The 9 best Kajabi alternatives to choose in 2026 (I’ve tried them all)

Kajabi is one of the most powerful all-in-one platforms for building and selling online courses.

But at $179–$499 per month, it’s a huge investment especially if you’re validating your first course and aren’t ready to commit that kind of budget.

But high pricing isn’t the only limitation that’ll push you to one of the Kajabi competitors.

After using and testing it for over 2 years now, I faced some serious limitations that were hard to ignore:

• Transaction fees when using a third-party payment processor
• Strict product limits on the Basic and Growth plans
• Being locked into Kajabi’s ecosystem of tools which can be painful when you want to migrate later or want to use best-in-class marketing tools
• Basic course assessment features

When you add it all up, it’s not hard to see why many creators, coaches, educators and info businesses choose to explore other options.

After testing 27 online learning tools and digital business platforms these are the best Kajabi alternatives that stood out to me:

1. Systeme.io: most affordable all-in-one digital business suite for coaches, creators and knowledge businesses
2. Thinkific: best dedicated course platform for creators, coaches and educators
3. Circle.so: best for paid online community memberships
4. EzyCourse: best value for money
5. Teachable: best for native payments tools and ease of use
6. Mighty Networks: best for building social learning communities
7. LearnWorlds: best LMS for teams and learning institutions
8. Kartra: most advanced digital marketing toolset
9. Stan Store: most intuitive digital storefront and creator monetization plaform

In this guide, I’ll compare each platform to Kajabi, highlight where it performs better, and help you find the right alternative for your business.

Best Kajabi alternatives: my quick summary

Choose Systeme.io if you want an all-in-one digital business platform but without the high price tag. Go with Circle if you want a robust online community software to build your memberships. Choose Thinkific if you want a specialized course creation platform with stronger online learning tools.

Below is my quick comparison summary of the top Kajabi alternatives and when to choose them.

Platform	Bottom Line	Pricing
Systeme.io	The closest all-in-one Kajabi alternative at a fraction of the cost. Sell courses, digital downloads, events, and even physical products.	Generous free plan $17 – $97 per month
Thinkific	Well-rounded online course platform for creators, coaches, educators and instutions. Strong learning tools, fair pricing, generous limits, and robust commerce features.	$54– $219 per month
Circle.so	The undisputed leader in community building. Host courses and communities in one place. It is also evolving into a full business hub with built-in email marketing, automation, website building, and native AI agents.	$89 – $199 per month
EzyCourse	The closest feature-for-feature Kajabi replacement. Sell courses, downloads, appointments, memberships, and coaching programs. The marketing suite is strong, with a website builder, email marketing, and powerful checkout tools.	$79 – $599 per month
Teachable	The easiest entry point for first-time course sellers. Launch fast, accept payments in nearly 50 countries, and let the platform handle tax remittance for you.	$39 – $189 per month
LearnWorlds	The best true LMS for educators, trainers, and corporations. Interactive course player, detailed student tracking, and advanced assessment tools.	$29 – $299 per month
Mighty Networks	Best for social learning. Built like your own private social network, with activity feeds, member profiles, and native mobile apps. Run courses, cohort-based programs, memberships, live events, and challenges in flexible spaces that mix content with conversation.	$79 – $179 per month
Kartra	The most advanced marketing platform on this list. Ideal for creators and digital entrepreneurs who want a best-in-class marketing stack to sell their expertise.	$59 – $549 per month
Stan Store	Simply the fastest tool to set up and begin selling online. Supports courses, downloads, coaching, community memberships, link-in-bio and webinars.	$29 – $99 per month

My detailed review of the top Kajabi alternatives

In this section I’ll dive deep and show you how these 10 platforms measure up against Kajabi. I’ll also show you if they’re worth the money and what to expect when you choose them.

Systeme.io

Cheaper alternative to Kajabi alternative for creators, coaches and small businesses .

Pros:

Cons:

Systeme.io is the best Kajabi alternative if you want an affordable all-in-one platform that supports digital product creation and a full marketing toolkit. 

Like Kajabi, Systeme.io lets you create and sell digital products such as courses, downloadables, webinars, communities and coaching programs. On top of that, it gives you a complete marketing stack to sell them featuring: a sales funnel builder, email marketing, automation, lead management and checkout tools.

But unlike Kajabi, Systeme.io is far more affordable across the board and has a generous free plan that lets you launch your digital business without any upfront investment. 

It also doesn’t charge you any transaction fees unlike Kajabi which imposes 0.5% – 2% surcharge fees when you use a third-party payment gateway.

Here’s how Systeme compares to Kajabi and why it’s a compelling alternative if you want an all-in-one digital business solution.

Systeme.io is cheaper and gives you more usage per dollar than Kajabi

Kajabi is expensive for starters. Its entry level plan costs $179 per month. And at this price tag, you can only create up to 5 digital products, 1 website, and have up to 2,500 contacts.

So if you launch 1 course and 1 community, you’ve already used two of your five product slots.

Meanwhile, Systeme.io’s cheapest tier (the Startup plan) costs $17 per month, and it gives you more usage limits of up to 5 courses, 5 websites, 5 blogs, 5 communities and 5 CRM pipelines, plus 5,000 contacts.

That is twice Kajabi’s contact allowance and five of each object type rather than five objects in total, for less than a tenth of the price.

It gets better as you scale.

Systeme.io’s most expensive plan costs $97 per month, which is still $82 cheaper than Kajabi’s entry tier, and it provides full access to its tools with unlimited usage.

