Looking for an all-in-one platform for your digital business?
Both GoHighLevel and Kajabi promise to be your one-stop solution.
But here’s the thing.
I’ve used both platforms extensively (Kajabi especially).
And I can tell you – they’re not exactly what they claim to be.
n the next few minutes, I’ll help you pick the perfect platform for your needs.
Short on time?
No worries.
Here’s a quick breakdown.
What I like about Kajabi 👍
- Excellent course and coaching tools: I’ve tested Kajabi a lot for online courses, coaching, and building communities. It has great features like content dripping, tests, student tracking, and keeping learners engaged. GoHighLevel just can’t compete here.
- All-in-one advanced automation: Kajabi makes sure all its built-in tools work really well together. They have an automation engine that glues in all the features really well! You don’t want use Zapier much with Kajabi (all-in-one + automation)
- Powerful customization tools: GoHighLevel has okay templates and merge fields. But Kajabi gives you much more control to change how everything looks and works across your business.
- Podcasts and built-in webinars (w/ streaming): You don’t need extra tools. Higher Kajabi plans include both, which helps a lot with marketing today.
- Tons of conversion optimization tools: You get lots of useful features like A/B testing, heatmaps, popups when people try to leave, order bumps, bundles, follow-ups for abandoned carts, and flexible payments. It’s like having everything you need to boost sales in one place!
👎 What I don’t like about Kajabi: The price gets high as you grow. For example, with Kajabi’s base $149/month plan, you only get 3 funnels to work with – while GoHighLevel gives you unlimited funnels from the start.
What I like about GoHighLevel 👍
- Awesome reseller program: If you help other businesses or resell tools, especially as an agency, GoHighLevel works great. You only need five clients paying $97/month to cover your costs. After that, you keep all the extra money. That’s a really good deal!
- Done for you and Done with you: Pay $299 extra and a GHL expert will set up your account. This helps if you want to start quickly or don’t have time. It also makes learning the system easier.
- Responsive support: Their support team knows their stuff and responds fast. This helps you and your clients get work done on time.
- Multi-channel approach: I really like how you can use calls, texts, picture messages, Facebook messages, and more in your HighLevel funnels. Everything’s in one place!
- All-in-one business platform: HighLevel probably has most tools you need – from email marketing to building pages to managing affiliates and appointments (CRM).
- Cost savings: One GoHighLevel subscription can replace many other tools. Just watch out – adding too many connections or sending lots of emails or texts/calls costs extra.
👎 What I don’t like about GoHighLevel: Learning curve. GoHighLevel’s interface can be overwhelming for beginners. The platform has so many features and options that it can take weeks to fully understand how everything works together. Or better yet, pay the $299 for an expert to set things up
Upfront bottomline
Here’s the bottom line – I’ve used both platforms a lot, and they each shine in different ways.
Kajabi works best if you’re a content creator or teacher (like a coach or consultant).
Why?
It’s built to help you create, market, and sell digital products. For example, it has specialist course creation features.
Plus, it gives you more control over how everything looks compared to GoHighLevel.
It has real good depth to its features.
Want to learn more?
Check out my detailed, hands-on Kajabi review here.
On the flip side, HighLevel fits all kinds of businesses – whether you’re generating leads or selling physical products.
It’s especially great for digital agencies that handle everything for their clients. If you are not into client service, you may need to rethink.
But one thing I really like is that they don’t limit your contacts, emails, or funnels like Kajabi does.
You can read more in my full GoHighLevel review.
Let’s break down how these platforms.
Overview
What does GoHighLevel do?
GoHighLevel (also HighLevel or GHL) is an all-in-one business platform for marketers, creators, and businesses.
GHL designed its platform, particularly for digital agencies and software resellers.
However, it also offers tools like online course creation, community building, and marketing automation to help digital creators.
The goal of HighLevel is to replace each of your other tools with a single subscription to GoHighLevel. Check this out:
What does Kajabi do?
With Kajabi, you also get an all-in-one platform for creators, marketers, and digital agencies. Here’s a sneak peek from the redesigned Kajabi dashboard.
Kajabi, for example, offers top-notch tools for creating courses, managing online communities, and automating email marketing.
There are, however, nuanced differences between Kajabi and GoHighLevel in their “all-in-one” aspect.
🛑 Watch out for the following before you shell out money for a paid subscription.
Key difference #1. Kajabi is more powerful for course creators
GoHighLevel offers some membership features, but to my mind is not intended for course creators.
Its membership system is more basic.
Instead of delivering extensive courses or supporting online communities, it is likely geared toward supporting agencies and businesses offering services.
With Kajabi, you can almost immediately tell the platform is built for these.
Like, consider these tools for course creation:
- Powerful course builder: The drag-and-drop interface helps you create structured courses with modules, lessons, and quizzes. You can add discussions and create multi-choice tests too.
- Smart content delivery: Control how students access your content with drip scheduling. Lock lessons until they complete previous ones – perfect for keeping students on track.
- All content types supported: Use any mix of audio, text, and video in your courses. Import videos easily from Google Drive, Dropbox, YouTube, or Wistia to keep things engaging.
