Thinkific vs Kajabi – Which One to Choose For The Best Value

When you’re looking to launch your first course, or you’re already an experienced course creator but you’re looking for a platform to host or transfer your courses to, you’re probably going to do a lot of research before you decide which option works best for you.

That’s why I’ve decided to do a thorough comparison of Thinkific vs Kajabi, two of the more popular online course platforms so you can have an in-depth look into the differences between these two platforms, their pros and cons, their plans, pricing, and so on.

Both of these platforms are great in their own way, and will allow you to create, market, and sell online courses and digital products to your audiences. However, while they are used for similar purposes, they do differ from one another in a few major ways.

Therefore, in order to make the right decision for your online business, you’ll need to familiarize yourself with all of the features, tools, and benefits that they offer and that’s what we’re here to help you with!

Before we begin, if you’re not quite familiar with these two platforms, here’s a quick overview of each of them.

Thinkific Vs Kajabi: What do they do?

Thinkific and Kajabi are both cloud-based platforms where you can create, market, and sell courses and membership sites.

Both platforms are designed to help you deliver online courses and digital products to your students, build your brand, build your website, grow your business, and everything else in between, without having to rely on any tech knowledge.

In comparison to other popular online course platforms like Udemy and Skillshare, Thinkific and Kajabi let you retain complete control over your courses. You can set your own course policies surrounding refunds, pricing, managing student data, and everything else.

Although there are a lot of similarities between these two platforms, there are some major differences that we’ll discuss in depth below, so you can figure out which platform works best for your needs.

While there are many differences between these two platforms, some matter more than others, so we’ll start with those ones and finish off with some of the ones that you may have a preference for, but won’t be a deal-breaker in deciding which platform to go with.

Pro and Cons of Thinkific and Kajabi

To help you make the right choice for your business, let’s take a look at the main benefits and features of these platforms, category by category, starting with their plans and pricing.

But first, a quick overview of their main pros and cons.

Thinkific Pros and Cons

Pros

• Free plan available
• Less expensive (paid plans start at $39/month)
• Easy to use builder, very intuitive
• Unlimited courses on all paid plans
• Better quiz answering options
• Live or interactive classroom experience
• Comprehensive training tools and guides
• The ability to sell courses in bulk
• Course-completion certificates
• Can sell your courses on Shopify

Cons

• Limited marketing options
• No live chat support for their free plan – only email support
• No 24/7 support
• Need integrations to automate your email marketing
• No mobile app

Kajabi Pros and Cons

Pros

• All-in-one business platform with an array of marketing and selling tools
• Advanced email marketing and automation features
• 24/7 customer support
• Live chat support
• An Android/iOS app available
• Kajabi University with resources on everything you need for your digital business

Cons

• No free plan available, 14-day free trial only
• A bit on the expensive side
• On Kajabi’s cheapest plan ($119/month) you can only sell 3 courses/digital products
• Third-party payment gateway integration required to sell in Shopify stores

Now that we’ve covered the main pros and cons of both platforms, let’s get into a more detailed comparison of their plans, features, and everything else.

Thinkific vs Kajabi: Main Features

Let’s take a look at the main features offered by these platforms and how they compare.

Course Creation

Both platforms offer all the standard course creation features including:

• Built-in Content Creation Tools
• Full Video & Content Hosting
• Coupons
• Course Bundles
• Affiliate Management Tools
• Downloadable Content
• Retain Ownership Over Your Content
• Import Existing Content
• Launch Membership Sites and more

Both Thinkific and Kajabi have intuitive course builders, that are easy to use and don’t require any technical knowledge. Thinkific offers a range of course template options you can use, and you also have the option of customizing your courses even further using HTML and CSS if you’re up for it.

With Kajabi, the whole process of creating courses is as fun and as enjoyable as Thinkific, although the main drawback users sometimes comment on is the fact that things are organized and labeled a little bit differently in Kajabi, making the platform a bit less intuitive than Thinkific.

So, while these features in Kajabi are more customizable, they also come with a steeper learning curve, which is why those who are looking for an easier and faster way to create their online courses might prefer going with Thinkific.

However, if you value personalizing your courses and don’t mind the fact that their course-building process isn’t as user-friendly as Thinkific’s is, then Kajabi will be a good choice for you.

