Kajabi vs. Kartra: a comparison

Choosing the right LMS platform can be overwhelming.

The last thing you want is for your platform or software of choice to be limiting your growth and capping your sales. And none of us want to rein in our wishlist or compromise our vision, right?

While Kajabi does have more LMS features, Kartra does support protected content, memberships, and online courses.

Kajabi is known for its intuitive platform. It’s generally accepted as easy to navigate and use. The setup process is quick and easy so you can get your business and online courses up and running on a tight timeline.

You’ll also be able to build a custom-branded membership portal, have multiple membership tiers, upload files and embed videos, drip content, and run automations.

Again, Kartra has more of a focus on marketing initiatives. You’ll find features like unique marketing-oriented video hosting and a calendar feature for scheduling that support marketing, and the membership creation and courses are secondary.

That being said, they still offer features you’d expect to see with membership sites like drag-and-drop membership builder, multiple membership tiers, ability to upload files, videos, or audios, structured lessons with categories, and sub-categories.

You can choose whether to drip your content over time or release it all at once. You’ll have the ability to track user’s progress through your Kartra dashboard.

It’s important to note that even though Kajabi has more features to support your online course, neither platform is a fully robust learning management system.

It’s important to understand the full scope of pricing before deciding on your platform or software. Without this understanding, you may find yourself paying for integrations, add-ons, and connector tools that you weren’t expecting.

You could end up with a costly, duct-taped solution on your hands that you’ll eventually have to migrate away from.

When it comes to pricing for Kajabi and Kartra, here’s what you can expect from both platforms: when you join annually, you’ll save money. They both offer 14-day trial periods. With Kajabi you can start for free, and with Kartra you can start for $1.

Both platforms allow you to manage your subscription, payment, and/or cancel your plan through their dashboard.

When it comes to accepting payments, neither Kajabi nor Kartra charges additional transaction fees, which is awesome.

Kajabi and Kartra offer multiple tiers to meet the needs of your business, and in this comparison, we’re focusing on their most popular tiers: Kajabi’s Growth tier and Kartra’s Silver tier.

Here’s what to expect on Kajabi’s Growth tier at $199 per month:

You’ll get 15 products, 15 pipelines, unlimited landing pages and marketing emails, 25k contacts, 10k active members, 1 website, and 10 admin users.

It’s important to note that this plan lacks the code editor. We’ll talk about the code editor more in the design flexibility section of this comparison, but if you know you’ll want a customized design, be sure to keep this limitation in mind.

And here’s what to expect with Kartra’s Silver Plan also at $199 per month:

You’ll get 12,500 leads, 3 customer domains as well as these unlimited features: emails, bandwidth, pages, videos, products, membership sites, team members, and help desks.

With either though, strongly consider the limitations because the price changes significantly from tier to tier.

Kajabi’s highest level tier comes in at $399 per month, and Kartra’s comes in at $499 per month.

When you’re considering customer support features, here are a few key elements to keep in mind: how do you communicate with their support staff, note any hours they have posted and response time expectations.

Consider how you can find training and resources on your own. If the foundation of your business is built on their platform, you’ll want to become an expert so you can know how their platform can best support your business.

And lastly, consider any added perks like Q&A calls, setup help, or help for hire.

Now, let’s dive into customer support options for Kajabi vs. Kartra.

Kajabi is known for having great client support. It’s important to note there are tier restrictions.
On the Growth and Pro plans you have access to 24/7 support via email or chat. On the Basic plan, you’ll only have email access 24/7 and chat support during posted business hours.

They have an added bonus too: when you sign up for the annual plan, you also get a 1:1 session with the Kajabi team to get you up and running.

Beyond their support team, you’ll have other resources to become an expert on their platform.
They have a help center with articles on how to implement features. Kajabi University is part of their help center and is structured as a course you can work through to build a foundational knowledge of the platform. You’ll also find in-app trainings from your Kajabi dashboard.

In terms of extras, Kajabi has regular webinars that cover everything from basic set up to advanced Q&A sessions that you can reserve (for free) ahead of time.

They offer other paid support services like Virtual Assistants from the official Kajabi Facebook Group.

In comparison, Kartra has a support team as well, but no live chat hours.

That being said, sometimes chat support for technical issues isn’t the best avenue because of the difficulty of communication via chat platforms. Step-by-step instructions or explanations can get lost in the back and forth style of a chat scenario.

They don’t have their support hours posted publicly as Kajabi does, nor do they have a response time expectation set.

They do offer a few other support areas you’ll want to be aware of. Their Kartraverse Training Center is structured like a course and has feature how-to articles. It isn’t a searchable knowledgebase though, which is a drawback.

