8 Best Kajabi Alternatives 2023
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Kajabi is one of the most popular online course platforms that you can use to create and launch your online course.
But before you make a commitment, there are a number of Kajabi alternatives that you should consider first.
What are the best Kajabi alternatives?
- Teachable
- Podia
- Thinkific
- Hyax
- Skillshare
- Ruzuku
- Udemy
- LearnDash
In this article, I’ll explain why you may want to consider some alternatives to Kajabi. Plus, I’ll go over some of the benefits and drawbacks to these specific alternatives.
Table of Contents
Why Should You Consider Kajabi Alternatives?
For a specific type of course creator, Kajabi can be a great choice. But for others, they might not be the best option available.
Kajabi doesn’t necessarily offer the cheapest plans when compared to other platforms. So if you’re on a tight budget, it might not be the right fit for you. Here I compare Kajabi’s pricing plans and what features you will get.
For beginner creators doing their first course launch, Kajabi might not be as user-friendly or offer as much hand-holding as other platforms.
It has a steeper learning curve when compared to other options. It’s also not as customizable as WordPress or some alternative platforms.
While Kajabi does come with a lot of features, it’s quite generalized. So it ends up not necessarily being the best at anything.
While Kajabi’s onboarding process is good, some users have said that their customer support was disappointing after getting signed up. By the way, you can check Kajabi’s course examples as well as customers review.
Finally, while Kajabi is a good solution if you just want to create a course and let it sit to be promoted passively, it’s not as great of a solution if you’re looking to actively promote the sale of your course.
Below I’ll go over some Kajabi alternatives that you may want to consider. Based on things like simplicity, pricing, user-friendliness, or available marketing tools.
- Read my in depth Kajabi review and why it’s still my top online course platform.
1. Teachable
If you need more in terms of marketing and promoting your course, then Teachable is an alternative that I would consider instead of Kajabi.
The main reason that
While
Their dashboard also takes a bit of time to wrap your head around, and can be confusing for new users.
So I do feel that
One area that
So once your course starts growing with satisfied customers, they can refer friends and everyone wins.
If you’ve already got a large social media following, it can also be a fantastic way to start getting large numbers of course sales early on.
Lastly,
You can set your course up so that when students take specific steps like using a coupon, completing a certain module, or enrolling in your course, they’ll receive an email from you.
You can also keep in contact with students even after they’ve finished your course, and use surveys and forms to follow up.
This can be a great way to see what people love about your course, and also identify potential areas for improvement. So I feel like
- You can read more about this online course platform in my Teachable Review, Teachable Pricing Plans and Teachable Course Examples
2. Podia
If you’re a more advanced course creator and your setup has a lot of moving parts, it can be hard to keep track of it all using Kajabi.
Podia is a great Kajabi alternative if you want to keep all of your instructor tools in a single location.
Podia lets you have your online courses, membership sites, and digital downloads all available in a single place.
That can be great if you have extra resources like ebooks or checklists that you want to share with members as well.
This platform has a straightforward and clean design. It’s great for content creators like YouTubers who may already have a large audience, and are seeking to sell additional content to their viewers.
For example, you may offer a lot of free videos and then use Podia to sell a more premium course, membership site, or other product.
The big downsides of Podia is that it’s pretty limited. Aside from creating courses, membership sites, or download areas, there isn’t much else that you can do.
There’s a limited amount available in terms of customization as well. So all Podia storefronts tend to look pretty similar, since they all start from the same template.
It will follow a similar pattern including an overview, a “What’s Included” section, a creator bio, and a FAQ area.
On the upside, you can create separate landing pages for all of your digital products.
Although Podia has a free 30 day trial, they also don’t have any kind of free plan. So if you’re looking for a free way to sell your course, they might not be your first choice either.
For those reasons I’d recommend Podia for existing content creators, and instructors that have multiple different online courses, memberships, or digital products to sell.
You can read more and compare Podia and Kajabi online course platforms to decide which is a better choice for your business.
- Read also my Podia Review and compare Podia Pricing Plans.
3. Thinkific
As a Kajabi alternative, Thinkific is very easy to use. The Thinkific dashboard is simple to use and easy to navigate.
You can do practically everything in terms of course creation on Thinkific by using a drag and drop editor.
