I believe any platform can be worth using so long as the price accurately reflects the value you get.
Although both platforms have a similar purpose, Teachable doesn’t come close to offering anywhere near the level of value you get with Kajabi.
Kajabi vs. Teachable: A Quick Overview
| Feature | Kajabi | Teachable |
|---|---|---|
| SupplyGem Platform Ranking | No. 2 | No. 8 |
| SupplyGem Score | 9.5 | 7.9 |
| Trustpilot Score | 4.5 | 2.6 |
| Costs From | $69/month | $59/month |
| Free Trial | Get a Growth plan 30-day free trial | Free plan available |
| Money-Back Guarantee | 30 days | 30 days |
| Platform Pros | – True “all-in-one” platform – Zero transaction fees – High-quality features – Best user experience – Beginner friendly – Excellent community tool – Full marketing suite | – Free plan available – Comprehensive course builder – Decent AI content generator |
| Platform Cons | – Feature limits on all plans – For digital products only – No free plan | – Dated platform – High transaction fees – Bad online reviews and customer service – Zero marketing tools – User experience isn’t great |
| Best For | Digital learning content creators | Course builders |
Kajabi vs. Teachable: Aren’t They the Same Thing?
No, Kajabi and Teachable are not the same thing. I mean, yes, they’re both course-creation platforms. But it’s like comparing a Ferrari and a Nissan: both are cars, but the differences are pretty obvious.
In this case, Kajabi is our Ferrari, and Teachable is our Nissan. Both platforms allow you to create and sell learning products (courses, communities, coaching, etc.), but the similarities end here.
Kajabi offers so much more, including a full marketing suite, high-end features, a modern, powerful interface, and a great user experience.
However, unlike our two cars, the cost of the two platforms is quite similar. The key difference is that Kajabi provides exceptional value for the price. That’s why I will always choose it over Teachable.
7 Reasons Why You Should Choose Kajabi over Teachable
There are many, many reasons to choose Kajabi over Teachable, but here are several that stand out the most.
Zero Transaction Fees
Sneaky fees really grind my gears. The Free and Basic Teachable plans appear very affordable but can cost you a lot more in the long run. Also, a “free plan” isn’t really free if fees are involved, is it?
The Teachable free plan imposes a whopping $1 + 10% on EVERY sale.
Let’s say you sell a course for $100. That means Teachable will take $11 each time someone buys it. Sell it 10 times, and you’ve lost $220 in transaction fees.
That’s insane.
Of course, it wants you to upgrade to a paid plan to avoid this. However, the Basic plan also has a 5% transaction fee. To avoid these fees altogether, you have to pay for the Pro or Pro+ plans, which start at $159 per month.
In contrast, Kajabi does not steal a slice of your action. Yes, its plan prices are slightly higher, but at least you know that’s all you’ll pay out each month for the platform, regardless of how many products you sell.
Modern, User-Friendly Platform
Kajabi is a great-looking platform with a modern, easy-to-use interface. You can quickly find the tools you need, and mastering them doesn’t take much of a learning curve.
It is clear the developers placed a lot of thought and care into the user experience of the platform. Also, the quality. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced a glitch or anything crashing in Kajabi (except that one time I spilled coffee over my laptop, but that was totally the cat’s fault).
In comparison, Teachable looks like it was built in 2014, which is coincidentally when the platform was founded.
It’s not pleasing to the eyes and looks outdated. And why is there SO much text and green color?
As for performance, it’s kind of meh. The layout isn’t as smart as Kajabi and feels clunky to use. I mean, it does the job, but it isn’t particularly fun to use.
Full Marketing Suite
Kajabi’s marketing suite is a big winner in my book and totally justifies the higher plan prices. That’s because you don’t have to pay for and use third-party apps for emails, funnel building, or automation. It’s all done right there in your Kajabi account.
This means you can seamlessly connect your products with the marketing and sales tools without any issues or messing about with complicated integrations. Oh, and it’s super easy to set up since Kajabi smoothly guides you through each step.
And, if you’re not a graphic design genius (which I am most definitely not), you’ll appreciate the premade sales funnels, email, and landing page templates just as much as I do.
While I’d absolutely love to chat about Teachable’s marketing tools, I can’t. Because there aren’t any.
Website Builder
I’ll let you into a secret here. I actually think that the website builder is the worst feature in Kajabi. By that, I mean that it doesn’t match the level of WordPress, Square, etc.
Still, you can use Kajabi to build a well-functioning, good-looking website for your business. The handful of templates look professional and modern, with a decent range of page customization options. Plus, you can add a blog, which helps drive traffic.
Although there is technically a website builder in Teachable, it makes Kajabi’s look amazing in comparison.
