Creating high-quality course content is crucial for building a sustainable e-learning business.
But it’s not enough.
Marketing your online course, generating leads for your sales funnel, and building a loyal tribe around your brand is equally important.
Kartra and Kajabi are two online course platforms that offer powerful marketing and sales capabilities for knowledge entrepreneurs.
But which one is right for you?
In this article, I’ll give you an in-depth comparison of Kajabi vs Kartra and help you choose the best online course platform for your business.
Let’s dive in.
Quick Verdict | The Best Online Course Platform Is….
If you’re in a hurry and want a quick recommendation, here’s my verdict.
Kajabi is an all-in-one marketing platform designed specifically for online course creators.
Kartra is an all-in-one marketing platform that online course creators can use.
So if e-learning features like quizzes, classrooms, assignments, etc., are your priority, Kajabi is the right choice.
But if you’re looking for advanced marketing and automation features, Kartra is an excellent platform (although it lacks some e-learning features.)
Kartra vs Kajabi – The Main Differences
There are many similarities between Kajabi and Kartra, and we’ll talk about them in detail later. But let’s understand their differences first.
| Kartra | Kajabi |
| It’s an all-in-one marketing platform for physical and digital products. | It’s an all-in-one marketing platform specifically for online courses and other digital products. |
| Doesn’t offer a free trial. | Offers a 30-day free trial (credit card required.) |
| Doesn’t offer quizzes, surveys, assignments | Quizzes, surveys, and assignments available for every lesson |
| Comes with a complete helpdesk solution | No such native feature |
| Offers native video hosting with a 50GB limit in the starter plan but unlimited storage in higher-priced plans. | Offers unlimited video hosting with Wistia for all plans |
| Interactive video features like in-video CTAs, tags, next video recommendations. | No such features |
| Doesn’t offer blogging features | You can create a standard blog with every website |
| No comment section on video pages | The student comment section under each lesson |
| The most popular plan starts at $149/month (billed annually) | The most popular plan starts at $159/month (billed annually) |
Kartra vs Kajabi – An Overview
Kartra and Kajabi are popular online course platforms used by thousands of knowledge entrepreneurs worldwide.
Unlike other mainstream online course platforms, Kajabi and Kartra have advanced marketing, lead generation, and sales features.
For example, they both offer native email marketing, automation, and sales funnels along with many other advanced features.
Let’s take a close look at these products to understand their unique strengths and weaknesses.
What Is Kartra?
Kartra is a platform that combines various digital marketing tools to offer you a complete online business solution.
You can also use it as an online course platform, but it’s primarily created for selling all kinds of digital and physical products.
Kartra is a business tool designed for users irrespective of their technical knowledge and expertise. You can use Kartra to create websites, landing pages, email marketing campaigns, or online courses even if you have zero coding or programming skills.
Here are the main features you get with Kartra.
- Drag & drop page builder for websites and landing pages
- Email marketing and automation
- Opt-in forms
- Marketing and sales funnels
- Membership sites
- Interactive videos with advanced features
- A complete helpdesk solution
- Affiliate management
- A marketplace to sell your sales funnel templates
As you can see, Kartra is pretty heavy on marketing and sales features and gives you all the necessary tools to market your online courses.
However, it does lack some course creation and management features that most other online course platforms offer.
What Is Kajabi?
Kajabi is an all-in-one digital marketing platform specifically designed for online course creators and all kinds of digital product sellers.
It allows you to create a complete classroom experience for your students to consume your video, audio, or text lessons. You can also create surveys, assignments, and quizzes to evaluate your students.
Like Kartra, Kajabi also requires no technical expertise, coding skills, or experience with website design. Using its drag & drop website builder, you can create amazing websites and landing pages for your courses.
Its robust email marketing and automation features allow to set up condition-based email campaigns and behavioral subscriber segmentation.
Here are some of the core features Kajabi offers
- A drag & drop website and landing page builder
- Various website themes
- Email marketing and automation
- Classroom environment
- Quizzes and assignments
- Blogging platform
- Marketing and sales funnels with templates
As you can see, Kajabi offers a host of marketing and sales features tailored for online course creators, which makes it a popular choice for e-learning professionals.
Kartra vs. Kajabi – Comparing Two of The Best Online Course Platforms
Both Kartra and Kajabi are high-quality products that offer immense value for money. But to help you decide which one’s better for your business, let’s do a detailed Karta vs. Kajabi comparison.
