Kajabi vs. ConvertKit review

When it comes to selling digital products online, the question every entrepreneur asks is, What’s the best platform to grow and scale your business? 

Both Kajabi and ConvertKit help creative entrepreneurs sell online, but each offers different tools and services to help you ultimately reach that goal. 

In this detailed Kajabi vs. ConvertKit review, we look at several key areas, including features, pricing, which one has the best sales funnel and much more to help you make your choice with confidence. 

What is ConvertKit?

ConvertKit bills itself as “the creator marketing platform.” It achieves this primarily by way of a combination of landing pages and email marketing to let users create simple sales funnels to segment and target their users according to their browsing habits or purchases.

If you’re looking for ConvertKit alternatives, you may be tempted to look at other email marketing software. But for building a creative business, nothing beats Kajabi.

Kajabi is an all-in-one platform designed specifically for knowledge commerce entrepreneurs. It combines a course creation platform with email marketing, blogging, podcasting, shopping cart, and sales funnel builder in one complete package, giving you a centralized way to build, launch, and grow your online business. 

On the surface, it may seem like these tools have very little in common, but many people looking to build an online business and make money with memberships will seek out the best platform to help them grow their business. 

Since Kajabi and ConvertKit are two of the most popular, we’ve decided to do an apples-to-apples comparison on the things that both platforms have in common, including: 

• Email marketing
• Web page builder
• Funnel builder 
• Pricing 
  

Keep reading to know which could be the right choice for your online business.

A closer look at the Page Builder: Which is better, Kajabi or ConvertKit? 

At their core, both Kajabi and ConvertKit offer the simplicity of an online page builder. ConvertKit, however, is limited to a landing page builder, in that you can click and drag different elements, including images and forms, to create a basic landing page.

From there, users can opt in and be subscribed to your mailing list. But as far as page builders go, that’s the extent of what ConvertKit offers. If you want to build a product page, a blog, or anything that falls outside the scope of a landing page, you’re out of luck. 

Kajabi offers a true page builder. In a head-to-head Kajabi vs ConvertKit review, Kajabi’s page builder simply offers more functionality and features than its competitor. In addition, Kajabi lets you use your own domain name, so you can create a recognizable presence and build authority and credibility while still benefiting from the flexibility of an all-in-one page builder. 

Both Kajabi and ConvertKit offer templates to help you get up and running quickly. From there, you can customize each one to suit your needs to the extent of the platform’s functionality. So, for instance, you can only drag and drop elements to create landing pages in ConvertKit, whereas Kajabi allows you the full freedom of creating every type of web page you need to attract and engage your target audience. 

Email marketing: What are the capabilities of both platforms?

One of the most important facets of selling online is your email list. A marketing gold mine if you know how to use it right, your list is the linchpin of your online business.

Because of that, it’s important to consider how Kajabi vs ConvertKit handles email marketing in terms of its email capabilities, list-building potential, deliverability, and many other features. 

Not to mention, from the user side, it has to be intuitive and user-friendly. It makes no sense to use an email marketing software that’s cumbersome to set up and limits you at every turn. So how does each platform approach email marketing

A lack of coordinated templates

Much like its landing page builder, ConvertKit’s email system is devoted to pure simplicity, and that includes its templates. You won’t find a lot of design inspiration here, with fewer templates that you can customize beyond adding a logo and a photo or two.

If you want to use ConvertKit to create a beautiful, branded newsletter, you’re better off looking elsewhere, because its email design capabilities are limited.  The good news is that the editing process is very straightforward and user-friendly, making it easy to add specific tags that give you some degree of personalization. 

HTML-friendly coding areas

What’s more, if you like playing in code, you do have some flexibility with ConvertKit to use HTML in specially formatted areas of your email. You can also create an unlimited number of templates for future use. But you must design those templates. They aren’t provided by ConvertKit. 

ConvertKit purposefully limits the design functionality of their email marketing tool mainly for aesthetic reasons: emails that are simple and load quicker convert better. And while that’s true, it’s also necessary to give content creators some freedom to make their templates look less robotic and more creative. 

It’s possible to have a “best of both worlds” scenario, and this is the kind of balance that Kajabi strikes in its email designer. 

Just as it does with the page designer, Kajabi gives you an email marketing software that’s flexible and creative. You can add your brand colors and designs, so your emails align with your chosen template. And with Kajabi’s simple, streamlined drag-and-drop interface, you can add images and brand assets quickly while saving time creating personalized emails of all types. 

Rich content made easy

Plus, Kajabi seamlessly integrates advanced email marketing features right into the platform itself. So if you want to add functionality — including enhanced personalization, countdown timers, video, and other rich media right into the email itself — you can do that just by clicking and dragging the element you want directly into the email. 