And if you’re not ready to spend anything at all, the free plan gives you 2,000 contacts, 3 funnels, 1 published course with up to 500 students, 1 website, 1 blog, 1 community and a custom domain. 

Systeme.io charges no transaction fees and lets you choose from up to 9 payment gateways

Kajabi charges a surcharge fee on every sale whenever you use a third-party payment processor like Stripe instead of its native Kajabi Payments. 

This ranges from 2% on the Basic plan, 1% on Growth, and 0.5% on the Pro plan. And that’s on top of Stripe’s own fee of 2.9% + $0.30.

And that’s on top of Stripe’s own fee of 2.9% + $0.30.

If you think about it, it’s as if Kajabi is penalizing you for using your own Stripe account other than their own.

To be fair, Kajabi Payments itself is a decent product. Its base rates are competitive with Stripe’s, from 2.9% + $0.30 on Basic to 2.7% + $0.30 on Pro, with Apple Pay, Google Pay, Klarna, Afterpay and sales tax calculation included. Its full rate card, including the surcharges Kajabi does not advertise, is broken down separately.

However, after doing some digging I realized Kajabi Payments has a serious shortcoming that only becomes apparent when you decide to leave.

If you migrate to another platform, you can’t export active subscriptions to your new payment processor . Your active membership subscribers have to re-enter their payment information on your new platform, which can lead to massive churn.

Meanwhile, Systeme doesn’t charge any transaction fees across its plans. 

The only fees you’re going to pay for are your payment processor’s rates.

Additionally, unlike Kajabi which locks you into three payment options, Systeme supports nine including: Stripe, PayPal, Flutterwave, Mercado Pago, Razorpay, Mollie, GoCardless, Secure and Pay, and Xendit.

Both have a strong marketing stack, but Systeme goes further with pipelines, A/B testing and webhooks

Both platforms let you build marketing funnels and attach automation rules, but Systeme gives you more tools to improve performance and connect the rest of your business.

Its funnel builder includes A/B testing, deadline funnels, and webhooks to external applications. 

With A/B testing you can compare different page designs, headlines, or offers so you can understand which variations convert more. 

Deadline funnels run per visitor rather than to a fixed date, so an evergreen offer stays evergreen instead of resetting when someone reloads the page.

Systeme also gives you Pipelines, a Kanban-style board that moves leads through stages you define. Selling coaching at $2,000 a seat, that board shows you which of eleven conversations stalled and where prospects drop.

Kajabi approaches funnels differently. Its Funnels feature is polished, beginner-friendly, and ships with prebuilt templates that generate the pages and the email sequence together, so you launch faster with less setup.

However, its funnel builder is less flexible. It doesn’t support split testing at funnel level, so you set up A/B tests page by page. It has no funnel synchronized webhooks, deadline funnels, and lead management tools like Pipelines.

Systeme.io pricing at a glance

• Free Plan: 2,000 contacts, 3 funnels, 1 course with 500 students
• Startup Plan ($17/month): 5,000 contacts, 10 funnels, 5 courses with unlimited students
• Webinar Plan ($47/month): 10,000 contacts, 50 funnels, 20 courses, 10 evergreen webinars
• Unlimited Plan ($97/month): unlimited everything, plus sub-accounts and free migration

Thinkific

Best Kajabi alternative for structured education that can scale into institutions.

Pros:

Cons:

Thinkific is the best alternative to Kajabi if you want a dedicated course platform with stronger assessment, advanced student progress tracking, and tools that can support more formal learning experiences.

While Kajabi excels as a business platform for creators, Thinkific is built around the education side of it. It gives you more control over how you structure lessons, evaluate learners, and expand from selling individual courses to running training programs for teams, organizations, and institutions.

Start with lesson types. Thinkific supports more of them than Kajabi, including presentations, multimedia lessons, live sessions (via Zoom), and PDFs as standalone lesson types. This flexibility lets you diversify how you deliver content instead of forcing everything into a video-plus-text mold.

It also has more ways to assess learners allowing you to know how well they’ve understood your content and also get feedback. You can create quizzes, exams, assignments and surveys. 

On the other hand, Kajabi limits you to multiple choice quizzes and basic assessments.

But one thing I loved about Thinkific is that apart from providing a great online learning tool for small creators and educators, it also offers a more robust solution for large businesses and institutions who want a more tailored and advanced software platform.

Plus is Thinkific’s stack for enterprises, training instuitions and large organizations. It provides a more comprehensive solution that features:

• SSO integration
• SCORM compliance and learning paths
• CRM integrations
• Custom roles and multiple administrators
• A branded mobile learning app
• Bulk student import and enrollment
• Enterprise-grade security

Meanwhile, Kajabi’s course creation tools are primarily tailored for creators and coaches who don’t require sophisticated learning management tools. 

Both platforms let you build online communities around your teaching programs. But Thinkific’s community builder still has a long way to go. It feels barebones, with limited engagement tools.

There’s no gamification of any kind, video conferencing relies on third-party tools like Zoom, and even writing community posts is a pain because the post editor offers limited formatting for rich text. If community is central to your business model, you’re better off integrating an external solution like Circle or Heartbeat.

