Kajabi is one of the leading platforms for coaches, online course creators, and membership course creators. It allows users to create a website, host a course, send email campaigns, and much more in a single platform. So while it has become one of the top solutions in the industry, any platform serving such a broad customer base is bound to have some drawbacks.
Here are just a few of the drawbacks that many of our users have mentioned:
- It doesn’t offer any kind of community (users can comment, but you can’t create subgroups, track habits, or accountability).
- Tracking student progress is difficult as you can see completed lessons, but not the actual documents they’ve completed or action steps they’ve taken.
- Many creators and coaches don’t need all of Kajabi’s features, but they still have to pay for them
- Overall, it’s designed to host a collection of videos rather than create a hands-on learning environment where students take action and build relationships with the coaches and other students.
So whether you need more community functionality or a simpler solution, here are some Kajabi alternatives that might be worth investigating.
upcoach
Upcoach is an ideal Kajabi alternative for group coaches (or cohort-based courses) that want a platform designed to build community and push students to take action through group accountability and positive peer pressure.
In short, upcoach is similar to an apprenticeship or internship where students take action and build relationships. On the other hand, Kajabi provides more of a university online class setting where students consume information, but don’t necessarily take action.
If you’d rather skip ahead and see for yourself how upcoach can improve your course’s success, try it out today (we offer a 14-day money-back guarantee).
Benefit #1 – Designed to Build Community and Inspire Action Through Accountability, and Habit Tracking
You probably add action items to the end of each lesson, but there is never any positive pressure to encourage them to execute those tasks. In fact, with a platform like Kajabi, you don’t even know how much of the assignment they completed.
upcoach takes a different approach to this.
Once a student finishes a lesson, to-dos are added automatically to their to-do list, and you can reach out to any students that are falling behind.
In addition to seeing which to-dos the student has crossed off, the Smart Documents feature also shows the coach how much of the document was completed. This makes it easy for the coach to see where students are getting stuck.
Finally, the habit tracker makes it easy for the coach and other students to see how well they are doing with their new habits. This positive peer pressure makes upcoach an outstanding platform as students are much more likely to take action on your advice rather than passively consuming information.
Benefit #2 – One Consolidated Platform For All of Your Coaching Needs
Kajabi doesn’t offer any type of community, which means you’ll have to use a combination of a team collaboration tool like Trello or Basecamp in conjunction with Kajabi.
Keeping track of multiple passwords is frustrating for students, and materials tend to get lost. You’ll have students emailing you questions like “where is this assignment?” or on the calls, they might say, “I never saw that one, so I didn’t do it.”
Therefore, upcoach is designed as a single scrolling platform with all lessons, scheduling, group communication, to-dos, worksheets, and habits in one single place.
Benefit #3 – Student CRM Makes Tracking Progress Easy
While several coaching platforms offer student CRMs that show their name, contact information, and the course completion percentage, none of them quite compare to upcoach’s student CRM.
With upcoach’s CRM, you’ll be able to see detailed information such as:
- Completed To-dos
- Tracked Habits
- Attended Meetings
- Completed Course Lessons
- Bio and basic contact information
For coaches that want to know how each student is doing (rather than looking at group averages), this is a huge bonus.
If you want to see for yourself how upcoach can benefit your coaching business, try it out now. If you don’t love it, we offer a 14-day money-back guarantee.
Who is This For?
upcoach is ideal for group coaches focused on improving the overall experience of their course. As an upcoach user, you’re focused on changing your students’ lives and improving metrics like course completion rate and NPS scores rather than just trying to sell more courses.
See this story about co-founder Todd Herman’s course that achieved a 9.5 NPS score using the upcoach platform and this story about co-founder David Henzel’s course jumping from a 7% to 93% completion rate.
Therefore, you’re looking for one consolidated platform that enables you to house your course and track student progress in one place.
