Kajabi Alternatives: Comparing Kajabi to Competitors

We’re always curious about who writes reviews for products online, so I want to give you the full disclosure.

We are the creators of the AccessAlly LMS plugin for WordPress, and we are affiliates for some of the tools that we’re comparing here, which means that we may earn a commission if you buy from our reviews.

This makes it possible for us to test and provide in-depth and hands-on experience with a lot of the course and membership tools you might be comparing. We never let an affiliate incentive sway us in our reviews.

Now let’s see how Kajabi compares, and why people might be looking for a Kajabi alternative in the first place.

If you’ve tried Kajabi and found it limiting, or you’ve outgrown the Kajabi system you might already know why you want to move. Here are some of the other common reasons why people look for Kajabi substitutes.

• Restrictions: The biggest reason most people chose to look for a Kajabi replacement is they realize the limitations of Kajabi. Because Kajabi is a closed and hosted platform, you can only do things the way Kajabi designed them to be done, or wait for them to release new features and functionality. This can often impact how you make money, and even how you manage your training courses and members.
• Limits on growth: Kajabi’s different tiers limit the number of products, courses, and active members you can have, limiting your business’ growth. Say you want to offer a free course when someone opts into your email list by signing up for a free course. With Kajabi, you’d be limited to 1000 sign ups on the $129/month plan, or 10,000 sign ups on the $389/month plan. The signup limit is not effective for list building or turning free members into paid participants.
• Lack of design options: Kajabi’s design options are limited because you must build within the Kajabi hosted framework. This can be stifling for those who value custom designs and want to be able to put their unique stamp on their courses and membership area.
• Can’t schedule campaigns with specific times: Unlike most email marketing platforms, you can’t schedule campaigns to go out at specific times with Kajabi. That makes it difficult to truly automate and plan ahead in your digital business.
• Lack of extensibility: Because Kajabi is a closed platform, unlike WordPress which is open-sourced, you can’t just install another plugin or add-on to enable more functionality. For example, if you wanted to add gamification or take advantage of a new way to track audio or video views… you couldn’t do it.
• No PayPal recurring payments: Kajabi does not handle recurring PayPal subscriptions or payment plans, so if you want to offer these types of payment plans you need to use Stripe. This can impact your sales numbers, especially if you have international customers who prefer to pay using PayPal.
• High cost: Kajabi’s pricing is covered more below, but it is not the most economical option on the market. Some people might look for a Kajabi alternative when their costs start to add up and they realize that by making more sales, they aren’t able to keep as many of their profits.
• No ability to add country taxes: If you operate a global business because you want to tap into a bigger marketplace, it helps to be able to have localized payment and language options. In Kajabi, you can’t add country taxes or easily handle multiple currencies or languages.
• Can’t retry failed payments: Failed payments happen for a variety of reasons, like expiring credit cards or because a card is full on a specific day. Being able to automatically retry a recurring payment can mean the difference between losing money, customers, and so many additional hassles trying to account for missing payments.
• Not open source: Kajabi’s code is not open source, which means that when you cancel your account you lose all of your content. If you were hosting your courses or membership management on a platform like WordPress, where you own your content and can also look at all of the source code that runs your business… it’s a lot safer and you retain full control over everything.
• Lack of integrations with other systems: Because Kajabi’s software philosophy is to be an all-in-one system, they haven’t focused as much on integrating with other systems. If you have everything in one tech system, it can become a “weak link” in your business if that system goes down. Having the ability to communicate between tech systems is key to having redundancy.

Now that we’ve looked all of the reasons why someone might choose Kajabi, or switch from Kajabi to another membership solution, it’s time to compare Kajabi alternatives!

In these in-depth comparison pages, you’ll see where each tool shines and where it falls short so you can make the best decision for your particular business and online teaching needs.