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.
In 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 extensively for courses, coaching, and communities. It offers content dripping, tests, student tracking, and engagement features that GoHighLevel simply can’t match.
- All-in-one advanced automation: Kajabi’s built-in tools work seamlessly together through its powerful automation engine. You’ll rarely need Zapier with Kajabi’s integrated system.
- Powerful customization tools: While GoHighLevel has decent templates and merge fields, Kajabi gives you significantly more control over appearance and functionality across your entire business.
- Podcasts and built-in webinars: Higher Kajabi plans include both features, eliminating the need for additional tools and strengthening your marketing capabilities.
- Tons of conversion tools: Get A/B testing, heatmaps, exit popups, order bumps, bundles, cart abandonment follow-ups, and flexible payment options – everything you need to boost sales in one place.
- Reliable email deliverability: Kajabi’s email system actually works. Unlike GoHighLevel (which has major deliverability problems and forces you to use Mailgun with extra costs), Kajabi’s emails reach inboxes without needing third-party tools or surprise charges.
👎 What I don’t like about Kajabi: The price jumps up fast as you grow. With Kajabi’s $149/mo plan, you only get 3 funnels – but GoHighLevel gives you unlimited funnels from day one.
What I like about GoHighLevel 👍
- Awesome reseller program: If you’re an agency helping businesses or reselling tools, GoHighLevel is perfect. Cover your costs with just 3 clients paying $97/month, then pocket all additional revenue.
- Multi-channel approach: Combine calls, texts, picture messages, and Facebook messages in one unified funnel system. Everything works together seamlessly!
- All-in-one platform: Get everything you need – email marketing, page building, affiliate management, and CRM functionality in a single tool.
- Cost savings: Replace multiple subscriptions with just one GoHighLevel plan. Just be aware that connections, emails, and texts/calls may incur extra charges.
- Robust contact management: See all client interactions in one place. Track emails, texts, calls, and engagement metrics centrally for better relationship management.
But.
You need to be aware of some serious downsides 👎 GoHighLevel has:
- Clunky UI: Settings are scattered throughout an unintuitive interface. Simple funnel edits require multiple confusing steps.
- Hidden email costs: Each email costs $0.01 to send. This adds up fast – a 30,000 subscriber list costs $300+ monthly for just one email campaign.
- Poor email deliverability: Many users report emails not reaching inboxes. You’ll likely need to pay for Mailgun or another third-party service.
- Buggy automation: Users frequently report serious glitches like emails sent to wrong people or multiple duplicate sends.
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.
One thing I really like is that they don’t limit your contacts, emails, or funnels like Kajabi does.
But please be aware about the serious downsides that I have explained above, especially with email marketing.
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.
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: Create structured courses using drag-and-drop interface. Add modules, lessons, quizzes, discussions, and multi-choice tests with ease.
- Smart content delivery: Control access with drip scheduling. Keep students on track by locking lessons until they complete previous ones.
- All content types supported: Mix audio, text, and video in your courses. Import videos directly from Google Drive, Dropbox, YouTube, or Wistia.
- Advanced analytics: See exactly how students are doing. Track progress, identify drop-off points with heatmaps, and access detailed course-level stats.
- Flexible coaching options: Run one-on-one sessions, group coaching, or live workshops. 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.
🏆 Bottomline: I recommend Kajabi if your business is focused on online courses, online communities, memberships, or a learning management system (LMS) with a business focus.
GoHighLevel’s CRM and automations are advanced
HighLevel seamlessly integrates SMS/MMS, emails, Facebook Messenger, and voicemail drops into funnels.
You can create detailed workflows for follow-ups, lead nurturing, and client retention with GoHighLevel’s robust CRM system.
It captures comprehensive information about individual leads.
This means you can segment and personalize your marketing strategies for better conversion rates.
GoHighLevel also includes a powerful Calendar tool for appointment booking and contact management, keeping everything in one place.
And, its social media planner can replace tools like Buffer or Hootsuite for basic scheduling needs.
Kajabi’s CRM, on the other hand, lets you segment audiences, score leads, and integrate your social media followers.
You can also manually import contacts via CSV if you prefer.
Plus, you’re free to add custom fields to your contact profiles for better campaign personalization.
Both platforms let you easily add, use, and remove tags and filters for smooth contact management.
