In this comparison review, I’m going to put Kajabi vs Kartra up against each other – and help you figure out which is best for memberships and selling your online courses.
Not just for courses!
But I’m going to compare how these two powerful platforms compare in terms of:
- Membership site features
- Email marketing (automation, tagging, and follow-up)
- Sales funnel capability
- Page editor/builder/design
- Pre-built customizable templates
- Affiliate management
And lots more…
The main difference between Kartra vs Kajabi is that Kartra happens to be an all-in-one marketing platform and funnel builder with more features while Kajabi shines specifically more for course creators.
Kartra wins by offering better conversion-boosting tools.
Just a summary. But there’s more.
Lets continue…
Kartra vs Kajabi – Key Differences & Similarities
Before dive into their full comparison breakdown, lets look at the summary of their similarities and differences.
First their similarities:
- You can build you membership site and create your online courses on both platforms using their inbuilt video hosting
- Both Kartra and Kajabi allow you to build sales funnels. In Kartra, the funnels are called “Campaigns”. While in Kajabi they’re called “Pipelines”
- You have access to intuitive WYSIWYG drag and drop page editors with various landing templates to customize your sites to your taste
- Kajabi and Kartra offers you email marketing and automation features like segmentation, broadcast, automated follow-up and lead importation
- Both tools also comes with an inbuilt affiliate management system and tools for recruiting and managing affiliates. Although that of Kajabi starts from the Pro plan while Kartra’s starts at the Starter package
- You can create blog pages with both platforms. However, Kajabi excels more because of its special blog feature that lets you create an index page for your posts
Differences:
- Kartra comes with an inbuilt helpdesk that allows you to easily provide immediate customer support via live chat. Kajabi currently doesn’t have a built-in helpdesk
- Kajabi comes with inbuilt student interactive and ‘Community’ feature for student interactions and engagement. This isn’t available on Kartra
- Kartra’s built-in Calendar functionality allows your clients to self-book and reschedule based on your availability, and even sends automated reminders. Nothing like this on Kajabi
- Kartra comes with advanced automation features like Behavioral Adaptive Marketing (BAM) and Dynamic 1click upsells, downsells and order bumps for increased conversion rates
- Kajabi on the other hand enables you to create and add course assesment feature like quizzes – which isn’t provided on Kartra
With Kartra you have all the tools you need ready-to-go at your fingertips, which makes it ridiculously easy to build and scale your online business fast… with tons of extra features at a more affordable price.
Kartra vs Kajabi – Complete Feature Comparison
Kajabi and Kartra are two different marketing solutions that both offer many features.
Now, let’s have a closer look at how they match up against one another.
Sales Funnel & Marketing Campaigns
First, we’re starting with the sales funnel and campaign builder features of both platforms:
Kartra
Kartra is well known as a funnel-building software, and it does it very well when it comes to that. And also has a campaign function that has everything laid out for you.
To literally plug and play.
The sales funnels in Kartra are referred to as “campaigns”.
This allows you to build/create the entire campaign from scratch.
Kartra has an upper hand over Kajabi when it comes to funnels (what it was built for), because of the way you can organize everything.
The Kartra campaigns give you fully built marketing funnels that already have the pages, checkouts, email marketing, automation, segmentation, tagging, and more already set up.
These campaigns were created by expert marketers – Frank Kern and Andy Jenkins.
Dozens of them. All DFY (Done For You).
Another cool Kartra funnel/campaign feature is the share funnel/import feature.
Which allows you to import campaigns from other Kartra members. Or lets you sell and share them on Kartra’s marketplace.
Kajabi
Kajabi also has a sales funnel feature called Pipelines which allows you to easily build a marketing funnel workflow.
This funnel tool lets you build high-converting sales funnels faster.
At the moment, you can choose from six pipeline blueprints to get started. Just like Kartra, each funnel pipeline contains every element (pages, emails, and automation) to launch your business.
All customizable.
