This post will be all about Circle.so vs. Kajabi.

Today, Circle.so is one of the leading platforms for online communities. Kajabi, on the other hand, is one of the most popular platforms for creating online courses with advanced marketing features.

With the recent updates, Circle and Kajabi have upgraded their features to overcome their downsides. To be clear,

• Kajabi‘s community component was only 20% of Circle’s. Recently, it acquired Vibely to help you build vibrant communities.
• Circle.so lacked automation workflows (triggers and actions). It has now launched automation workflows similar to Kajabi. It helps you perform bulk actions and automate community tasks.

Now you have a tough time choosing between the two.

Let’s get started with the review.

Features	Circle.so	Kajabi
Pricing starts at 💲	$39/mo	$149/mo
Transaction fees 💸	0%	0%
Trial	Sign up for 14 days free trial	Sign up for 30 days free trial
Any discounts available? 💰	NA	20% OFF on annual pricing – Save $960/year
Mobile apps 📱	Has only iOS app (But not truly white labeled) – See all the app features	Has both iOS and Android apps (But not truly white labeled) – See all the app features
Courses 📚	✔	✔
Communities	✔ – Explore Circle’s community features	✔ – Explore Kajabi’s community features
Supports custom domain?	✔	✔
Custom Single Sign-on available?	✔	✖
Has native live streaming? 📷	✔	✔
Upsells, coupons, discounts	✔	✔
Is white-labeled?	You can just remove Circle’s branding	You can just remove Kajabi’s branding
Explore	Explore all Circle’s features	Explore all Kajabi’s features

What do we like about Circle.so over Kajabi 👍?

• Circle.so excels in communities. It has features like a personalized feed, discovery page, weekly digests, group chat rooms, member directories, spaces, events, live streaming, private messaging, etc. On the other hand, Kajabi’s community just has topics and posts. That’s it!
• It has an embed widget to embed its spaces or groups on other platforms. For example – If you are using Teachable to host your courses, you can embed Circle’s spaces within the courses using this widget. This way, you can promote and motivate students to join the spaces.
• Circle offers weekly digests feature. This allows you to send a brief summary report of all the things happening in the community over a week. This helps inactive members to be aware of community activities without you spamming their inboxes.
• Circle has a native live-streaming feature. In the recent update, Circle.so has released features to schedule the live streams and run multiple events at the same time with different hosts (just create recurring events), making it more flexible. In the case of Kajabi, as of now, the live-streaming feature is available only for coaching programs, not for the courses.
• Circle.so provides single sign-on integration with top platforms like Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, Outseta, Teachable, Memberstack, Memberful, etc. This feature provides flexibility in logging in to various tools with the same credentials.
• On the Business plan, Circle has introduced workflows. You can use these to automate tasks and perform bulk actions to save time.
• Circle now supports live rooms and live spaces. These are quite different than live streams. You can use these for small meetings, and as of now, they are limited to 30 participants. You can think of live spaces as similar to Twitter spaces. You can read more here.

What do we like about Kajabi over Circle.so👍?

• Kajabi’s main forte is its courses. You can build highly advanced courses using its product blueprints (templates). You can create various courses like mini-courses, drip courses, and online courses.
• Kajabi excels over its LMS competitors like Thinkific and Podia with its sales and marketing features. To increase sales, Kajabi has built-in funnels (calls as pipelines), automation rules, a blogging platform, etc. In the case of Circle.so, if you want to build funnels, you can use tools like ClickFunnels, at an additional cost.
• Kajabi has built-in assessments. With this, you can create standardized tests, surveys, polls, and quizzes. You can even automate the assessment completion tasks. In the case of Circle, you can make use of Google Forms (which is free) or use any paid tools like Paperform or Typeform.
• For lead generation, Kajabi offers opt-ins 📰. You can design and customize these using its drag-and-drop page builder. To collect leads, you can embed the forms on landing pages, sales pages, or any other custom pages.
• Kajabi has both iOS and Android apps for its users. On the other side, Circle.so just has an iOS app, but they are working on releasing an Android app as well. Unlike Mighty Networks, these apps are not truly white-labeled, and you don’t have ownership of them.
• Recently, Kajabi acquired Vibely, helping you create highly engaging online communities. For engagement, they have points, leaderboards, challenges, live rooms, events, etc. This eliminates the need for third-party integrations.