There’s one single template and very few customization options. Unfortunately, that means your site will look like every other Teachable user’s website.
Diverse Community Builder
I’m a big fan of the Kajabi community feature because there’s just so much you can do within it to drive proper, meaningful engagement with your audience.
Sure, there’s the usual way to post and respond, but there are also tools for creating and running events and challenges. I’ve found these to be the perfect way to get people more involved in my brand and actually enjoy the experience.
There’s also the Kajabi Live feature—Kajabi’s livestream tool that allows me to jump into a live session at the click of a button. This is also super useful since it lets me connect directly with my community members—something they find extremely valuable.
You will also find a basic community feature in Teachable, but it’s exactly that: basic. Beyond posting and responding, there’s not much else going on.
Native Live Streaming
Yes, I know I already mentioned this, but it deserves its own section because it’s so useful!
Kajabi Live is a powerful tool for many reasons. Not only does it let me speak to my audience in real time, but it also features the ability to record my sessions, which I can then repurpose into other content for use in my products and marketing material.
It also has a text chat thread, reaction buttons—and my personal favorite—the ability to split the audience into breakout groups. This allows each group to converse on video separately from the other groups. I’ve found this brilliant when running assessments and challenges.
As you’ve probably guessed, Teachable does not have a live stream feature, so you’d have to use a third-party app like Zoom, which adds to the cost and inconvenience of using the platform.
Top Customer Service and Support
Support is where Kajabi excels. It provides a ton of ways for you to learn about the platform and, more importantly, use it properly.
The Kajabi University goes beyond platform basics and goes in-depth into marketing skills, strategies, and techniques to sell your courses successfully. Oh, and it’s free for all Kajabi subscribers.
There’s also the Help Center (lots of useful guides and walkthroughs to be found there), free live and prerecorded webinars, and free downloads you can access whenever you want.
As for live support, Kajabi provides live chat on all plans (they’re super helpful and responsive).
The only slight problem is that Kickstarter and Basic plan subscribers are restricted to 6 am to 5 pm Pacific Time. Email support is always available, though, and Growth and Pro plan subscribers can enjoy 24/7 live chat.
Teachable only provides live chat support on its Pro and Pro+ plans. All other plan subscribers must use email support or navigate the chatbot widget.
There is a Help Center that contains plenty of guides, but I find them too “wordy” with not enough illustrations to guide you.
What concerns me the most, though, is the recent wave of negative online reviews (check out TrustPilot, for instance) detailing the lack of support. A recurring theme is that service agents do not respond or are very slow to respond—something you don’t want to experience when you’re in the midst of an issue.
Kajabi vs. Teachable: How Do the Course Builders Compare?
I couldn’t finish this review without comparing the top feature of both platforms—the course builder!
Kajabi’s course builder matches the quality of the rest of the platform. It’s simple to use and gives you enough customization options to create diverse content for your audience.
There’s everything you’d expect from a decent course builder: You can upload video and audio content, create quizzes, upload files, gradually drip lessons, and more.
To enhance your offer, you can also create product bundles consisting of courses, a community, and coaching. This is important to me because it allows me to provide live and static learning for one price.
I particularly like the AI assistance. Plug in your course title and a quick description, and it’ll whip up a lesson plan and generate some of the content for you. Of course, it needs editing (definitely don’t rely on AI to do the work for you!), but it provides a great starting block to kick things off.
From a student’s perspective, all content is neatly laid out. You get a range of course templates to pick from, so you can choose the layout design that works best for your brand.
The mobile app is super useful, too, since it allows students to access their content from anywhere. Creators also get a mobile app to enable remote course management.
Overall, Kajabi’s course builder is a pleasure to use. Since you can connect it seamlessly to other platform features, it’s super simple to set up advertising campaigns and automation for your learning content.
The course builder is by far the best feature on Teachable. Although the interface looks dated, it offers a good amount of functionality.
Like Kajabi, there’s an AI content generator that works surprisingly well. It generated a decent course outline and associated content in a few seconds. Like with Kajabi, you’ll have to edit it, though, since it’s typical ChatGPT verbiage.
Then, you can bring your pages to life by adding videos, uploads, quizzes, etc.
What I don’t like, however, is the constant reminders that I have to upgrade to access all the course features.
Don’t expect too much on the Free plan. Most of the features are available on the Basic plan upwards, but if you want stuff like graded quizzes or completion certificates, you’ll need the pro plan.
From the student’s perspective, the course pages look okay, but they won’t set your world on fire. However, it’s easy to move around the content and navigate to the right area.
