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When comparing online course platforms, two popular choices are Kajabi vs Thinkific. Both platforms are used by dozens of thousands of creators and businesses selling online courses.
While they offer similar features, in reality they are very different elearning platforms suited for different cases. We tested both platforms and looked at their sales and marketing tools, course creation (authoring) tools, and e-learning features for a complete picture of what you should expect at each.
This guide will help you choose which course platform is the right fit for You!
Disclaimer: The information in this comparison is based on publicly available information on Kajabi and Thinkific pricing and support pages, as well as our individual research and reviews on their accounts. We’re also comparing the top-level plans of both platforms where all the features and capabilities are fully enabled.
This comparison was updated in April 2024.
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Kajabi vs Thinkfic in a Nutshell
Thinkific is a dedicated platform that’s made specifically for creating and delivering online courses and training. It also comes with many integrations with other software to make it easy to run a course business.
Meanwhile, Kajabi follows a multitasking mindset. It’s an all-in-one marketing platform that lets you do much more than just course creation. Kajabi offers a number of useful features for email marketing, course website design, and sales funnels.
Our Top Choice: LearnWorlds
LearnWorlds is an all-in-one course platform and Learning Management System (LMS), packed with features to create engaging learning experiences and branded academies.
Whether you’re a business aiming to launch a robust training program, or a course creator looking to expand your audience and monetize your knowledge, LearnWorlds provides all the tools you need to scale and succeed.
LearnWorlds has everything you need to create, manage, and sell online courses on any topic.
More than the features, LearnWorlds puts its customers on a pedestal with industry-leading support. Every support site rates LearnWorlds the top in customer support compared to Thinkific & Kajabi.
You can start with LearnWorlds with a 30-day free trial:
Your professional looking Academy in a few clicks
Start FREE TrialComparing Features & Pricing
When you dream of creating a successful eLearning business, there are many things to consider. Both Kajabi and Thinkific have done a great job for many educators, helping them with their educational journey.
Each platform comes with its own strengths and weaknesses and is suitable for different uses. In our experience, the most comprehensive solution for online courses is LearnWorlds.
Which is Right for You?
Both Kajabi and Thinkific are good choices for creators, entrepreneurs, and SMEs looking to launch simple video courses. However, each platform comes with strengths and weaknesses of its own, making it more suitable for different situations.
Thinkific
Thinkific is designed with a focus on course building and SMEs. The target audience of Thinkific includes individual entrepreneurs, creators, educators, and SMEs selling courses or educating their audience.
Its free plan makes it an ideal choice for beginners, but soon enough you will have to upgrade to a more inclusive one and purchase additional features separately to unlock its full potential.
Kajabi
Kajabi is geared towards marketing & sales. The platform caters to a wide audience, including online course creators with little technical knowledge, digital entrepreneurs, SMEs, freelancers, creators, and individual instructors.
These users usually want to sell simple video courses and downloadable content, without much educational requirements.
Kajabi Overview
Kajabi pros
User-friendliness: Kajabi is designed to be simple and intuitive, so you won’t have to wrestle with complex controls or confusing interfaces.
Built-in Email Marketing Tools: Kajabi brings to the table its own set of email marketing tools, saving you the trouble of scouting for external resources and integration costs.
Integrations: It plays well with other popular software, making it easier for you to use your favorite tools alongside Kajabi.
Sales Pipeline Building: Kajabi offers the ability to build sales funnels or pipelines, an essential feature to help streamline your sales process and increase conversions.
Online Community Feature: It comes with an inbuilt online community feature, allowing you to create, grow, and manage your community without needing a third-party platform.
Ready-to-use Course Templates: Kajabi provides pre-designed templates for your courses, saving you a considerable amount of time and effort in designing your course layout from scratch.
Kajabi cons
Expensive: Even the lowest-priced plan of Kajabi pricing options might feel a bit expensive when compared to other platforms. Kajabi’s trial also requires a credit card and will charge you in 14 days if you don’t cancel.
Limited Design Control: While it offers some customization options, you might find it doesn’t provide as much control over website design as you’d like.
Limited Learning Features: Compared to some competitors, Kajabi may offer fewer additional features when it comes to creating courses or learning tools.
