Kajabi vs Thinkific 2024: Which Is Best for Your Courses?

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Are you struggling to decide between Kajabi and Thinkific? Do you want to figure out which one is right for you? If yes, then you’ll love this guide.

Kajabi and Thinkific are two of the leading online course platforms in the market right now, and no wonder they are often compared. But which one’s better?

In this Kajabi vs Thinkific comparison guide, we’ll evaluate the two platforms in terms of features, usability, and pricing. We’ll also share insights from our experience working with these platforms.

By the end, you’ll be able to make an informed decision about the right platform.

Let’s get started.

Kajabi vs Thinkific Summary

4.6

Ease of Use

Course Creation

Website Building

Sales & Marketing

Customer Support

Pricing

4.7

Ease of Use

Course Creation

Website Building

Sales & Marketing

Customer Support

Pricing


Pros of Kajabi vs Thinkific

  • Multiple course player themes
  • Powerful community builder
  • Built-in coaching tools
  • Blogging and podcast tools
  • Sales funnel builder
  • Built-in email automation tools

Pros of Thinkific vs Kajabi

  • Better quizzing features
  • App store with 100+ apps
  • Add & manage course authors
  • Groups feature for creating cohorts
  • Unlimited courses & students
  • Flexible and affordable pricing

What Are Kajabi and Thinkific?

Kajabi and Thinkific are cloud-based platforms that allow you to create and sell online courses and memberships. Both are top-shelf solutions used by some of the biggest course creators and entrepreneurs to run their knowledge businesses.

Kajabi is an all-in-one platform that provides tools to manage all aspects of your business, including course creation and delivery, website building, blogging, sales funnels, and email marketing.

The idea behind Kajabi is to have everything under one roof so that you don’t need to stitch together various apps or learn to use them. This approach makes it much easier and quicker for you to get started.

Kajabi’s homepage
Kajabi’s homepage

On the other hand, Thinkific is a standalone platform with a focus on course creation and delivery. So you can create awesome online courses, deliver them professionally, and engage your learners.

It does offer built-in eCommerce functionality and some marketing features as well, but you won’t get tools for blogging, building funnels, and email marketing, and the idea is to use third-party platforms for these.

Thinkific’s homepage
Thinkific’s homepage

With this overview in mind, let’s discuss the specific feature differences between Thinkific vs Kajabi.

Ease of Use

An important aspect to consider when selecting an online course platform is how easy it is to use.

Both Kajabi and Thinkific are straightforward to use, and you’ll have a gentle learning curve.

On both platforms, the interface is clean and modern, and the navigation is kind of similar — individual tools are grouped into different sections, present on the left panel. When you click on an item here, the tool and its features appear on the right.

A quick walkthrough of Kajabi’s user interface

A quick walkthrough of Thinkific’s user interface

From this point, it’s all about getting familiar with the individual tools, available options, and how they work.

And the good thing is that all the platforms’ tools, such as the page builder and the course builder, use drag-and-drop functionality, making them pretty simple to use.

Having said that, Kajabi has a slightly higher learning curve. And the reason is simple: it offers way more features than Thinkific.

Kajabi overcomes this challenge by tightly integrating the tools. For instance, it has a dedicated section for creating and managing automations, but the automations option is also available inside various other tools, such as courses, offers, and funnels.

It also has a smart search bar on your dashboard, which you can use to find relevant help articles and search specific features and jump to that section of the platform.

Overall, both platforms are easy to use, and you need not worry about the learning curve or user-friendliness.

Course Creation and Engagement

In this section, we’ll take a deeper look at how the two platforms perform when creating courses and engaging your students.

Let’s start with the course builder.

Course Builder

Regarding course creation, both Kajabi and Thinkific allow you to quickly create your course structure and add content to your lessons.

Both platforms offer:

  • Unlimited video and content hosting for your courses.
  • A drag-and-drop course builder to add lessons and modules to your courses.
  • The ability to bulk upload your content and turn them into lessons.
Kajabi’s course builder
Kajabi’s course builder

What’s great is that both course builders support multiple content types natively, including videos, audio, text, quizzes, PDFs, and embeds.

However, Thinkific’s third-party apps enable you to add advanced lesson types to your course. 

