Kajabi vs. Kartra [2022]
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Both Kajabi and Kartra claim to be the best all-in-one platform available for your business. But obviously only one of those can be true. So which one is it?
Kajabi vs. Kartra, which one is best? Kajabi and Kartra are both platforms full of amazing features that can really drive the success of your business. But Kartra has some limitations that are really worrisome. Especially when it comes to how much bandwidth and emails you’re allowed per month.
In this article, I’ll look how Kajabi and Kartra stack up against one another. I’ll examine the price and different plans available for each, the features that both offer, as well as some limitations that you may face.
Kajabi vs. Kartra Compared
Kajabi and Kartra are both full-featured all-in-one platforms that give you everything you need to sell your online course, or any other digital product.
As a result, they’re priced higher than some other online course platforms.
For either option, you may pay double or triple what it would cost you monthly to host your course material on other options like Teachable or Thinkific.
But you also get everything that you need all in one place.
If you’re doing everything individually, you’d likely pay more than $100 per month just for different shopping cart, emailing, funnel building, and customer support systems.
So I think both platforms deliver a ton of value. Although neither may be an affordable choice if you’re just getting started.
Pricing
As I’ve already mentioned, pricing for either Kajabi or Kartra is higher than what’s available from some other online course platforms. I feel like it’s best suited for medium or large sized online businesses.
So if the idea of spending thousands of dollars per year to sell your digital products makes your heart race, maybe look into cheaper options.
Realistically, either of these options will cost you about $150 per month to get on a decent plan.
All of the prices below assume that you’re taking advantage of discounts for billing annually, instead of monthly. This will save you up to 25% on these platforms.
Kajabi Pricing
Kajabi has three plans available for you to choose from.
The Basic plan costs $119 per month. For that price, you can have up to 3 products and pipelines, 10,000 contacts, and 1,000 active members. Plus unlimited landing pages and marketing emails.
The Growth plan costs $159 and increases those limits to 15 products and pipelines, 25,000 contacts, and 10,000 active members.
Plus you can have up to 10 different admin users.
You also get advanced automations, access to the Kajabi affiliate program, and the ability to remove Kajabi branding from your site.
Kajabi’s most expensive Pro plan costs $319 per month. It enables you to have a whopping 100 different products and pipelines.
Plus you can send up to 2 million marketing emails, and have 100,000 contacts and 20,000 active members.
You also get up to 3 websites instead of 1 on the other plans, and as many as 25 admin users. You also unlock access to the code editor.
All of Kajabi’s plans have 0% transaction fees on all of your sales.
- Read more about Kajabi Pricing Plans and features you will get.
Kartra Pricing
Instead of three price plans, Kartra has four. Although the first one is quite restrictive.
The Starter plan costs $79 per month. It lets you have up to 2,500 leads, 1 custom domain, 15,000 emails per month.
Plus you get 50 GB of bandwidth and can host up to 100 pages, sell 20 products, and build up to 2 membership sites. You’re also only allowed to connect to the helpdesk once per month.
The Silver plan costs $149 per month. It allows up to 12,500 leads per month, 3 custom domains, 125,000 emails per month, and 125 GB of bandwidth.
Limits on the number of pages, products, membership sites, and access to help desk you can have are lifted, so you can make use of an unlimited number of these.
The Gold plan costs $229 per month. It allows up to 25,000 leads, 5 custom domains, 250,000 emails per month, 250 GB of bandwidth, plus all of the unlimited features of the Silver plan.
Finally, the Platinum plan costs $379 per month. It allows up to 50,000 leads, 10 custom domains, 500,000 emails per month, 400 GB bandwidth, and unlimited everything else.
All of Kartra’s plans also come with available add-ons if you need additional domains, more emails and bandwidth, or integrations and API.
Features
All of the features that both Kajabi and Kartra include are a dream. Whether you’re a digital marketer, a course creator, or an online entrepreneur, you’ll love what either platform can do for your business.
The big thing is how both platforms combine all of the major features you could need to run your business, all on one dashboard.
Kajabi Features
It’s not even an exaggeration to say that once you use Kajabi, you may not need most of the other platforms and services that you’re currently using.
The features that Kajabi includes can completely replace your need for website hosting, checkout plugins, analytics, funnel creation tools, email marketing platforms, and more.
1) Products
Kajabi gives you the option to sell basically any digital product that you can think of. So whether you’re selling online courses, memberships, or digital products, you can do it all in one place.
