Kajabi Review (2024) – The Best Software for Selling Online Courses?

by | Jan 3, 2024 | Software Reviews | 90 comments

Kajabi Review Summary

kajabi online courses

Hey there. Welcome to this in-depth Kajabi review, where we’ll take a deep dive into a popular “all-in-one” app made for experts, coaches, thought leaders, to be able to easily sell online courses, coaching, and communities.

If you’re looking for the best “one stop shop” software to sell online courses, look no further. 

If you’re here and reading this, it’s likely because you’re trying to answer this question: “Should I use Kajabi?”

The quickest, most straight-forward answer I can give you is most likely “YES,” because it’s pretty mind-blowing how much functionality is built into this one platform. Seriously. It’s pretty nuts.

However, in order to fully answer this question you have in your mind about Kajabi being a good fit or not, I need some more space to answer that, because there’s some variables involved.

And a quick head’s up: I’m a big fan of providing seriously in-depth resources for people like you, so this Kajabi review 2023 is on the longer end of the spectrum. 

The upside for you is that I can save you about 37.4 hours of Googling and testing that you’d otherwise need to do to get this information. So that’s kind of cool, eh? 

For the majority of people I’ve helped over the past 14 years (hundreds of people like you and me who want to sell knowledge and help people with it), Kajabi is an ideal solution.

It makes it easy breezy to construct the tech platform you need to monetize your hard earned knowledge.

Now, because I like this app and because this is a Kajabi review, you’re probably wondering if I use affiliate links. Let me answer that briefly so we can get on with the review.

Here’s the deal: Clarity Lab is reader supported, and that support comes from clicking on things (which doesn’t cost you anything…yay!) So, the links in this post are indeed affiliate links, which means that if you click on a link to go check out the app, and if you eventually sign up for a paid account, I make a small commission.

But here’s the cool part about my links: they have a built in layer of amazing, free help and bonuses for you: if you sign up for a free trial of Kajabi via any of the links in this review, like this one, you can get an extended 30-day free trial (which is twice as long as the free trial you can get on their website) PLUS a 90-minute one-on-one Kajabi session with me, for free.

Lots of free help for you on your path and small commissions for me. That’s what makes Clarity Lab “reader supported.” It’s a win-win for us both.

Okay. We good? 

Here’s a quick overview of the pros and cons of this software:

Kajabi Review Highlights
Kajabi all-in-one software

Name: Kajabi

Description: Kajabi is an easy-to-use, all-in-one website platform that allows you to build a business selling online courses, communities, and coaching. It gives you a website, blog, podcast, email marketing features, artificial intelligence writing assistance, payment checkout pages, online course area, live video streaming for teaching and meetings, member community area, quizzes, and affiliate marketing features...all in one app.

Offer price: $129

Operating System: Cloud, SaaS, Web

Application Category: BusinessApplication

Author: Forest Linden

  • Ease-of-use
  • Online Course Features
  • Built-in Community Space
  • Ease of Learning The App
  • Customer Support
  • Website Design Tools
  • Pre-designed Themes
  • Email Marketing Features
  • Blogging Features
  • Dedicated Mobile App
  • Pricing
Overall
4.9

Pros

  • Extremely easy-to-use.
  • Almost everything you need in one platform.
  • No webhost needed.
  • Video streaming for blog posts, lessons, webinars, and one-on-one meetings is built in.
  • No worrying about keeping plugins up-to-date.
  • Cheaper than duct-taping 12 separate apps to a Wordpress site.
  • Have your own private social network and community space.
  • Email marketing platform is right inside of Kajabi.
  • Artificial Intelligence writing assistant right in the app.
  • Your members get a dedicated mobile app.
  • Affiliate marketing tools are built right in.
  • Code-free website appearance editor is powerful.

Cons

  • Blogging features could be fleshed out more.
  • I’d love to see a full suite of tools to make SEO work on a Kajabi site easier.
  • There isn’t a set of features to handle customer support communication.
  • There’s no “import site content from Wordpress” feature yet.

Since this review is on the longer side, here’s an easy-to-use table of contents for you:

What is Kajabi?

Kajabi is a web-based, “all-in-one” software that gives you the tools needed to make money from selling online courses and coaching all within one app.

With Kajabi you’d have:

  • Website building tools
  • Marketing tools
  • Blogging and podcast hosting features
  • Artificial intelligence writing assistant
  • Membership site/online course software
  • Built in video streaming and Zoom-like meeting spaces
  • Private community social area that can be sold as a stand alone product
  • Payment processing right on the site
  • Email marketing tools
  • Automated marketing funnels for list building
  • Landing page tools
  • Features to create your own affiliate program

The Bottom Line (at the top)

Before I fully dive into the Kajabi review, I’ll start with my bottom line opinion of it.

It is the absolute best all-in-one software for selling online courses. Period. I’ve been in this industry for 16 years. I’ve seen all the apps. I’ve used many of them to sell online courses. And seriously, Kajabi is the best software for selling online courses, online community offers, consulting and coaching sessions, and for all the marketing you need to do to make a business like this super profitable.