For example, you can use the ThingLink app to add interactive videos. Or, you can use the Adaptive SimpleSim app to add test preparation simulations.

Lesson types supported in Thinkific
Lesson types supported in Thinkific

For adding content, you can do it one by one or bulk upload all your content at once. If you use the bulk upload feature, the platforms will automatically turn each file into a lesson.

Both platforms also allow you to reuse an existing video or copy content from another lesson.

Learning and Engagement

Keeping your students engaged is essential for a successful online course. On this front, both Kajabi and Thinkific have the necessary tools to foster learning and engagement.

Quizzes and Certificates

Both Kajabi and Thinkific allow you to create quizzes, and their capabilities are similar to an extent. Both platforms let you:

  • Create graded quizzes with multiple-choice and multiple-select questions
  • Add text and images to questions and answers
  • Add answer explanations
  • Restrict access to the next lesson based on quiz scores

However, Thinkific has a couple of advantages here. It allows you to import questions from Excel files and create randomized quizzes with the same pool of questions.

Creating a quiz in Thinkific
Creating a quiz in Thinkific

Additionally, Thinkific integrates with Brillium, a full-blown exam solution supporting more question types, timed exams, and other advanced assessment features.

Apart from quizzes, both platforms also let you create assignments. While Thinkific has a separate lesson type for this, Kajabi includes the feature in their Quiz lesson type.

Both let you add an assignment upload area to the lesson, review student submissions, approve or reject them, and send student feedback.

Kajabi’s manual grading feature for assignments
Kajabi’s manual grading feature for assignments

Kajabi has a feature called Assessments that lets you create marketing quizzes for generating new leads and segmenting website visitors. You can also use the feature to create surveys and coaching intake forms.

While Thinkific has a feature for surveys, it doesn’t support marketing quizzes.

Lastly, you can create certificates for course completion on both Kajabi and Thinkific. Both let you customize the design and text of the certificates and display student and course information.

However, Thinkific has an edge here, as it offers seven predesigned certificate templates, while Kajabi has just one default template.

Certificate templates in Thinkific
Certificate templates in Thinkific

Live Classes

Live classes are an important feature for any course builder, especially for cohort course platforms.

Thinkific supports a separate lesson type for live classes, where you can schedule a class and have your students join a live session from the course player.

Thinkific doesn’t have native livestreaming capabilities, but it integrates with Zoom for the same.

Kajabi, on the other hand, comes with built-in live video features. You can livestream directly from the platform and record sessions and add them as videos in the course.

The live video experience is excellent, and there’s no extra cost.

Kajabi’s live video experience
Kajabi’s live video experience

Again, your students will see the option to join a live session inside the course player. Kajabi also lets you send a notification when starting the session to remind your students to join.

However, neither platform allows students to register for the sessions and receive automated reminders.

Content Dripping and Locking

Both Kajabi and Thinkific allow you to drip your content based on student enrollment and by course start date.

The only difference between the two platforms is that Kajabi allows you to send automated drip emails to announce the release of new content, while Thinkific doesn’t have this feature.

Customizing the drip notification email template
Customizing the drip notification email template

Apart from content dripping, both platforms let you restrict access to certain content based on students’ progress.

Kajabi allows you to specify a lesson as a prerequisite for a specific module. So, unless the student completes that lesson, they won’t be able to access the module.

Additionally, there’s a specific setting for quiz lessons where you can make them mandatory for progress to the next lessons.

Kajabi’s content locking feature
Kajabi’s content locking feature

Thinkific also lets you mark lessons as prerequisites, but it works differently.

When you mark a lesson as a prerequisite, it locks all the lessons and modules after that lesson. If it’s a quiz, the user must successfully pass it to mark the lesson complete.

Thinkific’s prerequisite lesson feature
Thinkific’s prerequisite lesson feature

One handy feature Thinkific offers is setting a “video completion (%) required” at the course level. In this case, the lessons can be marked complete only when a student reaches the desired completion percentage.

Community

Thinkific Communities feature allows you to create online communities that look clean and elegant out of the box.

You can easily organize your community using spaces (topics), and you and your members can create discussion posts with text and images. You can also schedule events, but it doesn’t support native livestreaming.

A community built on Thinkific
A community built on Thinkific

However, the community builder lacks engagement tools, making it suitable only for basic course support communities.