Thinkific’s course builder is a bit limited in terms of visual design especially in comparison with Kajabi’s course builder which allows you to easily choose themes that differentiate how elements are visually organized on the screen, you can easily control the placement of images, text, and other elements, edit image-sizes and more.

While it doesn’t offer as much versatility in course creation as Kajabi does, with Thinkific you have more features that can be used for creating lessons, such as presentations and student feedback.

Building and Designing Your Website

To make sure your courses sell, you’ll need to create a website where people can find everything there is to know about you, your content, and the digital/physical products you’re selling. Your website needs to be easy to navigate and visually appealing so you can attract more potential customers and grow your business.

Both Thinkific and Kajabi offer users a chance to create beautiful websites, using their easy-to-use builder that allows you to build out a website around your courses or other digital product. Using their drag-and-drop builder, you can completely customize your pages and create a unique look for your website, without doing any coding or having to hire a web designer.

You can simply use their website builders to design and create your website from scratch, offering a lot of design flexibility so you can create the website you’ve envisioned for your business.

While their website builders function similarly, Kajabi’s builder offers more advanced options and customizations so it might be a better option for those of you who are looking to create a professional-looking site. If your priority is to have the best design for your website and courses, Kajabi might be the better option for you.

Themes and Templates

Using pre-designed themes and templates, you can easily build the courses you’ve envisioned, along with your website, membership site, and more. When you have access to different templates that are ready to go, building your online courses is easier than you’ve envisioned.

With Thinkific, you have three different themes to choose from that are available in your theme library. You can change the style of your theme in the settings, along with the colors, images, fonts, and so on.

With Kajabi, you have a larger selection of available themes, 12 to be exact. They are suitable for different types of products, online courses, webinars, membership sites, and more.

Same as with Thinkific, Kajabi allows you to customize the available themes, by changing the style to fit what you’ve envisioned for your business to look like.

Reporting and Analytics

To be able to understand your customers and their needs better you need to know what they like and don’t like about your content, as well as how they interact and engage with it. This will let you know what aspects of your online course business need improvement and help you identify your customers’ preferences.

Reporting and analytics are therefore essential to your business.

With Thinkific, you can get advanced reporting options so you can track your revenue, orders, student engagement, and so on. Using the tools offered by Thinkific, you can get better insight into your customers’ activity and get to know your audience better. This will help improve your marketing strategy so you can boost your sales.

In addition to Google Analytics, Thinkific provides a few other useful integrations that can be used for tracking and analytics, including Facebook Pixel, Mixpanel, Segment, Sumo, and Wizebank Analytics.

With Kajabi, you get three built-in analytics tools you can use, including Google Analytics, Segment and Facebook Pixel.

Kajabi allows you to monitor your subscription rate, your revenue, page views, opt-ins, and provides useful and detailed reports on profitable areas, areas where you can improve and more.

Thinkific vs Kajabi: Available Plans and Pricing

When it comes to pricing, Thinkific’s plans are more affordable than Kajabi’s.

Here’s a quick overview of their plans, starting with Thinkific:

Here are the packages that are available through Kajabi, and their prices:

The main difference between these two platforms when it comes to the plans they offer is that with Thinkific you can get a free plan, whereas Kajabi just offers a 14-day trial. You can use their trial to test out the platform and see if it’s a fit for you and then make your decision about purchasing, whereas, with Thinkific, you can stay on their free plan for as long as you want, or until you feel the need to upgrade to a more comprehensive plan.

Even when you decide it’s time to upgrade, Thinkific’s basic plan is still a lot cheaper than Kajabi’s. Their basic package is priced at $39 per month (paid annually) or $49 per month (paid monthly), while Kajabi’s is priced at $119 per month (paid annually) or $149 per month (paid monthly).

Kajabi’s growth package is priced at $159 per month (paid annually) or $199 per month (paid monthly), while their Pro package is priced at $319 per month (annually) or $399 per month (monthly).

However, as you will see below when we compare their features and the tools they offer, you’ll notice that Kajabi is more advanced in that matter and offers some features that are not available through Thinkific. That’s because Kajabi is an all-in-one business platform, while Thinkific is designed primarily as a course creation platform. This helps justify their differences in pricing.