“All-in-one” apps are apps that give you all the features you need to run your entire business with ONE FREAKING APP. (Which means no more crazy tech overwhelm from having to manage a WordPress site with 32 plugins and 8 other third-party web apps duct taped to it. I’ve been there and done that. It’s not exactly fun.)

And the thing is, I’m not alone in my opinion here. Want to guess how many people use it? I don’t have an exact number, but the official count from their site is now over 50,000 people.

And those business owners combined have made more than…wait for it…$4,000,000,000. That’s more than four billion in sales that have been processed on Kajabi sites from selling information products, community spaces, and coaching. (Insane, eh? Even crazier: in a very short amount of time YOU could be earning money from selling your knowledge on this platform.)

After helping more than 500 people in one-on-one sessions who want to make money online by selling information, this is what it comes down to for everyone: if you want to do what you’re passionate about, which is most likely helping people make a positive change in their life, you do not want to mess around with a complicated tech system.

You want to do what you love doing, which I will guess isn’t feeling high levels of tech stress where you literally feel hot and want to pound your keyboard and throw your computer out the window because some part of your website system isn’t working…again.

Kajabi is by far the best solution if you’re in the camp of people who don’t enjoy getting caught up in tech tangles (and really, what other camp is there to be in?), but who also need a full featured, powerful platform to build a business around selling your knowledge or community experiences.

If you already have a great website for your marketing site, blog, list building, and content marketing efforts, and if you want to sell online courses in a separate space from your main website, it can definitely be used for this.

You can easily integrate Kajabi with WordPress, Squarespace, or any other kind of website so that you can use it to process payments for your courses, deliver your online course content, and provide a community space for your members.

Kajabi vs Teachable

However, if all you need is an app to sell online courses, and you don’t need software to create your main website, or handle your email marketing, you may want to also check out Teachable. You can catch my full Teachable review right here.

In a nutshell, Kajabi is the best option to consider if you want everything in one platform: a marketing website, blogging and podcasting tools, email marketing tools, online courses, payment processing, community spaces for members, landing pages, affiliate marketing features, and even your very own artificial intelligence assistant.

Teachable, on the other hand, is the best lower cost option if all you need is software to sell your courses and give members a place to access your content online.

This would mean you already have a marketing site, an email marketing app, and anything else currently in your tech stack, and the only thing you’re missing is the online course features.

Teachable is great for that, and although you can just use the online course features of Kajabi with, for example, an existing WordPress site, you’d be paying for a lot of features that you wouldn’t be using.

Alright, back to the topic at hand. I’ve used so many different platforms and plugins that create membership websites to sell online courses, and so far, I haven’t come across an easier-to-use, better platform than Kajabi.

Teachable, Learnworlds, Thinkific, Podia, ZippyCourses, Ruzuku, WP Courseware, LearnDash, MemberMouse…and dozens of others. Those are all of the typical options folks tend to consider for creating and selling online courses, and I can tell you that none of them comes close to how good Kajabi is in terms of giving you a full, “all-in-one” platform to sell and deliver online courses. (Again, Teachable is great if all you need is software to sell and run online courses, rather than an all-in-one platform.)

 

Why you should trust me

Let’s be honest…we don’t know each other, and you’re probably not totally sure if, or why, you should trust my opinions about software. That’s perfectly understandable, so let me address it.

For this particular review, you’re in good hands because I’ve used this software in my own business over the last 14 years.

When I first started out, I had an online course about technology for building online course platforms (I know, I know…that’s so meta), and like you, I went through a long research process, wondering what online course software would be best to use. I ended up choosing Kajabi for my courses, and I am so thankful I did.

This is just to say that I’ve had a chance to test it over multiple years with real customers in actual business environments, as opposed to me just testing it without having real customers using it.

And that? Means that I’m in a good position to give you a thorough Kajabi review…one that will hopefully help make your own research process much faster and easier than mine was.

Also, I’ve built and run three online businesses over the last 16 years, and in each case, I did all the research, testing, and assembly of the tech systems.

Each of those businesses became multi-six figure businesses. The software platforms that powered each of those businesses were the tech engines that made that kind of revenue possible.

Alright, enough about me.

Let’s dive into the review.

Get an extended 30-day free trial + a free 90-minute, one-on-one Kajabi session with me.

Step 1: Sign up for a free trial of Kajabi by clicking on this link

Step 2: You’ll get an email telling you how to schedule your free 90-minute Kajabi session with me. We can go through some Kajabi how-to things, or talk about business strategy, or do both.

Step 3: Start learning to use this software and get your new site up quickly.

The User Interface

online course software

I’ve always found Kajabi to be quite easy to use. It’s FAR easier to use than a WordPress (and WordPress plugin) based tech system.

The interface of Kajabi is uncluttered and easy to navigate, even if you’ve never used it before.