Kajabi, on the other hand, has a full-fledged community builder. The community looks clean and modern, and you can organize it using access groups and circles (topics) and create rich media posts.

A community built on Kajabi
A community built on Kajabi

Apart from topics and posts, Kajabi Communities supports:

  • Native video uploading in discussion posts
  • Live meetups and native livestreaming
  • Group chats and private messaging
  • Gamification tools like badges and leaderboards
  • A members directory and detailed user profiles

So, when it comes to community building, Kajabi has more firepower than Thinkific, and you can use it for creating course support communities, standalone communities, and community memberships.

Coaching

Coaching is a suite of features in Kajabi to create and deliver one-on-one coaching programs.

Here are the key features of Kajabi Coaching:

  • Offer coaching programs with single or multiple sessions
  • Use Kajabi’s native scheduler for users to book sessions from their dashboard
  • Add an agenda, resources, and notes for each session
  • Use Kajabi’s live video feature to conduct face-to-face meetings with your clients
  • Sell coaching as on-demand products or add-ons to online courses
Kajabi Coaching student experience
Kajabi Coaching student experience

So, you can manage all aspects of your coaching programs within Kajabi, making it the obvious choice if you’re looking for a coaching platform. Thinkific doesn’t have any coaching features.

Apart from these learning tools, there are two specific things worth mentioning: Kajabi Automations and Thinkific Apps.

Kajabi Automations lets you create rules based on triggers and actions, and you can use them to drive engagement in your courses.

For example, you can use it to share additional resources when a student fails a quiz or send a reactivation email to an inactive student.

Thinkific’s app store is where the platform’s flexibility and extendibility shine. With over 100+ third-party apps, you can easily customize and extend Thinkific according to your unique needs.

For example, you can use the Wobo app to add digital workbook functionality or the Pointagram app to gamify your courses.

Content Delivery

Course player is where your students will spend the most time, making it one of the most important considerations.

Thinkific’s course player is well-designed, with a sidebar menu for easy navigation and a big content area on the right side. It uses a light color theme by default, but you can also opt for a dark mode.

It also supports a full-screen mode and lets students search through lesson titles, making the overall user experience great.

A walkthrough of Thinkific’s course player

Kajabi, on the other hand, has a library of four course player themes that are suitable for all kinds of courses, including evergreen courses, signature programs, and membership libraries.

A walkthrough Kajabi’s course player

For example, you can use the Momentum theme if you need a traditional style like Thinkific. Or, you can use the Premier theme to give your courses a more premium look and feel.

Lastly, Kajabi allows you to customize the course player design extensively, giving you full control over how your courses look.

Kajabi’s Premier theme in action
Kajabi’s Premier theme in action

Regarding the mobile experience, both Kajabi and Thinkific have free mobile apps that make it easier for students to access their courses on the go.

Additionally, both platforms allow you to get white-label mobile apps published under your brand while their team builds and maintains them.

However, in Kajabi, you have two separate apps — one for courses and one for communities, which is a pain for the end-users.

Course Creation – The Bottom Line

Both Kajabi and Thinkific do a great job at course creation and engagement. The course builders are easy to use and support all the important content types and learning tools.

The course players are well-designed, even though Kajabi has multiple themes and more customization options. Conversely, Thinkific provides more flexibility for incorporating new features via third-party applications.

Besides course creation, Kajabi has an edge with a more powerful community builder and built-in coaching tools.

Site Design and Customization

Both Kajabi and Thinkific make designing and building a functional website for your brand easy.

Both platforms take care of the essentials:

  • Both platforms offer free hosting and SSL certificates for your website.
  • They look after the technical aspects of running a website, including security, updates, and maintenance.
  • Both provide a free subdomain but allow using a custom domain.
  • Both allow you to remove all visible branding from your website and course areas.

With the similarities noted, let’s compare and evaluate the actual site building tools.

Website Themes

Both Kajabi and Thinkific have pre-built site themes that you can use to build your website quickly.

Kajabi has a library of 11 website themes, all having a clean, modern design. You can apply the themes to your site in a single click and easily adjust settings to match your brand identity.

