Kajabi vs. Thinkific: Which Course Builder Should You Use? | Complete Review & Walkthrough

Today we're going to check out the pricing and features of both Kajabi and Thinkific, along with diving into the actual dashboard of each one so you can see the look and feel and decide which one's going to be better suited for you and your business goals. By the way, if you want to take advantage of a free 30-day trial of Kajabi to play with the platform yourself, you can use my link profityourknowledge.com/kajabi. This is an affiliate link, so I get a small percentage of your investment in Kajabi, but there's no no extra cost to you compared to if you went through Kajabi's website yourself. All this does is simply support me and this channel for referring someone to Kajabi. But when you sign up with my link, I'm going to give you instant access to a course I created called Kajabi Kickstart, which is going to help you set up and launch your online business with Kajabi in that first 30 days. On top of that, when you're inside of Kajabi Kickstart, you will have access to a free 45-minute coaching session with me where you and I both get to deep dive into your Kajabi account, and I will be there to answer any questions you have about Kajabi marketing or even making your first sale with the platform. All this is free, and you can get instant access by going to profityourknowledge.com/kajabi or clicking the link down in the description. Without further ado, let's dive into Kajabi. So right here we have the Kajabi pricing plans that grow with you, if you will. We have our Basic, Growth, and then Pro plan, this is on the monthly, not the annual, so it's from $150, $200, or $400 per month to use Kajabi. Nice thing about Kajabi is there are zero transaction fees on all of their plans, which are awesome. A lot of the plans from different tools, I think Thinkific, we can see free per month, zero transaction fee. That's right, Thinkific is really cool about this. Ones like Teachable, and I think Kartra do it as well, they have transaction fees on their lower-priced monthly plans, and they take away the transaction fees when you're basically paying the same as you could be with Kajabi. As far as products go, we get 3, 15, or 100 products. Same thing with funnels, depending on the plan that you decide to go with in Kajabi. Unlimited landing pages and marketing emails. Which you can link together landing pages, by the way, and basically create funnels as long as you know what you're doing. For contacts, we get 10,000, 25,000, or 100,000 depending on your plan. And then active customers, that's people who've actually paid for your program, 1,000, 10,000, 20,000. Now you might think, 1,000, what, that's it? Well, you can sell new offers to those 1,000 customers, okay? So there's a lot of ways to work around the system. Again, you just need to know what you're doing. Topic for a totally different day. Let's look over at Thinkific. We have a free, a basic, start, and a grow plan. So the grow plan, most popular, $199, same as the growth plan for Kajabi. But let's see what we get. The nice thing is that even on their free plan, you get zero transaction fees. That's pretty intriguing if you're thinking about starting. I would much prefer looking at Thinkific over Teachable by far, because Teachable takes percentage and then plus a dollar. It's like 10% plus a dollar, and that's on top of your, your payment that you pay towards Stripe as well. So you end up losing a lot of money if you use Teachable. I do not like Teachable. I don't like the interface, I don't like anything about it. Okay, so I would much prefer Thinkific over Teachable. You get 2 spaces per community. I'm not really sure what they mean by spaces. Again, we're gonna take a little deep dive into the actual dashboard here in a second. 100% ownership of your content, that's nice. Drag and drop course builder, easy to use website themes, app store, cool, okay. A lot of cool stuff. You don't get to remove the Kajabi, or the Thinkific branding until you're paying $200 per month. And that's the same thing with Kajabi as well. You have the ability to remove Kajabi branding, it only starts at the growth plan. So I'm on the growth plan. It's not like super blatant, but at the bottom of your website it'll say powered by Kajabi. That's all it really says, so it's pretty subtle. On the free plan, you only get one course, which makes sense, you know, it's a free plan. That one course can make you a ton of money though, which is cool, and there's zero transaction fees and you get unlimited students, which is pretty awesome. The basic plan, you get unlimited courses. Wow. One thing to think, I say this, you know, because it's something just to think about, is that just because it says unlimited courses doesn't mean it's like the best thing in the world. Because that, I mean, people can be like, oh, but you get unlimited courses, like that's my selling point. It's like, well, If you're smart with your courses, 3 courses or products can be perfect. You have a low ticket option, a medium ticket, you know, couple hundred bucks. The low ticket's like $50 to $100, and then your membership site, which is a monthly recurring thing. Or it could be a, it could be some sort of like group coaching or just a main coaching program as well. But then if you're like me, I don't even do my coaching inside of Kajabi. I've played with it and it wasn't really for me. And I just do it on Zoom, you know, so it's totally separate of