Kajabi Themes and Site Design Tools

There’s a lot to love about this software (a lot), but one of my favorite parts of the app is their website builder which allows you to create hundreds of unique layouts for your website pages, your blog, and even your emails.

The website builder in Kajabi is quite powerful. You can make a ton of custom designs yourself without having to know one line of HTML or CSS code, which is handy if you don’t know any code.

There are also about 30 pre-designed “Kajabi theme packs” and they’re quite good looking out of the box.

Here’s a look at a few of the themes:

Kajabi themes

And here’s a closer look at one of the Kajabi themes, which gives you better sense of what a page can look like when it’s built with the website builder:

The things you can do with the website builder are, to be honest, fantastic looking, and there’s actually a lot of flexibility in terms of how you can make a page look and feel without having to touch a line of code.

You can even add professional, slick looking animations that happen as you scroll down the page where bits of text, or headlines, or images, or videos slide or fade into view.

You can make Kajabi themes feel like a conservative, corporate site by having corporate, business focused images and a traditional corporate blue color palette.

Or, you can make them look like a more feminine, warm and friendly site for a yoga teaching business by using photos from that world paired with a more feminine color palette.

The “Hop on the phone with me” Purple Box Interlude

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Theme Design and Editing

Here are the things I love about the theme design and editing features built into the website builder toolset:

1. The Kajabi theme editing tools make editing the design of your site incredibly easy. You start with great looking, pre-designed themes and customize them from there.

2. I love that editing the content of areas of the homepage is a process of clicking on the element or content area and then just editing content directly in the editing area in the left sidebar.

In the screenshot below, you can see an example of this in the dotted blue box on top of the photo background. That’s a section of text on the homepage of a demo site.

To edit that chunk of text, you just click on the blue Edit button in the middle, and an editing area opens up in the left column for you to make changes that you’ll see show up in the preview of the site on the right.

The whole process feels intuitive and easy compared to the conventional design and editing process involved with a self-hosted WordPress site or many other membership website software options on the market.

3. Inside the website builder area, there are options to preview the site on different mobile sized screens and desktop/laptop screen sizes as well.

You just click on the screen size you’d like to preview the site in, and the preview area resizes to that screen size, showing you how your design and content will reorganize itself based on that particular screen size.

What all of this means is that a) all Kajabi themes are mobile responsive, and b) it’s incredibly easy to see what your site will look like on various screen sizes.

Opt-in Form Builder

The opt-in forms built into the themes look fantastic without touching any code to customize them. That’s just awesome. Seriously. Getting good looking opt in forms that are connected to your email marketing tools can be a major pain in the ass when using other options like WordPress.

They’ve done an outstanding job of making the opt-in forms easy to set up, easy to tie to your email marketing platform (which is built right into your site), and have the forms appear on pages of your website.

What this means in the end is that it’s incredibly fast and easy for you to get what you need in place to grow your email list.

The screenshot below shows what the default opt-in form looks like in the theme I chose for the demo site I built for this review. Total time to create that opt-in form? 35.4 seconds.

Downsides

There aren’t really any downsides with the opt-in forms. I tried to find some, but…there just aren’t any.

Blog post creation

To be honest, blogging in this platform is currently the weakest part of its feature set, but it’s not that bad. The blogging features just aren’t as fully fleshed out as what you’d see in a WordPress site.

But, keep in mind that WordPress started out many years ago as a blogging platform, so the WordPress community has had a long time to develop its blogging features.

With Kajabi’s blogging features, you can do everything you need to do in order to create a solid content marketing strategy using blogging as your main form of published content.

You can also do everything you need to do for search engine optimization (SEO) on Kajabi.

When I create new blog posts, like the one you’re reading, I have a checklist I go through with about 70 things that need to be done on a post to ensure that I’m doing everything I can for on-site SEO work, and you can do every one of those things (with the exception of one advanced task that has to do with schema markup) in Kajabi.

It’s just that a handful of those things are slightly easier to do when blogging on WordPress and using an SEO plugin like Yoast.

Here are the things that stand out to me with the blogging functionality:

The good

1. The blog creation/editing area is clean and super easy to use. Here’s a look at what it looks like:

2. It’s super easy to upload a video into any blog post with the built in Wistia powered video player. You can see where you can upload a video to a blog post in the screenshot above.

3. There’s an artificial intelligence writing assistant right in the text editor area that can help you quickly create the first draft of whatever post you’re working on. If you haven’t messed around with generative AI tools like this before, you’ll likely be pretty surprised at how well they can write if you learn a bit about how to prompt them. (More on this AI writing assistant in a bit.)

4. The blog looks clean and professional on the front of your site and there’s tons of options for different layouts, such as having a single column, double columns, or even triple columns of posts. Here’s a look:

The Not So Good

1. There isn’t a full media area with all the images you’ve uploaded for other pages and blog posts in the past.

If you’re familiar with using WordPress for your website and blog, this might come as a surprise to you, because in WordPress you have easy access to a Media section, where all of the images and other media, like audio files, are displayed in a large library.

