Introduction
Ready to learn everything there is to know about online course creation? In our Kajabi review, we will tell you everything you need to know about this solution to developing courses for students of all backgrounds – and we’ll give you some insight into whether this is the software for you.
Kajabi is a one-stop-shop program that will allow you to create, market, distribute, and get paid for your online courses – without having to deal with a ton of different programs, templates, or email marketing tools.
After reading this Kajabi review, you should have a good idea of whether you want to jump in – or walk away. Here’s what you need to know.
What is Kajabi?
Kajabi is an online content marketing platform that is designed to help businesses and course creator teams make their own digital products, typically in the shape of online courses. One of many online course platforms that you can choose from, it’s a great way to grow your business and reach a larger population of students.
This system will allow you to build your email list, access a variety of email marketing features, and gain insights into how your customers are doing.
Everything can be personalized, from the email marketing campaigns to the custom domains, allowing you to truly take charge of your course for a uniquely personalized customer experience.
Founded in 2010, Kajabi was created by Travis Rosser and Kenny Rueter. It has more than 60 employees and more than 25,000 individual course creators. As of writing this article, Kajabi is utilized by thousands of big-name course creators like Brendan Burchard and Amy Porterfield.
Who is Kajabi For?
Kajabi is for teachers, entrepreneurs, and students who are seeking a better solution for online learning. This platform is loaded to the brim with features that will help you create, market, and sell your online course.
An all-in-one platform, it is ideal for the creator who doesn’t want to worry about using multiple solutions and kinds of software to create a single class.
With Kajabi, you can run your entire digital products business from one dashboard. It’s easy to use, meaning it is the perfect site for beginners as well as those who want a no-fuss solution to online course creation.
How Does Kajabi Work?
Kajabi is an all-in-one online course platform that will allow you to handle everything from one single program. You can build an entire course – and manage it – without ever having to sign up for a new subscription or learn how to use a new type of technology.
The website builder includes free hosting and SSL, a variety of site themes, a convenient page builder, and even blog accessibility. You can upload videos, quizzes, PDFs, and other kinds of course content for your students to access.
You can also offer a vibrant, easy-to-use community for students, with forums, helpful checkout pages, and payment processing features. Kajabi also offers a number of marketing tools, including affiliate programs, webinar funnels, lead magnet funnels, email marketing automation, and many CRM tools.
The beauty of using Kajabi is that the platform takes care of everything for you. It is not a course marketplace, like Udemy or Udacity, meaning you’ll have ultimate control over the pricing of your courses, student information, your policies – and everything else, all from one convenient dashboard and for one all-encompassing fee.
User Experience & Ease of Use
If you’ve never used one of the many other online course platforms to launch your course, you might not truly realize everything that Kajabi has to offer. That’s why it’s so important to emphasize that this platform is beyond unique when it comes to its all-in-one solutions – it is truly one-of-a-kind.
Kajabi lets you host your online programs and deliver them to your students in a more customized, professional way. You can build a full-fledged website, launch a blog, create marketing funnels, and fully automate your email marketing – all from one location.
This is as opposed to a traditional online course platform, where you’d need WordPress to manage your blog, ClickFunnels to develop and manage landing pages and funnels, and ConvertKit or MailChimp to handle your email marketing.
Kajabi lets you build your course business from one single platform so you don’t need to piece together various services – something that can be time-consuming as you are learning how to use them and also expensive in their upkeep and initial costs.
Features
Here are some of the most noteworthy features of Kajabi.
Course Creation
When you use Kajabi to create your online course, you’ll have access to some of the best content delivery tools.
You will upload your content and design its structure via Product Blueprints. These blueprints will allow you to create content in minutes, as you can choose from templates like mini-courses, online courses, membership products, coaching programs, and more.
You’ll get a sample structure with posts and categories added by default – you can go in and rearrange or delete these as needed.
Adding content to a lesson is easy. You can use helpful drag and drop features and add subcategories as needed via the lesson editor tool.
As part of all of the Kajabi payment plans, you will get unlimited Wistia hosting for videos. Because of this, you can add videos to any part of the lesson and on your landing page. When it comes time to upload content, that’s easy, too, since you can add it from your computer or from Google Drive and Dropbox.
Site Customization
When you’re designing the course area, you’ll be able to choose from more than a dozen different product themes so you can customize your course to look exactly as you’d like.
Many online course platforms force you to choose one overall theme that covers all of your products – but that’s not the case with Kajabi. With Kajabi, you can choose different themes for different products.
