The Truth About Kajabi — Is It Worth The Price?

Photo by John Schnobrich on Unsplash

This is one of the most expensive course platforms on the market, but it’s also one of, if not, thee best platform out there. My biggest gripe about Kajabi comes mostly from my standpoint. When I was first starting out my business as a creator, I saw the price tag on Kajabi and said “oh hell no. No thanks.”

The lowest tiered plan was $149/month, unless I wanted to pay annually, then it would go down to $119 month, which isn’t bad at all. But, you have to pay the full year up front ($1,428). Once again, it all comes down to what your standpoint is, that these prices make more or less sense. As a beginner, I needed something affordable, but still helpful tools that were going to help my business grow. and, not stress me out about financial costs every month.

Well, I’m about a full year into being a creator, and now I need lots of tools to operate the business. I need things for

• courses
• websites
• blogs
• payment processors
• email marketing
• automation and segmentation

As your business grows and becomes more complex, automation becomes your best friend, unless you want to delegate the tasks you need done every day. I prefer automation, and I enjoy creating strategic marketing automations on the backend.

The main reason I looked at Kajabi was because I wanted to start selling courses. As time goes on, you accumulate a lot of knowledge, and many people want to learn what you know, but in a much shorter time. And people are willing to pay to save time.

So, this is what I think about Kajabi and the core features I use as a creator.

Courses

I started looking for course platforms to create my first course. I had no clue how to create one, or how to organize one. I didn’t even know what I wanted from a course platform either. Creating online courses was a new world to me.

I currently go to college and I been in school for a while, so I had a good idea of what makes a good course experience. I talked to tons of other classmates and we always talked about what professors sucked and which ones were awesome. We would even tell each other which professors to avoid like the plague and which ones we recommended.

Over the years, you get a good idea of why students enjoyed a class. Most of it comes down to presentations and explanations. For example, some professors have strong accents that are hard to understand, but are great at explaining their lessons. Some professor lectures bore you till your head hits the desk, but then their slide presentations are so damn good. My favorite classes were always the ones that were most organized. Nothing about their teaching would be the best, but they were great at organizing their course material.

• easy to find files
• easy to follow lessons
• consistency in weekly lessons
• tons of relevant supporting material
• patience to help slow learners like me

The most common thing we students like is easy-to-use, easy to understand, and lots of help.

So, I wanted something that was accessible on PC and mobile to make it convenient to access, and easy to use. I needed to host videos, supporting text, and include audios and downloadable files when it made sense to include them to provide tons of self-help content. Then, it all comes down to the course creator (me) to put everything together in a way that is easy to understand.

This is why I really like Kajabi, because in each lesson, you can add

• videos
• audio
• slides
• video embeds
• form embeds
• upload images
• hyperlinks

Everything a teacher needs to provide all the needed information in one page.

Kajabi courses even adds a comment section for students to ask questions directly in each lesson. I love this because normally, we would use discord for communication outside of class. Now, we can have a built in communication experience within the lessons.

The next challenging part of course creation was actually creating the course itself.

Course Builder

Starting from scratch is just like a writer staring at a blank paper with writers block. You have so much to say, but it’s so hard to get started. Kajabi AI takes care of this problem by creating a really good outline for your course.

Kajabi AI will create several modules and relevant lessons inside each module. They even write some of the content for you within those lessons. It’s a really good way to start. But, they don’t even stop there. Kajabi AI even makes a landing page (sales page) and an email broadcast for sharing your course. They basically create the whole course and the marketing for you. It’s crazy.

You can even ask Kajabi’s AI to write a video script and social media content for your course.

However, I want to emphasize that you still need to add your own content and make some changes if you want to create a quality course. No one will purchase this AI-generated copy; it’s merely a solid outline to work from.

Building out the course is also straightforward. Kajabi provides tons of videos for members to learn every aspect of Kajabi. They simplify the understanding of each feature and how to design your courses. This was a significant advantage when I compared it to other platforms like Podia and Thinkific. While those are good platforms, Kajabi has the best tutorial videos that make it easy to build your course. They have everything covered in the Help Center and Kajabi University, exclusive to Kajabi subscribers.

I will say though, that most course platforms are mostly the same when it comes to building the course. They all feel intuitive, but the tutorial videos sets Kajabi apart.

Forms Of Payment And Transaction Fees

I’ve been selling online for almost half a decade, and I know that you can miss out on sales if your shoppers don’t have a payment option they can use. Kajabi gives shoppers all the major options to make a payment and payment plans which can get you even more sales for those expensive courses. Kajabi payments offers

• Debit / Credit card
• Google pay
• Apple pay
• Afterpay
• PayPal

You can offer your products as a one-time payment, multi-payment, or subscription model. I can’t tell you how thankful I am for this. I’ve lost plenty of customers in the past simply because Apple pay and Google Pay wasn’t an option.