That comes in handy because often you’ll want to re-use certain photos or media files in different areas of your site.

2. I would love to see this platform add in more easy-to-use SEO tools to make it easier to do SEO work while editing posts. You can get everything done that you need to get done, but it could be easier than it currently is.

Get an extended 30-day free trial + a free 90-minute, one-on-one Kajabi session with me.

Step 1: Sign up for a free trial of Kajabi by clicking on this link

Step 2: You’ll get an email telling you how to schedule your free 90-minute Kajabi session with me. We can go through some Kajabi how-to things, or talk about business strategy, or do both.

Step 3: Start learning to use this software and get your new site up quickly.

Hosting A Podcast On Kajabi

Gone are the days of getting your website all set up and then a few months later deciding that it would be a great idea to start a podcast, only…you have no idea how to host a podcast on your website, and you’re pretty sure you actually can’t do that on your current website. How do you get episodes to display properly with an mp3 player? And how do you get each episode to broadcast out to the major podcast distribution channels, like Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Stitcher?

Once again, Kajabi’s got you covered. You can host your podcasts right on your Kajabi website. You’d record and edit your shows in your office or studio and once you have an episode ready to post, the rest can be handled by Kajabi’s podcast features.

You list the episode title, description, upload the audio file, put in the episode description and an image for it, and even a transcript of the show, if you have one. Hit publish and you’re good to go. It will be sent out to all of your podcast subscribers via the various podcast networks mentioned above. (It still feels like magic to me when I publish a podcast episode and it shows up on people’s phones around the world.)

Here’s a view of what you’d see when you upload a podcast episode:

And here’s what podcast episodes look like on the front of a Kajabi site, where people can go to listen in or subscribe to your show right from a page on your site:

Online Course Features

Here’s another area where this app shines: creating a great experience for your members or students to go through your multimedia course content, and a streamlined experience for you and your team to manage the learning experience.

I know of many people, myself included, who have used Kajabi just because this part of its feature set is so good.

Creating an area for the content of your online course, or courses, is incredibly fast and easy.

Here’s a screenshot of the homepage of a demo course I built in my Kajabi site:

Below are the stand out aspects of the online course features.

1. Wistia video streaming is built right into the platform, and you get it for free. Wistia is, by far, my favorite video streaming service. I’ve been using it for multiple businesses and online courses for the last 10 years, and I’ve never had any problems with their service, ever.

Wistia video streaming, as a stand-alone service, starts at $99/mo. And that’s exactly how much my wife and I paid them, every month, for the 8 years before Kajabi integrated Wistia right into the app.

It was money well spent, but my point is that the Basic plan for Kajabi costs $119/mo. Wistia alone costs $99/mo. For $19 more, you get an ENTIRE website, online course selling platform, community features, a coaching session selling system, and Wistia is rolled in, which pretty much makes Wistia free, or it makes most of Kajabi free…however you want to look at it.

Here’s a screenshot of what the Wistia video player looks like inside an online course. (Apparently, the first lesson in my course about how to build an online technology platform has to do with…um…me taking a day off and going skiing?)

2. You can use the Wistia video player not only inside your member’s only course content, but also on your marketing/blog site (the non-member’s only area of your website.)

3. Some basic Wistia stats are built right into lesson pages so you can see viewer engagement, number of plays, and the play rate.

The image below shows the Wistia engagement stats for a video inside my wife’s online course, The Art of Money. The graph on top of the video thumbnail shows the aggregate data of how far people make it through the video and the colored bars below show individual viewers. This allows you to see how much of the video individuals watch and which sections they skip or watch multiple times.

4. You can set whether or not members can cancel their subscription by themselves or not. If you select “no” for this, people will have to contact your support team to cancel their subscription. It’s nice to have that option.

5. You can set up content drip schedules for your course modules and lesson pages so that people will get access to a given module or lesson pages on a set number of days after they join the program.

And it’s also easy to set things up where the content of your course is dripped out based on when your students complete certain lessons. So, for example, if they finish the last lesson in module 1 of your course, then the module 2 content is unlocked.

Being able to drip content out slowly can help reduce the overwhelm that some online learners feel if they see a giant curriculum with tons of modules and lessons to get through all at once when they login to your course area.

kajabi membership site demo

6. It’s easy to import a list of course members if you’re migrating from another membership site platform. You can simply import a .csv file with the names and email addresses of your members.

7. Category and lesson creation is straightforward. (You can even use the built in artificial intelligence assistant to help you create our course outline in seconds. Nuts!) You just need to create the categories first, then create lessons that go in each category.

You can even create sub-categories under the top level categories, and put lessons in the sub-categories. That makes organizing your learning materials even more flexible.

8. It’s easy to upload files to make available for download on any lesson page. When you do this, you’ll see download buttons or links created automatically for the files you uploaded. That’s awesome.