Not only that, but you can add additional features to your course, like quizzes, assessments, and certificates (although if you plan on adding a certificate, you will need to add a third-party tool, since Kajabi doesn’t have built-in support for creating your own certificates via the platform).
There are plenty of community features you can add, too, allowing you to enable discussion features and topics so your students feel more engaged.
There are plenty of other customization features for you to enable, too, including the ability to add custom domains and free SSL certificates, to upload and manage your own website themes, and to customize your site with the helpful page builder.
Marketing and Sales
Kajabi takes a unique approach to sales and marketing when compared to its competitors. You can use a variety of tools to market and grow your audience, including various product payment options, checkout tools, testimonials, sales pipeline builders, and more.
Of course, the email marketing tools on Kajabi are some of the best, too. You can do more than just send sweeping broadcast emails to your members. You can create automated email sequences that are sent based on user actions, allowing you to fully automate all of your marketing to your subscribers.
Kajabi even has built-in affiliate marketing tools so you can create a fully functional affiliate program!
Reporting and Administration
Last but not least, Kajabi has a number of reporting and analytics tools to help you get a good idea of how your website and courses stand. The admin dashboard will tell you everything from page views to opt-ins, affiliate sales of overall revenue. You can even track analytics for individual videos!
Kajabi Pricing Model
Kajabi has three different pricing options to choose from.
The basic plan, as you might expect, is the least expensive. With the basic plan, you can get access to a total of three pipelines and three different products. You’ll also have unlimited quantities of marketing emails and landing pages but you will be restricted to 10,000 contacts and 1,000 active members – you’ll also get a single website for an admin user.
At $149 per month, billed on a monthly basis, or $119 a month, billed on an annual basis, the basic plan isn’t cheap by any means. However, you’ll have access to so many features, all in one place, that you’re really paying for convenience – and that’s worth paying for. Even just with the basic plan, you will have access to all kinds of webinars, templates, key automation, and Kajabi University.
The next pricing plan is the Growth Plan. This increases the number of pipelines and products to 15 each – a significant jump. With this payment plan, you’ll also be able to access 25,000 contacts and 10,000 active members. You can deploy 10 admins, too.
You’ll pay $199 per month on this plan, which can be reduced to $159 a month with the annual payment plan. You’ll get advanced automation, the ability to remove Kajabi’s name from your course domains, and 24/7 chat support – something that can be quite helpful as you are building your courses.
Finally, consider the Pro Plan. This payment plan will give you a whopping 100 products and pipelines, 20,000 active members, 100,000 contacts, and three websites for up to 25 admin members.
Support
Kajabi has excellent customer support. In fact, it is viewed as one of the best when it comes to this feature. It has 24/7 live chat support in case you get stuck. In addition, Kajabi offers a variety of tutorials that will show you how to access various features and complete different tasks on the platform. All you need to do is type your query into this search bar!
To keep users engaged, Kajabi also has a unique rewards program known as Kajabi Hero. This program rewards course creators who reach various revenue goals by offering them exclusive perks and prizes.
Let’s not forget the Kajabi Facebook group, either. Here, you’ll find a community of more than 22,000 other Kajabi members where you can ask questions and get help from other course creators.
The Advantages (Pros) of Kajabi
As with any online course platform, there are several good reasons to consider using Kajabi.
Tons of Built-In Features
One of the most common reasons why users and course creators turn to Kajabi is that it offers an inclusive platform in which to build your online course. You don’t have to learn how to use a million different platforms or types of software, nor do you have to pay to maintain them all or jump between them as you work.
You’ll have access to built-in email marketing tools, with no need to integrate a third-party email provider, and built-in sales funnels software. You can create a variety of marketing funnels to drive sales.
There are even marketing automations that let you trigger course offers or emails based on student course completion or periods of inactivity. This course creation software also has a Kajabi marketplace, so you can give users a way to find your course on their own -no marketing required.
Customization
One of the biggest frustrations that online course creators have to deal with is the fact that everything is cookie-cutter. You may find, when creating your own online course, that you have to work with the templates and programming that is already provided to you by the course software. That’s not the case with Kajabi.
Instead, you’ll be able to customize everything so that it meets your preferences for its look and feel. It can be designed to match the appearance or theme of your website or business. You can choose from a number of professionally designed themes, too, if you don’t already have one in mind.
Of course, with Kajabi you can also set a custom domain. When Kajbai hosts your course, you can make it appear as though it is part of your website.