Kajabi, but I have offers, so people still go through checkout pages in Kajabi and then everything else gets set up on the backend. Okay, so you, you can get away with doing 3 products and you're gonna crush it in online business as long as you just know what you're doing, how to play the game. All right, so wouldn't say that that's, that shouldn't be the biggest selling point, but it is intriguing. Unlimited courses, you don't have to worry about a cap on the amount of courses that you can create. Just be smarter with your courses, that's all I'm gonna say. Okay, email, live support, live chat support. Over here, you get Thinkific mobile. So this is something to pay attention to in terms of Thinkific versus Kajabi. Deliver your course and content and communities to your audience on the devices they use most. So, their phone for example. With Kajabi, Every single one of these plans, it doesn't matter if it's the Basic, Growth, or Pro, you automatically get access to the Kajabi app. So I always recommend that clients I work with download the Kajabi app, and I have a video where I walk through like what it looks like so you can see what your courses can be like for other people as well. But you can use a Kajabi app as well, but you have to be paying at least $100 a month or $200 per month to have access to the Thinkific mobile app, okay, where you can have people just like Facebook or Instagram or the music app Spotify, anything like that. There's an app they click on and they get instant access to your courses right there, and they can start listening and using them on the fly, which is pretty awesome. So let's take a look inside. I mean, both of these are really great in terms of what they're delivering. I think the most intriguing thing, especially if you're just kind of getting started is you can have a totally free plan, one course, which is awesome. You know, if it was a $200 course or something, even $100 course, you get zero transaction fees. It's really intriguing, plus unlimited students, so an endless amount of people can sign up for that course. Pretty awesome. Kajabi, you get those active customers, okay? You kind of have to build up new customers, but you can create new offers and products and resell those to those customers. There's just like active customers on file, okay? And then if you ever need more, you can always talk to sales, and then they're gonna— they can figure out a plan for you. If you're on the Pro plan, you know, you get to that point, then you can talk about getting some more students and things like that. Alright, so let's take a look inside of Thinkific and Kajabi and look at the dashboard and see which interface makes a bit more sense to you. So here's Thinkific, and here's Kajabi. Starting with Thinkific, I just created this, it's like a free trial or something, just to kind of take a look inside of it. And it's pretty linear, okay, which I like. I like simplicity for sure. Kajabi seems a bit more robust. We have products, sales, website marketing, contacts, and analytics. Here we have managed learning products. I'm guessing that's where your courses go. Okay, so courses, communities, memberships, bundles, video library. Click on Courses. Your first course, they've already got it set up for you. I'm gonna close that. Okay, so you can add a lesson. I want it to be, oh, this is pretty cool. Exam survey. Let's go video. I'm not gonna actually do this, but we'll, current lesson. All course lessons, I wanna see what this looks like. So this is what your course is gonna look like, and I've taken courses from people who use Thinkific, and they work pretty well, you know, like, yeah, you have this little dropdown menu, that's really nice, it's off to the side, automatically have the dropdown, then they can click on the first video, go to the next one, you can add PDFs and all those different things, you can add drip pricing after purchase, I'm assuming that's like an upsell, of some sort. So we look at Kajabi and click on, let's say, like, my sweet mini course, we'll say, and we'll do a little preview of this one. Here's what it can look like. I've played with the fonts and things like that in here, so they're not the most pretty, but this is just one theme. This is the Momentum theme, and it has all the things laid out here. One thing I will say, just by playing with this briefly, is that Thinkific is nice because it has a dropdown. So these are the modules, chapter 1, and you can have all your different lessons underneath. A module is not the lesson alone. A module is the actual collection of lessons. So it's nice to have a dropdown. Like right here, the bold part is the module. It's the collection of lessons. And then we have step 1, 2, and 3. The, the thing about Momentum is that there is categories where you can click right here and it will open 'em up and you can see those different ones. But on the dropdown menu, you can't actually close and hide the content like that. So that's a bit of an advantage, I'll say, to Thinkific in terms of just the flow and the layout. And one thing I am curious about is the website design. So if site pages, theme, let's go theme library. And if I actually preview the website, I'm curious what this will look like. Your first course. Okay, so it shows you the curriculum. Discover your potential starting— discover your potential— oh, starting today. Haha, threw me off for a sec. Okay, so build. Vogue is the theme. We'll go to edit page. Okay, so this seems to be like a