Kajabi Website Themes
Kajabi’s website themes

Thinkific, on the other hand, has three site themes — Empire, Vogue, and Vision — all well-designed and with multiple sub-styles to choose from. Again, you can customize the settings to make it your own.

However, Kajabi offers more variety in terms of themes’ design and styles.

Thinkific’s site theme library
Thinkific’s site theme library

Both platforms also allow you to customize the themes by editing the theme code.

Lastly, you can also buy themes from third-party providers or design your own themes and import them into your website.

Page Builder

Kajabi and Thinkific have a visual, drag-and-drop page builder for building and customizing pages.

There are several pre-built page sections, including a hero section, course list, pricing tables, countdown timers, and plenty more that you can use on your page.

Moreover, you can specify your pages’ colors, backgrounds, and other aspects, right down to the header and footer.

Kajabi’s page builder
Kajabi’s page builder
Thinkific’s page builder
Thinkific’s page builder

However, Kajabi’s page builder is more powerful and gives more design options.

It has more page sections available, and you can customize the section layouts as you like. You can add new blocks, change their position and order, and modify the size and number of columns.

You can even create a custom section from scratch by choosing from over 20 available blocks and mixing and matching them to get the desired design.

Kajabi lets you freely customize section layouts

Thinkific, on the other hand, has restrictive section layouts, so you’ll only be able to choose from pre-built sections and can’t customize them as freely. For example, you can’t add additional elements or change the order of existing elements in page sections.

Thinkific has restrictive section layouts

Additionally, Kajabi’s page builder supports customization options like changing padding, adding animations, and controlling element visibility on mobile vs desktop, which isn’t possible with Thinkific.

Overall, Kajabi has a more robust page builder, making it more suitable for building full-fledged websites.

Blogging and Podcast

Thinkific doesn’t offer any blogging or podcasting functionality, so you’ll need to connect it to a content management system like Squarespace.

Kajabi, on the other hand, comes with built-in blogging features that allow you to publish and manage blog posts on your website.

You can create blog posts, configure SEO settings, categorize your blog posts, design your blog page, customize your blog sidebar, and show opt-in forms.

The platform also makes it easy to add content to your blog posts. You can add a featured image or video, write the content in the simple text editor, and embed media elements inside your content.

Kajabi’s blog post editor
Kajabi’s blog post editor

Apart from blogging, Kajabi also allows you to set up a podcast through its integrated podcasting feature.

It enables you to create episodes, host your audio files, and distribute them to major listening apps such as Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.

Finally, you can create a publicly accessible podcast on your website or offer it as part of your membership site on Kajabi.

Website Creation – The Bottom Line

Kajabi and Thinkific provide essential site building tools, including website themes and a drag-and-drop page builder, even though Kajabi’s page builder offers more flexibility.

Additionally, Kajabi has built-in features for blogging and podcasts which makes it a popular choice for coaches, while Thinkific doesn’t and relies on third-party applications.

Sales and Marketing

Regarding sales and marketing, Thinkific focuses on payments and selling tools like coupons and bundles, while Kajabi handles payments and offers complete marketing capabilities.

Let’s explore the specific features the two platforms offer.

Product Pricing Options

Both Kajabi and Thinkific let you charge a one-time price, a recurring fee, or even a payment plan for your products.

Regarding subscription payments, both platforms allow you to charge your customers monthly, yearly, or anywhere in between. In addition, you can offer a free trial or charge a custom payment upfront.

The only difference here is that Kajabi lets you create a weekly or bi-weekly subscription, an option currently unavailable on Thinkific.

Subscription pricing in Kajabi
Subscription pricing in Kajabi

Moreover, you can establish multiple pricing plans for your courses and bundles. This flexibility allows you to offer, for example, a one-time price and a payment plan for the same course or multiple tiers for your membership site.

Both platforms also let you create coupons and apply them to multiple courses.

However, Kajabi has a few advantages:

  • Kajabi supports a “Pay What You Want” option, currently unavailable in Thinkific.
  • You can also add a “Gift This Course” option to your course.
  • You can choose currency at the pricing plan level, whereas Thinkific only allows you to do this only at the site level.

Payments and Checkouts

Both Thinkific and Kajabi support Stripe and PayPal, so your customers can pay via credit card or their PayPal account.

