Kajabi vs. Teachable: The Best Online Course Platform for Your Business

Table of Contents

—

Kajabi and Teachable are online course platforms that let you create, publish, and sell online courses. Unlike massive open online course platforms like Udemy or Coursera that put your course on an open marketplace, Kajabi and Teachable allow you to sell online courses under your brand with complete control over your prices.

This in-depth comparison examines how Kajabi and Teachable compare as the best platforms for building and growing a profitable online business.

In addition to course-related functionality, we compare the marketing capabilities of each platform.

After all, people have to know who you are, what you’re about, and what you can do for them before buying from you.

Every successful online marketing strategy follows the same framework. As you compare Kajabi and Teachable feature by feature, analyze how each feature will support the following framework for your business:

Identify your audience.
Drive them to your site.
Entice them with a solution to their problems.
Nurture the relationship.
Persuade them to invest their time and money.
Get repeat sales.

We’ll compare Kajabi vs. Teachable capabilities in these key areas:

Online course creation and delivery
Online course structure
Video hosting
Customer progress
Assessments
Digital product templates
Website builder
Landing pages
Email marketing
Funnels (AKA sales funnels and automated marketing campaigns)
Live events, virtual summits, webinars, and live streams
Integrations
Monetization
Learning Experience
Security
Customization
Pricing

Kajabi vs. Teachable At A Glance

Online Course Creation And Delivery

Both platforms let you turn any type of content you’ve created (video, audio, digital workbooks, etc.) into a digital product.

Kajabi’s course creation capabilities are simple and straightforward. You can choose from easy-to-use Product Blueprints to create a/an:

Community – Group to foster communication, collaboration, and creativity among your students.‍
Mini-course – Short, one-category course and solution for a quick overview of your digital product. Perfect for less expensive courses.
‍Online course – Longer, more immersive online course experience with five separate categories to deliver organization and an in-depth starting point.
‍Evergreen training – Release the contents of your course over time to help increase customer engagement.
‍Start from scratch – A blank canvas for people who already know how to structure a course. Great for those migrating over to Kajabi from another platform.
‍Membership – Designed for visual and ever-evolving content. Allows subscribers to access content on-demand.

Teachable’s course creation capabilities are intuitive and take you through a step-by-step process to set up a new course. However, they only offer two options:

Set up coaching
Set up a course

With a coaching business on Teachable, you can:

Manage clients
Schedule
Upsell products

With Teachable courses, you can:

Create courses with various sections & lectures
Add content & commentary
Embed forms
Provide certificates of completion

When you look at Kajabi vs. Teachable and its course creation abilities, there are distinct differences.

‍Bottom line: If you’re an established business with various offerings, Kajabi is your best bet. If you’re on the smaller side and have niche offerings, Teachable will get the job done.

Online Course Structure

Both platforms let you group lessons under categories when building out the actual structure of your course. Your course appears to your students like an online syllabus, making it easy for them to follow along and learn.

One difference: Kajabi lets you create subcategories to nest under categories. Teachable does not.

Here’s an example of how you can organize a content-heavy course using Kajabi.

Subcategories help organize significant volumes of content, particularly from an optics perspective. Too much content in a course syllabus can run too long and appear overwhelming for your students.‍

Bottom line: If you have robust course content and want a higher level of organization, Kajabi is the tool for you. If you have a simple course structure, either platform should suffice.

Video Hosting

For back-end video hosting, both Kajabi and Teachable use Wistia, which:

Provides high streaming quality.
Automatically adjusts the quality based on your viewer’s Internet speed.
Provides uninterrupted playback (even going through a tunnel on 3G won’t stop users from enjoying your videos).

Both Kajabi and Teachable have unlimited video hosting for online courses.‍

Bottom line: Kajabi and Teachable have similar video hosting capabilities

Member/Student Progress

Up-to-date progress reports about your students or members provide you with answers to questions like:

Are they going through the course and digesting the material?
Are they getting stuck anywhere?
Are my videos too long?
Where do they tend to drop off?

With Kajabi, you get full access to all these details with our robust analytics. With lesson and video progress, you can track exactly how people are digesting your content individually and from multiple overview perspectives.

With Kajabi, you can see how much progress each student (up to 1,000 students displayed) has made in one course. Kajabi also lets you segment out your students however you’d like to categorize them.

For example, if you wanted to see how community members were progressing specifically, you could create a filter for them, as seen below.

‍

Let’s say you wanted to look at student progress by lesson. Here’s an example that shows all of your students' overall progress, broken down by each lesson of your course.

‍

Teachable also tracks your student's progress and video engagement on an individual basis. To view a student’s Progress Report, click their user profile to see information like:

Graded quiz scores
Lectures completed
A video heat map

Both Kajabi and Teachable offer video heat maps generated by Wistia so you can track how your students interact with and progress through your video courses. The heat map shows a second-by-second graphical view of how your audience watched your videos.

