How do two popular online course platforms, Kajabi and Teachable, measure up to one another?
This quick, accessible guide will help you to compare Kajabi vs Teachable. Focusing on what’s important to your business, and the main similarities and differences, it will help you to decide if either are right for you.
The platforms differ in what they offer and the cost involved. Which is best for you, if any, will depend on your business needs.
What do Kajabi and Teachable offer?
The Kajabi and Teachable platforms provide tools needed to build and deliver your online course.
- They allow you to structure your courses, breaking them down into modules and individual lessons.
- They offer tools to support course compliance – you can find out more about this in the 'what Kajabi and Teachable do well' section below.
- They do all the technical work, allowing you to focus on creating and selling your online courses.
- They allow you to sell your online courses, ebooks and videos and include integrated payment processing.
Key features of Kajabi and Teachable
The following are the key features offered with the Kajabi and Teachable packages:
In terms of key features, Kajabi and Teachable are similar in what they offer. However, they differ in how these are delivered, and for some features the differences are substantial.
The following sections explore in more detail how the two platforms compare for these features and others.
Overall, there is one key difference between Kajabi and Teachable, that will no doubt be pivotal in your decision making. Kajabi is an ‘all-in-one’ platform: meaning as well as hosting your content, it offers a full website setup and incorporates marketing tools, keeping everything in one place. While Teachable predominantly focuses on offering an online course creation platform, which works with your existing website and marketing tools.
What Kajabi and Teachable do well
There are many similarities in what Kajabi and Teachable offer:
- Both platforms offer similar features for creating online courses.
- They both have good useability and accessibility.
- Course creation features are similar.
- Both allow you to create membership packages / subscription plans.
- Both allow you to add videos, audio, pdfs, text, quizzes, etc. to your courses.
- They include unlimited video hosting (they use Wistia for this).
- Both allow you to add a comments section to your lessons.
- The ability to ‘drip content’ is available on both; this allows you to select when sections are unlocked.
The following are some areas in which the Kajabi and Teachable platforms vary, with one not necessarily out performing the other, but just offering something different depending on your business needs.
Marketing
Kajabi and Teachable both offer marketing tools, such as ‘upselling’ and email marketing. This is similar to other course platforms such as Podia and Thinkific. However, Kajabi offers more extensive marketing features, including automatic email marketing and sales pipelines, as part of their ‘all-in-one’ platform approach.
Customer support
Email support and live chat is available on both platforms. For Teachable, the live chat option isn’t available for customers using the Basic plan.
Kajabi offers live chat support 24/7, whereas Teachable limits this to Monday – Friday 10am – 5pm EST. Depending on your business needs and how much you may need to use it, this may be an important consideration, particularly if you’re in a different timezone to the customer support service. Note: Kajabi limits its chat support on its ‘basic’ plan and doesn’t offer this 24/7.
Website setup
Kajabi offers a full website setup, while Teachable links to your existing website. Which is preferably will depend on what you already have and what you feel is necessary to compliment this.
Course compliance
Both offer tools to ensure course compliance. Kajabi has the option to lock a category until a specific lecture is complete. Teachable, on the other hand, has more options, allowing you to make the completion of lectures, videos and graded quizzes compulsory.
Analytics and reporting
The ability to track students’ progress is available on both platforms. Kajabi provides information on the average engagement, total plays, play rate and drop off for videos. Teachable produces more extensive course-level analysis, with reports for every course, including lecture completion, video stats, video engagement, quiz scores and leaderboards.
In terms of sales reporting, Kajabi allows you to analyse your sales performance – daily, weekly, monthly and yearly – and sales for offers and subscriptions. For Teachable, it allows you to view transactions and statements, as well as breakdown analysis and upsell reports; similar to Kajabi.
Blogs
Both allow you to create a blog. With Teachable this is basic and can’t be customised. Whereas, Kajabi allows you to create a fully functional blog with features such as categories and sidebars. Again, how important this is will depend on how useful the feature is to your business. If you use a specialised blogging platform, such as WordPress, or don’t use blogging, then this may not factor into your decision making.
Pros and cons of Kajabi vs Teachable
The following are positive elements of Kajabi and Teachable in terms of what they offer over the other platform:
Kajabi
- An ‘all-in-one’ platform, it offers more additional features, without the need to integrate other tools. However, whether or not this is useful will depend on what your requirements are.