Pros
- Number one platform for improving the experience of your course
- You have a single consolidated platform for your course material, student activity tracking, and communication (this also means students only have one login)
- Coaches can have a bigger impact on their student’s lives with positive peer pressure through accountability and habit tracking
- All meeting scheduling and team communication is on one platform
- A detailed Student CRM makes it easy for coaches to see which students are falling behind and reach out for additional support
- Automating to-dos makes it easy for coaches to assign to-dos at the right time and track student progress
- Smart documents make it easy for coaches to see how much of a document students have finished
- The user interface is a single scrolling page that makes it easy for students to read
- It’s super easy for coaches to set up and get started
Cons
- Not designed for those looking to sell more courses (no complex email automation systems, landing page builders, etc.)
- It’s not a great match for coaches that want a hands-off approach to their course. If all you need is a place to host your videos and accept payments, Kajabi is probably a better option
Pricing
Upcoach offers a 14-day money-back guarantee and plans start at $29 per month (billed yearly). Try upcoach now and see how it can improve your student engagement.
Podia
Podia is a newer course platform quickly gaining recognition for being a simple, user-friendly tool that makes creating and hosting courses easy.
Therefore, it’s a top choice for beginner course creators and any professional looking for a more simplistic platform to host their videos and course. Without all of Kajabi’s advanced features, Podia is also just a fraction of the price.
Podia is also popular among eCommerce store owners as it offers a storefront option for people to purchase your products.
Despite being a more simplistic Kajabi alternative, it still offers a host of advanced features. Specifically, the first two plans include:
- Storefront
- Digital downloads
- Webinars
- Email marketing capabilities
- Messaging with students
- No transaction fees
- Integrated payment processing
- Instant payouts
However, Podia isn’t for everyone. While its simplicity makes it ideal for beginners, your website won’t have extensive customization options as Kajabi’s might. The quizzes and assessments are also rather simplistic as they only offer multiple-choice questions.
In addition, Podia’s analytics aren’t as strong as Kajabi’s. While Podia still shows you what lessons students have watched and completed, it doesn’t allow you to slice and dice the data to understand patterns between those that have finished the lesson and those that have not.
Unfortunately, neither Podia nor Kajabi offers a robust community that encourages habit tracking and accountability through positive peer pressure. Therefore, it’s less than ideal for group coaching or cohort-based courses.
Who is This For?
Podia’s low price and easy-to-use interface make it an excellent solution for beginner course creators looking to get started with a simple platform. It’s also a great option for companies that need a simple platform to host internal company training and SOP documentation.
Ecommerce companies also love Podia as it is the only course platform geared towards that audience.
Pros
- Designed to be a simple and easy to use platform for beginners
- Its simplicity makes it one of the cheapest high-quality platforms on the market
- Website design options are minimal, but it’s easy to navigate for beginners
- Simple multiple choice quizzes
- Course creators can see basic analytics like lesson completion
- Storefront makes it ideal for ecommerce platforms
- Host all of your videos in one place
- Send email marketing campaigns directly from your platform
- No transaction fees
- Automatic payouts and integrated payment processing
Cons
- Not robust enough for professional course creators focused on high-end deliverability
- No community or options for group accountability or habit tracking
- Minimal website design and development options
- Analytics are limited to simple lesson completions (you can’t slice and dice the data)
Pricing
Podia’s pricing starts at $39 per month, and they offer a 14-day free trial for you to try it out.
Teachable
Kajabi is often thought of as an all-in-one platform as it enables users to create landing pages, blogs, webinars, send email marketing campaigns, and more, in addition to its course creation tools.
On the other hand, Teachable is more focused on delivering an excellent course creation platform. Nonetheless, it does offer some excellent marketing features like landing pages, email marketing automation, and even A/B testing capabilities.
Moving into the course creation interface, Teachable has a beautiful UI, and its drag and drop editor makes it relatively easy for anyone to edit. You can also add quizzes, digital files, and other attachments along with your videos. While it doesn’t offer the customization options that Kajabi does, the simplicity makes it beginner-friendly, and even a great option for busy course creators that need a fast, simple, attractive design.