Green = student watched the video
Yellow = student re-watched the video
Orange = student re-watched the video multiple times
White = student skipped

Bottom Line: Both Kajabi and Teachable allow you to see high-level and segmented reports on your students’ progress.

Assessing Your Students: Testing, Surveys, Assignments

Every course creator wants their students to soak up as much knowledge as possible from the course. Building an interactive experience for your customers makes a big difference. It also sets your course apart from the slew of courses on the market.

When done right, testing helps your students:

Digest and remember material on a deeper level
Gives course creators a better understanding of students
Allows you to track progress

Both Kajabi and Teachable platforms offer built-in quizzes, assessments, and surveys.

Teachable Quizzes

Teachable allows you to add multiple-choice quizzes to any “lecture,” which is how Teachable refers to units of text, files, video, images, and/or quizzes. For simplicity, let’s consider a “lecture” a lesson.

In Teachable, quiz functionality depends on your plan level:

The basic plan ($39 per month) lets you create non-graded quizzes, which means you can’t track how your students score on the quizzes.
The professional plan ($119) lets you create graded quizzes and track scores. You can also require students to complete a quiz with a minimum score before proceeding to the next lesson.

However, Teachable can’t support a student’s ability to:

Answer open-ended questions in paragraph form
Upload a photo, audio file, or PDF to answer a question

In terms of Kajabi vs. Teachable, if multiple-choice questions are sufficient for your course, then Teachable’s quiz functionality will work fine.

Kajabi Assessments

With Kajabi, you have plenty of flexibility in how you design assessments, including:

Multiple-choice questions
Open-ended questions
Fill-in-the-blank statements
Images as the question itself

Grading comes free with every plan and students can easily upload assets and files directly into the lesson like:

PDFs
Word docs
Videos
Images
Audio files

Want to automatically subscribe students to an email sequence after they’ve completed the assessment? Email them with a link to test results? Would you like the ability to email your team every time a student completes an assessment? You can do all of that in Kajabi.

Like Teachable, you can require your students to complete an assessment with a minimum score before moving on to the next lesson. Or if it’s more important that they answer the questions rather than the grade itself, set the passing grade to 0%. Regardless of the score, students can move on once they answer.

Every course is unique. Picture the type of rich interaction that comes with having your students do more than click on a multiple-choice question.

The more flexibility you have in facilitating deep, meaningful interaction with your students, the better equipped you’ll be to create top-notch courses. With Kajabi, there’s much more you can do with assessments far beyond courses like using them in your landing pages to segment out your leads.

‍Bottom line: If you want robust functionality for testing your students, sending surveys, or simply designing a more interactive learning experience, Kajabi is one of the best Teachable alternatives.

Digital Product Templates: The Look And Feel Of Your Course

If you’ve ever purchased an Apple product, you most likely remember the visual experience, the packaging, and the overall high-quality presentation.

Powerful branding is one reason consumers are willing to pay premium prices for Apple products. The look and feel of Apple products alone give them a higher perceived value.

Customers want to be blown away by their purchases and feel that they’ve made the right decision once they've invested.

That feeling you once had unwrapping a beautiful, sleek MacBook Pro or iPhone — that’s the same feeling your customers should have the first time they log into your course.

This is where product theming, one of the most significant differences between Kajabi vs. Teachable, comes into play.‍

Teachable Product Templates

In Teachable, the concept of course theming is reduced to a singular template that allows you to change your:

Logo and background
Typography
Colors

Essentially, with these three options, you can customize the look of your online courses to match your specific branding. The downside is that all your products will look uniform. Aside from logo changes, you can’t customize the look of your various products.

In Teachable, each page in your course will have a video and a course outline so you can jump from one lesson to the next pretty easily. That works great for basic online courses, and maybe that’s all that you need.

But what if you wanted to sell other digital products in addition to your course?

This is where the rigidity of Teachable can become a problem.

If you’re selling a membership site, you most likely want to give your members fresh, new content plus ways to interact with you regularly.

In that case, a linear format primarily designed for online courses probably won’t work well for you. You need a platform with built-in flexibility that allows students to jump around easily.

On the other hand, if you’re selling access to one video, your platform would ideally allow you to create a one-page course site with the video. The traditional course outline Teachable offers isn't suited for that, either.

Kajabi Product Templates: Suitable For Any Type Of Digital Product

Here’s what Kajabi does that no other online course creator does: It presents you with a library of beautiful, highly customizable templates that you can apply to your different products.

Do you have an online course with several modules and lessons? What about a membership site? Want to add coaching and weekly webinars? What about creating a paid community?

If you have any digital product, Kajabi has the right template for it.

The best part is that you’re not obligated to use the same template for all of your products. You can choose a different template for each product.

Even within each carefully crafted template, you can customize each one with Kajabi’s easy-to-use template editor and powerful code editor.‍

Bottom line: If you want to make a strong impression on your customers and have the flexibility to serve your audience differently, Kajabi is the stronger platform and one of the best Teachable alternatives.

Website Builder

Having your course live in the same ecosystem as your website not only eliminates your tech integration headaches but it also gives your website visitors a more seamless experience, guiding them to make a purchase.