If you’re new to creating courses, websites, or online marketing in general, then this can be a big plus. You’ll save many hours that you might have to spend experimenting with different designs and coding on other platforms.
Thinkific covers most of these things so you don’t have to think about them. That allows you to focus on just creating the best courses that you can.
Despite how simple it is to use, Thinkific actually offers a huge amount of flexibility in terms of design. You can create a wide variety of totally unique-looking landing pages and content.
There are a wide number of different templates available. Including for flagship courses, mini-courses, webinar replays, membership bundles, or digital downloads.
While Thinkific does offer paid plans, they also have a free plan. Which is a great option for beginners who may not have much to invest in hosting their course at first.
I know it can be nerve-wracking to wonder if your brand new course will even sell enough copies to cover your hosting costs.
The main downside I see to Thinkific is that it doesn’t have very powerful marketing features. So you’ll need to find some external way to drive people to your landing pages and get them to buy your course.
But if you’re a beginner course creator who wants a lot of flexibility but doesn’t want to mess around with coding, Thinkific is a great choice. Especially since you have the option to start for free.
- Read the full Thinkific online course platform review, compare Thinkific Pricing Plans, and view the examples of Thinkific courses.
If you’re wanting to see what other options are out there for selling your online course, then check out my list of the 7 Best Thinkific Alternatives here.
4. Hyax
Like Kajabi, Hyax aims to be an all-in-one tool.
It offers the ability to sell any type of digital product, including courses, memberships, paid newsletters or even downloadable files and designs.
You can create a website, sales funnels and landing pages, alongside a private course or members area for paid content.
Hyax also boasts some advanced marketing tools, including the ability to collect recurring payments, add payment plans, upsells, order bumps, discounts and more.
Hyax has an intuitive modern interface and you can utilize a range of pre-built page and design templates, enabling you to focus on product creation and marketing, rather than web design.
One of the main downsides to Hyax is that is doesn’t have a built in email marketing capability like Kajabi does, so you would need to use a separate email platform like Convertkit.
There’s also no free plan, though they do offer a free trial you can try it out and see if it’s the right option for you.
5. Skillshare
Skillshare is a Kajabi alternative that’s pretty clearly made for entrepreneurs in the creative space. So it will either be a great fit for you, or not useful at all, depending on what type of course content you’re looking to sell.
Skillshare courses focus on topics like photography, design, and writing. If you’re looking to sell online courses on less creative topics like business or computer programming, this probably isn’t a great platform for you.
But if you want to teach how to draw with charcoal, it may be the ideal choice for you. This really restricts what kind of content is viable on the platform though.
A big upside to Skillshare is that they already have a huge userbase, much like Udemy. So you won’t need to spend time or money driving customers to your courses. I compare Udemy and Skillshare here.
This can also be a big downside though, as your sales are entirely in the hands of Skillshare as a platform. They offer very little in terms of marketing your own courses independently.
Besides restricting what kinds of courses make sense on their platform, Skillshare is also restrictive in terms of how you present your material.
Courses are typically only 20 to 60 minutes long, so it can be hard to teach more advanced topics without breaking them up into multiple modules.
I do think that Skillshare serves a very specific niche for a specific type of course creator. If you’re looking to put out “set it and forget it” type content on creative topics, then Skillshare may be your ideal choice.
It’s a good way to get passive course income without having to worry at all about marketing your own material. Although that does leave your success or failure in the hands of the platform itself.
- Learn more about this online course platform in my full Skillshare Review.
6. Ruzuku
Ruzuku offers some interesting alternative features that Kajabi lacks. The biggest difference between Ruzuku and other platforms is the communication tools that it makes available to you.
Students that take your course on Ruzuku are able to reach out to you directly while they’re in the middle of a course module.
On the one hand, this is great for engagement and allows you to answer questions for people as soon as they come up.
On the other hand, it might be a bit more involved and could become tiresome after a while. So you’ll have to decide if this is a feature that you’d love or hate.
Of course, there are ways of making this easier. For example, you could handle a virtual assistant to handle the questions. Particularly if your course is on a larger scale.
Aside from its most notable communication features, Ruzuku has a lot going on behind the scenes as well.
There are a lot of powerful tools on your dashboard to help manage your students, as well as track their progress and achievements.
Course creation tools are easy to use and straightforward as well.
