Today we are going to compare Mighty Networks and Kajabi. These two are the online community building and course creation tools serving a different set of audience.

By emphasizing networking, Mighty Networks is primarily focused on keeping members engaged 🤞.

It was founded by Gina Bianchini, Tim Herby, and Thomas Aaron in 2017. Gina Bianchini was the CEO & Co-Founder of Ning, a leading social networking platform serving over 100M people👱‍♂️. Gina has clearly understood the need for a community platform and started Mighty Networks 💪.

On the other hand, Kajabi is not a community-centric tool. Its main forte is courses 📚. It is one of the top online course creation tools dedicated to advanced course creators who need advanced marketing automation. But, it has a community component as well with very limited features and you may need to make a lot of tradeoffs. You can consider Kajabi as 80% courses and marketing, and only 20% community.

Mighty Networks’ main downside 👎 compared to Kajabi is the lack of in-built marketing automation features. But you can indeed make use of Zapier to automate a lot of marketing processes. But Kajabi’s lack of community features doesn’t have a workaround 😓.

So if you’re serious about community building, go with Mighty Networks.

Alright.

This review is based on my 3+ years of instructional design and community-building experience. I have made sure to keep this post benefit and use case centric🙏.

So, let’s get started.

Features	Mighty Networks	Kajabi
Starting price 💲	$39/mo – Visit the pricing page	$149/mo – Visit the pricing page
Free plan available?	✖	✖
Trial	Sign up for 14 days free trial	Sign up for unadvertised 30 days free trial
Any pricing discounts? 💰	2 months free with annual purchase – Save up to $198/year	20% OFF on its annual subscriptions – Save up to $960/year
Transaction fees 💸	0%	0%
Mobile apps 📱	Has completely white-labeled apps for iOS and Android (apps are called Mighty Pro) – Explore Mighty Pro apps	Has iOS and Android apps but are not completely white labeled. – Know more on Kajabi apps
Community features	Mighty Networks community supports ➡ Spaces ➡ Events ➡ Private messaging ➡ Member match making ➡ Member badges	Kajabi’s community is pretty basic and it just has feed, posts and topics. That’s it! – Know more on Kajabi community
Supports custom domain?	✓	✓
Custom Single Sign-on available?	✓	✖
Has native live streaming? 📷	✓	✓ – As of now this feature is available only for Kajabi coaching programs
Upsells, coupons, discounts	✖	✓
Is white-labeled?	✓ Mighty Pro apps are truly white labeled	✖
Explore more	Explore Mighty Networks	Explore Kajabi

What do we like about Mighty Networks over Kajabi? 👍

• Even though Mighty Networks offers communities+courses+memberships, the pricing is affordable. Kajabi mainly offers courses with some advanced marketing features. Considering the limited community building features, its pricing is too high.
• Mighty Networks’ community component is more powerful. It comes with rich member profiles, direct messaging, group chats, matchmaking, etc. Whereas Kajabi’s community is pretty basic and it just has a feed, posts, and topic features. That’s it!
• Mighty Networks has more community engagement features than Kajabi. It supports live streaming, live events, group chat events, branded in-app notifications, etc. These are lacking in Kajabi, but for live streaming, you can use Zoom integration.
• Mighty Networks comes with built-in live streaming. Kajabi recently introduced this feature, but as of now, it is only available for coaching. So to create live events within courses you need to use Zoom integration.
• Mighty Pro offers fully white labeled custom branded mobile apps. Kajabi also offers mobile apps but they are not fully white labeled. You can just remove the Kajabi branding. Kajabi apps are not owned by you. unlike Mighty Networks, you don’t have control over it.
• As Mighty Networks has a groups feature, you can create various custom groups based on the requirements. For example – You can create top earning affiliates groups, alumni groups, top active members groups, etc. This helps you in prioritizing the community tasks and targeting the right customers. In Kajabi this type of grouping is not possible and you may need to choose an external community platform for this.
• Mighty Networks supports unlimited members, courses, and instructors (even at just $119/mo). On the other hand, Kajabi’s lowest plan just supports 3 products (courses), while the highest Pro plan at $399/mo just supports 100 products and 25 admins.

