The main difference between the two platforms is that Kajabi at its core is an online course platform that also offers tools for building a website and marketing funnels while Kartra, on the other hand, is primarily a marketing platform that also offers features for hosting and delivering online courses and memberships.
Now, let’s take a deeper look to find out whether Kajabi or Kartra is a superior online business platform.
At a high level, both these platforms allow you to create and deliver digital products (online courses, memberships, etc.), build a website, create marketing funnels and run automated email campaigns.
We’ll get into the details of each of these in the subsequent sections but before that, let me explain the fundamental difference between Kajabi vs Kartra.
Kajabi is first an online course creator and its target audience is primarily online coaches, course creators, and membership site owners.
So, the most important thing in the Kajabi ecosystem is to let its users deliver the best learning experience to their members.
You can think of it as the core of the platform and everything else it offers, be it tools for website creation or sales & marketing, they are built on top of this core.
On the other hand, Kartra is first a marketing platform and then it also offers the ability to create online courses and memberships. So, Kartra’s primary focus is on offering a more powerful and extensive suite of marketing tools.
Plus Kartra doesn’t have a niche audience like Kajabi. It isn’t focused only on people selling online courses rather it targets a much wider audience which also includes those selling physical products or offering services.
Now I am not suggesting at this point that Kajabi’s sales and marketing tools or Kartra’s membership features aren’t good but I just want you to understand the basic philosophy behind the two platforms because that will make your job easier.
Another good thing about content uploading in Kajabi is that it supports cloud import which means you can easily import content into your products directly from Google Drive/Dropbox.
Moreover, you can edit any of the lessons and add or modify your content, add downloads to your lessons, change comments settings, etc.
Moreover, Kartra doesn’t support features like bulk uploading and cloud import which make it difficult to add content to your membership.
However, the biggest problem with creating courses or memberships in Kartra is that it puts a limit on the video bandwidth that you can use.
Unlimited video hosting is really an essential feature that most of the popular membership website platforms offer and so, almost everyone uses an external video hosting solution like Vimeo which means not just extra cost but also additional work.
The only thing that I like about Kartra membership builder is that it gives you a lot of flexibility for adding content to individual posts. There are 15+ element types that you can add and you can show them in any order you want.
In this section, we’ll discuss in detail the features that Kartra vs Kajabi offer for website building and blogging.
To start with, both platforms offer free hosting and SSL certificate for your website. Plus their team takes care of all the technical things like security, backups, updates, and maintenance.
You also get a free subdomain (xxxx.kartra.com or xxxx.mykajabi.com) for your website and you can use your own custom domain as well if you want.
When it comes to actual site-building tools, Kajabi has a library of 6 site themes that you can choose from.
The themes dictate the overall look and feel of your website and allow you to easily and quickly build a good looking website.
In addition, Kajabi provides you the option to import and use custom themes. So, you can hire a developer to build a completely custom theme for your website or if you’re a power user, you can do it yourself.
Installing a site theme is like the first step in the process and in order to build pages and further customize your website, you’ll need to use the page builder.
The builder has 20+ pre-designed templates for your pages. While the templates are clean and modern, the range is not very extensive and I hope they add more templates to it.
Once you select a template, you’ll be taken to the drag-n-drop editor where you can make changes to the existing design or create a custom design from scratch.
To start with, you can choose from a list of 40+ pre-built sections available in the page editor. There are sections available for various purposes.
For example, you can create a hero section with a background image or a video, a multi-column layout to show features, add pricing tables, list your courses, show your blog posts, add an opt-in form, display a countdown timer, etc.
Moreover, you can easily modify a section within your page. You just need to click on a specific element in the area on the right and an editing area will open on the left where you can see various options to modify the text, change colors, add animation and do other stuff.
If you want to remove certain sections or elements or change their order, you can do that as well and when you make any of these changes, you will see them in the real-time on the right.
Overall, Kajabi’s page builder gives you a lot of design flexibility and you can create any type of design you want but at the same time, it is very intuitive to use as well.