To be specific, here are the factors we’ll analyze
- Pricing And Features
- Course Creation
- Video Hosting Features
- Student Experience
- Course Website Builder
- Course Marketing
- Teacher Features
- Payment Management
1. Pricing, Free Trial, And Features
The pricing of your online course platform has a significant impact on your overall profitability. Let’s see how much Kartra and Kajabi would cost you per month.
Kartra Pricing And Free Trial
Kartra offers three different paid subscription plans that all come with a 30-day money-back guarantee and a 25% discount on annual billing.
| All of the plans come with a 30-day Free Trial. |
Let’s take a close look at what Kartra’s premium plans offer.
The Starter plan costs you $119/month ($99 on annual billing) and offers basic course creation, marketing, and sales features. It allows up to 2,500 leads, 15,000 emails per month, 50GB bandwidth, and up to 20 products for one custom domain.
It’s a good option if you’re a total beginner. However, if you want to experience Kartra’s full range of features, go for the Growth plan.
It allows up to 12,500 leads for three custom domains. Everything else, like emails, videos, bandwidth, funnels, products, etc., is unlimited.
At $189/month for annual billing, that’s a pretty good deal.
Established course sellers with bigger subscriber pools can also explore the Professional plan for more flexibility.
Kajabi Pricing and Free Trial
Kajabi offers three premium subscription plans that all come with a 30-day free trial and a 20% discount on annual billing.
Here’s a closer look at the features you get with each plan.
In the Basic plan, you get three products, three pipelines (sales funnels), up to 1000 active customers, and 1K email contacts for one website at $119/month.
That’s significantly costlier than Kartra’s Starter plan and offers only 3 products compared to Kartra’s 20. But Kajabi offers unlimited bandwidth and marketing emails.
Their most popular plan, Growth, costs $159/month and offers 15 products, 15 sales funnels, unlimited landing pages, and unlimited marketing emails.
The Pro plan is for established course creators looking to scale their businesses.
Which product offers more value? It’s a close call because if you compare Kajabi’s Growth plan with Kartra’s plan, Kartra’s slightly cheaper. But it doesn’t offer some of the online course selling features of Kajabi.
So I’ll call it a draw.
Winner: Draw
2. Course Creation
What options do you get with Karta and Kajabi when creating your course content? Let’s find out.
Kartra
Course creation isn’t Kartra main strength since it’s primarily a marketing, sales, and lead generation tool.
But it still gives you some pretty impressive options for creating membership sites and online courses.
Kartra has the same interface for creating online courses and membership sites. To determine whether your product sells as a recurring membership or as a one-time access course, you’ll use the payment settings in Kartra.
Kartra’s course builder is full of options and gives you all the features you need to create engaging online course lessons.
Kartra uses categories for modules and posts for lessons in a course.
A module represents a broad topic while the individual lessons carry the actual content of your course.
You can use videos, audio, text content, and PDFs as your course content. You can also add downloadable files with every lesson, along with links to additional reading material, checklists, and CTAs.
You can also add any other page sections or components to your lessons using the drag & drop blocks in the side panel.
Kartra’s course builder also allows you to enable drip content for membership sites so that your students stay engaged all the time. Plus, you can create content access levels to restrict your content for different customer types.
Overall, Kartra offers all the necessary course-building features, but the learning curve is steep since there are so many options.
Kajabi
Kajabi comes with a robust course builder that allows you to create high-quality courses and membership sites with drag & drop elements.
You can start by choosing any of its product templates.
Inside, the courses are divided into modules and lessons in which you can upload videos, audio, PDFs, and text content.
You can also change the look & feel of your lessons page by adding your logo and header image. Plus, you can add any additional downloadable files and links for your students.
Kajabi also offers automation features for every lesson.
For example, you can add students who complete a lesson to an email sequence.
Overall, Kajabi’s course builder is much simpler than Kartra and has a more traditional online course platform look.
But it lacks the flexibility that Kartra’s fully customizable lessons pages offer.
So once again, I’ll call it a draw.
Winner: Draw
3. Video Content Features & Hosting
Most online courses use video as their primary content type for delivering lessons. Let’s see what video features Kajabi and Kartra offer.
Kartra
Kartra calls itself a video marketer’s dream platform. And it’s hard to argue with it.
It’s among the few online course platforms that offer CTAs, sign-up forms, and user tagging in videos.
Instead of saying “fill the signup form below this video,” you can show a form or CTA directly in your video. Anyone who’s done video CTA before knows this feature gives you a huge advantage.
Here’s an example of how you can add a signup or buy now button to your video.