What do we like about Kajabi over Mighty Networks? 👍

• Kajabi excels over Mighty Networks with its marketing features. It has automations, pipelines, email marketing tools, and blogging features right inside the platform. The latter two features may be redundant for you if you already use say Convertkit and WordPress.
• With its automations, you can automate the course (and even) lesson completions, membership posts completions, and community tasks. This helps you in keeping your members in the loop. On the higher plans, it offers advanced automations to further specify the automation rules with conditional filters.
• Kajabi comes with pipelines (funnels). Kajabi provides various OVO (Opt-in-value-offer) templates for you to get started. You can customize these pipelines as needed, add custom pages, etc.
• Kajabi comes with a blogging feature. Using this you can create content marketing strategies for promoting your brand and publish SEO-friendly articles.
• For lead generation, Kajabi comes with opt-ins. You can customize these options using the builder, embed them on custom pages, and get more leads for your business.
• Kajabi comes with events feature where you can host webinars, product launch events, demo classes, etc. You can even automate the event tasks. For example – You can automate to provide free access to students who complete your course, offer discounts on events, stuff like that.
• Kajabi comes with a built-in email marketing tool. It also provides several email templates to make your job easier. You can create custom templates as well. You can create broadcasts or campaigns. Deliverability is also good because spammers cannot easily access it.
• To boost sales, Kajabi offers discounts, upsells, downsells, and order bumps. Kajabi is working on the ability to add 10 upsells and 10 downsells on the checkout pages.
• Kajabi comes with a coaching feature. You have one-off sessions and coaching packages (suitable for multiple sessions). It has recently introduced a live video feature for coaching, so no need to integrate with any external tools.
• Kajabi supports podcasts. You can create both public and private podcasts. You can distribute the podcasts to Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify with one click. But it will not replace the dedicated podcast platforms like Buzzsprout, as it lacks built-in audio editing, transcription services, and monetization features like advertising marketplace and sponsors.

Common downsides 👎

• Unlike Tribe.so, Mighty Networks and Kajabi don’t offer security features like keyword blocker and profanity checker. These features are very essential to avoid spam in a large community.
• Both these platforms lack engagement features like achievements, scores, ranking systems, leaderboards, etc. which you will get in tools like BuddyBoss. These features motivate members to engage more and be active in the community.

Upfront Bottomline ✨

The final choice depends on your use cases.

Go with Mighty Networks if –

• Your main focus is on creating a strong community and providing more value for members. Of course, Mighty also comes with a course feature.
• To make networking easy, you need community features like groups, chat, direct messaging, events, etc.
• You are more concerned about making it easy for members to be active in the community. For this, you need the tool with features like member discovery, online now (helping members to connect with others while they are online), easier navigation tools, match-making features, etc.
• You need a live event feature inside the community to host webinars, events, masterclasses, 7 or like 30-day challenges and pitch your offers.
• You need monetization strategies like paid memberships, online courses, paywalls, private groups, etc. to monetize the community.
• Need custom branded mobile apps (access to Mighty Pro) with built-in notifications, and in-app purchases to connect with your users and increase sales.

Go with Kajabi if –

• Your main business is selling online courses and you need excellent marketing automation features all inside the tool. For example – you need funnels, email marketing, blogging, and webinars (events) all inside one tool.
• To build a strong community (as Kajabi comes with limited community features), you are okay with spending money on external tools like Circle.so and Tribe.so.
• You are also a podcaster and you need the ability to create the podcasts and distribute them to other major podcast sites.
• You need built-in coaching programs to monetize your business (sell as an upsell to courses).

Latest product updates 🎈

First Mighty Networks:

• Mighty Networks has recently released a welcome checklist for hosts that allows you to easily curate content and features for your members to explore. It really helps you supercharge member onboarding experience. Your new members feel they’re right at home.
• Also, it has released new Zapier triggers – Member Purchased Plan, Member Requested to Join, Member Canceled Subscription Plan. You can now automate these actions with triggers. These unveiled a wide range of use cases.

It is also working on releasing new features like –

• Adding multiple speakers for live streaming.
• Turn off the chats in the network or for individuals.
• New reaction icons for posts & comments.

To stay up to date with all the future updates, you can keep an eye on this roadmap.

Kajabi has recently introduced –

• Native live streaming feature for coaching. Say “Hi” to running cohorts without Zoom.
• One-click theme updates are available.
• Contact previews for easier management.

Overview

Mighty Networks is one of the leading online community platforms that comes with various features like live events, paid memberships, groups, custom branded mobile apps, and ambassador programs to increase customer engagement. It also has a dedicated course builder for you to sell courses eliminating the need for LMS platforms like Teachable or Thinkific.

On the other hand, Kajabi is an advanced course creation platform that comes with excellent marketing features. Along with courses, it also supports podcasts, coaching programs, paid memberships, and basic communities.