If you have lots of third-party applications that you want to integrate with your course platform, Rukuzu is great at that too. It also works with both PayPal or Stripe, for even more flexible payment options.
While Ruzuku lacks any kind of internal sales or marketing tools, it does integrate with several different CRMS for tracking email marketing.
Ruzuku also has the option to host live webinars.
You might choose to supplement your online course with live Q&A sessions where you can directly interact with your audience, or you may go a different route and make all of your lessons live instead of as self-paced courses.
7. Udemy
I wouldn’t recommend Udemy as a Kajabi alternative for hosting your flagship course. But if you’re a beginner just starting to dip your feet into the world of online courses, then it’s a great platform to get started with.
Udemy offers lots of lessons and resources, as well as tools to help you succeed in creating your online course.
It’s one of the most popular online course platforms out there today. So you won’t need to do much in terms of marketing to sell your course.
Udemy is more of a “set it and forget it” platform where you’ll sell your course passively.
If your topic is unique and popular enough, you’ll get lots of organic traffic to it from Google.
Udemy has a built-in popularity tool that can help tell you what the traffic would be on your course, so you’ll know in advance if it’s an idea worth pursuing.
Since Udemy has over 100,000 courses at present, there’s also a lot of competition in terms of other course creators on the platform.
So you’ll want to do a search and see if multiple similar courses already exist on the platform.
If there’s a lot of competition from existing courses, you might want to explore other course ideas unless you’re confident that you can create a better product than what already exists.
One big drawback of Udemy is how much you can expect to earn. Udemy is restrictive about how much money you can charge for your course, particularly when you’re brand new.
They will also take a cut of between 25% and 50% from your sales. Some might consider this a worthwhile tradeoff since you don’t need to do any marketing for your course, while it might be unacceptable for others.
When students use a platform like Udemy, they are moreso customers of the platform, as opposed to you directly. Which is something to keep in mind.
For someone just getting started with online courses who has no existing audience, I think Udemy can be a great place to start, and it provides a lot of support for creating and marketing your course.
It will help you get some experience and confidence in your ability to create courses. Then you can start to transition to other platforms or host your own course content.
- Learn more about Udemy online course platfrom in my in-depth review.
8. LearnDash
LearnDash is a Learning Management System (LMS) plugin available for WordPress. In my opinion, it’s one of the best and most complete WordPress LMS plugins out there, and best ways to run your online courses overall.
So if you’re currently running your website on WordPress, it’s a Kajabi alternative that I would really recommend looking into.
Using LearnDash will give you more control over your course content and how it’s delivered, as well as provide you with more features, than most of the other options that I’ve presented on this list so far.
You can really design a course to meet your own requirements, and have something to be proud to call your own.
LearnDash is a feature-rich plugin that’s used by universities and businesses around the world.
Aside from a powerful course builder, it also includes the ability to create forums and interact with your students in other ways. You can give out certificates, badges, and other awards.
Take advantage of the ability to drip-feed your content to students, use advanced quizzes, and more.
Plus LearnDash fully integrates with shopping cart plugins like WooCommerce to make it easy to take payments.
Unfortunately, LearnDash doesn’t have a free plan. But considering what it’s offering, their basic plan of $199/year is a pretty great value. If you run multiple online courses, you can use their Pro plan for $369 per year.
The Pro plan gives you licences to use on up to 25 sites, which should cover all of the online courses you will ever create.
If you’re ready to get serious about your online courses, then I’d recommend LearnDash as my #1 Kajabi alternative.
It might not be as foolproof to set up and use for beginners as some other platforms on this list. But in the long-term, I really think it’s the best option for most online course instructors.
- Read my Learndash Review to know why it is the best WordPress LMS plugin.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is there a cheaper version of Kajabi?
We’re pleased to inform you that there certainly are cheaper, more affordable versions of Kajabi out there on the market…
One of our favorites is Podia. It has many of the features that you’ve got to know and love in Kajabi.
These include highly converting landing pages, access to courses, email marketing, membership systems, payment systems, affiliate marketing, live-streaming webinars, and much more…
Yet it happens to be available at a far more affordable price, and a fraction of the price that you would pay Kajabi, less than a third of the cost in fact.
But, if you don’t like Podia, you could check out the alternative Karta, which claims to have more features than any other all-in-one business software for half the cost of Kajabi.
