Teachable and Kajabi are two of the best LMS platforms available in today’s market. While Teachable focuses more on LMS needs, Kajabi prioritizes marketing features.

Teachable is limited to selling only courses and 1:1 coachings.

In contrast, Kajabi markets itself as an all-in-one digital platform that supports courses, coaching, communities, memberships, podcasts, and much more.

Based on your requirements, Teachable needs to be integrated with external tools (such as Circle.so for communities, Memberful for memberships, and ClickFunnels for funnel building).

Meanwhile, Kajabi already includes all these features (although it is expensive). You can read the complete Kajabi review here.

Let’s start the review and see which comes on top.

Here’s a quick breakdown of their features .

Upfront bottomline:

Teachable is a great choice if you need –

• A course platform with advanced LMS features such as course completion certificates, course compliance, student progress reports, etc.
• A native payment gateway for handling affiliate payouts and all complex payments.
• Integrated EU/VAT tax calculation capability for remitting the taxes easily.
• You need a feature-rich specialist online course creation platform and are comfortable integrating other tools like Circle.so for additional features like communities..

Choose Kajabi if you need –

• All-in-one platform for selling courses, coaching, memberships, podcasts, and digital downloads.
• A dedicated online community that comes with spaces, challenges, activities, points, accomplishments, leaderboards, etc., to drive engagement.
• Mobile apps for students (and for you; creator app) to consume content on the go, and increase conversions with in-app notifications & purchases.
• Integrations with sales funnels, automations, and email marketing so that you can focus more on marketing and selling your products.

What do I like about Teachable vs Kajabi ?

• With Teachable’s paid plans ($159/month), you can create unlimited courses. Additionally, you can enroll unlimited students in your courses. Kajabi, however, limits the number of products you can create. It does not allow more than 100 products with even its Pro plan ($399/month).
• Teachable offers a free plan, but there is a $1+10% transaction fee. On the other hand, Kajabi does not offer any free plans (although you can start with a 30-day exclusive free trial).
• Compared to Kajabi, it is much cheaper (almost three times cheaper). With Teachable, the lowest monthly plan costs $49, while Kajabi’s price starts at $149. You can see the plans here.
• With course compliance features, you can ensure your students are completing the courses; making it an ideal platform for academic courses. Also, you can host courses on various niche topics such as arts, health, business, etc. Here are 30+ examples of Teachable sites in various niches. You can view live.
• Teachable comes with built-in payment gateways , so you don’t need to pay for third-party tools. In addition to handling EU/VAT, it has a feature called “Backoffice” that handles all the complex and affiliate payouts. In Kajabi, this is not possible. So you need to integrate with Stripe, PayPal, etc.

What do I like about Kajabi vs Teachable ?

• Kajabi is an all-in-one platform having all the features you ever need to run a business (including email marketing, sales funnels, automations, site builder, blogging, etc). You don’t have to worry about integrating other tools since all the essential features are already built in.
• There is a dedicated page builder in Kajabi that is more powerful and feature-rich. With over 25+ blocks, you can design landing pages, opt-in pages, checkout pages, thank you pages, and much more.
• Kajabi comes with a website builder and offers you 10+ themes with plenty of customization options. Teachable’s design flexibility is pretty much limited unless you use their geeky power editor (for this you have to shell out $665/mo).
• Community is one of its strongest features (recently, it acquired Vibely). It helps you in creating a fun-based engaging environment with features like challenges, activities, points, accomplishments, etc). You can use its live stream feature to offer paid masterclasses, events, and webinars, as a part of community monetization.
• Kajabi offers lecture-specific automations, but Teachable does not. For example, you can apply a tag or send an email to the student once they finish a particular lesson, say a promotional video. This way you can keep customers in the loop.
• With Kajabi’s automation rules, you can automate course completions, product purchases, form submissions, assessment completion, community tasks, etc. With higher plans, you’ll be able to access advanced automations. These have an additional “conditional filter” to further specify the rules.
• Kajabi has a built-in funnel feature. These are OVO (optin, value, offer) based funnels that you can customize as per your requirements. There are several funnel templates available to simplify your work. This is not available in Teachable, so you have to use external tools like ClickFunnels.
• Kajabi has an advanced email marketing tool that supports both broadcasts and sequences. There are 12+ email templates to choose from. You have the flexibility to create your own custom templates as well.
• In case you are into content marketing, Kajabi has an integrated blog feature. Its built-in SEO settings allow you to maximize the visibility of your content in search engines. So, you don’t need external CMS tools like WordPress.
• Kajabi has a feature called “events“. This combines forms, email marketing, and automations together helping in automating event registrations, form submissions, sending reminders, etc. This is lacking in Teachable.

