Update: You can get our updated, in-depth review of the New Kajabi right here.
If you’re launching any kind of online program with a membership area, and if you’re in a search for what software to use to accomplish what you want to do, you’ve most likely heard about two different options: OptimizePress and Kajabi.
There’s often a lot of confusion about the differences between the two, which makes it hard for people to decide which one to consider using, so in this post, I’d like to clear up the fog a bit in hopes of helping you make a decision with less frustration.
First, let me explain, in general terms, what OptimizePress and Kajabi do.
What does OptimizePress do?
OptimizePress is a WordPress theme that allows you to quickly and easily create opt-in pages (or squeeze pages), launch funnel pages, sales pages, and membership area pages all right within a WordPress site.
If you’re thinking about launching your online program or product using the product launch formula method, where you publish a series of free training content pieces over the course of a week or two, and then open up your program for registration or make your product available for sale, OptimizePress is a popular option.
It gives you dozens of predesigned page templates with various layouts for the pages that you’ll need in order to set up your launch sequence.
That means you don’t need to hire someone like a web designer to help you get the kind of layouts you’ll want to use for your squeeze pages, launch funnel pages, and membership area.
One big thing that OptimizePress doesn’t do is that it does not handle the creation of a password protected member’s only area of your WordPress site.
To get that functionality (if you want to have your member’s area as part of your main WordPress site), you’d need to use a WordPress plugin like Digital Access Pass or Wishlist Member.
OptimizePress has page templates, or page layouts, for the membership area pages you’ll create with something like Digital Access Pass, but they are essentially just templates applied to the pages needed for your member’s area.
You’ll still need something like DAP or Wishlist Member to protect the pages of your members area though.
OptimizePress also integrates with your email marketing platform, like Aweber or Mailchimp, so that when you need to create an opt in form (or sign up form) for your launch funnel, you can create the web form in your email marketing app and then drop the HTML code for the form into OptimizePress.
It will then style the form and fit it right into a squeeze page that you build with an OptimizePress page template.
Now, OptimizePress does a lot of other things that are important, but in general, what I just described is the majority of what it does.
What does Kajabi do?
Kajabi has many similar features to OptimizePress, but it’s not a WordPress theme. It’s a separate, hosted web application, which means it’s a totally separate website than your main website, and as a result, it doesn’t require you to use WordPress.
Like OptimizePress, it allows you to easily create the pages and functionality you’d need to do a product launch sequence (such as squeeze pages and launch funnel pages.)
However, there’s one big difference between OptimizePress and Kajabi: Kajabi has a whole other set of built in features that allow you to easily create a membership site where the content of your online program is delivered (such as videos, audio recordings, articles, and downloadable files.)
So, when comparing OptimizePress with Kajabi, it’s not really an apples to apples comparison.
Part of their feature sets are very similar (the part that allows you to create a product launch funnel), but there’s another half to what Kajabi does that OptimizePress doesn’t do (membership site creation and management.)
With that said, I’ll run through the pros and cons of both OptimizePress and Kajabi, at least in my opinion.
OptimizePress Pros and Cons
Pros:
1) OptimizePress is less expensive than kajabi, at least for the squeeze pages, launch funnel pages, and sales page parts of your system. OptimizePress is a one time payment (currently $97), whereas Kajabi has a recurring monthly fee (currently $103/mo, $311/mo, or $799/mo, if you pay for a year at at time, and depending on what plan you choose.)
2) If you want to keep everything on WordPress, which you might want to do if you or people on your team know WordPress better than Kajabi, then OptimizePress allows you to do that, since it’s a WordPress theme.
3) You’d have much more flexibility to hire someone to do custom workflows and create custom code for your launch pages if you find that OptimizePress can’t do some things that you’d like it to do (which won’t be the case for most people) because OptimizePress is just a WordPress theme.
That means that you’d have full access to its code, as well as the code of WordPress, should you need to hire someone to customize something.
Kajabi doesn’t allow much access to the code that runs their platform, so if you want to do any kind of custom workflows, like having people added to Infusionsoft with multiple tags AND have them added to an Aweber email list at the same time when they opt in (or sign up for something you’re offering for free), you wouldn’t be able to do that because you won’t have access to the code in the Kajabi platform. But you shouldn’t need to do that kind of custom work until your business and list gets pretty big.
4) OptimizePress has a big selection of pre-designed graphics, such as add to cart buttons, arrows, or special box styles that can be used to highlight specific text on a page.
Those graphics can be quickly and easily added to any pages you create with OptimizePress, and they can really make your squeeze, launch, and sales pages look great…without having to hire a graphic designer. (Kajabi has a pretty good selection of similar graphics, but the OptimizePress selection is bigger and better in my opinion.)
5) In OptimizePress, you can set the date and time for launch pages to be auto-published. In Kajabi, that’s currently not an option, which means that you have to publish your squeeze, launch, and sales pages manually.
That’s not a huge downside, but some people like to be able to set up their whole launch funnel to be automated, in terms of when each part of it are published.
Cons:
1) In order to create a password protected member’s area on your wordpress site, you need to integrate OptimizePress with a WordPress plugin like Digital Access Pass or Wishlist Member. Optimizepress has layouts for membership pages, but it doesn’t handle payment processing or protection of your paid content on a WordPress site.
2) There’s no integrated video/media hosting and delivery, as there is with Kajabi, which has a built in content delivery network (Amazon’s Cloudfront content delivery network) that allows you to upload your videos and mp3 audio files, then embed them on launch funnel pages or your membership area pages inside your program.
This means you’ll need to use a separate service to host and stream your video and audio content, such as Youtube, Wistia, Vimeo, or Amazon S3 and Easy Video Suite.
With Kajabi, if you select a plan that has the content delivery network included, that functionality is built in.
3) Because OptimizePress is a WordPress theme, when you install it, it takes over the look and feel of your whole site. That means that if you want to keep the look and feel of your main site (which is probably using another theme) and still use OptimizePress, you’d need to install another copy of WordPress in a subdirectory on your server (or a subdomain), and then install OptimizePress and your membership area software (like Digital Access Pass) in that site that’s in the subdirectory or subdomain.
This isn’t that big of a deal, but it’s important to keep in mind, because if you install OptimizePress on your current, main WordPress site and you set it as the active theme, it’s going to change how your entire site looks.
4) You can’t easily customize the look and feel of the OptimizePress theme without editing its code, or hiring someone to do that for you.
It does allow you to do basic customizations, such uploading header or logo images that will appear at the top of pages you create with it, but for the most part, the pages you create with OptimizePress are going to look different than your main site’s look and feel, meaning, your main site’s theme.
This is also true of Kajabi’s launch funnel pages though, which are going to look different than your main site.
Kajabi Pros and Cons
Pros:
1) Squeeze pages and launch funnel pages are integrated with the member’s area. No need to install and learn another app to get your membership area created. This also means that the workflow around people buying your program and getting access to your membership area is tightly integrated within the same app…which is a good thing.
2) Kajabi has an integrated discussion forum inside the member’s portal. To get a discussion forum with WordPress, Optimize Press and either Digital Access Pass or Wishlist Member, you’d need to install a forum plugin for WordPress, like BBpress.
3) Kajabi integrates well with Infusionsoft and Aweber, which is important if you’re using either of those apps for your email marketing, or, in the case of Infusionsoft, for your email marketing, CRM, ecommerce, and affiliate tracking.
