Kajabi and ClickFunnels are two of the advanced marketing tools available in the market. But their intended audiences are quite different.
Kajabi targets entrepreneurs selling digital products like courses, coaching, podcasts, ebooks, and memberships. It is an advanced course creation platform that has excellent marketing features like pipelines, automations, email marketing, etc.
ClickFunnels mainly concentrates on funnels, and it aims at all kinds of businesses that want to sell both digital and physical products.
Recently in October 2022, ClickFunnels 2.0 was released, which is a brand new version of ClickFunnels 1.0. It has all the tools you need to grow your business – Sales funnels, email marketing, automation, blog builder, page builder, shopping cart, eCommerce features, courses, digital & physical products, etc.
I will take you through the differences and similarities between these tools in this blog post. This will help you identify which is better suited for your business needs.
Let’s get started.
Kajabi vs ClickFunnels 2.0: Features compared:
Where does Kajabi excel over ClickFunnels?
- Kajabi is an advanced course creation platform, whereas ClickFunnels has basic course features. With Kajabi, you can create various courses like drip courses, online courses, mini-courses, etc. Also, adding content to Kajabi courses is highly flexible. It supports comments for each lesson, and it has automation rules to automate lesson completion. This is a good feature to automate the tasks to retain your students to stay longer on your site.
- Kajabi has built-in assessments and you can use this for creating quizzes and surveys. It also supports graded assessments where you can set a passing grade. Even you can automate the assessment completion tasks with automation rules. This feature is lacking in ClickFunnels.
- Kajabi has built-in coaching and podcast features. You can sell coachings as an upsell to courses, sell private and public podcasts, etc.
- Kajabi has a blogging feature built-in. While ClickFunnels previously lacked this and is now available in version 2.0. ClickFunnels took inspiration from the Kajabi blog and introduced similar features, making both blogging platforms much similar. But I liked the fact that Kajabi’s page builder has few blog specific widgets like the author, recent posts, sidebar search, social links, etc. In ClickFunnels, you won’t find these.
- Kajabi calls its funnels as pipelines. Previously building the funnels in ClickFunnels was quite difficult and required a learning curve. ClickFunnels 2.0 has redesigned the funnels and made them similar to Kajabi pipelines. You will find a similar interface in both tools. Also, ClickFunnels has more funnel templates than Kajabi.
- Kajabi has automation rules to automate lesson completion, membership post-completion, assessment completion, course enrollment, event registration, etc. On the higher plans, you have access to conditional filters that help to specify the actions further. These automation rules made the job super easy. While in the case of ClickFunnels, you need to create and add pages, triggers, and actions to create the automation, which is more complicated than Kajabi.
- Kajabi has a mobile app for both iOS and Android. Students can go through the courses, access the community, make in-app purchases, access notifications, etc. ClickFunnels doesn’t have a mobile app. As most of the ClickFunnels users are marketers, this is acceptable.
- Kajabi’s theme builder is very powerful and allows you to custom code the theme if you are a developer. ClickFunnels has introduced this in its new version 2.0. Now it also allows you to custom code the theme as you visualize. In both tools, the theme editor is available only on their higher pricing plans.
Where does ClickFunnels excel over Kajabi?
- ClickFunnels has recently introduced ClickFunnels 2.0, a brand new version of ClickFunnels 1.0. ClickFunnels 1.0 was more of a funnel-building tool, while ClickFunnels 2.0 is now an all-in-one marketing platform with various tools like funnels, eCommerce, shopping cart, CRM, email marketing, etc.
- ClickFunnels 2.0 has introduced funnel flows, which are nothing but the actions that you can execute when a particular funnel is triggered. There are various actions available like – sending an email, adding or removing a tag, adding a note, adding an affiliate, course enrollment, etc. Also, 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.
- ClickFunnels 2.0 has a CRM tool built-in to manage all your contacts in one place. This tool tracks and maintains a log of all the contact activities and visitors who have visited your site. It supports tags, segments, custom fields, etc.
- ClickFunnels 2.0 now supports eCommerce and shopping cart features. You can build your eCommerce store using its drag-and-drop builder, and you can sell digital products, physical products, and bundles. While Kajabi is just dedicated to digital product selling, and you need integrations with tools like Shopify to avail this feature.
