In the world of online courses, there are a lot of platforms that educators can use to create, sell, and market their courses.
If you have looked around for course platforms you have probably heard of both Kajabi and Wix and are wondering: Should I use Kajabi or Wix to sell my online courses? Kajabi, with its latest offer is a much better deal.
One problem with Wix is that it is a jack-of-all-trades and a master of none.
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Main Differences Between Kajabi and Wix
The main difference between Kajabi and Wix is their scope and focus.
Kajabi is an all-in-one platform designed with an eye for creating, marketing, and selling digital products. As such, Kajabi has all the tools you need to run an entire business, right out of the box.
Wix is a popular web-building platform that uses a simple drag and editor.
Wix can make a large variety of websites, but it’s not focused on selling courses.
You can sell courses with Wix but you have to get a bunch of add-ons and extensions for payment processing, course hosting, etc.
Here are some main differences between the two:
- Features/functionality: Kajabi is all-in-one, Wix is mostly a web-building tool
- Pricing: Kajabi starts at $149, Wix is free to use, but extra functions cost a premium
- Marketing tools: Kajabi has marketing tools built-in to the platform. Wix does not.
- Course creation: Kajabi has powerful course creation tools Wix requires integrations to create and sell courses
- Integrations: Both Kajabi and Wix can integrate with several third-party apps
Pricing Comparison
Kajabi offers 3 pricing tiers:
- Basic: $149/mo
- Growth: $199/mo
- Pro: $399/mo
These may seem a bit pricey at first, but keep in mind that those costs include hosting, a domain name, and all the tools you need to run your business.
So it’s actually not as expensive as it might initially look.
Kajabi does not offer a free version but you can sign up for a 28-day free trial. They also offer a 30-day money-back guarantee and you can save 20% on subscription costs by switching to annual instead of monthly billing.
Wix follows a freemium model, meaning that the basic tools are free to download and use, but you have to pay extra for premium functions.
Wix offers 4 premium plans starting at:
- Combo: $13/mo
- Unlimited: $17/mo
- Pro: $22/mo
- VIP: $39/mo
Wix also has a special section for Business and eCommerce plans that start at $23/mo and go up to $500/mo.
Marketing Tools Comparison
Kajabi is built around its powerful suite of marketing tools which includes its email suite and sales funnel builder.
Kajabi’s email marketing suite is built into the platform so you don’t need any extensions.
You can run effective marketing campaigns with the email tools like list segmentation, drip scheduling, and powerful automations.
Pipelines are Kajabi’s take on sales funnels. The pipelines tool lets you arrange your sales funnel however you want.
It’s a good tool to get your head around the abstract structure of your sales strategy.
You can add landing & sales pages, and opt-in forms using the drag and drop editor.
Wix does not have any marketing tools with the free package.
There is an email marketing plan that costs $4.90 a month.
The plan gives you 5 “shoutouts” per month, 10,000 contacts, and 9,500 emails.
This is enough to do some marketing every month, but not as much as Kajabi.
There are a ton of marketing plugins you can get from the Wix store, but some have an extra subscription cost.
Website Building Comparison
Wix’s web building tools are one of its top-selling points.
Wix was actually among the first web-building applications to introduce a WYSIWYG drag-and-drop page editor and it is known for its intuitive yet very flexible website building tools.
Wix has amassed 1,000s of themes, layouts, and templates, and you get access to most of the right out of the gate with the free plan.
Wix also handles hosting and domains, though you have to upgrade to a premium account to remove the Wix branding from your domain name URL.
One problem with Wix is that it is a jack-of-all-trades and a master of none.
It can do a lot of things well, but it can’t do any one thing amazingly on its own.
You need to buy a premium plan and get some extensions before you can really tap into its full potential.
Kajabi, on the other hand, uses a similar web-building drag-and-drop interface.
Kajabi’s tools allow you to create attractive and modern pages with a high degree of functionality, even if the tools are ultimately more limited than Wix.
The upshot is that you don’t have to pay extra or make random one-off purchases to unlock Kajabi’s potential.
Theme Comparison
Kajabi works on a theme-based design.
The developers are currently focusing on turning the Premier Theme into a flexible and open-ended framework that can be individually customized.
Within the Premier theme are 6 layout presets with premade templates and elements.
Each layout has a clean modern display and can be further customized as you see fit.
Kajabi also utilizes themes at the individual product level.
There are 12 product themes to choose from, each with a unique look/feel. These themes can be customized further, a useful tool if you want to give your membership site a different aesthetic than your main page.
All Kajabi themes are mobile-responsive.
Wix has a huge library of over 500 themes, though not all of them are worth trying. When you pick a theme, Wix can use an AI to generate small differences to make it unique.
Modifying themes can be a tedious task, but Wix themes are extremely flexible.
Some themes also have trouble with mobile displays.
Course Creation & Student Engagement Comparison
Kajabi has a whole suite of tools for course creation and student engagement/management.
Creating a course in Kajabi is like creating a WordPress post.
You set up the lesson structure and then fill in the content using the drag and drop editor.
Kajabi uses Wistia for all video hosting and there are no upload limits. Kajabi still has a few kinks to work out in the course creation tool (it’s a bit difficult to incorporate multiple file-formats) but everything works solidly.
Pricing your products is straightforward and flexible too.
You can’t build a course with Wix’s free tools.
You will need to purchase a premium account so you can accept payments and have enough storage to upload course materials.
The problem is that even the Business VIP plan only has 50GB of storage, though they recently changed the plan to allow for unlimited video hours.
You also need to consider any LMS plugins you need for quizzes, assessments, surveys, and the like.
Integrations
Wix requires integrations to perform to its full potential so it has a ton of available extensions on the Wix store.
There are extensions for basically anything you need, from eCommerce plugins, templates, and analytics tools, to password managers, membership plugins, and more.
The problem is that most plugins require an extra subscription, and the free ones alone are not enough to do anything too amazing.
Kajabi is all-in-one so you don’t need any integrations to use it. That being said, there are 10 built-in integrations including popular services such as Google Analytics, Drip, ConvertKit, Aweber, MailChimp, and Clickfunnels. Kajabi also has an integration for Zapier which opens up customer integrations with 1,000s of non-native third-party apps.
Customer Support
Kajabi takes customer support seriously.
Users get access to 24/7 live chat support and email support.
There is also Kajabi University, an online library of educational resources with articles and how-to guides about aspects of running an online course business.
Kajabi’s developers also give in-person training sessions and live webinar events. Kajabi has managed to build a devoted following so there is a good community to reach out to.
Wix does not have live chat support but their English phone services are active 24/7.
Wix also allows service requests via a support ticket system. You take a ticket and the team tries to match you with a relevant expert. Customer support works well enough for the most part, but sometimes the phone lines can get tied up.
Given that Wix is one of the most popular web-building platforms in the world, it has cultivated a massive community. Topics on the Wix community boards get tens of thousands of views so you are almost guaranteed to find what you are looking for.
Final Word: Kajabi or Wix?
When it comes to a platform for creating, marketing and selling online courses, Kajabi is superior. The reason why is that Kajabi is literally built for selling courses.
You can make a course website using Wix, but it would take a lot of time, effort, and software workarounds. Kajabi makes building and selling courses simple and straightforward.
The simplicity hides a system with a lot of complexity too. So between Kajabi and Wix, our bid goes to Kajabi.