However, with its simplicity also comes some drawbacks. First, if you want to have any kind of community engagement and accountability tracking, you’ll have to use a few other third-party tools like Trello, Stickk, or even Slack. This adds friction to the overall experience and makes it easier for things to get lost.
Who is This For?
Teachable is an excellent choice for beginners that want a simple solution for purely course creation and hosting. It is not designed for professional, full-time course creators building a community and those who want a powerful all-in-one solution to display, market, and sell their course. Nevertheless, its simplicity is certainly a major bonus for beginners, internal teams, and anyone looking to create lead magnet courses.
Teachable themselves state that they are best for people creating courses as a side hustle.
Pros
- Hyper focused on delivering an excellent course creation experience
- The course and website editors are easy drag and drop builders
- It offers a free plan (users only pay a 10% transaction fee for each sale)
- Users can create unlimited courses on any plan (even the free plan!)
- You can add quizzes and other digital files to your lessons
- Basic landing pages, A/B testing capabilities, email marketing
Cons
- It only offers one standard website template (so you’ll probably need a WordPress site)
- There aren’t any options to create a community
- While you can build a website, there is only one website template
- The marketing options are rather basic and you might eventually need to upgrade to third party marketing tools
Pricing
Teachable offers a free plan (that charges a commission on sales), and the first paid plan starts at $24 per month.
Thinkific
Thinkific is somewhat similar to Teachable in that it specializes in creating the best course creation and hosting platform (rather than trying to be an all-in-one solution as Kajabi is). While it does offer some marketing features, it doesn’t enable sales automation or native email.
Nevertheless, it’s probably the second most powerful option to Kajabi. So if you need something that is easy to use, yet still offers many of Kajabi’s more advanced features, it’s probably the tool for you.
When you sign up for Thinkific, you can build your own website from a wide variety of stunning templates. Editing the user interface is super easy with their drag and drop editor and their templates are nice enough that you probably won’t have to do much. However, if you want to get fancier, you can also access HTML and CSS.
Designing the interface of your course is equally easy as it also offers premade templates and uses the same drag and drop editor. Once your course is structured how you want, you can add any of the following material to it:
- Videos
- Audio
- Quizzes/Tests
- Webinars
- Text
- Surveys
In general, Thinkific is most comparable to Teachable, though known for offering better website and course design capabilities.
Unfortunately, Thinkific does not have a marketplace for people to browse and buy your course, though they do offer an affiliate program to help you with your marketing. Another bonus on their marketing front is that they have integrations with ConvertKit and Mailchimp so that anyone can easily create email marketing campaigns.
While Thinkific’s marketing tools aren’t quite as robust as Kajabi’s, they can offer users a high quality course creation platform at a fraction of the price as Kajabi.
In fact, they even offer a free plan.
Another drawback with Thinkific is that while it offers community, these communities are posts and comments rather than enabling team members to track habits, hold each other accountable, and message privately.
Who is This For?
Thinkific is a perfect solution for course creators who want a platform focused on delivering a high-quality course creation product and a nice website. It’s probably the second most robust platform behind Kajabi. While it doesn’t offer all of the marketing automation bells and whistles as Kajabi, its simplicity makes it a fraction of the price of Kajabi and you can still integrate it with other marketing tools.
Pros
- Offers a free plan for beginner course creators
- Focused on creating the best course creation and hosting platform
- Website and course design is easy to edit with drag and drop editor
- They also offer plenty of unique templates you can customize
- The third party integrations (such as ConvertKit and Mailchimp) make it easy to build out your platform
- Test student comprehension with advanced quizzes, exams, and more after each lesson
- Immediate payouts and secure payment processes
- Membership site builder
- Flexible pricing to improve conversions (monthly payments or one time payment)
- It’s a much more simple alternative to Kajabi and, therefore, more affordable
Cons
- Lacks advanced community options like accountability, habit tracking, and messaging
- Its two step checkout process causes some friction as buyers have to log in to purchase
- Lacks the advanced marketing functionalities that Kajabi offers
- No live support options – only email support (though it is quite responsive)
Pricing
Thinkific offers an impressive free plan that enables unlimited students, the course builder and website templates. The first paid plan starts at $39 and includes premium features like a custom domain, drip content, and more.