No Free-For-Life Plan: Unlike Thinkific, Kajabi doesn’t offer a free plan for life. This could be discouraging for those wanting to try out the platform long-term without financial commitment.
Active-customers restrictions: Kajabi has strict maximum limits for users, sales funnels, and products that can be limiting if you are planning to sell a large number of different products to a wide audience.
Thinkific Overview
Let’s now talk about Thinkific, a platform that’s solely about creating and selling online courses. Thinkific makes things easy for beginners dipping their toes in online course creation with its user-friendly interface. It’s got your back from arranging your content to putting it up for sale online, covering all the necessary basics.
Thinkific Pros
Free Plan: Thinkific offers a free forever plan to get you started, although it’s a bit limited. You can include only one course and one community, and there are restrictions on offering discounts, coupons, or using affiliate selling. But, it allows for unlimited students on the platform.
Covers all the Basics: With Thinkific, you’ll have all the fundamental tools at your fingertips to kickstart your online course creation journey easily.
Website Builder: The platform offers a user-friendly drag-and-drop page editor that simplifies building a beautiful homepage and functional landing pages. You can also connect your custom domain and not use the Thinkific subdomain for your academy.
In-platform Sales and Marketing Tools: Thinkific comes with built-in tools for sales and marketing, to help you start your course distribution.
Integrations: Thinkific is compatible with popular software and tools, so you can easily integrate your preferred external applications.
Online Learning Communities: The platform offers online learning communities, a feature that can enhance student engagement and interaction, by having a membership area they can post & comment. The instructor can also interact with their students from there.
White-Label Option: Thinkific gives you the option for white-labeled courses, letting you put your brand front and center.
Thinkific Cons
Limited Website Themes: With Thinkific, you might find that your options in themes and templates are somewhat restricted, but consider that they are more customizable than the ones in Kajabi.
Basic Course Authoring Features: Thinkific’s course authoring tools are fairly basic and might not offer the range of features you’d find on other platforms, like LearnWorlds.
No SCORM, TinCan, or AICC Support: If your content relies on SCORM, TinCan, or AICC formats, you’ll find that Thinkific doesn’t support these must-have industry standards.
Limited Live Chat Support: Thinkific offers 24/7 email support through their ticketing system, but phone and live chat support have restricted availability during specific hours, and that is only for Thinkific plus customers.
Video Playback Limitations: Your students may find the video play tricky. Adjusting video speed each time and getting in and out of full-screen mode isn’t the best-case scenario for eLearning. Third-party video integrations, like the one Thinkific uses, affect the viewing experience, especially on mobile.
Ease of Use
Kajabi offers effortless usability and functionality due to its integrated design, where you can manage everything from a single location using an all-in-one platform.
Unlike a WordPress-hosted site, you won’t need to spend hours adjusting plugins or extensions to ensure their proper compatibility. Kajabi simplifies the process of creating online courses, membership sites, coaching products, communities, and more.
Thinkific is a user-friendly online course platform that provides easy-to-use tools for creating a website and selling courses. It is both beginner-friendly and customizable for more advanced outcomes.
You don’t need programming knowledge to build courses, and their intuitive drag-and-drop interface makes course creation quick and straightforward. Although you don’t need coding skills to use it, Thinkific provides you with the option to add custom code, if you want to create a more personalized experience for your students.
Course Creation (Authoring)
Kajabi offers various features for course creation. You can upload video and audio files, create quizzes and assessments, and issue course certificates. It provides customizable templates, blueprints, and user-friendly design tools to simplify course creation.
Thinkific also offers course creation tools, allowing you to structure your curriculum according to your preferences. If you’re a new course creator, Thinkific provides you with some ready-to-use templates to assist you in organizing your ideas and transforming your expertise into sellable courses.
LearnWorlds takes course creation to the next level. Its course builder enables you to create, organize, and fully customize your course content. LearnWorlds also supports SCORM, which is the industry standard when hiring instructional designers to build the course for you and allows for advanced quizzes and learning automations to make your work easier and the learning experience more personalized.