Although Kajabi lacks enough funnel and page templates compared to Kartra.
Plus, users of Kajabi won’t be able to share or import funnels with others.
Winner?
Kajabi and Kartra both give users access to building a marketing campaign from scratch to the top.
And they also support dominant marketing funnel features: 1-click upsells, order bumps which make up a good checkout system.
However, Kartra beats Kajabi in this funnel/campaign category.
Kartra provides a larger number of DFY pre-built campaigns, a much better and friendly funnel-building experience, and allows users to share campaigns with each other.
Kartra is the winner here
Membership Site and Course Hosting
Membership sites lets you deliver your content and as well as host your online courses. Both Kartra and Kajabi provide both features.
Kartra
Kartra arms course creators with all the necessary tools needed to host their courses and run membership sites.
With the help of its course builder.
One awesome thing about the Kartra membership site is that it comes with its own built-in audio and video hosting capabilities.
This means you have the ability to upload content directly on the Kartra servers without the need for an external media player.
Which is cool!
With Kartra memberships, you’d also be able to customize your membership portal, run multiple membership tiers, drip contents.
And display a progress tracking bar that shows how far your students have gone with your course. Which kinda keeps your students accountable.
The only few problems I have with Kartra membership is the lack of community feature and limitations on how much content I can host in terms of bandwidth.
For example, the Starter plan is set to 50GB while the other plans are unlimited.
Kajabi
You already know that Kajabi is great for hosting and monetizing your course. It comes with the best membership experience you can get anywhere.
In fact, users around the world will praise their membership site capabilities.
Kajabi has a more sophisticated and refined capability than Kartra. No doubt.
You see, Kajabi offers a variety of learning, student assessment, and student engagement features.
You can set assessments, build an online course community, create quizzes, and drip feed, and lock your content inside of your own Kajabi memberships.
Unlike Kartra memberships, there’s no cap on the amount or size of uploads or downloads you can do on your site.
Which is perfect for established course creators with tons of content.
Another great side about Kajabi course hosting is the ability for you to tag and follow up with your students automatically when they finish going through a specific post, module, or an entire course.
This is actually a great way to upsell low-ticket clients into your high-end programs. Awesome!
Winner?
When it comes to building a membership site, Kajabi does it well in a flexible and intuitive manner.
In this category, Kajabi takes the lead with its amazing student community, feature, assessments, and real-time student interaction within the course lessons.
Kajabi is the winner here
Email Marketing and Automation
Email marketing and automation play a significant role in helping creators and online businesses maximize conversions and connect with customers.
Kartra
I’d have to say that Kartra automation power is superior and you can do some crazy automation within your entire funnel.
First, it uses IF-THEN statements to help you tailor your messages neatly.
Plus, an automated visual sequence builder.
For example, if your lead clicks an email link, then Kartra will tag them as “VIP” AND put them into a new follow-up sequence you already set.
Or tag each lead or customer based on specific actions. Really nice!
Kartra also has what they call BAM – Behavioral Adaptive Marketing – a better marketing feature that triggers based and automates stuff based on how your customers/clients interact with your business.
Which even makes their entire platform powerful.
Besides the automation power, the Kartra email marketing system offers a visual builder, email templates, and everything you need to build a complete email marketing campaign.
For this, you have access to a ton of beautiful email templates. Which are professionally designed by experts so you can customize them to fit your brand.
If you want you can test every of your marketing automation rules and emails to find out which converts better with Kartra’s own robust split testing feature.
Kajabi
On the other hand, Kajabi also comes built-in with a marketing automation system and full-fledged email marketing software.
Kinda similar to what you’ll find in Kartra.
You can automate your email marketing by building powerful follow-up sequences.
And also set specific triggers based on actions your leads or customers perform some actions.
With the Kajabi email marketing automation, you’d be able to create complex automation workflows within the “Pipelines”.
That triggers based on your students’ or customer actions.
They also provide email templates to choose from or create yours from scratch.
Winner?