You eliminate that extra layer of friction that would otherwise force your visitors to bounce around different systems.

Both Kajabi and Teachable promise a drag-and-drop website builder made to house your course. Both platforms can host blog posts so you can deliver free, valuable content to potential customers.

But there are huge differences in Kajabi vs. Teachable’s website builders, so let’s dive in.

Teachable Website Builder

Essentially, a Teachable website is a basic storefront page that showcases your online courses. You can add certain blocks, such as images, text, and buttons, and certain block layouts predesigned, such as banners, pricing, etc.

The Teachable website builder has no actual templates to choose from. On the dashboard menu, the item named “Theme” gives these options to upload images for:

Site logo
Favicon
Homepage background with some degree of a dark overlay for the background
You can choose one font throughout your entire site (out of 11 fonts)
You can choose colors for specific sections

For example, one color for all buttons and links, one color for all headings, one color for your video player, and so on.

Since the Teachable website builder offers little flexibility in design or customization, Teachable sites tend to look very similar.

If you opt for Teachable’s business plan ($249 per month), you get the Power Editor, which lets you make advanced customizations with custom code, including HTML/Liquid and CSS.

But in all reality, who has the time to learn how to custom-code their website?

The Power Editor to edit a school’s template files, is still in development, and Teachable advises its users to be cautious:

Kajabi Website Builder

With Kajabi, you can build a beautiful website that’s safe, secure, and stable without hiring expensive designers or web developers. Kajabi’s templates offer multiple layout presets that you can customize.

You can pick a layout preset you like and add your own branding and copy. Then, you’ll have a stunning website with your library of products, about page, blog, and more.

With the framework in Kajabi, you get access to all the elements successful websites use, including options to add:

Custom domain
Site header
Video background
Opt-in forms
Calls-to-action (CTAs)
Feature highlights
Testimonials
Sales pages
Blog posts
Analytics

You could also add a Two Step Opt-in Popup to your site so when visitors land on your homepage, you can start capturing their emails.

The best part is that it’s all easily customizable with all Kajabi plans. With its drag-and-drop editor, you can make changes on the fly and move elements wherever you want — minus the scary custom coding you’d have to do with Teachable’s Power Editor.

No other online course platform comes close to letting you create beautiful, professional-quality websites from scratch.

So, if you’re done with tech headaches and trying to integrate your website to your products and marketing campaigns, Kajabi is your all-in-one platform.

‍Bottom line: There’s no question when it comes to Kajabi vs. Teachable’s website builders. Teachable’s is severely limited. With Kajabi’s many options for website customization without the need to code anything, it’s the clear winner.‍

Landing Pages

Landing pages are pages aimed solely at getting visitors to take a specific action, known as the call to action (CTA).

In order to separate from your website where visitors come to learn about you and your brand, landing pages should be simple. The goal is to remove potential barriers to conversion, so your CTA might be to:

Download a free PDF
Sign up for a newsletter
Buy a product
Provide your email for a discount code

You’ve seen landing pages in many different forms:

Opt-in pages
Sales pages
Thank you pages
Download pages
Video pages

Let’s compare Kajabi vs. Teachable and how their platforms can help you build and grow your online business.‍

Kajabi Landing Pages

With its built-in landing page functionality, Kajabi lets you choose from dozens of templates to create any landing page you need.

They’re perfect for:

Growing your audience
Delivering value
Selling your products

Not to mention, they're easily tied together to build an automated marketing campaign or funnel.

Here’s an example of a landing page funnel you could create in Kajabi in less than 20 minutes, and it flows like this:

Opt-in page that promises video content (in exchange for an email) which leads to…
A landing page with the video content and at the bottom of that page is…
An irresistible CTA that visitors click on and automatically directs them to…
A sales page featuring one of your introductory offers.

This simple example barely scrapes the surface of Kajabi’s landing page capabilities, but it can easily start generating sales from day 1.

Teachable Landing Pages

Teachable courses, by default, come with a sales page, a checkout page, and a thank you page. You can create up to 10 sales pages for each course and use the predesigned page blocks for sections like:

The author bio
FAQs
Testimonials

Keep in mind with Teachable, that getting people’s eyeballs on those pages, much less turning visitors into paying customers, will be difficult without having built a relationship.

You’re simply relying on cold traffic (people who have never seen or heard of you) to invest in your business.

If you choose Teachable over Kajabi, you’ll need to enlist (and pay for) third-party landing page software to add the automated marketing capabilities.

These services can cost you an extra $100 monthly in addition to your Teachable subscription. Kajabi comes standard with automated marketing capabilities.

Teachable vs. Kajabi CRMs

Speaking of additional software, what happens when your landing pages generate leads? Teachable does not offer customer relationship management (CRM) capabilities or ways to track those contacts.

If you chose Teachable, you’d have to get a CRM system. Yet another tool to pay for each month on top of your Teachable subscription.