Udemy
Udemy is a unique Kajabi alternative as it’s known more for its massive course marketplace than its backend course creation features.
However, it’s an excellent option for creators that are building a simple course (perhaps even a lead magnet course) and want to earn traffic from one of the most popular course marketplaces. The courses on Udemy are typically in a lower pricing bracket, so if you’re planning a course in the $0 to $300 range, it’s probably a great fit.
While they don’t offer any tools for creators to design a website, they offer a simple course builder that lets you upload your videos and separate them into modules. Along with the course, builder are plenty of resources geared towards beginner course creators to help them use the platform and optimize their course for the best results.
However, the engagement features are lacking. For example, you can include quizzes if you build them yourself, though Udemy doesn’t offer a quiz builder for you to use out of the box. There are also no community features, which means your completion rates will likely plummet. In fact, there isn’t even a place for students and teachers to communicate and interact.
Therefore, if you want a hands-off approach where everything is automated, Udemy might be a great solution.
The analytics in Udemy shows what percentage of students finished each lesson, though they don’t offer much more depth than that.
In addition, Udemy doesn’t offer any marketing tools other than its own marketplace. So if you want to run email marketing campaigns, design a landing page, or create any other marketing campaigns, you’ll have to use a third-party tool.
Who is This For?
Udemy is a great solution for creators that want a simple platform to house their lead magnet courses and first-time course creators. Its beginner-friendly tools make it dead simple to get your course up and running in a few minutes, and its massive course marketplace makes it easy to instantly get in front of a large audience (assuming you do some SEO). However, it’s not for coaches that care about student engagement and higher-priced ($300 plus) courses.
Pros
- Super simple and beginner friendly – get your course up and live in minutes
- Hosts all of your videos and enables you to see student completion rates
- Excellent host for lead magnet courses
- Massive marketplace that makes it easy to get in front of an audience actively looking for courses
Cons
- No website, landing page, or marketing tools
- The marketplace, while large, is very competitive
- No student engagement capabilities
- No community, accountability, or habit tracking
Pricing
Udemy only offers annual pricing starting at $360 per user per year.
LearnWorlds
LearnWorlds is similar to Kajabi in that it is a robust system for more advanced course creators and those looking to level up their game in course creation.
If you want to build a website for your course with LearnWorlds, you’ll be pleasantly surprised by the number of stunning website templates they offer. Any beginner can quickly swipe one of these templates, make a few changes with the drag and drop editor, and publish it. More advanced course creators can also take advantage of LearnWorlds’ code editor access on any plan.
While their websites offer plenty of customization, the course area has just one template, though it’s clean, straightforward, and thoughtfully structured.
However, where LearnWorlds really shines is its rich engagement features. First, their quiz builder is much more robust than Kajabi’s, and they even allow you to gamify your assessments by awarding badges for completing various assignments.
You can also host virtually any media imaginable, including videos, digital downloads, audio, and more. They also provide plenty of engagement features, including in-video CTAs, interactive ebook templates, and even live video classes.
Moving on to payments, LearnWorlds (like Kajabi) accepts Stripe and PayPal, though it also allows Checkout and PagSeguro for international customers.
While LearnWorlds delivers an excellent course experience, it doesn’t offer as many tools as Kajabi regarding marketing and selling your course.
It does offer a lite website editor, excellent affiliate marketing campaign support, and a basic blogging function.
However, it doesn’t offer email marketing automation (other than its Mailchimp and ConvertKit integration). You’ll also probably choose to purchase your own sales funnel automation.
Another feature that it lacks is community engagement and support. While there is a basic community forum, you can place students into cohorts, and there isn’t any habit tracking or accountability.
Who is This For?
LearnWorlds is an excellent choice for more advanced course creators that want to deliver an excellent experience and improve student engagement. It’s also a great option if you already have strong marketing and sales engine and just need a platform to plug into your existing machine.