- Advanced analytics: The course player shows you exactly how students are doing. Track their progress, see where they drop off with heatmaps, and get detailed course-level stats.
- Flexible coaching options: Run your coaching business your way – offer one-on-one sessions, group coaching, or live workshops. Plus, share downloadable resources with your students.
Also, for community engagement, Kajabi has an e-learning gamification approach that is so beautifully sophisticated that I wrote an entire blog about it here.
Here’s a preview:
Overall, I recommend Kajabi if your business is focused on online courses, online communities, memberships, or a learning management system (LMS) with a business focus.
Key difference #2. GoHighLevel’s CRM and automations are advanced
I like that HighLevel seamlessly integrates SMS/MMS, emails, Facebook Messenger, and voicemail drops into funnels.
You can also create detailed workflows for follow-ups, lead nurturing, and client retention, thanks to GoHighLevel’s robust CRM system.
It helps you capture a wealth of information about individual leads.
And this means you can segment and personalize your marketing strategies for higher conversion rates.
Plus, GoHighLevel includes a solid Calendar tool that powers a comprehensive appointment booking and contact management system, keeping everything streamlined and organized.
Also, GoHighLevel’s social media planner is versatile enough to replace tools like Buffer, CoSchedule, and Hootsuite—especially if you’re not after overly fancy features.
Meanwhile, Kajabi’s CRM enables you to segment audiences, score leads and even pull in followers from social media.
If you prefer, you can manually import contacts using a CSV file.
You’re also free to edit and add custom fields to enrich your contact profiles with additional details to improve campaign personalization.
Both GoHighLevel and Kajabi offer the flexibility to add, use, and remove tags and filters, making contact list management a breeze.
Like GoHighLevel, Kajabi lets you trigger actions such as sending coupons, emails, or granting product access using simple, once-set rules.
That said, I find Kajabi’s automation more tailored to course delivery and marketing than to comprehensive digital marketing workflows.
Key difference #3. Funnels and pipelines
I’ve always enjoyed using Kajabi’s funnel templates—they’re intuitive and effective. Of course, if you prefer more control, you also have the option to build your funnels from scratch.
It might seem like a small detail, but I really appreciate how Kajabi lets you pick a funnel template, customize it, and optimize it—all without leaving the page. You can visualize and adjust the entire process right there, making it seamless and efficient.
Kajabi automatically integrates your email marketing stack with your pipelines.
It sets up triggers and offers based on lead behavior.
This can help keep everything connected and streamline your workflow.
👎 Compared to GoHighLevel, Kajabi has one quack here. With the base $149/month plan, you’ll have just three funnels to work with – although you’ll get unlimited marketing emails and landing pages to go with it.
With GoHighLevel, you get unlimited everything; funnels, emails, landing pages, contacts, you name it.
I’ve found GoHighLevel to be pretty straightforward for creating funnels.
There’s no need to link different landing pages; it offers a visual, one-page experience that makes the process easy and intuitive.
Even better, GoHighLevel provides a wider variety of funnel templates than Kajabi, and they’re quite beautiful! A great head start on your funnel-building journey, in deed.
GoHighLevel funnels shine in multi-channel marketing, integrating two-way SMS/MMS, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, voicemail drops, and emails.
These channels often yield higher engagement rates than traditional emails, but it’s crucial to ensure GDPR compliance (of course).
Unlike Kajabi, which limits the number of funnels you can create across its plans, HighLevel offers unlimited funnels.
This makes GHL particularly well-suited for agencies or resellers managing multiple clients and products.
For niche players, both platforms deliver powerful funnel-building tools.
Key difference #4. Kajabi offers more customization options
Both platforms provide solid customization options with their drag-and-drop builders.
However, I’ve always preferred Kajabi’s customizability, especially with its theme templates.
These templates offer a strong foundation to start with, allowing for more personalized designs that align with your brand’s identity.
Kajabi’s templates definitely have that polished look, which can make a big difference in user experience.
Better, it offers over 40 elements to customize your pages. This means you can easily tailor the pages to just about any use case you can think of.
With Kajabi, you can whip up professional-quality web pages, blogs, and landing pages without needing to be a coding whiz.
And if you ever do want to dive into custom coding, that option is available in the $399/month plan.
On the other hand, GoHighLevel also offers a codeless experience for building your web, blog, and landing pages, making it easier to use.
But the page elements are not as many as Kajabi’s 40 options, but it’ll be enough.
On top of that, GoHighLevel brings a few features that might catch your eye, such as:
- Unlimited pages, allowing for boundless creativity
- Extensive customizability, whether you prefer to code or not, all at no extra cost
- A basic SEO tool, plus the ability to integrate a dedicated tool if you need more robust options
- Detailed web analytics for tracking and reporting
So, it really comes down to your preferences.
Do you lean towards Kajabi’s extensive customizability? Or, do GoHighLevel’s unlimited pages and integrated lead follow-ups speak to your needs?
