Hey there!

Ever found yourself caught up in the Kajabi vs. ClickFunnels debate?

Before the ClickFunnels 2.0 release, the decision was clear.

It was Kajabi.

But now?

Even I’ve been facing a dilemma, with ClickFunnels 2.0 in the picture!

As a funnel builder and course creator, I’ve played around with both tools for over 4+ years.

In this post, I’ll break down both tools for you

Sound good?

Overview

Features	Kajabi	ClickFunnels
Pricing	Starts at $69/mo	Starts at $97/mo.
Courses	Advanced course management and creation	Basic course functionality, recently introduced
Communities	Feature-rich, enables gamification and accountability	No community feature
Page Builder	Minimal but flexible, good for basic web design	Powerful and intuitive, feels like using dedicated page builder
Funnel Building	Contains different kinds of funnels, visual builder	Advanced funnel building with automation, split test, and analytics

Kajabi and ClickFunnels are two all-in-one marketing-centric platforms currently available. They’re the most comprehensive.

However, they target different audiences.

Kajabi started as a course platform and evolved to include membership management, coaching, email marketing, automation, a website builder, and a community feature with gamification elements.

ClickFunnels, on the other hand, is a pioneer when it comes to funnel building. They are a marketing-centric platform that helps you build funnels landing pages, and create simple membership sites.

But things changed recently. In October 2022, ClickFunnels 2.0 was released.

It comes with new features like:

• Funnel hub
• Basic courses
• E-commerce
• Blog builder
• Website builder
• Email marketing
• CRM

Previously, people would often use a separate LMS platform alongside ClickFunnels for their course needs.

Now, it may not be the case.

Or is it?

I guess, now is the perfect time to reconsider this approach and use ClickFunnels for all your requirements.

Let’s get started.

Quick decision – Kajabi vs. ClickFunnels

Similarities

• All-in-one platforms: Both Kajabi and ClickFunnels are comprehensive course platforms that come with the ability for you to build funnels, create digital courses, and email marketing. These features work together cohesively, enriching each other.
• Automation Builder: Both platforms include an automation builder for visualizing and managing your sales funnel, including triggers, actions, conditions, and paths (with stage-specific metrics).

Where does Kajabi excel over ClickFunnels?

• Mobile apps: Kajabi’s mobile app, available on both iOS and Android, allows your students to access courses, engage with the community, make in-app purchases, and receive notifications.
• Powerful course creation platform: Kajabi provides advanced features such as drip courses, certification, student-level analytics, heatmaps, and video retention graphs.
• Inbuilt assessments: You can seamlessly create quizzes and surveys. It also allows you to automate tasks upon assessment completion using automation rules.
• Advanced community feature: Being one of the top community platforms, Kajabi offers features like challenges, meetups, badges, and points to facilitate gamification and accountability within your community.
• Kajabi Events: This is an integrated live-streaming functionality that eliminates the need for specialist tools like Demio or Zoom Webinars.

Explore Kajabi

Where does ClickFunnels excel over Kajabi?

• More powerful page builder: While designing the pages, it feels like you are using dedicated page builders like Elementor. It has rows, sections, block templates, universal synced sections, A/B testing, etc.
• Canvas builder: It has a canvas builder to visualize the funnels, and it eases the building of complex funnels, eliminating the need for tools like Funnelytics or Geru.
• Multiple order form templates: ClickFunnels give you more flexibility and the design of your checkout forms.
• Sell physical products: You can create an eCommerce store with ClickFunnels’ drag-and-drop builder to sell various product types. It handles all the shipping, inventory management, and tax collection, making your job easier.

Explore ClickFunnels

Upfront bottomline

Let me break this down in a way that’ll make total sense.

Kajabi? It’s all about helping you create something meaningful. Think courses, communities, and yes – some pretty advanced marketing tools too.

ClickFunnels? They’re the marketing folks 🎯. They’ve got all thos A/B tests and automation tricks up in their platform.

But here’s something interesting…

Kajabi isn’t bad in the marketing department at all! They’ve got everything you need – from slick automation, triggers/actions, and also those upsells.

And, here’s the thing:

I love – Kajabi’s in-depth community features and those super handy mobile apps. I seriously can’t imagine working without them! Because audience engagement is everything.

Here’s something I’ve learned the hard way:the tools we choose end up shaping how we work.

And, I’ve found that Kajabi helps you become someone who builds real connections, not just another marketer in the crowd.

Course creation

As I told you before, Kajabi is a course-centric platform.

When you create a course, there will be a course builder wherein you can add modules, sub-modules, and house lessons inside them.

There are different types of lessons that you can create, such as video, audio, and assessments.

You can add various downloads, such as checklists, worksheets, or even templates that your students can download as part of your lesson content.

