Today we are reviewing Kajabi vs Thinkific. Thinkific is an affordable course creation platform whereas Kajabi is an expensive platform best suited for advanced course creators.

Despite Kajabi’s higher pricing and product creation limitations (even at $149/month, you can only create three products), is it worth purchasing?

If you are stuck with choosing between these platforms, follow this guide till the end. Will help you decide which platform to choose.

Here’s a quick breakdown to begin with 👇:

Features	Kajabi	Thinkific
Transaction fee💸	0%	0% (on all plans)
Pricing starts at 💰	$149/mo	$49/mo
Free plan available?	✖	Yes, you can create 3 courses in the free plan
Do premium plans support unlimited courses?	No. Even the highest plan at $399/mo supports 100 products.	✓ All the paid plans support unlimited courses.
Built-in surveys	Not available. But you can use its assessments feature to create surveys.	✓ Available
Course player customization features available?	Yes ✓	Yes ✓
Support for Adobe Captivate & Articulate Storyline files	✖	✓
Support for SCORM files	✖	✖
OTOs	Upsells, Order bumps	Upsells, Order bumps
Supported checkout	Single-page	Both single-page and two-page checkout
Has a built-in community? 👨‍👩‍👧‍👧	✓	✓
Sales page conversion elements	✖	Countdown timers (scarcity marketing) Social reviews, logos Testimonials
Mobile app  📱	✓ For both iOS and Android	✖
Is it truly white-labeled?	✖	✓
Integrations	It has native integrations with 10+ apps	Its Thinkific App Store has native integrations with 80+ apps
Has a native payment gateway?	✖	Yes, it has Thinkific Payments(But limited to the US and Canada)
Webhook and Zapier integration available?	✓	✓
Has affiliate marketing?	✓	✓
Built-in EU/VAT handling	✖	✖

Let’s get started with a Thinkific vs Kajabi post.

Overview 💫

Kajabi is a highly-priced advanced course creation platform best for course creators, marketers, and entrepreneurs who need advanced marketing automations, sales funnels, mobile apps, and advanced email marketing features all built-in.

Kajabi also supports coaching, podcasts, memberships, etc. You can consider it as a digital selling platform as well.

Whereas Thinkific is an affordable course creation platform that mainly focuses on courses and communities. It lacks dedicated memberships and podcasts, and there are no coaching and automation features available. If you are just looking for an LMS without advanced automation needs (or don’t mind using Zapier) and you are not much into other digital products selling, Thinkific would be the ideal solution to go with.

What do we like about Kajabi over Thinkific?

• Kajabi markets itself as an all-in-one platform for most online business needs. So unlike Thinkific, you don’t need many integrations to run your online business.
• We particularly love the Kajabi assistant. It’s handy for finding nested features inside Kajabi (as it comes with a lot of features). Thinkific just has a search bar.
• Kajabi has good iOS and Android apps, unlike Thinkific. The users can access their courses, take assessments, and it supports push notifications to increase user engagement.
• Kajabi’s site builder is super powerful. It gives various blocks like countdowns, opt-ins, accordions, pricing, custom blocks, offers, etc.
• Within each Kajabi offer, you can sell multiple products. This is a great way to increase sales.
• Kajabi has advanced marketing features like automations, pipelines, powerful email marketing, events, etc. With Thinkific, you need external integrations for this.
• Kajabi’s highest plan gives access to its code editor. With this, you can edit the templates and themes as you need. If you are a developer or coder, you will love this.
• Kajabi comes with events. With this you can conduct webinars, pre-launch your courses, conduct live meetings, etc.
• Kajabi’s automations are very powerful. Its higher plans come with advanced automation where you will get a conditional filter to trigger a specific action.
• Kajabi provides pipeline blueprints and it consists of opt-in, value, and offer. These funnels help you boost your conversions systematically leveraging the stages of audience’s journey coupled with right messaging..
• Kajabi has a dedicated affiliate program and it provides detailed metrics to analyze the affiliate’s performance. It converts your students to true advocates of your courses.
• With Kajabi, you can sell memberships, podcasts, webinars, and other digital downloads, all within a single platform.

What do we like about Thinkific over Kajabi?

• Unlike Kajabi, Thinkific provides course completion certificates. This increases the student’s course completion rate .
• The free plan is great for course creators who want to test the platform before committing long-term. You can create unlimited courses in Thinkific.
• Thinkific natively integrates with Shopify helping you sell courses in Shopify stores. With Kajabi, you’d need to integrate using Zapier, there is no direct integration available.
• Thinkific offers beginner-friendly pricing and is highly affordable. Thinkific’s lowest plan starts at $49/mo (supports unlimited courses & students).
• Thinkific’s community features are really good compared to that of Kajabi. Kajabi just has a basic community. In Thinkific, you can create groups, conduct live meetings (with Zoom integration), etc.
• Thinkific comes with its own payment gateway – Thinkific Payments but it is limited to the US and Canada.