Community Features

Mighty Networks’ communities excel over Kajabi’s. Unlike Mighty Networks, Kajabi’s communities are not suitable if you are serious about building the network of your audiences.

Mighty Networks comes with groups, direct messaging, chat, member discovery, live events, and member match-making features.

With Mighty Networks, you can create exclusive groups for different audiences. For example – you can create alumni groups, course-specific groups, guest speaker groups for internal purposes, affiliates groups, etc.

Having this kind of group helps you in better management. Moreover, you can even customize what a group should be called – a Circle, committee, space, section, tribe, or any other custom name.

Although this is a rather subtle feature, it helps a ton for members to feel they’re part of an extended family and boosts their belongingness.

This feature is not available in Kajabi.

You can promote these groups in the welcome checklist that appears for new members and also in the featured section that appears in the activity feed. This way members can discover and join your groups.

Also, in Mighty Networks the community members can customize how the feed should be visible (show personal feed, posts from posts, your activity, unanswered, near you, etc.) and you can sort it by last activity, date created, popular now, etc. For irregular members, this can be a boon!

With Kajabi, you can just set it to feed or the topics. That’s it. There is not much flexibility.

Apart from this, Mighty Networks also supports member categories to help them connect with others based on the similarities they share.

Also, there is a chat feature available for members to connect and interact with others. For this to work, the host should have enabled this option first. These features are lacking in Kajabi.

Winner: Mighty Networks. Mighty Networks’ main component is its communities. It is one of the top community platforms available today while Kajabi is more of a course creation platform, so you can’t expect many community features. It just has a basic community feed and topics for categorization.

Community Customization Options 🎨

Mighty Networks has good community customization features, compared to Kajabi.

Mighty Networks allows you to add up to four customized links (in the navigation menu) to your external or internal pages. You can add links to your eCommerce store (if hosted on sites like Shopify), memberships or courses if hosted somewhere, or add links to your events, blogs, own website, etc. These links are accessible on mobile apps as well.

Also, Mighty Networks allows you to customize the groups. For each group, you can add a custom logo, background photo, and theme color.

In Kajabi you can add a logo, product thumbnail, add custom branded colors, and add navigation bars. You can add sidebar messages like – a custom message to promote your courses, or community guidelines, announcements, etc.

Winner: Mighty Networks. With Mighty Networks you can customize the community and groups. It allows you to add up to 4 custom links in the navigation bar to promote your events or products.

Course Builder

Both Mighty Networks and Kajabi come with courses and they have dedicated course builder. But do note that Kajabi’s courses are more powerful than Mighty Networks.

With Mighty Networks, you can create online courses and cohort courses. Whereas in case of Kajabi, you have online courses, drip courses, and mini-courses (for product launches, small events, etc).

Kajabi excels over Mighty Networks with its course blueprints. With this, you have the course skeleton ready, you just need to fill in the content. But is it that useful? Perhaps you can create a course from scratch and clone it for subsequent creations, right?

Mighty Networks allows you to custom edit the course terms you use inside of the platform, similar to tools like Thinkific. For example – you can name the course as – class, seminar, workshop, or add any other custom name.

Similar to this, you can customize the terms like the table of contents, sections, lessons, and instructors. This feature would be really helpful for educational institutions and organizations in creating academic courses. This type of flexibility is not there in Kajabi.

Mighty Networks course curriculum consists of sections and lessons in it. While Kajabi’s course curriculum consists of categories, subcategories, and posts. Sub-categories help you add the course content in chunks for easier consumption. For example – if you have 100 lessons to add to each module, you can make use of these subcategories.

When it comes to adding content, Mighty Networks supports text, images, videos, and files. Along with these content types, Kajabi also supports audio files.

Both tools support comments for each lesson. You can make them visible or hide them.

When it comes to drip scheduling, Mighty Networks supports lesson-wise (lower level) drip scheduling whereas Kajabi supports categories (nothing but modules – higher level) drip schedule.

Mighty Networks doesn’t offer any course compliance features. Kajabi just offers a content locking option, which means you can lock a category until a student completes previous categories.

If you are more worried about students’ progress, implementing course compliance options help you make sure they complete the courses. For this, you can consider tools like Thinkific and Teachable.

Some people use Teachable for LMS and Mighty Networks or Circle.so only for communities. These are the absolute feature-rich tools in their areas. With this, they’ll not be sacrificing course compliance features and also community features that Mighty Networks offers.

With both Mighty Networks and Kajabi, you can sell the courses for one-time fee, subscriptions, or for free. Kajabi also supports multiple payment types. In case of Kajabi, you need to create offers for selling the courses.