Similar to GoHighLevel, Kajabi can trigger actions like sending coupons, emails, or granting product access with simple rules.
However, Kajabi’s automation works better for course delivery than for comprehensive digital marketing workflows.
🏆 Bottomline: GoHighLevel wins with its multi-channel marketing approach and powerful CRM features. Kajabi, on the other hand, has stronger automation for people creating courses, though it’s not as comprehensive for overall marketing workflows.
Funnels and pipelines
I love Kajabi’s funnel templates. They’re super easy to use.
You can also build funnels from scratch if you want more control.
Here’s something awesome – Kajabi lets you pick a template, customize it, and optimize it without jumping between pages.
You see the whole process right there. Simple and efficient.
Kajabi connects your email marketing with your pipelines automatically.
It creates triggers and offers based on what your leads do.
This keeps everything working together smoothly.
👎 But there’s one downside compared to GoHighLevel. With Kajabi’s $149/month plan, you only get 3 funnels to work with. You still get unlimited emails and landing pages, though.
With GoHighLevel, you get unlimited everything; funnels, emails, landing pages, contacts, you name it.
I’ve tested GoHighLevel’s funnel builder extensively and found it super straightforward.
The best part?
You don’t need to connect separate landing pages by hand. It gives you a simple, visual experience where you can build your entire funnel on one page – making the whole process quick and easy.
Even better, GoHighLevel offers more funnel templates than Kajabi, and they look amazing! They give you a fantastic starting point for your funnel-building journey.
Where GoHighLevel funnels really shine is multi-channel marketing. You can integrate two-way SMS/MMS, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, voicemail drops, and emails all in one place.
These channels often get much higher engagement than regular emails, but remember to stay GDPR compliant (very important).
Unlike Kajabi, which puts limits on your funnels across different plans, HighLevel gives you unlimited funnels.
This makes GHL perfect for agencies or resellers managing multiple clients and products.
But even if you’re focused on a specific niche, both platforms offer powerful tools for building effective funnels.
🏆 Bottomline: Kajabi gives you easy-to-use, all-in-one funnel building with limited capacity. GoHighLevel, on the other hand, offers unlimited funnels with multi-channel marketing features that work great for agencies and businesses with high volumes.
Kajabi offers more customization options
Both platforms offer solid drag-and-drop builders for customization.
But I’ve always preferred Kajabi’s approach, especially its theme templates.
These templates give you a strong foundation, allowing for personalized designs that match your brand identity.
Kajabi’s templates have that polished, professional look – which makes a huge difference in user experience.
Even better, Kajabi offers over 40 elements to customize your pages, making it easy to tailor them to any use case.
You can create professional web pages, blogs, and landing pages without coding knowledge.
And, if you want to add custom code, that’s also possible, but you’ll need 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 comes with a few eye-catching features:
- Unlimited pages: Create as many pages as you want without restrictions
- No-cost customization: Whether you code or not, you can customize freely without paying extra
- Basic SEO tool: Get started with SEO, or connect a more powerful tool if needed
- Detailed analytics: Track visitor behavior and generate reports right from the platform
So what’s it going to be?
Will you go with Kajabi’s extensive design options? Or does GoHighLevel’s unlimited pages and integrated lead follow-ups speak to your needs?
🏆 Bottomline: Kajabi gives you more design options with 40+ elements, while GoHighLevel lets you create unlimited pages with better lead tracking. Pick based on what your business needs most.
Kajabi provides more powerful conversion optimization options
GoHighLevel gives you plenty of options for setting up your e-commerce store and pages. Here’s what you get:
- Unlimited products: Create and sell as many products as you want, no matter which plan you choose
- Physical product support: Sell physical items directly or connect with your favorite platform like Shopify
- Live chat: Help your customers in real-time right on your pages
But wait, there’s more!
Check out these additional features:
Kajabi’s checkout features make selling online super easy.
- More payment options: Use Kajabi Pay, PayPal, Stripe, all major credit cards, Buy Now Pay Later, Apple Pay, and Google Pay.
- Easy integration: Add another payment gateway using Webhooks and Zapier.
- Sell more: Create upsells, cross-sells, downsells, and even pay-what-you-want pricing with Kajabi Pay.
- Boost your sales: Add order bumps and bundle deals to increase your average cart value.
- Get back lost sales: Use powerful cart abandonment funnels to recover customers who leave.