Common downsides 👎

• Both tools don’t come with a built-in tax calculation system, unlike Teachable.
• Both tools lack guarantee badges to use on the checkout pages.

Upfront bottomline ⚡️:

Kajabi is an expensive course platform best suited for marketers. With this, along with courses, you can even sell coachings, memberships, webinars, podcasts, etc.

Kajabi doesn’t offer course completion certificates and course compliance features, as Kajabi users’ target audience is not students. Kajabi is made for marketers and advanced course creators.

On the other hand, Thinkific is an affordable solution and is the toughest contender to Teachable. It has excellent integration with Shopify (good news for eCommerce store owners🤞), comes with community features, natively integrates with 80+ apps, offers certificates, comes with excellent course compliance features, graded quizzes, and has randomized question banks, etc. If your target audience is students, Thinkific is the way to go.

Latest product updates 🎈:

Both Thinkific and Kajabi are releasing new features making the tools more powerful.

Kajabi has recently released –

• Native live streaming feature for coaching eliminating the need for external integrations like Zoom.
• One-click theme updates – always have your site on the latest theme version.
• For contacts it has a preview feature. It helps you view all the contact details with just a click of a button.

Thinkific recently released a community feature. Communities act as a power hub increasing the student’s engagement. Now, you can offer communities alongside courses.

To increase the ease of use, Thinkific has made the admin dashboard more intuitive than before, allowing you to create an engaging learning experience.

If you want to take a look at all the updates, click on the links below.

Interface

Both Kajabi and Thinkific have a neat and modern interface. The features are arranged logically for a flow. You can access all the features within 3 to 4 clicks.

With both, in the dashboard itself, you can get a quick overview of all the tools in the sidebar.

To quickly search for the features you need, Kajabi has a search assistant. You can search for whatever you need within Kajabi. On the other hand, Thinkific just has a search bar.

Winner: Tie. I really liked the interface of both tools. Also, all the features are neatly arranged for logical flow and you can access the features within 3 to 4 clicks. Kajabi helps you quickly find the features and the tools needed, with its search assistant.

Course creation 📚

Course/product types

With Kajabi, you can create courses, coachings, memberships, communities, and podcasts. While in Thinkific, you can create and sell only courses and communities.

Thinkific doesn’t have a dedicated memberships feature, but you can use its course bundles feature to sell your membership content.

If you want to sell your podcasts, you can use integrations with external tools like ListenNotes. Add the files using the “embed code” in the lessons.

Product templates:

Both Kajabi and Thinkific provide templates to create your courses quickly. In addition to course templates, with Kajabi you will also get templates for memberships and community products.

Kajabi calls its product templates as Blueprints.

In Kajabi, you can create various courses like –

• Mini-course
• Drip course
• Online course
• Or a blank course

Thinkific supports:

• Pre-sell course
• Mini-course
• Flagship course
• Webinar replay
• Membership resource library
• Blank course

Winner: Kajabi. With both Thinkific and Kajabi you can create various types of courses and both offer course blueprints. But Kajabi has an edge with its coaching and podcasts. You can sell these as upsells along with courses to increase sales.

Course structuring and uploading

Kajabi’s course structure consists of categories (nothing but modules), posts, and subcategories, while Thinkific’s courses consist of chapters and lessons inside them.

In case of Kajabi, if you have longer content the sub-categories help you organize the content in chunks, for a smooth user experience. For example – if you have 100 course lessons to add, you can create various subcategories and add them.

Let’s see the types of lessons supported.

Kajabi supports

• Text
• Audio
• Video
• Assessments
• Image, and files (like GIFs, ZIP files, PDFs, etc).

While Thinkific supports

• Text
• Video
• Audio
• Images/Multimedia (PDF, Downloads)
• Presentations
• Live – Integration with Zoom is needed for this.

Similar to Teachable, Kajabi supports multiple content types inside the lessons. For example – You can add video/audio/assessment along with text lessons. But in case of Thinkific, you can just add videos and text within the same lesson.

On both these platforms, you can bulk upload the videos saving tons of your time.

No one wants to upload the videos one by one, right?

Kajabi supports cloud upload from Dropbox & Google Drive. Thinkific as of now doesn’t support this feature.