- More marketing tools than Teachable, including a sales pipeline builder to market and funnel traffic. Note: there are limitations with each of the packages though.
- Offers a range of themes (10+), allowing you to customise the design more. Teachable is more limited with just one default theme.
- There are no transaction fees on any of its packages; while Teachable charges 0% on its two higher priced packages but 5% on its Basic plan.
- Allows you to build a ‘community’ area, where members can engage in and start discussions and send private messages, while admin can set discussions, pin posts and send announcements. This isn’t available on Teachable.
- Offers more flexibility with assessment. You can include multiple choice, multiple option and paragraph style questions, as well as accept assignments from students. Teachable, on the other hand, only allows you to use multiple choice or multiple option questions and doesn’t have an upload option to accept assignments from students. Kajabi also lets you include images with your questions and some basic formatting but Teachable is text only and doesn’t allow question formatting.
Teachable
- Offers unlimited courses and videos, as well as unlimited student numbers. Compared to Kajabi which limits the number of ‘products’ (courses, subscriptions or other digital products) and the student numbers enrolled, even with their most expensive plan.
- Considerably cheaper, particularly the Basic plan, so it’s a good option for new businesses or those with smaller budgets. See pricing section below.
- More options for course compliance, making it better for some courses. How important this is will depend on your requirements and the types of courses you deliver.
- Offers course completion certificates, with 3 certificate templates which can be modified and personalised, or you can build a custom template (although this requires some coding knowledge). You can also add certificates to courses so students automatically receive them upon completion. Kajabi doesn’t offer course completion certificates as a built-in feature; this would require a 3rd party platform if you wanted to use them with Kajabi.
- Their course builder offers more flexibility, with the ability to add different types of content (videos, pdf, quizzes, etc.) to lessons and easily order them. Kajabi limits content per lesson, for example restricting multiple content types, such videos and quizzes within the same lesson.
- More in depth course engagement reporting is available in comparison to Kajabi.
Pricing
An important consideration before investing in either of these platforms is pricing. Below is an overview of the packages, fees and any limitations on courses, student or admin users:
Teachable focuses on delivering online courses and memberships, offering unlimited courses, videos and student users. Furthermore, it is quite clearly the cheaper option.
Kajabi, on the other hand, offers an ‘all-in-one’ platform, with additional features such as landing pages, sales pipelines and automated email marketing. However, its packages are more expensive and each have limitations on the products, pipelines and student users.
Therefore, whether the additional cost of Kajabi is beneficial or not, will depend on which features you require and/or prioritise to meet your business needs.
For more details on each of the packages Kajabi offers visit our Kajabi Pricing blog.
Do Kajabi or Teachable offer AI powered, adaptive courses that personalise content for users?
A key feature missing from both Kajabi and Teachable is the ability to offer AI powered, adaptive courses that personalise course content for individual users. A platform which supports this would allow you to offer a personalised learning experience to your students.
A high quality adaptive learning platform, such as Godaptive, captures data as your learners interact with your course content and automatically reacts to their learning needs. Using artificial intelligence (AI), it can adapt and personalise the content, providing additional resources and further assessment tools where necessary, to support your users’ individual learning needs.
An adaptive learning platform gives you the same ownership over your courses and delivery of your desired content. The key difference you get with AI powered courses compared to traditional courses is a significant improvement in the user experience. Each student gets their learning environment optimised, resulting in improved learning outcomes and much higher student satisfaction.
An online course platform such as Godaptive, which enables the delivery of adaptive personalised courses, can make your online courses stand out from the competition. Supporting better user retention, exam results and course completion rates, you can increase engagement with your products and ensure that your users keep coming back for more.
To learn more about an AI powered, adaptive learning platform visit our ‘Benefits of an Adaptive Learning Platform’ blog. Here you’ll find more information about how adaptive learning works, why to choose it and the benefits for your business and learners.
Conclusion
In simple terms, Kajabi is an 'all-in-one’ platform offering course delivery, marketing tools and website setup, while Teachable is a standalone platform focusing on delivering your online course.
Overall, Kajabi may be preferable if you want everything together – your course, marketing tools and website – and have a larger budget. Whereas, Teachable could be a better option if you’re mainly interested in building an online course, you have no need for the additional tools, and your budget is smaller.
If you’re looking for a platform which can give your online courses an edge over the competition, visit the Godaptive website to find out more about AI powered learning.