Kajabi, on the other hand, does offer a CRM with which you can:

Tag, segment, and filter your customers
Integrate with automated email campaigns
Trigger coupons and product access for specific students
Track customer behavior, product engagement, and performance on assessments

Bottom line: The Teachable platform lacks a CRM, but comes equipped with the basic landing page types to get you started. Kajabi offers landing pages you can build into sales funnels and integrate with your CRM (also contained in Kajabi).‍

Email Marketing‍

Email is the lifeblood of any online business. It converts more effectively than any other marketing medium out there. Consider the latest stats on email marketing:

80% of business professionals believe email marketing increases customer retention
59% of marketers say email is their biggest source of ROI
59% of respondents say marketing emails influence their purchase decisions

Both platforms claim to offer email marketing, so let’s compare Kajabi vs. Teachable and see how they stack up.

Teachable Email Marketing

Teachable advertises “integrated email marketing” in its list of basic plan features. The platform, by itself, allows you to send emails to your students or a subset of students.

You’d likely send course-related announcements to customers who have already purchased your course. Teachable would allow you to notify students when you’ve updated a video, added a new lesson, or made changes.

Those emails are helpful to your students, but they’re not the type of email marketing that nurtures prospects into new customers.

What about the people who have opted-in to your mailing list or signed up to receive a freebie? They’re not paying customers yet. How can you cultivate a relationship over email and eventually convert them into paying customers?

To do that, you’d have to enlist a third-party email provider. Another add-on that would cost extra depending on the number of email subscribers you have.

Kajabi Email Marketing

Kajabi Email works right out of the box. No plugins are needed. You can start building relationships with prospects by sending personalized, beautifully designed email broadcasts and autoresponders.

Use email marketing to keep the conversation going, add value, and consistently show up for your existing and potential customers. Email is a huge opportunity to stay top of mind in your corner of the market.

As an upgrade from other platforms like Teachable, Kajabi’s new Email Visual Editor makes it easy to add rich design to your emails with:

15+ templates
12 preset sections that allow you to quickly add new content, countdown timers, images, and video previews
Mobile vs. desktop layouts with responsive editing capabilities

Behind the scenes, Kajabi Email comes with Email Subject Line Validation, improving deliverability as you type your subject line.

The tool automatically checks for potential spam triggers and suggests exactly what to fix to help you increase open rates and stay out of the spam folder.

There’s also no need to worry about frustrating integrations and broken APIs because Kajabi Emails natively integrate with the rest of your site including:

Events
Marketing automation
Digital products

Wondering how you benefit from having your email marketing under one roof with the rest of your business? Here’s an example of an autoresponder sequence you can build in Kajabi:

Create a Kajabi landing page with a video about your upcoming digital product.
Anyone who opts into that landing page, automatically gets entered on your Kajabi email sequence.
Throughout the week, Kajabi automatically sends a daily email with a new video. Each video is delivering value and building up excitement about your upcoming product.
At the end of the week, you notify your prospect that you’ve opened up registration to your online course with discounted early bird pricing.
A few days pass, and because the prospect hasn’t purchased yet, your autoresponder notifies them that the discounted pricing offer will soon expire.
You close the cart and you’re done. Now you have a proven launch funnel that runs while you sleep.

You can do all of this inside Kajabi. To see Kajabi’s unveiling of our email builder earlier this year, check out the email launch live replay. You can also review our email Q&A blog, or watch the Kajabi Email Deep Dive Training video.

Bottom line: When it comes down to Kajabi vs. Teachable, Kajabi has all the email marketing capabilities you need to develop and grow your business. With Teachable, you’ll have to enlist the services of a third-party email marketing platform.

Funnels (AKA Sales Funnels And Automated Marketing Campaigns)

While we're on the subject of landing pages and email marketing, one robust feature entirely unique to Kajabi is the power to create funnels, also known as sales funnels.

Teachable does not offer sales funnels and automated marketing campaigns. You have to pay for separate integrations at an additional cost. And a business without those capabilities is less likely to flourish.

Funnels in Kajabi are automated marketing campaigns that tie together your opt-in forms, your landing pages, and automated email, to help you sell your digital products and online courses.

The idea behind Funnels is simple: you can’t expect to sell your digital offerings if people don’t know you exist. You need to build a relationship first. Funnels help you do that by creating:

Awareness --> Interest --> Decision --> Action (prospective customer converts to a paying customer).

This sequence of steps is necessary for cultivating a customer relationship. The end goal is that the customer buys your product (and hopefully becomes a customer for life).

If you’ve ever thought to yourself, “I have great ideas and amazing content, but how do I get my message out to the world and sell?” Funnels is your answer.

This Funnels feature in Kajabi is entirely automated, meaning once you’ve created your funnel, you can set it up to run automatically. With a hands-off feature like that, you can build your online business while you sleep.

Here are some examples of Funnels you can put together inside Kajabi with just a few clicks:

Free report. Capture emails & build your list by offering a free downloadable report.
Product launch. Engage and excite your list with a multi-video sales process.
Promotional offer. Capture emails, follow up, and present an irresistible offer to start making sales today.
Webinar. Host your own free webinar, where you can demonstrate your skills and offer your products to your audience.

