Kajabi and ClickFunnels are two of the most popular online platforms in the market and almost everyone involved in the business of selling products and services ends up comparing these two solutions at some point.
However, both platforms differ significantly from each other in terms of their features and capabilities, so much so that it can be confusing for people to figure out which one is right for them and how to use that tool in their business.
Now, there are quite a few Kajabi vs ClickFunnels comparisons on the web but most of them would tell you why one of these is literally the best platform out there without giving you the complete picture.
So here I am with the most comprehensive comparison guide where I’ll do an in-depth evaluation and discuss the pros and cons of using each of these platforms.
By the end, you’ll have a clear idea of what ClickFunnels vs Kajabi has to offer and which is better suited for your business needs.
Let’s get started
Before we start analyzing all the features of Kajabi and Clickfunnels in detail, let’s start by discussing at a high level what these two platforms are and what they can do.
Kajabi is an all-in-one platform that offers those interested in selling online courses (and other digital products) all the tools they need to build and run their business.
The core of the platform is about creating online courses and membership sites and so Kajabi offers best-in-class features for product creation, content delivery, and member engagement.
On top of this core, they offer features for building a website, creating a blog, building funnels, and doing email marketing, thus enabling users to run their entire business from a single platform.
Clickfunnels, on the other hand, is primarily asales funnel software. So you get powerful features for building landing pages and checkout flows for your campaigns. You also have an inbuilt marketing automation platform.
However, it doesn’t include the ability to build a regular website or a blog, and the membership site builder is very basic as well, so it isn’t supposed to function as an all-in-one platform.
Another important difference is that unlike Kajabi, ClickFunnels isn’t just focused on people selling digital products. In fact, all types of businesses including online creators, physical product sellers, service providers, SaaS solutions, etc. use the platform.
Now, both platforms are supposed to be easy to use so that even those with little or no technical skills can use them.
We’ll discuss if that’s really the case in the next section when we talk about the usability aspect of the two platforms.
For creating an online course/membership site, Kajabi vs ClickFunnels have very stark differences between them, and there’s a clear winner here.
As mentioned previously, Kajabi is specifically targeted towards people who want to create online courses and memberships. So it offers a lot of useful features that you won’t find in ClickFunnels.
To start with, the process of course creation in Kajabi is pretty straightforward. Once you create a new “Product”, you can easily structure it into “Categories” (modules) and “Posts” (lessons), and then you can easily add content to them.
When it comes to adding the content to your course, you can either upload it one-by-one or you can bulk import multiple videos together. Plus you can upload content from your computer or directly from the cloud (Dropbox, Google Drive, etc).
So that you know, Kajabi even takes care of content hosting for you. As part of your subscription, you get unlimited storage for your videos, audio files, PDFs, etc.
What I like most about Kajabi’s course builder is that while it is super easy to use, it still gives you a lot of control over how you want to structure your content and deliver it.
As far as ClickFunnels membership site is concerned, you can easily create a structure for your online course. You can break your course into sections and lessons and add content to them.
However, ClickFunnels doesn’t offer any inbuilt content hosting. So if your course includes videos, you’ll have to use an external video hosting solution like Vimeo and then embed the videos in course lessons.
Now, this doesn’t just mean that you’ll be paying separately for content hosting but it also slows down the process of course creation and makes content management more challenging.
Another aspect of course creation where Kajabi vs ClickFunnels differ significantly is learning and engagement tools.
With Kajabi, you have this feature called Assessments that gives you the ability to create quizzes, surveys, and assignments. So you can create graded quizzes and require your students to score a certain percentage in order to pass the quiz.
You also have a lot of flexibility in terms of how you want your students to consume your content. So you can either drip your content, or you can also create prerequisite lessons and force your students to watch the modules in a certain order.
In order to facilitate user discussions, Kajabi gives you a couple of options. You can either use their in-lesson commenting system or you can also create a standalone community area.
Now, ClickFunnels doesn’t really have much to offer here. You can’t create quizzes or assignments, it doesn’t support native comments or community features.
The only thing that you can really do is to drip your content. But even this dripping feature is kind of incomplete as you can’t even send your students automated email notifications when new content is released.
The most important aspect of course creation and delivery is the end-user experience and the difference between the two platforms is like chalk and cheese.
With Kajabi, you have several well-designed themes for the course player that will work for all types of digital products including online courses, membership sites, online coaching, etc.
You can even customize these themes further with their drag-n-drop editor to suit your needs and match your brand.