You can customize the price, look, and delivery of all of your products. Or even combine things like memberships, courses, or ebooks into different packages.
As long as it’s something digital, you can market and deliver it using Kajabi.
2) Websites
Kajabi hosts all of your content and pages for you. So you’ll no longer need to rely on WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, or other hosts.
When you consider how much it normally costs to host a website each month, it adds a lot of value to having everything done through Kajabi.
Plus you don’t have to worry about updates, plugin compatibility, or any of that technical stuff.
3) Payments
Kajabi has a built-in checkout that integrates with PayPal and Stripe seamlessly, and allows you to get paid instantly. Plus you know it’s all secure.
Plus Kajabi always has a 0% transaction fee, so you’ll only pay the standard Stripe or Paypal processing fee, usually 2.9% + $0.30.
This eliminates the need for other tools like Woocommerce, Infusionsoft, or Samcart.
4) Analytics
Kajabi’s powerful analytics dashboard can tell you everything that you need to know about your business in realtime.
You can see reports that show how customers are progressing through your course material and how they’re engaging with your business.
And you can even see user forecasting that will help you to make better decisions about the future.
5) Email Marketing
Everything that you need to manage and nurture your email list, as well as keep in touch with all of your subscribers, is built into Kajabi too.
You can use the visual email builder to make great-looking emails that include countdown timers, integrated video, and other premium features.
So whether you’re currently managing your email list through MailChimp, Aweber, ConvertKit or some other platform, you can move your email contacts over and cancel those services to save even more money.
6) Pagebuilder
Making beautiful pages is easy with Kajabi. You won’t need Clickfunnels, Leadpages, Instapage, or any other dedicated funnel platform any more.
Kajabi provides a simple way to pick a theme and customize a page to exactly what you’re looking for.
Best of all, it just works! As soon as you hit publish, everything is fully integrated with all other aspects of your business.
That’s something you’ll take for granted if you’ve never tried to connect a bunch of different apps and plugins together before.
- See Kajabi Course Examples of ordinary people who created their courses,
7) Community
If your community lives on Kajabi, you can ditch Facebook groups or reliance on any other platforms to keep in touch with your customers and students.
The Kajabi mobile app allows you and your students to connect and engage more, even when you’re on the go.
Make a community on your own terms, without worrying if your posts are reaching all of your members, or having platforms like Facebook trying to charge you for a post to reach additional people.
- Take a deep dive look at many features in my Kajabi Review.
Kartra Features
Much like Kajabi, everything is built into Kartra and just works right out of the box.
So there’s no more trying to hold together all of your different plugins, apps, and platforms with duct tape or worrying about compatibility and updates.
I might go as far as to say that Kartra offers more features and goes even deeper with them than what Kajabi offers.
Although I’m a bit skeptical about their tagline “Create, market and launch online without hiring a team of copyrighters, web developers, designers, or system integrators!” which almost sounds too good to be true.
Everything in Kartra is broken down into different modules. Here’s a look at some of what they have to offer.
1) Kartra Checkouts
This gives you everything you need to sell products and services. You can sell an unlimited number of products.
You can have multiple price points for each item, including multiple ways to pay. Whether a one-time payment, installments, or recurring payments.
You can even do really complicated things like offering a 1-month trial for $1, followed by $99 per month. Or charge an initial $400 setup fee, then $50 per month afterward for the first year. So your options are quite literally limitless.
Kartra allows you to make great-looking checkout pages that allow for 1-click transactions. Previous customers are remembered.
So the next time they want to buy something from you, all they have to do is click “Confirm Order” and everything else will be already pre-filled for them.
You can also add on downsells, upsells, and last-minute add-ons. And of course special promotions and discount coupons, complete with expiration dates.
2) Kartra Pages
Kartra has over 500 page templates to choose from if you want to keep it simple. Or you can customize pretty much every element on the page if you want it to look just how you like.
Everything is drag and drop with no coding required, so you don’t have to be a tech wizard to make great looking pages.
3) Kartra Leads
You can use Kartra Leads to keep tabs on potential customers in a way that you may have not thought was possible. Actually, the level of detail you can see is a bit scary, although super helpful for your business.
You get all the basic details about each customer like their name, address, and other basic information. But you can also see more advanced stuff like how much money they’ve spent with you overall and when they joined.
You can also add your own notes to their accounts if you wish.
You can see everything from the first sales page they visited, which videos they watched, what products they ordered.
