Circle vs Kajabi: My Honest & Detailed Review (Early 2025)

Should you prioritize creating a community experience around your digital products, or focus on building a full-fledged digital business where digital products, sales, and marketing are seamlessly integrated in one platform?

That’s where Circle and Kajabi chart their differences.

Circle is a comprehensive community platform that also supports digital product delivery. It allows you to build and sell courses, coaching programs, and membership subscriptions. It’s the ideal solution for creators, educators, and coaches looking to sell their digital products while building an engaging online community around them.

On the other hand, Kajabi is a full-suite digital business platform. It offers tools for course creation, communities, website building, sales funnels, and email marketing. Simply put, it provides the essential tools you need to create, market, and sell your digital products.

But, which one should you choose? In this Circle vs Kajabi review, I’ll break down how both tools compare when it comes to:

• Course creation
• Online community building
• Membership site-building
• Marketing and sales capabilities
• Value for money

I won’t just compare features and pricing. I’ll also give clear recommendations on when to choose Circle and when Kajabi is a better fit. Let’s get started.

Circle vs Kajabi: A Quick Summary

At first glance, Circle and Kajabi look like they do nearly the same thing—help you build and sell courses and community memberships.

But after researching and testing each platform, it’s clear they serve different users.

Circle — Best for building learning-focused communities.

Circle offers robust features for creating communities centered around your digital products. You can create individual spaces for learning, discussions, chats, and events. 

It also has strong community engagement features including group chats, community posts, live streams, leaderboards, polls, and quizzes. 

Circle is ideal for creators, coaches, and educators who want to build a community experience around their digital courses. That way, students can interact, learn from each other, and collaborate.

Kajabi — Best for building an online education business.

Kajabi, on the other hand, equips you with everything you need to build a sustainable business around your knowledge and expertise. 

In addition to creating courses and coaching programs, Kajabi offers powerful tools for email marketing, sales funnels, and website building.

Kajabi best suits creators, coaches, and edupreneurs looking for an all-in-one platform to market and sell their digital products without integrating external tools.

Below is a quick comparison table showing how Circle vs Kajabi measure up in key areas like course creation, online community building, ease of use, and pricing.

Circle vs Kajabi: User Experience

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Both Circle and Kajabi have intuitive interfaces, and honestly, tearing them apart based on this was a tough call. However, after a deeper look, a few things set Circle’s interface apart, making it easier to use. Let me show you.

Circle is easier to use, while Kajabi has a steeper learning curve.

Circle’s interface is beginner-friendly and feels more polished than Kajabi’s. It has a clear layout with its navigation organized into two distinct sections — a left sidebar and a top navigation bar.

The left sidebar serves as the control center. Here, you can add and manage community spaces, and space groups, and launch live streams.

For members, the same sidebar is visible displaying the spaces and space groups of your community.

One the other hand, the top menu bar offers quick access to settings for Courses, Events, Members, and Leaderboard.

Additional tools and settings are tucked away in a dropdown menu, keeping the interface clean while still providing access to more advanced options when needed.

Navigating Circle’s dashboard feels smooth and intuitive. The platform loads quickly, and I didn’t experience any lags or bugs. Despite being packed with a ton of community-building features, Circle manages to keep its interface clutter-free and easy to navigate for both admins and members.

Meanwhile, Kajabi’s interface looks modern and well-designed but with a few caveats. Like Circle, it has its main tools and settings on the left side for easy access. 

However, due to its all-in-one nature, Kajabi has a steeper learning curve. With tools for course creation, marketing, and sales, it can feel overwhelming, especially for new users. 

Even after using it for over a year, I still find myself referring to the platform’s knowledge base. But once you become familiar with its wide range of features, navigation feels smoother and easy to use.

In terms of performance, Kajabi is slightly slower to load compared to Circle, though not significantly so. I didn’t encounter a few bugs and glitches, but it performed better than platforms like ClickFunnels.