Winner: Kajabi. Kajabi’s course features are more powerful than Mighty Networks. Kajabi offers course blueprints, allows you to automate the course completion tasks, set up funnels for selling more, offers coaching as upselling, etc. Mighty Networks as of now, just offers basic features.
If these extra course features that Kajabi comes with are more important than the above-mentioned community features of Mighty, then you may want to consider Kajabi and do with a separate community building platform.

Engagement features

For engagement, Mighty Networks has features like matchmaking, badges, group chats, direct messaging, questions, polls, in-person events, etc.

With a match-making feature, members can connect with others based on their category and the region they are located in. This helps members meet up and exchange their ideas, and attend the events or conferences hosted in their localities.

I really liked the Mighty Networks online now feature. This helps your members know who is online and they can chat with them, and also as a host, you can also connect with them, arrange group calls, talk with them live, etc. This encourages community members to actively check the community and involve in the activities.

Also, the badges (quite similar to tags in the case of Circle.so) in Mighty Networks help the users know others – if they are new members, a host, an active users, team members, community manager, etc. If they have any questions or are stuck somewhere, badges help them know whom to ask.

On the other hand, Kajabi just has live events feature to connect and engage with community members and a basic community. There are no other features.

Mobile app

Both apps also support custom-branded notifications and in-app purchases.

Kajabi allows you to add a logo, customize the app colors, and remove Kajabi branding. That’s it!

Note: With Mighty Networks, you have full control over the app creation, design, customization, and launch. The platform itself takes care of managing your apps on Google Play store and Apple Play Store listings. This is very similar to how you create your own LMS apps with tools like Passion.io. On the other hand, Kajabi apps are not fully white-labeled.

Mighty Pro white-labeled apps can be a game changer for your business. Imagine, if your business has its own app, you can market them under your own brand, and it will be very easy for members to find it and consume the content. It is like one app, one community, one platform, all under the same roof. This way you can keep your members away from all the social media distractions, or other networking sites.

You can read this case study by Adriene Mishler, one of the top most influential yoga instructors, who moved her community (Kula by Yoga With Adriene) from Facebook Groups to Mighty Pro (as Facebook Groups have a lack of control, a lot of distractions, lack of custom branding options). Her own custom-branded app helps the audience to access the community easily and her community now has 220,000+ passionate members.

Winner: Mighty Networks. Mighty Networks allows you to create fully white-labeled mobile apps and you can list your own apps on Google Play Store and Apple Play Store listings. On the other hand, with Kajabi you cannot create your own apps. But they have their own app which you can’t customize as you need.

Marketing and checkout options

For monetization, Mighty Networks provides paid memberships, online courses, and live virtual events.

Kajabi provides features like paid memberships, events, coachings, and podcasts. Also to increase sales it provides upsells, downsells, and order bumps. These marketing features are lacking in Mighty Networks.

Kajabi and Mighty Networks both have built-in one-step checkouts. But these are not much optimized for conversions. You can edit the checkout page in Kajabi using the page editor.

With Mighty Networks, for creating a paid membership, all you need to do is choose the topic for the membership site, create a subscription pricing model, and start offering the content and gate the access to paid members.

In case of Kajabi, you have a dedicated membership feature. To help you get started quickly, it also provides a blueprint (template) where you will have the structure ready and just need to fill in the content.

Next is live events.

With both these tools, you can offer virtual paid events where you can invite guest speakers to provide more value for the audience, or conduct small webinars and pitch your products offering discounts, etc.

Coachings:

Unlike tools like Kajabi or Teachable, Mighty Networks lacks dedicated coaching programs. To offer professional coaching services, you may need to integrate with Google Calendar or Calendly for booking & scheduling the appointments.

With Kajabi also, you need integration with Calendly or Google Calendar for scheduling the appointments. Kajabi allows you to offer either one-off sessions or packages.

Kajabi podcasts:

With Kajabi, you can create public and private podcasts. You can monetize the podcasts by selling memberships along with private podcasts.

Online courses:

We have discussed this already. You can sell online courses on both of these platforms.

You can even use Kajabi’s automation rules for selling the courses or even other products. For example – For those who complete the course, you can offer discounts to join your private communities, offer free memberships, etc. This type of automation is not possible with Mighty Networks.

Referral programs:

Mighty Networks has a built-in ambassador program where you can send notifications for members to refer others and get rewarded for their work.

There are three tiers available – Bronze, Silver, or Gold Ambassador.