While Thinkific is more budget-friendly, considering everything that the platform offers, in the end, it will depend mainly on your needs and the needs of your online business when determining which platform suits you best.

Visual Appearance

Both Kajabi and Thinkific look great out of the box and provide themes that are modern, professional, attractive, and functional. You can use their templates to build professional landing pages, sales pages and you can even go with custom themes and templates when you want to achieve something unique.

With Thinkific, on the other hand, there isn’t a market for custom, premium themes, so if you want to build something that differentiates you and makes you unique, you will need to do custom coding on the theme you select.

Ease of Use

With Thinkific’s visual editor, you can easily build your courses from scratch using pre-made templates. Thinkific makes it easy to add all types of different content, including text, PDFs, audio, videos, surveys, assignments, quizzes, and more. Just use their drag-and-drop editor to upload all content, add your descriptions, choose different color themes, fonts, and more.

Thinkific is designed to be easy to use and quite intuitive, meaning you don’t need to be tech-savvy to be able to create great-looking courses and content.

While Kajabi also comes with an easy-to-use drag-and-drop editor that allows you to easily build everything including courses, membership sites, landing pages, sales pipelines and customize pre-designed templates to make your courses stand out without having to do any coding, Kajabi isn’t as intuitive as Thinkific, and many find that to be one of its flaws.

With Kajabi, editing your site can sometimes be a bit confusing as the platform isn’t as flexible and as easy to use as Thinkific is. The main criticism users have about Kajabi on this subject is the way some things are named, and where they are located.

That’s why once you figure all of that out it will be much easier to go on from there. Expect to spend some time figuring out where everything is located and how things work before you start creating your courses and other aspects of your business. And if you get stuck at any step of the way, you can always contact Kajabi’s chat support or check out the guides and tutorials available on their website and through their Hero University.

We won’t discourage you from using the platform just because it is not as intuitive as Thinkific is and will require a bit more time until you figure out how everything works, we would just advise you to not be afraid to ask for assistance from their support team or freelancers who offer Kajabi services so you can get the most out of the platform.

Student Experience

The experience students have when taking your courses plays an important role in the success of your online course business. Not only is it directly connected to the success of your courses by helping generate more sales, referrals, and upsells, but it also makes your courses look and feel premium and professional.

Here’s how Thinkific vs Kajabi compare when it comes to student experience.

Thinkific’s dashboard is visually appealing, clear, and easy to follow. Students can easily track their progress, keep up to date on what’s next in their course, and more. The whole learning process is improved by the option to add many content formats for students to interact and engage with, including text, images, videos, multimedia, downloadable files, quizzes, surveys, presentations, webinars, and more.

Other aspects of Thinkific that help improve the student experience include:

• Built-in certificates available through Accredible
• Reminder emails
• Free Wistia video hosting

When it comes to Kajabi, you also have the option of adding text, images, videos, quizzes, and other similar content to make your courses more engaging to your students.

The platform also offers more available themes and templates than Thinkific so you can create a better learning experience for your students by customizing and tailoring it to fit their needs best.

What’s great about Kajabi is that they have a mobile app that allows students to follow your courses on the go and track their progress through their phones. The app saves their progress and allows them to pick up from where they left off and it also comes with a “magic link” that students can use to access content without a password.

While both platforms are designed to provide a great learning experience for your students, since Thinkific is specifically designed with that aspect in mind, it does have an advantage over Kajabi in that regard.

Thinkific vs Kajabi: Student Accommodation Limit

Another important aspect that course creators should consider when choosing an online course platform is the number of students they can accommodate.

When it comes to Thinkific, it doesn’t matter which plan you choose to go with, since all 4 available plans, including the free plan, allow for an unlimited amount of students.

With Kajabi, however, that is not the case. If you go with Kajabi, the number of students you’ll be able to accommodate will depend on the type of plan you choose to go with. Their Basic plan allows for 1000 active members (students), their Growth plan can accommodate up to 10,000 and their Pro plan can accommodate 20,000.

Thinkific vs Kajabi: Other Limits

The number of students you can accommodate isn’t the only limit you’ll need to take into consideration when making the choice of Thinkific vs Kajabi.

Other aspects you should consider include:

Course Limits

When it comes to Thinkific, if you decide to go with their free package you will be limited to three courses. However, if you choose to go with one of their paid plans, you can have an unlimited number of courses, no matter which of the paid plans you choose.

