Kajabi vs. Wordpress: Which will support your knowledge commerce site best?

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Kajabi vs. WordPress Takeaways

Here’s a summary of how these tools stack up to one another: 

• Kajabi is the right choice for you if you want to build a successful business that sells digital products and wants everything you need all in one place.
• WordPress is a good choice for you if you have a set of marketing and sales tools you absolutely love and don’t mind gluing them all together.
• Choose Kajabi if you want to focus on growing your business instead of the technical side. Choose WordPress if you like digging into code or APIs or if you’re okay with hiring a team to maintain it. 

Kajabi vs. WordPress overall comparison

Kajabi is an all-in-one business platform tailor-made for entrepreneurs like you who want to sell their knowledge online. It includes everything you need for knowledge commerce with one membership, including: 

• A website 
• Online course creation tools with unlimited video hosting 
• A product creator for other digital products like membership sites or ebooks 
• Email marketing built right in 
• Intelligent sales funnels to automate some of the marketing and sales processes 
• Robust analytics to see how your site is performing as well as how your customers are consuming products like online courses.
  

WordPress is a giant when it comes to website hosting and website creation, with around 40% of the Internet being a WordPress site. That size comes with some advantages like a strong ecosystem of developers, plugins, and templates. You can get a managed WordPress hosting. Alternatively, you can build your WordPress website using Elementor which now offers built-in cloud hosting for WordPress features.

But there are also some downsides to that scale. Plugins are a constant source of security concerns. Plus, because it’s primarily about websites, WordPress itself cannot provide all the tools you need to run a thriving knowledge commerce business. However, you can use different tools to speed up WordPress to help your website perform better.

So you will have to maintain many different tools and stitch them all together. 

Creating a website for your business 

Once you have a digital product to sell, you should have a website to sell it on. Even if you’re planning to sell your courses and digital products in other online stores, it’s always a good idea to have your own website that you own and control. 

Wordpress.org vs Wordpress.com

First, let’s break down the difference between Wordpress.org and Wordpress.com.

Wordpress.org is the open-source version that’s free. You can literally download it today and if you know how to do hosting and how to set up a website, you can have a website that’s almost free. 

Of course, it quickly gets complex. In fact, businesses using the “free” version typically use it because they have a team of developers and want to build something very specific for their business. Or they’re very tech-savvy and love to dig around in the code to set up things like hosting. 

You can go with Wordpress.com and pay a monthly fee that includes hosting and a simplified process for creating a website. With one of these plans, you get a website builder, access to thousands of free and paid templates, plugins to enhance your site, and more. 

You do have to have one of the more expensive plans to get access to plugins, to accept payments natively, and to get advanced SEO features, though. 

WordPress is good at creating websites. That’s part of the reason why it’s so popular and why it accounts for a large portion of Internet sites. WordPress website development is a huge field and there are many experts who can custom-create websites.

But, it hasn’t been created with knowledge entrepreneurs in mind. 

Because of that, you can use it to sell online courses and digital products - but only if you stitch together a lot of different tools or hire developers. If you’re great at coding up websites and digging around technical documentation to connect APIs, you’ll probably enjoy molding WordPress sites into exactly what you need. 

Kajabi website building tools 

Kajabi approaches website building in a different way: everybody who wants to sell their knowledge online should be able to create a beautiful, fully-integrated website without having to know how to code or hire a design team. 

Kajabi’s website builder is tailor-made for knowledge entrepreneurs who want to spend the bulk of their time creating great content and growing their sales. It comes with a variety of gorgeous website templates that help you make a website in minutes that looks like it was created by design professionals. 

Of course, you can also build your Kajabi website from scratch. Or you can customize the Kajabi templates to fit your brand and your business. Your Kajabi website will also be responsive out-of-the-gate, which means it’ll look great no matter what device your customers are seeing it on. 

Along with the ease of creating a nice-looking website, Kajabi gives you all the tools you need to run a thriving online business, all in one place. This is a fully-integrated website which means you can easily accept payments through credit cards, debit cards, and PayPal.

Kajabi also comes with a landing page builder, email marketing software, and automated sales funnels software that is tightly integrated with your website. You can get these working on a WordPress site but you would have to pay for different services and make sure it all fits together neatly. 

