Are you looking for an online course platform that won’t break the bank?

Kajabi is one of the best out there.

But with a starting price of $149/month and limitations on the number of products and funnels in the beginner plan, it may not be the best choice for beginners.

Especially if you’re new to course creation and are just testing the waters!

Luckily, there are affordable alternatives!

Based on my 3- 4 years of experience trying out different funnel and LMS platforms, I have shortlisted some really affordable alternatives to Kajabi in this blog post.

Let’s begin.

Circle – Best for communities

Circle is a comprehensive community platform that has recently evolved into more of an all-in-one solution.

They recently introduced marketing hub that comes with the ability for you to send email newsletters broadcast and also drip campaigns.

It now offers:

• Community features: Host discussions, live events, and create engaging spaces
• Course creation: Build and host online courses with a modern, intuitive interface
• Email marketing: Send broadcasts and create automated email sequences through Circle Marketing Hub
• Automation workflows: Create sophisticated automation rules based on member actions and behavior

What makes Circle stand out is its modern, intuitive interface and flexible community spaces that can be customized for different purposes.

Pros 👍

• Clean, modern interface inspired by platforms like Slack and Notion
• Excellent community moderation features
• Flexible space layouts (feed, chat, courses)
• New Marketing Hub with email automation features

Cons 👎

• Limited marketing features compared to Kajabi
• Advanced features like automation workflows only available in higher plans
• Basic checkout features without order bumps or upsells

🏆 Bottom line: Circle is an excellent choice if you prioritize community features and need a modern, flexible platform. With the addition of Marketing Hub and courses, it’s becoming more of an all-in-one solution, though not as comprehensive as Kajabi.

Explore Circle

Podia – Cheapest light-weight alternative

Podia is the closest alternative to Kajabi, offering a premium experience at an affordable price.

Here are main features:

• Courses: Podia offers features like unlimited video hosting, drip feed, quizzes, and bundling. However, it lacks student-level engagement analytics and video heat maps.
• Digital products: Podia allows multiple digital product uploads and easy website embedding.
• Coaching: Podia provides a new coaching functionality and calendar booking integration.
• Email marketing: Podia supports one-off broadcasts and simple email sequences but lacks advanced marketing automation and funnels.
• Website chat: Podia offers a chat widget for website embedding.
• Affiliate marketing: Podia has a basic affiliate marketing feature but lacks features like affiliate-specific commission rates and multiple commission tiers.

But at times, you may feel that it lacks depth in its features. For example, it only integrates with other webinar platforms but does not have any native streaming capabilities

Pros 👍

• Dozens of features for the price.
• Embeddable checkout forms (WordPress-ready).
• Email marketing broadcasts and drip campaigns.
• Unlimited courses even in their most basic plan unlike Kajabi.
• Zero transaction fee
• Affordable pricing.

Cons 👎

• Doesn’t come with any mobile apps! (a big one!)
• Basic communities feature
• Lacks native streaming abilities unlike Kajabi Events.
• Lacks marketing automation features (you may need to use Zapier)

It’s beginner plan (Mover plan at $39/mo) offers unlimited courses, coaching, digital products, students, storage, and email, whereas Kajabi’s beginner plan (even at $149/month) has limitations.

If you want more advanced options, such as webinars, affiliates, and the ability to include third-party tracking codes on your website, you need to go with the Shaker plan.

🏆 Bottom line: If you’re looking for an all-in-one Kajabi alternative, Podia is right for you. I’ve reviewed Podia in detail in one of my previous blog posts. Although it may lack some automation features compared to Kajabi, it has really competitive pricing compared to Kajabi and has good email marketing features.

Explore Podia

Systeme – Closest alternative to Kajabi

Systeme is an all-in-one platform that allows users to create online courses, sales funnels, launch membership sites, sell digital products, email marketing, all in one platform.

It is the closest alternative to Kajabi, and comes at a really affordable price.

While Systeme comes with most of the marketing automation features that Kajabi offers, it lacks course creation features like student assessment, student level insights, and its powerful page builder.

The pricing starts from free and goes up to $97/month for advanced features and “unlimited everything”.

This makes it very affordable compared to Kajabi which starts at $149/month.

Pros 👍

• Simple drag-and-drop interface for easy course and membership site building.
• Integrated features for sales funnels, email marketing, and communities.
• Support for selling physical products alongside digital courses.
• Responsive support via phone, email, or live chat.
• Robust free plan with unlimited courses, emails, and members.

