Kajabi Review (2024) An Honest and In-Depth Review

Online education has grown in popularity year by year, even before Covid-19 made way for more remote classes. Online courses offer greater flexibility and affordability, serving a wider demographic. Millions of U.S. students take degree-earning classes online, to say nothing of how many people are enrolling in skill-based courses, life-coaching memberships, and other programs.

Kajabi is a fully-integrated platform for delivering online educational content. Digital entrepreneurs can develop, sell, and market their content in one place, with little if any need to use third-party services.

In this article, we’ll take a closer look at third-party Kajabi reviews, what Kajabi offers, payment plans for the service, and, of course, every content creator’s burning question: is Kajabi worth it?

What is Kajabi?

Kajabi is a platform to sell online courses and other educational products. The company is based in California and was founded by Travis Rosser and Kenny Reuter. Since its inception, its founders have continued to develop and improve it by adding new features, improving functionality, and being closely involved with their customers. One of Kajabi’s main priorities is being aware of what its users need and want, and working hard at developing those tools for them.

What does Kajabi Do?

Kajabi provides a wide array of features that many digital entrepreneurs need to sell online courses and manage their businesses. This is a list of their current features as of January 2024. I mention the date because Kajabi is actively engaged in improving functionality and adding features, in the 3 years I have been using Kajabi leading up to 2024, they have added coaching, podcast hosting, a new community, the creator studio, and an AI assistant.

Digital courses

Kajabi is an industry leader in selling digital courses. Their interface is user-friendly for the creator and the customer, and managing your content is easy and quick. They are a powerful course delivery platform and give you lots of options on how to deliver your content as well as integrate your course with your community. There is also a live room that you can use to meet with people who are in your course making a seamless experience for you and them to provide coaching or Q&A right in Kajabi, no Zoom or third-party needed.

They have 2 main templates for course delivery and can connect you with vetted third-party providers who sell templates. If you are in the digital entrepreneur world, chances are good you have taken a course from someone that was built on Kajabi.

Coaching

Coaching is a product that facilitates meeting one-on-one or in a group setting with your clients. It utilizes the Kajabi Live Room so you don’t need Zoom or a third-party for the meeting. There is a space for you and your client to keep confidential notes, as well as a shared notes space. You can upload content for your client, set an agenda, and notes for each session. Kajabi provides a scheduler to make the bookings and connects to your Google Calendar. You can also connect a third-party scheduler if you prefer. Kajabi has built in integration with Calendly that is very easy to set up and use. You need to be a pro subscriber to Calendly in order for the integration to work because it relies on setting the events in Calendly to private.

Community

In fall 2022 Kajabi acquired Vibely, an independent community platform. The new community was released to all Kajabi users in January 2023. The community offers different levels of access, challenges, meet-ups, the live room, a leaderboard, a forum and chat room, direct messaging, and a wild card page that lets you add anything you want into the community. It has its own app for easy access via a smartphone. Look at my Kajabi Community article for a deeper look into what the community feature is like.

Podcast Hosting

Kajabi podcast hosting gives you the ability to manage your public and private podcasts right from Kajabi without any third-party applications. You can connect your podcast to Apple, Google, and Spotify for distribution.

Offers

A Kajabi Offer is essentially a checkout page. It is where someone can give you money (or not) and get access to your product. You can connect Kajabi to Stripe or PayPal, or if you are in the United States, you can use Kajabi’s own payment processing. If you use Kajabi Payments, you are able to collect payment through credit cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Buy Now Pay Later. Offers can be set up for a variety of payment methods including one-time payment, multiple payments, subscription payments, pay what-you-want, and you can allow for free trials and coupons.

Coupons

Setting up coupons with Kajabi is quick and easy. You can provide single-use coupons that are triggered through automations or set up a universal coupon for a seasonal promotion that anyone can use, like SummerSale15. You can also track the use of coupons so you can see who in your customer base used a coupon.

Affiliates

Kajabi has two affiliate programs. First, you can set up affiliates to sell your products. Second, you can become an affiliate for Kajabi, like me :). Look into my Kajabi Affiliate post if you want to learn more about becoming an affiliate for Kajabi.

With Kajabi’s affiliate program, you can track how many clicks, opt-ins, and transactions your affiliates are getting through their links. You can also set up a coupon all your affiliates can use so that their audience can get a special deal and they can get credited for the sale.

