Kajabi vs. Mastera

Are you exploring virtual teaching with Mastera? At first glance, it may seem fair to compare Kajabi and Mastera. Both are online teaching platforms that allow you to create courses, host live videos, and sell content and memberships as a business. 

But look closer and you'll see a different picture. Although they share some similar features, the two platforms are strikingly different from each other.

In this thorough Kajabi vs. Mastera review, we'll take a closer look at how Kajabi and Mastera compare in terms of features, pricing, support, and much more. Let's jump right in!

What is Mastera? 

Billing itself as a “video experience platform,” Mastera helps people monetize their passions through live classes, pre-recorded videos, content, memberships, and 1:1 bookings. Mastera was originally created from another service called Gleantap, a tech startup that launched in 2018 to help gyms and fitness studios with client retention. 

When the COVID-19 pandemic forced gyms and fitness studios to close in 2020, Gleantap pivoted with a new purpose: to help their users continue to share and teach what they love, virtually. 

Officially launching in February 2021, Mastera has since shifted its goals. Originally, it was designed to help their brick-and-mortar clients continue to support their own customers from home. It has since evolved into a platform allowing anyone to share their knowledge online and get paid for it, quickly and efficiently. 

How does Mastera compare to Kajabi? 

Mastera is a video-based learning platform. Designed primarily to deliver video classes, it focuses on the centralization and ease of access to learning materials via an online interface. 

The bulk of Mastera’s system centers around interactivity through its Zoom integration and video hosting. You can book one-on-one appointments or group classes. If you only want to stream your lessons over Zoom or deliver on-demand video courses, Mastera will fit your needs nicely. You also get basic analytics and the ability to chat with attendees and students one-on-one via email and text. 

Kajabi, on the other hand, is an all-in-one business platform. Selling and delivering online courses are only a part of its full offerings. When you compare Kajabi’s feature set to Mastera, you’ll see that it’s hard to make a head-to-head comparison.

Both Mastera and Kajabi allow you to deliver either live online or pre-recorded classes. However, Kajabi lets you do so much more, as we’ll cover in the rest of this article.

Memberships

Both Kajabi and Mastera give you the ability to build online memberships. Memberships allow you to charge a recurring fee to access specific information, be it a course, videos, digital products or other items. The fee is often charged monthly, but some memberships can run on a quarterly, semi-annual, or annual basis as well. 

On its lowest-priced plan, Mastera lets you have up to 100 active subscribers, whereas Kajabi’s lowest tier allows up to 1,000 active members. That’s a considerable difference and worth considering as you choose between Kajabi vs. Mastera for your course creation platform. Be aware, Mastera also charges you an extra $0.50 per subscriber if you go over your allotted quota. 

Kajabi goes much farther than simply letting you sell memberships. Within your membership or course, you can also offer coupons, free trials, payment plans, and more. You can accept payments for your course or membership through both PayPal and Stripe with no extra fees or per-transaction charges. 

And last but not least, to help keep your membership or course secure and keep members subscribed for a longer period of time, you can also take advantage of Kajabi’s Drip Content feature. Rather than letting people subscribe and download everything all at once (and then never hear from them again), you can gradually “drip” content to them according to a schedule of your choice.

Not only does this increase the chances they’ll stay subscribed longer. It also prevents them from getting overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information, videos, quizzes, and more that you have in store for them.

Selling products

Another feature Kajabi and Mastera share is the ability to sell products. 

Kajabi specializes in digital products, such as courses, membership, and coaching. But we understand that you’re not just selling a course or a membership. You’re building a business. To that end, we’ve included several features to help you accomplish that goal. 

These features include the 1-Click Upsell, which lets you sell more to your students or members while they’re already in the process of buying from you. 

Another feature is abandoned cart recovery. If a visitor has expressed interest in joining your course or membership but leaves before the transaction is completed, abandoned cart recovery springs into action. It sends them an email reminder that you can customize to encourage them to complete their order.

Mastera allows you to sell physical products as well as memberships. But this feature is only available through the $199/month Elite plan. And their site doesn't say how many products you can sell, what the fees are (if any) per transaction, and other important details. 

Website builder

Both Kajabi and Mastera let you set up a website. However, Kajabi’s drag-and-drop website builder vastly outperforms Mastera’s basic website setup. 

On Mastera’s lowest priced plan, the Starter Plan at $39/month, you are limited to a single-page website. The Premium and Elite Plans, at $99/month and $199/month respectively, allow you to operate a full website with multiple pages. 