landing page. I don't think that Teachable— or that Thinkific, sorry— gives you a sort of, um, let me see real quick. Additional products, pricing banner, bonus material. Okay, so it seems like they give you the option to do not like a website, but you can have kind of like a site for your course, almost like a sales page, and then people can pick up your course. So it's really important to pay attention to. Okay, it doesn't say anywhere here about giving you like a full-fledged website. So that's an advantage I would say that Kajabi has over Thinkific. If we go over to website and we click even right here, you like— this is a full-fledged website. My entire website is built inside of Kajabi, which I could pull up real quick. So this is my website and this is all inside of Kajabi. Every single page, every single like bit, my blog Everything is done inside of Kajabi, which is pretty awesome. In here you can change all this stuff. You can click on the background image, you can change the background color if you want it to be, you know, you click right here, we want it to be more dark, we'll say. You can change that, looks a lot better. You can change out these pictures, okay, and this is gonna become your actual homepage, which is pretty amazing. We can even, you know, change out like, the fonts and a lot of stuff. So you can fully customize your entire website and landing pages, whether you want to create sales pages or anything like that inside of Kajabi. With Thinkific, I'm not really seeing anywhere to do that. That, that's pretty— I mean, it's pretty big. It's just you got to think about it. Like, if you're spending $200 a month and you can get unlimited courses, unlimited students, zero transaction fees, that's all awesome stuff, but you don't get like a website. And that's kind of where I think the biggest like selling point for me would be with Kajabi because I like the, the idea that Kajabi has and I feel like they've really perfected this where you get to have your website, your email marketing, your landing pages, your checkout pages, like sales, everything that you need is done inside of one software that works seamlessly together. Yes, you can integrate with Zapier and MailChimp and other tools like that, But Kajabi gives you like a nice sleek looking website, you know, right here. And then you can click here and go over to like squeeze pages and all, like everything in my brand is built inside of Kajabi, okay? Which in Thinkific, I feel like you'd have to have a website builder like WordPress, for example, to host your website, and then you'd be able to link it to Kajabi or link it to Thinkific. And Thinkific would basically just host your course. So, gotta kinda think about what your intention is with your business. Do you wanna have everything in one place, like your website and all that stuff, and you like the themes inside of Kajabi? I'm, I'm not gonna go into website themes right now. I have other videos where I do that and the landing pages and different themes and whatnot. But you have to really think, like, Kajabi really is the complete package with everything that you need. To build your online business. Thinkific, it's nice, it's just more for just courses. It seems like that's what I'm seeing. The real way to play with it is just to kind of go inside and play with it yourself. I mean, with Kajabi, you still get the, the mobile app and you get the website builder and the email marketing. Like, you're not getting email marketing with Thinkific, it's just for courses. And just hosting courses and a community and that kind of stuff. So that's where I really see Kajabi beating out Thinkific. In that case, you know, even if I was a fresh user, I would lean more towards Kajabi just for that reason because you're spending essentially the same price unless you want to go with one of these lower per month plans. But yeah, I mean, if you're getting up to the point where you're doing the $200 per month plan, I feel like you might as well just stick with Kajabi. But if you're still on the fence even going through this and the things that I shared, the biggest thing is just to try it out yourself. Both of them have a free trial. Give it a shot, play with it, see what the interface feels like to you. Um, Kajabi's gonna be more robust. If you want the email marketing, the website, that's inside of Kajabi. Give both of 'em a free trial. Um, if you wanna get double the amount of trial time in Kajabi, check out my link or consider checking it out, profityourknowledge.com/kajabi. You're gonna get 30 days to try out the platform instead of 14. If you go through their website, that's what you get. And I'm also gonna give you access instantly to Kajabi Kickstart. That's gonna walk you through how to set up and prime your business for automation and all the good stuff that you want out of a business in Kajabi so that you can be set in that first 30 days. And you get a coaching call with me. I'll answer any questions you have about marketing, sales, Kajabi, et cetera. There's a link down in the description, but I'd love to hear from you down in the comments. Which one do you like more? Maybe if you use Thinkific, I'd love to hear your thoughts about why you think it's better or not as good as Kajabi. Let me know. I wanna hear what's going on inside your mind. Which one, just by what I've shared and what I've shown you today, do you think would be a better option? I hope this was helpful and insightful, and I will see you in the next one.