Are you looking for the perfect courses and memberships selling platforms that help you build a profitable online business? Then, you've come to the right place.

There are a ton of digital platforms that will help you sell courses. But, finding the right fit for your business can be a challenging task.

Hence, today I am going to compare two well-known course hosting platforms – Kajabi and Thinkific.

I am going to highlight the key differences between the features and benefits of the Kajabi and Thinkific. This will help you make a wise choice.

I am going to distill their key Marketing and course creation features. These 2 features are what makes or breaks an online course business success.

Kajabi vs Thinkific: In-depth review

What do I like about Kajabi vs Thinkific?

• Kajabi markets itself as a one-stop-shop for your online business needs. It has pretty decent features including everything from emails, landing pages, sales pages, courses, memberships, blogs, and websites. Thinkific misses out these features and its forte is only course creation.
• Kajabi charges no transaction fee on your course/product sales.
• Kajabi's customer onboarding experience is a pleasant one. The training videos provided once you buy it do prove to be resourceful.
• Kajabi comes with plenty of customization options and built-in templates. While using Thinkific you can feel lost trying to do the same.
• Kajabi offers 24*7 customer support through a live chat, which in most cases, is available to you in an instant. Thinkific provides email support which is only available during 5 workdays between 10 am to 5 pm PST.
• Kajabi offers advanced automation capabilities such as sending customized emails to a student on a lecture completion. Thinkific doesn’t offer any such capability.

What do I like about Thinkific vs Kajabi?

• In Thinkific, you can design the access portal, course, and payment methods all in one interface. This is particularly helpful if you don't want to be bothered with heavy tech like in the case of Kajabi. Also, the course creation process is a breeze.
• Thinkific is also suitable for live or interactive classroom experience with features like surveying and narration. It is also suitable for accredited programs such as university courses.
• There is a free plan in Thinkific where you get charged only a percentage of each sale. This is especially great for starters and startups to test out the platform before committing.
• Thinkific has beginner-friendly pricing. Kajabi might be overkill if you’re a beginner.
• Thinkific offers unlimited courses and students on its paid plan. Kajabi has a cap on both courses and students on all its paid plans.

Overview

Kajabi is an all in one setup for your online courses. It helps you market as well as create courses and memberships with ease.

On the other hand, Thinkific only focuses on its core functionality – course hosting and delivery.

This means Kajabi is the powerhouse of the online course hosting world. Thinkific is a great platform for those who want to focus on course creation and not marketing.

Kajabi comes with exceptional email marketing and advanced automation capabilities. Though Thinkific is a course centric platform, it doesn't have that high-end marketing stack. It focuses on one thing – course creation. You can say Thinkific is somewhat comparable to Teachable.

Also, one of the most important decisions while choosing a course hosting platform is pricing. Kajabi has much more premium pricing than Thinkific.

Interface

In Kajabi, all your available features are in the sidebar. But they are quite nested adding some level of complexity while navigating.

Kajabi's search assistant comes handy in accessing these features easily.

On the other hand, Thinkific's UI and UX seem decent. Though you might get confused at times trying to find functionalities.

For example: “Integrations” is available under the “Market and Sell” button rather than the “Settings” tab.

But over time, you are bound to get used to it.

Bottomline: Kajabi's UI is quite intuitive even though nested. But, there is no such big drawback of Thinkific's UI.

Course creation

In Kajabi, you can create 3 types of courses: mini-courses, courses, and evergreen training with drip functionality.

Clicking the “Create” button in Kajabi's interface loads up a new product for you.

Course modules/sections are called “Categories” in Kajabi. Each “category” can then have multiple “sub-categories”. Inside categories and sub-categories, you can have posts that act as course lectures.

And, the type of content you can upload are videos and assessments/quizzes.

You can also add helpful resources and downloads for lectures.

Kajabi also has advanced automation. This helps you send custom email notifications to your students.

On the other hand, Thinkific is a course centric platform. You have multiple features to create an engaging course for your audience.

In Thinkific hosted courses, you can use elements like video, quiz, multimedia, text, survey, PDF, audio, download, presentation, exam, assignment.

