Kajabi vs. Hivebrite: Which is best for you?

Trying to decide the best platform for your online community? With so many options on the market, that can be a daunting task. To help you out, we’ve compiled a thorough comparison of Kajabi versus Hivebrite in this blog. 

Keep reading to find out which of these platforms is better suited for your online community and business needs.

Here’s what we’ll be talking about today:

• What is Hivebrite? 
• What is Kajabi?
• Community features
• Pricing and cost-effectiveness
• And, more!

An Overview: Hivebrite vs. Kajabi

What is Hivebrite?

Hivebrite is an online community platform that allows you to create, manage, and monetize private communities for students and alumni, business groups, and nonprofit organizations.

With Hivebrite, you can host a large number of members, create live feeds, and customize the interface to match your brand colors and identity. It lets you create both paid and free membership options and adjust access rights for your members.

Hivebrite comes with a higher price point than other course platforms, and it’s more complex. As a result, it may be better suited for larger enterprises with an established IT team to help with setup.

What is Kajabi?

Kajabi is an all-in-one business platform for creative entrepreneurs. Since launching in 2010, it’s empowered over 55,000 knowledge creators in 120 countries to serve 60 million students and make over $3.5 billion in sales.

With Kajabi, you get all the tools you need to turn your knowledge into income. Not only does it help you build an online community, but it also gives you a course builder, coaching platform, sales funnel builder, and more. Plus, every tool is designed specifically for knowledge creators, so its intention is to drive revenue.

Okay! Now that you’ve had a high-level look at Hivebrite vs. Kajabi, let’s look more deeply at the different features you get with each. 

Community

Community is at the heart of Hivebrite’s platform. It includes many features to help you grow and nurture your community in a safe and engaging way. For example, Hivebrite features: 

• Advanced tools for searching and managing member data
• Streamlined content creation and management
• Event management with calendar, ticketing, and online payments
• Centralized communication systems with support for email and notifications
• Collaboration features like job postings and resume sharing

Hivebrite allows you to turn on or off different features as your community grows and evolves, and it lets you give different access rights to different members of your community. It’s highly customizable, but it’s also highly complex.

In comparison, Kajabi focuses on giving creators the tools they need to build and manage a thriving community while also making it easy to set up and run. And while it has always offered a powerful suite of community-focused features, we’re continually looking for ways to improve!

In 2023, Kajabi is just launching a new set of community features through our acquisition of the best-in-class community platform Vibely, such as:

• Live calls
• Challenges
• Leaderboards
• Accountability tools
• Real-time chat

Kajabi also recognizes that community is just one aspect of an online business, so it provides an array of other fully integrated business-building tools. That’s why it gives you ready-to-use templates as an easy starting point for funnels, courses, emails, and more. Plus, you can customize everything to match your brand and personality. 

With Kajabi, you can focus on serving your community, because running your business is easier.

Pricing: which is more cost-effective? 

Hivebrite’s pricing is a bit of a mystery, as it doesn’t show on their website, but allegedly the cost starts at $500/month. That is already higher than most community platform options on the market, and if you want to use everything Hivebrite has to offer, you may have to upgrade your subscription to an even higher-priced plan.

Another downfall of Hivebrite is that it doesn’t offer a free trial. You can book a demo, but you can’t go through the platform before signing up for a costly subscription.

Kajabi offers three different pricing plans, allowing you to decide which one works best for you and your business, with the first tier starting as low as $119/month. Billed annually, Kajabi’s plans are: 

• Basic ($119/month) — this plan includes three products, three funnels, unlimited landing pages and marketing emails, 10,000 contacts, 1,000 active users, one website, and one admin user. You’ll also get a 0% fee on all transactions, access to webinars and events, and access to basic automations.

• Growth ($159/month) — this plan includes 15 products, 15 funnels, unlimited landing pages and marketing emails, 25,000 contacts, 10,000 active users, one website, and 10 admin users. You’ll get everything the Basic plan includes, as well as the ability to remove Kajabi’s branding, 24/7 chat support, affiliate marketing options, and advanced automations.

• Pro ($319/month) — this plan includes 100 products, 100 funnels, unlimited landing pages and marketing emails, 100,000 contacts, 20,000 active users, three websites, and 25 admin users. You’ll get everything the Growth plan includes, as well as access to a code editor.

Kajabi also offers a 14-day free trial, so you can check for yourself whether this platform is right for you before you commit.

Apart from pricing, there are a few other core differences we need to cover to help you choose the platform that best matches your needs.