Common downsides 👎

• Unlike tools like Tribe.so, Circle.so and Kajabi don’t offer security features like keyword blockers and profanity checkers. If you have large communities, these features are very much essential to avoid spam. But indeed, you can counter this easily by dedicating your community only to paid members.
• Both these tools lack gamification features like points, rankings, and leaderboard systems, which are essential to motivate students to engage more in community activities. If you need gamification features, you need to go with Tribe.so.
• The apps provided by both of these are not completely white-labeled and are not owned by you. If you consider tools like Mighty Networks or Passion.io, they allow you to create your own custom-branded apps, which you can publish on app stores. And you own 100% ownership of the apps.

Latest product updates 🎈

Circle.so has recently introduced courses. You can create online courses or cohort courses.

With the release of courses, you will get –

• Course spaces.
• Drag and drop curriculum builder.
• Interactive lesson editor.
• Native video hosting and attachments.
• Embedded comments with image and file attachments, GIFs, and notifications.
• Student dashboard and progress tracking.
• (Coming soon) Customizable sales page editor for your course.
• (Coming soon) Advanced video analytics.

In the future, you can expect these features –

• Multi-currency paywalls.
• Scheduled posts.

Kajabi has recently introduced –

• A calendar scheduler eliminates the need for tools like Calendly.
• Also, it allows you to record & upload live videos, and send them in emails.
• Kajabi has also released quizzes and course-specific exams to encourage proactive learning.
• Affiliate coupons – You can offer affiliate-specific coupon codes to maximize referral conversions.

Community features

Kajabi and Circle.so both include built-in communities.

A couple of months ago, Kajabi acquired Vibely, an online community-building tool for creating highly engaging communities. Before, Kajabi’s community support was limited to only topics, posts, and members, which was not very strong.

Let’s take a look at all the features they support.

Kajabi’s community consists of groups, while Circle’s consists of spaces.

The number of spaces you can create is limited in both tools.

Circle (as a specialist community platform) gives you several templates for you to create communities quickly. You have templates for –

• Coaching community
• Course
• Podcast
• Product
• Basic communities
• Etc.

When you replicate these templates, default spaces will be imported. Currently, Kajabi does not offer any templates.

In both platforms, you can charge a one-time fee, a subscription fee, or multiple payments. Kajabi also offers pay-what-you-want pricing, so members can pay for whatever they want.

Circle.so supports paywalls, which allows you to charge access to your community spaces through subscriptions or one-time payments. If you want to gate access to content with paywalls, the community spaces should be private or secret.

Both tools communities have features like-

• Chat, group messages, & direct messages
• Native live streams
• Native polls & questions
• Member profile pages
• Customized member fields
• Member tags

Kajabi has a few unique features like –

• Live video calls
• Smart recording library
• Accountability tools and progress tracking
• Challenges, badges, and accomplishments.
• Events and RSVPs
• Ambassadors (similar to Mighty Networks)
• Leaderboards

Winner: Circle.so. Compared to Kajabi, Circle.so offers more control and flexibility. I personally feel Circle.so is the future of communities. It has recently introduced Discord or Slack like chat as well to warm up the audience before upselling them to spaces. If you have larger communities or are scaling your community, it provides community moderation features to prevent spam. With Kajabi, you feel quite restricted.

Gamification

You can foster community engagement with features like tags, badges, and rewards. Kajabi stands out here, with its points, challenges, and accomplishments.

Here are a few ideas on how you can leverage tags to gamify engagement –

• Add qualifying tags based on their tier or roles
• Tags based on activity or milestones
  • 💬 Active contributor (+100 Points)
  • 🌟 500 club (+500 Points)
  • 🏆 1k club (+1000 Points)
  • 🎧 Live listener
  • Etc.
• Tags based on content
  • 🎙 Guest speaker
  • 📝 Guest poster
  • 🔮 Storyteller
  • 🧠 Community expert
  • Etc.
• Random and fun tags

Also, with Kajabi, you can assign challenges to members. Challenges can be recurring, group challenges, or individual challenges. By participating in group challenges, members are inspired by their peers and achieve more.

Kajabi offers several challenge templates for various niches, including health, fitness, arts, lifestyle, spirituality, and business. You can customize this to match your needs.

You can set the prizes and rewards for winners –

• Provide free access to your paid space.
• Assign 100 points.
• Feature as Gold member of the group
• Provide free access to the course
• Etc.

Kajabi also has monthly and all-time leaderboards. You can see a list of all top members based on their activities.

Live streaming

Both Circle and Kajabi support live streaming. To connect with members, you can schedule group calls for specific spaces, conduct live sessions, run QAs, and more, all in real-time.