When it comes to watching content on mobile devices, all the course player themes are mobile responsive by default. In addition, Kajabi even has a mobile app for both iOS and Android devices which takes the mobile learning experience to the next level.
Contrast this to ClickFunnels, there is just one default course player theme and it isn’t well-designed. Most importantly, it isn’t mobile-friendly at all.
For instance, when a user takes your online course via mobile, they see expanded course navigation and need to scroll down to the bottom to watch the actual content.
This is a huge issue since so many learners prefer to watch content on their mobile and this will be a deal-breaker for a lot of creators.
Another major issue related to end-user experience in ClickFunnels is that your students don’t get a single account for all your courses.
So if you sell multiple courses, your students will need to create a separate account and will have a separate login for each one of them which isn’t how it should be.
If you compare this to Kajabi (or for that matter any online course software), all your courses and memberships are housed in one protected area and your students need to create an account just once.
So ClickFunnels isn’t suited for offering any sort of memberships including online courses. There is some basic functionality here and there but it feels more like an afterthought.
Kajabi, on the other hand, is a feature-rich online course platform. It allows you to quickly set up your online course, offers all the important learning and engagement tools, and is superb from an end-user experience point of view.
Simply speaking, Kajabi vs ClickFunnels is light-years ahead when it comes to creating an online course or a membership site.
It’s very important to have a good looking website for your brand as it plays a key role in selling courses online and with both ClickFunnels vs Kajabi, you have some sort of a website creation capability.
To start with, both Kajabi and ClickFunnels are hosted platforms. So you don’t need to install anything on your system or buy website hosting separately, you just need to create an account in order to start using these tools.
Plus their team takes care of all the technical stuff like security, updates, backups, as well as maintenance.
In addition, you get a free subdomain (site.mykajabi.com and site.clickfunnels.com) for your website pages. Alternatively, you can also use your own custom domain if you want.
However, the two platforms differ significantly in terms of the actual website building capabilities.
With Kajabi, you have a proper website builder which also includes the site themes feature apart from the page builder.
It offers 4 pre-designed themes that you can install on your site in 1-click. All the themes are clean and modern and allow you to create a site-level design much easier and quicker.
Additionally, you can also import and use custom themes. So if you want a completely custom theme for your website, you may hire a developer or create one yourself if you’re an advanced user.
Once you select and install a theme, you can build individual website pages using the native page builder. There are 20+ pre-built templates available for the pages that you can easily choose and modify.
As far as editing is concerned, the page builder has a drag-and-drop editor and you can see the changes you make on your pages in real-time.
Now, the page builder is not just easy to use but it also offers a lot of customization options. It has 40+ pre-designed sections that can be used for various purposes.
You can do simpler things like adding text, images, videos, etc. and then you can also do more complex things like adding a pricing table, add a multi-column layout to show features, add an opt-in form, displaying your blog posts, list your courses, etc.
Apart from this, you can easily edit these sections, move or delete certain elements in your page, modify the color, change spacing, as well as add animations.
Overall, Kajabi has powerful website building features and you can do more than just creating landing pages i.e. you can build a fully-fledged website for your business.
As far as ClickFunnels is concerned, there is no concept of a website here. It doesn’t offer any site-wide themes and you can’t create a site-wide header or footer or even define layouts at the site level.
In order to create a website, you’ll have to create individual pages using the page builder and link them together manually which is more time consuming and will be difficult to manage as well.
However, ClickFunnels’ page builder is pretty powerful and you can create all sorts of pages using it.
There are tons of different templates available for all kinds of pages including homepage, webinar registration, opt-in pages, sales pages, etc. The page template library here is definitely more varied and comprehensive than that in Kajabi.
Also, ClickFunnels offers a drag-and-drop page editor which lets you easily modify different elements and sections within your page while tracking the changes in real-time.
So you can add/delete elements like headlines, text, images, buttons, videos, etc to a section. It also supports additional elements like pricing table, testimonials, video/image popup, opt-in form, countdown timer, etc. which is pretty useful.
Moreover, the page editor is pretty flexible and lets you easily create multiple column layouts and adjust the padding and margin of various elements as well as add animations.
So ClickFunnels has pretty powerful page building capabilities and is a bit more flexible than Kajabi’s page builder (even though the latter is easier to use).
You can build individual pages for your website and your funnels but then ClickFunnels isn’t a good option for building a proper website.
Now, let’s quickly talk about the blogging capabilities of ClickFunnels vs Kajabi.