4) With Kajabi, there is very little work needed to create a membership site. You essentially pick a theme, change some colors or margins or fonts, upload your logo or header images, add your program’s content, set up permission levels, and you’re done.
5) The theme customization tool is great. It’s an entire panel of adjustments you can make to the CSS code that styles your membership area and funnel pages…but you don’t have to touch any code.
6) A content delivery network (Amazon’s Cloudfront CDN) is built in to Kajabi if you sign up for the plan that includes this feature.
7) Creating launch funnels and membership sites for new products or programs that you want to have separate from each other is easy with Kajabi. It just take a few clicks to create a new “project” inside of Kajabi and once you do, you can start setting up a new launch funnel and membership area.
8) There are a number of squeeze page theme options you can choose in Kajabi that use a full page picture background and a simple opt in box in the middle of the page.
These types of squeeze pages have been winning all of the split tests I’ve heard being done on different types of squeeze pages. You can’t create these kinds of squeeze pages with OptimizePress currently.
9) Kajabi comes with a pretty extensive library of marketing training videos from some big internet marketers. They call this Kajabi University, and there’s a lot of good content in there.
10) Kajabi’s customer support team is amazing. Having 24/7 live chat support really comes in handy, particularly when you need help right in the middle of a launch on a weekend. I always feel like an app is only as good as it’s customer support, because if you’ve got a great app but poor or no customer support, you’ll run into big problems eventually. With Kajabi, the app is great and the support is great.
I haven’t heard of any bad reports of OptimizePress support, and I suspect that the support they give is great, but they don’t have 24/7 live chat, as Kajabi does.
Cons:
1) Kajabi is more expensive than OptimizePress. At the time that I’m writing this post, OptimizePress costs $97, and that’s a one time payment. Kajabi’s available plans are $103/mo, $311/mo, or $799/mo.
2) There’s not a lot of access to customize the style of the squeeze pages, launch funnel pages, or membership area pages beyond what you can do with their theme editor. Their theme editor is actually really amazing. You can adjust many things about a theme without touching any code. I wish every WordPress theme had the same kind of editing interface. However, if you want to enter in custom CSS to fix certain things that may be off in some browsers, you’re limited in terms of how much custom css you can put in.
3) There’s little access to create custom code/workflows if needed. Again, you may not ever need that. I don’t for my business, but some bigger businesses do.
4) Currently, they don’t support mobile devices, so your Kajabi squeeze pages and launch pages could be messed up in mobile devices, or at least not displayed using responsive CSS, which is what resizes and reorganizes websites in mobile browsers so they are displayed well on tiny screens.
5) You can’t hide text and buttons until a certain time has elapsed after a sales page loads.
This is often desired by marketers who want to hide the add to cart or buy now buttons, as well as any sales copy, that appears below a sales video, until a certain amount of time has elapsed after the sales page has loaded in the prospect’s browser.
The theory behind this tactic is that if you show the sales copy and buy now buttons (and the price) before prospects are engaged in the sales video, you can lose a lot of customers because they’ll see the price of your program but wouldn’t have understood the full context of the price, such as all the deliverables, benefits, and bonuses that they would get if they sign up for your program.
If that happens, you can lose a lot of customers because they’re making a buying decision based almost entirely on the price alone.
In Kajabi, you can only hide the add to cart buttons so that they appear at a given point after the sales page has loaded. You can’t, however, also hide the sales copy that appears below the sales video.
With OptimizePress, you can have custom work done by a programmer that would allow you to hide both the add to cart buttons and the sales copy until a certain amount of time has elapsed after the sales page loads for a given prospect.
6) With Kajabi, you currently can only set up automatic content dripping for online programs that you have set to “evergreen mode”, which means that your program is always available.
You can’t set up a content drip schedule if you’re doing a timed launch where your program opens for registration and closes for registration in a short period of time.
A content drip schedule means you set content to be released to a specific group of members on a date and time that you set, such as publishing one learning module every week on a specific date and time.
All of this means that if you do want to release your content over time, and if you’re Kajabi project is not in evergreen mode, doing that can be a bit of a tedious process if you have a lot of lessons.
It involves manually setting the correct permissions for your content categories, sub categories, each individual content post, and each forum category that you may have set up for each module so that the correct group of people in your member’s portal get access to the newly released content.
6) People aren’t notified via email of replies to comments in launch funnel threads when using the built in Kajabi comments.
This may seem like a small thing, but when you’re doing a product launch, with multiple pieces of free content being published over a week or two, people often like to have comments beneath each piece of prelaunch content so that you can have a conversation with your prospects during your prelaunch phase.
With Kajabi’s comment system, people who leave comments on your launch funnel pages are not notified via email when you respond, which means the only way they’ll find out if you responded is if they go back to your funnel page where they left a comment and go hunting for their comment on the many pages of comments you might have.
Most people won’t do that, so the end result of prospects not getting an email notification of your replies to their comments is that you can’t really have a conversation with people.
This is unfortunate, particularly when folks ask you questions in the comments and you take the time to answer them.
7) Similarly, in the member’s portal (or membership area) of Kajabi, by default, members aren’t notified of comment replies that you or your team post on individual post pages.
Those pages are where you post the individual lessons that make up your online program, and again, it’s common to turn on the commenting feature for post pages so that people can ask questions about a specific lesson.
People can turn on the email notifications for comment replies in their profile settings, but they are not enabled by default.
This creates situations where your paying members think you’re not responding to their questions, which can make them upset.
You can instruct people to enable the email notification settings in the welcome email they get right after joining your program, but still, some people will miss those instructions and not enable them.
The Bottom Line
Okay, those are the pros and cons of OptimizePress and Kajabi that I’m aware of currently. There are likely a few others, so if you use either of these, and if you’re aware of any pros or cons I’ve missed, please let me know in the comments below.
So, which one should you use for your particular business?
If you’re looking to go the less expensive route, OptimizePress is the clear winner.
You’ll need to also install and learn other plugins for WordPress to get the other features that Kajabi has, but the recommendations I gave for those plugins (Digital Access Pass, Wishlist Member, BBpress) are all either one time payments or are free (in the case of BBpress.)
You’d also need to use a separate service to host and stream your videos, but there are affordable options among the recommendations I gave above.
If you’d like to have more functionality all within one app, and if you have a bigger budget to work with, Kajabi is an awesome option.
Because it has so many features built in, it can seriously cut down on the number of problems that might otherwise arise as a result of trying to tie together 5 or 6 different apps and plugins to accomplish the same things.
I’m a big fan of Kajabi and have been using it for my own business for the last year. For me, the pros far outweigh the cons and the benefits are worth the extra cost. Plus, any company that goes overboard with their customer support, as Kajabi does, will always win a place in my heart. There’s nothing wrong with the support from OptimizePress, but having 24/7 support from Kajabi has saved my hide multiple times right in the middle of launches.
At the end of the day though, they’re both great options.
Okay, thanks much for spending some time with me today in this rather lengthy post. I hope it’s helped clear up some confusion and made it easier for you to make a decision about what software to use for launching an online program or product!
This information is incorrect: Optimizepress comes with its own membership software (Optimizemember) based on a white label version of S2. You do not have to purchase and integrate Wishlist or DAP to create a membership site in Optimizepress.