Cons 👎

• Does not offer a dedicated mobile app, requiring users to access content through a web browser.
• Doesn’t come with a gamified community feature like Kajabi.
• Offers fewer options for customization and website builder options compared to advanced platforms.
• Lacks specialist course features and indepth analytics unlike Kajabi.

🏆 Bottomline: Systeme.io is best suited for entrepreneurs, coaches and consultants looking to launch their first online courses or membership sites without breaking the bank. The robust free version also makes it a good option to test the waters. If you’re interested in exploring more on how Systeme stacks against Kajabi, refer the blog post.

Explore Systeme

GoHighLevel – Most comprehensive

GoHighLevel is the most comprehensive digital business management software.

It combines the best of both Kajabi and ClickFunnels. It offers a range of features for lead management, a fully equipped CRM, landing page builder, website builder, a unified conversation dashboard for all your leads, courses, and even a basic community feature.

It feels like a jack of all trades but master of none. On the other hand, Kajabi has more depth in its features and aligns its offerings specifically for digital coaches.

But.

GHL’s popularity is among digital marketing agencies.

Because of its white label feature, it allows you to rebrand the entire SaaS app and sell it to your unlimited clients as if it’s your own software.

This setup provides excellent transparency regarding your client’s business and sales, and lets you tailor your offerings accordingly.

However, if you want to sell HighLevel as a SaaS to your clients, then you need access to sub accounts and custom branding you need to go with $297 per month.

Pros 👍

• Comprehensive platform with extensive capabilities.
• Excellent CRM feature. No need for additional tools like HubSpot or ActiveCampaign.
• White label feature to sell your own SaaS at your pricing.

Cons 👎

• Mobile apps focus mainly on lead management, messaging, and business reviews, catering to agencies.
• Course features are not as advanced as Kajabi or Teachable.
• Community feature lacks gamification elements.

🏆 Bottomline: Overall, if you’re a digital marketing agency looking to offer your own SaaS, GoHighLevel is a great choice. However, if you are an individual business and need specialized features for course creation and community gamification, like challenges and leaderboards, Kajabi would be the better option.

Explore GoHighLevel

Thinkific – Best for courses

Thinkific is an excellent alternative to Kajabi and Teachable for creating online courses.

But unlike Kajabi, Thinkific is not an all-in-one platform. It is only meant to be an online course platform.

You can create your course, create sections and add lectures. There are options for you to create private courses, drip schedule content, cohorts, expiring content, membership sites, etc.

All of their paid plans come with access for you to create unlimited courses and have unlimited students on your platform.

👉 I personally think that interface of Thinkific is pretty dated. They certainly need to refine their UI/UX for a more premium feel.

Thinkific has integrations with various tools like Stripe, PayPal, MailChimp, Constant Contact, ConvertKit, Aweber, Google Analytics, Sumo, etc.

It also has Zapier integration to easily integrate Thinkific with various other tools in the market.

Thinkific comes with three plans – Basic, Start, and Grow. None of these plans come with a transaction fee like Teachable, which is a great upside.

Pros 👍

• Ability to create different types of courses
• Advanced course compliance features
• Student level course insights (for better accountability) and heatmap reports

Cons 👎

• Lacks good functional mobile apps
• Community feature is barebones
• Interface feels dated
• Lacks marketing and automation features that Kajabi and Podia comes with.

👉 Bottom line: Thinkific is an excellent alternative to Teachable for creating online courses. It offers incredible features like that of Teachable. However, this is not an all-in-one platform like that of Kajabi.

Explore Thinkific

LearnWorlds

LearnWorlds is a really feature-rich learning management system out there.

It’s best for academic usecases.

Along with the basic course creation abilities, it has good features like memberships, quizzes, certificates, course compliance, blogging, community feature, etc.

👉 I found the interface of LearnWorlds to be quite overwhelming, with many features jammed together.

When it comes to features, there are a few outstanding ones that caught my attention:

• Support for surveys: The platform offers support for surveys, which is a valuable addition.
• SCORM/HTML5 support: It supports SCORM/HTML5 in course content. This means that migrating in and out of the platform can be done with just a click of a button, making it incredibly easy.
• Interactive videos: This feature enables the addition of interactive elements such as buttons, quizzes, and call-to-action buttons directly within the video.

I loved this interactive videos feature a lot. This enhances student engagement and interactivity.