- Look professional: Choose from many checkout page designs for a seamless buying experience.
Overall, Kajabi gives you everything you need to maximize sales at checkout.
🏆 Bottomline: GoHighLevel offers unlimited products and physical item sales, while Kajabi excels with advanced checkout features like upsells, order bumps, and multiple payment options for higher conversions.
Email marketing
GoHighLevel and Kajabi both offer unlimited emails, email broadcasts (for one-time announcements), and automated sequences.
But here’s what I love – GoHighLevel’s multi-channel approach is super impressive.
You can manage email, SMS, voicemail, and even social media marketing all from one platform.
There’s a catch though.
Kajabi includes email costs in its plans, but GoHighLevel charges you $0.01 per email on top of your monthly subscription.
If you have more than 20,000 contacts, these costs pile up fast.
Even worse, they use Mailgun for emails which has poor deliverability and high fees!
Because of this:
You might end up buying another email marketing tool, which defeats the whole purpose of an all-in-one platform!
I also noticed GoHighLevel’s email templates look more basic compared to Kajabi’s polished designs – though you can still customize sections with different elements.
That said, I’m really impressed with GoHighLevel’s ability to create complex workflows across multiple channels and trigger-based actions, like cart abandonment reminders.
You can also track leads, split-test emails, and add appointment scheduling right into your GoHighLevel campaigns. This is perfect if you’re managing multiple clients or complex marketing sequences.
On the other hand, Kajabi’s email templates look amazing.
You can easily create eye-catching emails even if you’re not a design expert.
You’ll love how Kajabi runs automated campaigns that send content based on what your users do. This is super important for nurturing leads and keeping your learners engaged.
Plus, I really like how Kajabi handles email delivery. It gets you better open rates.
With GoHighLevel? You’ll need to connect Mailgun (or whatever email service you prefer) if you want to send bulk emails reliably.
Kajabi makes setting up timed email sequences and automatic follow-ups really simple. Think welcome emails, webinar sign-up messages, and course purchase confirmations.
Kajabi also integrates with platforms like Mailchimp for more advanced email marketing features.
And if you want to go deep with your GoHighLevel email campaigns, you can use their API – but you’ll need the $297/month plan for that.
🏆 Bottomline: Kajabi offers better email deliverability and polished templates with no hidden costs, while GoHighLevel provides multi-channel marketing but charges per email with potentially poor deliverability.
Integrations
Kajabi doesn’t give you direct API access.
Instead, it connects with other apps through Zapier.
This lets you link up with all kinds of tools – email marketing platforms like Mailchimp, payment systems like Stripe and PayPal, and even webinar platforms.
GoHighLevel, on the other hand, has a much stronger integration system.
With direct API access in the $297/month plan, you can build all kinds of custom integrations – way more than what Kajabi offers.
Plus, GoHighLevel connects directly with SMS tools like Twilio, email platforms like ConvertKit and AWeber, and messaging apps like WhatsApp.
And if that’s not enough, it works with Zapier too, giving you even more options.
🏆 Bottomline: Kajabi relies on Zapier for integrations, while GoHighLevel (in the $297/month plan), offers superior connectivity with direct API access and native integrations with SMS, email, and messaging platforms.
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 ($89/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 2 distinct plans: the Starter plan at $97/month, and the Unlimited plan at $297/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 to resell the platform as your own branded product? You’ll need the $297/month plan.
With this plan, you can create and set up sub-accounts for clients with your own apps or Marketplace tools. Kajabi doesn’t offer this at all.
The best part?
There’s no limit on how many times you can resell it.
But here’s the catch – you’ll need to pay extra for email and SMS messages through services like Mailgun and Twilio. These costs can really add up based on your usage!
🏆 Bottomline: Kajabi offers tiered pricing with feature limits, while GoHighLevel gives you unlimited everything at a lower cost, but hides extra fees for email and SMS that can really add up and blow your budget.
Verdict
Ultimately, Kajabi and GoHighLevel serve different business needs.
Kajabi is perfect for content creators. It gives you everything you need for courses, coaching, branding, and marketing automation in one package.
GoHighLevel, on the other hand, shines with its powerful CRM, reputation management, and marketing across multiple channels.
But here’s what you need to know about GoHighLevel before jumping in: it’s not easy to learn, the email delivery is poor, and there are hidden costs for email and SMS that can really blow up your monthly bill!