Wow! Awsum article!!! Thanks so much. Have used both over the years – love Optimize Press – but/and having to bring all the mechanisms together and the hackability of WP eventually drove me away from it. If I had stayed with Kajabi several years ago when they started I’d be in a good place – so now re-upping – and very much appreciate this review – many great points. A biggie is them not being responsive / and the forum communication – so hoping those will come about in Kajabi Next. Thanks again!!! 🙂
…and if a person can’t do everything technical themselves – $100 / month is not a lot of money in the long run if you start making income at what you’re doing. DAP took more skill than I had and I was also in Wishlist for a long time and it took more skill than I had on my own… so it’s also about weighing the values based on personal skill base…
Thanks much for the kind words, Cary! I’m looking forward to seeing Kajabi Next myself. They haven’t upgraded Kajabi at all in a couple years, so I’m curious to see the next version of it to see what it can do.
Thanks for stopping by and sharing your experiences with us!
Hope all is well with you,
~Forest
Hi this is kinda of off topic but I was wanting to know if blogs use WYSIWYG editors or if you have to manually code with HTML.
I’m starting a blog soon but have no coding know-how so I wanted to get guidance from someone with
experience. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Hi Manie,
every blog software I’ve seen for the last 5 or 10 years uses WYSIWYG editors, and there’s a nice one that comes with WordPress. If you want a little better one, install the Tiny MCE Advanced plugin in wordpress. That’s what I use 🙂
Hope this helps!
Cheers,
Forest
I really like your blog.. very nice colors & theme. Did you make this website yourself or did
you hire someone to do it for you? Plz reply as I’m looking to create my own blog and would like to know where u got this from.
thanks a lot
That is very interesting, You’re a very skilled blogger.
I’ve joined your rss feed and sit up for in the hunt for more of your wonderful
post. Additionally, I have shared your site in my social networks
Awesome explanations!
Thank you so much!
Just wanted to pipe up that with OP2 and Digital Access Pass, and Vimeo you now have something immensely more powerful then Kajabi for a fraction of the cost. DAP is pretty much integrating with everything now a days including Ontraport, Infusionsoft, third party mailing systems, PayPal, CB, and even CCBill (for the aspiring adult models).
Downsides of this set up, can’t use DAP on the wordpress specific hosting but I have never seen the benefits to those platforms and DAP has a learning curve but the DAP people walk you through the entire set up.
Awesome! Thanks for adding that info to the conversation here.
Totally agree about OP2 + DAP, but would personally go with Wistia over Vimeo.
Can you say more about not being able to use DAP on wordpress specific hosts? Are you referring to hosts like WordPress Engine or Synthesis? Curious what the limitation is around that, as I’ve not heard about that before.
Thanks again!
I kinda agree on Wistia versus vimeo. I use Wistia for the sales page and Vimeo for the course materials. As much as I like Wistia its to expensive (for me) to do all the course work. The best value I get is the analytics off the sales page, hence Wistia for that.
Yes I am speaking about WP Engine. Not sure about Synthesis as I have never looked at them. It has to do a lot with the access the host gives you. DAP is actually an application that sits at the root of your domain and a plugin that connects to it in your wordpress control panel. The way WP-Engine set up their hosting, you can’t install the DAP application. Plus there is issues with the Cron Job, etc. Just doesn’t work. The way DAP works is the very reason you can use it on Non-WP sites as well.
Here is where DAP talks about it: http://www.digitalaccesspass.com/doc/dap-certified-web-hosts/
To me its not a big deal. I never understood the point of a WP specific host. It’s not a heavy application like Magento so IMO it doesn’t need specialized hosting. I am running my sites through a vmware cloud shared hosting and its fantastic, for half the price plus I can install Drupal, Magento and anything else on it. Or for $60 a month you can get a full managed VPS from Liquidweb and have the freedom you need.
I personally have a reseller account so each site gets its own segregated Cpanel, using Litespeed instead of Apache, all the things you need for a fast site.
Thanks much for this, Chris.
I remember now about the brunt of DAP being installed on the root, outside of the WP directory. Forgot about that.
Pressable has a similar wonky thing they do with their managed WP hosting set up that would probably prevent using DAP for the same reason on their servers.
Thanks again for bringing this little snag to my attention.
Cheers!
Forest
Hi, thank you for your post. At the advice of a business coach, I am changing my site to OP, but aside from the templates, which I don’t like anyway, what is the advantage of using OP over WP, being that OP is templates?
Can I not use all of the same plugins in WP and save my we designer the headache of writing lots of code to fight against the OP templates?
What is the advantage of OP?
Hi Lyz,
just to clear things up a bit: you don’t use Optimize Press instead of WordPress. You use both together. WordPress is the content management system that powers your site. Optimize Press is a big plugin that adds a ton of features and functionality to your WordPress site.
You don’t need to use OptimizePress’ themes for your whole site. You can just use them for optin pages, launch funnel pages, sales pages, and your member’s area pages.
For the rest of your site, you can use any other premium wordpress theme, or your own custom one.
The advantage to using OP is that it makes creating optin pages, launch funnel pages, sales pages, and styling your member’s are WAY more simple than creating all those things from scratch.
Hope this helps a bit!
Cheers,
Forest
Hi there! I just wanted to ask if you ever have any
issues with hackers? My last blog (wordpress) was hacked and I
ended up losing many months of hard work due to no backup.
Do you have any methods to prevent hackers?
Forest, do you know if Kajabi has any kind of integration with Amazon for order fulfillment? Specifically, if I published a book and it was available for sale on Amazon, how could I set up Kajabi so that when a customer signs up for the paid course, Amazon ships them a free copy of my book (like, as a premium)?
Hi Chris,
there is no integration between Kajabi and Amazon, but that’s not where you’d need the integration to happen anyway.
Kajabi just handles the membership area and squeeze pages/launch funnel pages/sales pages.
You need to tie Kajabi to an app that handles the ecommerce, like Infusionsoft or Ontraport.
You’d need to look for a solution in either Infusionsoft’s market place, where there are loads of third party plugins for infusionsoft, or chat with Ontraport folks to see if there a way to set up the automatic fulfillment the way you want.
You might be able to set it up with Infusionsoft without any plugins, now that I think about it a little more.
There’s an option to send a fulfillment report via email when purchases happen in Infusionsoft, so if you can get an email address to send fulfillment orders to Amazon, that might be all you need.
I’d chat with Infusionsoft sales folks about that and see what’s possible.
Hope this helps a bit 🙂
Cheerio,
Forest
Hi Forest, again thanks for a very helpful post, moving me towards Kajabi over wordpress etc. I hope you may help with answers to 1-2 questions that may be obvious to you not me:
1)would you envisage the whole new website would be hosted on Kajabi? We (are moving from webplus so planning a totally new site) or just the membership / funnel etc parts? – I’d rather have it all in one place if that works well
2) What is 1 Kajabi project? I’m not clear how the 20 limit links to web pages etc
3)We currently use http://www.pure360.co.uk email (nearly free for us) it includes an HTML editor so I guess we just put Kajabi code in? are we missing functionality by not using an integrated email solution?