Features like exams and surveys make it more credible for accredited courses. You can create course certificates in Thinkific using Accredible's native integration.

You can also drip-feed course content to your students in Thinkific, similar to Podia or Teachable.

Bottomline: I will go with Thinkific if I want to focus on only course creation and sacrifice the marketing aspect to an extent. But, if you’re using 3rd party integration for marketing with Thinkific then that’s a great route as well.

Membership creation

In Kajabi, you have an option to create memberships that require you to further create products under it. Membership plans can be created with differential pricing from the “offers” section.

However, the process of creating a membership is the same as that of creating an online course.

On the other hand, Thinkific doesn’t come with an exclusive memberships option. Though, you can create a subscription for your course and drip feed the content as a hack around this drawback.

Bottomline: Kajabi wins here since it has an exclusive memberships area. The Kajabi team also keeps working on improving their features, so you can expect new rollouts for memberships as well. Kajabi is one of the best membership site platforms you can consider.

Design and customization

Kajabi has an inbuilt visual builder for designs and customizations.

Kajabi loads up a visual builder when you start customizing stuff like landing pages, sales pages, and websites. It also gives you a couple of templates/themes for inspiration.

Kajabi's visual builder has a ton of elements like accordions, timers, images, opt-in forms, videos, and much more.

But with Thinkific this isn't the case. It pales in comparison to the design and customization flexibility of Kajabi.

Thinkific has something called “Site themes” and within each site theme, you have styles. But its scope is limited.

Bottomline: I’d anyway go with Kajabi if design and customization is the priority because the look and feel of a website/landing pages do matter a lot.

Analytics and reporting

Kajabi's analytics and reporting dashboards are in-depth. You can view the average engagement, total plays, and play rate of your video lectures. You can also have a visual tab on the video drop-offs – a useful tool to create engaging content.

The Analytics section of Kajabi does cover all important metrics – sales, traffic, and conversion rates. Still, you can go ahead and integrate it with Google analytics.

Thinkific also provides reporting at the video level including completion rate, drop-offs but it fails to provide an aggregate reporting of all the courses.

Also, reporting for videos is available at an individual level rather than at an aggregate level.

Given this, Thinkific has some serious reporting capabilities. However, it can be integrated with Google analytics for site-wide analytics reporting.

Bottomline: Without a doubt, Kajabi is the winner with its sophisticated reporting and analytics capabilities.

Marketing features

Building an online course is only a job half done. The other half includes getting traction for your online courses. The ability to market your paid content, get more students, and making money is essential.

Thinkific has basic marketing capabilities like you can bundle the courses and provide coupons for increased conversions.

Kajabi not only has a rich marketing toolkit with email, sales funnel, and much more capabilities but also processes payments with ease, making it the big boss in the marketing segment.

Let's compare the marketing tools of these 2 platforms to make things clear.

Email marketing

Thinkific is much like Podia in the email marketing game. And, we have discussed Podia's basic email capabilities here. These platforms allow for the basic functionality of sending email notifications to students. Unfortunately, you can’t execute autoresponder campaigns.

Kajabi has a full suite of email marketing solutions under its hood.

You can use Kajabi’s autoresponder to send product launch campaigns or student onboarding ones.

Kajabi allows you to segment your email list and set different automation for each. Like any other good email marketing tools such as GetResponse, Drip, ActiveCampaign, and others, it also houses triggers and actions.

Bottomline: Kajabi has a robust email marketing suite. While Thinkific will need an integration with a 3rd party email marketing solution.

Sales funnels & landing pages

To build sales funnels in Kajabi, you have a feature called sales pipeline builder. And, you know how important sales funnels are in the online marketing arena. Thinkific doesn't have such a feature.

The pipeline builder in Kajabi lets you build custom landing pages and email marketing campaigns.

For example, if you want to launch a product then Kajabi allows you to create an

1. Opt-in page
2. Email sequences
3. Video pages
4. Upsell pages
5. Offer/sales pages

You can also run webinar events with Kajabi.