Thinkific has an interesting feature “copy lessons”. With this, you can copy the lessons from your other courses as well. If you are creating multiple courses around a similar topic and have the same lessons in the curriculum, this would be a great feature that helps in creating courses super quickly. This is lacking in Kajabi.

Winner: Kajabi. I really find Kajabi’s sub-categories feature helpful when creating long course content. This encourages pro-active learning and may result in an increased course completion rate. Also, Kajabi’s cloud upload will be flexible to add the content on the go and saves your storage.

Enrollments

Do you want to offer free courses to students as lead magnets?

If so, you can do this with both tools. In Kajabi, you need to create the offers at zero price for this.

Also, you can sell other courses or other products for a one-time fee, subscriptions, or multiple payment plans.

You can also offer free or paid trials on the subscription plans, to convert more users.

What if you want to sell your products in multiple currencies to cater to a global audience?

If you are using Stripe payment gateway with both platforms, you can sell your products in multiple currencies. Thinkific’s native gateway – Thinkific Payments, allows you to sell only in USD 💲.

Bulk student actions:

Thinkific supports bulk student enroll/unenroll. With Kajabi, you can grant an offer in bulk for multiple contacts.

As Kajabi comes with a tagging feature, you can add the tags or remove tags in bulk for easier contact management.

Winner: Kajabi. With both tools, you can offer trials and sell the courses for free to attract leads. Also, both support bulk student actions. Kajabi has an edge here as it supports multiple currencies within the platform.

Content delivery (to the students)

Both Kajabi and Thinkific support drip scheduling of the chapters (categories in the case of Kajabi).

With Thinkific, you can drip schedule the chapters based on –

• Student enrollment date.
• Student course start date.
• On a specific date (ie. calendar date).

In Kajabi, you don’t have these fancy options to drip schedule.

Similar to Teachable, in Kajabi you can send automatic email notifications when the drip content becomes available. In the case of Thinkific, you need to send it manually by configuring the drip campaigns.

Let’s discuss comments 💬.

Both these tools support lesson wide comments.

In Kajabi, you can make the comments section visible/hidden/locked. With Thinkific, you have options to enable/disable the discussion section for each lesson.

In Kajabi, the comments section will be directly accessible for students below the content. But in the case of Thinkific, students need to click on the discussion to access this, which adds friction and discourages students from participating.

Next is the course player and the front-end students’ experience.

Kajabi’s course page looks very attractive and is minimal without any distractions. The comments section is accessible straight under the lesson content.

Thinkific’s front-end experience is also very neat and attractive. It even has a search bar to find the lessons immediately, which is lacking in Kajabi.

Both platforms support a video speed controller, focus mode (full screen), video quality controller, and display the course progress.

Course player customization options:

Kajabi doesn’t offer many course player customization features. You can just

• Make the course player inline/simple.
• Customize the player and background color.
• Customize the post player language, post player pagination text/auto-advance, etc.

Winner: Kajabi. Kajabi’s comments are easily accessible after the lesson content and it encourages them to leave comments. Whereas with Thinkific, students need to click on discussions and then get involved in the comments. This discourages them from decreasing the students’ engagement.

Apart from this, Kajabi supports cloud uploading and it has a rich page editor to customize the course pages as you need. On the other hand, Thinkific doesn’t support cloud upload and its page builder is not as powerful as Kajabi.

Course compliance options

Course compliance options matter a lot to make your students complete the courses.

Kajabi sucks at offering course compliance features, but it is acceptable. Because Kajabi is targeted more towards marketers who are eager to learn and succeed in their business and is not for students.

If you consider tools like Thinkific and Teachable, these have excellent course compliance options as these tools are used by course creators, teachers, and coaches whose target audience is entry-level students.

You got this, right?

With Thinkific, you can:

• Enforce video completion percentage: Specify the % duration to mark the lesson as complete.
• Grade the quiz completions – Add a passing grade for the quizzes
• Add prerequisite lessons.

In case of Kajabi, you have content locking and graded assessments feature. You can lock any category until the specific post or the assessment is completed.

That’s it. There are no other compliance features.

Winner: Thinkific. Thinkific matches Teachable when it comes to course compliance options. But, Kajabi is very poor at this.

Analytics and reports 📊

Student level reports

Further, to know how students are progressing through your course, both these platforms provide student-level reports and video watch duration graphs.

In Kajabi, you can view the student’s progress reports under the Analytics section. But note that the reports are not as detailed as you get in Teachable.

You can filter the reports by product, segments, name, and email for easier analysis.