4)We currently have the main company data on Access with lots of customisations. I guess some sort of weekly batch synch may work to keep people details / course paid for etc updated (I know there is a lot more to explore here, this is the first round on this)
5) you wrote this 13 months ago, surely Kajabi have plugged some of the gaps you mention in the article?
6) Am I right you potentially offer 1:1 guidance / help with e.g. a Kajabi project?
Many thanks again for the article.
Hey Tim,
glad to be of some help to you in these posts and replies.
Your list of questions leads to many variables and tangential conversations that would need to be had in order to address them all completely, and it would take some time to get into all of them. This level of detail and conversation is much more efficient for everyone involved if done live on the phone or via a skype call.
I offer paid consulting where I help folks with the kinds of decisions you’re facing, and if you’re interested, you can learn more about that on this page: http://techhusband.com/consulting/
If you’re interested in doing a paid session with me, just fill out the form on that page above and I’ll get back to you.
Cheers!
~Forest
GREAT insight! Thank you so much!
Great post Forest!I’m currently evaluating Kajabi, so this is very helpful.
Question – Since Kajabi includes video hosting why are you also using Wistia?
Hey Bruce,
glad you enjoyed this post on Kajabi 🙂
I use Wistia because their video player and streaming is much better than Amazon S3, which is what kajabi uses to stream their video and audio files.
I’ve found the kajabi video player to be a bit clunky. It can get hung up for some people too, which creates more support tickets and wasted time.
Wistia nails the playback for folks with all different internet connection speeds, and I rarely get support tickets from people saying they can’t get a wistia video to play.
Also, when you use Wistia, you get a ton of valuable user engagement stats. You can see how far into each video people are watching and which segments are getting watched multiple times. That data is super valuable for both marketing videos and content videos inside a program.
Lastly, if you choose the lowest level of Kajabi plans and then pay for a $99/mo Wistia account, you’ll be paying the same you’d be paying for the Kajabi plan that includes media hosting/streaming, but you’d be getting a much better video streaming service 🙂
Hope that helps explain things!
Thanks for the fantastic post and all the detailed discussion, not to mention the spreadsheet comparison example. This has been very helpful.
You bet, Justus.
Glad to be of some help to you.
Cheerio,
Forest 🙂
Hi
Kajabi uploads your video to amazon s3. so if a user logged into kajabi based membership portal copy pastes the video link to a non member buddy, the video could be watchable as well as downloadable by him. I really dont see the value in this kajabi video content feature. You could just as well create your s3 amazon account , upload videos and put their link in your membership website. I am speaking from experience.
Nice review.
Thanks much, Adnan.
I agree with you, and that’s why I don’t use the plan level of Kajabi that includes the S3 CDN service. Well, that’s one reason…the other is that I like using Wistia to stream my videos. It’s a much better streaming service compared to anything that uses S3, at least in my opinion.
Hope all is well with you, and thanks for stopping by 🙂
Cheerio,
Forest
Hi,
I’ve been doing about 2 months on research on both platforms, and in the light of the new features of OP 2.0, I’m getting OP. That being said, 24/7 chat support is great and should be a massive pro to people not that into WordPress. (some people actually manage to hate it, don’t know why, but anyways)
Also, big people use one and big people use the other. Since I’m working on my first online program and quite know and like how WordPress works after almost two years blogging in it, OP for me and my wife, who is starting her own business.
If I wasn’t around to drive the technicalities of WP out of her way though, I would recommend her Kajabi.
But now I have a question: About video hosting, I know there is not a single 100% secure hosting which is completely protected from piracy, but is there an affordable service that is more secure than youtube or vimeo? Because plugins for downloading a copy of a video hosted in either are very popular.
Should I look for a more secure option, or change my strategy taking the possibility of piracy into account?
Hugs from Brazil,
–JV
Hi Johnny,
my own particular opinion about securing streaming videos in a membership area is that I don’t worry about it.
I use Wistia for all of my video streaming, including my marketing videos and my content videos inside of membership areas.
Videos streamed over Wistia are served over a secure connection, but I tend not to worry about people stealing my videos.
Even if a plug-in doesn’t exist for a given video streaming service, you can always buy a $99 copy of Screenflow and record any video that shows on your screen. So there’s no real way to totally protect your video content.
A better approach, in my opinion is to make the content so unique that no one could steal it, such as having you in each video for certain segments, or having a watermark in the lower right or lower left of each video that cannot be easily edited out.
Hope that helps a bit!
~Forest
Well, first of all, thanks for the help, surely clarified a point, but I think I didn’t express well what kind of piracy I’m talking about.
I will already appear most of the time for most videos, that was part of the plan since day 1. In adition, Brazil’s market, specially in my niche, is quite small so I’m sure that people stealing my content for marketing purposes (selling it as if they were making it or if I made it for them) is quite unlikely. I’m not bothering with $99 Screenflow pirates.
The thing is, youtube is not only free to pirate, but also extremely easy. Even Chrome has 3rd party youtube download plugins on it’s store, that’s how much they don’t care about it. My worry is that, using YT, Vimeo or any popular streaming service, anyone can download my content and host it somewhere else, maybe to drive traffic to his blogspot, driving away sales to try to make some cents off of adsense. That’s the guys I’m worring about.
My strategy for now will be to host the pre-launch videos on YT to leverage my 900+ subs and get even more attention to them, and use a less popular service for the actual course content, saving some money for wistia on last case scenario.
Thank you anyway. Awesome work.
Just a quick note:
OptimizePress Cons #3:
“3) Because OptimizePress is a WordPress theme, when you install it, it takes over the look and feel of your whole site. That means that if you want to keep the look and feel of your main site (which is probably using another theme) and still use OptimizePress, you’d need to install another copy of WordPress in a subdirectory on your server (or a subdomain), and then install OptimizePress and your membership area software (like Digital Access Pass) in that site that’s in the subdirectory or subdomain.”
– There are two versions OptimizePress, OptimizePress 1.0 is only available as a theme but OptimizePress 2.0 can be installed either as a plug-in or as a theme. In case you want to use another theme for your site, you can just install OP 2.0 as a plugin and still be able to use its features. 🙂
Thanks much for this, Anne!
I’ve got Optimize Press 2.0 installed on a test site, but haven’t had time to take it for a spin yet…so I didn’t know that it can be installed as a plugin now. That’s fantastic!
All the best to you,
~Forest
Optimizepress is certainly the better one.
Forest, I really appreciate your insights.
On the WP option, there are additional costs be considered:
Premium theme: $ 69 / yr
Fast cloud based hosting (beyond the cheap shared server): $ 20-30/mo
Video converting and hosting: ¿?
Backup plugin (a realiable one, not free): $ 80/yr
Opportunity costs, derived from the time spent on the learning curve and maintenance (upgrading plugins, backing up, solving troubles…)
Extra help from the geeks, when troubled
I think there is a trend to integrate forums to the content or even to courses. Kajabi seems to have it well solved as a pushbutton.
I will love to read a review for three big players: Kajabi, Optimize Press 2.0 and Premise 2.5 (from the guys of copyblogger), considering the ease of integration to forums.
Regards, I read you from México
Pedro G.
Thanks much for stopping by and adding your thoughts to the conversation, Pedro. Indeed, there are other costs to consider, as you mentioned. All in all, you can easily reach $500 to $600 per month for all the software expenses needed to run an online business that sells information products.