Thinkific pricing at a glance

• Basic ($54/month): unlimited courses, 1 community, 5 digital downloads, 10,000 students, 100 GB monthly bandwidth
• Start ($109/month): unlimited downloads, 200 GB bandwidth, live cohorts, certificates, assignments, memberships
• Grow ($219/month): 3 communities, 400 GB bandwidth, branding removal, API access, B2B group orders
• Plus (quote only): SSO, SCORM, learning paths, custom student limits, 7,500+ GB bandwidth

Also read: Thinkific vs Kajabi, Thinkific alternatives, Thinkific review

Circle

The best Kajabi alternative for professional communities.

Pros:

Cons:

Circle is a stronger alternative to Kajabi if your education business is built on group-based learning, masterminds, and coaching programs. While Kajabi offers decent community features, Circle provides more sophisticated tools for access, engagement, and membership management.

Unlike Kajabi, Circle is built around a community experience. It integrates courses, live events, discussions, and resources into a social network so for learners, everything is available in one place instead of being split between a course portal and a separate community tab.

 This design supports a broader range of community-led learning models including:

• Cohort-based learning with embedded chat and live events
• Group coaching with member-only resources and live sessions
• Ongoing memberships with topic-based discussion areas and private group spaces

You’re not forced to center your offer around a course. You can lead with conversation, collaboration, and  live calls and still offer pre-recorded content later.

Meanwhile, Kajabi community platform feels secondary and is offered as a separate digital product, tacked onto the main course experience. This model works fine if your main offer is a course and you want to embed a private space for student’s interraction.

When it comes to customization and branding, Circle gives you much more room to build something unique that feels like your brand

You can:

• Apply custom branding and styling across your entire community
• Use your own domain without Circle branding
• Upgrade to Circle Plus for a fully branded mobile app
• Whitelable email notifications 

However, in Kajabi communities, you’re stuck with a rigid layout. Customization is mostly cosmetic. You can change colors, fonts, add a logo and banner image. But you can’t white-label everything unless you’re on it’s Growth and Pro plans which let you remove the “Powered by Kajabi” branding at the footer.

Both platforms let you natively host live events, send reminders and allow members to RSVPs.

But Circle offers more scalability leting you add more livestream attendees and hosts  on its Custom plan based on your needs. 

Meanwhile, in Kajabi the experience is capped to 200 attendees.

If your business relies on live delivery like running large coaching sessions, live training, community calls, or Q&As Circle gives you an edge.

Both Circle and Kajabi offer built-in email marketing and workflow automation tools. In Kajabi these features are deeply embedded into its platform. 

On the surface, this feels like the best deal ever as you won’t need to buy separate tools for that. But it also limits you if you prefer or already have in place specialized platforms like Kit, ActiveCampaign, or MailerLite.

Meanwhile, Circle’s email marketing tool is an optional addon. You can decide to use it, or you can plug in external tools if you prefer them instead.

AI is becoming a huge thing in online coaching and educational businesses. And Circle is making huge strides towards it. 

Recently, they’ve introduced AI agents to streamline member experiences. You can train custom AI agents on your internal resources like (guides, FAQs, onboarding content) and use them to support members inside your community.

These agents can handle:

• Personalized onboarding
• Support requests
• Billing and access issues
• Resource recommendations based on user behavior

It’s still early, but it’s clear that Circle is building toward smarter, more scalable communities.You can check out my in-depth Circle guide to explore everything it offers. I’ve also written a detailed Circle vs Kajabi to see how both tools stack up against each other.

Circle pricing at a glance

• Professional ($89/month billed annually): unlimited members, with caps on spaces, moderators and livestream capacity
• Business ($199/month annually): adds workflow automation, API access and branding removal
• Circle Plus (quote only): highest limits, AI agents, SSO, branded apps
• Email Hub: add-on from about $99/month at 10,000 contacts; included at 10,000 contacts on Circle Plus

Also read: Circle vs. Kajabi or Circle review

EzyCourse

The affordable all-in-one platform for creators who want courses, coaching, memberships, email marketing, automation, and an AI website builder in one place

Pros:

Cons:

EzyCourse is one of the few platforms I’ve used that genuinely competes with Kajabi’s all-in-one setup. Plenty of tools claim to do so but very few ACTUALLY offer good online learning tools together with a solid marketing tech stack.

Take the marketing-first all-in-ones like: Systeme.io, GoHighLevel, and Kartra as an example. They have an exceptional marketing stack for funnel building, email marketing, automation and checkout.  But on the other hand, they struggle to offer good online learning infrastructure.

Which is why, Kajabi charges a premium price for their subscription. It takes the learning side seriously and keeps a strong marketing stack behind it, so you never have to choose between selling well and teaching well.

Meanwhile, EzyCourse excels on both, and on the teaching side it goes further than Kajabi does. You get 13 lesson types, SCORM compliance, graded assignments with file uploads, surveys, and coaching programs with a strong tracking and feedback model.

Behind that sits the marketing toolset featuring: branching email automations with split testing, affiliates, an AI site builder, and checkout across nine payment gateways. 

Not to mention that you get many of these features for as low $79 a month with 0% transaction fees on every plan.

EzyCourse features

Below are the outstanding features that make EzyCourse a strong alternative to Kajabi giving you the most out of every dollar.