Students’ progress can be analyzed within groups and course-wise in Thinkific.

Video analytics

When it comes to videos, both Kajabi and Thinkific have excellent video retention graphs with detailed analytics, helping you analyze where students are engaging, and where they are dropping.

Kajabi even provides heat maps showing you how well the students are engaging with your videos.

Thinkific has recently released advanced reporting (still in beta mode). With this, you will get powerful video analytics like play rate, hours watched, engagement rate, loads, plays, and much more.

Winner: Thinkific. Thinkific recently released an advanced report which provides in-depth insights on a student’s course progress, whereas Kajabi is good at its video-watching retention graphs and heatmaps (Thinkific lacks heatmaps).

Assessments

Quizzes

With Kajabi, there is no feature called quiz. But you can use its assessments to create quizzes.

For creating the quizzes, you can use – multiple choice, paragraphs, files, etc.

You can also grade the assessments. Graded assessments help students to seriously go through the course content and with this, you can also get to know how well the students are learning.

Similar to this, Thinkific supports graded & non-graded quizzes.

I really liked that Kajabi allows you to automate the assessment completion.

This encourages students to genuinely complete the assessments. For example – When an assessment is completed, you can grant them an offer, add a tag, send a congrats email, subscribe to an email sequence, and much more. Thinkific doesn’t support these automations.

If you’re wondering what Thinkific’s unique feature is, it’s randomized question banks.

You can avail this feature on Thinkific’s Pro plan or higher. You can specify the number of questions to generate in the question bank.

This feature would be really helpful for schools or institutes conducting competitive exams.

Winner: Kajabi. Both tools support graded and non-graded quizzes, but in Kajabi you can further automate the quiz completion which is a great way to make your customer stay with you, either by promoting other offers, or granting free access to events, adding a tag, etc.

Certifications

Kajabi doesn’t support certificates. It’s not a deal-breaker. As Kajabi is centered towards marketers, they don’t need certificates.

In case of Thinkific, it offers built-in certificates. It even natively integrates with Accredible, to automate the issuing of certificates. And, also you can send email notifications for this.

Winner: Thinkific, obviously.

Surveys

You can use Kajabi assessments to create surveys. Thinkific supports built-in surveys.

In the surveys, you can add these question types:

• One answer
• One or more answers
• Rating
• Scale
• Free Text

It also provides detailed survey reports for you to get insights.

Winner: Thinkific.

Mobile apps 📱

One of the main selling propositions of Kajabi is its mobile app. It has both iOS and Android apps.

Students can take the courses, assessments, and participate in the community on the go. You can also send push notifications (really good as it has higher open rates), to connect with your customers.

Thinkific doesn’t offer any apps 😔. It will be a deal breaker for you if most of your audience are students who depend on smartphones to consume the content.

Lately, Kajabi has introduced some updates to the app 🙌.

• Now Kajabi supports audio in the background. So, even if you lock the app or exit the app, the lessons will be played in the background.
• The app now supports video casting to Apple TV, Roku, Chromecast, etc.
• There is an exclusive Favorites tab available. Students can favorite the posts and view them all in that tab.

Winner: Kajabi.

Digital product selling 🛒

You can sell digital products with both these platforms, but Kajabi has an edge here.

I will tell you why.

Kajabi allows you to sell memberships, communities, podcasts, webinars (through its events feature), and other digital downloads (eBooks, PDFs, guides, etc). If you need an affordable digital product selling platform, you can consider tools like Podia. I would recommend it as an affordable Kajabi alternative if you are mainly into digital products.

Note that, if you want to sell physical products you can do that by embedding the links in CTAs like “Buy Now”.

While with Thinkific, you can sell memberships (through course bundling) and digital downloads. If you want to sell other products, you need external integrations.

If you want to sell webinars, you need to have Zoom integration. In the Thinkific app store, you will get 80+ apps ✨ to integrate and extend the functionality of your courses.

Pro tip: As Kajabi has tight limits on the number of products you create (basic plan at $149/mo allows just 3 products, $199/mo plan allows just 15 products). So, to sell your other products you should make use of offers.

I will explain to you.

1. If you want to sell any digital downloads, you need to create an offer.
2. Add automation – WHEN an offer is purchased THEN send an email to customers with a link to download the product.

In case of Thinkific, you can create unlimited products 🔥 even in its basic plan at $49/mo.

If you are also running an eCommerce business along with courses, Thinkific natively integrates with Shopify
. You can sell your Thinkific courses on the Shopify store as well. With Kajabi, you need to use Zapier to integrate it with Shopify.

