Kajabi vs Teachable

If you are wanting to start selling courses online you can use a platform like Udemy who controls your pricing, has everything on their platform, or take FULL control by creating your own pricing model and set it all up your own platform.

Two of the market leaders that allow you to do this are Teachable and Kajabi. And I want to talk through my choice and the reasons why I chose one over the other.

Video also available on YouTube here.

Courses with Categories

Your course will look like a proper syllabus of content when you use either Kajabi or Teachable. Having said that, Kajabi allows for sub-categories to be nested under main categories.

This is important if you are building membership sites or courses with lots of content so that menus don't become endless lists that look too daunting and overwhelming to some users.

Video Hosting

Both Kajabi and Teachable use the amazing integration with Wista, one of the best platforms for ensuring huge deliverability. With unlimited hosting, the videos will be delivered to the user in a version that will be best suited to their device and internet speed.

Progress of your Customers and Students

With the ability to track the progress of your videos and content in your courses, you can see how engaged your users are. Kajabi and Teachable both offer this but the way that Kajabi offers you it on product basis or by individual members is great.

Your Branding

Product theming is quite limited in Teachable. You can change the logo and background, typography (fonts) and the colours. Your membership site, single product download or online course will use the same theme.

Kajabi however lets you go to town! You have many themes to choose from to suit your content AND you can even access their Premier and Momentum themes for customise them to your heart's content!

Layouts, buttons, sections, fonts, colours, calls to action, sidebars, navigation... the customising options are second to none.

Marketing Tools

If you build it, they won't come. Marketing tools are a must.

Landing pages, sales pages, opt-in pages, checkout pages, thank you pages, video pages, webinar pages and replay pages, plus all the emails, affiliate tracking and CRM functionality of tagging people and tracking them, it's all needed.

Teachable allows you to build your sales pages but that is about it. All of the rest of your marketing needs will have to be served with external email marketing and landing page software. This could run to a cost of anywhere between $200-$500/month as a starter. Kajabi has it all built in.

Some would say that Teachable has email marketing, but it's only build to send notifications to students, it does not give you the ability to build a list of leads and nurture them like you can with Kajabi. Essentially the Teachable emails are more announcements rather than emails.

Assessments and Quizzes

Grading your students, sending them results and measuring success is a gamification feature that both platforms offer. With Teachable you need the pro plan to do this - in Kajabi, they are available for everyone! The teachable quizzes allow you to have multiple choice answers but no paragraph based free text or indeed file uploads. You get that in Kajabi. Coupled with the ability to lock content based on results on an assessment too, you can restrict further access to courses based on the score they get in assessments on Kajabi.

My verdict

Personally, I would plump for Kajabi every time. And yes, I am biased as I moved my entire business into the platform 4 years ago.

I built my entire website, blog, courses, marketing system, checkout pages, and membership sites on Kajabi. With something like teachable, it just allows me to do my courses.

If I used just Teachable, I would be spending the same money on the pro plan as Kajabi but still need a separate email marketing platform, separate website and hosting, separate landing page solution and that all adds up in terms of costs.

24/7 support from Kajabi and the way that I can save $1,000's a year on not needing all kinds of other systems, it's would be a no-brainer for me if I was looking again.

In fact in my first year, cancelling Infusionsoft, WordPress hosting, my WordPress backups, Amazon S3, my own Wistia account, SamCart and a number of other systems, it saved me almost $8,000 in my first year on the costs of all my systems.

Dive over to www.getkajabi.com and sign up for your trial of Kajabi and give it a whirl. You've nothing to lose. If you don't like it cancel before the end of your 28 day trial.