I also like the idea of Afterpay, because it gives people a chance to pay the cost over a period of time if you’re selling an expensive course. From my selling experience, I don’t have any data for the performance of payment plans yet, but statistics show that conversion rates go up between 20–30%. Good lord, that’s a big difference, and I’m glad I have that option now.

Just about every other platform that compares to Kajabi is usually less expensive, and that’s why those platforms boast about being a better option. But unlike Kajabi, they charge fees on every sale you make. Kajabi doesn’t charge you anything when you make a sale. They have 0% transaction fees. That means, when you make a sale, you keep all the money. But don’t forget, someone has to send that money to you. That’s usually going to be Stripe or PayPal. That’s the only fee you do pay, but that’s standard across every single online platform out there.

Once again, depending where you stand, Kajabi’s price tag seems very expensive if you’re just starting out, but if you are already selling products, especially courses, then the price makes a lot more sense.

Email Marketing And Automations

I started my creator’s journey last year (2023), and I had no clue what the hell email marketing was. I didn’t even understand why people were buzzing about newsletters.

Now, I can’t emphasize enough how important email marketing is. It’s the most powerful tool you have to grow your business, and the one direct line you have to your audience and customer base. I thought social media marketing would be the golden platform and all that I needed. However, those algorithms know how to kick that chair out from under you. Shadow bans and reduced reach being the two big problems.

This is another reason I like kajabi. They have a built in email marketing tool that is good enough to be your main email service provider. Honestly, my favorite ESPs are ConvertKit* and Beehiiv*. I think those two are the standard of what every email service should be, and in my opinion, Kajabi comes very close to being just as good.

It has all the main features like

• Tags
• Templates
• Sequences
• Automation
• Sell products
• Segmentation
• Landing pages
• Campaign analytics
• Unlimited broadcasts

I’m a big fan of analytics.

Data speaks, and if you have enough data speaking to you, then you can make significant marketing improvements to your business. With Kajabi email reports, you can view all the important metrics for your emails.

You get a click report to see what links your audience is clicking, how many times they clicked, and which subscribers clicked. You can tag everyone that clicked and send them personalized, targeted marketing emails. This helps so much to improve your sales, conversions, and to focus on the things that interest your audience.

You can even see detailed stats for your funnels to see what part is actually converting to sales and how much revenue you have made with that funnel.

As good as Kajabi is, I still have one reason I can’t fully commit to just Kajabi and that’s referral networking.

Kajabi doesn’t have an integration with Sparkloop or any referral program, and that’s why I love using ConvertKit*. They use Sparkloop for their Creator’s Network to help me grow an audience.

I wanted to use Sparkloop with Kajabi to help grow my email list, especially since I can already make beautiful, custom landing pages with Kajabi. This would be an amazing opportunity for them to become a top tier email service provider.

Although, they do have a new feature in the works specifically for newsletters. They haven’t given details on what this is or what it’s going to bring, but you can imagine they’re going to take some plays out of Beehiiv or ConvertKit’s playbooks. My guess would be

• Ad networks
• Referral networks
• Improved dashboards
• Better email editors
• Subscriber only sections
• A/B testing

I’ll write another article as to what it could be and go more in-depth on Kajabi email marketing plus newsletters in a future article.

Final Verdict

There are still many other features that Kajabi offers which stand out that I haven’t mentioned, but these two — courses and email marketing — stand out the most. The AI course builder is extremely helpful in getting a course started, which includes the sales page and email marketing broadcast. Additionally, the email marketing aspect that Kajabi offers is incredible. Using both within the same platform makes selling products and marketing to the right audience so much easier.

The more my business grows and the more features I use, the more Kajabi just makes sense. At first, it felt like an expensive platform because it is. It offers tons of features that justify the price they ask. However, Kajabi makes no sense if I only want it for course hosting and nothing else. I should mention that I also use Kajabi for my main website and to host my blog posts, which together draw even more value.

I would highly recommend this for everyone that wants to sell courses, and the other features that Kajabi offers. Normally, the plans are expensive but now, everyone can afford it with Kajabi’s new Kickstarter plan*.

For only $69/mo, you can build your first course, create a website, host your blog, create landing pages, use their email marketing tool, and more. You really don’t need anything else. It has everything you need to get started with your business. You can even upgrade once you start outgrowing the plan, and you won’t have to worry about transferring over later from a different platform because you will already be established and set right with Kajabi.

You can sign up with my affiliate link here and get a free 14-day trial for the Kickstarter plan.

If you’re ready to go all in on Kajabi, you can sign-up for a 30-day free trial here on the higher tiered plans.

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*I am affiliated with the products mentioned in this article and will receive a commission from those platforms.