In the world of online course platforms, two options you may have heard of are Kajabi and Ontraport.
We are going to cover Kajabi vs Ontraport and talk about why Kajabi is the superior platform for selling digital products and online courses.
Kajabi is an all-in-one business platform designed for creating, marketing, and selling digital products. It’s one of the more popular business platforms for selling digital products because of its intuitive site-building tools and large suite of marketing tools.
Ontraport is another platform made for businesses that sell digital products. Ontraport has a similar suite of tools as Kajabi and the two platforms are marketed to a similar audience/demographic.
Kajabi vs Ontraport at a Glance
Main Differences Between Kajabi and Ontraport
Both Kajabi and Ontraport market themselves as “all-in-one” business platforms, but there are key differences. The main difference is that Ontraport is mostly focused on web analytics and creating web pages.
Ontraport also does not have a dedicated module for building online courses, so it’s not truly an all-in-one platform for course businesses.
Now, let’s get into a more specific review of Kajabi vs Ontraport.
Pricing Comparison
Let’s start with Kajabi pricing. Kajabi offers 3 plans to choose from:
- Basic: $149/mo
- Growth: $199/mo
- Pro: $399/mo
All plans allow for products, pipelines (more on those later), landing pages, marketing emails, and contacts/active members. The main thing that changes is how many you get access too. The Basic plan, for instance, gives you up to 1,000 active members and the Pro plan gives you up to 20,000 active members. Some features are locked out of lower pricing plans, but the majority are all in one place.
Best of all, Kajabi’s plans are transparently priced. Everything you see is what you get.
The platform won’t try to upsell you products and you won’t need to purchase premium add-ons. Kajabi is a bit more expensive than some other course platforms but the large suite of tools makes the price worth it. There are also no transaction fees on site purchases.
The platform does not offer a free tier version, but you can sign up for a 14-day free trial. You can also save 20% on subscription costs by opting for annual instead of monthly billing.
Ontraport offers 4 main pricing plans:
- Basic: $79/mo
- Plus: $147/mo
- Pro: $297/mo
- Enterprise: $497/mo
Unlike Kajabi, Ontraport does restrict features from lower-tier pricing plans. For example, on the Basic pricing plan, you do not get access to account set up, email consultation, a good chunk of automations, or any eCommerce solutions. You are also locked out of a large portion of the business marketing tools unless to buy the Plus plan or higher. Ontraport prices start lower than Kajabi, but you ultimately have to pay more to have the same features.
Like Kajabi, Ontraport does not have a free tier version, but they do offer a free trial for 14 days.
Marketing Tools: Kajabi VS Ontraport
The real meat and potatoes of both platforms is marketing tools.
Kajabi’s marketing features include email automations, unlimited sales/landing pages, segmented email lists, and marketing campaign templates you can tweak to your heart’s desire.
The real draw is the “Pipeline” editor, Kajabi’s take on sales funnels. The Pipeline editor gives a visual representation of your sales funnel that you can add sales and landing pages to with the drag-and-drop interface.
Kajabi also has some great email marketing automation tools that opens up complex for unique targeted marketing campaigns. You can also set up an affiliate program for your page.
Ontraport is a dedicated email marketing platform that is oriented around visual campaigns.
Ontraport has a simple block building interface for forms and social media marketing capabilities.
Ontraport offers a nifty visual sales pipeline editor and some tools for reporting live business analytics and statistics, along with email advertising tools.
Overall, Ontraport has a good customer relationship management (CRM) system. that puts business marketing tools in one place.
As far as marketing tools go, both Kajabi and Ontraport have a solid suite of functions.
However, we give our bid to Kajabi due to the better pricing structure and better email marketing automations.
Website Building Comparison
Kajabi presents a powerful set of web building tools that let you customize your business site how you want. Kajabi also hosts your course so you don’t have to worry about paying extra hosting fees.
The web-builder uses a simple drag-and-drop interface and you can choose between defined templates and customize layouts and element placement.