Pros
- Excellent, feature rich platform for creating an engaging course
- Deliver your courses in a drip (by date or day)
- In-video CTAs, interactive ebooks, and
- Excellent affiliate marketing support
- Plenty of website templates that are easy to design
- Accepts payment through Stripe, PayPal, Checkout, and PagSeguro
- Extensive analytics for both business success (such as revenue) and student engagement (such as course completion rates)
Cons
- Lacks basic marketing functions such as email marketing automation
- Lacks advanced community features such as cohorts, habit tracking, and accountability
- The initial dashboard can be a bit confusing
- The course area only has one template that enables minimal editing
Pricing
LearnWorlds pricing starts at $24 per month and you can test drive it with a 30-day satisfaction guarantee.
Ruzuku
Ruzuku is known for being a dead-simple Kajabi alternative, and it offers unlimited course creation and unlimited students at every level. So if ease of use is a top priority and you build a lot of courses or have a lot of students, it might be a great option. However, with its simplicity comes to some limitations.
First, it offers a website builder, though it isn’t as robust as Kajabi’s. For example, it offers just 14 color schemes you can edit (only 7 of which are mobile-friendly), and it doesn’t allow you to edit the HTML/CSS.
However, if all you want is a simple homepage that is already beautifully designed, it does the job.
As you move into the course creation area, you’ll notice a similar design. It offers just a single template and walks you through how to fill out the information. For example, you can add your lesson videos and activity (such as a quiz) with the lesson. This rigid structure makes it difficult for beginners to mess up the course creation process, but it also limits customization.
The quizzes and polls Ruzuku offers (though only in their higher-priced plans) are also simplistic. Quizzes are multiple-choice only, and there isn’t an option to grade them.
This is an issue for coaches who want to track student comprehension, and it’s rather surprising as they offer plenty of other engagement features. For example, you can host live video lessons for a more interactive experience, and you can even record and upload webinars. They also offer a community forum, though it’s quite simple and doesn’t offer much more than basic Q&As.
When it comes to marketing your courses, Ruzuku offers a website builder and Mailchimp integrations, though that’s about it.
I should also mention that they do not enable Zapier integrations. This means that if they don’t have a marketing feature you need, you’ll have to do without it.
Specifically, here’s what the platform is lacking:
- Pipelines
- Landing pages
- Affiliate marketing program
As far as payments go, you can use Stripe or PayPal to accept payments, and they never charge a transaction fee.
One last unique feature of Ruzuku is that it offers daily content backups to ensure your content is never lost.
If you run into problems using Ruzuku, they primarily offer email support, though they promise to respond in four business hours, which is considerably faster than most other course platforms.
Who is This For?
Ruzuku is a good option for beginners who want the simplicity of a solution like Udemy, though with more course creation features. Ruzuku’s ideal customer isn’t too concerned about marketing or selling their course as it offers limited marketing features.
Pros
- Unlimited courses, data storage, students, and hosting
- Very simplistic and geared towards beginners
- Create a lite website (mostly just a homepage) with mobile responsive options
- Host live streams and webinars
- Quizzes and polls (for higher pricing tiers)
- Alerts and notifications for events/posting
- Simple analytics to track student progress
- No transaction fees for payments
Cons
- No Zapier integrations
- Minimal design customization (no CSS/HTML access and minimal customization options with the basic editor)
- While it offers a community forum, the community features are lacking overall
Pricing
Ruzuku offers a 14-day free trial and paid plans start at $74.75.
Which Kajabi Alternative is Best For You?
Ruzuku offers a 14-day free trial and paid plans start at $74.75.
Plenty of different course creation platforms have popped up in recent years, and each is ideal for different needs.
Here at upcoach, we found that there wasn’t a platform ideal for accountability, habit tracking, and building a community for students with similar goals.
Therefore, we built a solution.
So if you’re hosting cohort-based courses or interested in improving the experience and community of your existing course, you can sign up for upcoach risk-free as we offer a 14-day money-back guarantee.