Accomplishing that with a self-hosted WordPress site using a membership site plugin takes several steps and several minutes of time per file. Not in this platform, though. It just takes a few seconds.

9. There are about a dozen different options for course area themes you can use to display your course content, and they’re all mobile responsive. (These are different themes than the Kajabi website themes I mentioned above.)

10. On your side, as a course manager, there’s a progress area where you can see how far people are making it through the modules and lessons. It’s amazing to have that information.

It can give you insight into where people are stalling in your course, or where they may need more support, or different content, to help them make it through the rest of the course.

In the image below, the individual member names on the left are blurred out, and the blue progress bars show you how much of the course each person has completed. The numbers in the right column are how many times an individual has logged in to the member area.

Kajabi online course member progress

11. If you have multiple courses, it’s incredibly easy to display a course catalog, or menu page, of all of your courses that people can buy. This is surprisingly difficult with other membership site software options on the market.

In this platform, each course will have a tile with the main image you’ve set for the course, the title of the course, and a short description.

In the screenshot below, the Featured Offers section of this Kajabi site is an example of what it looks like when you display multiple courses you’re offering for sale.

kajabi course examples

12. The Kajabi Mobile App: You have the ability to give your course members a dedicated mobile app they can download on their phone to access course content and the community area of your site. (This means they don’t have to access your course content through a mobile browser.)

The Kajabi mobile app is easy to find in the Apple app store or Android app store, and it gives people a great experience of accessing your course content or community from their mobile devices.

Downsides of the course creation features

1. There’s only one small thing about Kajabi’s course features that bothers me: you can’t turn off all the comments below lesson page content all at once. If you don’t want to have comments under your lesson pages, but you had previously turned them on, in order to turn them off you need to go into each individual lesson page and turn off the comments. It takes a while and there should be an option to turn off all comments with one click.

Get an extended 30-day free trial + a free 90-minute, one-on-one Kajabi session with me.

Step 1: Sign up for a free trial of Kajabi by clicking on this link

Step 2: You’ll get an email telling you how to schedule your free 90-minute Kajabi session with me. We can go through some Kajabi how-to things, or talk about business strategy, or do both.

Step 3: Start learning to use this software and get your new site up quickly.

Private Social Media Area and Community Space

Kajabi recently acquired a community platform called Vibely and integrated all of its features right into the Kajabi platform. This is great news for Kajabi owners because this brings a massive upgrade to the previous version of the community features inside of the platform.

What having a community platform built right into Kajabi means is that you don’t have to sign up and use an external third-party community platform like Facebook groups, Mighty Networks, or Circle. You can have all the features you need to offer your members a vibrant, fully functioning community space, right inside of your own Kajabi member’s area.

Up until they acquired Vibely and put all of its features inside of Kajabi, Circle was the best option for creating a community space for your members. But after testing out the new community platform features in Kajabi, it is just as good, if not better, than Circle…and it has the huge benefit of being right inside your site, which means that the experience of your members going from course content to the community area for a given program is seamless. (And they don’t have to login again to get to your community area.)

All of the features you’d expect a robust community platform to have are here. Members can post updates, add photos and videos, comment on other people’s posts, like posts in the community network, and more.

You can even run live video sessions and challenges, such as a 30-day challenge, for your members right inside your community space.

You have the option to create a community space as a part of an course or program offering, or, you can sell access to just the community space as its own stand alone product.

Overall, the community features of Kajabi are one of its strongest areas now, which is a big win for you if you decide to use this platform for your business.

Here’s a peek at what the community space looks like to a member on a Kajabi website:

Artificial Intelligence Writing Assistant

AI is getting a lot of press coverage and attention on social media these days. It’s everywhere it seems, and it’s even inside of Kajabi now.

Inside Kajabi is a built-in AI writing assistant that you can use to help you create written content for emails, course outlines, lesson pages, blog posts, and any page on your website.

They’re using Google’s Cloud AI Platform to accomplish this, and from my testing and use of the Kajabi AI Writing Assistant, like other good AI platforms, it creates surprisingly good written content as long as you know a bit about how to prompt it.

Kajabi has some good suggestions in their help docs about how best to prompt their AI writing assistant, and it’s worth it to take the time to learn about how best to write prompts for the AI engine.

From my experience in using AI tools, I’d say that ChatGPT4 is a tiny bit better at creating content than the Google Cloud AI Platform, but in order to use ChatGPT4 you need to pay for a subscription for it and learning to prompt it is a bit of a steeper learning curve.

Kajabi’s AI writing assistant is right there where you need it, just a click away in many parts of the app, and once you learn the basics of prompting and AI engine, you’ll be creating content for emails and lesson pages in no time. It’s insane how much AI can speed up your writing process.

Here’s a look at the AI writing assistant interface inside of Kajabi. You’ll see the prompt I wrote in the top box and some of the copy it generated for me in about 20 seconds in the box below that:

Coaching Tools

Another huge set of features built right into this platform is all of the tools you’d need to start offering coaching or consulting sessions to people in your market.