"It took me less than 48 hours to get everything set up in Kajabi, ready to convert and send traffic to. The first week I had products online, over 25% of those who purchased took my order bump on the checkout page. Not to mention Kajabi's checkout page performed over 15% better than Teachable's checkout page, which I was previously using! I have been so impressed with this software because it really has made selling easy."

— Haley Burkhead of the Profit Planner

As you can see, Kajabi Funnels can accommodate various needs, including building your list, hosting a webinar, and selling your digital products.‍

Bottom Line: Kajabi Funnels can help you build a profitable online business that's built to last with built-in automated sales funnels. Teachable does not have the capability to build sales funnels.

Live Events, Virtual Summits, Webinars, And Livestreams

You know how critical it is to build your audience in a way that’s consistent and sustainable. You need new people discovering you, telling their networks about you, and subscribing to your emails.

Free live webinars can help you attract new audiences. Both Kajabi and Teachable offer some webinar support, but there are major differences when comparing Kajabi vs. Teachable.‍

Kajabi Event

‍Kajabi comes with the power to host your webinars. You can build out and market any kind of event through Kajabi, such as:

Here are a few examples of events you can set up:

Live Zoom training. Host a live video training and engage with your audience.
Virtual conference. Host a virtual summit that runs over a few days.
Evergreen webinars. Run fully automated webinars. Just set an event to repeat however you’d like — every 10 minutes, every hour, every day. You can set your webinar to run on autopilot.

Once you’ve nailed the type of event, date and time, Kajabi makes it easy to:

Add countdowns to your landing pages and email broadcasts.
Register people (for both digital and in-person events).
Send email notifications reminding people about the event.

The best part? You don’t have to think much about what elements you need to create a marketing campaign around your event. Kajabi comes with a webinar funnel that includes customizable templates for your:

Registration page
Confirmation page
Sales page
4 reminder emails
5 follow-up emails

Set up your webinar funnel once, and let Kajabi take care of the rest.

Teachable vs. Kajabi Webinars

Teachable doesn’t offer a native way to add live streams, but you can run webinars inside Teachable by embedding live video stream code into a lesson.

While Teachable allows you to run webinars to engage with your students, its webinar support capabilities don’t allow you to reach audiences outside of them.

The most you could do is upsell products to existing customers. With Teachable, you can’t leverage webinars to build your list, sell your product, or build your brand authority publicly.

According to Teachable’s statement, its customer care does not support live streams:

If you’re interested in using webinars or any kind of live events to grow your business, you’d need to pay for another webinar platform outside of Teachable. But even with an external webinar platform, you’d still be missing the incredible benefits of having an automated marketing campaign (which comes with Kajabi).

Bottom line: Engaging your audience through live events can help you grow your list, build brand authority, and sell more of your products. If you want to leverage the power of webinars, virtual summits, or events of any kind, Kajabi is the Teachable alternative you need.

Integrations

There is no shortage of tools out there right now to help you grow and automate your online business. Odds are if you're a digital entrepreneur looking to sell online courses, you’ve used some of them already.

But software platforms can be confusing to navigate. Their primary goal isn't to work with other platforms, but to execute their primary purpose in the best way they can.

So how do you make these tools work with your online course platform?

That’s where integrations come in.

Integrations make it easy to connect third-party apps with your online course platform and have them work together in powerful ways.

Kajabi offers everything you need to run a successful online business. But we also recognize that you may have some favorite third-party apps you’re not ready to give up yet.

That's why Kajabi has built-in integrations to give you that extra flexibility and allow you to build your business as you see fit.

Teachable also has built-in integrations (but some are only in beta, and functionality isn’t available for all users).

So which platform does it better?

Teachable native built-in integrations:

Google Analytics
SumoMe
Zapier
MailChimp
Segment
ConvertKit

Kajabi native built-in integrations:

Google Analytics
Zapier
MailChimp
Segment
ConvertKit
Drip
ActiveCampaign
ClickFunnels
AWeber
Facebook Pixel

It's not just the number of integrations that puts Kajabi ahead in this category, it's the integrations themselves and the convenience they bring to your workflow.

For instance, Kajabi's Facebook pixel integration lets you easily track every page on your site simply by pasting your pixel ID.

In Teachable, here’s what you’d have to do to start tracking your audience with the Facebook pixel: grab the actual code and paste it into the code editor for all of the courses you want to track. Doesn’t sound very convenient, does it?‍

Bottom line: Compared to Teachable, Kajabi has more built-in sales and marketing integrations for everything from analytics to email marketing to Facebook tracking.

‍Support Is A Feature: 24/7 Live Chat And Email

With any software platform, you can’t overlook excellent support.

The last thing you ever want to happen when creating and selling your online course is getting stuck with no help.

Sure, you can read countless help articles to find an answer, but what if you were about to launch and something went wrong the night before? Do you have a way to get help immediately?