However, Thinkific supports PayPal only for one-time payments, while Kajabi lets you offer the PayPal payment option for subscriptions as well as payment plans.

This can be a limitation if you plan to use Thinkific as a membership site platform.

Thinkific’s payment gateways
Thinkific’s payment gateways

Apart from these, both platforms have introduced managed gateways called Thinkific Payments and Kajabi Payments (currently available only in limited countries).

These gateways use Stripe in the backend and charge the same processing fee as Stripe. However, they give you additional benefits such as Apple Pay and Google Pay support and built-in sales tax handling.

If you are using Thinkific, but you are in a country where Thinkific Payments is not available, you can use Quaderno to handle your taxes.

Now, let’s talk about the checkout page.

Kajabi has a one-step checkout process, meaning that the user enters their personal information and completes the payment process on a single page and only then needs to create an account.

The checkout page is well-designed, and you can completely customize it by adding elements like your logo, a promo video, offer details, testimonials, and a money-back guarantee badge.

The result is a checkout page that doesn’t just look beautiful but also converts really well.

A sample checkout page built in Kajabi
A sample checkout page built in Kajabi

Additionally, Kajabi has a popup checkout option, allowing users to quickly purchase products without leaving the page.

Thinkific also has an optimized one-step checkout process where the user enters all the details and completes the purchase on a single page. The design is also simple and clean, even though you can’t customize it.

So, you can’t show testimonials and other elements as you can with Kajabi.

Thinkific’s checkout page
Thinkific’s checkout page

Apart from the ability to create checkout pages, both platforms let you add an order bump to the checkout page or include a 1-click upsell offer on the thank you page.

However, Kajabi also has an abandoned cart feature that lets you track customers who don’t complete their purchases and send them an automated follow-up email.

Overall, Kajabi’s checkout tools are more advanced than Thinkific.

Marketing Funnels

Kajabi features a tool called Sales Funnels that enables you to create and automate marketing funnels easily. It’s a powerful feature for creating end-to-end marketing campaigns, and Thinkific has nothing like it.

The funnel builder has pre-made blueprints that you can select, and it will automatically create all the steps in that funnel, including landing pages and email campaigns.

Kajabi’s sales funnel blueprints
Kajabi’s sales funnel blueprints

For example, to launch your course, you can use the Product Launch funnel, and Kajabi will create the optin page, the email sequence, the video pages, and the offer page.

Similarly, you can select the Zoom Webinar blueprint to create webinars, and Kajabi will set up the landing pages, the event, and emails.

Kajabi funnel builder
Kajabi funnel builder

You can further customize any step in your pipeline. You can change your landing pages, modify the email sequences, or even add new steps to your funnel.

But the best part is that you can do all this without leaving the funnel builder, so the user experience is amazing.

Kajabi’s funnel builder supports inline editing

Kajabi Funnels is simply a game-changer, and no other course platform has anything close to it in terms of features or ease of use.

In addition to entire funnels, you can also create standalone landing pages for lead generation and course marketing. Kajabi’s library has 40+ nicely-designed landing page templates, which can be customized using the page builder.

Finally, you also can create optin forms for your website or your blog, and you use them either as inline forms or as popups.

Thinkific doesn’t have any capabilities for building marketing funnels or landing pages, and you’ll have to rely on third-party solutions like ClickFunnels for handling these aspects.

Email Marketing

Thinkific has very basic email marketing capabilities, as it just allows you to send broadcast emails to your students and doesn’t support automated email sequences.

Plus, you can’t have your email list on Thinkific, so you’ll need a third-party email marketing solution like ConvertKit.

Kajabi, on the other hand, has a full-blown email marketing suite that lets you do much more than just send one-off emails. You can create automated email sequences to nurture your leads or launch a product.

You can easily define a schedule for your automated emails. For example, you can set your first email to go out immediately, the second email on Day 2, the third email on Day 4, and so on.

A sample email sequence in Kajabi
A sample email sequence in Kajabi

Moreover, Kajabi has a tagging system which is a very efficient way to manage your subscribers and run automations.

But best of all, you can use Kajabi Automations rules to trigger actions like adding/removing tags, triggering a new email sequence, and sending users a unique offer.

For example, you can send a nurture campaign to someone when they subscribe to your newsletter. Afterward, you can add them to a sales campaign, and as soon as a purchase is made, you can move them to the onboarding sequence.