Winner: Kajabi. With Kajabi, you can sell memberships, podcasts,, webinars/events, etc. In Thinkific, you need to integrate with external platforms to sell digital products. But, if you are an eCommerce store owner, Thinkific natively integrates with Shopify.

Memberships (Earn recurring revenue🎊)

Kajabi has a dedicated memberships feature, whereas with Thinkific you need to use its course bundling feature to sell your membership content.

Kajabi has a membership blueprint so you already have the skeleton ready, you can just start adding the content for it. If you want to gate the content access with various membership levels you can do that with offers. Create multiple offers – Gold, Silver, Bronze and sell your membership products for a one-time fee, multiple payments, subscriptions, or for free.

To motivate the students, you can offer free memberships as a bonus to those who complete the course successfully or when a student completes an assessment, or when you bring in a new member for you, etc. You can use Kajabi automations for this.

Let’s discuss Thinkific memberships (course bundling).

Thinkific supports this feature only on the Pro plan ($99/mo) and up.

With this feature, you can sell multiple courses and sell them for a single price.

When it comes to pricing, you can sell it for a one-time payment, subscription, or set up a payment plan. Like Kajabi, you can create different membership tiers as well.

Note that if you are selling the bundles and don’t wish to provide access to your individual courses, you can hide the courses in the main course directory/on the home page.

Winner: Kajabi. Kajabi has a dedicated membership site feature and you can drip schedule the content, automate the membership completion, customize the membership site page, and much more. Whereas Thinkific just provides basic features to sell memberships as course bundles. You can’t automate and gamify the membership tasks.

Community features

Thinkific’s community is more feature-rich than Kajabi.

Kajabi’s community is pretty basic.

You can create topics for students to engage in the discussions. You can set the community homepage as feeds/topics.

You can add a sidebar message (any announcements, discount offers, promotion messages, community guidelines, etc), add a logo, customize the colors to reflect your brand, etc.

You can even sell your community as a paid offer along with courses. With this, the chances of students enrolling in courses will be higher as they get access to the community to grow along with like-minded people.

Let’s discuss Thinkific communities.

Note: With Thinkific’s Pro plan at $79/mo, you can create only one community (enough if you want to have a site-wide community). If you want to build more communities (per course level) you need to go with a Pro + Growth plan and higher. In the case of Kajabi, the community feature is available on the Basic plan (though it costs $149/mo).

Thinkific allows you to create site-wide communities (similar Facebook groups), course-wide, or membership-specific communities.

It has designed the community to fully integrate with the Thinkific site. So, based on your community settings, students will be automatically added or removed. No more manual work is needed.

You can customize the appearance to match your brand and host the community on your own domain.

You can also customize who will have access to the community:

• Logged in students.
• Enrolled students.
• Students in groups.
• Only me (best to set if you have not launched the community yet).

If you think Thinkific’s community features are not enough for your needs, you can consider integrating with dedicated community platforms like Circle.so. Thinkific natively integrates with Circle SSO. You can either embed Circle’s community on Thinkific or create communities directly in Circle.

Similar to Thinkific, Teachable also integrates with Circle SSO for building communities.

To integrate Kajabi with Circle, you need to use Zapier integration.

Winner: Thinkific. Thinkific comes with built-in communities. Its Primer plan at $399/mo supports unlimited communities. In case of kajabi, its community feature is pretty basic. In case of both, if your needs aren’t met, you can further integrate with tools like Circle.so.

Design and customization 🎨

Themes

Kajabi provide you with several pre-made themes to design your course page and the site as well.

The themes are modern and look professional. Thinkific doesn’t offer any themes to design the courses.

You can customize the typography, color scheme, favicon image, message colors, background images, etc. I really liked the flexibility Kajabi offers in designing the pages. You can customize sections to match your needs.

Kajabi offers 11+ free themes to design your site. You can upload the custom themes, and save the themes for later use. On the other hand, Thinkific just has 3 site themes with various styles.

Winner: Kajabi. Kajabi offers various themes (11+) to design your site, unlike Thinkific which offers only 3 themes. Also, using Kajabi’s code editor you can customize the themes as needed, unlike Thinkific. You can upload your own theme in Kajabi.

Page builder

Kajabi has a dedicated, feature-rich page builder to design your products, memberships, site, blog pages, posts, etc. While Thinkific’s page builder is pretty basic with very limited design options.