Even what emails they received, opened, and clicked. You see pretty much every interaction that a customer has taken with your business.
This is also useful for detecting breaking points where people seem to be dropping off. It can be an early warning sign that there’s a broken link or something else in one of your emails, and will allow you to quickly fix it.
4) Kartra Funnels
I think of Kartra Pages kind of like the cooler younger brother of Clickfunnels. It allows you to make great-looking pages with high conversion rates in just a few minutes.
You can make everything you need including lead capture pages, sales pages, checkout pages, upsell pages, thank you pages, and more. Build entire sequences with a drag and drop tool.
You can A/B test all of your pages, and automate them with IF/THEN rulebooks to determine what next steps get taken automatically.
There are a bunch of tried and tested campaigns already included as well, if you just want to try out something that’s proven to deliver results before you start getting your hands dirty.
Plus So Much More
I could write a whole article just about the extensive and powerful features that Kartra offers. There’s equally deep video, helpdesk, affiliate, mail, and other areas of the platform that are worth exploring.
Limitations
If either Kajabi or Kartra gave you unlimited access to all of their features, my recommendations may be quite different.
But each limits what you can do in different areas of your business, so you’ll need to think strategically about which makes the most sense for you.
Kajabi Limitations
Kajabi plans limit how many products and pipelines you can have. As well as how many contacts and active members you can have.
There are also limitations on how many websites or admin users you’re allowed, but I consider this less of an issue.
The Basic plan limitations that concern me the most are how many products you can have, and how many active members you can have.
But 3 products and 1,000 active members is likely enough for most people who are just getting started.
The Growth plan allows for up to 15 products, which I feel like is enough for most small or medium-sized entrepreneurs.
Active members are defined by Kajabi as anyone that has access to at least one of your courses. So if someone buys multiple products from you, they still only count as one active member.
This means even on the Basic plan, if your product costs $50, you can earn up to $50,000 in sales before you’ll need to upgrade to the next plan level. So it’s not a huge restriction.
However, you should consider 7 best alternatives to Kajabi before starting your courses.
Kartra Limitations
I feel like the limitations that Kartra puts in place are much more significant and could possibly have a detrimental impact on your online business, depending on how you structure it.
For me, the most glaring problem is their limit on bandwidth for all of their plans. With 50 GB of bandwidth on their lowest plan, and a maximum of 400 GB per month included in their highest plan.
I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t seem like very much to me. I personally use several hundred GB of data each month at home just watching Netflix and Youtube.
Even most home internet plans nowadays offer unlimited bandwidth. And I can’t think of any other online course platform that has bandwidth limitations, so I’m actually a bit shocked that Kartra has these limits in place.
On Kartra, your monthly bandwidth includes any time that you upload or download something, as well as hosting and streaming any of your videos. And even images and other assets that appear on your pages.
This is practically a dealbreaker for me, as it means you can’t realistically host your own video content on Kartra.
Especially not at a high resolution. Videos can be anywhere from a few hundred MB each, to multiple GB if they’re being streamed at 1080p or 4k. So if you’ve got hundreds or thousands of students, this just isn’t feasible.
You’ll need to host your video content on Vimeo or another platform to avoid racking up huge bandwidth costs.
Limiting how many emails you can send each month through Kartra is another thing that raises an eyebrow for me.
Many platforms, including Kajabi, allow you to send an unlimited number of marketing emails. So it’s surprising that Kartra would choose to limit this.
While getting 125,000 emails per month on the Silver plan is likely enough to cover all of your students and everyone on your mailing list multiple times, it’s more the principle of it for me.
And the fact that when your company gets larger, you may need to be constantly monitoring and counting to stay within your limit.
Lastly… Only 1 connect to helpdesk is allowed per month on the Starter plan. Are you kidding me???
So while Kartra has some really amazing features, it might not matter at the end of the day when you look at all the limitations and fine print that they put on everything.
Conclusion
Both Kajabi and Kartra are all-in-one platforms that have every feature you need to run your business.
I feel like Kajabi has significantly less limitations on how you can use their platform. Especially when it comes to how much bandwidth you can use, and how many emails you can send.
You may choose to ignore these limitations and go with Kartra anyway.
If you have a six-figure business, their features may be so powerful and useful that it’s worth paying extra even if you go over your bandwidth and email limits.
I can see how the benefits you’d gain from using the platform could outweigh the extra costs.
If you’re wanting to see what other options are out there for selling your online course, then check out my Kajabi comparison 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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