Both Kartra and Kajabi have an inbuilt automation capability that is pretty much capable of performing all sorts of in-funnel task follow-ups, automation, tracking, and analytics.
However, Kartra wins by a little margin in this category.
This is because of the integrated BAM feature and split-testing capability.
Kartra is the winner here
Kartra vs Kajabi – Page Editor & Builder
The page editor/page builder is responsible for the actual page design and customization on both platforms. It usually features drag-and-drop functionality.
Kartra
Kartra page builder allows you to create, customize, and edit beautifully designed pages using their drag and drop page builder capability.
The page builder and editor fully = mobile responsive. You can switch between desktop, tablet, or mobile view with a click of a button.
It works the way a normal visual page builder should work; blocks, sections, columns, settings components, duplicate, split-testing, etc.
Do you know the most interesting part?
Kartra provides over 500 pre-designed customizable page templates to choose from.
Ranging from:
- sales pages
- checkout pages
- lead capture pages
- video marketing pages,
- thank you pages
- coming soon pages
- webinar pages
- blog pages
- squeeze pages
- product launch pages
- upsell pages
And lots more. isn’t it crazy?
This means you really do NOT have to start building and designing your page from a blank canvas. Just pick from the library of templates designs and roll.
You just have to edit and customize them a bit using the Kartra drag and drop page editor.
Kajabi
For Kajabi’s page editor all you need to do is click on an element to modify your page. Edit texts, headlines, buttons, colors, videos, etc.
Unlike Kartra, building your pages in Kajabi is being split into 2 parts – the page builder itself and the theme editor.
With the page builder, you are given the option to choose from the pre-designed page templates and edit your page.
While the theme editor gives you the absolute customization features to add and remove elements.
Here you can add more functionality to your website, i.e., countdown timers, accordions, videos, CTAs, forms, and much more.
The templates in Kajabi aren’t as much compared to that of Kartra.
It lacks dozens of templates for various needs and goals that Kartra comes with.
But overall Kajabi’s page builder and editor are flexible, responsive, and easy to use without writing a line of code.
Finally, one greater side of the Kajabi page is the blogging feature.
This is a blog creation feature that lets you publish posts.
Like, you can create an index page for your posts, organize posts into categories, set your blog sidebars, and configure SEO settings. All with the blog creation function on Kajabi.
Winner?
The winner here is Kartra. Because of its hundreds variety of templates for accomplishing anything in your business. And also comes with more customization options.
Kajabi on the other hand comes with its own advantages in this category; easiness and blogging.
Kartra wins here based on the numerous templates.
Kajabi vs Kartra – Affiliate Management System
Both Kartra and Kajabi provide in-built affiliate software for managing, assigning, tracking, and paying affiliates.
Lets see how they stack up against one another.
Kartra
Kartra houses a robust affiliate center with tons of features.
Kartra affiliate tracking and management tool allow you to reward for a second-tier commission, collect tax forms, enable instant PayPal payments, and set a minimum threshold before payment.
And guess the cool part?
Kartra comes with built-in affiliate questionnaires.
With this, you take your potential affiliates through a screening process and have them agree to your partnership terms and conditions agreement.
You can set up affiliate payments to automatically go out to all affiliates. Or only certain affiliates of your choosing, and/or only after a minimum amount of sales is made.
There’s a lot of bells and whistles around this Kartra feature.
Or is it the detailed partner analytics that shows you how well each affiliate is performing, earning per click, sales, and conversions can all be tracked?
Finally, there is also a Kartra Marketplace for promoting your products and service and that of other business owners.
Kajabi
First of all, the Kartra affiliate marketing center is available on all of its plans. Starting from the basic to the advanced.
Unfortunately, for Kajabi you have to be a user in the PRO or Premium plan to be able to manage affiliates. This is not too good in my opinion.
Besides that, the Kajabi affiliate center is a perfect fit for anyone in need of the basic affiliate management needs; approve, set commission percentage, and pay affiliates.