You don’t need to spend that much, but it’s not hard to get to that level if you choose certain software solutions.
At any rate, thanks again for stopping by.
All the best,
Forest
thanks Forest, awesome detail. I am struggling with this decision, as I love the new OP and want to use a more robust forum solution live Vbulletin. However, creating three-way functionality between Infusionsoft, Vbulletin and OptomizePress is a bear.
Great Post! I appreciate the insight.
However, I think I’ll stick with Optimize Press (for now). I much prefer the flexibility of being able to customize my site and keep things under one umbrella. Plus, another recurring monthly fee just isn’t worth it IMHO.
I spent a good part of my day researching both platforms. From what I gather, Kajabi is a membership service in a box. It’s the fastest way to start a membership site for non-technical people. Which is fine, but that’s also why they charge such a high premium. They realize most people just starting out would rather not have to deal with the nuances of setting up and running a website.
The downside to this limited flexibility is when someone pays for your membership and are sent to a “______.kajabi.com” website; you run the risk of losing some brand consistency.
In fact, each time you use an outside service not controlled by your brand, it raises the question “What is ____(service)___?”
I say this as a customer, and not as operator, since that what happened when I first discovered Kajabi.
That being said, OP is not all that difficult to set up and allows for more customization. I prefer to keep my branding consistent throughout (as much as possible).
Another thing I noticed is that Kajabi doesn’t even run off SSL. For the monthly premium, SSL should be included I think.
Again, if you are an absolute beginner, and have no knowledge on setting up WordPress, installing themes, or plugins, Kajabi may very well be the best setup for you. Then again, if one can afford to dish out $99/month or more for a done-for-you setup like Kajabi, I’d prefer to upgrade my hosting plan, invest in some better website security, and hire someone from Odesk to tweak OP to my specifications.
Just saying… ~$1200+/year can take you far on a personal setup.
In regards to the discussion on Ontraport or Infusionsoft, I’m not really familiar with either. However, what I can say is that JV Zoo works well for managing affiliates, and it keep things ULTRA simple; and Aweber works just fine for emails.
In a complicated Internet Marketing world, I think the simpler you can keep things, the better. However, the operating costs of running your online business shouldn’t be ignored.
Although Kajabi is appealing, and appears to work great out-of-the-box, I think they are a bit overpriced.
Personally, I think people should try Optimize Press and Wishlist Member first before committing to Kajabi’s monthly fee.
This holds true especially for beginners who are new to internet marketing and don’t have a way to drive a substantial amount of traffic to their site to cover the cost.
On the other hand, if you’ve got little technical knowledge and money to burn, Kajabi is your friend, because those flaming dollars will also buy you traffic.
I do have a question though… You mentioned that you cannot protect your site without an external plugin like Wishlist; is this entirely true?
I only ask because I have setup membership sites using nothing but OP and WP and had no issues restricting content. It’s not until now that I’ve started to investigate Wishlist Member for a larger product launch.
-Bri
Great points, Brianna. Thanks for adding them to the discussion here 🙂
In the old version of OP, it didn’t have any membership area create capabilities, so you needed something like wishlist member or digital access pass to create password protected areas of your site that are accessible only to paying members.
You can create simple password protected pages with wordpress by itself, with no plugins, but that wouldn’t allow you to provide paid access only, nor do any kind of automated content dripping.
With the new OptimizePress, it does have membership area protection built in, so my comment in this post isn’t accurate anymore, in light of the recent release of OP 2.0.
Hope this helps a bit, and again, thanks much for your comments 🙂
~Forest
Hi Forest,
Great article! I am using Kajabi and Getresponse for my salesfunnel but i am wondering. How do you track affiliates the enter your Kajabi squeez page. Do you have a hidden customfield or something. How do you know which email addresses are from your affiliate partner. I can t figger it out. Thanx
Hey Bart,
thanks much for your kind words about this post on OptimizePress and Kajabi.
In order to track affiliate sales, you’ll need to be using an app that either has affiliate tracking built in, like Ontraport or Infusionsoft, or you’ll need to use a stand alone affiliate tracking system like Post Affiliate Pro or idevaffiliate.
You’d need to check with post affiliate pro and idevaffiliate to see if they can integrate with both kajabi and whatever you’re using to process your payments, but there’s a good chance either of those would work fine, if you’re not keen on switching from get response to Ontraport or Infusionsoft for your email marketing (and your ecommerce, CRM, and affiliate tracking.)
Affiliate tracking software sets a cookie in prospect’s browsers that “tags” them to an affiliate. If they come back later and buy a product, the cookie is in place and sends a message to your affiliate tracking software that credits the sale to the affiliate. That’s how you know which affiliates made sales.
Hope that helps a bit!
Cheers,
Forest
So now that OptimizePress 2.0 has just arrived – how does it stack with Kajabi?? Seems like they have really upped their game and all for the same $97 one off fee – bargain?
Hey Sarah,
yes, now that OP 2.0 has been released, this changes the comparison a bit between Kajabi and OptimizePress.
I haven’t had a chance to check out the new OptimizePress yet, but I’m looking forward to testing it.
Given the list of features it now has, it’s directly competing with Kajabi’s feature set…now that you can create a protected membership area on your wordpress site with it.
Infusionsoft, Kajabi, and WordPress for your public marketing site is still going to be a lot more powerful and flexible than WordPress, OptimizePress, something like Aweber for email marketing, and an authorize.net account + paypal for processing payments. But…the former combination is much more expensive. If you can get similar functionality with WordPress + OP + Aweber + authnet/paypal, it may be a great less expensive option for building similar functionality.
Hope this helps a bit 🙂
Cheers,
~Forest
Forest, awesome content here. On the one hand I wish your post had been here a few years ago when I started my research on this industry – “luckily” I haven’t pulled the trigger until now so can still benefit from you. This post is a Godsend for those of us just beginning.
The one remaining question I have has to do with something mentioned earlier in the comments, the rumor that Kajabi keeps your content if you switch platforms. I first heard this a few years back in a training video (from Pagan or Johnson or Kern, I can’t remember) and it has been my major objection to choosing them. Has your research into changing systems revealed anything about this?
Thanks again!
Hey Matthew,
glad that some posts on my site are helping you out on the path! Thanks much for your kind words.
As far as Kajabi keeping your content if you switch platforms, I’ve never heard of that actually happening, though I have heard that rumor before.
I can confirm that that is just a rumor. I chatted with Kajabi support just now and they said that’s completely false. If you cancel your account they delete all the content in your account and they don’t keep a copy of it anywhere.
Hope this helps!
Cheers,
Forest
Thanks. After I posted I was doing comparisons and almost immediately ran across yet another page, kajabialternatives.com, which cited that rumor. It appears to be a sleazy marketing page for FusionHQ but who knows. Thanks for the reply, cheers!
Really appreciate your thorough and informative article.As a recovering technophobe, I love anything that simplifies the technological end of Internet marketing.
You’re welcome, Terry! Glad this post helped you a bit on your journey with technology 🙂
Best wishes,
~Forest
i am new to marketing online and just signed on with infusionsoft. i however just saw ontraports feature set and was very impressed. i see that you have used infusionsoft previously and are leaning toward moving to ontraport. i do see IS and ontraport look very similar in features, however ontraport looks more reasonably priced. i am also hoping that optimizepress 2.0 will be a viable solution for a wordpress theme for me to use as i really liked the demo shown that is supposed to be released this month. can you share what you like better about ontraport compared to infusionsoft, as i am only just beginning and want to make best choice before i dive all the way in. thanks for your time.