Kajabi offers 25+ blocks to design your pages. Some of the important blocks include:

• Assessments
• Countdown timer (for scarcity marketing)
• Opt-in form bar (to collect leads)
• Offers
• Cross sell
• Custom content
• Pricing options
• Etc

With Thinkific you will get 15+ sections to design the pages. Some of the notable sections include –

• Countdown timers
• Bonus materials
• All pricing smart section
• Social proofs – logos, reviews (increases conversions)
• Checklist
• Upsells (to increase the average cart value)
• Etc.

Note that both tools don’t offer any page templates or section templates, unlike tools like Kartra. With both, you can customize the images, typography, colors, etc. to reflect your brand.

Winner: Kajabi. Kajabi has a powerful site builder to design your site pages. You can add any custom content as well using custom blocks. In case of Thinkific, there are limited blocks available to design your pages.

Blogging ability:

Kajabi has a built-in blogging feature. To design the pages you can add a search bar, sidebar opt-ins, author info, social links, etc. Thinkific lacks this, but you can integrate it with WordPress.

Website level options

Both Thinkific and Kajabi support custom domain/subdomain. You can remove the “powered by” label in both tools.

Thinkific is a completely white-labeled solution, similar to LearnWorlds. You can avail this feature on its highest plan at $499/mo.

Note that Thinkific supports custom texts. You can customize the names you use. For example – You can change the courses to product, lessons to categories, etc. Kajabi doesn’t support this.

Winner: Thinkific. Both tools support custom domains, but Thinkific has an edge with its completely white-labeled solution. With Kajabi, you can remove the Kajabi branding at $199/mo, in the case of Thinkific, you will get the white-labeled solution with its prime plan at $499/mo.

Sales and marketing 💸

Basic marketing feature

Both tools have marketing features like coupons/discounts and course pre-sell features. In Thinkific you can also offer free lesson previews to increase sales.

Let’s discuss coupons:

In Kajabi you can create both single and multi-code coupons. While Thinkific lacks in creating bulk coupon codes.

In both tools, you can limit the coupon usage duration (means till what time the coupon is valid) and add an expiry date for scarcity marketing.

Pre-selling:

In Thinkific you have an in-built feature to pre-sell a course, similar to Teachable and Podia. Whereas, in Kajabi there is no built-in feature.

But there is a workaround.

You need to create landing pages and add a sales video to promote and pre-sell your product. Also, you need to have an email campaign set up to follow up with customers.

Next are free previews.

In Thinkific, you can use free previews as lead magnets. Also, this helps students access the quality of your course content and helps in converting them into customers.

Winner: Thinkific. Thinkific allows you to offer free previews and pre-sell the courses to increase sales. While Kajabi lacks these and it only has a coupon feature.

Payment processing

Thinkific has its own payment gateway “Thinkific payments”, but the service is available only for customers in the US and Canada. Kajabi doesn’t have its own gateway👎.

Both Thinkific and Kajabi support Stripe and PayPal integration. Depending on the country you are in, there are other gateway integrations available with Kajabi. Click here to view more on this.

Also, both tools accept the payments through their built-in checkouts and students can pay through Credit cards. Kajabi offers instant payouts whereas for Thinkific it depends on your region. (For US people it takes 2 days).

Winner: Thinkific. If you are from the US or Canada, Thinkific Payments (a built-in payment gateway) help you to handle all the payments. But if you are from other countries, both tools provide you integration with PayPal or Stripe. With both, built-in checkout is available to collect the payments.

Checkout, OTOs (like upsells, bump offer, and downsells)

Both Kajabi and Thinkific have built-in checkouts (single page), so you don’t need any integrations with shopping cart platforms like ThriveCart.

In both, the payment gateways automate sign ups, payment processing, and enrollments.

Note: Thinkific’s checkout works only with Thinkific Payments, Stripe, and PayPal. If you are using an external payment solution, you will need to use an external checkout page. If you want to use other payment gateways, Thinkific recommends InfusionSoft, Shopify, and CheckoutJoy. These tools support automated enrollments.

To increase the conversions at the checkout, you can add testimonials, videos, social proofs, etc.

OTOs:

With Thinkific and Kajabi, you can offer upsells and order bumps to increase the cart value.

In Kajabi, you can add upsells while creating the offers. Unlike Podia, you can add only one upsell in Kajabi. Kajabi’s beta update has introduced the ability to add up to 10 upsells and you can expect this to be live shortly ✨.

Thinkific comes with an Upsell section to add in your pages. You can add upsells on:

• Course landing page
• Bundle landing page
• Home page
• Custom pages

If you want to add upsell after post-purchase, there is an Upsells [smart section] automatically present on your Checkout – Thank you page.

Next are order bumps.