Here are the other CTA types you can add to your Kartra videos.
Kartra also gives you total control over your video’s appearance. You can change the player’s color, enable or disable video controls, and add a splash screen.
Plus, you can embed your video to a page or display it as a popup when visitors click on a button.
One of my favorite things about Kartra is its detailed video analytics that tells you exactly how much content users have watched.
You can enable user-tagging based on how much content they view and trigger different automation sequences using it.
The only disadvantage?
Kartra’s entry-level plan has a 50GB bandwidth limit. But the higher-priced plans offer unlimited bandwidth.
You can also upload videos to Vimeo, YouTube, or Wistia and embed them into your lessons.
Kajabi
Kajabi also offers some pretty impressive video and content hosting options.
Unlike Kartra, Kajabi offers unlimited video hosting with Wistia. You can upload videos to individual lessons from your computer, Google Drive, or Dropbox account.
Kajabi also offers detailed video analytics using which you can see the engagement level of your viewers and how long they’re viewing your videos.
However, Kajabi doesn’t offer video CTAs or forms like Kartra.
Plus, it also doesn’t offer the flexibility that Kartra offers with embeddable and pop-up videos.
Which means Kartra is the clear winner here.
Winner: Kartra
4. Course Website Builder
Your course website is different from the pages inside your course. The purpose of your website is to market your course and convert visitors into leads. Let’s see how Kartra and Kajabi compare in this area.
Kartra
Kartra offers a feature-rich page builder to create high-quality, responsive course websites and landing pages using simple drag & drop blocks.
Even if you’ve never designed a site before, you can easily create one with Karta’s website templates.
It gives you all kinds of templates like squeeze pages, long for sales pages, product launch pages, product review pages, etc.
But if you want to start from scratch, you can choose a blank canvas and start building your page with drag & drop elements.
You can choose every component of your website from the drag & drop list.
For example, here are the different navigation menus you can choose.
Similarly, you can add a hero image, a product section, testimonials, services, counters, opt-in forms, footers, etc.
Every element is fully customizable and gives you complete control over its appearance.
Kajabi
Kajabi also offers a brilliant website builder to create your course website pages and landing pages for your marketing campaigns.
It comes with more than a dozen different templates that are fully customizable.
But if you want to start from scratch, you can use its drag & drop website builder to customize every aspect of your site.
You can add new images, text sections, CTA buttons, columns, sections and customize everything else in a page template.
You can also add exit pop-ups, two-step sign-up forms, counters, and many other elements to your website.
You can connect your landing page opt-in forms with Kajabi’s email marketing suite or third-party email service.
Overall, Kajabi’s page builder offers everything you need to create a professional and responsive website.
But Kartra’s website builder gives you more flexibility and control over your site’s appearance.
Winner: Kartra
5. Course Marketing
Marketing and sales are the strengths of both Kartra and Kajabi. Let’s see how they perform head to head.
Kartra
Kartra is packed with amazingly detailed marketing and sales features.
It gives you a completely integrated sales machine to plug with your online course and generate sales.
Let’s start with its funnels and email marketing features.
Kartra gives you ready-to-use marketing funnels for different objectives that you can simply activate and connect with your product.
These funnels are designed by professional marketing and conversion experts and will likely perform better than anything you create yourself (unless you’re a bigger expert, of course.)
With a funnel, you don’t need to create pages for a product launch separately. You can simply plug & play the relevant funnel to your product.
If you don’t find the funnel you need, you can purchase it from Kartra’s funnel marketplace, where marketers from around the world share their best funnels.
Alternatively, if you have a high-performing funnel, you can sell it on the marketplace as well.
Kartra also offers native email marketing and automation features that are comparable with any leading email marketing service.
It gives you a complete subscriber management system through tags and lists. Plus, all of your Kartra assets, like website pages, landing pages, courses, etc., are fully linked with each other. This means that you can trigger if-then automation, tag users, add them to your email list or send them a specific sequence from anywhere in the Kartra ecosystem.
It works like a well-oiled machine that seamlessly transitions your visitors into leads and customers.
Kajabi
Marketing and sales are Kajabi’s strengths as well. It gives you a robust website and landing page builder, using which you can set up squeeze pages for your courses.
It offers a complete funnel system called Pipelines that you can activate for different marketing objectives.
For example, you can activate a pipeline template for a product launch, a webinar, or a lead nurturing sequence.
It gives you the complete set of landing pages, email scripts, opt-in forms, and check-out pages required to convert visitors into customers.
Plus, Kajabi’s email marketing and automation features are more robust than most other online course platforms.