Thinkfic doesn't have an exclusive page builder. You'll have to integrate with 3rd party apps like Clickfunnels, Unbounce, or LeadPages.

Bottomline: Kajabi's sales pipeline builder compares with none of the online platforms. Thinkific won't even come close. We have Kajabi as the clear winner here.

Affiliate marketing systems

Both Kajabi and Thinkific, allow for affiliate marketing system setup. And, they provide capabilities such as follows:

1. Add new affiliates
2. Track sales of affiliates
3. Track commissions
4. Share unique links for each affiliate

Both platforms provide a personalized affiliate dashboard for each agent.

The key difference is Kajabi allows anyone to become an affiliate. But, with Thinkific things are different. One will need to be a regular user of your course/product before having the ability to promote your courses.

Bottomline: We saw that Kajabi is a clear winner in each marketing feature department. Maybe that’s why Kajabi is priced on the higher end.

Integrations

As we know now, Thinkific lags with a lot of essential marketing tools. And, Kajabi looks like a whole suite of marketing solutions. But, still, we need to know if we can integrate both of these with 3rd party marketing apps of our choice.

Both these platforms allow for integrations with analytics and tracking scripts. Google Analytics, segment, and FB pixel are only some of them.

You can also integrate them with your existing CRMs and email tools of choice. Even if that isn't possible, then you have help from the almighty Zapier integrations. This will allow you to integrate them with 1000s of marketing apps on the market.

Pricing

Finally, pricing! How much will these 2 platforms dig deep into our pockets? Let's take a look starting with Thinkific.

Thinkific's pricing is beginner-friendly. The free plan charges you transaction fees, the basic plan costs $49 a month, the Pro Plan costs $99 a month.

There is even a high-end plan called Premier. I think the premier is meant for enterprise customers like Universities, institutes, and education companies.

Looks like Thinkific is reasonably priced too since you have no cap on courses and students.

Kajabi's pricing is premium. And, because of this reason, there are some key differences in its pricing structure.

1. The Basic Plan – costs $149 a month, allows up to 1000 active students, 3 products and 3 sales pipelines.
2. The Growth Plan – costs $199 a month, allows up to 10000 active members, 15 products, and 15 sales pipelines.
3. The Pro Plan – costs $499 a month, allows up to 100,000 students, 100 products, and 100 sales pipelines.

Kajabi has only a 14-days free trial and no free plan like Thinkific. This probably ensures that Kajabi's product doesn't attract any tire kickers. It is for serious creators in the market.

Bottomline: Kajabi and Thinkific's pricing shouldn't be compared ideally. Kajabi is a powerful tool with marketing capabilities that are nowhere to be found in Thinkific. Look at your business case and accordingly choose if pricing is a concern.

Customer support

If you're going to pay the sticker price for any of these 2 platforms then it's worth considering their customer support. And, I can vouch for the customer support of both these platforms.

As of today, the support team at both platforms are cooperative. They try to resolve one's issues with full satisfaction.

But the key difference here is customer support channels. Kajabi is good with its instant 24*7 chat support.

But, Thinkific doesn't have chat support. So in the latter's case, you'd need to email them. Personally, I am not a big fan of following up on email threads.

Bottomline: Kajabi can be helpful with its instant 24*7 chat support. But, Thinkific's email support responses are only during their work hours of 9 am to 5 pm PST.

So, if you'd need help in a different time zone or during weekends, then you'd need to observe some patience.

FAQs on Kajabi vs Thinkific

Bottomline: Which is right for you?

If cost isn't a barrier to having a good course hosting platform, then go with Kajabi. It will give you everything from course creation to marketing and sales under one roof. If pricing is a factor then go with Thinkific.

This is because you can anytime integrate it with external marketing apps of your choice.

Coming to the marketing aspect, if you're a pro sales funnel builder then you can go with Thinkific. In doing so you can use the landing page builder of your choice to build funnels. If Kajabi's sales pipeline builder helps make things easy for you then go with it.

Do note that these are my personal opinions. How your online courses business fits with a platform is the right route to make decisions.