Creating an automation in Kajabi
Creating an automation in Kajabi

Similarly, you can tag users based on the lead magnet they sign up for and send a personalized email campaign to engage them.

As you can see, this combination of tagging and automation makes it possible to automate your email marketing efforts completely.

Overall, Kajabi’s email marketing tools are robust, easy to use, and should work well for a majority of creators.

Affiliate Marketing

Thinkific and Kajabi allow you to create and manage your affiliate program on their platforms. So, you can add affiliates, set a commission %, track sales, and calculate commissions.

The affiliates also get a personalized dashboard where they can see their performance.

Affiliates in Kajabi
Affiliates in Kajabi
Affiliates in Thinkific
Affiliates in Thinkific

However, there are a few things that you can do in Kajabi but not in Thinkific:

  • Kajabi lets you create a public registration page for affiliates.
  • Affiliates can link to a site outside your Kajabi website.
  • Kajabi tracks form submissions, so you can get affiliates to promote lead magnets.
  • You can customize the cookie tracking period for your affiliate program.

Sales and Marketing – The Bottom Line

Kajabi is a clear winner over Thinkific in terms of sales and marketing features.

It offers powerful marketing features like sales funnels, email marketing, and automations, all of which aren’t available on Thinkific.

Additionally, Kajabi has better capabilities for selling tools like product pricing options, checkout pages, and payment processing.

Reporting and Administration

Both platforms provide extensive reporting and administration tools, which we’ll focus on in this section.

Reporting Tools

Both Kajabi and Thinkific have robust reporting tools. There are several reports available on both platforms that let you track different metrics.

Here are some of the things that both platforms let you track:

  • Student progress and course completion rates
  • Number of students enrolled
  • Revenue earned
  • Video engagement rates

However, Kajabi has a few additional reports that Thinkific doesn’t.

The most notable is the Subscription Metrics report, which lets you track important metrics like monthly recurring revenue (MRR), average revenue per user (ARPU), and churn rate.

Kajabi’s Subscription Metric report
Kajabi’s Subscription Metric report

Thinkific has also introduced a report for tracking subscriptions, but it’s only available if you use Thinkific Payments.

There are also reports for tracking page views, new leads, and affiliate sales in Kajabi.

Otherwise, the individual reports on both platforms are very useful. They include graphs and tables that make data analysis easy. They also support essential features like filtering data, choosing a custom date range, and exporting reports.

Thinkific’s revenue report
Thinkific’s revenue report

People Management

Kajabi and Thinkific have robust tools for managing your users. Both allow you to:

  • Filter users based on different criteria, such as their purchases and activity.
  • Select multiple users and perform bulk actions like enrolling them in a course or sending a broadcast email.
  • See individual users’ detailed profiles and manage their enrollments, subscriptions, and other information.
  • Bulk import users from a CSV file and give them access to specific products.

Apart from these, Kajabi lets you add tags to users and create segments, giving you more flexibility and making managing users easier. This functionality is essential in Kajabi, as it is designed to facilitate email list management.

And then, there is the Automations feature that can help automate many administrative tasks. For example, when someone upgrades to a higher tier, you can automatically cancel their original subscription.

Using Automations to manage subscription upgrades
Using Automations to manage subscription upgrades

Lastly, Thinkific has a feature called Groups that makes it easier to organize users into cohorts and manage their progress. You can also add a Group Analyst to manage the users and pull their reports.

This is a useful feature if you plan to sell courses in bulk to companies or just create cohort courses.

Thinkific’s group progress report
Thinkific’s group progress report

Kajabi doesn’t have a similar feature, and the workaround is to use segments to group users together and manage them. The only significant downside is that you can’t add group-specific admins.

User Roles

Both platforms let you assign different roles to your team members, although access levels are defined differently.

Kajabi’s Administrator role is the same as Thinkific’s Site Admin. Both roles have complete access except for payment integrations.

Kajabi Assistants can handle everything except financial reports, while Support Specialists can moderate comments and manage students. In Thinkific, you have a single role for such activities — Course Admins.