Access to 24-hour support can mean the difference between a smooth, successful launch or a ton of wasted time, money, and effort.

Both Kajabi and Teachable take pride in their support. But how do they compare to each other?

Both offer help documentation, training courses, and the ability to send out emails to support. All of these bridge the gap between being a novice and a bonafide digital entrepreneur success.

We can't speak to the quality of Teachable support, but we can tell you that Kajabi's software is supported by 24/7 live chat and email support.

Bottom Line: Both platforms offer standard support like help centers and email requests. However, Kajabi goes a step further by offering 24/7 live chat support.

Monetization

Both Kajabi and Teachable offer strong tools for monetization, but their approaches differ significantly. Let's examine them.

Kajabi Monetization

Kajabi excels with a comprehensive suite of monetization tools for creators who want to build a business rather than just sell courses.

You can charge for your courses using one-time fees, subscription models, or recurring payments (e.g., monthly or annual).

Kajabi integrates seamlessly with advanced sales funnels, making converting leads into paying customers easier. Its robust email marketing system, with automation features like drip campaigns, helps you nurture potential buyers into customers over time.

Additionally, Kajabi supports affiliate programs, where you can reward others for selling your courses.

Kajabi also includes sales and landing pages directly tied to funnels, helping you guide visitors through a smooth purchasing process. These integrated features mean you won’t need third-party tools to run your business.

Kajabi’s sales analytics provide detailed insights, allowing you to track revenue, churn rates, and more, which is ideal for scaling your business.

In summary, Kajabi offers:

Multiple payment models: Charge for courses using one-time payments, monthly or annual subscriptions, and installment plans. Kajabi also supports recurring payments, enabling you to build membership sites.
Sales funnels: Kajabi’s built-in sales funnel tool allows you to create sophisticated funnels for lead generation, product launches, and course promotions. Funnels integrate seamlessly with landing pages, forms, and email sequences.
Email marketing & automation: Kajabi includes an advanced email marketing system with automation capabilities, such as drip campaigns, welcome sequences, and follow-up emails, which help nurture leads into customers.
Affiliate program management: Kajabi offers built-in tools for managing affiliate programs. You can create custom affiliate programs to incentivize partners to promote your courses.
Customizable sales pages & discounts: You can create custom landing pages and sales pages for different offerings, including discount codes, promotional offers, and upsells or downsells during checkout.
Analytics and insights: Kajabi provides advanced analytics on churn rates, revenue, offer performance, and user behavior, allowing you to track and optimize your sales strategy.
Lead capture forms: Kajabi supports multiple lead capture methods, including opt-in forms and pop-ups that can be integrated into marketing funnels to build your email list.
Webinars and live events: Monetize webinars and live events using Kajabi's integrated platform. This platform allows you to offer paid live sessions and automate follow-up actions.
Upsells and order bumps: Kajabi includes built-in features for upselling and adding order bumps during checkout, which can significantly increase your average order value.

Teachable Monetization

Teachable offers solid but more basic monetization options. You can charge for courses using one-time payments, subscriptions, or memberships. However, Teachable’s free plan (while appealing to beginners) has a significant downside. It takes 10% + $1 transaction fee per sale.

The Basic plan reduces this to a 5% fee. Only with the Pro plan do you get 0% transaction fees.

Teachable also supports bundled courses, coupons, and sales pages but lacks the deeper marketing automation that Kajabi offers.

While it does include affiliate marketing tools and email functionality, Teachable's email marketing system is less advanced, primarily focused on basic announcements rather than automated sales sequences.

Teachable Monetization Features:

Multiple payment models: Teachable supports one-time payments, subscriptions, and course bundles. You can also offer free courses to attract leads.
Sales pages & coupons: Teachable allows users to create customizable sales pages and offer discount codes or promotions to attract customers.
Affiliate marketing: Built-in affiliate marketing tools let you reward affiliates who promote your courses. However, this system is less comprehensive than Kajabi’s.
Email marketing: Teachable’s email marketing is basic, primarily focused on announcements and course updates. It lacks the automation and depth found in Kajabi’s system.
Transaction fees: Teachable charges transaction fees (up to 10%) on lower-tier plans, while higher-tier plans, such as Pro and Business, remove these fees(.
Course bundling: You can sell multiple courses together as a bundle, giving customers more value and encouraging higher sales.

Bottom Line: If you need an all-in-one business platform with advanced marketing and automation tools, Kajabi offers a stronger monetization strategy.

Learning Experience

The learning experience provided by an online course platform is crucial for student satisfaction and success. Both Kajabi and Teachable offer solid learning experiences, but their approaches differ.

Kajabi Learning Experience

Kajabi offers a polished and highly customizable learning experience. It emphasizes creating a seamless, professional atmosphere for your students.

Course navigation is intuitive, and large images, clean fonts, and responsive design ensure that your course looks great on any device. You can also offer interactive assessments that go beyond multiple-choice quizzes.

