Thinking about creating and selling courses online?
Skool and Kajabi are two big names.
They’ve made waves in e-learning.
But they’re different
Ready to find out which is right for you?
Overview
Skool was founded by Sam Ovens, a well-known name in consultancy (founder of Consulting.com)!
It’s mission is to create a vibrant, community-driven learning environment by combining social media features with educational content.
What sets Skool apart is its emphasis on community engagement, incorporating discussion forums, group activities, and social feeds to encourage interaction among learners.
On the flip side, Kajabi was started by Kenny Rueter and Travis Rosser back in 2010 with the goal of helping entrepreneurs and experts monetize their knowledge.
Kajabi is like a one-stop shop for creating, marketing, and selling online courses and membership sites.
It offers a complete suite of tools that include course creation, marketing automation, sales funnels, and analytics, making it easier for course creators to manage and grow their online businesses.
👉 In a nutshell, Skool focuses on building community engagement and organic growth (think Facebook Groups), while Kajabi provides powerful tools for building and scaling online businesses.
👍 What I like about Skool compared to Kajabi?
- Intuitive UI and UX: Skool’s UI and UX are the best. You feel right at home. And according to my experience, Skool offers the best engagement rates compared to Kajabi and even Circle.
- Gamification: Skool provides engaging features like points, levels, and leaderboards, allowing people to earn points and unlock exclusive courses and access to events.
- Community discover feature: This is similar to Facebook’s community search engine where people can search for keywords and join the communities they are interested in, leading to many organic leads.
- More popular platform: Skool is becoming a more popular platform than Kajabi as it is backed by Alex Hormozi, and they are making use of network effect and growth flywheels to make it a one-stop destination for all online community building and joining needs.
- More affordable: Skool offers much better value with unlimited members and courses on both plans ($9/month for solo creators, $99/month for teams), while Kajabi at $149/month imposes significant limitations on products and marketing features.
👍 What I like about Kajabi compared to Skool
- A more comprehensive platform: Kajabi provides an all-in-one solution for course creators. It offers tools for course creation, email marketing, website building, automation, sales funnels, and community, making it easier to manage and grow online businesses from a single platform.
- Specialist course creation features: Along with the basic course creation functionalities that Skool provides you, Kajabi also comes with support for quizzes, advanced assessments, student level course completion reports, and retention graphs.
- Built-in live streaming ability: You won’t need to use Google Meet or Zoom to hold live events in Kajabi. You can use it for coaching events and community live streams.
- Marketing automation: All the features of Kajabi work together in a unified way with the help of their automation engine, wherein you can set triggers and actions within the platform similar to Zapier.
- Good number of integrations: Compared to Skool, Kajabi integrates with a wide variety of different apps and email marketing platforms, reducing the need to use Zapier.
Verdict
If you all want a community-centric platform, Skool is the way to go. On the other hand, if you want a more all-in-one digital selling platform that has got real depth to all its features, you can go with Kajabi.
Although Skool has got fewer features compared to that of Kajabi, it is becoming way more popular
Why?
👉 The main reason why I went with Skool is because my target audience is already there in other Skool communities. Also, as I already host my website on WordPress and have email marketing sorted out, it made perfect sense to skip Kajabi.
And more people are getting familiar with Skool communities, the engagement rates across all the Skool communities are increasing due to the familiarity effect.
That will be a big entry barrier for other competitors to play in.
If you want to know more about my hands-on experience with Skool, refer this blog post.
On the other hand, Kajabi as of now is more feature-rich and it is a more matured all-in-one platform. It not only comes with the gamified community feature and also more feature-rich courses feature, but also the ability for you to send emails, automation, podcast hosting and whatnot.
If you want to know more about my experience with Kajabi, refer this blog post.