As far as ClickFunnels is concerned, it doesn’t have any blogging features. Although they do offer a few page templates for blog posts, they are more like regular pages and it can’t replace a proper blogging tool.
Meanwhile, Kajabi offers decent blogging capabilities. While it can’t match a dedicated blogging platform like WordPress, you can create a fully-functional blog on the platform itself.
So you can create blog posts, add content to them, define SEO settings for them, add opt-in forms, create a blog sidebar, group your posts into different categories as well as show them on a blog page.
In a nutshell, Kajabi is certainly more powerful in terms of website creation and blogging capabilities and is better suited for creators who want to build a fully-fledged brand website.
One of the most important offerings of both Kajabi and ClickFunnels is to build funnels. Both sales funnel software have a visual builder that lets you easily create marketing workflows.
The idea behind a visual funnel builder is to make it really easy and quick to build sales funnels for those who might not have as much time or knowledge to build one from scratch.
Kajabi calls it the ‘Sales Pipeline Builder’ and when you create a new pipeline, you can choose from a set of pre-built pipeline blueprints.
You have blueprints for lead magnet funnel, simple sales page funnel, product launch funnel, webinar funnel, etc.
When you select a blueprint, Kajabi puts together all of the pieces you need to build a funnel, including email campaigns, landing pages, forms, offers, automation rules, etc.
For instance, if you select the webinar blueprint, Kajabi will automatically create a webinar ‘Event’, registration page, confirmation page, sales page, offer checkout page as well as the pre-webinar and post-webinar emails.
Further, you can easily customize each of the steps in the pipeline builder including pages, email sequences, Events, etc. and you can do all this without leaving the builder at all.
Kajabi Pipeline Builder supports inline editing, so when you click on a page or an email sequence, it will open the editor on the right and you’ll be able to make changes right there.
I really love this feature for inline editing as it makes it quicker and easier to build and customize your sales funnels.
As far as ClickFunnels is concerned, it is really the platform that popularized the concept of a sales funnel builder and I must say that it is still one of the most powerful funnel builders out there.
To start with, ClickFunnels vs Kajabi has a wider range of sales funnel blueprints and templates.
When you create a new funnel, you’re first asked to select a funnel type. There are 20+ predefined funnel types which cover most of the commonly used funnels and is definitely more extensive than Kajabi.
Moreover, ClickFunnels has funnel types for marketing both physical and digital products while Kajabi is focused on digital products only.
Even when it comes to individual landing pages and checkout pages, ClickFunnels has a much bigger library of templates.
For example, Kajabi has just one default template for your checkout page while ClickFunnels has 30+ checkout page templates you can choose from.
In addition, there are a couple of other features that I found quite useful with ClickFunnels Funnel builder.
The first feature is that you can share your sales funnels with others by simply copying the share link and sending it to the person you want to share with and they can import entire funnels into their account easily.
Another such feature is ‘Text Optin’ which lets your users opt-in to your funnel by sending an SMS. This feature will be very handy if you want to convert attendees from an in-person event into subscribers without requiring them to actually visit a landing page.
Finally, ClickFunnels supports A/B testing for individual landing pages, so you can split test different versions of a page and track your leads and sales. This feature is currently not supported by Kajabi.
Having said that, there are a couple of areas where Kajabi does a better job.
To start with, Kajabi Pipeline Builder brings everything from pages to emails to automation rules in one place while ClickFunnels builder just supports landing pages and checkout pages.
If you want to set up your email automation in ClickFunnels, you’ll have to do it from a different builder available under Follow Up Funnels.
Secondly, it supports inline editing for all the elements which means you can completely customize the funnel without leaving the builder at all. This is much easier to use and is great from a user experience point of view.
Overall, ClickFunnels has a more powerful funnel builder with a very extensive library of funnel types and templates while Kajabi is better in terms of the actual funnel building experience.
Both Kajabi and ClickFunnels have inbuilt email marketing capabilities which include the ability to create broadcast emails as well as automated email campaigns.
With Kajabi, you can easily create email broadcasts using the pre-built email templates and the drag-n-drop editor which can be used to modify email design as well as content.
In addition, you can create automated email campaigns using the sequence builder. Here you can create the emails, set the delay between them, add automation rules, etc.
When it comes to email list management, you can add tags to your email subscribers as well as create dynamic segments. This tag-based system is more fluid and flexible than a list-based system and is what ESPs like ConvertKit use.
Moreover, Kajabi has an inbuilt Automations feature that lets you automate your entire email marketing process.