Whichever platform you decide to use, you can always save a considerable amount of money by paying annually rather than monthly. You could literally save hundreds of dollars by paying this way.
If you’re still in two minds about which platform might be the best one for your business, why not take advantage of the opportunity to run free trials? Highly recommended.
Does Kajabi replace MailChimp?
MailChimp has to be one of the biggest email marketing services out there, and it also happens to be one of the easiest to use too.
But if you’re interested in running with the Kajabi platform, the good news is that there will be no need to continue to run MailChimp separately alongside it…
This is because Kajabi offers a much more comprehensive digital marketing platform, and can even replace MailChimp altogether, if you didn’t want to run the two systems together at the same time.
If you did want to run both systems, however, there’s no need to panic because you still can.
This is because MailChimp integrates perfectly with Kajabi, which means that you don’t have to choose between the two systems, and you can get everything working together like clockwork.
Can I sell physical products on Kajabi?
So, Kajabi is specifically designed for developing and selling digital products such as courses and ebooks. But that certainly doesn’t mean that you have to stick with selling only digital products…
We’re pleased to inform you that Kajabi is also a really great platform for selling physical products as well…
The best way to enable the selling of physical products on the Kajabi platform is by embedding Shopify’s buy button directly onto your pages on the Kajabi platform.
But that’s by no means the only method available for selling physical products on Kajabi. You can also integrate your preferred third-party distribution service into your Kajabi web pages by integrating with Zapier.
Examples of third-party distribution integrations with Zapier include the likes of Shopify, and Amazon.
What is the difference between Kartra and Kajabi?
Karta is a great alternative to Kajabi, and is perhaps a better option for many people. That’s because there are one or two really handy features integrated into the Karta platform that are missing in the Kajabi platform.
Unlike Kajabi, Karta offers more in the way of help desk features and scheduling tools (more on Kajabi’s scheduling functionality very shortly).
And the Kajabi platform’s most affordable option cuts out a lot of the really handy tools that are readily available at a more affordable price with the Karta platform.
This includes affiliate tools, automations, the theme editor, and the analytics that can be used to examine how the business is performing.
In short, Karta truly is an “all-in-one” online business platform, offering more tools to get your online business off the ground, and although Kajabi makes the same claim, it just doesn’t quite live up to what Karta has to offer its users. Especially on the lower priced plans.
But perhaps where Karta really stands out against Kajabi is with its very own affiliate marketplace. You can use it to both find affiliates and become one yourself.
Does Kajabi have a scheduler?
The truth is that Kajabi does not have an already integrated scheduler. However, there are several easy ways around this if you wanted to use Kajabi with a scheduler. All you would have to do is embed a scheduler within the platform.
And, there’s a choice of different schedulers that you can use. These include the likes of Acuity, Calendly, Book Like a Boss, and so on.
Embedding a scheduler into your Kajabi platform isn’t hard, and can usually be done in a few simple steps. Instructions on how to embed a scheduler into your Kajabi platform are readily available online.
Does Kajabi replace AWeber?
One of the great features you can take advantage of on the Kajabi platform is it’s marketing automation services.
We would argue that with Kajabi properly set up to handle all of your email marketing services, you don’t really need any additional email marketing services, such as AWeber…
However, if you are already using AWeber and you wish to continue to use it, you may be pleased to learn that you can integrate AWeber with Kajabi, and have Kajabi form submissions added to your AWeber list.
Clear instructions on how to set this up are all readily available online via the Kajabi Help Center.
So, you can use Kajabi to replace AWeber if you want it to, but you can also continue to use it if you prefer.
Conclusion & Even More Kajabi Alternatives
Kajabi is a great platform for creating online courses, but it might not be the best choice for everyone.
The online course platform that you choose to use will have significant long-term implications on how you run your courses, and your online business as a whole.
So I feel that it’s a critical step for every entrepreneur to spend a few hours researching the different platforms available.
That will allow you to make an informed decision about what makes the most sense for you and your specific situation.
If you’re wanting to see other Kajabi alternatives for selling your online course, then check out my Learnworlds vs. Kajabi, Kajabi vs. Kartra or Kajabi vs. Clickfunnels articles.
About the Author Jacob M.
Jacob has a background in finance and engineering. Outside of his day job, he is a lifelong learner, who enjoys reading, taking online courses, and writing about what he's learned.
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