In this blog post, we’re going to dive deep into a comparison between Kajabi and Thinkific.

As a course creator, I’ve had the opportunity to spend a lot of time on both platforms.

And with a solid background in instructional design, I’ve got a keen eye for what works well, and what doesn’t.

So what’s my goal here?

To guide you in making the best choice for you.

Overview

Let’s start with Kajabi.

It’s a comprehensive digital platform that lets you sell online courses, coaching. And, you even have the option to create communities.

And it also comes with built-in email marketing automation features. This means you don’t have to use multiple platforms like ClickFunnels for building sales funnels.

And it already provides a website builder and sales funnel creation capabilities.

And it’s been on the list of the 5,000 fastest-growing private firms in the US. Not just once, but for seven years straight.

And guess what? It’s now valued at $2 billion.

It’s the all-in-one nature of the platform. Plus, the seamless integration of its features.

It’s super easy to navigate. Even for those who might not be tech wizards.

Now, that’s a unique selling proposition.

Now, let’s talk about Thinkific.

It was founded by Matt Smith. He came up with the idea when he wanted to move his LSAT course online, but couldn’t find a platform that met his needs.

Thinkific is really a specialist in the course creation field.

It offers academic-focused tools such as exams, assessments, surveys, and much more.

Features	Kajabi	Thinkific
Pricing starts at 💰	$149/mo	$49/mo
Do premium plans support unlimited courses?	No. Even the highest plan at $399/mo supports 100 products only.	✓ All the paid plans support unlimited courses.
Has a built-in community?	Yes. Feature-rich	Yes
Mobile app  📱	Yes. For both iOS and Android	Yes. For both iOS and Android

Quick decision

👍 Why do we prefer Kajabi over Thinkific?

• An all-in-one platform: Kajabi is quite impressive. It’s a comprehensive platform where you can sell courses, build communities, and create digital products. Plus, it has built-in email marketing and funnel-building capabilities, making it extremely handy.
• Multiple course player themes: Kajabi offers a variety of themes for their course players. This means your Kajabi site can stand out from the rest.
• Powerful website builder: Kajabi’s powerful site builder eliminates the need for WordPress and also comes with a handy funnel design feature. Plus, it boasts robust blocks like count downs, opt-ins, and many more.
• Community gamification features: Unlike Thinkific, Kajabi has an array of gamification features for their community. They recently acquired Vibely, which adds features to assign points, hand out badges, set up challenges, and display leaderboards for your community members.
• Feature-rich mobile apps: Kajabi has feature-rich mobile apps for both iOS and Android. While Thinkific also offers them, they can be a bit buggy and not as well-maintained.

👍 Why do we prefer Thinkific over Kajabi?

• Unlimited courses: You can create as many courses as you want. Whereas, Kajabi restricts you to creating only 3 products even in their $149/mo plan.
• Excellent assessment features: Thinkific, designed primarily for academic purposes, offers features like quizzes, graded quizzes, assessments, question banks, and even exams. There’s a lot of depth to these features.
• Budget-friendly: Thinkific is very affordable, making it ideal for beginners. Their lowest plan starts at just $49/mo, which includes unlimited courses & students.

Upfront bottomline

If you need an all-in-one platform, and you haven’t set up your website, funnels, or email marketing system yet, Kajabi could be your best choice. It’s a comprehensive solution offering a wide range of features. What’s more, it provides excellent value for your money.

On the other hand, if your need is specific to course creation and you’ve already got your funnels in place, then Thinkific would be the right platform. In all their plans, they allow you to create unlimited products.

Interface

Both Kajabi and Thinkific have a clean, modern interface. The features are logically arranged for ease of use.

In Kajabi, the sidebar features are intuitive, enabling smooth navigation between different functionalities. You won’t have to think too much when moving around the various features.

On the other hand, Thinkific also employs a sidebar-driven interface.

However, some of their feature categories are unintuitively names. As a result, you may need some time to understand what each category contains. Additionally, the interface might feel a bit cluttered.

Course creation

Now let me compare both of these platforms when it comes to course creation.

When you create a new course on Kajabi, you have the ability to organize your lessons in modules and submodules.

This submodules functionality offers an additional layer of organization, which can be incredibly useful.

In Kajabi, each lesson must be created separately for each content format. This means you can’t combine multiple content formats within a single lesson.

As a result, you end up with quite a number of individual lessons.

While, Thinkific allows you to organize your lessons in a variety of ways, within different modules.

Beyond the different content types offered by Kajabi, Thinkific provides additional content types like presentations, live videos (with Zoom integration), quizzes, assessments, exams, and even surveys.

Both platforms allow for the drip scheduling of modules and lessons. Here’s a bonus feature with Kajabi: it enables automatic email notifications. In contrast, with Thinkific, you need to run a drip campaign in parallel with the unlocking of the course.

🏆 Winner: Tie. Kajabi’s sub-modules feature is handy for creating longer courses, and the ability to send emails for drip content release is a plus. With Thinkific, however, you benefit from additional content formats such as presentations and the capability to embed surveys directly within the course to increase engagement.

Assessments

Let’s dive into quizzes and assessments.

With Kajabi, you can create quizzes and open-ended questions. You also have the option to ask people to upload any file as part of their assessment.

You can also grade quizzes, setting a passing grade for proceeding with the course.