For example, when someone signs up for one of your lead magnets, you can add a tag to the subscriber and send them a specific email campaign.
Similarly, when someone buys one of your courses in Kajabi, you can add another tag and unsubscribe them from the sales email campaign.
However, what I like the most about Kajabi’s email system is the fact that it is very well integrated with other tools on the platform and work in tandem with them to give you the ability to create even more powerful marketing campaigns.
For example, you can send a unique single-use coupon to your subscribers at a specific point in their email journey, something which won’t be possible if you were using a third-party email provider.
With ClickFunnels, you have better list management features. Apart from the tagging feature, it lets you create lists as well which is very helpful if you have multiple businesses on the platform.
The automation feature in ClickFunnels is called Follow Up Funnels where you can create your autoresponders and define the automation rules.
Like Kajabi, you have the essential automation features, so you can subscribe them to or remove from email sequences based on their actions.
If you want to send one-off emails to your audience, you can create those as well using the Broadcasts feature.
While all this sounds great, there is one major issue with ClickFunnels email tool that will be a deal breaker for a lot of people.
ClickFunnels requires you to connect to a third-party SMTP solution before you can send your first email with the platform.
Contrast this to Kajabi or for that matter any email provider, they all come with inbuilt support for email sending.
Working with a third-party SMTP service comes with a lot of challenges as you have to take care of things like warming up your servers, email deliverability, etc. which requires technical knowhow and expertise which most business owners don’t possess.
As a result, Kajabi’s email marketing platform is much better in terms of usability. Otherwise the two platforms are similar in terms of email features and functionalities.
Affiliate marketing is one of the most effective ways to scale your online business and both Kajabi and ClickFunnels let you create and run your own affiliate program.
With Kajabi, it’s pretty straightforward. There is minimal set up required and everything works out of the box, so you can launch your affiliate program in a matter of minutes.
Plus you get all the essential features to run your affiliate program, so you can add new affiliates, set an affiliate commission for them, track their performance and export payout reports in order to process payments to them.
When it comes to ClickFunnels, it has a dedicated tool for affiliate marketing called BackPack. Apart from the essential features, BackPack offers some advanced affiliate tools as well that are currently not supported by Kajabi.
For instance, you can modify the cookie period to define a duration for your affiliates to receive a commission after someone visits your website.
Similarly, you have the ability to set up a two-tier affiliate program for your products. If you’re an advanced marketer, you may find this feature pretty useful.
Having said that, there are a couple of issues with BackPack that make it very unusable or impractical in a way.
Firstly, if someone is already a ClickFunnels affiliate or is an affiliate for someone else who also uses BackPack, they will have to most likely use an incognito window to log in. This is a very common complaint against BackPack.
Secondly, it only supports tracking on ClickFunnels pages. If you want affiliate tracking for a page on your main website or your blog, that won’t be possible.
Plus keep in mind that BackPack isn’t a white-label affiliate platform. Your affiliates will see ClickFunnels branding and you can’t replace it with your own logo.
All of these issues combined make Kajabi a better option than ClickFunnels for running your affiliate program even though the latter has more features.
An important criteria for selecting any online platform is that it should play well with the other tools in your tech-stack and in this section, we’ll see how the two platforms integrate with other popular marketing tools.
First and foremost, both platforms allow you to add third-party scripts, so you can integrate them with any tool that uses this type of integration.
This includes analytics and tracking solutions like Google Analytics and FB Pixel or popup solutions like ConvertBox and OptinMonster or even tools like Deadline Funnel.
Moreover, you can integrate popular payment gateways into both platforms. While Kajabi supports just Stripe and PayPal, ClickFunnels integrates with several gateways including Stripe, PayPal, Infusionsoft, Recurly, etc.
When it comes to email marketing services as well, ClickFunnels has more number of direct integrations.
So Kajabi integrates with Active Campaign, Aweber, ConvertKit, Drip, and MailChimp while ClickFunnels integrates with all of these solutions as well as others like GetResponse, Infusionsoft and Constant Contact.
Finally, both platforms also integrate with Zapier which enables you to create indirect integration with literally thousands of marketing apps and tools.
For example, you can use Zapier to integrate with an email automation platform such as Campaign Monitor with which both platforms don’t have a direct integration.
One of the areas where Kajabi stands out among all other online platforms including ClickFunnels is its best-in-class customer support.
In addition to email support, Kajabi offers 24/7 live chat support which is excellent as you’ll get your queries solved within a few minutes.