You can set up complete automation sequences based on conditional triggers and design campaigns for different segments of your email subscribers.
Once again, however, Kartra’s features offer more control and flexibility and open up more possibilities for you as an online course marketer.
Winner: Kartra
6. Student Experience
What’s the student experience in Karta and Kajabi? Let’s find out.
Kartra
Kartra lessons pages don’t have the classic classroom look. In fact, they look more like blog posts with videos.
But it gives you a lot of control over the appearance of your lessons pages. You can choose from several templates and customize them according to your brand’s colors.
This is how your content is shown to your students.
It looks neat and gives the centerstage to your content but still doesn’t give you the classroom feel that Kajabi offers.
Kajabi
Kajabi’s course and individual lessons pages are well designed and share all the necessary information with your students.
Here’s an example of a lesson in Kajabi.
You can see the main video lesson in the center and all the other lessons and modules listed on the side.
There’s also a progress score to show students their progress.
Kajabi is the clear winner here.
Winner: Kajabi
7. Teacher Features
What exclusive features do you have to evaluate and assess your students in Kajabi and Kartra? Let’s find out.
Kajabi
You can use assessments in Kajabi to conduct multiple-choice questions, multiple answer questions, or open-ended quizzes.
There’s no native survey feature, but you can use embedded forms on your course pages to gather student feedback.
Kajabi also doesn’t offer any certificates but does give you the option to upload certificates created through third-party apps.
Kartra
Unfortunately, Kartra doesn’t offer quizzes, certificates, or surveys.
However, you can use third-party apps for conducting these evaluations.
Winner: Kajabi
8. Payment Management And Pricing Options
Let’s talk money and see how Kartra and Kajabi help you manage it.
Kajabi
In Kajabi, students can pay for courses using PayPal or credit cards (if you have Stripe.)
As for pricing options, you can offer one-time, recurring, and installment payment options to your students.
Kartra
Kartra offers four different payment gateways
– PayPal
– Stripe
– Authorize.net
– Braintree
As for student pricing plans, you can offer one-time, recurring, and installment payments.
Winner: Kartra
Kartra vs Kajabi – Pros and Cons
Before reaching the final verdict, let’s look at the major pros and cons of Kartra and Kajabi.
Kartra Pros and Cons
| Pros | Cons |
| Has a world-class website builder | Not a specialized product for course creators |
| Offers dozens of customizable templates | Offers a mediocre student experience |
| Has automation triggers for everything | No quizzes and assessments |
| Offers advanced email marketing features | No student analytics |
| Has beginner-friendly pricing plans | Limited bandwidth in the starter plan |
| Gives you in-depth analytics | Doesn’t offer a free trial or free plan |
| Offers multiple payment gateways |
Kajabi Pros and Cons
| Pros | Cons |
| Highly scalable course creation and marketing features | More expensive than Kartra |
| Complete marketing funnels with proven templates | No course completion certificates |
| Advanced email marketing and automation features | Limited payment gateways |
| Clean and distraction-free student experience | |
| Live, pre-recorded, and scheduled webinars. | |
| Powerful website builder with more than a dozen fully customizable templates | |
| Quizzes and surveys | |
| Detailed student analytics | |
Kartra vs Kajabi Verdict | Which Online Course Platform Is Right For You?
I’ve given you a detailed analysis of both Kartra and Kajabi. From all the features, it’s clear that both Kajabi and Kartra are amazing products with numerous sales, marketing, and conversion optimization features for online course creators.
But what should be your choice when it comes to Kartra vs Kajabi?
In my opinion, Kartra offers superior marketing, sales, and automation features than Kajabi. But its student experience is slightly weaker. Still, it offers more value for money.
So if you can compromise on the student experience (and a few other online course-specific features), Kartra is an excellent choice.
However, Kajabi’s marketing features aren’t bad in any way. Plus, it offers an excellent student experience along with several features specifically designed for online course creators. But it’s slightly more expensive.
If you can settle for slightly less advanced marketing features but a significantly better student experience, Kajabi is the perfect option for you.
By Jawad Khan for Learning Revolution
See also:
Jeff Cobb, Founder of Learning Revolution
Jeff Cobb is an expert in online education and the business of adult lifelong learning. Over the past 20+ years he has built a thriving career based on that expertise – as an entrepreneur, a consultant, an author, and a speaker. Learning Revolution is a place where Jeff curates tips, insights, and resources to help you build a thriving expertise-based business. Learn more about Jeff Cobb here.
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