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Start FREE TrialCompare LearnWorlds Vs Kajabi
Compare LearnWorlds Vs Thinkific
Features & Functionalities
Let’s dive deeper into an analysis of the features and functionalities of both tools, exploring how these capabilities can contribute to the growth of your aspirations!
Assessments
Kajabi lets you create and customize assessments that serve as tests or surveys that you can publish on your website’s homepage and landing pages.
Thinkific offers a quiz builder for crafting multiple-choice questions to assess your students. These quizzes serve as valuable formative assessments, providing feedback and reinforcing the course material. Additionally, you can export and review the results at a later time.
Analytics & Reporting
With Kajabi’s Analytics, you can access various metrics including net revenue, offers sold, and page views. It also provides advanced metrics, such as MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue), ARPU (Average Revenue per User), and Churn Rate (% of users that stop using your service).
In your Analytics dashboard, you can find reports on Net Revenue, which shows your daily earnings after deducting refunds or discounts, and Subscription Metrics that help assess your business’s health.
Thinkific Analytics Orders Report allows you to examine trends and obtain an overview of total orders within a specified time frame. It helps answer questions about unique student orders and identifies products with higher order counts.
You can also leverage tracking and analytics apps to gather, organize, and analyze student data. This enables you to understand student behavior, improve student experience, refine marketing strategies, and enhance student support systems.
Native Mobile apps
Kajabi offers a mobile application for both Apple and Android users. This app provides your students with easy access to all your courses, coaching, and website content with just a single touch.
Thinkific recently introduced a mobile app designed for users of their Start and Grow plans. This app is compatible with both Android and Apple devices and offers a wide range of features to foster engagement and connectivity. Turning on the mobile app feature automatically creates a shareable link that your students can use to download the app.
The only true White-Labeled Mobile App
LearnWorlds on the other hand, offers you the opportunity to use a White-Label Mobile App Builder to develop your own custom mobile learning app for iOS and Android.
With this tool, you can take advantage of the user-friendly click-and-edit visual builder, allowing you to create a professional eLearning app without the need for coding expertise.
Developing your own educational app would cost north of $50.000, with LearnWorlds you get that with a small additional fee on your plan.
Build the perfect branded mobile app for your academy. Instantly.
Memberships & Community
Kajabi Communities is a recent addition that offers a set of tools for building and monetizing a successful community. It includes various features such as live calls, challenges, leaderboards, accountability tools, real-time chat, and more. Kajabi acquired Vibely to add on it’s community features.
Thinkific Communities lets you create an online space where members can connect and work together on a specific topic. You can either build a community around your courses to make them even more valuable or create a separate community that you can sell as its own product. Thinkific Memberships is another feature that lets you create a membership site where you can offer exclusive access to your courses and communities.
Website Builder
Kajabi provides a diverse collection of visually appealing templates that are readily available for use and can create a professional outcome. With their integrated website builder, you can personalize these templates and tailor them to your specific needs.
Thinkific offers a user-friendly tool with a drag-and-drop page builder. This lets you create both course pages and general websites. But keep in mind that if you want to make your sales pages look more elegant, you’ll need a basic understanding of design.
If your design skills are limited, you might end up with pages that don’t look very professional. You can always use the provided templates and make small changes easily. However, if you’re aiming for a more spectacular design, you might need help from a professional designer.
On the other hand, LearnWorlds offers a user-friendly website builder that enables you to effortlessly design landing and sales pages for your online school through a frontend editor based on templates. It is designed to be beginner-friendly, requiring no coding skills, while still allowing for extensive customization options.
Sales and Marketing Features
Thinkific provides tools that help you keep track of orders, make discount coupons and create subscriptions. These features are only available if you upgrade to a paid plan. Also, you can set up an affiliate program with custom payment terms.
On the other hand, Kajabi has some notable marketing tools. Kajabi’s logic focuses on its sales funnel, pipelines, and sales automation features which includes email marketing tools. Even courses are part of the products in a sales funnel for Kajabi.
Email Marketing and Automations
Kajabi includes built-in email marketing software to assist you in creating effective and efficient email campaigns. Kajabi includes one-off broadcasts and sequences/automations for more efficient email marketing.
Email sequences/automations are a series of emails triggered when a visitor takes a specific action, like completing a form or making a purchase. Email broadcasts, on the other hand, are emails sent to a specific audience, such as an email blast, newsletter, or individually crafted messages.