All Kajabi themes are mobile-friendly too and you can add pop-ups, headers, and videos without having to use any plug-ins or extensions. You can also use the platform to set up membership sites.
Ontraport falls short here. Ontraport does not have web building tools and has to be hosted through a WordPress.
That means any editing tools you use have to be WordPress site editing tools and you have to create a membership site.
So if you use Ontraport, you will most likely have to shell out for plug-ins and extensions to make sure everything works together. The membership sites function is also relatively limited for business use.
So when it comes to web building tools, Kajabi wins, simply because Ontraport does not really have any web-building tools, aside from the business marketing page creator.
You also can only really create membership sites with Ontraport and you need a membership site to host courses (more on that one point later).
Theme Comparison
Both Kajabi and Ontraoort’s page designs are based on themes. You can pick a general theme and customize it further.
Kajabi used to offer 11 themes, but they recently switched focus to turning the Premier Theme into a flexible framework that can be customized fully. There are 6 different ‘layouts’ made from pre-selected design templates you can choose from, all of which have a sleek modern design that is perfect for an online storefront. All the older themes have been moved to the Legacy themes which you can switch to if you want.
Ontraport also has themes for its pages. You can either choose from templates or start from scratch. The templates use a block-building design but you can access the HTML editor if you have some coding knowledge. It’s harder to find workarounds if you don’t find the right layout though.
Course Creation & Student Engagement Comparison
Course creation is the main area where the two platforms differ. With Kajabi, you can design, upload, and publish an online course all using the built-in tools and with unlimited hosting. The platform’s course building tools are simple and can be set up in just a few hours.
Ontraport, on the other hand, does not have actual online course creation tools. Instead, you have to use a string of integrations and plug-ins to upload, host, and market an online course. So that means you will have to upload your course materials without any branding, logos, or templates, which can be very difficult if you don’t know what you are doing. You can also only upload an online course to a membership site.
That also means that Ontraport does not have student engagement tools. So if you want to sell online courses with the platform, you’ll have to get extensions that allow for quizzes, assessments, and the like. With Kajabi, you can create quizzes, surveys, and student assessments to keep track of progress and completion rates.
Integrations: Kajabi vs Ontraport
As far as integrations go, both Kajabi and Ontraport have a lot. Integrations for common services like MailChimp and ConvertKit. Kajabi has 10 built-in integrations but also includes the Zapier integration which opens up integrations with 1000s of apps. Integrations are easy to set up as you can grab API keys directly from the dashboard. The Zapier app, in particular, is very flexible and is basically a customizable API for non-native app integrations.
Ontraport also has a large library of integrations, including popular sales ones such as Shopify, WooCommerce, ZippyCourses, MailLift, and more. However, it’s not clear from their site which integrations work with the WordPress membership site function. On the plus side, they offer some great eCommerce solution integrations and include Zapier integrations.
Customer Support Comparison
Customer support is an important part of a course platform. Users need resources if they run into any problems using the tools.
Kajabi offers comprehensive 24/7 customer support and technical help, along with a huge library of educational resources. Users also get access to Kajabi University, on online training resources with articles, videos, and how-to-guides on subjects ranging from how to create an online course to more technical topics like video editing.
Ontraport offers customer support and most users praise it fairly highly. However, they do not offer 24/7 support and you can only call 6am-12am Monday-Thursday, 6am-9pm Friday, and 9am-9pm on Saturday & Sunday. Ontraport has a decent library of support materials, but not as many as Kajabi University.
Conclusions
Here is a quick summary of what we covered: Both Kajabi and Ontraport market themselves as “all-in-one” business platforms, but Ontraport noticeably lacks web-building/course hosting tools and instead has to rely on other means for course hosting.
Ontraport has a decent suite of business marketing tools, but as an all-in-one business platform, it falls short.
Overall, Kajabi is one of the best online course platforms for business because of its more transparent pricing structure, better email marketing tools, more comprehensive set of tools, better web-building tools, sales tools, and course creation systems.
If you have narrowed down your decision to Kajabi or Ontraport, then Kajabi is our number one pick.