Website

Kajabi is a fully functional website platform. They have 11 templates and also connect you to vetted third-party providers who sell templates. Kajabi has put a lot of attention to making their website platform user-friendly and has developed it in a way that makes it easy to produce great looking websites that clearly convey your message. Look at my Kajabi Websites article for a list of websites that have been built on Kajabi.

Landing Pages

Kajabi’s landing pages are built with the same editor as the website pages. This helps flatten the learning curve as the skills you get in one part of the platform completely transfer to the other. Kajabi gives you about 50 templates for landing pages over the themes, sales, podcast, thank you, optin, link in bio, and coming soon. The link in bio templates are great to help drive traffic to your website and not rely on third-party apps like link tree.

Landing Pages has AI integration that can help you set up the outline for the copy of your page, help you with headings or bullet lists, or provide whole paragraph copy if that is what you are looking for.

Each landing page has its own mini analytics page showing views and form opt-ins that is easy to access. Setting up the page title, meta description, url, and sharing image is also easy to do for each page.

Blog

The Kajabi blog uses a template-based approach that makes it easy to add blog posts and schedule content. For an example of what the Kajabi blog looks like, look at your screen… you’re seeing it right now :). My favorite thing about the blog is that it is easy to use. When something is easy, it gets done, and when something gets done, it can start making you money.

Email Marketing

Kajabi is a fully functional email marketing platform. It has a great email reputation that you can rely on to get good delivery rates or you can connect your custom domain to it and send emails from your own domain. Kajabi email lets you send individual emails, create email sequences, have event-based emails, and offers a wide variety of automations to stitch together your funnels.

There are many email templates to give you inspiration for design and you are able to save your own emails as templates for future use. Kajabi email includes analytics on sends, delivered, opened, clicked, hard bounced and unsubscribed. Look at my Kajabi Email Marketing Article for more information about Kajabi’s email feature.

Funnels

Kajabi has 7 funnel templates to get you started or you can choose to start from scratch and build your funnel from the ground up. The funnels feature brings together in one palace, the features of landing pages, email marketing, forms, offers, and automations so you don’t have to bounce around in Kajabi going from one place to the next. This is great because it means you again don’t have to learn a new way of doing things but can rely on the skills you have developed while spending time in each feature. You also get extra analytics in the funnels area.

Events

Kajabi Events are used for specific date in time type things, like a webinar or a workshop. In an event, you can set up emails that deliver before and after the event to get people excited about coming, give them the meeting details, and offer them the next step in their journey. You can duplicate events, so once you have it set up it is easy to repeat and you save time not having to recreate all the emails.

Forms

Kajabi Forms is where you set up what information your form collects, if it is single or double opt-in, and what your form does after it collects the information. You can use the default form fields or create your one field to collect specific details like what workshop to attend, Tuesday or Thursday. In the Kajabi growth plan, you can use conditional logic automations so you can give people different experiences based on what they provide in the form.

Assessments

Kajabi assessments is a good tool for collecting data from your customers. I see this being used the most as a tool to set a benchmark for your customers when they join your program so they can see how much they have improved by a later date when they take it again. The assessment tool isn’t very flexible but in most cases, it gets the job done.

Contacts

Kajabi Contacts is a built-in CRM tool that keeps track of who is on your email list and what they do within your business. It tracks purchases and makes it easy to see a customers life time value, the transactions they have had, send them the receipt for that transaction and see what product that translation gave them. It makes it easy to modify the access date for a product as well as revoke or grant access. Kajabi has a tag system that makes it easy to track actions taken and filter your list to see who has done what. They also show the last 20 or so emails that a contact has been sent and what their engagement with each email was.

Within Kajabi contacts you can filter your list many different ways throughout 17 categories and get information about specific actions taken, or general engagement. There is also an insights area where you get specific analytics related to the growth of your email list and email engagement.

Analytics

Kajabi Analytics gives you detailed information in the areas of Net Revenu, Subscription Metrics, Opt-ins, Page Views, Product Progress, Offers Sold, Affiliates, and Payments. Each website, landing, and funnel page also has its own analytics so you can see page views and opt-ins.

