Kajabi vs. Squarespace

If you're looking to host an online course, start a membership site, or build a business website, you may be evaluating Kajabi and Squarespace. In this detailed comparison, we'll take a closer look at how the two platforms differ and which could be the best option for your specific needs. 

How they differ: Squarespace vs. Kajabi

Squarespace, at its core, is a website-building app that allows businesses to sell tangible (rather than digital) products online. Squarespace promises to help you “sell anything.” But their focus isn’t on digital products such as courses and coaching. Instead, it’s on e-commerce and physical products.

Kajabi, on the other hand, is built from the ground up to help you sell digital products like online courses, memberships, coaching programs, blogs, and podcasts. Its tool set includes not only course-building tools but also marketing and sales tools that empower you to turn your knowledge into a profitable business. 

This is the key difference between Kajabi and Squarespace. But since they serve different audiences, their features differ as well. That being the case, as you review their features, start by asking yourself which type of product you intend to sell.  

In this comprehensive comparison, we’ll be looking at key features that you need to consider, including pricing, website builders, templates, third-party integrations, customer support, and more. 

Let’s jump in: 

Pricing comparison

Squarespace pricing consists of four different plans: 

• Personal at $16/month
• Business at $23/month
• Commerce at $27/month 
• Advanced Commerce at $49/month

Kajabi offers three plans: 

• Basic at $149/month
• Growth at $199/month 
• Pro at $399/month

Looking solely at price, Squarespace seems to be the clear winner. But shopping by price is almost always a mistake. It’s important to evaluate what you’ll get for your monthly investment.

Squarespace gives you a website builder, website hosting, and top-of-the-line security for your website. It doesn't have many of the features you need to grow your business. 

And of course, that’s reflected in the price. You must pay extra for many of the extensions and third-party add-ons that are essential for growing your business. For example:

• Email marketing software
• Search engine optimization
• Inventory management
• Order management
• Print-on-demand
• Shipping and logistics

Be aware, the cost of these extensions and any additional marketing and sales tools you need will quickly add up. Your total investment will rival or even surpass the cost of Kajabi. 

With Kajabi, on the other hand, what you see is what you get. There are no hidden fees. Everything you need to build your business is built in: a website builder and hosting, a course builder, coaching tools, a payment processor, email marketing, a funnel builder, analytics, and more.  

To fully understand the value of Kajabi’s all-in-one toolset, let’s explore a few of its core features in more detail.

Marketing and automation

Kajabi was built from the ground up with marketing at its core. Its mission: to equip knowledge entrepreneurs to easily monetize their skills and passions. To fulfill that mission, Kajabi gives you an entire suite of marketing and sales tools at no extra charge. These include:

Email automation

Email automations are email sequences that automatically go out when a visitor or customer takes an action that you specify in advance. 

For example, when someone joins your list, an email series is triggered to onboard them and help them get to know you. When someone buys your course, they’re automatically sent login credentials and a welcome message.

With email automation, you can grow your list of students or members and automatically follow up with them as they work their way through your course or membership. Kajabi's email automation is easy to use and features an intuitive drag-and-drop interface — no programming experience is necessary. 

List segmentation

Using Kajabi's built-in marketing automation, you can also segment your list according to the criteria you specify. 

Want to target beginners versus more advanced students or members? Kajabi lets you tag and target users according to your own specific criteria, so you can ensure that you’re sending the right message to the right people at the right time.  

The process is deeply intuitive and user-friendly. Even if you've never built a mailing list before and have no idea how to create segmented groups, Kajabi walks you through the entire process. 

As you become more comfortable with building lists, you can also automate much of the heavy lifting. Kajabi lets you sort and organize your prospects into different groups based on their course goals and interests. 

This allows you to concentrate more of your time and attention where it's needed, namely, creating new courses, new marketing campaigns, and getting more students into your class rosters! 

Marketing templates

Even if you're not sure where to start with marketing automation, Kajabi can help. Its pre-made templates are essentially marketing playbooks, pre-filled with the most common automation actions. 

So if you want to deliver a free download after a user has subscribed to your mailing list, for example, you only need to select the template, drag to apply, and you're done. It really is that simple, and it can save you hours of time. 

Funnel builder

The funnel builder is Kajabi's spin on the traditional sales funnel. And it’s as easy to use as Kajabi’s email software and marketing templates. Just click and drag to create your own funnel. Then set the criteria that prospects must fulfill as they move through it.

Here again, pre-built funnels are also available to help you start selling right away without having to wade into the code or try to figure out a convoluted "if this then that" system. However, if you want to control every aspect of your funnel, Kajabi gives you that freedom as well. 