It also gives you an overview of how your affiliates are performing.
In terms of clicks, leads, and conversions.
Winner?
Kajabi affiliate center lacks some advanced affiliate management system features: tracking, automated payments, and tier commission.
Kartra offers more affiliate marketing-oriented features and flexibility.
Kartra wins in this category.
Customer Service & Community
The thing is: nearly 70% of people would spend more money with a company that has excellent customer service
How helpful and supportive are Kartra and Kajabi’s customer service? Any live chat feature?
Do they both have a community where customers can interact and share ideas?
Lets find out.
Kartra
Kartra provides quite an all-around support channel both for users and non-users.
First, you can contact Kartra’s support team by submitting an online ticket or message via live chat. Live Chat hours are usually 8:00 AM PT – 12:00 PM PT. During workdays.
Secondly, they have technical documentation:
This is where you can find questions on advanced components of Kartra software; integrations, APIs, adding custom domains, payment gateways, and lots more.
Thirdly, they have the Kartranaut Academy:
This is where you get step-by-step training videos for every feature in Kartra, and become an expert at whatever pace suits you.
Lastly, we have the ever-active and engaging Kartra Facebook community. Which I’ve been part of since 2018.
A great place of inspiration and education for every online marketer to belong.
As you can see, there are 24k+ online business owners and marketers in the Kartra group.
Kajabi
Kajabi support is also an amazing one.
Just as Kartra offers different ways for you to get the best from their platform – Kajabi also provides both users and non-users ways to exploit their software to the fullest.
First, 24/7 Chat Customer support:
Kajabi provides 24/7 live chat support for its expensive customers. Not for those on the Basic plan.
Those on the Basic plan don’t gain access to 24/7 support access.
Secondly, Kajabi University:
This is a resource created by Kajabi, aimed at helping you create and build your online business with the platform. Everything you need to launch your digital business can be found there.
Thirdly, Kajabi Webinars & Events:
These are daily educational and Q&A webinars. Held from Monday through Friday.
From the comfort (and social distance) of your own home. The daily webinars revolve around mastering Kajabi as a tool and strategy to grow your online business.
Lastly, the Kajabi Facebook community:
This is yet another avenue to network, interact and inspire oneself. Currently, their group is around 26k members.
Winner?
For this category, we can all agree that Kajabi offers 24/7 live chat support beats that of Kartra’s. However, they went ahead to implement a limitation for those on the Base plan. Which isn’t too cool.
On the other hand, Kartra also provides live chat but only for about 4 hours daily. And this is on all plans.
So it’s fair to call this a tie.
What are the Diffrences Between Kartra vs Kajabi
Everything we’ve discussed so far in this comparison review is features found on both Kajabi and Kartra.
This part is where I cover briefly the difference between the two:
Video Hosting
As you may know, Kajabi offers unlimited Wistia hosting for videos as part of all their plans and you can use them anywhere with your Kajabi plan. Which is great.
However, Kartra takes advancement further by building its own video hosting.
Meaning you don’t need to bother paying externally for Wistia, Vimeo, or free YouTube hosting.
Kartra’s inbuilt video hosting isn’t what actually makes the difference here.
Guess what does?
It is the ability for you to be able to add compelling CTAs and opt-in forms at any point while your video is playing, as well as automatically tags viewers based on their behavior.
And you automatically follow customers/users based on video engagement.
This is mind-blowing!
As these in-video actions enable you to scoop more conversions, influence social shares, and increase sales.
Scheduling Calendar Application
There is an inbuilt Calendar application within Kartra that lets your customers book any type of appointment with you.
If you’re a consultant, coach, or just want to host live events, you need a simple and intuitive calendar tool where your customers can check, schedule, and self-manage their appointments on their own.
Except, with Kajabi, you’ll need to purchase a separate calendar software in order to do this.
Find out more on Kartra Calendar: https://home.kartra.com/feature-calendars
Community Building Tool
We touched on the community features earlier.