Without a doubt, the fastest way to start making money with a Kajabi site is to put up a sales page for coaching sessions and use the tools in the app that make it incredibly easy for you to create and sell individual coaching sessions, or packages of coaching sessions.

There are built in tools to allow your coaching/consulting clients to schedule sessions with you, pay for the sessions, keep notes for each session, and for you to make it easy to deliver any downloadable assets, such as pdf files, to your coaching clients.

You can even use the built-in video calls tools right inside Kajabi to meet with your coaching clients.

Honestly, the amount of things Kajabi has built into their platform is kind of mindblowing. This set of coaching tools allows you to not have to pay for and use a scheduling app like Calendly or Coaches Console, nor do you have to pay for a Zoom account to host your live video sessions with clients. It’s all built right into Kajabi, which is a huge amount of monthly subscription savings.

Here’s what the setup of a coaching package looks like to prospective coaching clients:

And here’s a view of the client area where they can see your session notes, take their own session notes, and download any files you’ve given them related to a given session:

Email Marketing Tool

Having your email marketing platform right inside of your website platform is a big plus when using an “all-in-one” solution.

It means that you don’t have to tie together, and login to, a separate stand-alone email marketing app in order to send the emails you need to send to run your business, whether it’s emails announcinging a new podcast episode, or a new newsletter, or annonucing a new module is available to the members of your online course.

Here are the things that stand out to me about the email marketing tools in Kajabi:

1. The email marketing features are amazing. You’ll find everything you need to accomplish all of the basic and advanced tactics of list building and email marketing.

You can do almost everything that the top of the line, dedicated email marketing apps, like my favorite stand-alone email marketing platform, Convert Kit, allows you to do.

You’ll find tools for creating opt-in forms for things like free offers, broadcast emails, webinar registration, and autoresponder emails.

Here’s what an autoresponder sequence looks like in the email marketing area:

kajabi autoresponder emails

In addition, there are about 45 different ways to segment your email list based on actions that people take, tags they’ve been given by your automations, things they’ve opted in for, or products they’ve purchased. The list segmenting in this app is powerful and very flexible.

Here’s a look at some of the ways you can create filters for who to send an email to when you’re in the process of creating an email:

best software for online courses

2. The email builder is AMAZING. All the tools you have for designing web pages in Kajabi exist in the email builder as well. It’s one of the most powerful email builders I’ve seen in any email marketing app anywhere. Here’s what a nice looking email designed in the email builder looks like in someone’s inbox:

email marketing in Kajabi

3. Creating an automated follow-up campaign, or series of emails, is easy and straightforward.

4. Building an opt-in form and tying it to an automated email campaign is also super easy. What that means is that creating a sign-up form for something like a free email course on your homepage is simple and quick. It takes just a few minutes.

Before I move on, it’s important to really grasp what it means to have your email marketing and list building tools integrated right in to the same software system that your marketing site is built on.

The bottom line is this: it makes your life around your tech platform greatly simplified.

When all of these things are tightly integrated within one platform, it means that it becomes incredibly easy for you to create full workflows for doing things like offering free things on your site as lead generators that grow your email list.

Creating the free offer content, like a multi-media mini course, then creating a web page, an opt-in form, a thank you page, and having emails sent out automatically when someone signs up…that whole process is WAY easier to accomplish on Kajabi than it is when you’re using WordPress, 15 plugins, and 4 different stand-alone apps that are tied to the WordPress site.

Alright, here’s a view of the web form, or opt-in form, editing area, which, like everything else in this this app, is super easy to use:

creating opt in forms with Kajabi

Kajabi Integrations

Out of the box, it integrates with these email marketing platforms:

That means that if you’re already using something like Convert Kit for your email marketing platform, and if you like it and want to keep using it, you can.

You just turn on the Convert Kit integration and paste in your API key from Convert Kit and then any opt-in forms you have on your Kajabi site will be connected to your Convert Kit account, sending folks over there so you can manage your email marketing needs from Convert Kit.

In terms of payment integrations, you can use Stripe and Paypal. Integrating either of those takes less than 5 minutes. Are you seeing the pattern here? Soooo many things are way easier and simplified when you use this Kajabi.

It also integrates with Google Analytics, Click Funnels (for landing pages), and you can add the Facebook Ad tracking pixel as well for running Facebook ads that send people to your site.

Dozens and dozens of Kajabi integrations with other apps are available by connections made through Zapier and Segment, which are services that creates connections between apps that don’t natively integrate with each other.

Pipelines: A Marketing Funnel Builder

This set of features allows you to easily build complete workflows for things like offering a free webinar to build your list, or to build out the entire workflow and content pages for a product launch.

I have to say, this is one of my favorite parts of the new Kajabi. The creation process for building out a marketing funnel workflow like this is, in every other platform, quite a task. And it’s a task that requires you to do A LOT of visualization of where in the app to create the many different pieces of content needed for list building and marketing funnels.

