It’s been said that online learning is going to be a trillion-dollar industry by 2030 - which means there is still time for you to claim your chunk of digital real estate and enjoy a slice of the pie! What’s more, it’s never been this easy to create and sell your knowledge and expertise online. There are countless platforms you can use to launch your info products business with a few clicks.
But, choosing the right one is key to unlocking a smooth, seamless creation process and providing the best experience possible for your students. That’s why we’re here to break down two top contenders and help you find the right solution: Thinkific vs Kajabi.
While each platform has been referred to as the #1 choice for course creation and sales, only one can reign supreme. We’re going to take a deep dive into the intricacies of each platform and highlight where they exceed along with where they fall short. By the time you’ve finished this complete breakdown on Kajabi vs Thinkific, you’ll be well on your way to creating a thriving business. Let’s start with a general overview of both platforms below.
A General Overview of Kajabi vs Thinkific
Before we get into the actual Kajabi vs Thinkific debate, we want to iterate that regardless of where you choose to build, what matters more is your commitment to the process, the value of your expertise & knowledge, and your ability to find students.
That last point is emphasized because as you’ll learn below, the biggest difference between these two platforms is in how they allow you to market your courses and find new students.
Let’s get the ball rolling by unpacking Kajabi.
Kajabi: Overview, Plans, & More
Kajabi is one of the simplest, most intuitive platforms for turning what you know best into an informational product. That can be a course, a podcast, a coaching program, membership to a community, you name it. Over 100,000 different businesses have used Kajabi to earn more than $5 billion in revenue.
And, the overarching theme of this entire Kajabi vs Thinkific conversation can be summarized by this: Kajabi doesn’t just help you create these products. It helps you market them to get your products in front of the right people. More on that later. For now, let’s unpack the three different plans you can choose from as a Kajabi creator:
- Basic ($119/month): This entry-level plan gives you the ability to create up to 3 products and build 3 funnels to sell your offers. You can have unlimited landing pages and send unlimited marketing emails, but you’re limited to 10,000 contacts and 1,000 active customers.
- Growth ($159/month): Stepping up to this mid-tier plan, you gain the ability to sell up to 15 products and build out 15 funnels. And now, you can house as many as 25k contacts and 10k active customers at once - with up to 10 different admin users helping you manage your business. It’s also worth noting that in this plan, you unlock affiliate programs, more advanced automations, 24/7 chat support, and the removal of Kajabi branding for a more cohesive experience for you and your students.
- Pro ($319/month): Kajabi’s top plan offers everything mentioned so far, but you get a custom code editor - so you can really create the website and courses of your dreams. You also can scale much higher with up to 100 products and 100 funnels, 100k contacts, and 20k active members. You also get the option to build up to 3 unique websites and work alongside 25 admin users.
Thinkific: Overview, Plans, & More
Thinkific is one of the most sophisticated course creation and community-building platforms the world has to offer - and it’s a worthy competitor to a platform like Kajabi. It’s trusted by brands like Shopify, Hootsuite, Later, and countless others as a means of creating and marketing your expertise.
Where Thinkific really shines is in the ability to customize every single touch point within your business - from the landing pages down to the course experience. We’ll talk more about this as we compare and contrast Thinkific vs Kajabi side by side. First, though, let’s go over the different plans available and their respective prices:
- Free: This is one of the big advantages Thinkific has over Kajabi - a free plan. You can get your business off the ground without committing to a monthly payment plan. Here, you get 1 course, 1 community, 2 spaces per community, unlimited students, and 0% transaction fees, and email support for the first 30 days - that’s pretty incredible for a free plan!
- Basic ($49/month): When you decide to scale up to the basic plan, you can create unlimited courses and you’ll also get 5 spaces per community. You also get access to Thinkific’s Accelerator program to help you hit the ground running while leveraging email and live chat support. Other features include a custom domain, coupons & discounts, and an affiliate program.