With Kajabi, their Basic plan allows you to create 3 products (courses) and 3 pipelines, their Growth plan allows for 15 products and 15 pipelines and with their Pro plan you can create up to 100 products and 100 pipelines.

Website Limits

With Thinkific, you are allowed to set up as many websites as you’d like, but you’ll have to purchase a separate plan for each of them, as they do not have a master admin area where you can have access to multiple Thinkific schools in one dashboard.

With Kajabi, on the other hand, you can create multiple websites (3 to be exact) under their Pro plan only, but their other plans are limited to one website.

Admin Users Limits

On Thinkific, site admins have full admin privileges that are similar to those of the site owner. They are allowed to manage students and courses, and have all the permissions as the site owner, aside from being able to transfer account ownership and set up payment integration.

On Thinkific, you can assign 2 site admins if you’re on their Pro plan and 5 site admins if you’re using their Premier plan. Simply assign them their role in the user roles section by checking off-site admin and you can allow them to have all the site admin privileges over your courses, sites, and content.

When it comes to course admins, the Pro plan allows for 5 course admins/authors, whereas the Premier plan allows for 50.

With Kajabi, you can have only one admin user on their Basic plan, 10 admin users on their Growth plan, and 25 on their Pro plan.

Marketing and Selling

Both Thinkific and Kajabi are specifically designed for marketing and selling purposes. Therefore, both platforms offer a range of tools and features that you can implement to achieve your marketing goals.

When it comes to Thinkific, most of these marketing features can be found under the market and sell section, although they are dispersed throughout other sections as well.

Here’s what Thinkific offers when it comes to marketing and selling:

• Coupons. With Thinkific’s paid plans, you have the option of offering coupons to your students that they can use when purchasing your courses.
• Affiliates. Use this feature to incentivize your students or fellow marketers to sell your courses, bundles and membership programs to prospective learners by paying them commission for every course or digital product sold.
• Sales Widget. Use this feature to direct your users straight to a landing or checkout page by placing a sales widget onto your website.
• Customize your website. In the design your site section, you can find all the tools you need to customize your sign up and checkout page so you can have a more visually appealing site and boost your conversion rates.
• Offer a free trial. Thinkific allows you to offer your students a free trial as part of your courses, which your learners can use to get more familiar with what you offer and then be able to purchase your course if they like your content.
• Create bundles. You can create bundles of related courses and sell them as one single product for a single price. This way you can offer some discount for your content and sell more courses.

While Thinkific offers a wide range or tools and features specifically designed for marketing purposes, Kajabi’s features when it comes to marketing and selling are more advanced and the tools they offer are designed to help you market your courses better.

The platform offers tools that can help you maximize your ability to market your courses.

Those include:

• Automations. Streamline and simplify the whole process on the platform by creating automations which are available in almost every part of the service. Depending on your subscription plan, you can have access to basic and advanced automations. You can use these processes to automate all of your basic admin actions, so you can focus more on the creative part of your process as an edupreneur. Automations can be found in pipelines, email campaigns, events, forms, offers, posts and so on.
• Pipelines. As part of Kajabi’s available automations, pipelines are automated marketing and sales funnels used to take your potential customer through the journey of getting to know your product and becoming a paying customer. Pipelines help you automate that whole process by creating landing pages, email campaigns and offers which are completely automated and free up your time so you can focus on creating exceptional content for your students.
• Email campaigns. With Kajabi, you can easily learn how to create and send email campaigns to your list of subscribers in the form of email broadcasts or email sequences.
• Email sequences. Automate the process of sending one or more emails to your visitors and students after they’ve completed a certain action like completing a form, making a purchase and so on.
• Email broadcasts. You can use email broadcasts to send announcements and newsletters to a specified audience in your contact list by creating email campaigns.

If you place priority on marketing your courses and have the budget to go with one of Kajabi’s plans, then we recommend this option. While Thinkific offers all the standard marketing features, such as bundles, coupons, affiliate marketing and integrations with email service providers, the tools offered by Kajabi in terms of marketing and selling are not found in alternative platforms, so if this is something you value highly and wouldn’t mind paying a bit extra to get it, Kajabi is the way to go.