Features such as community groups, course discussions, and student profiles promote student interaction and collaboration. The platform offers a wealth of features, but most advanced ones are available only in higher plans.

Coming to the pricing plans, their Starter plan costs you $29/month.

They charge a flat fee of $5 for every sale in their beginner plan.

Their Pro plan costs $99/month or $79/month (annual payment) and comes with no transaction fee.

The higher plans offer many additional features, such as website builder, blog, memberships, affiliate management, SCORM, and customizable checkout page. For more information, read my detailed LearnWorlds review.

Pros 👍

• Interactive video content feature is excellent.
• It comes with a dozen of advanced features across different areas like courses, memberships, blogging, and community management.
• It comes with white label functionality in their higher plans.

Cons 👎

• Poor cluttered user interface.
• A lot of features are held back in their Pro plan.
• It lacks of some advanced marketing automation and checkout features.
• Lacks many marketing and automation features compared to Kajabi.

👉 Bottom line: LearnWorlds is an excellent all-in-one alternative to Kajabi that’s more focused on the academic course-creation side of things with a ton of features to play with.

Explore Learnworlds

Teachable – Most advanced for course creation

Teachable is one of the best platforms for creating online courses. It is designed to do one thing exceptionally well i.e online courses.

👉 If you already have a website, email marketing, and a platform for list building and just need a course hosting platform, Teachable is the best option. Because, Teachable is not an all-in-one platform.

For online courses, it comes with features like:

• Quizzes
• Discussions
• Lesson notes (timestamped notes for students!)
• Advanced course-compliance features
• Course-completion certificates
• Own affiliate program
• Video-level analytics and heatmaps
• Student segmentation

The free plan allows publishing of only one product and has a 10% transaction fee.

Even their basic plan comes with a 5% transaction fee and allows publishing only five products.

Previously, the basic plan supported the publishing of unlimited products. However, in 2023, they imposed this restriction, leading to a lot of backlash from existing members.

For most people, the Pro plan at $159 per month may seem viable because it comes with a 0% transaction fee and the ability to create and publish up to 50 products.

Pros 👍

• Advanced course creation features
• Superior video compliance features (for example unless a video is watched 90% of it’ll not be marked as complete).
• Set up your own affiliate platform.
• Own payment gateway for streamlined payout and tax management
• Has an iOS app.

Cons 👎 

• The free and basic plan charges you 10% and 5% transaction fees, respectively.
• Basic plan allows publishing only up to 5 products.
• They lack an Android app

👉 Bottomline: Teachable may be worth it for you if you’re okay with their basic plan, which has a 5% transaction fee. However, their Pro plan, which costs $159 per month, may not be a good value for the money, considering that Teachable is not an all-in-one platform. At this price point, you may be better off with Kajabi. Additionally, the speed of implementation of new features with Teachable has lagged a lot since its acquisition by Hotmart in 2020.

Explore Teachable

FreshLearn

FreshLearn is a unique all-in-one creator platform where you can not only create and sell digital products like courses, digital downloads, and live masterclasses but also build complex courses for continuing education and live cohorts.

It comes with the following advanced inbuilt features:

Unlike Kajabi, FreshLearn has no limits on students, enrollments, storage, or digital product creation in any of the plans. FreshLearn also offers a very generous free plan.

The course creation journey is self-explanatory. You can add elements like video, documents, audio, live links, assessments, and assignments to a chapter.

Pros 👍

• Supports digital products like digital downloads, courses, masterclasses, etc.
• Option to generate branded and personalized completion certificates on successful completion of the course.
• Advanced assessments
• Unlimited courses, members, enrollments, and storage in all the plans.
• Gamification features like rewards, badges and challenges
• No transaction fee on any plan.
• Free forever plan.

Cons 👎

• Not an all-in-one tool (lacks email marketing and automation)
• Less direct integrations. Zapier is available though.
• Need to add more support documentation.

Explore Freshlearn

LearnDash – Most advanced WordPress LMS

LearnDash is the most versatile learning management system for WordPress. If you already use WordPress and know the technical side of things, choosing LearnDash gives you more freedom and room for custom development.

It comes with only:

• Course creation
• Membership creation (groups feature)

It doesn’t come with email marketing, marketing automation, digital product selling, and other functionalities.

One of the strengths of LearnDash is its extensive range of addons and integrations with other WordPress plugins, which can be used to add payment processors (WooCommerce), customization options (Elementor), and enhance customer engagement features (Gamipress).