With Kajabi, you’re able to create an unlimited number of landing pages. Using Kajabi’s own Premier Theme, you can customize these pages to fit your branding, style and theme. Plus, all pages are mobile-responsive, so they load fast and look clean and modern on any device. 

Kajabi gives you a good selection of themes, all of them offering an impressive array of customizable sections and design flexibility. This means you can create a professional-looking page without the need for a website designer or developer. 

And there’s almost no learning curve involved in using Kajabi. Just click and drag your way to bring your design vision to life. In minutes, you’ll be looking at a stunning work of art that perfectly captures your style and the visual brand of your business. 

Kajabi even lets you use your own domain name, whereas Mastera charges you an additional $99/month for the privilege. Through Kajabi’s comprehensive knowledge base, you can learn exactly how to register your domain (if you don’t already have one) and tie it to your new Kajabi site in no time. 

From here on, Kajabi and Mastera have even more differences than similarities. Let’s take a closer look at how Kajabi contrasts with Mastera

Course design

At its core, Mastera makes it easy for you to upload videos or stream live course lessons through Zoom. You get up to 100 GB of hosting space to do so. However, the design of your course is completely in your hands. If you’ve never designed a course before, Mastera won’t guide you. 

Conversely, Kajabi will take you by the hand and walk you through building your course step-by-step, even if you’ve never created a course in your life. There are several ways to construct your course offerings. When you create a new product, you can either start from scratch. Or, you can follow a Product Blueprint to quickly create a Mini Course, Online Course, Drop Course, Membership, or Community.

You can also do a deep dive into the company’s business-building knowledgebase, Kajabi University.

Quizzes and assessments

Another feature that’s conspicuously absent from Mastera is the ability to create engaging and interesting quizzes and assessments. These are useful to determine how students are doing in your course and how far they’ve progressed. 

Mastera does offer detailed analytics on member progress. However, the ability to ascertain whether or not lesson content has been learned satisfactorily is missing. Considering that the company considers itself an online learning platform, such a feature should be a given. Unfortunately, quizzes and surveys are nonexistent in Mastera. 

Kajabi offers numerous types of surveys and assessments as well as tests which can be graded by the teacher. You can also create a self-assessment for the student to complete and check on their own. Detailed analytics on the percentage of students who have taken the quizzes and their results are available on the Kajabi dashboard.

Email marketing

A common facet of any serious online business is email marketing. Kajabi has email marketing baked into its core. With features like intelligent segmenting and tagging, you can ensure that the right message goes to the right students at the right time. You can also automate follow-ups, up-sells, and email campaigns.

With Kajabi, you can send an unlimited number of marketing emails. Easily create different message triggers. Click and drag to create personalized messages. These powerful email marketing features are included at no extra charge with your Kajabi plan. 

Mastera doesn’t provide email marketing campaign functionality at all. You can communicate with your students via text messages (also known as “Conversations”) and one-on-one emails. However, you cannot create autoresponder follow-ups or send behavior-triggered emails to specific segments of your audience. 

Marketing automation

Marketing automation is another area where Kajabi clearly leads. Marketing automation through Kajabi is done through Pipelines. These are simple ways of creating events that trigger marketing activities, based on the user’s behavior.

For example, if Student A has completed the assessment for your beginner’s course, you can create an automation to:

• Send an email congratulating them on completion.
• Wait two days.
• Send them an email announcing your intermediate course, with a 10% discount if they register within the next 3 days. 
  

This is just one example of an Automation. Simple choose the trigger:

• Tags being added or removed
• An email is opened or clicked
• An email sequence is completed
• An event is registered
• A form is completed
• A student is inactive for 7, 30, 60, or 90 days
• An offer is purchased
• A post is completed

And then tell Kajabi what you want to happen next. The Automation ensures your strategy is executed without fail, freeing up hours of your time so you can work on building your business and sharing what you love. 

You can also create complex pipelines using a simple drag-and-drop “if-this-then-that” type of process flow. You don’t need programming or marketing experience. Several ready-made pipelines are available. You can apply any of them to your own marketing right from the start, so that you don’t need to create it from scratch. 

In the past, you’d have to pay a third-party service like an email marketing platform or a sales funnel builder to be able to incorporate this type of functionality into your business. But as with email marketing, it’s included in the Kajabi platform at no extra charge. 

Mastera has no such marketing automation features. There is an optional “Marketing Add-On'' which costs an extra $49/month, but as of this writing, it is unknown what’s included. And from the pricing layout, this seems to be only available to Enterprise-level subscribers who must reach out to the company for a custom quote. 