- ClickFunnels allows you to sell physical products. It handles all the shipping, inventory management, and tax collection, making your job easier.
- ClickFunnels 2.0 has a more powerful page builder (like that of Kartra) compared to Kajabi. While designing the pages, it feels like you are using dedicated page builders like Elementor. It has rows, sections, block templates, the ability to add tracking codes for individual pages, etc.
Latest product updates
In September 2022, Kajabi introduced updates like –
- Import lessons & quizzes – Now, you can import duplicate lessons or quizzes from other courses. This feature is already present in tools like Thinkific.
- Google Calendar integration – You can connect Kajabi with Google Calendar and sync all your schedules, events, and meetings in one place to stay organized.
- Duplicate the offer automations – You can now duplicate the offers, and it imports all the settings, and the automations added. So, you just need to customize the offer. This feature would be really helpful if you want to execute multiple tasks on those offers.
- Multi-factor authentication – Secure your account with not just login but also with OTP.
- Kajabi creator app – For users like you to manage your business on the go.
ClickFunnels updates:
One major update of ClickFunnels is its release of the 2.0 version and making the tool an all-in-one marketing platform and not restricting it as a funnel-building tool.
The team behind ClickFunnels 2.0 is working on releasing –
- Affiliate center
- Conversion boosters
- Events and deadlines – For hosting masterclasses, webinars, etc.
- Appointments and rep management to improvise sales.
- Etc
Upfront bottomline
The target audience for these two platforms are quite different.
Kajabi is for course creators, teachers, instructors, trainers, or marketers who are mainly into an online course business.
Choose Kajabi if –
- You need an advanced LMS and marketing tool with automation rules, email marketing, funnels, student & course progress reports, video retention graphs, communities, etc.
- Want to sell various digital products like courses, digital downloads, podcasts, coachings, etc.
- You don’t want to sell physical products.
- In-depth student reports, course reports, and retention graphs matter the most to you.
ClickFunnels is for entrepreneurs, eCommerce store owners, business owners, marketers, and agencies, who need an all-in-one marketing platform without the need to integrate with third-party services.
Choose ClickFunnels if you have –
- An eCommerce store that wants to sell physical products along with digital products, and you need features like shipping, tax calculation, and inventory management all in a single platform.
- You need excellent funnel recipes and funnel workflows to build complex automations.
- You need a funnel canvas to visualize the funnels and need a replacement for tools like Funnelaytics and Geru.
Courses and memberships
Kajabi is king when it comes to courses (as it has advanced LMS features) while ClickFunnels 2.0 has basic course features. ClickFunnels 1.0 lacked courses.
Kajabi provides you with several course blueprints, to begin with. You have templates for mini-courses, online course, drip courses. They also provide templates for creating memberships & communities.
While ClickFunnels 2.0 provides a skeleton for creating the basic courses and nested courses (helpful if you have long content).
Note: It is strongly seen that ClickFunnels has taken inspiration from Kajabi’s courses and made the features as in Kajabi. You can see that both have a similar interface, course structure, design options, etc. If you have used Kajabi previously, you will feel this.
Both Kajabi and ClickFunnels 2.0’s course curriculum consists of modules and lessons. (Kajabi calls modules as categories and lessons as sub-categories).
In both, you can lock or drip schedule the lessons until the previous ones are completed. You can use these features as a part of course compliance.
Unlike dedicated LMS tools like Thinkific or Teachable, these tools lack course compliance features like –
- Enforcing lecture order
- Enforcing lesson completion
- Enforcing quiz completion
These features are very much essential to increase the student’s course completion rates.
Kajabi excels over ClickFunnels when it comes to adding course content. Kajabi supports bulk uploading of videos to save tons of your time. Also, it supports cloud uploading of files from Dropbox & Google Drive.
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 lesson content, first, you need to edit the template. Then only you can add the content. This is a big downside as it adds more friction each time to edit the template.
Memberships:
Kajabi has a dedicated memberships feature while in the case of ClickFunnels you need to use its courses+blogs to create the membership site and offer the content over time.
Winner: Kajabi. Kajabi is king when it comes to courses. You have course templates, bulk video uploading, cloud uploading, import lessons, and comments features. While ClickFunnels 2.0 course is a bare minimum.