As far as Kartra is concerned, it doesn’t have any site themes feature and you’ll have to rely completely on the page builder to build your website. However, the good thing is that the page builder is really powerful.
It has 200+ templates for all types of pages including home page, sales page, etc. and I like how vast and refreshing Kartra’s page templates’ designs are.
And then you can completely customize these templates using their page editor. The page editor is again drag-n-drop and it’s a live editor which means you can see the changes you make to your page in real-time.
The building block in Kartra pages is called “Sections” and there are several section types for things like hero section, testimonials, pricing table, FAQs, etc.
What I like about “Sections” in Kartra is that you have tons of templates for each section type, something which is missing in Kajabi.
Once you add a section to your page, you can further modify it. You can add/delete individual elements like text, headlines, buttons, videos, etc. to a section, modify their style as well as add animation effects.
Another handy feature that Kartra page builder offers is called “Sites” which allows you to share global components (headers, footers, custom styles, etc.) among multiple pages. It is a useful feature and it makes up for lack of site themes in Kartra to some extent.
The only thing that I don’t like about Kartra’s page builder is that it is a little clunky and can be slow to load at times.
As far as blogging is concerned, Kartra doesn’t have any blogging features. It does have a few page templates for blog posts but then it can’t replace a blog.
On the other hand, Kajabi lets you create and manage a blog on the platform. So, you can create new blog posts and add content including videos to them.
Kajabi even creates an index page for your blog posts automatically which you can further customize as you want.
Finally, Kajabi lets you configure SEO settings, organize blog posts into categories, show opt-in forms and customize your sidebar elements. Basically, you can create a fully-functional blog on Kajabi.
However, you should keep in mind that Kajabi isn’t meant to replace a specialized blogging platform like WordPress and so, if blogging is like your main business, Kajabi won’t be the best option to host your blog.
To sum up, both platforms offer some handy site-building tools. So, if you want to just build your sales pages and lead generation pages, Kartra vs Kajabi definitely has more to offer.
On the other hand, if you’re looking for a platform to not just build landing pages but also a fully-fledged website along with a blog, Kajabi vs Kartra will be a better option.
In this section, we’ll discuss what different tools do Kajabi and Kartra offer for sales and marketing and see how they compare to each other.
Now the two platforms don’t just let you accept payments and sell your products but they also allow you to build end-to-end marketing funnels. So, you get tools for lead generation, email marketing, checkout pages, affiliate marketing, etc.
Let’s discuss each of them individually.
To price your product, you create what is called an “Offer” in Kajabi. Your offer can either be a one-time product or a recurring subscription or even a payment plan.
For recurring subscriptions, you have the flexibility to create weekly, monthly, quarterly or annual subscription. Plus you can create a free trial or even charge an initial setup fee.
Now Kartra gives you all the options for pricing that Kajabi offers. In addition, it has something called “Recurrent Instalments” which allows you to create a complex pricing structure which is a combination of recurring payments and payment plans.
For example, if you want to charge your customers 3 monthly installments of 99 USD every year, you can do that with Kartra. Even though such a pricing model isn’t very popular, it’s still good to have.
Moreover, both platforms give you the flexibility to decide access to what products are available in which pricing offers, which is useful if you want to create multi-tiers for your course or membership.
While Kajabi is meant to sell digital products mainly, Kartra also supports physical products. So, Kartra lets you charge a shipping cost separately and you can set a custom shipping charge for each destination.
With Kajabi, you don’t have the ability to charge shipping fees separately. The workaround is to include the shipping fee in your product price which obviously has its limitations.
Another handy feature that Kartra offers is the ability to collect sales taxes (e.g. EU VAT). It allows you to configure a sales tax % for different regions and Kartra will automatically add the correct sales tax amount depending on the customer’s location.
Kajabi at this point doesn’t have the capability to handle sales taxes and you’ll have to rely on an external solution like Quaderno for the same.