This is an aspect you can’t go wrong with settling with Kajabi.
You can create your own community on Kajabi (just like the private Facebook group) where you and your students can interact and share ideas.
A discussion community is something I’ve seen in play among many course creators. Personally, this is a major factor I consider before enrolling in courses.
HelpDesk
Kajabi currently doesn’t have a built-in helpdesk — meaning you’d have to purchase yet another 3rd party software.
Helpdesks are great deals when it comes to running smooth customer service and support for your online courses.
Kartra’s Helpdesk lets you quickly deploy a customer support HUB to help you satisfy your customers’ needs without the headaches of integrating a third-party system.
It includes a Ticketing System, Agent Chat support System, and Knowledge Base Management System so you can help your customers at multiple levels.
Find out more about Kartra Helpdesk: https://home.kartra.com/feature-helpdesk
Quizzes and Course Assessments
Another feature is NOT present on Kartra but on Kajabi. The online course assessment and quizzes.
To improve your member engagement and add more valuable course content, you can utilize Kajabi Assessments.
With this feature inside of Kajabi, you can create and add quizzes to your online course.
Quizzes help to test your students’ understanding of the material.
The quizzes can include multiple-choice questions, multiple-option questions as well as paragraph-style questions, and so forth.
Done For You Funnels/Campaigns
Kartra provides plug-and-play marketing campaigns that include all the assets you need to launch your product.
Over a dozen of them:
- Simple List Builder Campaign
- Quick Launch Campaign
- Book Funnel
- 4 Day Cash Machine
- List Builder Sales Campaign
- Digital Agency Campaign
Each campaign includes all the assets you need — pre-designed and written with world-class copy, including emails, landing pages, squeeze pages, thank you pages, checkouts, and more.
You can share create your own campaigns and sell/share them with others in your network or sell in Kartra Marketplace.
This is another juicy feature not available on Kajabi.
More about Kartra done for you Campaigns and Funnels: https://home.kartra.com/feature-campaigns
Kartra vs Kajabi Pricing
Here we are going to explicitly discuss all of the pricing plans of both tools and compare.
First, Kartra Pricing Plans:
Like I mentioned somewhere in this guide, Kartra gives you access to all its features from the Starter to Platinum plan.
This is so interesting because you’ll hardly find something like this on any marketing platform.
Although no absolutely free trial. Just a $1 14-day trial.
Here are the 4 packages in Kartra:
- The Starter plan – $99/mo
Kartra Starter plan offers you access to send 15,000 emails per month, have up to 2,500 contacts, 2 membership sites, 100 pages, 1 team member, 50GB video bandwidth, one custom domain, etc.
- The Silver plan – $199/mo
Here you are given access to up to 12,500 leads, 3 custom domains, send unlimited emails per month, unlimited video bandwidth, unlimited membership site, unlimited helpdesk, create unlimited pages, unlimited team members, unlimited products, Kartra agency.
- The Gold plan – $299/mo
The third Kartra package offers and allows you to send 250,000 emails per month, 5 custom domains, and all features in the Silver plan.
- Platinum plan – $499/mo
You have access to send 500,000 emails, 10 custom domains, and unlimited number of stuff.
For a Kartra discount, you can grab two months for free when you pay annually.
Meaning you pay for just 10 months!
Then, for Kajabi Pricing and Plans:
While you may be thinking that Kartra is expensive – on the other hand, Kajabi looks more expensive, having three plans compared to Kartra’s four.
And Kajabi offers you a free 14-day trial.
- Basic Plan – $149/mo
On this Kajabi plan, you can only create 3 products, 3 pipelines, 10,000 contacts, 1,000 students/members, unlimited landing pages and emails, 1 website, and a single admin.
- Growth Plan – $199/mo
Here on this plan, you will be able to sell 15 products, 15 pipelines/funnels, 25k contacts, 10,000 members, one website, 10 administrative users, unlimited pages, and emails.