Design and page builder
Both Kajabi and ClickFunnels 2.0 have a dedicated page builder. ClickFunnels page builder has been developed, taking inspiration from Kartra’s builder. You find a similar interface.
With both platforms, you can design the entire website using the site builder.
Kajabi provides over 10+ free themes to design the website, while ClickFunnels as of now, has only one theme.
Kajabi allows you to import the themes or upload your own theme.
There’s more.
Both allow you to custom-code the theme. On the higher plans, you will get access to their power editor (code editor), and you can customize the theme as you wish. This is a good option if you are a developer.
Let’s discuss the page design.
ClickFunnels 2.0’s page builder 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 offers block templates for –
- Headers and footers
- Stacks
- Feature and about us sections
- Testimonials
- Offer sections
- CTAs
- FAQs
- Etc.
If you compare this with Kartra, the number of block templates you will get is very low.
Kajabi doesn’t provide any block templates.
Kajabi’s course page blocks:
- Course progress
- Cross sell
- Instructor
- Image
- Custom blocks
Blog page blocks:
- Author
- Recent posts
- Sidebar search
- Social links (for promotion)
- Sidebar optin (to collect leads)
Website level options
Both Kajabi and ClickFunnels allow you to have your own domains and sub-domains. Kajabi even supports custom email domains.
On the higher pricing plans, you can remove the branding in both.
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
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.
Kajabi calls it funnels as pipelines. Its consists of an optin-value-offer (OVO). Some of the ready-made pipelines available include –
- Sales Page OVO
- Product Launch OVO
- Zoom Webinar OVO
- Free Book OVO
- Coaching Campaign OVO
- Etc.
ClickFunnels 2.0 has introduced funnel automations called Funnel workflows. These are nothing but the set of automation actions you can use to automate the funnels when they are triggered. The best thing is you can trigger multiple funnels at the same time. This would be really helpful if you want to build complex funnels.
Refer to the screenshot above to know all the funnel actions available.
ClickFunnels 2.0 has a funnel canvas. This helps you to visualize the funnels on a blank dashboard. If you have more complex funnels, you will find this feature really helpful.
I liked the fact that ClickFunnels support split path actions. You can either split test the pages or the paths based on YES or No arguments (Conditional logic) opening up new ways of designing the automations.
Automation rules in Kajabi:
Kajabi has made automating the tasks very simple unlike ClickFunnels, where you need to create the funnel with workflows. If you are a beginner, you will find Kajabi’s rules very simple to automate tasks.
There are rules available to automate the courses, memberships, event offers, email sequences, and much more.
If you go with Kajabi’s higher pricing plans, you will get access to its advanced automations. These come with a conditional filter – “Only if condition” to further specify the rules.
Winner: ClickFunnels. ClickFunnels’ funnels and automations are much more powerful than Kajabi. Its visual funnel builder and canvas ease the building of complex funnels.
Email marketing
ClickFunnels 2.0 has a dedicated email editor to design the emails while Kajabi just has a basic text editor.
ClickFunnels has over 15+ email templates for promotional, invitational, newsletters, and order confirmation emails. Kajabi also has email templates.
Some of these include –
- Cart abandonment
- Community connect requests
- Drip email notifications
- Assessment completion emails
- New community comments
- Much more
In both, you can create your own templates or design the emails from scratch.
Kajabi supports email broadcasts and sequences, whereas ClickFunnels 2.0 as of now supports only broadcasts. They’re working on releasing follow-up sequences which will be available soon.
Unlike tools like Kartra, both these lacks email split testing feature.
Kajabi emails will be more powerful when you combine them with its automation rules. You can automate
WHEN –
- An email sequence is sent.
- An email sequence is opened.
- An email sequence is clicked.
THEN –
You can trigger the actions like –
- Grant an offer
- Register to an event
- Add a tag
- Much more
Winner: ClickFunnels. ClickFunnels’ drag-and-drop editor helps you to design emails that convert better. Also, its pre-built templates help in better conversions.
Marketing and checkout features
Upsells, downsells, and order bumps:
Kajabi supports upsells, downsells, and order bumps. They are working on providing the ability to add upto 10 upsells and 10 downsells. While ClickFunnels support only upsells and downsells.
Checkouts:
Both tools have built-in checkout features. ClickFunnels gives various checkout templates while Kajabi just has a legacy template. You can customize them using the page builder.