When it comes to payment processors, Kajabi supports Stripe and PayPal and you can use them to process both one-time and recurring payments which is awesome.
On the other hand, Kartra supports 4 payment gateways – Stripe, PayPal, Authorize.net and Braintree and so, it gives you more options.
Now let’s talk about checkout pages. With Kajabi, you just have one checkout page template. The template is well-designed from a conversion point of view and you can further customize it.
So, you can easily add a sales video, display product details, show testimonials, highlight your refund policy, etc. Plus you have complete control over what information you want to collect from your customers.
Moreover, Kajabi supports important checkout features like 1-click upsells, order bumps and cart abandonment.
Now Kartra has much more to offer for building checkout pages. So, it has a library of 30+ checkout page templates that you can choose from and you can customize them fully using the page builder.
Kartra also supports all the important checkout features like 1-click upsells and order bumps. In addition, it also allows you to create downsells in your funnel.
Overall, Kartra vs Kajabi is the clear winner when it comes to pricing your product and building a checkout page.
We’ve already talked about the page-building capabilities of the two platforms in the previous section.
While both the page builders are pretty flexible and give you a lot of design options, Kartra’s library of templates is much more extensive. You get more than 200+ templates compared to just about 20 templates in Kajabi’s library.
Moreover, Kartra gives you the ability to A/B test your landing pages, something which isn’t supported by Kajabi currently.
Another useful lead generation tool that both platforms offer is “Forms”. So, you can create opt-in forms that you can use on your landing pages or you can embed them on an external website.
Plus you can display the forms based on a time delay or when a user tries to exit your page.
Having said that, the Forms feature in Kajabi is pretty basic. You have no templates and you can only do basic customizations in the design.
On the other hand, Kartra has dozens of templates for opt-in forms and you can completely customize them using the page builder.
Apart from these essential tools, there are a couple of additional features that these platforms offer for lead generation.
We’ve discussed about Kajabi Assessments in one of the previous chapters but the nice thing about it is that it also allows you to create marketing quizzes.
So, you have the ability to create quizzes and add them to your landing pages so as to collect leads and segment your visitors.
Kartra currently doesn’t have inbuilt support for creating lead generation quizzes but they’re already working to add this feature to the platform.
Similarly, one feature that Kartra offers is Videos. So, Kartra Videos let you use videos to collect leads, show timed CTAs, display share buttons, etc.
Now, Kajabi also lets you host marketing videos and you can also show CTAs at the end but that’s pretty much it. You don’t have the ability to show opt-in forms and collect leads.
When it comes to email marketing, both Kajabi and Kartra allow you to manage your email list, send broadcast emails as well as autoresponders and automate your entire email marketing workflow.
In order to create automated email campaigns, you can use the sequence builder. You can add a new email by clicking on the “Add New Email” button at the top and you can define the amount of delay after it should be sent.
Moreover, you can define triggers for when someone should be added to or removed from your email sequence.
For list management, Kajabi has the tagging feature. So, you can add a tag to your subscriber based on the lead magnet(s) they’ve signed up for, the offers they’ve purchased, the lessons they’ve completed and much more.
Finally, Kajabi has this Automations feature that allows you to take certain actions based on specific triggers and automate the entire process.
For example, when someone signs up for a lead magnet, you can add a tag to the user and subscribe him/her to an email campaign.
Similarly, when someone purchases one of your products in Kajabi, you can add another tag and remove them from the sales campaign.
Now, things work very similarly with Kartra except that it has more features to offer. To start with, Kartra’s email sequence builder is more flexible and gives your more options than Kajabi.
For example, it allows you to delay sending an email by a certain number of hours (Kajabi lets you define delay in days only) and you can also specify the days of the week on which it should go out.
Similarly, it has a “Split” step which allows you to create parallel paths in your email sequence based on a certain condition. Now, something like this is possible in Kajabi but it isn’t easy to do.