• Sell more than just courses: Kajabi already supports courses, coaching, communities, podcasts, newsletters, and memberships. EzyCourse expands on that with appointments, events, physical products, audio and video libraries, and paid private or group chats. If you want to grow beyond courses without adding another platform, EzyCourse gives you more flexibility.
• Supports SCORM courses: If you’ve already invested in SCORM training content, EzyCourse lets you upload and deliver SCORM 1.2 and 2004 packages while tracking learner progress, scores, completion, and pass or fail status. Kajabi doesn’t support SCORM, so existing SCORM libraries need to be rebuilt as native lessons before they can be delivered.
• Coaching programs with strong client tracking: Both Kajabi and EzyCourse let you sell coaching. The difference is, EzyCourse offers a stronger client tracking and feedback tools. It lets clients submit assignments, upload files, complete exercises, and receive feedback inside the coaching program. Coaches can track progress over time instead of relying on email or external apps. Kajabi includes coaching products but with limited feedback and tracking features.
• Built for teams and multiple instructors: If you run your business alone, this feature won’t matter much. But if you’re working with instructors, assistants, developers, or business partners, EzyCourse gives you dedicated user roles with separate permissions. What I liked most is the Revenue Partner role. You can assign an instructor or partner a percentage of sales for specific products, and EzyCourse automatically tracks their earnings in one place instead of forcing you to calculate commissions in spreadsheets. Kajabi supports admin users and multiple instructors, but revenue sharing typically has to be managed outside the platform.
• Marketing automation with conditional branching: EzyCourse lets you trigger workflows based on purchases, enrollments, tags, form submissions, lesson activity, and other user actions. You can build conditional paths, add wait steps, split contacts into different branches, and test different emails.
• Advanced checkout builder: EzyCourse gives you the same conversion tools you’d expect from a premium platform. You can increase order value with order bumps, one-click upsells and downsells, flexible pricing models, coupons, and abandoned checkout automation to recover lost sales. Kajabi also includes a strong checkout experience with upsells, order bumps, coupons, subscriptions, and payment plans, so you aren’t giving up conversion features by switching. The difference is that EzyCourse delivers a comparable sales toolkit at a much lower monthly price.
• More payment gateway options: EzyCourse supports Stripe, PayPal, Paystack and several regional payment gateways, making it easier to sell internationally if Stripe isn’t widely available in your market. Kajabi primarily focuses on Stripe and PayPal, so creators in certain regions may have fewer payment options.
• Multi-level affiliate marketing: EzyCourse supports traditional affiliates, student affiliates, and multi-level affiliate programs. If automatic payouts through Stripe Connect are available on your plan, commissions can be distributed without manual calculations. Kajabi includes affiliate management, but it focuses on a standard single-level affiliate model.

EzyCourse pricing at a glance

EzyCourse is one of the best-value all-in-one platforms I’ve reviewed. Even on its entry-level plan, you get unlimited courses, unlimited students, built-in email marketing, automation, communities, coaching, and 0% transaction fees. Most platforms either limit the number of products you can create or require you to upgrade before you unlock those features.

Compared to Kajabi, the value is easy to see. Kajabi’s entry-level plan limits the number of products you can sell, while EzyCourse lets you create unlimited courses from its Essential plan.

• Essential ($59/month billed annually, $97 monthly): 2 communities, 1 coaching program, 5 digital products, 10,000 emails a month, 1 TB video
• Pro ($139/month annually, $199 monthly): 5 communities, 5 coaching programs, 50,000 emails, 3 TB video
• Unlimited ($199/month annually, $399 monthly): unlimited communities and coaching, 100,000 emails, 5 TB video, branded iOS and Android apps included
• Elite ($299/month annually, $699 monthly): 500,000 emails, 10 TB video, all current and future add-ons

Teachable

Best Kajabi alternative for educators and creators

Pros:

Cons:

Teachable has been around almost as long as Kajabi. Both platforms let you build and sell online courses. So it’s safe to say they have a lot of features in common.

However, Kajabi has evolved into a complete business operating system while Teachable has stayed focused on course creation and hosting. 

Sure, Teachable added some marketing tools, but they’re fairly basic. The website builder, email automation, and funnel builder are limited and you’re better off with third party platforms for marketing and sales features.

And when you look at it, it is for a good reason. Teachable removes friction at every stage of the course business, from creating curriculum and improving the student experience to handling international payments and tax compliance. 

Instead of overwhelming you with dozens of business tools, Teachable keeps the course creation workflow simple, making it easy to upload content, organize lessons, and publish products. With its drag-and-drop curriculum builder you can upload multiple files at once, organize lessons in bulk, and set up your course faster.

Students get a clean, distraction-free learning experience with its intuitive course player, while creators don’t have to worry as much about the operational side of selling globally since Teachable Payments supports multiple currencies, and automatically handles sales tax and VAT calculation and remittance in supported countries.

Teachable features

• A more focused course creation and learning experience: Teachable is built around the course itself, and that focus shows in the details. Its curriculum builder supports bulk uploads, making it faster to organize large libraries of videos, PDFs, and downloads, while its clean course player gives students a distraction-free way to consume materials. Creators also get deeper visibility into student behavior through video heatmaps that show where learners watch, skip, or rewatch content—insights Kajabi doesn’t provide natively.
• Global payments that work in countries Kajabi doesn’t support: This is one area where Teachable has a meaningful advantage over Kajabi. Teachable Payments is available in 41 countries, compared to 25 countries for Kajabi Payments, giving creators access to a broader native payment infrastructure. Beyond availability, Teachable handles much of the complexity of global selling: it supports 35+ local payment methods, automatically displays prices in local currencies, and calculates, collects, and remits sales tax, VAT, and GST across 45+ markets. For creators selling digital products internationally, those built-in payment and compliance tools can remove a significant amount of operational overhead.
• Multiproduct support: Despite its reputation as a course platform, Teachable supports much more than online courses. You can sell digital downloads, coaching, memberships, bundles, and other digital products from the same storefront, making it a solid fit for creators who want to diversify their offerings. It’s not as expansive as Kajabi’s all-in-one business ecosystem, but it covers the products most creators actually sell without adding unnecessary complexity.
• Mobile learning app: Teachable’s mobile app is more focused on course consumption. Students can access their purchased courses, watch lessons, track progress across devices, download content for offline viewing, and continue learning without leaving the app.
• Strong integration ecosystem: Teachable works well for creators who prefer to use their own tech stack. It offers native integrations with tools like Kit, Mailchimp, Zapier, Segment, Google Analytics, and Deadline Funnel, making it easier to connect your course platform with your existing tool set. 