Online communities

Want to create a community around your brand? This is an area where one would think that a platform devoted to online learning would surely come out on top. However, barring email and text conversations, Mastera has no online communities for students or members to communicate with each other. 

Kajabi’s Community is one of many types of digital product you can build. As with email marketing and pipelines, everything you need is included at no extra charge.

The Community Product Blueprint allows you to create and manage an interactive space where you and your members can communicate. This works very much like an online forum. You can offer access to this community as a standalone product, or bundle it together with a course or membership. 

Mobile app

One of the best ways to connect with your audience is to reach them wherever they are by way of a mobile app. This way, even if they’re on the go or stuck in traffic, they can still complete their lesson, listen to course material and more. 

Kajabi facilitates and simplifies this process by letting users connect to their courses through the Kajabi mobile app. The app, available on the Apple Store and Google Play Store, allows members to watch courses and connect with other members. The app also saves their progress, so that they can pick back up where they left off on any device at any time.

Mastera also offers a mobile app for Android and iOS operating systems. However, as with its other offerings, this functionality is only available on the Enterprise plan. You have to schedule a consultation with the company for more details and pricing. 

Pricing comparison 

When it comes to pricing, Mastera is cheaper — on the surface. However, if you dig deeper, you’ll see that it may not necessarily be so. Let’s take a closer look: 

Mastera offers three plans: 

1. Starter at $39/month
2. Premium at $99/month 
3. Elite at $199/month

The higher the tier, the more features are unlocked. The Starter plan lets you create unlimited classes and content and sell them to an unlimited number of customers, but you can only have 100 active subscribers at a time. You’re also limited to a single-page website.

The Premium plan gives you a full website with multiple pages, up to 300 active subscribers, and unlimited live classes, on-demand videos and posts. You can also build and sell courses (how those are different from creating classes and posts isn’t clear) and add other teachers to your account. At this level, you can also white label your website and use your own domain.

On the Elite plan, you get everything in the Premium plan with up to 500 active subscriptions and the ability to sell physical and digital products. The Elite plan also affords you priority support.

Kajabi also offers three plans. When paid annually they are priced as follows:

1. Basic at $119/month 
2. Growth at $159/month 
3. Premium at $319/month
   

All plans include all the features. The higher tiers simply offer more scalability in terms of the number of email contacts and active members you can have.

When you do an apples-to-apples comparison like this, it may look like Mastera is the less expensive option. However, with only 100 active subscribers on the Starter Plan, compared to Kajabi’s 1,000 active subscribers on the Basic Plan (and with all features included), that may not be the case. 

Kajabi is built for scalability. It doesn’t try to extract more money as you need more features. 

In contrast, with Mastera, you’ll need to pay extra for features you need to market your business, including these basics: 

• Email marketing
• Community forums
• Live events and webinars
• Marketing automation
• Mobile-friendly website design
• Podcasting
  

It all adds up! When you consider the costs of all of these things over time, not to mention the cost of trying to integrate everything with one platform, it’s easy to see that Kajabi is the clear leader in terms of value for price. 

Customer support

Both Kajabi and Mastera are well-known for their superb customer service. As a newer company, Mastera works hard to demonstrate how committed they are to helping people succeed through online course instruction. They have less of a track record and less brand awareness, so customer service has (and does) work hard to satisfy their users.

Kajabi has been in business for far longer and has thousands upon thousands of five-star reviews of its customer service. It also has a comprehensive knowledge base, which walks you through its features with detailed step-by-step guides and videos. There’s also Kajabi University, which teaches you all about building an online business on Kajabi. 

On top of these self-help initiatives, Kajabi offers support to all users via email. If you have the Growth plan or higher, you also get access to support via 24-hour live chat. This helps you quickly find a resolution to any issue you may have, whether it’s getting guidance when you’re first starting or troubleshooting an issue with your account. 

You can do so much more to have a thriving online business than just sell courses online. And with Kajabi as your platform, you can build a business that’s scalable, flexible and built to perform. 

Kajabi vs. Mastera: Which is better? 

Now that you’ve reached the end of our Kajabi vs. Mastera review, you can clearly see that, although both platforms allow you to create and sell courses online, only one is tailored to help you transform that course into a thriving, expandable online business.

If all you want to do is deliver live online classes, on-demand videos, posts, and merchandise, Mastera could very well tick all the boxes for you. 

However, if you want to go beyond that, with plenty of marketing tools to take your business to the next level, you’ll get farther (and ultimately spend far less) with Kajabi. 

When you consider all of these benefits alongside the support, community and growing feature list all rolled up into one monthly price, Kajabi clearly outshines the competition. Try it for yourself for 14 days absolutely free.

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