There is a student app, but Android users will be out of luck since it is only available for iOS. At this point, I think it’s unacceptable to offer this only to Apple users. All other major course-building platforms have apps for Android and iOS, so what’s Teachable’s excuse?
The verdict? It’s a perfectly acceptable course builder, but the plan restrictions are annoying and less comprehensive than Kajabi’s.
Kajabi vs. Teachable: Value and Cost Comparison
What I want to do here is compare the two lower-tier plans with each other to see how affordable they actually are when you start selling courses.
Here’s a comparison of the cheapest plans:
| Cost/Feature | Thinkific Free | Kajabi Kickstarter |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly cost | $0 | $69 |
| Monthly cost paid annually | $0 | $55 |
| Total annual cost | $0 | $660 |
| Transaction fee | $1 + 10% | 0% |
| Total cost of selling 10 courses for $100 in one month* | $110 | $69 (or $55 if annual payment chosen) |
* 10 is the maximum number of students you can have on the Thinkific Free plan.
Now, let’s look at the next pricing tier:
| Cost/Feature | Thinkific Basic | Kajabi Basic |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly cost | $59 | $149 |
| Monthly cost paid annually | $39 | $119 |
| Total annual cost | $468 | $1,428 |
| Transaction fee | 5% | 0% |
| Total cost of selling 100 courses for $100 in one month* | $559 (or $539 if annual payment chosen) | $149 (or $119 if annual payment chosen) |
*The Thinkific Basic plan allows unlimited students.
In both cases, we can see that Kajabi is significantly cheaper.
It’s also worth noting that Teachable has restricted features on its lower-tier plans, giving you even less overall value. For example, you can’t access the community feature or have custom domains on the Free plan.
Kajabi gives you access to most of its features (all the important ones, anyway!) on ALL its plans. What differs is the limits for each feature (though Teachable has feature limits, too).
For a final comparison, here are the two platform’s top-tier plans compared:
| Cost | Thinkific Pro | Kajabi Growth | Thinkific Pro+ | Kajabi Pro |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly cost | $149 | $199 | $249 | $399 |
| Monthly cost paid annually | $119 | $159 | $199 | $319 |
| Total annual cost | $1,428 | $1,908 | $2,388 | $3,828 |
Yes, Teachable’s top-tier plans cost less, but again, you have to consider the value you’re getting.
If you’re paying for a top-tier plan, it’s safe to assume that your business is successful and that you may want to scale at some point. At this stage, you’ll find Teachable incredibly limited.
On the other hand, Kajabi’s comprehensive feature set is diverse enough to allow advanced users to grow their businesses successfully.
Try Systeme.io if You Want a Cheaper Kajabi Alternative
Many people are drawn to Teachable over Kajabi because it offers a free plan. But, as we discovered earlier, that plan is not actually free thanks to those transaction fees.
However, I don’t think people should have to suffer unfair fees just to get access to a “cheaper” plan—especially those just starting their business journey.
With that in mind, let me present an alternative option: Systeme.io.
The platform certainly isn’t as fancy as Kajabi (though it looks more modern than Teachable), and some of its features are pretty basic. However, I would 100% pick it over Teachable for the following reasons:
- It has a genuinely free plan with ZERO transaction fees
- Paid plans start from $27 per month—a real bargain!
- You will find sales funnels, email marketing, and automation included on the platform
- There are loads of web page templates, and it has a blogging feature
- It’s super easy to use—very beginner-friendly
Kajabi vs. Teachable: Final Thoughts
We rate Kajabi as the #2 platform on SupplyGem for good reason. The price truly reflects the value you get from it. For course builders, it’s currently the best option out there, and I don’t see that changing any time soon.
The bottom line is that Teachable is overpriced—even on the Free plan! The quality of the features and lack of customer service do not justify the high prices.
I would love to see this platform prove me wrong by implementing serious upgrades, but I won’t hold my breath.
What are your thoughts on these platforms? Let us know in the SupplyGem community!
Frequently Asked Questions
Can You Migrate Existing Courses to Kajabi or Teachable?
No, there is no automatic process that enables the migration of existing content from Kajabi to Teachable or vice-versa. You have to manually recreate your content into the new platform.
Do Kajabi and Teachable Offer Mobile Apps for Students and Creators?
Teachable offers a mobile app for students, but it’s for iOS only. Kajabi has three mobile apps for students, creators, and communities. All are available on Android and iOS. You can also create a custom mobile app in Kajabi.
Can Kajabi and Teachable Integrate with Third-Party Apps?
Yes. Kajabi and Teachable integrate with third-party apps and support Zapier. Teachable has more native integrations than Kajabi. However, Kajabi is an “all-in-one” platform, so it is less likely you’ll need to use an external app.