Teachable pricing at a glance

• Starter ($39/month, $29 annually): 5 products, 1 admin, 100 active students, 5 imported students, 7.5% transaction fee
• Builder ($89/month, $69 annually): 10 products, 1,000 active students, 50 imported, 0% fee
• Growth ($189/month, $139 annually): 50 products, 5 admins, 5,000 active students, 1,000 imported, branding removal
• Custom (quote only): flexible products, students and seats; student caps drop away entirely above $10k a year in platform sales

Also read: Teachable vs. Kajabi

LearnWorlds

Best Kajabi alternative for comprehensive online learning features (ideal for educators, instructors, and corporate training)

Pros:

Cons:

LearnWorlds is the ideal Kajabi alternative for corporate training, accreditation bodies, learning instuitions and teams. 

Compared to Kajabi, it offers stronger student tracking, assessment tools and course engagement tools. You get an interactive course player, advanced quizzes, graded exams, self-assessments recorded as audio or video, text assignments and video submissions from students.

If you think about it, LearnWorlds offers features that compete with LMS vendors on the teaching side while still pricing like a creator tool. Most corporate LMS platforms charge per seat, so your bill climbs with every learner. Meanwhile, LearnWorlds charges a flat monthly fee and adding students does not raise it.

LearnWord features

• Interactive video player: Instead of treating video as something students simply watch, LearnWorlds lets you turn it into part of the lesson. You can embed quizzes, buttons, transcripts, navigation points, overlays, and prompts directly inside the video, encouraging learners to participate rather than passively consume content.
• Stronger assessment tools to evaluate learning: Kajabi includes quizzes, but LearnWorlds offers a much broader toolkit. You can create graded exams, assignments, question banks, audio and video self-assessments, and even ask learners to submit video responses. If your goal is to evaluate competence instead of tracking lesson completion, LearnWorlds gives you considerably more flexibility.
• SCORM and HTML5 support for professional training: This is one of the biggest reasons educators and corporate trainers choose LearnWorlds. You can import SCORM-compliant and HTML5 learning packages created in professional authoring tools, making it possible to reuse existing training materials instead of rebuilding every course from scratch. Kajabi simply isn’t designed for that type of instructional content.
• Indepth reporting: Kajabi does an excellent job helping you understand your business through sales, revenue, and marketing analytics. LearnWorlds shifts the focus to the learner. Its reporting lets you monitor progress, assessment results, engagement, completion rates, and overall learning performance, making it much easier to identify where students are succeeding or struggling.
• AI that supports instructional design: Both platforms use AI to speed up course creation, but I found LearnWorlds’ implementation more useful. It helps generate course outlines, learning activities, assessments, and structured educational content, making it feel like an assistant for designing better learning experiences rather than simply helping you write faster.

LearnWorlds pricing at a glance

LearnWorlds offers affordable pricing packages compared to Kajabi. Every plan includes unlimited courses, built-in tools for 1-on-1 coaching, student assessments, and support for multilingual sites through Weglot integration.

Here’s a quick look at the plans:

• Starter – $29/month
• Pro Trainer – $99/month
• Learning Center – $299/month

Explore LearnWorlds 30-days for Free

Mighty Networks

The best Kajabi alternative for building a social community around what you teach

Pros:

Cons:

Mighty Networks is the stronger alternative to Kajabi for creators who want to build a thriving community around their courses, memberships, or coaching programs. While Kajabi includes community as one of many features, Mighty Networks is built around a community with courses, cohorts and live events layered into the experience.

Like Kajabi, you can create multi-lesson courses, drip content, host live events, sell memberships, and charge for access. But on Mighty the community is the product, and the moment members log in they land in an activity feed of posts, polls, questions and profiles instead of a depressing course dashboard.

Everything runs on what Mighty calls Spaces, and each one is its own room with modular configuration to include various content formats like a feed, chat, events and resource libraries. 

But one thing I liked about Mighty Networks however, is how well it helps members connect with one another. Instead of expecting members to find each other on their own, its People Magic AI can automatically recommend relevant people they can connect with based on shared interests, goals, location, and activity. 