You can even monetize your community by restricting live events access only to paid members.

Winner: Kajabi. Circle just has member tagging. I am sure they will introduce the remaining features within a few months. Kajabi has points, challenges, accomplishments, leaderboards, and events to foster community engagement.

Course builder 📚

Kajabi has an advanced course builder while Circle just has basic course features. The former provides blueprints for online courses, drip courses, and mini-courses.

Kajabi’s course curriculum consists of modules, sub-modules, and lessons. While Circle consists of sections and lessons. Kajabi’s submodules help you split long content into chunks so students can consume it more easily.

When it comes to adding course content, both support text, images, audio/video, and files. Circle also supports custom HTML. Both allow you to drip-schedule the content to avoid binge-watching.

Kajabi has additional features like –

• Offers course completion certificates (even integrates with Accredible)
• In order to ensure course compliance, you can lock modules until previous lessons are completed.
• Enforcing graded quizzes – Students will be able to access the content only if they cross the passing grade.

Circle.so lacks these.

Recently, Kajabi introduced live lessons inside of the courses. You can conduct weekly coaching sessions and connect with students in real-time. (The sessions are limited to just 200 participants).

As of now, Circle lacks this feature.

AI assistant

Kajabi has introduced a new AI content assistant in its latest update. It can be used to create content for courses, landing pages, email marketing campaigns, etc. There is also an AI course generator available. It will create an outline for you based on the topic you enter.

Use Kajabi’s AI tools to create your products super fast.

What’s more?

Kajabi gives in-depth course progress reports, video analytics, and heatmaps that we will discuss later in this blog post.

Winner: Kajabi. It includes an advanced course builder with LMS features such as course completion certificates, course compliance (content locking and graded assessments), video analytics, and AI content creator. Circle‘s course features are about 20% of Kajabi’s.

Mobile app 📲

Kajabi and Circle both have mobile apps for Android and iOS. The apps aren’t white labeled, unlike Mighty Networks.

With these apps, students can –

• Consume courses on the go.
• Access communities and memberships.
• See all the product updates.
• Take quizzes, assessments, and download the attachments.

To increase conversions, both support in-app purchases and push notifications.

As an added advantage, Kajabi also has an app for creators like you. You can manage your entire business on the go.

Winner: Kajabi. Apps support in-app purchases. There is also a creator app available to manage your business on the go.

Sales and checkout options 💲

For marketing, Circle has one-click upsells, free trials, coupons, and discounts. It supports paywalls to gate content access to paid members. With this, you can easily charge your community and accept payments instantly.

With Paywalls you can –

• Charge bi-weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annual subscriptions.
• Offer various membership tiers with different pricing plans.
• Charge for private spaces and accept one time payments.

Kajabi supports upsells, downsells, order bumps, free & paid trials, coupons, and discounts. To accept payments, it has a built-in checkout feature.

In contrast to Circle, it supports bulk coupon codes. You can create as many unique discount codes as you wish to offer to your customers. This would be really helpful to offer exclusive codes during occasions like Black Friday.

Both these support Stripe and PayPal payment gateways. Kajabi also integrates with 10+ other gateways depending on your region. To see the list of tools, you can refer to this help guide*.

Funnels:

Kajabi has built-in funnels. There are several pre-made templates available for you to begin with.

You can customize the funnels using the blank canvas. You have the flexibility to add your own custom pages. There is a funnel checklist available to track your funnel progress.

There are page wise stats available to analyze how well your funnel is converting.

With Circle, you need to use external tools like ClickFunnels for this.

Winner: Kajabi. There are advanced marketing features, order bumps, downsells, bulk coupon codes, various payment gateway integrations based on your location, and funnels built in.

Security

For community moderation, Circle has profanity checking, flagging inappropriate posts, and spam prevention features. It monitors all space comments & posts. So you have full control over spam prevention.

In case of a large community or if you want to scale an existing one, these features will help maintain a safe and secure environment for your channels.

Kajabi lacks these security features.

Winner: Circle.so

Email marketing and automations

Kajabi has an advanced email marketing tool built-in while Circle.so lacks this. The latter just has built-in notifications that you can tweak as needed.

Kajabi allows you to set up either email broadcasts or follow-up sequences. There are more than 15 email templates available. Some of them include –

• Cart abandonment
• Community connect requests
• Drip email notifications
• Assessment completion emails
• New community comments
• Much more

It is also possible to create your own custom email templates.

Circle needs to be integrated with third-party tools to set up email campaigns.