Kajabi supports different types of quizzes and assessments, including:

Multiple-choice questions
Open-ended questions
File uploads (PDFs, Word docs, images) allow you to test students’ knowledge in a more interactive and personalized way.

Additionally, Kajabi’s platform is designed to track student progress in real-time, offering robust analytics to see where students are succeeding or struggling, making it easy to adjust your content accordingly.

Kajabi also supports community-building through forums and group discussions, enhancing peer-to-peer interaction. Its integration of various media types (videos, audio files, text, etc.) further enhances the learning experience.

Lastly, Kajabi’s mobile apps (for iOS and Android) allow students to access your courses anytime, increasing accessibility and engagement.

Teachable Learning Experience

Teachable focuses on simplicity and ease of use, making it a great choice for creators who want to get their courses online quickly.

You can offer multiple-choice quizzes in lessons, though the functionality is limited compared to Kajabi.

You can add quizzes to each lesson, but functionality is limited:

The Basic plan only allows non-graded quizzes.
The Professional plan enables graded quizzes and tracks student scores.

Teachable also offers a video heat map feature powered by Wistia. This feature shows detailed analytics of how students interact with video content, so you can see what engages them the most.

It, however, lacks some of the rich customization options that Kajabi provides. While it does support student progress tracking, it’s less comprehensive in terms of data segmentation and analysis.

Teachable is also a more budget-friendly option that allows students to navigate courses easily with a clean, user-friendly interface. It integrates basic community-building features but is more limited than Kajabi’s offerings.

Bottom Line:

Kajabi is ideal for course creators who want a fully customizable learning experience with advanced assessments, community features, and detailed student tracking.
Teachable is a more budget-friendly option for those who want simplicity and quick setup, though its learning tools are less advanced than Kajabi's.

Security

Security is a critical consideration when choosing an online course platform, as you want to ensure the protection of your content and customer data.

Kajabi Security

Kajabi emphasizes comprehensive security features aimed at protecting both course creators and students. It employs SSL encryption to secure communications and data transmissions, ensuring that sensitive information like passwords and financial data remain safe.

More Kajabi security features include:

SSL encryption: Kajabi uses SSL encryption to protect all user data during transmission, ensuring secure communications between users and the platform.
PCI compliance: Kajabi is PCI-compliant, which means it meets the security standards required for processing payments securely. This is critical for protecting credit card information and preventing fraud.
Two-factor authentication (2FA): Kajabi provides two-factor authentication for added account protection, ensuring only authorized users can access accounts.
Automated backups: Kajabi performs automated backups, ensuring your content and user data are protected from accidental loss or malicious attacks.
User permissions: Kajabi allows you to control access levels for different users, ensuring that only authorized individuals can view or edit content.
Compliance: Kajabi complies with major data protection regulations, including GDPR, ensuring that your business meets international standards.

Teachable Security

On the other hand, Teachable also provides SSL encryption and PCI compliance to protect creators and students during transactions.

Where Teachable stands out is its BackOffice Payments feature, which simplifies payment processing by automatically handling taxes such as VAT and US sales tax for international transactions. This feature provides an additional layer of security and convenience by reducing the risk of errors in handling payments across borders.

Teachable also has a fraud detection team that actively monitors accounts for suspicious activity, providing creators with peace of mind knowing that transactions are being watched for potential issues.

Other security features include:

Compliance: Teachable is also GDPR compliant, providing a secure environment for international businesses.
Fraud detection: Teachable has a dedicated team that monitors for suspicious activity and fraudulent transactions, providing an extra layer of security for users.

Bottom Line: Kajabi and Teachable offer essential security features like SSL encryption and PCI compliance. However, Teachable's BackOffice functionality simplifies payment security and tax handling, making it a strong option for global transactions. Kajabi, on the other hand, provides more customization and additional protections like two-factor authentication and automated backups, making it ideal for those looking for more comprehensive control over their security environment.

Customization

Customization is essential for creating a unique and branded online learning experience that aligns with your business’s goals and aesthetic.

Kajabi and Teachable differ significantly in their flexibility and personalization levels.

Kajabi Customization

Kajabi is known for its high level of customization, allowing creators to tailor almost every aspect of their platform to reflect their brand.

Website and page builder: Kajabi’s drag-and-drop website and page builder has multiple templates and layout presets, allowing for extensive customization without coding.
Product templates: Kajabi provides customizable product templates for various types of digital products, from courses to membership sites.
Branding options: Kajabi allows for deep customization of branding elements, including fonts, colors, logos, and more.
Custom code: For those with coding knowledge, Kajabi’s advanced editor allows for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript customizations, providing ultimate flexibility.
Flexible themes: Kajabi offers a variety of themes that can be customized and applied differently to each product, allowing for a unique look and feel across your offerings.

Moreover, Kajabi’s customization extends to email marketing, where you can design fully branded email campaigns and automated sequences, ensuring a cohesive look across your entire course ecosystem.