Creator Studio

The Kajabi Creator Studio is really cool. This tool was introduced in 2023 and has grown so much. It takes your videos that are already uploaded into Kajabi, either in one of your courses or from a page, and helps you transform them into shareable bites for social media. It creates a transcript for the video and then you just need to click on the groups of words you want to include and it slices the video and blends it together into something you can share. You can add images or text afterward and it even connects to your social networks to make it easy to post.

The creator studio also creates transcripts for closed captions that you can add to the videos on your pages or in your course. Adding closed captions is a great way to increase the accessibility of your content. Kajabi has a search function within the closed captions so your customers can open a video, search for a word or phrase, and can see where in the video that word or phrase was said and jump right to it.

Automations

Within the Kajabi Basic plan, you get access to all the automations you need to perform the standard actions of an online business. If you want to introduce conditional logic, you need to upgrade to the Kajabi Pro plan. For example: when a person completes a form and chooses weight loss, they get a different tag than if they chose yoga.

Artificial Intelligence

Kajabi has integrated artificial intelligence throughout the platform.  In a general sense, they have Ama, short for Ask Me Anything, which you can find beside your user menu in most of the areas of Kajabi and ask any question you want. They also provide a very helpful AI Promt document to help you get good results from Ama.

Kajabi AI also helps you with creating course outlines, landing pages, funnels, and marketing emails.

Hire an Expert

Hire an Expert is a marketplace within Kajabi where you can find experts who have been vetted by Kajabi and know the platform very well. You can higher coaching, done for you work, or buy templates.

What is Kajabi best for?

Kajabi is best for “digital products” like online educational content. This content ranges from coaching services, online courses, exclusive membership content, and other digital products. As an educational platform, it includes the infrastructure for communication between educators and students as well as open forums for students. It also includes marketing and sales software, customizable website themes, gamification capabilities, and tools for creating video content and other materials.

Can you make money on Kajabi?

Kajabi is a great platform for earning revenue on educational content. In other words, if you can make courses that people will buy, then you can make money on Kajabi. A Kajabi membership also includes comprehensive materials on how to leverage your platform for the highest return.

On the Kajabi website, they suggest these tips for beginning creators:

1. Use video content. Video content typically performs better than other mediums when it comes to perceived course value.
2. Use mini-courses. Mini-courses are less of a commitment than full courses—which can make them easier for both students and digital creators to commit to.
3. Offer special interest PDFs. A short PDF that sells for 20 dollars can be a high source of revenue if it provides information people are interested in. Valuable PDFs could include recipes, DIY instructions, step-by-step solutions, or any other specialized information that users might rely on.
4. Test the water with Facebook Live Streams. You can start sharing information and education in a casual setting, like Facebook Live. Asking for a small fee can help clients commit to your content and anticipate more content from you down the road.
5. Bundle products. If you already have a cache of educational resources, you can offer a bundle or all-access pass for a discounted rate, and let users engage at their own pace.

It is possible to sell physical products on Kajabi, but the platform is designed for digital and educational content. It sells things as single items, there is no add-to-cart experience where you can add many times or multiples of each item to your cart and then checkout. This is perfect for buying a digital course since you are just buying one of them and are creating login credentials that you will need to access the content

Is Kajabi user-friendly?

Having a user-friendly platform for online educational content is critical—both for creators and students. My opinion is yes, and from what I see online, most reviewers agree: Kajabi is easy to use, intuitive, and supportive. They have an easy user interface, a strong support network, and fully equipped automatic features that do most of the work for you. These features help make the process of creating and distributing online courses natural and easy.

What third parties will I need if I use Kajabi?

Kajabi delivers most services you need as an online educator, eliminating the hassle of coordinating third-party services. If you are interested in other third-party features, Kajabi integrates with Aweber, Mailchimp, Drip, Google Analytics, Facebook, and several other companies. If you need a course accreditation certificate, you can use Accredible.

Kajabi also partners with Stripe and Paypal to process payments if you aren’t going to use Kajabi's in-house payment processor.

How much does Kajabi cost?

For a full breakdown of Kajabi costs see my Kajabi pricing post. Kajabi does not have a free plan but offers free trials for 14 days from their website. If you are interested in trying out Kajabi, I recommend getting a 30-day free trial and the free extra support I give all my referrals. Like many other platforms, they have monthly plans as well as an annual counterpart, if you subscribe to the annual payment you will get a 20% discount from the monthly fee.