So yes, WordPress is a great place to make a website. But, it’s not a great out-of-the-box website for people wanting to sell digital products like online courses and membership sites. 

Kajabi has the edge in websites for knowledge entrepreneurs because you can use it to build your website and it includes all the tools you need to run your thriving online business. You’re not going to have to worry about keeping different plugins secure.

Creating digital products

Kajabi has a world-class product generator to help you build an online course, membership site, or more. WordPress doesn’t have that functionality, so you’d have to use another tool for helping you create your online courses and products. 

Kajabi has a world-class course builder and digital product generator. With the Product Templates, you can build a great-looking online course, mini-course, membership platform, drip course, or coaching program in just a few clicks. These templates are fully customizable to fit your brand and they give you a jump-start that helps you get your online course finished sooner, so you can begin making sales.  

Of course, you can build your products from scratch, too. You can have video trainings, audio courses, worksheets, email-based courses, membership sites, personalized coaching, and more. Kajabi also includes unlimited video hosting so you’ll never have to worry about bandwidth again. 

WordPress doesn’t have a native solution for building online courses and digital products. It does play nicely with a lot of course creation tools but that is an additional cost. Plus, you’re going to have to make sure that it’s integrated with your website. Sometimes that can be a bit tricky.  

So, if you’re looking for a tool to help you create online courses or digital products, Kajabi has you covered. 

Support

As an entrepreneur, you have to do a lot. But you shouldn’t have to do everything alone - including troubleshooting problems. 

With WordPress, your support will depend on which tier of service you have but most business owners will have unlimited email support and live, 24-hour chat support. Those are both great to have but WordPress does point out a few limitations to what kind of support they can provide. They can’t offer any guidance on third-party tools or applications you’re using on your WordPress site. 

That makes sense to a degree.  But remember: if you want to use WordPress to sell your knowledge online, you’re going to need a bunch of third-party tools to play nicely with your website. When those inevitably break, you’re going to have to play support tag with multiple services to narrow down what’s wrong and how to fix it. 

Because Kajabi is an all-in-one business platform, you’ll have one amazing support team to guide you through it. The support team is great at diving into problems and really going above and beyond to get to the root causes and fix them. Kajabi offers 24-hour support through email and chat.

Kajabi also has a comprehensive help center, hours of video trainings through Kajabi University, and an active peer support community. Our Official Hero Facebook group has lively discussions about not just the technical side of Kajabi, but business growth as well. 

Integrations

If you’re looking to integrate your website with other services, both WordPress and Kajabi can handle that. Kajabi has direct integrations with Mailchimp, Facebook, Google, and more. You can also connect your Kajabi site to thousands of other services using Zapier. 

WordPress also has a ton of services that integrate with it through plugins or direct integrations. You do have to be mindful that the plugins are updated or from reputable vendors, though. But overall, WordPress has a nice variety of services that can integrate with it. 

Pricing

For WordPress, you’re looking at $4 to $45 dollars per month, depending on what plan you’re on. At first glance, it’s definitely less expensive than the Kajabi pricing plans which range from $119 to $319 per month, when you sign up for an annual plan. 

But remember, your WordPress account just gets you a website and website hosting. If you’re looking to sell your knowledge online, you’re going to need to pay for:

• Email marketing software 
• Video and Audio Course hosting 
• Digital product software 
• Funnel building software 
• Analytics 
• And more. 
  
  

So your total cost of using a Wordpress site could end up being much more than Kajabi when you add it all up. And don’t forget about the cost of your time in having to make sure all your tools are playing nicely together. 

The Winner

If you’re serious about having a successful online business that sells digital products like online courses, Kajabi is the right solution for you. Kajabi is built by digital entrepreneurs, for digital entrepreneurs. It has everything you need to build your products and website and generate sales … all in one place. 

In the last decade that Kajabi has been around, we’ve helped our customers earn over $5 billion dollars in gross market value. We’ve helped numerous people take their businesses to 7 figures!

Sign up for a 14-day free trial of Kajabi today. You can see first-hand how easy it is to run your business from a true all-in-one online course platform.

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