Thinkific also comes with email broadcasts but lacks any email automations. To make up for it, it offers more integrations with top email marketing software like MailChimp, ConvertKit, Constant Contact, AWeber, ActiveCampaign, and EngageBay.
Furthermore, Thinkific enables you to grow your email list by using attractive popups and opt-in forms, offering valuable incentives on your Thinkific landing pages.
Customer Service
Kajabi provides a variety of support options to assist you. You can reach Kajabi’s support team through live chat, email, or telephone. In cases where your concern is not urgent or if live chat is not available, you can send an email inquiry to support@kajabi.com.
Reviews about the Kajabi support are mostly positive and pretty happy with the user experience provided by their support staff and Kajabi university.
While Thinkific provides round-the-clock email support by submitting a ticket, the availability of phone and live chat support is limited to specific hours. Additionally, before being connected to a human agent, you may need to interact with a chatbot or navigate through an automated phone system.
Reviews about the Thinkific support are mostly positive, but stay in the realm of the software, and do not go above and beyond as Kajabi & LearnWorlds’ support teams.
LearnWorlds is often praised as having the best support in the industry, with the team going above and beyond to help our customers succeed. Offering 24/7 support by email, a live chat, and onboarding calls for higher plans.
Video Hosting
Kajabi and Thinkific both host their videos through Wistia, which is the state of the art in video hosting services today.
Both support video lessons and embedding videos on their website builders. They do offer similar reporting and analytics for video based on Wistia.
Here is where LearnWorlds shines as well, by taking video to the next level with its proprietary technology to add interactivity to videos and enhance the learning experience. You can add quizzes, pop-ups, navigation, and more on top of your videos.
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Start FREE TrialCertificates
Both Kajabi and Thinkific provide you with the ability to create and customize the certificates awarded to your students.
With Thinkific you have the option to select from various certificate designs or incorporate your own personalized background image. Thinkific lets you feature the student’s name, course completion and expiry dates, and other customized fields.
Kajabi enables you to distribute both generic and personalized completion certificates to students through your Kajabi account. You have the flexibility to personalize the appearance of your certificates using themes and templates designed to align with your brand.
Payment Gateways
Kajabi integrates with two reliable payment gateways, Stripe and PayPal, to facilitate easy and secure payment collection for your audience. These platforms are available internationally and enable you to receive payments directly on your Kajabi website.
Kajabi is also beta testing their own payment gateway Kajabi Payments.
On the other hand, Thinkific provides Thinkific Payments, its native payment gateway and the default option for subscribers in the USA, UK, and Canada. For subscribers from other countries, Thinkific also supports external payment gateways, with Stripe and PayPal. In addition to this, you can offer various payment transaction types, including one-time payments, subscriptions, payment plans and digital wallets such as PayPal, Apple Pay, and Google Pay.
Integrations
Kajabi strives to include as many functionalities as possible inside their own product, offering only the essential basics of integrations. The most important being Zapier which helps integrate with many other software.
Thinkific provides a large number of integrations for streamlining workflows, automating tasks, and enhancing the customer experience. Thinkific goes a step beyond here by creating native integrations through Thinkific Apps allowing other companies to build integrations to their ecosystem as well.
Comparing Kajabi’s Price with Thinkific
When it comes to picking the perfect online course platform, understanding the cost is a big part of the decision. Pricing changes based on the features, number of users, products/courses, and other factors.
LearnWorlds is the most value-pack platform across all pricing levels when compared to Kajabi and Thinkific:
*Pricing information was updated on April 2024
What User Reviews Say?
We’ve collected reviews from two well-known websites, G2 and Capterra, where real users share their experiences. By comparing these reviews, we can get a better idea of what it’s like to use these platforms, straight from the people who have actually used them.
LearnWorlds gets top reviews across both review platforms, while Kajabi is lagging behind in most categories. In 2024, Thinkific took a slide in reviews as it’s quality of service has been reduced after laying off 150 employees the past 2 years.
*Review scores were updated on April 2024.
Which one is the best?