Both tools support order bumps. Note that Thinkific’s order bumps are available only if you are using its native gateway – Thinkific Payments.

Winner: Kajabi. Both platforms have built-in checkouts, upsells, and order bumps. In the near future, Kajabi allows you to add 10 upsells (it’s still in beta). In Kajabi, you can add order bumps with any of the payment gateways you use, unlike Thinkific which restricts order bumps to only its native gateway.

Email marketing 📨

Kajabi’s email marketing is more powerful than Thinkific. Thinkific’s built-in email marketing just allows you to send notification emails.

In Kajabi you can send broadcasts and email sequences. As Kajabi also comes with automations, you can add triggers and actions for the email sequences.

In Thinkific you can send email notifications for weekly reminders, welcome messages, discussion replies, etc.

Kajabi has several email templates for –

• Member welcome email.
• New podcast subscriber welcome.
• User canceled subscription.
• Mention notifications.
• Cart abandonment.
• Much more.

Along with these, you can create your own custom templates as well.

Kajabi also offers forms (both single & multi-step) to collect leads. To protect spam you can also add reCAPTCHA. There are some basic form fields available. If you want to collect more details, Kajabi allows you to create custom fields as well. You can also automate the form submission.

If you want to manage your leads with lists and segments, you can use native integrations of these tools.

Events

Kajabi has a feature called “events”. You can use events to host product launches, live meetings, webinars, etc. Events consist of:

• Opt-ins
• Email sequences
• Offers
• Automation

The best thing with Kajabi is you can automate the event registration process. For example – If a user completes a course or completes the assessment or completes an email sequence, etc. you can register them to an event.

Winner: Kajabi. Kajabi blows Thinkific out of the water in this aspect. Kajabi supports email templates, sequences (series of emails), email automations (you can trigger the emails for certain actions), etc. Also, it has built-in events feature to conduct product launches/live meetings/webinars, etc.

Funnels 📶

Kajabi comes with built-in funnels, called pipelines (Remember, it can’t replace big gems like ClickFunnels). These pipelines consist of opt-ins-value-offer pages. You can add extra pages or delete them as per your requirements.

Aso, the pipelines are fully customizable. Just click on any page and it loads the editor for you.

The pipelines have automations combined in them. You can automate the opt-ins, email sending, granting offers, etc.

To help you track how you are progressing through the pipelines, Kajabi provides you with a pipeline checklist.

You can also view the pipeline analytics – the pages and email conversions.

Thinkific doesn’t support the funnels feature.

But, there is a workaround.

You can create custom pages and add CTAs to redirect users to the next pages, thus creating a funnel.

Otherwise, you can integrate with funnel-building tools like ClickFunnels or Kartra. These tools give you more power and flexibility to design complex funnels for your business.

Winner: Kajabi. Kajabi’s pipelines are very powerful and you can combine them with automations. Also, there are several pipeline templates available if you are just beginning. In case of Thinkific, you need to integrate with external tools if you are serious about building funnels.

Affiliate marketing

Kajabi has a power affiliate program solution built-in. Whereas Thinkific lacks a dedicated affiliate program but you can have your affiliates within the tool.

If you are on Kajabi’s Growth or the Pro plan, you will get access to its affiliates feature.

For affiliates to promote your products, first, you need to enable affiliate commissions for offers. Then the affiliate will share links to redirect to any URL, landing page, or checkout page.

After setting up the affiliate program, you can enable automatic registrations or manually accept the affiliates.

Note that Kajabi and Thinkific allow you to give special commissions to your VIP affiliates. This encourages them to sell more and earn more.

To create an affiliate in Thinkific, you need to use the user role “affiliate”. The affiliate can see the affiliate links to promote. By default, Thinkific tracks the commissions for all the products that users purchase. If you don’t wish affiliates to promote any product, you need to exclude it.

Thinkific gives you a detailed report on affiliate commissions earned. But the sad news is, that Thinkific doesn’t handle affiliate payouts. You need to pay affiliates outside of Thinkific.

Affiliate reports:

Kajabi’s affiliate dashboard gives metrics on clicks, affiliate form submissions, conversions, and conversion rate.

Under the transactions, you will get a detailed report on each affiliate.

Thinkific lacks this kind of affiliate report. It just tracks the revenue generated assisting you in payouts.

Winner: Kajabi. Kajabi’s affiliate program is more powerful than Thinkific. In Kajabi, affiliates can directly sign-up, whereas in Thinkific you need to manually add affiliates. You can even create affiliate questionnaires in Kajabi, before approving them. This helps you approve quality affiliates.