Templates

Hivebrite doesn’t offer customizable templates, which means it will take longer to create your online community, email campaigns, or events. Creating a course is a much more time-consuming process when you have to do it from scratch.

Kajabi, on the other hand, brings you a wide variety of customizable templates to create a mini-course or a full-blown program, as well as landing pages, websites, email campaigns, and newsletters.

And if you do want to start from scratch, our intuitive design tools will make life easier for you when you’re coming up with your next creation!

Bottom line: Kajabi brings you a wealth of customizable templates that save you time and money when it comes to setting up your online course, website, or email campaign. This is something Hivebrite doesn’t offer.

Tools for coaches

As a knowledge creator, you want to share and monetize your area of expertise and make it as easy as possible for your members to access your materials.

Because Hivebrite is geared towards larger organizations, its tools for coaches are limited.

Hivebrite has a Media Center where you can give your users access to documents and files. You can also organize events and share news and updates. And you can send emails and messages to certain members based on a variety of criteria.

Kajabi offers a robust set of coaching tools to help you set up your online community quickly and easily. Our website even offers an example of what your coaching site could look like in Kajabi:

With Kajabi’s tools for coaches, you can:

• Create coaching packages
• Market your services
• Process payments
• Schedule meetings
• Host and record live calls
• Share resources
• Send follow-up emails
• Built-in scheduler

You can also access free resources on creating successful coaching programs through Kajabi.

Bottom line: Hivebrite is built for organizations, not independent coaches and creative entrepreneurs. Kajabi offers a seamless experience for coaches that includes free resources, specific tools, and direct support, all for a fraction of the cost.

Integrations 

Hivebrite and Kajabi take very different approaches to integrations with third-party platforms. Hivebrite offers social media integrations with Linkedin, Facebook, and Twitter so you can promote your events and let users sign into your community with their social logins. It also integrates with customer relationship management (CRM) systems like Salesforce and Blackbaud.

Kajabi offers integrations with the types of tools that are more important to independent entrepreneurs, such as:

• Email platforms like ConvertKit and MailChimp
• Analytics tools like Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel
• Funnel-building software like ClickFunnels (via Zapier) 

By connecting with Zapier, you can connect an endless variety of apps to your Kajabi account. 

Bottom line: Hivebrite offers limited integrations, mostly to make it easier for users to log in, or to let you connect your database of members. Kajabi offers integrations that empower your email marketing and analytics as well as give you unlimited flexibility with Zapier.

User ratings

Hivebrite is a popular choice among users, scoring 4.3 out of 5 stars on the review site G2.  

Here are Hivebrite’s user ratings by category:

• Ease of use (8.4/10) with their online community management average scoring a solid 8.5/10.
• Quality of support (8.9/10) with an online community management average of 8.8/10.
• Ease of setup (8.1/10) with an online community management average of 8.5/10.

Kajabi is also in a great position on the G2 leaderboard, with 4.4 out of 5 stars.

Here are Kajabi’s user ratings by category:

• Ease of use (8.7/10) with their online community management average scoring a solid 8.6/10.
• Quality of support (8.7/10) with an online community management average of 8.7/10.
• Ease of setup (8.6/10) with an online community management average of 8.4/10.

Bottom line: Both platforms have great user reviews, but Kajabi’s scores are higher than Hivebrite’s, with “ease of use” and “ease of setup” as the main advantages.

Kajabi vs. Hivebite: which is best for you?

Both Kajabi and Hivebrite have great functionality and solid customer support for setting up and managing your online community, but the differences are vast. 

Hivebrite is primarily an online community platform aimed at alumni groups, business networks, and non-profit organizations.

Kajabi is an all-in-one business platform that helps creative entrepreneurs engage their audience and monetize their knowledge. 

Hivebrite is designed to help large organizations manage their content, communicate with their members, share job opportunities, and manage memberships and donations. If you’re a big-budget enterprise looking for a platform to grow your community, then it might be the best choice for you.

However, if you’re a digital entrepreneur wanting to build and monetize a community around your skills and knowledge, Kajabi is the perfect all-in-one solution for you.

It offers all the tools and templates you need for a complete online business. It also offers free training and information on successfully starting and growing your business, as well as a community of over 38,000 “Kajabi Heros” who actively support each other to achieve more. 

If you’re curious about Hivebrite, you can request a demo to learn more about its features and benefits. With Kajabi, you can view an on-demand demo on our home page, and when you’re ready to get an even closer look, you can try it free for 14 days!