Sales Tracker

Both Kajabi and Thinkific allow you to track your revenue and sales through their sales tracker.

Kajabi’s sales tracker offers more advanced options and more data points that you can analyze. One advantage of Kajabi’s sales tracker over that of Thinkific is that it displays your revenue and sales data graphically and it also has a separate affiliate marketing report. While Thinkific’s sales tracker may not be as advanced and robust as Kajabi’s, it still offers complete and informative reports that you can use to track your sales and make improvements so you can boost your performance.

Affiliate Program

Both platforms offer affiliate programs that you can use to reach more learners and scale your business.

The only downside when it comes to Kajabi’s affiliate program is that it is available on the higher-paying levels only and is not a part of the basic package.

With Thinkific, on the other hand, the affiliate program is available for all tiers.

Customer Service

Both Kajabi and Thinkific offer reliable and professional customer support to help users navigate their platforms better and improve their experience.

Thinkific offers customer support via:

• Email
• Live chat support on paid plans
• Phone (Monday to Friday, from 9 am to 5 pm PST).
• Facebook community
• Tutorials designed to make the onboarding process easier
• Hour-long onboarding call to help you get started (Pro and Premier plans only)

Kajabi, on the other hand takes the lead in this category, by offering customer support via:

• Email
• 24/7 live chat for those using the Growth and the Pro plan
• Onboarding call to help you get started
• Training webinars through Kajabi University
• A community of experts on their social media platforms
• Live training to help users solve issues in real-time

FAQs

Let’s take a look at some of the most frequently asked questions about Thinkific vs Kajabi that people usually have before they decide which platform to go with.

Do Kajabi and Thinkific Offer Free Plans?

With Thinkific, you have the option of selecting their free plan from the 4 available plans that they offer. Their free plan is not limited to a period of time but is limited in the features and tools that it offers as well as the number of courses you can create. You can stay on their free plan as long as you want, and upgrade to one of their paid plans when you’re ready to scale up.

With Kajabi, you can only get a 14-day free trial, available for all three packages that they offer. This allows you to test out the platform’s features for free, but if you decide to continue using the platform you will need to subscribe to one of their paid plans.

Are Kajabi and Thinkific Expensive?

Thinkific’s lowest-priced package starts at $39 per month (paid annually) or $49 per month (paid monthly), and they also offer a free plan. In comparison, Kajabi’s cheapest plan is priced at $119 per month (paid annually) or $149 per month (paid monthly), and they do not offer a free plan. Although their basic plan is around $100 more than Thinkific’s basic plan, the fact that Kajabi is an all-in-one platform and provides more tools and features that are designed for marketing and selling purposes than Thinkific does justify its price.

Do Kajabi and Thinkific Charge Transaction Fees?

No, neither of these platforms charge transaction fees when someone purchases your course or digital product. You keep all of the money you charge for your products, aside from the processing fee of 2.9% + 30 cents collected by Stripe for each transaction.

Can I Move My Courses from Another Platform to Thinkific or Kajabi?

Whichever course creation and hosting platform you’re using now, both Thinkific and Kajabi can ensure a seamless and quick transition and migration for your courses and your students. Their support team is here to make sure all aspects are covered and everything from logins, to student progress, enrollment dates, and so on are transitioned properly onto your new online course platform.

If after reading this review, you’re still left with unanswered questions about the way Kajabi and Thinkific work, check out their FAQ sections on Kajabi and Thinkific to find out what it is you’re looking for.

Thinkific vs Kajabi – Which One is Best?

All in all, we can conclude that Kajabi is a great all-in-one platform that’s suitable for experienced course creators who are looking to create and scale their knowledge business and have all parts of their online business under one roof, while Thinkific is suitable for those who are looking for a course creation platform only, and don’t necessarily need to have their website, email automation, sales funnels and everything in one place. If you already have your business up and running, have your own website set up, and you already do email marketing, Thinkific would be the way to go.

If, however, you want to take advantage of all the extra marketing and sales tools Kajabi has to offer and would benefit from using an all-in-one platform that has all of the necessary tools and features under one roof, then you should consider paying extra and going with Kajabi. In the end, it’s up to you, your needs, and your budget when it comes to determining which platform suits you best.

You can learn more about each one and make sure you are choosing the right one in this Thinkific Review and Kajabi Review