Digital products: What can you sell on each platform? 

Digital product sales are where Kajabi vs ConvertKit begin to go their separate ways.

Selling on ConvertKit

 ConvertKit generally focuses on the following types of content creators:

• Musicians
• Authors
• Podcasters
• Coaches
  

And although there are many users who don’t fall into these categories, these types of artists and producers mostly fit ConvertKit’s audience profile. As such, you can sell a variety of digital items on ConvertKit, including:

• Music
• Paid newsletters
• Presets (photo or video presets made in different software programs like Adobe Lightroom or Premiere Pro)
• Coaching

Using ConvertKit, you can create a basic product page to sell your creations online, along with a brandable page URL, buy-now buttons, and more.

Selling on Kajabi

Kajabi approaches selling digital products differently than ConvertKit. It doesn’t expect you to fit into a specific content creator group.

Instead, Kajabi is targeted toward all knowledge entrepreneurs. If you have knowledge worth sharing and selling, Kajabi is the platform to build on. 

Where Kajabi excels is in the fact that each of its individual tools work together as part of the whole: like cogs in a wheel. That means, rather than having to deal with clunky, cumbersome third-party integrations, add-ons, and plugins (many of which cost money beyond the monthly fee you pay to access the marketing platform itself), you have everything at your fingertips in one smooth, seamless, and self-sufficient marketing toolbox. 

Here are some of the core offerings that you can sell with the Kajabi platform:

Online courses

Monetize your knowledge with a professional-looking, polished course. With Kajabi, you can create a course based on our proven Product Templates. The guided templates help you create a course quickly and easily or start from scratch and build it yourself, your way! 

Podcasts

This attention-getting, accessible medium is uniquely tuned to turn your ideas into paying customers. Bring on special guests, build your authority and transform your podcast into recurring income. Kajabi distributes podcasts to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts.

Membership sites

Kajabi is fully equipped to build a robust membership program and craft a community of hungry, paying subscribers. Not only does it help you build a membership site, it helps you monetize and grow your membership site. 

In just a few clicks, you can have a guided template that walks you through the process. Just add your content!  You can also manage your membership site with built-in automation that saves you hours of time while providing your customers with the best possible learning experience. 

Coaching

Kajabi makes it intuitively simple to customize every aspect of your coaching business, including resources, notes, agenda, and the number of live sessions. You can also upsell and cross-sell your offers, so clients can continue to benefit from your expertise (even booking one-on-one time with you).

In addition, Kajabi features a built-in CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool so that you can know precisely where your clients are at every stage of your sales funnel. See what they’ve purchased from you in the past so you can create customized offers that keep them coming back again and again. 

And more!

These are just a few of the many ways that Kajabi goes beyond simple landing pages and email marketing to create a fully interconnected marketing system. With Kajabi, it’s easy to start and scale your business. Its integrated toolset seamlessly bridges the gap from creation to marketing to growth and beyond. 

Pricing: What to know about cost and contacts

Kajabi vs ConvertKit handle pricing in very different ways. It’s important to know not just the cost but also the long-term return on investment and how well each platform’s pricing scales so you can keep more of your profits in your pocket.

ConvertKit pricing

ConvertKit has a free plan for up to 1,000 subscribers. If you choose the yearly billing option, you get two months for free. ConvertKit’s pricing page has a slider that you can move from 0 to 500,000 to see how the pricing changes across each of the platform’s three plans. 

For example, if you have 55,000 subscribers, you’ll pay $379 per month on the Creator plan and $519 per month on the Creator Pro plan. The Creator Pro plan lets you access Facebook custom audiences, set up a newsletter referral system, enable subscriber scoring (ConvertKit’s quasi-CRM functionality), and unlocks advanced reporting options.

At their core, ConvertKit’s pricing is based on a per-contact basis. However, it’s important to keep in mind that this pricing only allows you to create and manage landing pages and send emails.

If you want to build advanced web pages, incorporate a shopping cart, sell a membership or course, ConvertKit’s platform doesn’t include this type of functionality. You can, however, set up such a system on your own website and then incorporate ConvertKit’s landing page and email marketing system into it. But here again, that also means you’ll need to pay separately for hosting and website design in addition to ConvertKit’s fees. 

Kajabi pricing

Kajabi handles pricing differently. Because it’s an all-in-one marketing and creation platform, landing pages and emails are built into the system. With Kajabi, the Basic plan starts at $149 per month and lets you sell up to three products with three marketing funnels, which automate your marketing process. You can have up to 10,000 contacts on your mailing list and up to 1,000 active customers.