Squarespace email campaigns review

Squarespace offers a variety of marketing tools specifically designed around e-commerce and payment processing. So if you want detailed analytics on purchases and product sales, you'll find that Squarespace gives you that flexibility. They also offer native support for a variety of payment options built into the platform. 

But in terms of marketing tools, the Squarespace platform simply isn't built for things like integrated email communications, follow-ups, upsells, and downsells. 

Squarespace does include an email marketing service, but to give an honest Squarespace email review, we need to emphasize that it isn’t free. You’ll pay an additional $5-$64 per month on top of your Squarespace subscription, depending on the plan. 

Website builder and templates

Both Kajabi and Squarespace can be used to create a beautiful, mobile-responsive website that's unique enough to professionally represent your brand. 

Squarespace, remember, is primarily a website builder. It’s easy to imagine they’d be the clear leader here. But Kajabi has also established itself as a leader in this area. 

Both Kajabi and Squarespace offer drag-and-drop simplicity, so you can build a beautiful website without hiring a web designer or sloshing around in the code. Building pages that look the way you want is easy. 

Design-wise, Squarespace lets you create some stunning results. Kajabi pages tend to reflect a modern, crisp, and clean design. Pages across both platforms are infinitely customizable, and you can change entire templates to give every page its own unique style. 

Using templates with Kajabi and Squarespace

Both Kajabi and Squarespace use templates as their starting point for your web pages. They each give you a default template that you can customize to your liking. 

Kajabi's core templates, known as Premier, are more of a framework rather than a template. There are six different presets for this framework that can be further customized for your online course or membership site.

Squarespace also has a considerable selection of templates and is consistently adding more. Although in version 7.1 you can't change your template once you choose one, you can customize nearly every facet of it. 

Note: In Squarespace, you can’t change the color on an individual section of any page, since color changes apply broadly to different types of content. Changing one changes them all. 

However, overall both Kajabi and Squarespace excel when it comes to the freedom and flexibility you have with their templates. Both are highly customizable, so you can choose the right look for your online course or membership site. 

A note on creating membership sites on Squarespace

Both Kajabi and Squarespace allow you to create membership sites. However, due to the way Squarespace approaches membership site architecture, it's possible for someone with little web development knowledge to bypass your payment gate and access your premium content without paying for it. 

This is a known problem within the community and Squarespace is actively looking into a resolution. However, we feel it's important to know that this is a very present issue affecting sites on the platform.

If you're considering a membership site as your core business enterprise, it makes sense to choose a platform where bypassing the payment gate isn't a simple matter of tweaking some code. 

Course creation

Course creation is an area where Kajabi truly excels. It was built to not only deliver courses behind a secure, intuitive workspace but also foster engagement and collaboration between your students and you. 

To host online courses on Squarespace, you’ll have to devise a workaround. That’s because Squarespace wasn’t built for course creators. In order to sell courses on Squarespace, you’ll have to upload your course lessons to individually password-protected pages. 

That sounds like a simple solution, until you realize that every student would get the same password to access the material, and if one student shares the password with others, you have to change it for everyone. 

Or, someone might use Squarespace to host their site then pay for a learning management system to build and host their courses. But, that means an added cost, integrating the systems, and a potentially disjointed user experience.

Kajabi lets you create all types of courses, including introductory courses, expert "deep dive" courses, and even certification courses. Even if you've never created a course before, their in-depth library walks you through the process, including: 

• Honing in on the right topic for your course
• Seeing how much competition is out there
• Knowing how to structure your course
• And much more

Through Kajabi’s centralized dashboard, you can see precisely how many students have completed your course, where various students are in the process, and who may need a little extra help or encouragement — essential information for bringing the attentiveness of the classroom into the virtual space. 

Student engagement

It's one thing to create a course, but another thing entirely to get students to engage with one another and you, the teacher. Student engagement, therefore, should be at the core of your course creation efforts.

In addition to engagement, there's also the matter of assessment. How can you be sure the students have adequately learned the material from one lesson before moving on to the next one? 

Squarespace doesn't offer any type of student engagement or assessment tools. There may be third-party workarounds to provide this type of functionality, but there's no way to natively create things like quizzes or other exams in Squarespace. 

As you might expect, Kajabi has assessments built into the system, so there's no need for clunky workarounds. You can even quiz your students throughout the duration of the lesson to ensure that they fully understand the material before they're able to proceed to the next one. 

Plus, students don't have to wait on you to see their grades. Grades can be calculated automatically, and you can log into your dashboard to instantly see how students are performing. 

Do you need to concentrate on certain lessons in more detail or add supplementary material? The assessments part of the dashboard will show you where students may be having difficulties. 