The cost will also vary depending on which plan you choose. Kajabi has three plans: Basic, Growth, and Pro.

Kajabi Basic

Kajabi’s Basic plan is designed for beginners in the digital education field. Beginners may not yet have a customer base, or may only have early outlines or portions of their content ready. The basic plan helps creators find an audience and curate more material with intuitive, easy-to-use tools.

A few features of the Basic plan include:

• 3 products
• 1,000 active customers
• 1 website
• 1 Admin User
• Unlimited landing pages
• Basic automations

The plan also comes with several creator support services, including Kajabi University and chat support during regular business hours.

The Kajabi Basic plan costs either $149 per month or $119 a month if you pay annually.

Kajabi Growth

Kajabi’s Growth plan is designed for entrepreneurs who already have developed course material and have an existing audience. This plan includes all of the fundamentals that come with the basic plan, as well as additional tools and features.

Some additions and upscaled features include:

• 15 products
• 10,000 active customers
• 10 Admin Users
• The option to remove Kajabi branding
• Affiliate program (where partners can refer students to your course for a small commission)
• Advanced automations

The Kajabi Growth plan costs either $199 per month or $159 a month if you pay annually.

Kajabi Pro

Kajabi’s Pro plan is designed for already successful companies that are interested in escalating the scope and reach of their programs. It has all of the features of Kajabi Basic and Growth, with additional benefits.

Extra Kajabi Pro bonuses include:

• 100 products
• 250,000 active customers
• 3 websites
• 25 Admin Users
• Code Editor

The Kajabi Pro plan costs either $399 per month or $319 a month billed annually.

What are the drawbacks of Kajabi?

I love Kajabi and use it for my business, but it isn’t perfect. I’ve compiled my concerns as well as some of what I’ve heard from the Kajabi Facebook Community and other users. The three concerns we found that any content creator might want to consider are:

1. There is a Learning Curve. While Kajabi does provide an easy-to-use platform for inexperienced users. When you start, it is a new program, and you will have to put the time in to learn it. You’ll make the most out of Kajabi by getting the free extra support I give all my referrals in the first 2 months. It helps a lot to have an experienced user to ask your questions to when you first jump in. Kajabi also provides a vault of tips and tricks called Kajabi University, all of which are included in any of the plans.
2. Cost. Kajabi's monthly fees are higher than fees at some of Kajabi’s competitors. This is largely because Kajabi provides services that are not included in other monthly memberships, it is an all-in-one platform.
3. All-or-nothing bundles. Related to the cost, every Kajabi plan comes with a bundle of services. If you need some or most of these services, bundling them can help you save time, money, and hassle. That said, if you don’t need a decent portion of the services provided, you’d be paying extra for a product you might not end up using.

Some more feature-specific concerns are that formatting text can sometimes be trickier than you think it should be and the emails don’t look as good as flowdesk. Honestly, that is a fair point, flowdesk has a great email editor. However, if people are opening your emails because they like the way they look, and not because they like the way reading your content makes them feel, they probably aren’t going to buy your stuff.

Is Kajabi worth it?

If you are looking for an industry-leading platform for providing educational content, that is easy to use for both you and your customers, Kajabi is a great platform—especially if you don’t want to put the time and money into setting up third-party services for things like marketing automation, or deal with the extra time needed to learn how to use and connect different platforms for your website, landing pages, funnels, and sales. With Kajabi, you get a huge amount of value for your dollar and you can save yourself a lot of time and hassle.

Of course, it’s not for everyone, but if you’re in the process of developing educational content and you want to know whether or not Kajabi is a good deal, you can try it out with confidence knowing that it is an industry-leading platform trusted by tens of thousands of digital entrepreneurs.

Kajabi 30-Day Free Trial

If you think now is the right time to try out Kajabi you can sign up with my 30-day free trial link and I will give you 3 free sign-up bonuses. I am an affiliate for Kajabi and have helped over 100 people test it out and see if it is right for them. The help I give my referrals is designed to help you understand as quickly as possible if Kajabi is right for you and will meet your needs. The goal is to know if you want to keep using it before your trial is over. Check out my bonuses page, I’ll help flatten the learning curve for you and be there to answer your questions.

Happy Kajabi-ing Ahead

JD Kajabi Expert