Mighty Networks features

• People Magic AI and People Explorer: Most community platforms leave member discovery to chance. Mighty Networks actively helps members find one another through People Explorer, then goes further with People Magic AI by recommending relevant members based on shared interests, goals, location, and activity. It can even facilitate double opt-in introductions, something Kajabi doesn’t currently offer.
• Strong member engagement tools: Mighty Networks feels much closer to an actual social platform. Members and hosts can publish long-form posts, interactive polls, questions, rich media, recurring discussions, and other content designed to encourage participation .
• Network spaces: Every Space can have its own feed, chat, events, courses, and members, allowing you to separate cohorts, masterminds, memberships, alumni groups, or regional communities without creating disconnected experiences. Members can move between Spaces inside one network, while each group develops its own conversations and culture.
• Live events feel like part of the community: Both platforms support native live sessions and integrate with Zoom, so you aren’t forced into one meeting platform. Mighty Networks goes further by placing events directly inside the community experience. Members discover upcoming sessions from their Spaces, RSVP without leaving the platform, continue discussions afterward, and on higher-tier plans can host larger native livestreams.
• Cohort learning is available across every plan: Both platforms support self-paced courses, but Mighty Networks is built around learning with other people. Cohort programs are available on every plan, making it much easier to combine courses, discussions, live sessions, and group accountability without paying for Kajabi’s higher-tier subscriptions.
• The mobile community app: Mighty Networks offers a mobile community app that you can also use to deliver your programs. Members can receive notifications, join discussions, attend events, and participate from dedicated iOS and Android apps. If you upgrade to Mighty Pro, you can even launch a fully branded mobile app under your own name, giving your community a permanent place on members’ home screens.
• Icebreakers: Growing a community isn’t just about attracting members. It’s also about helping them participate. Mighty Networks includes Icebreakers that encourage new members to introduce themselves, share their goals, and start conversations from day one. It’s a simple feature, but it lowers the barrier to participation in a way Kajabi doesn’t currently match.

Mighty Networks pricing

• Launch: $95/month ($79/month billed annually), with a 2% transaction fee on every sale
• Scale: $215/month ($179/month annually), which halves the fee to 1% and adds advanced automations, deeper analytics, more integrations, and branded app access
• Mighty Pro: custom pricing for fully white-labeled native apps and enterprise support, reportedly from around $2,000/month with multi-year terms

Kartra

Best Kajabi alternative for robust sales and marketing tools.

Pros: 

Cons:

Of all the platforms I tested, Kartra stood out as the most compelling all-in-one alternative for advanced sales and marketing automation features.

Kajabi’s marketing tools are decent—but Kartra’s funnel builder, page builder, webinar hosting and video management are more robust.

Let’s start with its funnel builder.

Kartra can build sophisticated marketing funnels while in Kajabi you’re limited to simple linear setups.

Both platforms offer visual funnel builders, but Kartra’s is easier to use and far more dynamic.

It feels more like a visual flowchart. You can drag and drop steps, rearrange them freely, and create non-linear funnels with branching logic.

Even better, it lets you map different traffic sources to specific funnel paths. For example, you can send traffic from social media and search engines to different paths which is better for personalization.

Kartra also includes built-in funnel simulation. You can model revenue projections and test different scenarios before launching. 

Meanwhile, in Kajabi you can’t drag and rearrange funnel steps. You’re stuck with a static, linear setup.

You can trigger a funnel from a user action (like filling out a form), but it doesn’t let you control entry paths based on traffic source which limits personalization and segmentation.

If you care about design flexibility, Kartra gives you more to work with out of the box. It comes with over 99 professionally designed templates and a large library of prebuilt sections you can drag into any part of your page.

Its builder also gives you more design control. You can drag and drop elements into your page, change background, add padding or effects like box shadow, rounded corners, animations or parallax scroll. And if you know a thing or two about code, you can style ‘em via CSS or edit the entire page source code.

Kajabi’s page builder lets you create decent web pages but has limited customization options. For example it doesn’t let you modify individual sections using code or add advanced effects like parallax. It offers barely any section templates that you can add to your page. But you can use its custom Widgets functionality which lets you add more design appeal to your pages. 

But they’re available as an addon costing $5 – $27 per month to use 3 to 25 widgets on your website.

When it comes to webinar hosting and video content management Kartra is the better choice Kartra gives you an edge.

That’s not surprising, considering it’s owned by the same people behind WebinarJam and EverWebinar—two of the most reputable webinar hosting platforms.

You can run live, scheduled, on-demand, or evergreen webinars directly from your Kartra dashboard for upto 5,000 attendees. But it goes further to boost engagement in a live session by enabling you to launch polls, share files, present slides, run Q&As, and a live chat. 

In Kajabi you’re limited to a basic video stream for upto 200 attendees, screesharing, live chat, and breakout rooms. That’s fine if you’re doing simple live coaching. But not enough if you’re selling through webinars or teaching live at scale.

Kartra has a better video management system. You can upload videos into a centralized content library, organize them into playlists, tag them for tracking, and reuse them across funnels or membership areas. Even better, Kartra lets you embed opt-ins or call-to-action buttons directly inside your videos. You can trigger automations based on how much someone watched or whether they clicked — turning your videos into interactive sales tools.

Kajabi doesn’t offer anything close. There’s no video library. Every video lives inside a product or a course module. If you want to reuse a video across multiple products or pages, you’ll need to upload it again or manage it manually.

Katra pricing at a glance

Kartra isn’t cheap, but the pricing reflects what you’re getting. An all-in-one marketing platform with built-in tools for email marketing, funnels, membership sites, helpdesks, checkout systems, and automation. You won’t need to patch together multiple tools, which can save time and reduce integration issues.

Here’s a simple breakdown of Kartra pricing:

• Essentials: $59/month – Supports upto 500 contacts.
• Starter: $119/month – Supports up to 2,500 contacts, and 1 domain.
• Growth: $299/month – Allows 12,500 contacts and 3 domains. Adds more advanced automations, bandwidth, and email volume.
• Professional: $549/month – Supports 25,000 contacts and 5 domains. Includes priority support, advanced analytics, and full feature access.