Note: Migrating a course onto or off of Squarespace is complicated. So you want to be sure Squarespace is right for you before building your digital presence on it. In fact, at least one Squarespace reviewer recommends using Kajabi for your courses, even if you choose to build your website on Squarespace.

If you choose to move your course from Squarespace to Kajabi, we recommend simply recreating your course from scratch and using Kajabi's own built-in tools to supplement your existing material. 

Third-party integrations

Both Kajabi vs. Squarespace allow for built-in integrations with third-party tools, but Squarespace has more of them than Kajabi — largely because Kajabi users don’t need as many add-ons and integrations. 

That said, Squarespace is most likely to support e-commerce integrations, such as inventory management and order processing tools.  

Kajabi currently offers ten integrations with third-party tools, including:

• MailChimp
• AWeber
• ClickFunnels
• ConvertKit
• Google Analytics 
• And more

In addition, both Kajabi and Squarespace integrate with Zapier, which allows for an even wider range of integrations with other tools. You may need some development experience in order to make these integrations fit your specific needs, however. 

Customer support

When someone signs up for either Kajabi or Squarespace, the hope is that they'll never need to use customer service. But if they do, it's nice to know that customer service is there to help. So how do the two platforms compare when it comes to support? 

Squarespace offers email support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, as well as live chat support Monday through Friday. Squarespace does not have a phone support option, but technical and support requests are handled quickly through their various channels.

Another interesting facet of Squarespace is "circles," their community forum. These "circles" teach you how to create a course on the Squarespace platform. Be aware, though, they're only available if you have three or more Squarespace sites.

On the other hand, Kajabi offers 24/7 live chat support for users on the Growth plan or higher. Beyond that, there's an extensive catalog of resources, such as training videos, webinars, guides, how-to articles and Kajabi University. These guides don’t just help you use Kajabi. They also help you master course building, marketing, and growing your business. 

Which is better: Kajabi vs. Squarespace?

If you want to create an online course with as little hassle and headache as possible, Kajabi is hands-down the best option for your needs. After selecting a plan and setting up your account, you can immediately start uploading your content.

Kajabi also comes with a lesson editor that walks you through important aspects of engaging your students. Think lessons titles and descriptions, as well as uploading videos. You can also create your assessments and give your students different options for completing them, such as a multiple-choice quiz or fill-in-the-blank questions. 

If these were the only features that Kajabi offered, it would still be a powerful course creator. But we've barely scratched the surface.

You see, in addition to being a course creation tool, Kajabi is also a course marketing tool. Using funnels and landing pages, you can segment your messages to potential students at different knowledge levels. So you can engage everyone, from complete beginners to advanced students who are interested in more complex topics and challenging certifications. 

You can also follow up with video marketing to further reinforce the concepts you teach and ensure that the right message is seen by the right prospect at the right time. 

Even when a student enrolls in your course, they never have to leave Kajabi. They can pay for the course directly through Kajabi using their preferred payment method. And you’ll never see a transaction fee or additional charges beyond your monthly fee. 

Truly an all-in-one platform

Squarespace is an ideal platform for selling tangible goods, where things like shopping logistics and inventory management are a concern. But for course creation and other digital products, Kajabi is the clear winner.

That's because you're not simply investing in a course creation platform. You're getting a website builder, a subscription/payment manager, an email marketing campaign builder, a student performance tracker, a blog, a video hosting suite, and a graded assessment tool. 

In short, everything you need to actually create, launch, and market an online course. So yes, on the front-end, Kajabi appears to cost more. But it can save you money in both the short and long term. 

Furthermore, with Kajabi, you can focus on sharing your knowledge instead of mastering a lot of tech and tools. We get it. Not all entrepreneurs are technical wizards, or even want to be.

That’s why we’ve bridged the gap, giving you easy, intuitive, and accessible tool sets that actually work. We build drag-and-drop simplicity and smart workflows into every feature, so anyone can build a profitable online business. 

Using Kajabi, your high-priority business-building tasks are easy to master. Creating landing pages, building and segmenting email lists, offering discounts, managing payments, automating marketing processes: It's all a part of what makes Kajabi an outstanding course creation platform. 

Taking the next steps

Both Kajabi and Squarespace offer a 14-day trial, so you can take them each for a spin before you make your final decision. However, before you get too deep into the course creation process, it's a good idea to go with a platform that has been expressly built for this purpose. It should be packed with features and guidance to help you build and scale — not just as a teacher, but as a course creator in today’s knowledge economy. 

Try Kajabi risk free for 14 days and discover how easy it is to build a business that brings your knowledge to the forefront. With Kajabi, you can start inspiring, motivating, and educating your best students today. 

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