As LearnDash is integrable with Elementor and many other popular WordPress builders and themes, the web design and customization options are potentially endless.

LearnDash’s pricing starts from $199/year for 1 site license.

If you want access to 10 sites, including their Propanel access for advanced analytics (student-level reports), it would cost you $229/year.

You need to renew the plan at the complete price if you want ongoing updates and support.

Their support is really good. Along with regular customer support, they also have a highly active Facebook group to solve all your queries.

Pros 👍 

• LearnDash is extremely versatile WordPress plugin that comes with courses and memberships feature
• Almost all the popular WordPress plugins work seamlessly with LearnDash.
• It is really a cost-effective yet powerful solution for your learning management system needs.

Cons 👎

• It involves a lot of learning curve if you are not familiar with WordPress as a CMS.
• LearnDash involves some tech and WordPress experience.
• It does not offer marketing automation, email marketing, or advanced marketing features like Kajabi or Teachable. It also lacks customization and design options out of the box, requiring basic HTML/CSS knowledge or the use of third-party apps.

Explore LearnDash

Ruzuku

Ruzuku is an online course platform that offers a range of features to help course creators build and sell their courses.

The platform provides tools for course creation, marketing, and student engagement.

Here are some pointers:

• User-friendly course creation: Ruzuku’s course creation process includes a drag-and-drop interface for easily uploading and organizing content like videos, PDFs, audio files, and quizzes.
• Student engagement features: To boost student engagement, Ruzuku incorporates features such as discussion forums, quizzes, assignments, and the ability to track progress and provide feedback.
• Marketing tools: In terms of marketing, Ruzuku offers email and affiliate marketing tools, as well as the ability to create landing pages and sales pages for effective course promotion.

Although Ruzuku offers a range of great features, there are a few things to consider:

• The pricing model is based on the number of students enrolled, which can be costly for mass-market courses.
• The design and user interface may be outdated compared to other online course platforms.

👉 Winner: Ruzuku is a decent option for course creators looking for an intuitive course builder and a range of marketing and engagement features. However, the pricing model and outdated design may be drawbacks for some users. At $99/mo (their Core plan )and $199/mo (their Pro plan), the value for money is low.

Explore Ruzuku

Kartra

Kartra is an all-in-one platform that offers a range of features to manage online businesses. It provides email marketing, landing pages, sales funnels, membership sites, video hosting, webinars, and more.

One of Kartra’s main benefits is that it’s an all-in-one solution.

It has excellent marketing features:

• Behavioral Adaptive Marketing (BAM): This feature allows you to display relevant offers based on prospects’ previous behaviors on your site. Excellent of eCommerce!
• Dynamic OTOs: You can use this feature to show targeted one-time offers based on specific customer actions on your site.
• Split testing landing pages: With this feature, you can test different elements on your landing pages to identify the ones that convert well.

However, one downside of Kartra is that it can be overwhelming, especially for beginners. The sheer number of features can be daunting, and it may take some time to learn.

Additionally, Kartra’s pricing can be a bit high compared to some of its competitors. While it does offer a 14-day trial for $1, the monthly pricing starts at $99 per month, which may not be affordable for everyone.

🏆 Winner: Kartra is a powerful all-in-one platform that offers a range of features for online businesses. While it may take some time to learn how to use it effectively, its marketing features are excellent. It’s more of a funnel platform or an alternative to ClickFunnels than an LMS.

Explore Kartra

Wrap up

There are numerous platforms available for course creation and membership.

However, finding a platform that provides an extensive range of features like Kajabi does can be challenging.

In my opinion, if you’re seeking a high-quality alternative to Kajabi, you should consider either Podia or Systeme.

Podia serves as an all-in-one platform, yet it is a lighter version of Kajabi. On the other hand, Systeme provides a more comprehensive solution. At just $97 per month, it offers unlimited everything. In fact, that is their highest plan.

However, both of them doesn’t offer the same depth of features. For instance, they lack a mobile app and a feature-rich community support like that of Kajabi.

Alternatively, if you already have your own website and funnel set up, you might want to consider one of the course-centric community platforms like Skool or Circle. I have reviewed these platforms in other blog posts.

I’ve done my job of comparing the different alternatives to Kajabi; it’s up to you now to decide by weighing different features.

If you have any doubts, leave them in the comments section.