When you’re in the middle of figuring out a tech issue, the last thing you want to do is scroll through a course to find an answer. Being able to search articles and learn about features is a very valuable feature.

They also offer frequent Q&A sessions where you can get your questions answered and connect with the Kartra team.

Kartra does offer an easy way to place feature requests and vote on the feature request queue right from their support page. This makes it clear they value their communities’ opinions and want their customers to be part of the feature update process, which is nice.

All-in-all, Kajabi takes the lead for their customer support and onboarding offerings.

As discussed, Kajabi offers more LMS features than Kartra. That being said, neither of them offers the advanced features you can expect from a true LMS software, like multiple quiz types, required scores to unlock content, auto-generated course certificates, and video bookmarking, just to name a few.

Kajai does allow for assessments, quizzes, surveys, and assignments. They offer a graded quiz feature that allows you to see your students’ results from your Kajabi dashboard.

And although these aren’t traditional LMS features, it’s worth mentioning a couple of unique features within Kajabi so you can get the full picture of what to expect. Kajabi gives you unlimited Wista access for video hosting, which can be advantageous if you’re creating a video course.

You can also create a community, allow comments under lectures, and automate content unlocking based on lecture levels.

Kartra has fewer LMS features. They don’t offer any type of quiz. They don’t have anything comparable to Kajabi’s community feature.

They do, however, offer a help desk feature, which is unique to their platform. Although it isn’t a traditional LMS feature, it’s worth mentioning here so you can see the possibilities.

If you know you want to create an advanced learning experience for your users, Kajabi is a better choice for you. However, it’s important to note that they don’t offer a lot of popular LMS features that can truly make the difference for your students.

Bulk course enrollment is a selling tactic that allows you to package your online courses and memberships for groups. This can be extremely useful if you develop corporate trainings, programs for families or schools, or any kind of community course. 

In this scenario, a team leader purchases a specific number of courses or programs for their agency. Then, they have the power to assign their allotted number to team members. In a fully integrated bulk course enrollment, they can purchase more licenses, communicate with team members, and see their team member progress, all from a beautifully designed dashboard. 

Neither Kajabi nor Kartra offers a bulk course enrollment feature. If you know this is part of your business model now, or might be in the future, the lack of this feature is a serious consideration.

E-commerce features and integrations allow you to accept payments right on your site. When it’s integrated with your platform or software, you have the ability to create a seamless experience for your customers and keep everything centralized.

When it comes to e-commerce features, Kajabi and Kartra are quite similar. Kartra has a slight advantage because they work with more payment processors than Kajabi does.

Kajabi accepts payments through a Stripe integration or a PayPal integration while Kartra integrates with Stripe, PayPal, Braintree, and/or Authorize.net.

Both systems can accept recurring subscriptions, one-time payments, or payment plans. With either, you can set up order bumps and upsells which is a great feature to increase your selling potential.

Kartra does offer what they call recurrent installments, which allows for a more complex payment structure that’s a combination of subscription plans and payment plans.

If you know you want e-commerce flexibility, Kartra is a better option for you.

Both Kartra and Kajabi offer affiliate functionality. With each platform, you can run an affiliate program that allows affiliates to sign up, see their clicks, find their unique links, and see conversion rates. 

Payouts for both systems are done through a third party, like PayPal, which is very common among affiliate programs. 

They’re both lacking a seamless way to share marketing assets with your affiliates. That means you have to rely on email notifications from an email system or manual emails from your team to communicate swipe copy, share images, and share important timelines. 

If you run a robust affiliate program, you’ll want affiliate functionality that supports an asset dashboard, in addition to all the links, tracking, and other affiliate information mentioned above.

As we all know, inboxes get messy, and it can be easy for your affiliates to lose track of your emails containing your valuable swipe copy, images, and important timelines. 

Kartra does offer an affiliate screening process, and Kajabi does not. An affiliate screening process can be a useful tool if you want to review and/or approve affiliates before they’re officially part of your program. 

In summary, Kartra’s affiliate functionality is more advanced and flexible than Kajabi, but neither offers a fully customizable, easy to use dashboard interface for your affiliates.

• • You want a basic course-website and have no plans of expanding your offerings in the future
  • You’re not attached to a specific design and willing to flex your vision when met with system limitations
  • You don’t have a CRM setup and have no plans of setting one up in the future
  • You won’t mind setting up your business on ‘rented land’ and manually migrating when your business grows

• • You’re focused more on marketing initiatives
  • You don’t have, nor do you ever want a robust membership site and online programs
  • You want everything centralized in one location with as few integrations as possible
  • You’re okay with looking through hundred of templates to find the ones that fit your brand the best