But let’s think big and longer term - going back to that 55,000 subscriber list. On ConvertKit’s highest plan, you’d pay over $500 per month, compared to Kajabi’s Pro Plan at $399/month. In addition, Kajabi’s Pro plan unlocks a host of features not available through ConvertKit, including

• The ability to sell up to 100 products
• Up to 100 different marketing automation funnels
• Unlimited landing pages and marketing emails
• Up to 100,000 contacts
• Up to 20,000 active customers
• 3 different websites and 25 different administrators
  

Plus, Kajabi charges no transaction fee when you sell your products. When you use ConvertKit Commerce to sell your products, you’ll have a transaction fee of 3.5% + $0.30 per transaction. Kajabi integrates with Stripe and PayPal to process payments. Stripe charges 2.9% + $0.30 as a processing fee, which could put a noticeable amount of money back in your pocket depending on how much you sell. 

What’s more, each Kajabi plan provides you with many more features beyond unlimited landing pages and emails. You get an online course builder, podcasting suite, membership area, coaching scheduler, blog, shopping cart, and much more. 

Why pay more and get less? 

Scalability and growth

The real question of growing an online business with Kajabi vs ConvertKit comes down to how easy it is to scale the business on each respective platform. Because ConvertKit is devoted to landing pages and email marketing, it’s a segment in which they perform admirably. 

But there’s much more to marketing than just that. If you launch and try to grow a digital business on a platform that restricts you right out of the gate, you’ll never tap into your full potential as a knowledge entrepreneur. 

Oftentimes, people start out marketing on free email marketing tools only to quickly reach their subscriber limit. This causes them to feel entrepreneurial growing pains as they reach the limit of one platform after another. 

Kajabi allows you the freedom to truly grow and expand, without reining you in or hamstringing your access to various tools or options. From design creativity to subscriber and member growth, Kajabi is intensely focused and driven to help you excel. 

Of course, no matter how smooth the setup and onboarding process is, sometimes there will inevitably be snags in the process. As a final step in our ConvertKit review, we also took the time to compare support features between both platforms.

Support and tutorials

ConvertKit primarily offers support via its user-driven community and extensive getting started guides and tutorials. Premium-level users can access one-on-one support from specialists around the globe, so that they can get direct assistance when and where they need it.

Kajabi also offers a comprehensive help center, backed by its thriving user community. Walkthroughs, tutorial videos, and step-by-step guides are also included, as is free access to Kajabi University. There, you’ll find various free courses that show you how to get the most out of the platform and build a thriving business.

Live chat is available from Kajabi during certain hours on the Basic plan, or 24 hours a day, 7 days a week from the Growth and Pro plans. The Kajabi team also regularly hosts webinars and special events where users can ask questions, get tips, and submit feature requests for potential inclusion in future updates to the platform. 

Kajabi vs ConvertKit: Which tool comes out on top? 

After our comprehensive ConvertKit review, we’ve found this tool to be helpful if you’re just starting out and only need access to email and landing pages to promote small scale business endeavors such as your music or art. 

We do want to mention that Kajabi integrates with ConvertKit if you are already using ConvertKit but looking to take advantage of what Kajabi has to offer. You don't have to give it up ConvertKit right away or at all.

But if you have yet to sign up for ConvertKit, it doesn’t make sense to start building your business on a platform that you could outgrow within a matter of months. To scale your business and truly grow it beyond the launch phase, you need more than email and landing page functionality. You need Kajabi, the ConvertKit alternative that’s a far superior platform, with more features at a lower price point. 

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Kajabi gives you access to every tool at every level, whether Basic, Growth, or Pro. And every tool is fully integrated into the Kajabi system, with the ability to seamlessly communicate and transfer data between them. Because of that, you’ll spend less time getting your site and your business up and running and can instead concentrate your time on developing a winning marketing strategy that helps you continue to grow and scale. 

The best part is, there’s no better time than now to take the entrepreneurial plunge and discover the benefits of working in the knowledge economy. With a helpful customer success team ready to assist you, easy-to-follow templates that save time while helping you shortcut the effort you spend building your business, you can focus on sharing what you love and start getting paid for it. 

When you consider the amount of features, the creative flexibility, the affordable price point, and premium service, it’s easy to see how Kajabi raises the bar on what a business marketing platform should be. 

Join us for live Q&A webinars every day, Monday through Friday. Register today to learn everything you need to know to succeed as a knowledge entrepreneur, including selling products, Kajabi templates, funnels, webinars, and the Kajabi Partner Program. 

Still researching? Check out our other competitor comparisons: 

Kajabi vs. Teachable
Kajabi vs. Thinkific
Kajabi vs. Podia
Kajabi vs. Patreon
Kajabi vs. Clickfunnels
Kajabi vs. Ontraport
Kajabi vs. Wordpress