Latest product updates :

Recently, Teachable introduced:

• A forever-free plan that allows you to create 1 course (content is limited to just 10 video lessons), 1 coaching product, and 1 digital download. There is no limit to the number of students you can enroll.
• A public API to help you connect with other tools and services.
• Launch Accelerator Challenge – An exclusive program to help creators like you teach how to build a successful business in less than 30 days.

What’s new in Kajabi?

• In February 2023, Kajabi introduced course completion certificates. You can customize them as needed and allow students to share them on social media platforms.
• It has launched new product templates for courses, communities, podcasts, and memberships.
• Similar to platforms like Gumroad, Kajabi now supports pay what you want pricing option.. If you are selling any digital downloads or products like Notion templates, eBooks, or sales funnel copies, you can set this pricing and let customers decide what to pay.
• Kajabi acquired Vibely, an online community platform. Now you can create engaging communities right inside the platform. It also supports community migration from other platforms.

Course creation

Course/product types

Teachable supports courses, coachings, and digital downloads. While Kajabi supports courses, coachings, podcasts, memberships, communities, and digital product selling.

With Kajabi, you can create various types of products. These include –

• Online courses – You can use this to offer long-form content for your students.
• Mini-courses – These are in-short courses helpful for creating product launch videos, demos, summary videos, etc.
• Drip courses – Use this to create courses where content will be dripped over a period of time. Suitable for academic courses/employee training courses where you can release the content or assignments regularly).
• Members – You can offer premium content to members based on their membership level. Teachable lacks memberships, but you can use the course bundling feature to sell membership content.
• Communities – Kajabi has dedicated communities that are engaging. It has challenges, badges, accomplishments, leaderboards, and native live stream features. Teachable doesn’t support communities and needs integration with tools like Circle.so.

Course structuring and uploading

Course structure

Teachable’s course curriculum consists of sections and lessons. While Kajabi has modules, sub-modules, and lessons.

Submodules help you divide the course content into chunks making content consumption easier for students. Students may feel overwhelmed without submodules, lowering the course completion rate.

Content uploading

Teachable supports various content types like –

• Text
• Images
• Audio & video
• Banner images
• Files and attachments (For this, it has a PDF viewer)
• Graded and non-graded quizzes
• Marketing tools like- upsells and referrals.
• Custom coding

Kajabi supports –

• Text
• Audio
• Video
• Assessments
• Images, and files (like GIFs, ZIP files, PDFs, etc).

As opposed to LearnWorlds, neither of these tools supports Adobe Captivate, Storyline, or SCORM content types.
If you want to create academic courses for students, I strongly recommend you go with LearnWorlds as its features are aligned with academic-centered courses. It offers live classes, webinars, Webex integration, custom user roles (you can assign students, teachers, mentors, coordinators, etc. ), 1-on-1 & group sessions, exams, and more.

Kajabi recently introduced the ability to add live lessons to courses, similar to Thinkific. Adding this requires enabling the live rooms feature under the course settings. These sessions are limited to 200 participants. This helps students to clarify their doubts, participate in real-time discussions, and build networks.

Note: Recently, Kajabi has introduced an AI content assistant you can use to create content for a new course or update the existing content. Simply tell the AI your course topic. It will generate the outline for you that you can fine-tune to your liking. If you don’t have a Kajabi account yet, you can try this AI tool by joining AI Creator Hub.

Video subtitles:

Kajabi and Teachable both support subtitles for videos in any language. In this way, students are able to understand the lesson content in their native language. You can also make the video content downloadable so that they can view it offline.

At the moment, you can only upload .srt files. It is not possible to manually add subtitles.