Hi Heath,
Infusionsoft and Ontraport are similarly priced, in terms of their monthly fee, but the big difference is that with Ontraport, you don’t have to pay a $2,000 required training fee.
The big things that stand out as better about ontraport have to do with the ability to embed a My Account section on my site for customers to handle their own billing information changes, and the fact that you can also embed your affiliate center on your own site as well. With IS, you have no way to give customers an option to update their own billing information securely, so it has to be done over the phone, which is a pain.
Also, with the IS affiliate center, it’s a hosted IS page, and isn’t on your site, which means it’s not your branding…it’s INfusionsoft’s branding.
I also like the option of being able to create a membership area on my wordpress site with Ontraport…more things in one place is always better.
Those are the things that are on the top of my mind around this. There’s a few other smaller things that I can’t remember at the moment.
I’d definitely recommend getting on the phone with the Ontraport folks and see if you can get a live tour of it from them.
Hope this helps a bit!
Cheers,
Forest
Thanks so much for the feedback. While purchasing infusionsoft I took the plunge and purchased customerhub for the membership site side of things but I am reconsidering going with the new optimizepress that is coming out this month as I just am not too impressed with the aesthetics of what customerhub brings . What do you think of doing that? Would that be a promising duo in your opinion? I also was looking at imember360 as well. Trying to figure out how to release all my content in the most strategic way. Thanks Forest!
Hey Heath,
you’re welcome for the feedback. We use CustomerHub for my wife’s business and have for years. It’s okay, but not my favorite app for creating a membership area.
OptimizePress can be used in conjunction with CustomerHub, as they do different things. OP doesn’t create the protected member’s area where your course content would be delivered. It’s just for squeeze pages, sales pages, launch funnel pages, and for styling the member’s area of a wordpress site if you’re using digital access pass or wishlist member to create a membership are of your wordpress site.
The one thing I do like about customerhub as opposed to kajabi is that customerhub has a My Account area where your customers can update their own billing info and even make a payment if they owe you one. Very nice. Can’t do that on Kajabi (if you’re using infusionsoft and kajabi), which creates a lot of support issues and phone calls when people need to update their billing info (you have to manually update their info that they give you over the phone. Pain in the butt.)
I’ve heard of a few folks using imember360, but haven’t heard much about it, nor have I used it. Sorry that I can’t say anything about that.
Hope this helps a bit!
Cheers,
Forest
Thanks Forest for your response. Look forward to finding out what OP looks like on your mobile device.
Hi Sue,
I took a look at my optimize press site on my ipad and iphone and they look fine. It’s not a responsive theme, meaning that the elements of the site don’t get automatically reorganized to create a layout that works better on smaller screens, but other than that, the site looks fine…like any normal website in a browser on a small screen.
Hope this helps a bit!
Cheers,
Forest
Thanks for this great info Forest. Do you have any inside knowledge on the look of optimizepress on mobile/tablet devices? I have heard the theme doesn’t fit the devices all that well – but can’t find any info on the internet. I have also heard an update of optimizepress is coming soon – sometime after June 2013 – do you have any information on that eg pricing. As I haven’t purchased optimizepress yet, I can’t contact their support to get further information.
Hi Sue,
I actually haven’t checked optimizepress on mobile devices, so I can’t say anything about that. I’ve got a demo site set up with some OP pages though, so I’ll check it on my iphone and ipad and see what things look like and will get back to you.
It’s been rumored to be ready for an update for many months now, but I haven’t seen the update yet, so I’m not sure exactly when it will be coming out. Not sure what the price will be when it comes out, but I suspect it won’t be much different than it is, unless there are a ton os new large features for it.
Sorry I can’t be of more help around that. I’ll let you know what OP looks like on mobile devices as soon as I get a chance to take a look.
All the best,
Forest
thanks very much – will check out wistia 🙂
THAT was an awesome read. Thank you so much. One of the very few lengthy posts I have actually read from top to bottom, word for word.
Thanks much for the kind words, Rob. It’s always a risk doing long posts like this, but I’m glad to hear that you got some good benefits from it.
Hope all is well,
~Forest 🙂
Thanks for the article – can I ask you why you host on wistia vs the integrated content delivery? just doing the kajabi free trial and deciding what to do
Hi Fay,
I use the Wistia player instead of the built in Kajabi player because I enjoy having the engagement stats that Wistia provides, which gives me a lot of data on each video that I play in my Kajabi site. This comes in handy particularly for the marketing videos inside of the product launch funnels, but is also really nice to be able to see for the tutorial lessons that are part of my program.
This data allows me to see which videos are getting watched the most, and which parts of which videos are most popular, or where in particular videos I am losing people.
Also, I find that the Wistia video player does a better job at making sure that the videos play properly for everyone around the world know no matter what their Internet connection speed is.
I’ve seen the Kajabi player have trouble sometimes, so I have always just stuck with Wistia.
Hope this helps 🙂
Cheers…
Forest
Forest, great article. Looking to do a membership site and it seems as if Kajabi is easier. Do you know if Kajabi allows you to create affiliate programs? In other words, can the squeeze page URL be modified to include an affiliate code?
Hey Steven,
thanks for the kind words about this post 🙂
Yes, you can run affiliate tracking with Kajabi squeeze pages and launch funnel pages, but Kajabi doesn’t handle the affiliate tracking, so you don’t need to be able to manually modify the kajabi urls.
Whatever system you’re using to track affiliate sales will simply ask you for the url of your kajabi squeeze page, in this case, so you’d just paste in whatever your url is for that page, and the affiliate tracking software will set a cookie in the browser of visitors who come to that squeeze page.
In other words, Kajabi doesn’t handle affiliate tracking. You’d need to use other software for that, like Infusionsoft or Synergyx or Post Affiliate Pro.
I’d add Office AutoPilot/Ontraport to that list, but they currently can’t track affiliate traffic through Kajabi squeeze pages, so they’re not a good option for integrating with kajabi right now if you’re going to do affiliate marketing.
Hope this helps, and good luck on your work around building your membership site!
~Forest
Very helpful thank you! You definitely helped me to make my choice.
You bet, Rebekka 🙂
I’m glad I read through all the comments because you bring up something in your last comment that interests me very much!
I’ve been using WP for about three years with a homeschooling website, so I’m very familiar with it. I use Headway for my theme, by the way.
I’m going to be launching a life coaching site in the next few months and, unlike my homeschooling website, it will be for the purpose of making some serious money. I’ve been taking an online course from Daniel Levis, which has answered so many questions for me. For instance, I’ve heard about “squeeze pages” for years, but never even knew what they were, never mind how to set one up!
Daniel went over OptimizePress and Kajabi. He also recommends Infusionsoft. However, he certainly left out some details (he can’t cover everything after all!) For instance, I didn’t know that OptimizePress would change your WP theme if you didn’t set it up not to.
All that being said, your mentioning that you’re thinking of moving to OAP/Wordpress/OptimizePress intrigues me! I’d prefer something starting out of the gate that I won’t have to change for a long time, if ever. It sounds more streamlined (for me) to go the OAP/WP/OP route. I’d be interested what you think of that for someone starting out launching a site that will be offering information content as well as selling services. I’m not that concerned presently with the functionality of a member site, though I’m not ruling that out for the future.