As a reward, you can offer –

• Discount to purchase the products in our online shop.
• A free ticket to your next event.
• Place as our featured member of the month.
• Free access to your courses.
• Much more

Note: This is not an affiliate program that tracks the commissions and the payouts. This is just a booster program to motivate the members to refer others.

In case of Kajabi, you have a dedicated affiliate program. You can offer commissions on each of your products and ask affiliates to promote them. For processing the payments, you need integrations with Stripe or PayPal.

Winner: Mighty Networks. It has various monetization strategies like paid memberships, paywalls, courses, etc. I found its ambassador program more helpful in speeding up growing your community.

Security

Both Mighty Networks and Kajabi don’t offer security features like keyword blacklists or profanity blockers to avoid spam in your community. If you need these security features, you may need to consider tools like Tribe.so.

But as a host or admin, before giving access to the members you need to do quality checks for the profiles first. If you keep your community exclusive to paid members, this should not be a problem though.

Analytics

Both Kajabi and Mighty Networks are good at analytics. With Mighty Networks you will get the analytics related to members, content, messages, and subscription revenue.

You will get the analytics like –

• Daily active members
• Weekly active members
• Active members
• Member retention rate graphs
• Total interactions
• Total posts
• Etc.

You can see the above image to know all the data Mighty Networks provides.

As Kajabi is more focused on courses, you will get more data on it. It gives student-level reports and video analytics with heat maps & video retention graphs.

You will also get product-level reports for memberships and communities, as well.

Winner: Mighty Networks. Mighty Networks’ analytics is more detailed than Kajabi’s. Also, Mighty Networks’ graphs are easier to understand.

Integrations

Mighty Networks has native integrations with Zoom, Google Analytics, and Facebook Ad Pixels. In addition to these, it also has API and Zapier integrations to connect with 1000’s of other tools and services.

Kajabi has more native integrations than Mighty Networks. It integrates with MailChimp, Drip, ConvertKit, Facebook Pixel, Google Analytics, etc. It also has Zapier integration to connect with the rest of the tools.

Zapier provides 4 triggers and 6 actions to automate the tasks with Mighty Networks. Whereas you have 8 triggers and 8 actions in case of Kajabi.

The integrations can really help you a lot to integrate these tools with webinar marketing and email marketing tools you may be using to design your complete funnel.

Refer to the screenshots above to know more.

Winner: Kajabi, obviously.

Pricing

Mighty Networks’ pricing starts at $39/mo. It comes with features like live streaming, chat & messaging, paid memberships, and events features.

If you need online courses, live cohort courses, Zapier APIs & Workflows, you need to get its Business plan that costs $99/mo. This plan is best for course creators.

If you need custom-branded mobile apps, you need to get Mighty Pro. To know more about these pricing plans, go through this comparison.

Mighty Networks discount:

If you choose annual subscriptions, you will get 2 months of free access to Mighty Networks. This means you can save $66/year on the lowest Community plan and save $198/mo on the Business plan.

Kajabi’s lowest pricing plan starts at $149/mo. This plan supports 3 products and 3 funnels. If you want features like – the ability to remove Kajabi branding, affiliate program, and advanced automations, you need to get its Growth plan at $199/mo.

If you are a developer and you need custom coding features, get its Pro plan at $399/mo.

Kajabi discount

Kajabi is offering a 20% OFF on its annual plans. With this, you can save up to $960/year. See the above table for more details.

Wrap up

Mighty Networks is for you if you want to build a thriving online community platform with a basic LMS for your business. Whereas Kajabi is suitable if you are mainly into course creation and are interested in in-platform marketing automation.

Mighty Networks mainly focuses on providing community features to increase user engagement and interaction. Also, it helps you monetize the community with paid memberships, paywalls, courses, and live events.

While Kajabi helps you in creating, marketing, and selling your online courses. Also, it comes with podcasts and coaching as well. You can offer coaching as an upsell to your courses.

If you need custom-branded apps for your business, you have Mighty Pro. It is best if you are in health, fitness, arts, lifestyle, and coaching niches. Kajabi also has mobile apps but it is pretty basic and is not completely white labeled.

FAQs on Mighty Networks vs. Kajabi

What is Mighty Networks?

Mighty Networks is one of the best community and online course creation tools available today.

What is Kajabi?

Kajabi is an advanced course creation tool best suited for course creators and teachers.

Does Kajabi come with a community feature?

Yes. But Kajabi’s community features are not as powerful as Mighty Networks.

Do these platforms offer trial?

Yes. Both tools offer 14 days free trial.