Automations

Kajabi comes with automations, unlike Thinkific. If you are on Growth and Pro plans you will get access to advanced automations.

Compared with basic automations, these advanced automations come with an additional conditional filter to further automate the task with “Only if”.

You can add automations in –

• Pipelines
• Email Campaigns
• Events
• Forms
• Offers
• Posts (Products)

To manage the contacts efficiently you can automate the tagging process. For example –

• You can add a tag when a form is submitted.
• Add a tag when an offer is purchased
• Add a tag after an email sequence is completed.
• Much more.

Winner – Kajabi, obviously. Kajabi comes with built-in automations. Its higher plan at $199/mo supports advanced automations where you will get conditional filters to further automate the tasks.

Integrations

Thinkific has more integrations than Kajabi.

Kajabi has native integrations with:

• Aweber
• Mailchimp
• Drip
• ConvertKit
• ActiveCampaign
• Segment
• Google Analytics
• Facebook Pixel
• ClickFunnels
• Zapier

Thinkific has a dedicated app store with over 80+ apps & services available to integrate. Some of the popular apps include –

• ActiveCampaign
• Zoom
• eWebinar
• Facebook Pixels
• Facebook Messenger
• Google Analytics
• Sumo
• Salesforce
• etc

Both tools support API integrations. In the case of Kajabi, you also have Webhooks integrations available to automate the tasks.

Winner: Thinkific. Thinkific through its app store, provides native integrations with over 80+ apps. Kajabi provides native integrations with over 10+ apps. Further, both support API and Zapier integrations.

Pricing 💲

Kajabi is an expensive solution, whereas Thinkific is highly affordable. Even, Thinkific has a generous free plan with enough features to run your online course business as a beginner. Compared to this, the Teachable’s free plan is just like signing-up for a free trial and is not feature rich.

Kajabi’s lowest plan costs $149/mo, this plan limits you to creating just 3 products and 3 pipelines. This plan lacks advanced automations, the ability to remove Kajabi branding, and the affiliate program features.

To avail these features you need to go with its higher plan at $199/mo.

Kajabi’s Pro plan at $399/mo gives you access to a code editor. If you are a developer or you want to add some custom CSS this would be a great addition.

Thinkific’s premium pricing starts at $49/mo, and allows you to create unlimited content & courses.

To get features like certificates, communities, live lessons, and advanced course building features like assignments, randomized quiz bank, members-only website pages, and much more you need to GoToMeeting their Pro plan at $99/mo.

If you need features like:

• Brillium exams integration
• White labeling
• API access
• Groups

You need to purchase its Premier plan at $499/mo.

Kajabi and Thinkific discount

Both Kajabi and Thinkific are offering a huge discount on their annual plans.

Both these tools annual subscriptions offer 20% disocunt. If you want to save money, go with annual plans.

Winner: Thinkific. Thinkific is an affordable solution compared to Kajabi. It supports unlimited courses, provides advanced course building features, live lessons, etc. at $79/mo. Kajabi event at $199/mo supports only 15 products.

Support

Both Thinkific and Kajabi offer excellent support. Both have in-depth knowledge base articles, live chat, email support, etc.

Both Kajabi and Thinkific offer free courses (Kajabi University is available for this) to learn and master using these tools.

Both Thinkific and Kajabi have active Facebook communities. You can join the groups and get assisted by their customers.

Winner: Kajabi. Kajabi’s webinars and the university courses help you build a successful online business on Kajabi, than Thinkific’s courses.

FAQs on Kajabi vs Thinkific ❓

Kajabi vs Thinkific: Conclusion 🏆

Kajabi and Thinkific are two of the best course creation platforms available today. The final choice depends on your needs.

Choose Thinkific if –

• You need an affordable course platform.
• Your target audience are students and you need excellent course compliance features and course completion certificates to offer to students.
• You need communities to sell along with courses. (In case of Kajabi as you have limitations on the number of products to create, it will be difficult to create unlimited communities), Thinkific excels at this.
• You need advanced reporting tools like prerequisite lessons, randomized quiz banks, members only website pages.
• You need a truly white-labeled solution.
• Basic marketing features are enough for you.
• You are a beginner and want to get started with Thinkific’s generous free plan.

Choose Kajabi if –

• You are an advanced marketer and pricing is not a concern for you.
• You need features like automations, funnels (pipelines) and advanced email marketing solutions.
• You are a coder and need more flexibility in designing the courses.
• You need the ability to sell other digital products as well.
• You need a mobile app for your users to consume the content on the go.
• You do not need course compliance and certificates.