Easy to Access for Students
Kajabi isn’t just helpful for course creators – it’s also a boon for students who want to take courses that are offered here, too. You can engage with your students via a built-in community platform (a platform that operates similar to a forum) and you can offer a variety of payment options to your students, including a monthly payment plan for courses that might be paired with heftier price tags.
You can even offer recurring monthly subscriptions!
The Disadvantages (Cons) of Kajabi
There are a few disadvantages to consider when using Kajabi as well, though these tend to be minor.
No Free Option
Sadly, with Kajabi, there is no free option to give you an idea of whether this course creation software is right for you. The prices can be a bit higher than what you might find on other platforms, so it can be difficult to decide whether this platform is right for you without being able to participate in a free plan.
No Built-in Completion Certificates
You also won’t be able to offer built-in certificates of completion. This is a feature of Kajabi that is surprisingly lacking, especially when you consider that many other online course creation platforms offer this as an innate feature. You can integrate third-party software to do this, but that can be cumbersome, clunky, and costly to do.
Small Marketplace
Although there’s a good chance that most of your course marketing will be done by you, the course creator, if you’re relying solely on the Kajabi course marketplace to sell your class, you might want to come up with an alternative strategy. The marketplace is pretty small and it can be difficult to search as a student.
Kajabi Alternatives
There are plenty of alternatives to Kajabi to consider as you’re shopping for the right course creation program. Some Of the others include Thinkific and Teachable.
Thinkific is one of the most popular alternatives, offering lower price points and, some may argue, an easier-to-use platform. Although Thinkific is not all-inclusive, like Kajabi, it is easy to integrate with a variety of third-party platforms.
However, when comparing Thinkific to Kajabi, bear in mind that the sales and marketing tools on this online course builder are sorely lacking. It has plenty of features for sales funnel building and email automation, but the checkout process is far from optimized.
Teachable is another alternative This online course platform lets you create and sell your own online courses underneath your own brand. It has all the features you need to develop an engaging online course, including video and quiz compatibility, but the site-building capabilities on Teachable are more limited than what you will get with Kajabi. It also doesn’t have as many capabilities when it comes to email marketing automation, sales funnel creation, or landing page management.
Conclusion
Hopefully, this Kajabi review has been helpful in determining whether it’s the right software for you. When it comes to selling and optimizing your business, turning to digital products and online course creation products that will let you be the true master of your content is important. Kajabi may not be everybody’s favorite solution, but for many users, it’s the ideal solution.
Consider signing up for a membership today so you can start creating your own online courses. Chances are, Kajabi has everything you’ve been looking for.
FAQ
Is Kajabi legit?
Kajabi is legit. This company has more than 60 employees and serves more than 25,000-course creators. Although you’ll need to read the details to find out whether Kajabi is the right choice for you, there’s no arguing the fact that this platform is a legitimate way to create a class and hopefully, earn some money, too.
Is Kajabi worth the money?
That’s a decision you will have to weigh carefully. Kajabi is far from being the most expensive solution out there when it comes to creating your next online course, but it does come at a price. The most inexpensive plan is still $149 per month, while those from competitors can be found at around $49 to $99 per month – and many of these have free trials so you can test drive them first.
The benefit of using Kajabi, when it comes to its overall monetary value, is that you don’t have to worry about paying for additional third-party features – no other platforms offer a sales funnel builder and other built-in features. With Kajabi, you’re paying for convenience, so that’s something to be considered when you are deciding whether it is worth the money.
Is Kajabi free?
Kajabi is not free. There is a 14-day free trial, but this trial is limited and may not give you the best idea of whether Kajabi is the right software for you. That said, the benefit of using Kajabi is that there are no transaction fees for you to worry about.
Is Kajabi easy to use?
Kajabi is easy to use. Although there is no free trial that will let you play around with the program and see if it’s right for you, it is used by tens of thousands of course creators and accessed by more than 33 million students – a simple testament to its ease of use.
Kajabi has tons of built-in features, including integrated email marketing tools and the ability to be integrated with additional providers (only if you choose) such as MailChimp and ConvertKit.
Not only that, but Kajabi is easy to use if you want to add gamification or sell physical products.
How much is Kajabi per month?
The least expensive plan on Kajabi, the basic plan, is $149 per month. The most expensive, the pro plan, is $199 a month.
Does Kajabi have an app?
Kajabi has a mobile app that will allow you to provide your students with a one-touch learning experience. It is accessible by both iOS and Google Play users.