In every other platform I’ve ever used or tested, the marketing funnel creation process takes you into at least 5 or 6 different areas of the app you’re using. But in this software? It’s all in one place, and the set up process is entirely automated. It’s a bit mind blowing.

When you see this pipeline tool in action, you’ll likely feel as I did: “Why the hell didn’t someone create a marketing funnel creation tool like this before?”

Here’s what it looks like when I chose to create a Zoom webinar funnel. I simply clicked on that type of funnel, and this is the very next thing I see is an easy-to-understand flowchart of the marketing funnel laid out clearly down the page. From there I can edit the placeholder content:

creating marketing funnels with kajabi

And it creates an automated series of emails that go out before the webinar as reminders, and another series of emails that go out after the webinar to help sell webinar attendees whatever it was you worked so elegantly to sell them at the end of your webinar:

kajabi webinar emails

After it sets all this up for you in a matter of seconds, you just go in and edit the email copy, the copy on each page of the funnel, and the design of each landing page in the funnel. It’s insanely easy to use.

Years ago, when I used to create funnels like this in the first version of Kajabi, it would literally take me 4 hours to build a funnel like this. Now? It takes 28.7 seconds. I’m not kidding.

From now on, until I see something better out there on the interweb, this pipeline marketing funnel builder is the best, easiest way to build marketing funnels. Period.

Downsides

Nope. None. This part of of the app is amazing.

Contact Records and Management

There is a simple person record for each contact on your email list and member list inside the app. This is not a full blown customer relationship management set of features, but you can do many things you’d do in a larger CRM.

Here’s what a contact record looks like:

Person record in online course software

The page lists out a person’s name, email, what they opted in for, what they’ve purchased, emails they’ve received, and notes you can write about that person.

It’s great to have all of this in there, but if you’re looking for a full CRM suite of features, as you’d get with something like PipeDrive or Salesforce, you won’t find those features here.

Most small business owners selling online programs don’t need a full CRM, so the information you have access to in the person record for each member is perfect.

Get an extended 30-day free trial + a free 90-minute, one-on-one Kajabi session with me.

Step 1: Sign up for a free trial of Kajabi by clicking on this link

Step 2: You’ll get an email telling you how to schedule your free 90-minute Kajabi session with me. We can go through some Kajabi how-to things, or talk about business strategy, or do both.

Step 3: Start learning to use this software and get your new site up quickly.

Payment Processing

Here’s another big chunk of functionality that draws people to want to use an all-in-one app: being able to process credit card payments right on your site, and having all of that integrated into the main tech platform for your business.

Here are the stand out points of the payment processing features:

1. Kajabi integrates with Stripe and Paypal for payment processing, which is great.

I love Stripe (Paypal, not so much), but, here’s the thing: you can ONLY use Stripe and Paypal currently. That means that if you’d like to use something like Authorize.net for your payment processing, you won’t be able to do that.

2. You can set the currency for your courses to be in whatever currency you’d like. (The currency you get paid in will be set to whatever currency your bank uses.)

3. The checkout page when buying a course is really nice looking.

There’s also space on the checkout page where you can show your course graphic plus some bullet points to remind people of the main benefits they get when they sign up. You can even add a few testimonials with customer photos to the checkout page.

4. The checkout process is streamlined to reduce the percentage of people who bail on a purchase during checkout. All they see at first is just a simple step of entering their email address and credit card info.

When that’s done, they’re taken to a second page where they enter their name and create a password.

Here’s what the first page of the checkout process looks like on Kajabi:

kajabi checkout page

5. You can easily present customers with a terms and conditions page that they have to click to agree with before they finish the purchase process.

This is a nice option if you’ve ever run into problems with people not reading things like your refund or opt-out policy of your program in the past.

6. If you want to use upsells, which is when you present customers with another course or product right after they purchase something, that option is available in the checkout process. They’re called “order bumps.”

7. It’s easy to create coupon codes if you want to offer special discounts on your courses at some point.

8. After someone buys a course from you, you can send them to the course library page, listing all of the courses or products they’ve purchased from you.

They’ll see the course they just bought, plus, via a link in the main menu, they can see all the other courses you’re selling on a course catalog page.

This is a great feature that’s very challenging to replicate on other membership site platforms.

A workflow process like this can help you sell other courses because when a person buys one course, they’ll see all the other courses you offer.

From there, they can click on the ones they don’t own to learn more and purchase them.

Affiliate Marketing Features

There’s a built-in affiliate program if you have the Pro or Premium plan.

This allows you to manage your affiliate marketing program, while also giving your affiliates a dashboard where they can get their click and sales stats.