Verdict: Circle easily outpaces Kajabi with its intuitive, fast-loading, and clean interface. It’s simple to navigate for both admins and members. Kajabi on the other hand is loaded with extra tools, which can lead to feature fatigue for those looking to start quickly.

Kajabi vs Circle: Online Course Creation

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Both Kajabi and Circle come with strong course creation tools, but they differ significantly in how they structure courses and engage students. After testing both platforms’ course-building capabilities, here’s what I discovered.

Kajabi offers courses as standalone products, while in Circle, they are part of a community experience.

Kajabi allows you to sell courses independently, meaning you can focus solely on course creation without linking it to other offers. This setup gives you flexibility if you want to build individual product lines like coaching or memberships later. The community feature is optional, so you’re not forced into blending courses with a forum.

Meanwhile, Circle ties courses to its community structure. Every course exists as a separate space within your community forum.

You can gate course spaces behind a paywall to offer exclusive content to specific member tiers.

Because courses live within the community, members can easily transition from discussion to learning. This makes Circle a better choice if you want to cultivate a community-centric learning experience to engage your students.

Kajabi has a more feature-rich course structuring system than Circle.

Kajabi provides an AI course outline generator that can create a full course structure based on your input. Just enter your course title, and description and enable the AI outline generation option.

Kajabi’s AI will generate an entire course outline, structured in Modules and Lessons — along with your course lesson descriptions.

However, I don’t see this as a big advantage over Circle. The reason being, you can get better course outlines by using external AI tools like ChatGPT using more detailed prompts. That said, Kajabi’s built-in AI generator can still be useful for beginners who need help structuring their course.

Once you’ve structured your courses — Kajabi lets you add Submodules. As I had stated earlier, Kajabi uses Modules and Lessons to structure your course curriculum. 

Essentially, submodules let you add a subsection in your course chapters to break into more digestible chunks. This can come in handy if you have a longer course and you want to break it down into manageable subtopics.

Circle, on the other hand, keeps everything everything straightforward. Courses are structured into Sections and Lessons, which are less complex but still effective.

Both platforms let you upload videos, PDFs, and other learning materials, but Circle is more transparent about storage limits. You get access to storage ranging from 100GB to 1TB depending on your plan. Kajabi on the other hand doesn’t specify storage limits, making it harder to anticipate your storage limits.

However, both platforms let you import video content from Google Drive, Dropbox, Wistia, Vimeo, and YouTube. But Circle offers a smoother video embedding experience for videos. Its link embed feature allows you to easily insert videos directly into your course lessons without issues.

I tried using Kajabi’s link import feature and it never worked.

However, Kajabi does have an edge with its native video recording feature. You can record and upload videos directly within the platform, which can save you time.

Kajabi offers more course player design than Circle.

Kajabi provides over six customizable course player templates. You can modify the layout, color schemes, and typography, and even add widgets like gamification badges.

Meanwhile, Circle doesn’t offer course design templates. Its course player is simpe with limited options for customizing the layout or branding for your course player.

Kajabi has more features for assessing students than Circle.

In Kajabi, you can create quizzes and assessments to track students’ understanding of your learning material. You can also issue certificates of completion, which adds value to your course.

On the other hand, Circle allows you to add quizzes to your course where you can set a minimum passing grade that students must attain to progress to the next course section. However, it lacks a built-in certification feature requiring integration with a third-party tool.

Verdict: Kajabi is ideal for course creation if you need need more course design freedom, and student assessments with certifications. However, if you want a simple, distraction-free course builder, Circle is a better solution.

Circle vs Kajabi: Community Building and Management

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Circle is a community-first platform. As such, all its digital product offerings are optimized around a community experience. In contrast, Kajabi treats its community feature as a separate product, much like its courses and coaching offerings.

So how do their community-building features stack up? Let’s find out.

Both Circle and Kajabi offer strong community engagement features like discussions, group chats, live events, and gamification but Kajabi also has challenges.

In Circle, you can initiate discussions, create group chats, and host live events. Members can share various content formats, including text, images, videos, PDFs, code snippets, and polls. 