Key difference #5. Kajabi provides more powerful conversion optimization options
GoHighLevel offers a range of options for setting up your e-commerce store and pages, including:
- The ability to create and sell unlimited products, no matter which subscription plan you choose
- Native support for selling physical products or the option to integrate with your favorite web store platform, like Shopify
- On-page live chat support to assist customers in real-time
And that’s not all! Here are a few more features to consider:
Kajabi’s checkout optimizations take e-commerce to another level.
- More payment options are available, including Kajabi Pay, PayPal, Stripe, all major credit cards, Buy Now Pay Later, Apple Pay, and Google Pay.
- Easily add another payment gateway using Webhooks and Zapier.
- Implement upsells, cross-sells, downsells, and even pay-what-you-want pricing if you choose Kajabi Pay.
- Offer order bumps and bundle deals to increase your average cart value.
- Elaborate cart abandonment funnels help you recover lost sales.
- Plenty of checkout page design options help you create a seamless customer experience.
Overall, Kajabi really steps up its game to boost sales at checkout.
Key difference #6. Email marketing
GoHighLevel and Kajabi both provide unlimited emails, email broadcasts (for one-time announcements), and automated sequences.
That said, I find GoHighLevel’s multi-channel approach particularly impressive. It allows you to manage email, SMS, voicemail, and even social media marketing all from a single platform.
For instance, Kajabi includes email costs in its plans, while GoHighLevel charges $0.01 per email, which is separate from your monthly subscription.
If you have over 20,000 contacts, those costs can add up quickly.
Additionally, GoHighLevel’s email templates have a more basic appearance compared to Kajabi’s polished designs—although you can still customize sections with various elements.
That said, I commend GoHighLevel for its ability to deliver intricate workflows across multiple channels and trigger-based actions, such as cart abandonment reminders.
You can also track leads, split-test emails, and integrate appointment scheduling directly into your GoHighLevel campaigns. This is crucial for managing multiple clients or complex marketing sequences.
On the other hand, Kajabi’s customizable email templates are vibrant and allow you to create visually appealing emails with minimal experience.
You can also look forward to automated campaigns that deliver content based on user actions, which is vital for nurturing leads and engaging learners.
Plus, I enjoy how Kajabi manages email delivery, which boosts open rates.
In contrast, you’ll need to integrate Mailgun (or your preferred email service) to reliably send bulk emails through GoHighLevel.
Kajabi also makes it easy to create timed email sequences and automated follow-ups, such as welcome emails, webinar enrollments, and course purchases.
Kajabi also integrates with platforms like Mailchimp for more advanced email marketing features.
And, if you’re looking for depth and flexibility in your email campaigns with GoHighLevel, you can take advantage of the API, which is available on the $297/month plan or higher.
Key difference #7. Integrations
Kajabi doesn’t provide direct API access; instead, it connects with third-party apps through Zapier.
This allows you to integrate with various tools for email marketing, like Mailchimp, as well as payment gateways such as Stripe and PayPal, and webinar platforms.
GoHighLevel, in contrast, boasts a robust integration ecosystem.
With direct API access available at the $297/month plan or higher, you can create and implement diverse custom integrations–far more than Kajabi can handle.
Additionally, GoHighLevel offers native integrations with SMS providers like Twilio, email platforms such as ConvertKit and AWeber, and instant messaging channels like WhatsApp. Plus, its integration with Zapier expands your options even further.
Key difference #8. Is GoHighLevel cheaper than Kajabi?
Here’s the thing. Kajabi and GoHighLevel cater to different types of businesses with their distinct pricing structures.
Kajabi now offers four plans: Kickstarter ($69/month), Basic ($149/month), Growth ($199/month), and Pro ($399/month).
It’s worth noting that Kajabi, even at its highest tier ($399/month), doesn’t provide unlimited tools beyond emails and landing pages.
Advanced features like affiliate marketing, custom branding, and webinars/podcasts are only available at the most expensive levels.
In contrast, GoHighLevel offers three distinct plans: the Starter plan at $97/month, the Unlimited plan at $297/month, and the SaaS Pro plan at $497/month.
Here’s what makes GoHighLevel different from Kajabi – all their plans give you unlimited everything.
You get unlimited accounts, contacts, funnels, emails, and more. Want white-label solutions with iOS and Android apps? You’ll get those with the two higher-tier plans.
But there’s a catch – you’ll need to pay extra for email and SMS messages through services like Mailgun and Twilio. These costs can really add up depending on how much you use them.
There’s a big plus though:
GoHighLevel lets you resell the platform as your own branded product. Kajabi doesn’t offer this at all.
To get this reselling feature, you’ll need the $497/month plan. With this plan, you can create and set up sub-accounts for clients with your own apps or Marketplace tools.
The best part?
There’s no limit on how many times you can resell it (amp it up)
GoHighLevel vs Kajabi: Verdict
Ultimately, Kajabi and GoHighLevel cater to slightly different business needs.
Kajabi shines for content creators, providing a comprehensive suite of tools for courses, coaching, branding, and marketing automation.
On the other hand, GoHighLevel offers powerful CRM, reputation management, and multi-channel marketing capabilities.
With its extensive workflows, unlimited features, and reseller program, I believe GHL is an excellent option for agencies and businesses seeking to expand their client base with minimal restrictions.
