Kajabi versus Teachable is really a question about what you're buying. Kajabi sells a course business in a box — email, funnels, landing pages, and the course itself, priced like the bundle it is. Teachable sells course delivery — a focused, cheaper-at-entry platform that assumes you'll bring your own marketing stack. Both are good at what they actually are; most bad purchases in this category come from buying one while expecting the other. We compared them the same way we compared the field in our roundup of the best online course platforms: total real cost, depth, and fit.
Full disclosure before we start: we make a competing product, and it appears — clearly marked — in one section near the end. Everything else is us adjudicating between two tools we don't make.
What Kajabi does best.
Kajabi's pitch is that a course business is more than a course, and the product backs it up. Email marketing with automations, landing pages, sales funnels ("pipelines" in Kajabi language), a website, podcasts, coaching products, and communities all live inside the one subscription. For a creator who would otherwise be wiring a course platform to an email tool to a landing-page builder to a funnel product, Kajabi's genuinely differentiating feature is the absence of duct tape: one login, one bill, and the email tool already knows who bought what.
It's priced like the bundle it replaces — entry starts at about $69 to $89 a month depending on promotions and billing cycle, and the tiers climb from there. The other headline: Kajabi doesn't charge transaction fees on your sales. You pay the subscription; your revenue is yours (minus payment processing, which everyone pays). That flat-cost model is a real comfort at higher revenue, and it's a big part of why established course businesses stay.
What Teachable does best.
Teachable is the focused option, and focus has real advantages. The course builder is straightforward, the student experience is clean and familiar — Teachable has hosted an enormous share of the internet's courses, so your buyers have almost certainly used it before — and the learning curve is gentler than Kajabi's, because there's simply less product to learn. Quizzes, certificates, coaching products, and digital downloads cover most delivery needs without ceremony.
Entry pricing is the other draw: Teachable's paid plans start meaningfully cheaper than Kajabi's — historically around the $29-to-$59-a-month range at the low end — and there has usually been a free or near-free tier to test on. The trade to understand is fees: Teachable has historically charged transaction fees on its entry plans, removing them on higher tiers — check current terms, because the plan structure has shifted more than once. Cheap entry plus a percentage of sales is a great deal at low volume and a quietly expensive one at high volume.
Total monthly cost of the real stack.
Sticker price is the wrong number; compare the whole stack you'll actually run. With Kajabi, the subscription is most of the story — email, landing pages, and funnels are inside, so the realistic add-ons are small. With Teachable, the honest budget includes what you bolt on: an email marketing tool, probably a landing-page or website builder, maybe a funnel product. Individually cheap, collectively those often carry a Teachable stack past Kajabi's price — and that's before entry-tier transaction fees take their percentage.
The crossover math is worth doing on paper. At low revenue and a small list, Teachable-plus-free-tier-email is clearly cheaper. As list size and sales grow, the bolt-ons climb their own pricing ladders and the fee line grows with revenue, while Kajabi's cost stays roughly flat. Where the lines cross depends on your numbers, but the direction is consistent: Teachable is cheaper to start, Kajabi is often cheaper to scale — the same one-bill-versus-many logic behind our flat-fee pricing, so we admit to finding Kajabi's model sensible.
Course-building depth.
For the course itself, the two are closer than either's marketing suggests. Both handle video lessons, drip schedules, quizzes, certificates, coaching, and communities in some form. Teachable's builder is the more approachable of the two, and its checkout and student experience are excellent defaults. Kajabi's course templates and product variety (courses, podcasts, memberships, coaching) give it more shapes to sell in, and its community and membership tooling is deeper.
Neither is a true LMS in the corporate sense — if you need SCORM, compliance tracking, or enterprise learning features, you're shopping in a different aisle (our Thinkific comparison covers a platform that leans further into course-structure flexibility). For selling knowledge to consumers, both clear the bar comfortably, and course depth alone should rarely decide this matchup.
Marketing tooling.
This is the widest gap, and it's by design. Kajabi's email is a real email marketing product — broadcasts, sequences, behavioral automations tied to purchases and course progress — and its funnels and landing pages are first-class citizens. You can run an entire launch inside Kajabi without leaving.