The platform also offers gamification features, including leaderboards, and badges. Members can earn points for receiving likes on their posts, with one like equating to one point. The more points they accumulate, the higher they rank on the leaderboard.

Kajabi provides features similar to Circle’s community engagement. You can engage members through discussions, group chats, live events, and leaderboards. 

However, Kajabi takes it a step further by allowing you to launch challenges. This allows you to create structured tasks or goals for members to work toward, providing them with an additional incentive to participate.

Both platforms allow for community post creation, but Circle’s post editor is more advanced.

Circle offers a robust post editor that gives you extensive options to create rich, interactive content. Its editor supports headings, bullet points, blockquotes, and CTA buttons, making it easy to format long-form content or simple threaded discussions. 

You can add various content formats to your posts, including images, videos, audio files, PDFs, forms, GIFs, polls, and data tables. Its embed feature lets you integrate content from over 700 platforms.

 Want to share a Notion template with your community? No problem. Have a Canva carousel? You can embed it. Need to share a Loom recording? That’s possible too.

Kajabi features a simple community post editor that allows you to share various content formats, including text, videos, images, and PDFs. However, compared to Circle’s editor, Kajabi’s post editor offers less extensive formatting options and flexibility.

Circle has strong community moderation features, while Kajabi doesn’t offer any.

Circle provides built-in tools to maintain a safe environment for your members. These include profanity filters, reporting tools, and options to flag members for review.

You can also assign roles like moderators to manage specific spaces or the entire community. Moderators can remove posts, review flagged content, and enforce content approval for individual members.

Kajabi, on the other hand, lacks automated community moderation. You can only appoint moderators to monitor content and manually delete inappropriate messages.

Both allow you to host live events but Circle offers more flexibility.

In Circle, you can schedule and host live events within the platform which eliminates the need for third-party platforms like Zoom. You have the flexibility to start:

1. Live Rooms (up to 30 participants): Ideal for interactive sessions like coaching, 1-on-1 meetings, or small group cohorts. All attendees can participate via video, audio, and chat, fostering engagement and collaboration.
2. Live Streams (100–1,000 participants): Perfect for webinars, Q&As, or AMAs, where only the host and co-hosts have speaking privileges. 

Members can join from the Circle mobile app or any web browser. Additionally, you can record these sessions and repurpose the content for courses, providing long-term value for your community.

Meanwhile, Kajabi’s Live Rooms offer similar functionality, with the ability to screen share, chat, start breakout groups, and record sessions. However, it caps at 200 participants and doesn’t support larger-scale events like Circle’s Live Streams.

Verdict: Circle outperforms Kajabi in community-building with more diverse event-hosting options, and built-in moderation tools. It also offers stronger native content creation features for engaging and managing members.

Kajabi vs Circle: Sales and Marketing Features

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Kajabi has built a reputation as an all-in-one platform for course creators, integrating robust sales and marketing tools. It includes a website builder, sales funnels, and an email marketing system, all baked into its core product.

Circle, originally known for its community-building features, has recently introduced a Marketing Hub. It’s an add-on that offers email broadcasts and sequences, but it’s not bundled with Circle’s primary platform.

Let’s learn a little bit more about how both platforms measure up in terms of sales and marketing.

Kajabi is a marketing powerhouse, Circle’s Marketing Hub is offered as an addon.

Kajabi includes essential tools for marketing and scaling your educational business, such as:

• Sales funnels
• Website builder
• Email marketing

These features are included in all plans at no extra cost.

Circle, on the other hand, has limited built-in marketing features. It recently launched Marketing Hub, which allows you to send email broadcasts and set up automated workflows. 

However, this tool is available as an add-on.

Circle also doesn’t offer a dedicated funnel builder. The closest alternative is its Lock Screen feature, which locks content behind a paywall. 

Kajabi supports more payment gateways than Circle.

Kajabi has a built-in payment system called Kajabi Payments, which is available only in the United States, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom. The payment system includes exclusive features such as Apple Pay, Google Pay, Afterpay, and Klarna.