Automations

Both Kajabi and Circle come with automation rules (Circle calls as workflows). You can use these rules to perform bulk actions or automate business tasks.

With Circle you can create automation workflows when (entry rules) –

• A member joined community
• A member RSVP’d to event
• A member joined space
• A member is removed from space
• A member joined space group
• A member is removed from space group
• A member is charged for a paywall
• A member is subscribed to paywall
• A tag is added to member
• A tag is removed from member
• Etc.

And trigger actions like –

• Send a direct message
• Remove member from community
• Add member tag
• Remove member tag
• Add a member to space group
• Remove member from space group
• Add member to space
• Remove member from space
• Cancel paywall subscription
• RSVP member to event

You can combine multiple entry rules to trigger an event workflow. In the above screenshot, I have created a workflow to add a tag when a member joins the space.

What else?

You can use these workflows to execute bulk actions on the target audience to save time.

There are several audience filters you can make use of to segment the audience.

• Custom profile fields
• Tags
• Spaces
• Paywalls
• Location
• Event RSVP
• Last login date, and
• More.

Follow this link to explore more on this.

In the same way, Kajabi has automation rules as well. They can be used for automating course completion, student enrollment, community tasks, emailing, and registering for events.

In the above screenshot, you can see that when BloggingX Gold Membership offer is purchased, I can trigger –

• Sending an email.
• Registering for an event.
• Add a tag.
• Subscribe to the sequence.
• Etc.

On its higher plans, Kajabi gives access to advanced automations. These come with an additional “conditional” filter to further specify the rules.

Winner: Kajabi. It has an advanced email marketing tool with broadcasts and follow-up sequences. On the higher plans, it also gives access to advanced automations with conditional filters.

Reporting and analytics 📈

Kajabi provides more detailed analytics compared to Circle.

Circle provides basic reports related to members, engagement, community traffic, leaderboards, messages, spaces, etc.

Metrics include –

• Top members
• Active commenters
• Post starters
• Active spaces
• Active posts
• Etc.

While Kajabi provides course reports, student progress reports, video analytics & heatmaps, funnel performance statistics, etc.

Its video analytics reports are a game changer. The retention graph helps you analyze where students are engaging and where they are dropping. You will get metrics like average engagement rate, total plays, play rate, etc.

Winner: Tie. Kajabi is good at the course and student reports, while Circle has better community & member reports.

Integrations

Both Circle and Kajabi have enough native integrations. They integrate with various payment gateways, email service providers, LMS platforms, etc.

Circle provides single sign-on integration with –

• Memberstack
• MemberSpace
• Teachable
• Memberful
• WordPress
• Outseta
• Bubble
• Auth0
• Stripe

Kajabi has integrations with –

• PayPal
• Stripe
• Calendly
• Typeform
• ActiveCampaign
• Drip
• ConvertKit
• MailChimp
• Google Analytics
• Much more

Also, they have API and Zapier integrations to connect with thousands of other apps and services.

Winner: Kajabi. It has more native integrations compared to Circle.so.

Circle.so vs Kajabi: Pricing

Circle.so‘s pricing starts at $49/month, but it lacks advanced analytics, live streaming, and CSS customization. With the Professional plan at $99/month, you can remove Circle.so’s branding.

Recently it has introduced a Business plan that costs $199/mo. Choose this plan if you need API access, email white labeling and workflows.

Kajabi is more expensive than Circle. Its premium pricing starts at $149/month. There are only three funnels and three products available.

The Growth plan costs $199 per month and includes features such as affiliate programs, advanced automations, and custom branding.

If you are a developer and require a code editor, opt for its $399/month Pro plan.

Both Circle.so and Kajabi don’t charge any transaction fees.

Discount:

As of now, Circle.so is not offering any discount on its plans. While Kajabi is offering 20% OFF on its annual subscriptions.

Circle.so vs. Kajabi: Winner? 🏆

Circle.so is for you if you are looking to build a thriving community for your online business. It is a big plus 👍 that Circle.so has introduced an LMS feature. Although their LMS feature as of now is pretty basic, it serves the needs, and their changelog is impressive 😋.

However, with Circle.so you’re more reliant on third-party integrations for email marketing, funnels, and automations (which isn’t the case with Kajabi).

However, if you plan to focus on courses and need excellent marketing tools, Kajabi is perfect for you ✌. Its community component is quite weak. Kajabi can be used to host courses and Mighty Networks or Circle.so can be used to host communities to get the best of both worlds. The final choice depends on your business needs.