It also supports these features that are not found in ClickFunnels:

• AI course creation: Facilitates the creation of AI-driven courses.
• Bulk video uploads: Allows for mass uploading of course videos.
• Cloud uploading support: Integrates with Google Drive and Dropbox for cloud uploads.
• Drip scheduling feature: Enables delayed release of course content.
• Content locking for compliance: This allows for control over content access until prerequisites are met.
• Customizable course player: Provides 7+ templates for tailoring the student’s course player dashboard.

Here’s how the most popular Kajabi’s course player interface looks like:

Of course, as I told you before, there are around 7+ templates for the course player and dashboard

Now about ClickFunnels.

🙁 It almost feels like ClickFunnels UI designers blatantly copied Kajabi’s design elements

In both the platforms, you can lock or schedule the lessons to be dripped until the previous ones are completed.

You can use these features as part of course compliance.

One thing you need to keep in mind is that all the lessons in ClickFunnels follow the default “lesson template”.

If you want to make any changes to the lesson’s layout, first, you need to edit the template and play with the placeholder variables.

🏆 Winner: Kajabi. It has got really advanced course management features to even match up with specialist tools like Teachable. ClickFunnels, on the other hand, has just recently introduced its course functionality and doesn’t have depth in features.

Memberships and community

Kajabi after their acquisition of Vibely, they have introduced a lot of functionalities like gamification, accountability, community meetups, badges, and points, and have really improvised on their community features.

It now stacks really well against specialist community tools, like Circle and Mighty Networks.

Once you create a community in Kajabi, you can create various access groups within it and set a pricing model.

People who join your community will be able to access it and interact with other community members through the feed, challenges, and meetup tabs.

These tabs allow for interaction, accountability, and networking opportunities for the members.

👉 One big benefit of Kajabi is that it offers both Android and iOS apps, allowing your community members to interact with each other easily. On the other hand, ClickFunnels does not have any community feature to begin with, let alone mobile apps.

And.

In ClickFunnels, you need to use their Courses and Blogs feature to create a membership site and offer content over time using the Dripping feature as I described earlier.

This is how a typical membership content page looks like on ClickFunnels.

👉 Also read: 7 Kajabi Community Examples Crushing it with Gamification

🏆 Winner: Kajabi (no comments)

Design and page builder

🎨 Both Kajabi and ClickFunnels 2.0 have a dedicated page builder. Previously, ClickFunnels page builder was buggy, and it had performance issues, but things have changed after the release of 2.0.

Kajabi provides over 10+ free themes to design the website vs. 1 with ClickFunnels

When it comes to the page builder itself, Kajabi offers 40+ sections for you to insert on your page.

👉 Their page builder feels minimal, but the flexibility is good. I know many people who use Kajabi as their sole website builder instead of using other website-building tools like WordPress or Squarespace.

However, for advanced web design needs, Kajabi’s page builder may feel restrictive at times unless you’re familiar with advanced web design patterns.

On the other hand, as I told you, ClickFunnels 2.0’s page builder is a major revamp. It now has rows and sections to design the pages.

The page-building experience is a breeze, and you feel like using premium page builders like Elementor.

ClickFunnels is more feature-rich than other page builders. It has unique features like universal sections that sync changes across all instances, and also the ability to A/B test landing pages.

👉 Also, they have introduced a page-building collaboration feature, which is unheard of. This feature allows multiple people to work on the design of the same page, just like you do on Google Docs.

When it comes to custom branding, both Kajabi and ClickFunnels offer the ability to use your own domains and subdomains.

And on the higher pricing plans, with both of these tools, you have the option to remove the branding and use custom branding.

🏆 Winner: ClickFunnels. Both tools have powerful page builders with good customization options. But ClickFunnels excels over Kajabi with its page and block templates.

Funnel building and automations

With Kajabi, there are different kinds of funnels, and you can click on any of these blueprints to get started.

As you can see, Kajabi also has a real good funnel builder that lets you visually build the funnel and also add automations right in the flowchart.

Kajabi’s funnel builder includes an analytics feature for an easy view of key performance indicators like conversion rate, total revenue, and conversion tracking.

Kajabi provides a simple automation rules feature for beginners.

For instance, you can create automations that activate actions when a student finishes a lesson.

You could also design a lesson to encourage students to advance and maybe upon completion, you could either reward them with a one-time-use coupon or automatically enroll them in any event hosted on Kajabi.

And.

ClickFunnels:

ClickFunnels 2.0 has FunnelHub, which is the main dashboard area to manage your site builder and the funnel pages.

To build the funnels, ClickFunnels has over 15+ funnel templates that you can import with just a single click.

Here are a few of the funnel recipes:

• Optin funnel
• Lead magnet funnel
• Product launch funnel
• Video sales letter funnel
• Squeeze page funnel
• Etc.

You can also build the funnels from scratch using the page builder.

ClickFunnels has introduced a feature called Funnel workflows, which allows for funnel automations.