Note: If you want to convert everything including closed captions to your preferred language, you need to change Kajabi’s site language first. In comparison to Teachable, Kajabi supports a limited number of languages.

Cloud uploading:

Both these tools support cloud uploading of files from Google Drive and DropBox, to save your storage space. Teachable also supports uploading files from Microsoft One Drive.

Bulk actions:

Teachable lets you bulk upload multiple files at once, saving you tons of time.

Who likes to upload files one by one?

You can bulk upload videos, documents, audio files, and banner images. Every time a file is uploaded to Teachable, it creates an individual lesson. Therefore, name them appropriately to ensure proper arrangement.

Note: This feature is available only in the paid plans.

It is disappointing that Kajabi, as of now, only supports bulk uploading of video files. The rest must be uploaded one by one.

Unlike Kajabi, Teachable also supports other bulk actions like –

• Publishing
• Preview
• Rename
• Delete

Course enrollments

You can sell both free and paid courses with these LMS tools. You can use free courses as lead magnets, i.e. collect users’ email addresses in exchange for free content. Customers will sign up for your paid courses if your content is really good.

Kajabi‘s website builder includes email opt-ins. You can design the popups to reflect your brand and collect the emails with no effort. With Teachable, you need to use an external page builder to create popups.

In addition, you can offer free trials on your paid courses so that students can assess the quality and see if it meets their needs.

Teachable has recently added this feature to offer free trials. In the past, you were supposed to use Zapier to accomplish this. Kajabi allows you to offer both free and paid trials.

Both tools will automatically enroll the students once the offers are purchased.

Do you want to create a sense of urgency by capping enrollments (say for scarcity marketing)?

If yes, both tools will allow you to do that.

On the sale and checkout pages, you can set a quantity limit.

Kajabi even lets you limit the time a product can be accessed. You can set the expiration date by which students can purchase the offers. When the time expires, you can redirect them to specific landing pages.

Teachable has recently introduced the ability to add a product access duration. You can specify until when students can access the products or consume the content of the course.

This duration can be set on a free, one-time purchase, or subscription plan. Upon completion of the access duration, students will be automatically unenrolled, and they will not be able to access the course or receive a certificate.

Setting course pricing:

This duration can be set on a free, one-time purchase, or subscription plan. Upon completion of the access duration, students will be automatically unenrolled, and they will not be able to access the course or receive a certificate. and Teachable, both have four payment plans.

1. Free
2. One-time purchase
3. Payment plans
4. Subscriptions

Teachable doesn’t support subscriptions for digital downloads.

Note: With Kajabi, you can’t directly set pricing for products. The only way is to create offers. These act as a price tag for your products. To sell any of your products –

• First, you need to create an offer.
• Include the products to sell in that (you can add multiple products).
• Set the payment plan.

Content delivery (to the students)

Drip scheduling:

To avoid students binge watching the lessons, you can drip-schedule the course content. Kajabi and Teachable both offer drip-scheduling of sections and modules, respectively. However, neither allows you to drip schedule the lessons. The only workaround is to create each lesson with a separate section.

You can drip schedule either –

• On a specific date.
• Days after student enrollment.

When the dripped content is available, you can send students an email notification. Both of these have a default template that you can customize.

Note: Teachable requires the drip date to be set and activated at least 48 hours in advance.

Let’s discuss the comments feature.

Comments:

Kajabi and Teachable both support lesson-wide comments. By default, Teachable comments are public. Kajabi, on the other hand, lets you make them visible, hidden, or locked.

I liked the fact that Teachable supports multi-threading of comments. This helps to keep the conversations organized. Also, it will be easier for students to engage in specific threads with other students and instructors. If you need this, you should enable this feature in settings.

Unlike tools like Thinkific, which doesn’t allow embedding comments under lessons, Kajabi and Teachable’s comments feature is straightforward and easily accessible for students.

Course player options:

It is really important to see how the course player looks for students in the front end. It is where they spend most of their time and interact with your course content.

Both Teachable and Kajabi give course templates (Kajabi has themes) to design your course pages.

These templates change the look and layout of the course overview pages, which is the very first page students see when they enroll.