- Start ($74/month): There are some big benefits to stepping up to the Pro plan. You get everything mentioned so far along with 10 spaces per community. But, the real kicker is in the ability to create assignments for students, create bundles & add-on packages, offer memberships & payment plans, live lessons, and more advanced course-building options - along with a more advanced website code editor.
- Grow ($149/month): This plan gives you more ways to optimize your courses while expanding into new learning products. You can host three different communities with up to 20 spaces per community. You also can bring another admin user into your ecosystem with this tier. Your support is bumped up to a priority level, and you can reach support via phone. You can also leverage the bulk student emailer, bulk enrollments, and access API capabilities while removing any Thinkific branding.
While you’ll likely fall into one of these four plans, Thinkific also supports an enterprise-level plan for the largest companies out there - guaranteeing uptime of 99.9%, email white-labeling, bulk selling apps, single sign-on, and more. But at this point, it’s time to start comparing Thinkific vs Kajabi side by side.
Thinkific vs Kajabi: Breaking Down Key Differences to Help You Choose the Right Course Creation Platform
The Thinkific vs Kajabi debate really boils down to a few key comparisons:
- The course/product creation experience
- The learning experience for students themselves
- Sales & marketing capabilities
- Creator support
- Pricing
In this section, we’re going to see how Kajabi vs Thinkific stack up against one another in comparing these five factors. Let’s start with what matters most: course/product creation.
Course/Product Creation Experience
With Kajabi, there is a multitude of ways to create info products for your community. You can offer mini-courses, standard online courses, drip courses, memberships, coaching programs, and a community itself. Within that community, you’re able to sell anything you see fit - from PDFs to e-books.
Now - Thinkific is an incredible course creation platform in its own right, as we mentioned earlier. But it’s a bit limited in terms of versatility. Think about it like this: it’s designed to do one thing really well. And that is creating courses. You may find that other info products - like memberships, coaching programs, and the community itself - leave a bit to be desired.
With that said, the usability of Thinkific’s course creation interface is as simple and seamless as it gets. Even those who don’t consider themselves tech-savvy will find it easy to use.
The best way to examine just how solid a platform’s course/product/website creation experience is by looking at the Creator Friendliness Score - which helps creators gain unbiased insights into how platforms stack up against one another. While Kajabi does have an edge in many ways over Thinkific, this score is not one of them:
- Kajabi: 68.83
- Thinkific: 84.42
Learning Experience for Students
The overall learning experience for students matters most - as this is how you create a sustainable info products business. If you don’t have students raving about your products, it’ll be much more challenging to grow.
And while both Thinkific and Kajabi offer a great experience for students, Kajabi takes the cake. Chances are, you’ll have students who want to take their learning experience on the go with them - and Kajabi makes this more seamless than Thinkific through their mobile app experience. Students don’t have to try and navigate the web on their phone - they can pull up courses and the community itself in an iOS or Android app.
As you may already realize, this is not something that is offered with Thinkific. If students want to learn from their mobile phones, they’ll have to use web navigation - which can be quite clunky on any platform. With that said, Thinkific does offer more sophisticated quiz options - like the ability to ask multiple question types and randomize the questions you ask in quizzes.
Sales & Marketing Capabilities
You can create the most incredible, value-packed course for your students - but if you don’t have students, what’s the point? That’s why we want to stress the importance of factoring marketing and sales into the Kajabi vs Thinkific debate.
As we mentioned briefly earlier, this is where Thinkific falls a bit short. You can easily get your Thinkific website up and running in a few minutes as there really isn’t much to it - which is a good thing for those who just want to get started, but a bad thing for those who want to create a more customized experience.
Thinkific also lacks a blog which means content marketing is tougher - you’ll have to host a blog elsewhere. You also don’t have access to integrated email marketing tools, so again, you’ll need additional software in your stack. Sales funnels are nonexistent on Thinkific as well. To make up for this, Thinkific is outfitted with an array of integration capabilities - but this just leads to added costs and headaches.