See how Kajabi and Kartra compare in detail.

Try Kartra for 30-days

Stan Store

The beginner-friendly Kajabi alternative for creators and coaches who want a digital storefront and a link-in-bio tool

Pros: 

Cons:

Stan Store doesn’t try to compete with Kajabi’s breadth of features. And that’s exactly the point.

While Kajabi aims to be the ultimate platform for creators and knowledge entrepreneurs,  Stan Store focuses on helping creators launch and sell fast. It strips away many of the advanced features that sound impressive on paper but often go unused by many solo creators and coaches.

Take coaching, for example.

One criticism you’ll hear is that Stan Store doesn’t include built-in video conferencing. Instead, it relies on tools like Zoom and Google Meet. 

And it’s busy to see why.

For example when I used Kajabi’s coaching products, I almost always hosted sessions through Google Meet or Zoom anyway. They’re platforms I already use every day, and I’ve found them to be more reliable.

So for many creators, it’s almost the same case for them. They already have an established workflow built around Zoom or Google Meet, so forcing everything into an all-in-one platform doesn’t necessarily make the experience better.

Then the same thing with its course creation platform. 

Sure, Stan Store lets you build a structured curriculum with video lessons and quizzes.

But chances are, most creators aren’t launching the next online university. They’re packaging their expertise, validating an idea, or selling a digital product. 

At that stage, advanced learning features like quizzes, certificates, assignments, and detailed student analytics rarely determine whether a course succeeds.

What matters is getting your offer in front of customers as quickly as possible.

Now, when you take this reasoning, it’s easy to see Stan Store follows the same pattern when it comes to its marketing tool set.

Kajabi unquestionably offers a more powerful marketing suite. Its website builder, email marketing, funnels, and automation capabilities are significantly more advanced.

Stan Store takes the opposite approach. Instead of giving you endless customization options, it provides clean, pre-built storefronts and landing pages that are ready to publish with very little setup. 

And while customization is limited, the pages look excellent on mobile devices: which is exactly where most creators receive the majority of their traffic from platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.

The bottom line is if you’re a creator, coach, or freelancer who simply wants a beautiful storefront, a link-in-bio, and the fastest path from idea to revenue, Stan Store is one of the best Kajabi alternatives available. It deliberately sacrifices depth in exchange for speed and simplicity—and for many creators, that’s exactly the right trade-off.

Stan Store pricing

• Creator: $29/month ($25/month billed annually, $300/year). The storefront, unlimited products, courses, bookings, subscriptions, a basic community, and lead capture.
• Creator Pro: $99/month (about $79/month billed annually). Everything in Creator plus email marketing, funnels, upsells, discount codes, affiliate management, payment plans, and ad pixel tracking.

Both plans charge 0% platform transaction fees; you only pay standard Stripe or PayPal processing (about 2.9% + 30 cents per sale). There’s no free plan.

Final take: is there something better than Kajabi?

Kajabi is popular for a reason. It’s the go-to platform for many course creators and digital entrepreneurs.

But let’s be honest, it’s expensive. You’re limited on how many products you can create, assessments are basic, and its website editor doesn’t offer much design flexibility.

If you’re looking for better value or more specific features, there are solid alternatives worth considering. Some offer stronger marketing automation, others focus on community, and a few combine both at a lower cost.

Here’s my quick recommendations for the top 4  best alternatives to Kajabi.

1. Systeme – nearly the same tech stack as Kajabi but far more affordable.
2. Thinkific: best dedidcated online course platform
3. Mighty Networks – ideal if your focus is building a learning community.
4. Kartra – advanced marketing and automation features.
5. LearnWorlds – full-featured LMS with strong learning tools at a low price.

Also read:

• Kajabi review
• Kajabi pricing review and indepth breakdown
• Best online community software platforms
• Best course creation tools
• Best membership site platforms
• Best online learning platforms
• Kajabi vs Thinkific
• Circle vs Kajabi
• Kajabi vs Kartra

Kajabi limitations: why many creators explore for alternatives

I’ve used Kajabi for some of my personal projects. And there’s no denying that it’s one of the strongest all-in-one platforms for selling online courses, coaching programs, memberships, and other digital products.

In fact, if you’re looking for a complete platform with course creation, email marketing, funnels, website building, payments, and community features under one roof, Kajabi is hard to beat.

That said, no platform is perfect.

Below are some of the major downsides of using Kajabi.

1. The highest entry price in the category. Kajabi is one of the most expensive all-in-one platforms for creators. Its entry-level plan starts well above many competitors, making it difficult to justify if you’re just launching or earning a modest monthly income. While the platform is polished, the high upfront cost can slow your profitability during the early stages of your business.

After the 2025 restructuring, Kajabi eliminated its $89 Kickstarter plan, and the cheapest option now starts at $143 per month billed annually or $179 monthly, which reviewers identify as the highest entry price in the course platform market. For a creator earning under $2,000 per month, the platform fee swallows a punishing share of revenue. At $500 in monthly course sales, the Basic plan alone consumes 28.6% of revenue before processing fees, a ratio few small businesses can sustain.