Teachable Customization

Teachable offers a more limited degree of customization. While it has a drag-and-drop editor for course pages, the customization options are less extensive than Kajabi.

It provides basic customization options that allow you to create a branded course experience, but with some limitations:

Site design: Teachable’s site design is straightforward, with limited templates and customization options.
Course branding: You can customize basic branding elements like logos, colors, and typography, but the overall look and feel are more uniform across all products.
Power editor: Teachable’s Power Editor, available on the business plan, allows for custom code editing (HTML/CSS), but it requires technical knowledge and is more complex.
Customization limitations: While Teachable offers some customization, it is more limited compared to Kajabi, particularly in terms of layout flexibility and the ability to apply different themes to different products.

Bottom Line: Kajabi offers extensive customization options, making it ideal for creating a highly branded and unique online learning experience.

Teachable provides essential customization features but with less flexibility, particularly for non-technical users.

Pricing‍

Now that you have seen the major differences between Kajabi and Teachable, it’s the perfect time to discuss pricing. Let’s see where you can get the most bang for your buck.

You can see all the details directly from Kajabi’s pricing page and Teachable’s pricing page.‍

The plans that are most similar in nature are the Kajabi Growth plan and the Teachable Pro plan. At first glance, it looks like you might save money with Teachable.

But there’s a catch.

With Teachable, you’ll have to pay separately for a whole host of third-party tools like:

Landing page software
CRM
Email marketing platform
Webinar software

All of those tools combined can easily cost hundreds of additional dollars per month, which must be factored into the cost of going with Teachable.

There’s nothing more frustrating than purchasing a product only to discover you’ll need to pay for more services just to get everything working the way you want.

That’s why you can often save money by investing in one platform that will eliminate the need to pay more for third-party tools.

Let's not forget to mention that as of January 5th, 2023, Teachable increased its prices. The most notable price increase occurred in their Business plan. It increased from $299 annually to $499 and up. We'll do the math for you. That's a 80% increase!

‍Bottom line: When it comes to pricing Kajabi vs. Teachable, there’s no dispute: Kajabi is much more cost effective. Plus, you never have to share a cut of your revenue with Kajabi. You worked hard for your money. You should keep it all.

Kajabi vs. Teachable: Pricing Comparison

Table comparing Kajabi and Teachable's pricing

Kajabi vs. Teachable: Who Gets A Cut Of Your Profits?‍

Investing in an online course platform is a big deal. And since you’re already paying for a monthly membership, you should be able to keep your hard-earned profits.

At Kajabi, we’re fanatical about your success. And a huge part of that success means you should reap the rewards of your Knowledge Commerce business.

That’s why Kajabi does not take any cut of its Heroes’ profits, which is one of the key differentiators between them and Teachable.

Teachable takes a 5% transaction fee from the sale of every paid course with a Basic membership plan.‍

Bottom line: Imagine starting as a new business owner and losing 5% off every course you offer. That adds up over time. When comparing Kajabi’s business model to Teachable's, Kajabi benefits entrepreneurs and business owners more.

The Final Word On Kajabi vs. Teachable‍

If you only need a software tool to build and deliver your online courses, Teachable is a great choice.

Meaning, if you want to use Teachable, you should already have these pieces in place:

Website
Marketing tools
Email list
Automation tools

If none of these are in place, you’ll have to look outside of Teachable for the solution.

The limited website functionality that Teachable provides means it can’t act as the online hub for your brand. It’s only a back-end for which your online courses are delivered.

It also means that when it comes to actually growing your business by acquiring new leads and turning them into customers, you’ll need to pay for different software apps.

For some people, that can work fine, but for others looking to streamline and easily scale up, that presents a huge problem.

We know you’re tired of duct-taping different tools together. If you’re looking for more powerful marketing and sales tools that other platforms can't offer, you know which platform you need.

Kajabi has all the tools you need in one place, making it easy to run your entire online business selling digital products.

Here’s a quick breakdown of what you can do with Kajabi:

Build, sell, and deliver any type of digital products, including membership sites, online courses, downloads, and more.
Create landing pages to build sales funnels, turning leads into customers.
Send marketing emails to build relationships with your prospects.
Use the built-in CRM to manage all of your leads and customers.
Use an integrated payment system to collect money for your content.
Create a website to serve as the home of your business on the web.

This is just the tip of the iceberg of what Kajabi can do for you and your online business.

And don't just take our word for it. See how independent review site Sell Courses Online thought Kajabi stacked up against Teachable.

‍By having every tool under one roof, you don’t just save money but also put your time and energy into what you do best: creating valuable content, serving customers, and scaling your online business.

We hope this article has helped illuminate the key differences between Kajabi vs. Teachable.

Still researching? Check out these other comparisons:

Kajabi vs. Thinkific
Kajabi vs. Podia
Kajabi vs. Clickfunnels
Kajabi vs. Wordpress
Kajabi vs. Ontraport
Kajabi vs. ConvertKit
Kajabi vs. Patreon
‍Kajabi vs. Samcart
Kajabi vs. LearnWorlds