Kajabi and Thinkific are both excellent platforms for creating and selling online courses. However, it’s essential to be aware of the distinctions between them before making a decision.
🥇 Why choose LearnWorlds?
LearnWorlds is the best choice for creating an elearning academy. It offers advanced educational features like quizzes, exams, certifications, flexible courses, interactive videos, and the only one that supports SCORM courses. At the same time, LearnWorlds’ ecommerce features and marketing automations are top-class and can match what Kajabi has to offer.
Your professional looking Academy in a few clicks
Start FREE TrialWhy choose Kajabi?
Kajabi is a platform made for people who focus on marketing & sales. Kajabi is mainly an all-in-one marketing platform which enables you to build a business on selling digital products like courses, build communities, and offer coaching programs.
It’s an easy platform to use and keeps most functionalities you need in one place. You pay a little more than alternatives, but don’t need to foot the bill for additional software in most cases.
Why choose Thinkific?
Thinkific is an online course platform that offers instructors and students a user-friendly environment for teaching and learning. It serves as an efficient solution for creating and selling online courses. Authors, speakers, subject matter experts, and others use Thinkific to expand their online businesses or monetize their expertise.
Thinkific comes with better features for elearning and building academies compared to Kajabi, but lacks it’s all-inclusive marketing & sales capabilities. Thinkific is more suitable for educators teaching or training and for creating lead capture academies.
Other eLearning platform options
If none of the above fits your criteria, there are always more online learning platforms to review, from simple coaching platforms like Teachable to complete LMS like Docebo or TalentLMS.
Teachable
Teachable enables influencers and creators to expand their businesses by developing and offering courses. Teachable is a more basic platform focused on simple video courses & coaching. It comes with less customization capabilities but works better for new course creators and coaches.
Teachable has a more open free plan with less feature limitations but higher fees:
Compare Kajabi Vs Thinkific Vs Teachable Vs LearnWorlds
Compare LearnWorlds vs Teachable
Podia
Podia’s key features include publishing online courses in a step-by-step manner, selling courses through a user-friendly and cost-effective platform, and providing coaching sessions or cohort-based courses.
Podia is the cheapest alternative in the list, and only works if you need a sales page for a video course, don’t expect many educational features.
Read more about LearnWorlds vs Podia
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
What is the difference between Kajabi and Thinkific?
Thinkific is mainly focused on the creation of online courses, whereas Kajabi offers a comprehensive suite that includes marketing and sales tools as well. In other words, Thinkific is more focused on the creation process, while Kajabi provides a broader range of features for running an online learning business.
Which one is better, Kajabi or Thinkific?
Deciding between Kajabi and Thinkific depends on your needs. If you’re looking for an all-in-one solution with marketing tools, Kajabi could be a better fit. However, if you’re primarily focused on creating and selling online courses, especially as a beginner, Thinkific might be the better choice due to its simplicity. However, when considering value for money,
LearnWorlds stands out as it blends the benefits of both Thinkific and Kajabi, but at a more reasonable cost.
Why do people use Kajabi?
People use Kajabi because it simplifies the process of creating and selling online courses or digital products by offering an all-in-one platform. It includes features for marketing, sales, and website building, making it a good fit for entrepreneurs and small businesses that prefer a comprehensive tool. However, there are also alternatives like LearnWorlds. This platform not only meets those same needs but also offers even greater flexibility and customization options.
What are Thinkific competitors?
There are several competitors to Thinkific in the online course platform market. Notable names include LearnWorlds, Kajabi, Teachable, and Podia.
Can you build courses on Thinkific?
Yes, you certainly can. Thinkific is an online platform designed for course creation and selling. It provides a variety of tools to do just that using a simple drag-and-drop builder. However, depending on what you require, you might come across certain constraints, particularly if you’re using the free version of the service.
Can I build a website on Thinkific using the page builder?
Yes, you can indeed build a website on Thinkific. They provide some templates and a user-friendly drag-and-drop builder to help you create your site. Thinkific comes with limitations on customization, and if you don’t know html or css you are limited to their builder’s templates.
Nick Malekos is a Senior Digital Marketer in LearnWorlds. He is a results based and well-rounded Digital Marketer with years of experience in the education industry, writer and digital literacy trainer.
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