That’s where Kajabi really shines. You’re actually given the tools you need to market and sell your products. First and foremost, you have access to way more themes in actually building your website. This makes it easier to create a unique brand experience that you’re proud to show off. The platform also accommodates landing pages so you can start building your email list from day one. The email marketing tool within Kajabi gives you everything you need to build campaigns and set up automations. And within Kajabi you can access your own CRM software - helping you segment lists and students as you see fit.
But that’s not all - there is also a blog within Kajabi, so you can build out a content marketing channel and focus on SEO. This will bring in qualified leads on autopilot to help you grow your business while you sleep. Kajabi also offers pipelines - which are sales funnels - that further supercharge your sales and marketing channels.
All of this is to say that Kajabi places an increased focus on sales and marketing within their platform. This allows you to consolidate other tech and eliminate headaches while scaling your business.
Support for Creators
Whether you’re a new creator starting from scratch or you’re trying to bring in an existing database of students over from another platform, you may need some help along the way. And that’s why support is so important in a creator platform. The good news? Both Thinkific and Kajabi offer terrific support for creators. With that said, there is an obvious edge to Kajabi here.
You get 24-hour technical support via live chat with Kajabi - whereas you only have access to phone or email support with Thinkific. The latter claims that most inquiries are answered within 5 hours - which isn’t bad, until you consider the fact that Kajabi responds immediately.
There is also Kajabi University which can help answer most of your questions right off the bat. Meanwhile, Thinkific offers a document support channel of its own through the free Thinkific Acadamy course or their Accelerator Program on paid plans.
Looking beyond the actual customer support channels of each platform, they both offer groups with other creators to help answer questions, gain inspiration, and network. However, Kajabi’s group is nearly twice the size of Thinkific - so do with that information what you will.
Pricing
In comparing pricing, we want to weigh Kajabi’s Basic plan ($119/month) to Thinkific’s Start plan ($74/month), as these are the most comparable in terms of cost & features. On the surface, Thinkific looks to cost much less than Kajabi - but do you get what you pay for when opting for the cheaper platform?
While you gain access to a few cool features in Thinkific that you miss out on in Kajabi - like Live events in communities, certificates for course completion, live lessons with Zoom - you also need to consider all the additional software subscriptions you pay for with Thinkific that you wouldn’t with Kajabi. So in the end, it’s hard to say which actually offers more bang for your buck.
Kajabi vs Thinkific: The Verdict
Now it’s time for what you really came here for today: we’re going to give you our verdict in the Kajabi vs Thinkific debate. Because so much of your success as a creator is contingent on sales and marketing, we believe Kajabi reigns supreme over Thinkific.
With that being said, you can start and grow a thriving course and community business on either platform. It’s less about where you build, and more about what/how you build. We encourage you to make a decision on either of these platforms and then get to work - because ultimately, neither platform can do the work for you!
Parting Thoughts on Whether You Should Create on Thinkific vs Kajabi
Hopefully, you feel more confident in choosing between Kajabi vs Thinkific after reading this comparison post. Both offer a few key features that the other lacks, but it’s hard to argue against Kajabi as the more all-in-one platform. You don’t have to integrate 3rd party software to market and sell your products. And, you can create a more on-brand experience with greater customization capabilities.
However, Thinkific does offer a free plan for those who want to get started without any costs. This platform also offers more advanced quiz options and course bundles.
But before you pull the trigger on one of these platforms, we encourage you to read a few other comparison posts we’ve put together to empower creators like you along their journey. You can learn about Kajabi vs Podia, Podia vs Teachable, Podia vs Thinkific, Circle vs Tribe, Mighty Networks vs Kajabi, and Circle vs Mighty Networks.
If your heart is set on either Thinkific vs Kajabi, though, then it’s time to weigh the pros and cons yourself and figure out what matters more to you. Then, get the ball rolling and take action!