1. Here’s what your affiliates would see when they login to your dashboard to check their click and sales stats.
kajabi course examples

2. All the basics of an affiliate management program are in the affiliate program features, including your own dashboard, as an admin of the site, where you can track the clicks and conversions of your affiliates.

affiliate-stats-admin-side

3. You can create affiliate links for your affiliates, set default commissions, override the defaults and create custom commissions for individual affiliates, and send out links for affiliates to go to a page to sign up to become one of your affiliates.

4. You can send out emails to all of your affiliates from inside the app, using the same built in email marketing features you’d use to send out broadcast emails to your regular email list, but these emails will only go to your affiliates.

Downside

You can’t upload swipe copy or advertising banners for your courses into the affiliate area where your affiliates can login.

You can, however, create a page just for this purpose in the Pages section of the app, where you’d give your affiliates different sections of a page where they could download banner images or email swipe copy for them to use when telling their audience about your course.

It’s a relatively easy work around.

Kajabi Customer Support

Kajabi has always had great support. Whenever I’ve needed to contact them over the years, the support folks have always been timely, helpful, and smart. Their support team actually stands out as one of the stellar examples of how to do customer support if you own a software company.

If you have the Pro plan level and above you can get 24/7 live chat support, and I can tell you from experience, being able to get instant help when you’re in the middle of launching an online course is a life saver. I can’t tell you how many times their support folks saved my butt during launches.

Tutorials and documentation

They have a solid set of written and video tutorials that show you how to use every section of of the platform.

You shouldn’t have too much trouble learning how to use it from their tutorials, which can sometimes be an issue with apps like this.

Kajabi Pricing

The team at Kajabi changes things periodically, so make sure you get their latest pricing and an up-to-date list of which features come with which plans by clicking on the button below to check the current Kajabi pricing.

As you’re considering the cost, remember to keep this in mind: The cost of getting all the features Kajabi has in one place by using other apps is quite high. Here’s a list of other apps you’d need to pay for each month to get the full set of features that Kajabi has in one place:

  • a website builder such as Squarespace, which costs $18/mo
  • a dedicated online course platform like Teachable, which costs $99/mo
  • a landing page builder like Lead Pages, which costs $59/mo
  • an app that gives you a private social network/community discussion space, like Circle, which costs $99/mo
  • a video streaming service like Wistia, which costs $99/mo
  • a paid subscription to ChatGPT to serve as an artificial intelligence writing assistant, which costs $29/mo
  • an email marketing app like Convert Kit, which costs $29/mo
  • an app that allows you to run affiliate marketing programs, like Post Affiliate Pro, which costs $97/mo
  • a checkout cart app that connects with Stripe or Paypal so you can take payments on your site, like SamCart, which costs $49/mo
  • an app for financial reporting, key performance metrics, and customer progress tracking, like Baremetrics, which starts at $50/mo

So, let me do the math for you here. The total for all those separate apps listed above (apps that you’d need to get the same functionality that Kajabi has), is $610/mo.

And the starting cost of Kajabi? $119/mo. 

See? That kind of puts things in perspective, right? I don’t know about you, but this puts Kajabi in the “well that’s a no-brainer” category.

Kajabi Membership Site Examples

If you’re curious to see this software being used out in the wild, here’s some great examples of entrepreneurs who are using it:

Brendon Burchard. His main site is not running on it, but all of his courses are.

James WedmoreThis whole site is running on it, including his online courses.

Chalene Johnson. She’s using a similar set up as Brendon is, with her main site running on a self-hosted WordPress site, likely with a custom WordPress theme, and many of her courses are using Kajabi.

Modern Soul Society. Their whole site is running on it.

Balanced Cents. His whole site is on it. (Kind of sounds like I’m talking about a drug, like this site’s “on it.” And I’m definitely on it.)

Financial Recovery Institute. This whole site and its large online course is running on it. (This is a site I built for a client.)

Jen Rene. Her whole site about yoga is running on it.

Should I Use Kajabi?

If you don’t classify yourself as a “techy” person, and you know, without a doubt, that you don’t want to mess with any frustrating, overwhelming tech stuff, Kajabi should be at the top of your list for consideration.

If you feel like you need a highly customized, uniquely branded website, it may not be the best fit for you. But even if you have something like a custom WordPress site for your marketing site, it would still be my top choice for selling your online courses and other digital knowledge products.

Alrightee then. That’s it for this Kajabi review! If you’re still reading and made it all the way down here, holy moly! You’re amazing! I hope this has helped you in your quest to find the best solution for your tech platform. 🙂

If Kajabi sounds interesting to you, I highly recommend taking it for an extended 30-day free trial spin while also getting a 90-minute consutling session with me for free, and seeing for yourself whether or not it would work for you and your business.

Cheers!

~Forest Linden

Get an extended 30-day free trial + a free 90-minute, one-on-one Kajabi session with me.

Step 1: Sign up for a free trial of Kajabi by clicking on this link

Step 2: You’ll get an email telling you how to schedule your free 90-minute Kajabi session with me. We can go through some Kajabi how-to things, or talk about business strategy, or do both.

Step 3: Start learning to use this software and get your new site up quickly.