The only complaint that I have with Kartra’s sequence builder is that it’s slow and kind of clunky as it keeps reloading after anything you do in the builder.
As far as list management is concerned, Kartra too has the tagging feature but it also lets you create “lists” which is useful if you run multiple businesses on the platform.
Also, Kartra has a more powerful Automations feature than Kajabi that you can use to automate various tasks within the app.
Finally, Kartra also enables you to send SMSs to your subscribers via services like Twilio and Plivo.
Overall, Kartra vs Kajabi has better email marketing and automation capabilities and it is one of the strongest aspects of the Kartra platform.
With Kajabi, you have a Sales Pipeline Builder which is pretty intuitive and makes the process of building funnels super easy. When you get started, it asks you to select from one of the 6 available Pipeline Blueprints.
As soon as you select a blueprint, Kajabi will create all the pages, emails and even your offer for that campaign. And you can always add new pages and email campaigns to your pipeline from within the builder.
For example, if you select the Webinar blueprint, Kajabi will automatically create the registration page, the confirmation page as well as the reminder and follow up emails.
Moreover, you can customize any of the steps involved in the process. For example, if you click on a page in the pipeline, it will open the page editor on the right where you can make changes to your page.
Similarly, if you click on an email campaign, you can make changes to it right here.
So, you can build your entire sales funnel without leaving the builder at all which is an amazing experience.
As far as Kartra is concerned, sales funnel creation is one area where it lacks. While it has powerful capabilities for the individual tools, it doesn’t have a visual funnel builder like Kajabi.
So, in order to build a funnel, you will set up some pages, then exit and build a product, then set up email campaigns and then back to the pages again. Moreover, you have to manually link all the pieces together.
It may not be an issue if you’re building a simple two-step funnel (e.g. lead magnet funnel) but if you’re building more complex funnels, the process can be both time consuming and overwhelming.
Now Kartra has something called “Campaigns” which allows you to group different assets in a funnel together and you can even share them with other Kartra users but without a visual funnel builder, it isn’t very helpful.
Both Kajabi and Kartra offer you all the essential tools to create and manage an affiliate program for your products.
So, you can add affiliates, choose which products you want them to promote, create affiliate links, set a custom commission % for your products, send announcements to affiliates etc.
Plus you can track the performance of your affiliates in the admin dashboard and export their payout reports in order to send them payments.
Having said that, Kartra also offers some advanced affiliate marketing features which are currently missing from Kajabi.
For example, you can enable instant PayPal payments for your affiliates and you can also set a minimum sales threshold to release affiliate payments.
Similarly, Kartra allows you to collect and manage tax forms (W9 or W8BEN) from your affiliates and you can prevent them from being paid until they filled the tax form.
If you’re an advanced affiliate marketer, you also get features like ability to set a second-tier commission and grant affiliate commissions upon lead generation rather than sale.
Now, there are a couple of other handy marketing tools that we haven’t discussed in this section.
The first one is Kajabi Events which lets you set a date and time with a sequence of emails around it, enabling you to set up live webinars, evergreen webinars, virtual summits, etc. inside Kajabi.
Kartra doesn’t have a similar feature and it relies on third party tools like WebinarJam to create “Events”.
Another such feature is Kartra Calendars. It is a fully-fledged scheduling tool that allows you to set your availability, book appointments, accept payments, manage cancellations and do much more.
Now Kajabi doesn’t have an inbuilt scheduling tool and you’ll have to use an external solution like Book Like A Boss.
Both Kajabi and Kartra allow you to integrate with analytics and tracking solutions like Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, etc.
In addition, you can integrate with popup solutions (e.g. ConvertBox), evergreen scarcity tools (e.g. Deadline Funnel) and for that matter any software that just requires you to place a script in the head of your website.
When it comes to integrating with other email marketing solutions, Kajabi has direct integration with five tools – Aweber, MailChimp, Drip, ConvertKit, and Active Campaign.