2. Hidden surcharges the pricing page doesn’t show. Kajabi advertises 0% transaction fees through Kajabi Payments, but its own help center documents extra costs. There is an additional 0.7% on every subscription or payment plan transaction, and another 1.5% on international cards. For a membership business, that pushes the real rate to roughly 3.6% plus 30 cents rather than the headline 2.9%. Sellers with international audiences pay even more. Read my comprehensive Kajabi pricing review to find out.

3. A penalty for using your own payment processor. Choosing Stripe instead of Kajabi Payments triggers a surcharge. Kajabi adds a 2% surcharge on Basic, 1% on Growth, 0.5% on Pro, on top of Stripe’s standard fees. This locks creators into Kajabi’s payment rails or charges them for independence.

4. Aggressive feature-gating across tiers. Core scaling tools sit behind the more expensive plans. The Basic plan excludes the affiliate program and advanced automations, which unlock only on the Growth plan. Cohort courses, API access, webhooks, and branding removal also require higher tiers, so the features that help a business grow are exactly the ones that cost the most.

5. Restrictive product, contact, and member caps. Each plan limits what you can build. The Basic plan caps you at 5 Products and 2,500 Contacts, and membership-based businesses can hit a separate ceiling on active members. Growing audiences run into these walls and face a forced upgrade.

6. A contact-counting method that inflates your plan. Reviewers point to how Kajabi tallies contacts as a driver of unnecessary upgrades. Its contact-count methodology, counting expired free-access leads as “customers,” is cited as pushing users into higher-priced plans artificially. You can pay for a larger tier because of leads who no longer engage.

7. Limited design and customization. The builder satisfies basic needs but frustrates anyone wanting control. The website builder is clunky with minimal room for customization, and meaningful page edits often require CSS knowledge. Template variety is thin, with checkout pages and layouts feeling constrained compared to dedicated site builders.

8. Weak technical SEO. Creators who depend on organic traffic outgrow Kajabi’s ceiling. On the platform you cannot access server level controls, cannot fully customize schema markup beyond what the platform allows, and cannot fine tune technical SEO the way a competitive content strategy requires. Many coaches migrate to WordPress specifically for deeper SEO control and asset ownership.

9. Painful migration and lock-in. Because Kajabi bundles everything, leaving means rebuilding everything. Switching costs include losing card-on-file relationships if you used Kajabi Payments, with re-billing flows typically losing 5-20% of subscribers to friction, plus custom automations and funnels that do not transfer. Migration involves data format incompatibility, limited export options, and difficulty transferring student progress. The friction is severe enough that users report absorbing $1,200+ annual increases rather than face the switch.

10. No free plan and a steep learning curve. Kajabi offers only a 14-day trial with no permanent free tier, so there is no way to build at zero cost while validating an idea. Kajabi also has a steep learning curve, particularly when navigating the platform’s extensive features, which could be challenging for less tech-savvy users.

Kajabi competitors and best alternatives: FAQs

1. What is the best Kajabi alternative for online course creators?

Thinkific. It supports four assessment types against Kajabi’s one, adds presentations, live sessions and standalone PDFs as lesson types, and hosts unlimited courses on every plan including the $40 entry tier. Note that it meters students and video bandwidth instead, from 10,000 students and 100 GB a month on Basic.

2. Which Kajabi alternative is the most affordable for beginners?

Systeme.io. Its free plan includes 2,000 contacts, 3 funnels, one published course with up to 500 students, a website, a blog, a community and a custom domain, with no card required and no expiry. Paid plans start at $17 for 5,000 contacts.

3. Is there a Kajabi alternative that supports physical product sales?

Kartra and Systeme.io both do, and Kajabi does not support physical products at all. Kartra lets you sell digital and physical goods through one checkout from the Starter plan up; Systeme.io includes inventory tracking and shipping fields at checkout.

4. What platform is better than Kajabi for community-based learning?

Circle.so and Mighty Networks. Spaces can be forums, chats, resource libraries, events hubs or courses, and access groups tie bundles of them to paywalls.

5. Does any Kajabi alternative offer better AI course creation tools?

LearnWorlds. You set topics, instructional style, audience level and tone before generation, and the output needs light editing. Kajabi’s generator works from a title and a description only.

6. Are there Kajabi competitors that include email marketing and funnels?

Kartra and Systeme.io include full email marketing, funnels, automation and affiliate tools in the subscription. Teachable and Thinkific send sequences but have no funnel depth. Circle charges separately for email through Email Hub, from about $99 a month at 10,000 contacts.

7. Which Kajabi alternative gives the best value for money?

Systeme.io At $97 a month you get unlimited contacts, funnels, courses and automations. Kajabi’s Pro plan costs $499 a month, or $399 billed annually, and still meters you at 100,000 contacts.

8. Is Kajabi worth the money?

For a creator earning under $2,000 a month, no. Kajabi Basic at $179 consumes 28.6% of $500 in monthly sales before processing fees, and caps you at 5 products and 2,500 contacts. Above roughly $5,000 a month, with funnels and community both in daily use, the bundled price starts making sense.

9. Which is better, Kajabi or Teachable?

Teachable for course creation, commerce and international selling: it remits US sales tax, EU VAT and GST on every plan and pays creators in markets Kajabi cannot reach. Kajabi for marketing, funnels and community. Read my Teachable vs Kajabi review.

10. Is Circle or Kajabi better?

Circle if the community is the product, Kajabi if the courses are. Circle gives you Spaces tied to access groups and paywalls, moderation tooling and unlimited members from $89. Kajabi gives you a better course builder and a full marketing stack from $179.