The quality of support is excellent as well and based on my experience of working with hundreds of Kajabi creators, I can tell you that their team really cares about their customers.
Now, ClickFunnels’ weakest part is its customer support. There is no ‘real’ chat support and so it’s difficult to get 1:1 technical assistance.
While the support is responsive, you’ll most likely be assisted by other ClickFunnels members and not dedicated customer support team unless you specifically ask for an expert.
So you can expect quite a bit of back and forth and a significant delay before you can get your issues resolved.
If you’re not looking for 1:1 technical assistance rather you want to learn how to use a specific feature on the platforms, you’ll be glad to know that both Kajabi and ClickFunnels have a rich knowledge base with lots of how-to articles and videos.
As far as the user community is concerned, both platforms have well-engaged Facebook groups where you can interact with other creators, exchange ideas, collect feedback on your products and campaigns, etc.
While ClickFunnels FB group is much bigger in size (250k+), it is one of those salesy type groups where people are always sharing rags to riches type stories. You’ll get a feeling that it promotes a weird-cult like following which I personally don’t like.
The Kajabi community is better in that sense as it sticks to the real aspect of a community by offering value-rich, engaging content that genuinely helps creators enhance their online business.
Before we conclude this comparison, let’s talk about the pricing plans that the two platforms have to offer. Let’s talk about ClickFunnels first.
ClickFunnels offers two main pricing plans. The lowest plan costs $97/month but it only allows you to access the core sales funnel builder.
It doesn’t offer email marketing or affiliate program features on this tier. Plus you can only have up to 20,000 monthly visitors which is a bit too low.
The lowest tier is good for those getting started but if you’ve an established business which gets decent traffic, you’ll need to be on the second tier.
The second tier is called the ClickFunnels Platinum plan (costs $297/month) and gives you access to additional features (e.g. email marketing) as well as unlimited monthly visitors.
Now, Kajabi pricing starts from $149/month. It allows you to have up to 3 products, 3 pipelines and 10,000 email contacts.
On the Basic Plan, you’ll find most of the features the platform has to offer, the only major exception being affiliate marketing tools.
The second tier and the most popular one is the Growth plan which costs $199/month and allows up to 15 products, 15 pipelines and 25,000 contacts. It includes the affiliate marketing suite and also allows you to remove Kajabi branding.
The highest tier is the Pro Plan (costs $399/month). It offers not just increased limits for products, pipelines and contacts but also allows you to have up to 3 websites.
While ClickFunnels has a lower starting price than Kajabi, the latter has a more reasonable and flexible pricing model.
Firstly, there is no limit on the number of monthly visitors you can have on your website on any of the plans which is awesome.
Secondly, most of Kajabi’s features including email marketing are available on the $149/month while you’ll have to upgrade to the $297/month ClickFunnels Plans to get email marketing tools.
Finally, you need to consider the fact that ClickFunnels has a very basic membership site builder. Plus it doesn’t offer a lot of things like inbuilt video hosting, website builder, blogging features, inbuilt SMTP, etc. for which you will have to use third-party solutions and pay separately.
We’ve covered in detail all the important features of both Kajabi and ClickFunnels and if you’ve followed the guide, you should have a clear understanding of what the two platforms can do for your business and based on that, you should be able to make a decision.
However, if you want me to make a recommendation for Kajabi vs ClickFunnels, let me share some quick pointers that should help you.
Kajabi is an all-in-one platform that offers best-in-class features for creating an online course or a membership site. It will be the right option for you if:
ClickFunnels, on the other hand, is primarily a sales funnel builder. It does have marketing automation capabilities and a membership site builder but I don’t recommend using them. It will be right for you if:
I hope this Kajabi vs ClickFunnels guide helped you make a decision and pick the right platform for your business.
If you still have any doubts or confusion regarding the two platforms, please drop a comment below and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.
Hey there! I'm Baidhurya, the brains behind SellCoursesOnline. I used to run a digital agency, where I helped course businesses launch their eLearning platforms. I also led the tech and marketing teams at StationX, helping it grow to 500K+ students. In addition, I created the popular supply chain network design course. With 8+ years of experience, I'm here to share my expertise and insights on course creation and platforms with you.
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Hey there! I’m Baidhurya, the brains behind SellCoursesOnline. I used to run a digital agency, where I helped course businesses launch their eLearning platforms. I also led the tech and marketing teams at StationX, helping it grow to 500K+ students. In addition, I created the popular supply chain network design course. With 8+ years of experience, I’m here to share my expertise and insights on course creation and platforms with you.
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