Would love to know more, as well as what you decide. I’m so glad I stumbled on this post!
Hi Anne,
I think that starting off with OAP/WP/OP would be a solid choice…just as solid as Infusionsoft/Kajabi/WP.
You’ll have everything you need to sell information products, whether you deliver them as downloadable files or within the pages of a membership area on your WP site.
What I’d recommend you do is to start a spreadsheet of all the features you think you’ll need for your upcoming life coaching site, and think ahead to what you might be offering in a year or two from now.
Then, check the feature list of OAP/Ontraport and OptimizePress to see if everything will be covered between those two pieces of software and WordPress.
Make another couple columns for the features of OAP/Ontraport and OptimizePress on your spreadsheet to accomplish that.
If everything looks good, I’d set up a tour of OAP/Ontraport with one of their sales people and check things out first hand…and ask them any questions you might have after going through all the feature comparisons.
Hope this helps a bit!
p.s. I may not make a final decision around migrating to OAP and OptimizePress for another month or two, so I can’t give you an answer on my own decision just yet, but I will say that I’m definitely leaning towards OAP/Ontraport 🙂
Thanks so much for the reply, Forest. I will get to work on that with my tech person (my 28-year old daughter!)
And once again, thanks for posting this valuable information. It’s really something critical that I needed at this juncture.
Thank you very much for sharing your spreadsheet ! It helps a lot !
I may try to have a look into OAP before deciding.
Have a nice day and regards from The Canary Islands, Spain 😉
Thanks so much for this post. Very useful! I’m still doubting though about which one to choose… I’ll have to read your article again 😉
You’re welcome, Anne! Good luck with the decision process. I know it can be challenging. One thing that I do when trying to decide between two apps that have a lot of similar features is to create a big spreadsheet of all the pros and cons of each choice. I know it sounds simple, but it helps me decide when there are so many variables to consider.
Hope this helps,
~Forest
Thanks, Forest! It does!
Just a last question, to complicate a bit more the decision 😉
What do you think about Office Autopilot? Is it an option for you?
Thanks again!
Hi Anne 🙂
Funny you should ask that. I’m actually starting a decision process around migrating from Infusionsoft to OAP right now.
Want to see the spreadsheet I’ve started to help me with the decision? Have a peek: https://www.evernote.com/shard/s42/sh/da08095a-25a9-4657-a1f7-e1066fc85a2e/a61cb1d4f2472ed115acf71e3100ed2c
I’ve been with Infusionsoft for a long time, so migrating to OAP is not a small decision for me, but there are many things about OAP that are pretty appealing. I’ve started to highlight those things in the above spreadsheet.
I haven’t had a chance to get a tour of OAP from one of their sales reps, though I’ve cruised around in a friend’s OAP app to check it out and it looks really powerful.
If it can address some of the annoyances I have with Infusionsof/Kajabi, I may be switching in the next few months.
If I do that, after I’ve had a chance to set up my OAP system, I’d create an in-depth post comparing Infusionsoft with Office Auto Pilot.
We’ll see how things go.
For you, I think it would be worth it to check out OAP and set up a session to get a tour from one of their sales people. I’ve heard that the folks over there are great.
Cheers!
~Forest
I am interested in the decision you made. Right now I am deciding between OAP w/ WordPress, Optimize Press, and Buddy Press or OAP w/ Kajabi. Thoughts?
By the way this is a great post
Hi Charles 🙂
Well, the one thing that would have me leaning towards OPA w/wordpress, OP, and BuddyPress is that OAP’s affiliate tracking doesn’t currently work with Kajabi squeeze pages, meaning, if you have affiliates and use the OAP/Ontraport affiliate tracking links, they won’t track leads and sales on Kajabi pages. I’ve spoken with them about this, as it’s kind of a deal breaker for many people, and they said there’s a challenge for them in getting their affiliate tracking system to work on kajabi funnel pages. And they said they didn’t know when this would be solved.
I do know of one big internet marketing guru who’s using Ontraport/OAP and Kajabi though: Brendon Burchard. Only, he’s not using the launch funnel or squeeze pages of kajabi. He’s just using kajabi for the member’s portal for the actual program content delivery.
For the squeeze pages and launch funnel pages, I believe he’s using Ontraport/OAP hosted pages, which allows him to use the OAP affiliate tracking system without a problem.
I’m actually considering switching my whole system over from Infusionsof/Kajabi to OAP/Wordpress/Optimize Press, so that’s a fine option to go in my opinion, at least as far as I can see from my current view, having not put OAP through real world testing yet.
Hope this helps a bit 🙂
Thank you so much, Forest. I am researching which to go with.
I love the pros of Kajabi but the cons are pretty disappointing. I hope they fix those soon.
To clarify, is Kajabi the only one of the two you compared and others mentioned in comments that protects the paid videos/materials? How unsecure/accessible to non-paying members are they on OP?
Someone mentioned struggling with set up on Kajabi. I know it is hard to say how hard something actually … but for someone who can do blogspot or basic WP (which i find so hard), how hard would you guess Kajabi to be?
Thanks again!
Hi Janel,
you’re quite welcome 🙂
Between Kajabi and OptimizePress, yes, Kajabi is the only one that will give you a way to easily create a protected member’s area with your program’s content in it.
OptimizePress doesn’t protect any content on your WordPress site, but it does work with WordPress plugins like Digital Access Pass or Wishlist Member, both of which are designed to create membership areas right on your wordpress site.
The way that OP works with those plugins is by giving you page templates and widget templates to style the member’s area that you create with those plugins. But by itself, OP doesn’t protect any content on your wordpress site.
As far as how secure your content will be if you create a membership area with Digital Access Pass or Wishlist Member, it will be just as secure as a kajabi membership site, so I wouldn’t worry about that.
In terms of how hard Kajabi is to set up, I’d say it’s a little harder than doing basic things with WordPress, but not that much harder than setting up OptimizePress.
The Kajabi workflow is pretty easy to understand and use, but depending on what ecommerce and email marketing platform you use, the process of integrating Kajabi with whatever you’re using for those things can be a little challenging to wrap your head around, but their documentation and instructions are pretty clear, so if you just go step by step through them, you should be fine. And if you get stuck, they have 24/7 live chat support, and as I mentioned in this post, their support team folks are great to work with.
Hope this helps a bit 🙂
Cheers,
Forest
Great info Forest…. I am starting on project on Kajabi and find it a bit difficult to set up a whole funnel setup. Im going to look on youtube and see if I find my answers. Great post by the way.
Thanks, Carlos! Glad you enjoyed the post. Hope you get past the set up challenges with Kajabi with ease. And lean on their live chat support…they’ll really help you out. Great folks on their support team. 🙂
Hi there and thanks for your article. How do you feel Kajabi would work with Clickbank as the processor for a membership site as well as webinars series sales?
Thanks so much!
George
Hi George,
I haven’t used Clickbank myself so I can’t speak from personal experience with it, but I know that many people use Clickbank with Kajabi.
As far as selling webinars with Clickbank, you can certainly do that, but you would need to make sure that whatever webinar platform you’re using can integrate with Clickbank to process payments and have the webinar access set up automatically, which is something that the Evergreen Business System can do, for example.