As far as Kartra is concerned, it doesn’t have a direct integration with any third-party email marketing solution and anyways, it won’t make sense to use Kartra but not their email marketing tools.
Finally, both platforms have a Zapier integration which allows you to integrate with literally any other platform out there.
When it comes to customer service, Kajabi’s support is simply best-in-class. You get 24/7 live chat support and you will generally get your queries resolved in a few minutes.
Believe me, nothing beats 24×7 chat support. There have been a few instances when we needed urgent support in the middle of a launch and the chat support came as a lifesaver for us.
While you wouldn’t really need it but you also have the option to reach out to their support via email.
Now Kartra doesn’t offer live chat support to its users. The customer support is through emails, so you can create a ticket from the support portal and the Kartra team will get back to you via email.
Generally speaking, Kartra’s email support is pretty responsive and I find the quality of responses to be good as well. However, if you’re like me, you’ll definitely miss live chat support.
In addition, both platforms have a comprehensive knowledge base where you can find a how-to article/video for literally every feature on the platforms.
So, if you don’t like reaching out to customer support for every question, you’ll find their knowledge base useful.
Both platforms also have dedicated training portals for their users. So, Kajabi has something called Kajabi University and Kartra has something called Kartraverse Training Center where you can find training on how to use the software as well as other marketing stuff.
Finally, both platforms also have a private Facebook Group for their users where the users can ask their questions, seek help and feedback from peers, share their wins and network with like-minded professionals.
Now, Kajabi pricing follows a similar model. It doesn’t charge any transaction fee and all the features except a couple of them are available on all the tiers.
The first tier in Kajabi is the Basic Plan that costs $149/month and it allows you to create up to 3 Products and 3 Pipelines, and have up to 10,000 contacts and 1,000 active members.
The second tier which is also their most popular plan is called the Growth Plan. It costs $199/month and it allows you to create up to 15 Products and 15 Pipelines, and have up to 25,000 contacts and up to 10,000 active members.
Plus you also get access to advanced automation and affiliate marketing tools that are otherwise not available on the Basic Plan.
The third tier is the Pro Plan. It costs $399/month and offers much higher limits on Products, Pipelines, Contacts and Active Members.
So, Kartra definitely seems to be more reasonably priced than Kajabi. However, there are a couple of things that you need to consider.
Firstly, Kartra puts a limit on the video bandwidth which makes it not suitable for hosting your training videos.
So, most Kartra users host their membership videos using third-party services like Vimeo and Wistia which means additional cost for you.
Secondly, there are features that one platform offers but is missing from the other. For example, Kartra doesn’t offer you inbuilt blogging tools and Kajabi doesn’t have an inbuilt scheduling system or a helpdesk tool.
So, depending on what features you require, the cost can be higher for one platform or the other.
We’ve covered a lot in this guide and if you have gone through all the sections, you will have a clear idea of what the two platforms have to offer and how they differ in terms of specific features.
However, if you’re still not able to decide between Kajabi vs Kartra, let me make my recommendation based on the scenarios where I have seen each platform to work better.
On one hand, you have Kajabi which offers the best-in-class features for creating an online course/membership.
You get a super easy to use course builder, 10+ well-designed course area themes, mobile app functionality and some powerful engagement tools like Assessments, Community, Content Locking, etc. all of which result in a great learner experience.
On top of that, Kajabi offers you some very handy features for building your website, running your blog, building marketing funnels as well as automating email marketing which means you can run your entire digital products business from a single place.
So, Kajabi will be a better option for you if your core business is about selling online courses, memberships, online coaching, etc. Plus it would make sense to use Kajabi if you want to run your entire business or a major part of it through the platform.
I have seen a few “experts” suggesting to use both the platforms together — Kajabi for courses and Kartra for marketing but it would be an overkill and I don’t recommend taking this route.
I hope this Kajabi vs Kartra guide helped you make a decision. Which of these two platforms do you think will work best for you and why? Please let us know in the comments below.
If you still have any questions about either platform, leave a comment 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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