Winner: Tie.
eCommerce and shopping cart
ClickFunnels 1.0 lacks eCommerce features. In ClickFunnels 2.0 they have incorporated these eCommerce and shopping cart features. While in the case of Kajabi, you need to integrate with tools like Shopify, at an additional cost to build an eCommerce website.
Products:
Both ClickFunnels and Kajabi allow you to create and sell courses, digital downloads, and memberships.
ClickFunnels 2.0 supports physical products as well. For this, it even handles all the taxes, inventory, and sales management. The unique thing about Kajabi is it supports podcasts, coaching, and communities as well.
When it comes to product pricing, in Kajabi you can charge –
- One-time payment
- Multiple payments
- Subscriptions
While for ClickFunnels you can charge a one-time fee and subscriptions. To increase sales and conversions you can offer free and paid trials.
While setting up the pricing for physical products in ClickFunnels, you can enable the variants to allow users to select different colors and sizes.
ClickFunnels has a unique custom center feature. It is nothing but a kind of online shopping portal where you can display all your products for users to take a look at.
Compared to ClickFunnels 1.0, the brand-new version has more eCommerce features. These include –
- Member login area (for memberships)
- Taxes, inventory & shipping (coming soon)
- Orders
- Customer center
- Abandoned carts
- Etc.
Winner: ClickFunnels, obviously. It has built-in eCommerce and shopping cart features. It has a customer center area, built-in tax handling, the ability to sell physical products, etc.
Affiliate marketing
ClickFunnels 2.0 is working on its affiliate program and will be available soon. Will update once it goes live.
Kajabi’s affiliate program is available only on its higher plans – Growth and Pro plans. You can either automatically accept the affiliates or do it manually. If you are already in this game, you can use automations to create affiliates in bulk.
You can create VIP affiliates and offer them special discounts on your products.
To analyze how your affiliates are earning Kajabi gives 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 gives you the flexibility to connect with the apps based on your geographical location.
Winner: ClickFunnels.
Pricing
ClickFunnels 2.0 has three premium plans with the lowest plan starting at $147/mo, it supports 1 website, 20 funnels, 1 admin, 3 courses, etc.
If you need advanced features like an affiliate program, API access, the ability to share funnels, liquid theme editor (for custom coding), you need to shell out $197/mo.
To get hands on the tool, you can sign up for its 30 days free trial and explore the tool.
Kajabi is quite expensive compared to ClickFunnels (for advanced users who want to go with higher pricing).
The premium pricing starts at $149/mo, and it supports only 3 products and 3 funnels, while ClickFunnels at $147 supports unlimited products (not courses) and unlimited funnel workflows.
To access its affiliate program, and advanced automations, and to remove Kajabi branding you should go with its Growth plan at $199/mo.
Kajabi has recently introduced a free plan that you can sign up to explore the tool for a limited time.
Kajabi discount
If you choose annual billing, Kajabi gives you a 20% discount on all its plans. With this, you can save up to $960.
- With the Pro plan, you can save $960/year.
- With the Growth plan, you can save $480/year.
- While with the basic plan you can save $360/year.
FAQs on Kajabi vs ClickFunnels 2.0
What is ClickFunnels 2.0?
ClickFunnels 2.0 is the brand new version of ClickFunnels 1.0. Previously ClickFunnels was more of a funnel-building tool, while now ClickFunnels 2.0 is marketed as an all-in-one marketing platform.
Does ClickFunnels 2.0 have a free plan?
No. But it offers you the 30 days free trial. This is enough to try out the tool.
Do these tools charge transaction fees?
No. Both tools don’t charge any transaction fees.
Do Kajabi and ClickFunnels 2.0 offer discounts?
ClickFunnels as of now doesn’t offer any discounts. But Kajabi offers a 20% discount on its annual subscriptions.
Conclusion
Kajabi is the perfect choice for creators, coaches, marketers, and entrepreneurs. If you are main priority is courses and need excellent marketing features to sell them, choose Kajabi.
If you are a marketer, eCommerce store owner, or entrepreneur who needs the ability to sell both digital and physical products, ClickFunnels is the best bet. It is affordable compared to Kajabi.
I hope you found this post on Kajabi and ClickFunnels helpful.