Hope this helps a bit!
Thanks for stopping by.
~Forest
Hi this is an awesome post! I am creating a membership site and have been evaluating CustomerHub for membership videos which is part of Infusionsoft. Do you know about CustomerHub? Apparently they don’t have forums apparently built in, which are useful.
I heard that once your videos are with kajabi they “control” them… is that true? So if you wanted to take your business elsewhere, they would keep your content.
Thanks in advance–look forward to any general thoughts on this topic.
Best
Hi Guy,
yes, I know Customer Hub. My wife and I use it for the membership area of her business and have been doing so for the last couple of years.
It’s true that they do not have forums built into their platform.
The only way to get forums is to integrate Tender App with Customer Hub and set up a forum in Tender.
The integration between Tender and Customer Hub works well, but that also means that your discussion area will not be in the Customer Hub site.
People will be going over to your Tender site in order to enter the forum.
As far as the videos on Kajabi, they don’t control them once you upload them there, and they don’t keep your content if you decide to cancel your account and set up your member’s area on another platform. At least I’ve never heard of them doing that.
There is only one thing that I like about customer hub better than Kajabi: in customer hub members have a My Account area where they can manage their billing information and even make payments if they are past due.
It comes in handy all the time to allow people to update or change their credit card information when they need to, and also to have them make a payment that is past due because of a failed payment that happened resulting from their credit card information changing.
When that happens in your membership site with Kajabi, if you’re using Infusionsoft with Kajabi, there is no easy way for customers to change their billing information themselves and make a payment.
I have strong hopes that the Kajabi team will integrate this “My Account” type of functionality into their platform soon because it adds a lot of work when someone needs to change their billing information (without a secure webpage for people to go to and enter in new credit card information themselves, the only route that people actually trust is to do it over the phone, with you manually updating their credit card information and running through a payment for them on your side, which adds a good deal of work for you.)
Hope this helps 🙂
Forest
Thanks for the detailed reply!
I already am happy with a membership site based on Membergate – but need to add a doorway page (basically membergate is a CMS who’s standard front page is a customized view into your content) – I really like the page designs and graphics supplied by OptimizePress and have many other sites running WordPress where I could use the theme, but for this site with my Membergate membership I just want a well designed html page adn this domain does not run WP (rather not install if I can help it) . Wonder does OP generate standard html that I could extract and use as a stand-alone html page or does it tie too closely into WP?
Jeff
Hi Jeff,
OptimizePress doesn’t generate standard HTML in the way that your hoping that it does. It’s very tightly integrated with WordPress in terms of its functionality. Sorry that I don’t have an answer that you were probably hoping for.
Hope all is well with you 🙂
Forest
Delaying content to be displayed is appalling simple. Just use this code snippet:
jQuery(document).ready(function() {
setTimeout(function(){jQuery(“.delaycontentbox”).show()}, 10000);
});
THE STUFF YOU WANT TO BE DELAYED GOES IN HERE!
Delay value is in milliseconds.
Crap, the code got stripped out so my comment doesn’t make sense.
Look at this screenshot: http://screencast.com/t/vbPj5CC1Y
Forest,
I have a question. Of ALL the membership platforms with you are familiar, which are best capable of allowing a customer to buy multiple products of time? Specifically, if I sell a customer Course A, which has its own discrete membership area, can the same customer return a few months later and buy Course E (also with its own discrete member area)?
It doesn’t matter to me whether they get a new login or that the content is added under their initial login. I just want them to have access to both courses even though they signed up/paid at different times.
Thanks,
Doc
Hi Doc,
As far as I know, out of all the membership site platforms that I’m familiar with, they all allow you to do what you’re describing.
With Kajabi though, depending on what plan you choose, you’ll have a limit on the number of separate projects, or online member’s portals, that you can create. Also, they will get new login information when they sign up for Course B or C or D.
Hope this helps a bit.
Cheers 🙂
Forest
Wow Forest. This is awesome. Thanks again for over delivering on such excellent content!
Matt
You bet, Matt! Glad you enjoyed this post 🙂 Cheers!
Forest,
Great comprehensive post comparing the two products. Optimize Press 2.0 is coming soon (I hear) and an update to this article after it ships would be great.
Keep up the excellent posts.
Thanks,
Walt
Thanks Walt! And thank you for all your help in the Tech Genius Facebook group!
I’ll be sure to update this post once OP 2.0 comes out and I’ve had a chance to check it out.
All the best,
Forest
What a great post. Total keeper. Thanks for putting this together. You rock.
Thanks much, Justin! Hope all is well with you…
Forest…awesome blog post! Super thorough and filled with amazing content, as usual. Thanks!!
I am a big fan of Kajabi and most of that is due to the look and feel of the membership portal. It looks so professional and classy and is easy to use for members. I have not done that many online programs but ones I have done in non-Kajabi have not been user-friendly in my opinion. They do not look like a quality product (I haven’t seen all of them of course!). Also the Kajabi support is second to none. I think I get my money’s worth every month just by the support they provide. I also love to have an all-in-one system rather than all these bits and pieces to fit together.
Thanks for sharing this, Tora. I agree with you about the look and feel of the kajabi member’s portal. It’s super fast to set up and it looks really good right out of the box.
I also agree with you about the support…actually, I think I should add that as a pro of Kajabi. Having 24/7 live support available is great, and the folks that are on the live chat support line are awesome (as is the American based support team in California.)
Cheers!
I was so happy when I discovered OptimizePress! I have a real issue with someone charging on ongoing fee for a software program. I think it’s a bit greedy. I like to buy it outright with no ongoing fees. I love OptimizePress and having Wishlist separately doesn’t bother me. Having said that, I am just starting off in my business. When it gets bigger I may well look at Kajabi again, as I do want to mostly focus on online video programs.
Hi Forest,
I can tell that Kanjabi is the ideal way to go, and my budget isn’t there yet…how tough will it be to convert from Optimize (or other wordpress theme) to Kanjabi once I’m ready?
Hi Robin,
converting from OptimizePress and some kind of membership site plugin for wordpress over to Kajabi would be a manual migration process. To be honest, migrating a large amount of content and a member list with ecommerce transactions tied to them is not a fun process. I’ve done migrations like this before.
But as long as you can plan ahead for migrating, it can totally be done. Just plan on it taking two to three weeks to get your new system set up and move all your content and users over to the new system. How long it takes to migrate really depends on how many members you have and how much content you have in your program.
It may not take more than a week or two if you don’t have much to move over.
But starting with OptimizePress and something like Digital Access Pass is a great way to go when your budget doesn’t allow for the all in one type of apps like Kajabi. And you could be fine for many years using that set up. There’s nothing wrong with that at all.
Hope this helps a bit 🙂
Forest
Now THAT was thorough & comprehensive! I was leaning Kajabi & will stick w/ that decision. Thanks for a great post. Gonna tweet it. (…and I’m gonna go read it again)
You’re welcome! Glad you enjoyed the post!
Hi Forest,
This was an awesome read, I actually first found Kajabi through this page. It’s here that I collected a ton of information for my article. Can you give me your honest opinion on it?
http://www.warriorforum.com/warrior-forum-classified-ads/834971-kajabi-can-you-really-make-money-kajabi.html