a flexible pricing structure, so you can access new features as your business begins to grow. If you’re just getting started with eLearning, then you probably don’t need the excessive functionality that Kajabi can offer. Teachable might provide you with a much shallower learning curve.