Funnel workflows automate funnels upon certain triggers and can initiate multiple funnels at once, useful for complex funnel building.

Some really good features here are:

• Funnel canvas
• Funnel analytics
• Conditional split paths
• Split test

👉 ClickFunnels rethought its funnel-building methodology from the ground up to make it really robust and intuitive for unveiling really interesting marketing use cases.

🏆 Winner: ClickFunnels. Its Funnel Builder is more intuitive and powerful, offering unique features like conditional split paths and A/B testing. The Basic plan allows up to 20 funnels, providing good value compared to Kajabi.

Email marketing

Kajabi email marketing supports both email broadcast and sequences You can create your own templates or design the emails from scratch.

Similar to ClickFunnels, they also have a visual email editor that lets you drag and drop various building blocks to emails.

👉 The best feature of Kajabi is autoresponder sequences This feature can be incredibly useful for creating email sequences, such as a seven-day or 30-day life improvement challenge. It can gamify the conversion process for your webinar attendees.

Kajabi emails will be more powerful when you combine them with its automation rules.

You can automate a lot of things.

For example, you can set the trigger as “email sequence is clicked” and the action would be “register them to a webinar” hosted on Kajabi events. One click webinar registration!

And.

Let’s discuss about ClickFunnels.

ClickFunnels 2.0 has totally revamped its email marketing functionality, which was previously called as Actionetics.

It now has over 15+ email templates for promotional, invitational, newsletters, and order confirmation emails

Some of these include:

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

Also, they have a dedicated email builder, which comes with various section layouts and also building blocks to send really visually attractive emails.

Currently, with ClickFunnels, you can only send broadcast emails.

They are currently working on releasing follow-up sequences, which will be available soon. If you require this feature immediately, you can create email funnels with delays using flows as a temporary solution.

⚠️ The main drawback is that emails can only be sent through the ClickFunnels domain, not custom ones. However, they’re working on supporting other email service providers.

🏆 Winner: Kajabi. It comes with an email sequences feature as well.

Marketing and checkout features

Both Kajabi and ClickFunnels support profit-maximizing features like upsells, downsells, and order bumps.

With Kajabi, you have the ability to include up to 10 upsells and downsells 🫠 to your offer checkout process, which is impressive. They have recently rolled out this feature.

And about ClickFunnels:

But, ClickFunnels offers more templates that have been proven to generate higher conversions.

Although both of these platforms offer conversion-optimized order and checkout forms, Kajabi offers only one template, which requires customization using its page builder.

🏆 Winner: ClickFunnels is a pioneer in checkouts and OTOs. It also comes with multiple order form templates. So, it’s safe to say that ClickFunnels checkout process is more conversion-friendly.

Affiliate marketing

👉 ClickFunnels 2.0 is working on its “Affiliate center” feature and will be available soon.

On the other hand, Kajabi already comes with a dedicated affiliate marketing feature that allows you to recruit your students as your brand ambassadors.

Kajabi’s affiliate program is only available on its higher-tier plans, specifically the Growth and Pro plans.

You have the option to either automatically accept affiliates or manually process them.

Additionally, you can create VIP affiliates and offer them special discounts on your products.

To help you understand your affiliates’ performance, Kajabi provides insights on clicks, form submissions, conversions, and the conversion rate.

🏆 Winner: Kajabi.

Integrations

Kajabi has over 10+ native integrations while ClickFunnels has over 25+ integrations.

Both also support Zapier and Webhooks integration to connect with 3rd party apps.

👉 When it comes to payment gateway integrations, Kajabi comes with Kajabi payments which is their proprietary payment gateway that enables many features like say Google and Apple Pay along with the regular Stripe and PayPal integration.

Pricing

Kajabi is quite expensive compared to ClickFunnels (for advanced users who want to go with higher pricing).

The Basic plan pricing is at $149/mo, and it supports only 3 products and 3 funnels.

To access its affiliate program and advanced automations and to remove Kajabi branding, you should go with its Growth plan at $199/mo.

Whereas ClickFunnels 2.0 has two premium plans, with the lowest plan starting at $97/mo; it supports 3 brand workspaces, unlimited funnels and courses.

The primary distinction among these plans is the number of contacts you can store in their CRM.

👍 It does not impose limitations on the number of products or courses you can create, unlike Kajabi or Teachable.

Conclusion

If you require advanced course features, an ability to build gamified communities, coaching, podcasting, feature-rich iOS and Android apps, and an all-in-one solution, Kajabi is undoubtedly the best tool for you. It’s course feature is miles ahead to that of ClickFunnels.

However, if you’re more interested in a sophisticated funnel builder with A/B split testing, a completely revamped page builder, and proven templates to improve conversions, ClickFunnels would be the ideal choice.

As I mentioned earlier, ClickFunnels is primarily focused on marketing, but Kajabi not only emphasizes marketing automation but also on course creation and community building (value delivery).