In addition, Kajabi supports Stripe and PayPal as alternative payment gateways.

Circle, on the other hand, only supports Stripe for payments.

Both platforms allow you to offer paywall trials, discounts, and coupons during checkout but Kajabi also includes upsells and order bumps.

Kajabi allows you to offer trials, discounts, and coupons during checkout, but it goes a step further with upsell and order bump features. This can help you maximize revenue by offering relevant add-ons at strategic points in the purchasing process​

Meanwhile, Circle also enables you to offer paywalled trials, discounts, and coupons, but it does not have dedicated upsell or order bump features.

Verdict: Kajabi outshines Circle when it comes to sales and marketing tools. Its all-in-one approach lets you manage every aspect of your marketing strategy without needing external integrations. Circle, while improving with its Marketing Hub, still lags behind in providing a comprehensive solution for creators focused on growing their business through marketing automation, and sales funnels.

Circle vs Kajabi: Pricing

Circle offers affordable entry-level plans, while Kajabi provides advanced features at a higher price.

Circle’s pricing starts at $49/month for its Basic plan, whereas Kajabi’s lowest tier, Kickstarter, starts at $69/month. Circle’s mid-tier plan, Professional, is also more affordable at $99/month compared to Kajabi’s Basic plan, which starts at $149/month.

However, as your business grows, Kajabi’s pricing offers better value for money. Kajabi’s Pro plan costs $399/month, the same as Circle’s Enterprise plan, but it includes unlimited landing pages, email marketing, and up to three websites. At the same price point, Circle lacks website and email marketing capabilities.

Circle has a transaction fee while Kajabi doesn’t.

Circle charges a transaction fee ranging from 0.5% to 4%, depending on your plan — which is exclusive of Stripe processing fees. Considering that you’re paying a premium price to use Circle,

Meanwhile, Kajabi does not charge any transaction fees beyond those imposed by payment processors like Stripe or PayPal. I would advise you to visit this page to understand more about the charges imposed on your transactions in Kajabi.

Kajabi’s free trial comes with a catch while Circle is transparent.

When you sign up for Kajabi’s free trial, you’re required to provide credit card details, where they place a temporary hold of $149 for validation.

While Kajabi doesn’t actually charge you until the trial ends, the hold feels downright sly.

I mean, there are better ways to verify a card, like how Clickfunnels only charges $1 for validation. Kajabi’s approach struck me as sneaky—almost like they’re hoping you’ll forget to cancel so they can charge you.

Circle, on the other hand, is transparent. It offers a 14-day free trial with no credit card required, letting you test any plan risk-free.

Circle vs Kajabi: Pros and Cons

Every software has its advantages and drawbacks. It’s no exception for Circle and Kajabi. Below I’ll break down key strengths and limitations of both platforms to help you make an informed choice.

Circle Pros and Cons

Kajabi Pros and Cons

Circle vs Kajabi: Which One Should You Use?

Circle and Kajabi are both strong platforms for course creation and community building, but each serves different needs.

Circle thrives as a community platform. It offers powerful community organization, moderation, and engagement features. Using it, you can start group chats, discussions, live events, and courses. Community-wise everything about Circle feels polished and well-built. 

Choose Circle if:

• You want to build and grow a community around your digital courses or coaching programs.
• You need a straightforward membership solution.
• You prefer using specialized marketing and sales tools separately.

Meanwhile, Kajabi is a full business suite for creatives and coaches. It includes course creation tools, coaching options, sales funnels, website building, and integrated email marketing. Kajabi focuses on providing an all-in-one solution for digital product creation.

Choose Kajabi if:

• You need a platform that combines digital product creation with built-in marketing tools.
• You want to offer certificates to students upon course completion.
• You plan to offer various digital products like courses, downloads, coaching, and podcasts.

Interesting readings:

• Circle vs Mighty Networks
• Circle vs Podia
• Kajabi alternatives
• Best community platforms