Besides these, Thinkific has two additional user roles:

  • Revenue Partners role is for adding co-authors to courses and sharing revenue with them. Currently, it’s not possible to add multiple instructors in Kajabi.
  • Group Analysts role is for managing users in specific groups. Again, Kajabi doesn’t have a similar role.
User roles in Thinkific
User roles in Thinkific

Third-Party Integrations

Thinkific provides a more comprehensive range of third-party integrations than Kajabi.

With Kajabi, you get native integrations with popular email marketing platforms like ConvertKit, ActiveCampaign, Drip, and more.

Kajabi’s email marketing integrations
Kajabi’s email marketing integrations

You can also integrate with analytics solutions (e.g., Google Analytics), opt-in forms (e.g., OptinMonster), and any other solution that requires a script code.

Lastly, you have a Zapier integration to connect Kajabi to those applications that aren’t natively supported.

On the other hand, Thinkific has a full-fledged app store where you can find 100+ apps and integrations.

Apart from essential integrations like email marketing services and Zapier, you can find apps for adding new features and enhancing user experience.

Thinkific’s app store
Thinkific’s app store

For instance, Thinkific doesn’t support note-taking, but there’s an app called BeastNotes for that. Similarly, you can use Thinkific’s Shopify app to enable a full-fledged shopping cart.

Besides apps, Thinkific has public API and single sign-on features, giving you even more flexibility.

So, Thinkific is a clear winner when it comes to third-party integrations. In fact, it’s the only hosted course platform to have this kind of ecosystem around it.

Customer Support

Kajabi and Thinkific have excellent customer support, and we found them helpful and responsive in our testing.

The good thing is that both platforms offer email and live chat support so that you can easily reach out for help when needed.

However, Kajabi scores a point for providing 24/7 chat support, while Thinkific’s chat support is available only during US working hours.

Kajabi offers 24X7 chat support
Kajabi offers 24X7 chat support

For those who prefer to find answers on their own, both platforms have a comprehensive knowledge base, including plenty of how-to info (articles and videos) covering every functionality on their platforms.

They also invest heavily in customer training. You can find plenty of free courses and live trainings to learn about various aspects of course creation and marketing.

Lastly, both platforms have highly engaged Facebook Groups you can join for further support and advice from other customers.

Pricing Plans

Kajabi and Thinkific offer multiple pricing plans, but their approaches are different.

Kajabi has three pricing plans ranging from $149/mo to $399/mo. While there’s no transaction fee on any plan, they put a limit on the number of active customers and products allowed on each plan.

For instance, you can create only three products on the Basic plan while you can create 15 and 100 on the Growth and Pro plans.

Regarding features, all plans include access to most of the platform features. For instance, all its important features except affiliate marketing are available on the Basic plan.

Kajabi’s pricing plans
Kajabi’s pricing plans

On the other hand, Thinkific has five plans ranging from free to $499/mo. There’s no transaction fee on any plan. Plus, it doesn’t limit the number of courses or students on any paid plan.

However, Thinkific has a different approach to feature access.

For instance, custom domain and coupons are available on the Basic plan ($49/mo), while features like memberships, live classes, and mobile apps are only available on the Start plan ($99/mo) and above.

And if you want API access or the ability to remove Thinkific branding, you’ll need the Grow plan ($199/mo).

Thinkific’s pricing plans
Thinkific’s pricing plans

Overall, Thinkific has more affordable and flexible plans that can cater to almost any budget and requirements.

Kajabi, on the other hand, has steep pricing, but it is good value for money if you want to consolidate multiple aspects of your business on a single platform.

Kajabi vs Thinkific: The Final Verdict

This guide has evaluated the two platforms in terms of features, usability, and pricing. But what’s the final verdict?

Kajabi is a better option if you’re looking for an all-in-one platform for your online course business. Besides course creation and engagement, it has tools for blogging, podcasts, sales funnels, and email marketing.

Additionally, it’s better suited for creating membership sites, online communities, and coaching programs.

On the other hand, Thinkific is a better option if you want a standalone platform primarily for creating and delivering online courses. It has robust course creation tools, a huge library of third-party apps, and more affordable pricing.

Additionally, the platform is better suited for creating online schools with dozens of courses (and even instructors).

We hope you found this Thinkific vs Kajabi guide useful. Which of the two platforms seemed more suitable for you and why? Let us know in the comments below.

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