- PRO Plan – $399/mo
This is the highest Kajabi plan at the moment. It comes with 100 products, 100 pipelines, 20k active members, 3 websites, 100k leads, and admins.
There are also some other limited features on the smaller Basic plan like the inability to remove the Kajabi branding on your pages, lack of automation, and no affiliate program management.
You get all that on both the Growth and PRO plan, while you have access to the Theme Editor and Experts Academy on only the PRO plan.
There is also a 20% Kajabi discount available when you get on the annual option.
Which is the Best? (users opinion)
Kartra and Kajabi are both powerful all-in-in-one software that you can use to host your online courses by building membership access.
However, they serve very different purposes – one being a specialized membership site software and the other a complete marketing suite and funnel building software.
Yes! Kajabi is awesome for courses and Kartra for funnels and all that.
I know you would ask – But Kajabi also has a funnel building and automation platform?
You’re definitely right about that. I took my time to seek the opinion of users who had been on both platforms and one common statement they all made.
Is that:
Kajabi is not a good option for landing pages, funnel steps and order pages with limited page builder capability. But has sophisticated members area features.
Here is a question addressed about both platforms:
After testing Kartra myself and still do (helping students) – I can’t agree more with the response above.
Another user of both systems shares a view:
See a comparison between Kajabi vs Kartra vs ClickFunnels:
There are quite a lot of comparisons about Kajabi and Kartra found all over the internet – and everywhere I go, Kartra keeps dominating over Kajabi in an overall head-to-head comparison.
One beauty about Kartra is that it can do pretty much whatever ever you want it to do.
Like:
You can get into your Kartra account and use the “products” to sell your physical products, digital products (online courses, eBooks), and even your services.
Another part is that Kartra allows A/B split testing on your landing pages, emails, while Kajabi doesn’t.
This alone would be a HUGE deal breaker for marketers and business owners who are crazy about testing things.
Kartra vs Kajabi – My Final thoughts
It’s no doubt that Kartra wins with a lot of features – Helpdesk, Calendars, Video hosting, and a lot of other enticing stuff. But that doesn’t mean Kajabi is bad.
GET KAJABI IF…
You already have a good funnel and landing page builder, Helpdesk, appointment scheduling application, and just need an excellent membership site platform for building an amazing member area experience and community for your students.
GET KARTRA IF…
You’re looking for an all-in-one tool that you can use for building your funnels, marketing your products, customer service application, building a member’s area, taking appointments, automating everything under one roof without using a variety of different applications.
As an all-one marketing application Kartra includes a huge range of features that just aren’t available in a specialized product like Kajabi.
My complete Kartra review dives in-depth about Kartra.
With Kartra you have all the tools you need ready-to-go at your fingertips, which makes it ridiculously easy to build and scale your online business fast… with tons of extra features at a more affordable price.
Hopefully, this Kartra vs Kajabi in-depth comparison guide helped you decide the best for your online course and business?
Do let me know in the comments which you’ll be going for.
Check Out My other Kartra Comparison Posts:
amazing review of both, thankyou
Thank you Rachael
This was SO helpful! Thank you!
You’re welcome Mike! I’m glad it the comparison helped
Thank you!!
Happy to be of help Steve 🙂
Thank you for this review, helped me a lot!
You’re welcome Grace. happy to help 🙂 and thanks for commenting
Thank you Khris, really appreciate the article.
What about the option of adding a tool like Membervault to Kartra? Its not to expensive.
I’m on GetResponse at the moment, they do have Funnel and evergreen webinars but no membership.
What does people say about GetResponse, what is it lacking to be a good alternative?
I will probably switch to Kartra very soon.
Thank you too ErmeCo,
Honestly, I don’t think you really need to add another membership site like Membervault to Kartra. Remember Kartra has its own membership site feature built into it?
Yeah GetResponse is definitely a nice option to be called an all-in-one but from my experience doesn’t match up to Kartra it that regard.