Thinkific, on the other hand, supports both graded and non-graded quizzes.

And, to take it to the next level, they offer a question bank functionality, which is excellent in an academic setup.

Course player

Now, let’s talk about the course player. This is the interface that students see when taking the course.

Kajabi offers three different themes for the course player. These unique designs enhance the overall course design experience.

And, Kajabi’s course player includes a comment section at the bottom of the course. This makes it very intuitive and encourages interaction.

On the other hand, Thinkific has a different approach.

Students need to click on a ‘discussions’ button to interact with comments. It appear in the right sidebar.

While this design may work for some, it could potentially decrease user engagement.

Design and customization

As I mentioned earlier, Kajabi has a full-fledged site builder with visual funnel building functionalities.

It offers more than 11 themes for website design, and if you’re into coding, you can even upload your own themes.

The site builder is rich with diverse blocks that you can use to build your website. You’ll find conversion-friendly blocks like countdown timers and content reveals. You don’t need to necessarily use separate tools like Elementor or ClickFunnels.

While, Thinkific doesn’t offer a comprehensive site builder.

It does provide three site themes with various styles, but customization isn’t as extensive as Kajabi’s.

If customization is important to you, you may need to still make use of WordPress for your website.

Community

Kajabi has seriously upped its game in the community feature department. Thanks to the acquisition of an application called Vibely.

Kajabi now offers a lot of gamification features like points, badges, leaderboards, and even the ability to host challenges.

Kajabi’s community feature is so powerful than other dedicated community platforms.

On the other hand, Thinkific’s community feature feels pretty basic.

They haven’t updated the features, as their development roadmap seems to be pretty slowly. The limited functionality allows you to create different spaces and discussion areas.

You can control access to your community by granting access to various spaces based on course enrollments. But honestly, it’s very limited.

In my opinion, I don’t see anyone building a truly engaging community using Thinkific’s community features in 2024.

Analytics and reports

When it comes to analytics and tracking, there are two key things I focus on as an instructional designer.

1. Student engagement: I examine course consumption reports to gauge how students interact with the material.
2. Video retention: I use retention graphs to identify where students may lose interest during lesson videos.

Both of these platforms offer these capabilities.

You’ll have the ability to view retention graphs and heat maps, which provide a visual representation of where people might be dropping out from your lesson videos.

It’s incredibly useful data for fine-tuning your course content.

Payment processing

In the past, both of these platforms only offered support for Stripe and PayPal. However, they’ve recently evolved.

Now, both platforms have their own proprietary payment solutions. It enables you to have instant payouts, reducing a lot of back-office work when it comes to taxation.

However, their own payment gateway is currently limited to the US and Canada only.

Checkout pages

When it comes to checkout pages, both of these platforms have a single-page checkout functionality.

This makes it easy for your customers to complete their purchases.

👍 You also have the ability to include order bumps in both of these platforms. This technique maximizes the value of each transaction, allowing your customers to add additional products or services to their purchase.

In the thank-you page, as part of the post-purchase workflow, you can add multiple upsells.

This is a brilliant strategy to let your customers spend more when they’re in the zone.

Email marketing

Kajabi comes with a built-in email marketing tool. This feature could potentially replace any dedicated email marketing tool you’re currently using.

But I’m seeing many people, although they are using Kajabi, still make use of a separate email marketing platform for more customization abilities.

With Kajabi, you’re equipped to send broadcast emails and email sequences.

Plus, Kajabi’s email funnels and automation builders allow you to set emails as specific actions in your sequence.

While, Thinkific does not offer any email marketing functions.

Instead, it automatically sends transactional emails or email notifications.

These are triggered by specific events on your website like weekly reminders, welcome messages, replies to discussions, and other community updates.

Affiliate marketing

Both Kajabi and Thinkific come with the ability to set up your own affiliate programs. This way, your students can transform into brand ambassadors, earning commissions for the sales they generate.

Also, both platforms let you treat any of your affiliates like VIPs, assigning them special commissions based on their performance.

Now, Thinkific takes it a step further. In addition to the affiliate functionality, it also offers a revenue-sharing feature.

This means you can have a co-instructor for your course and split the revenue with them.

Integrations

Both of these platforms integrate with popular marketing and email marketing platforms. They even connect with tools like Zapier.

But to take it further, Thinkific got a dedicated app store with over 80 different apps and services for you to integrate with.

But I’m not quite sure how Thinkific keeps tabs on all those apps. Are they all working currently? I have to wonder, especially considering the fact that Thinkific hasn’t seen any major updates in quite a few years.

Pricing

When it comes to pricing, Kajabi carries a more premium price tag.

Why?

Well, it’s packed with a ton of features. Plus, it provides excellent value for your money.

But, there’s a downside to Kajabi.

They limit the number of products you can create. Specifically, in their Kickstarter and also Basic Plan (at $149/mo!), you can only create up to 3 products and 3 funnels.

On the other hand, Thinkific has a different approach.

With all their paid plans, they allow you to create unlimited courses.

Bottomline

Let’s break it down.

If you’re looking for a all-in-one platform that lets you build your website, set up sales funnels, and also offers a feature-rich community, Kajabi is the way to go.

But, if your needs are more focused on course hosting, and you’ve already got your funnel set up, then Thinkific is your best option. Plus, it supports unlimited courses for the price.