Teachable gives you the essentials — checkout, coupons, order bumps, affiliates, basic emails to students — and expects your marketing to live elsewhere, integrated through the usual connectors. That's not a flaw; it's the architecture. If you love your existing email tool, Teachable's approach is arguably better, because Kajabi's bundle is only a bargain if you actually use the bundle. If you're starting from nothing and dread wiring tools together, Kajabi's approach is worth its premium.
Payments and fees.
Kajabi: no platform transaction fees on any plan — subscription plus standard payment processing, full stop. Teachable: historically, transaction fees on entry plans that disappear on higher tiers, plus payment processing; it has also pushed its own payments system, which changes the fine print again. Check the current terms before you commit, and model the fee against your projected revenue rather than reading it as an abstract percentage. A fee that costs less than the subscription difference at your volume is fine; the mistake is not noticing when you've grown past that point.
Who each is really for.
Kajabi fits the creator for whom courses are the business: an audience to email, launches to run, several products to sell, and a preference for one system over five integrations. Its price is only high if you ignore what it replaces. Teachable fits the expert with a course to sell and either a marketing stack already in place or no need for one yet: the teacher, consultant, or author testing whether the course has legs before committing to platform-sized spend.
The honest failure modes run in both directions. People overbuy Kajabi and pay bundle prices while using it as a video host. People underbuy Teachable and end up re-assembling Kajabi out of subscriptions, with none of the pieces talking to each other. Decide which failure you're more likely to commit, and buy against it. If neither shape quite fits, the middle of the market exists too — Podia plays the simpler-and-cheaper bundle role — and there's a third architecture, which brings us to us.
The third option.
Disclosure: Mewayz is our product.
Mewayz approaches the same problem from a wider angle: instead of a course platform that added marketing (Kajabi) or one that stayed focused (Teachable), it's an all-in-one business platform — 150+ modules covering courses, email marketing, a website builder, a store, CRM, and bookings — for one flat fee, with no transaction fees on top. The LMS module on paid tiers handles course delivery, and the free plan already includes the store, website builder, and link in bio page, so you can build the audience-facing pieces before you pay anything.
The honest trade-off: Kajabi's funnels and Teachable's student experience are more specialized than our equivalents, because a decade of single-category focus buys polish. Where Mewayz wins is breadth per dollar — if your course sits inside a wider business with clients, invoices, or bookings, one flat fee replaces the whole stack rather than just the marketing corner of it. The side-by-sides are at Mewayz vs Kajabi and Mewayz vs Teachable, and you can start free and see whether the wider platform fits before the LMS tier costs you anything.
FAQ
Is Kajabi better than Teachable?
For running a whole course business — email, funnels, landing pages, delivery — in one place, yes. For hosting and selling a course at the lowest entry cost with the gentlest learning curve, Teachable is the better fit. They're different products more than they are competitors on the same axis.
Why is Kajabi so expensive?
Because it's priced as a bundle. Kajabi's entry tier costs about what a course platform plus an email tool plus a landing-page builder would cost separately. If you use the bundle, the price is reasonable; if you only need course hosting, you're overpaying.
Does Teachable take a percentage of sales?
It has historically charged transaction fees on its entry plans, removing them on higher tiers — and the plan structure has changed more than once, so check current terms. Kajabi charges no platform transaction fees on any plan; both leave standard payment-processing costs.
Can I start on Teachable and move to Kajabi later?
Yes, and it's a common path. Course content ports with manual effort, but students, purchase history, and email automations are the sticky parts — migrating them is the real cost of switching, so the longer you wait, the heavier the move.
Do I need Kajabi if I already have an email marketing tool?
Probably not for the email alone. Kajabi's bundle is a bargain only if it replaces subscriptions you'd otherwise pay for. If your marketing stack already works, Teachable plus your existing tools — or a flat-fee platform that includes both — is usually the saner spend.
The bottom line: buy Kajabi when courses are the business and you want the machine assembled; buy Teachable when the course is the product and you'll assemble the rest yourself, watching for the fee line as you grow. And when the course is one piece of a bigger operation, price the whole stack — that's the comparison where one flat fee tends to look best, which is exactly why we built it that way.