Circle vs Kajabi
An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.
The short answer
Editorial assessmentKajabi compared with Circle
Circle is a community platform with courses and events attached. Kajabi is a creator business platform with a community attached. Circle costs $89 to Kajabi's $179 and has the better discussion product, better space permissions, and a cleaner member experience, but charges a 2 percent transaction fee on Professional and sells email as a separate add on. If community is the product, Circle. If community is retention for a course and coaching business, Kajabi, and the included branded app closes a real gap.
Choose Circle if
Creators, coaches, and small businesses running a paid membership or cohort program who want courses, events, discussion, and billing in one branded product on their own domain, and who are doing enough revenue that a 1 to 2 percent platform fee is a rounding error rather than a tax.
Choose Kajabi if
Coaches, course sellers, and creator businesses already doing meaningful revenue who want courses, email marketing, a website, checkout, and a community on one bill under one brand, and who value the branded mobile app included at every tier more than they value best in class discussion software.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Circle | Kajabi |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Community | Community |
| Starting price | $89 per month (Professional) (14 days trial) | $179 per month (Basic), or $143 per month billed annually (free trial) |
| Pricing model | Flat monthly platform subscription with unlimited members, plus a percentage transaction fee on every paid membership, course, or event sold through Circle checkout, plus paid add-ons for email marketing. | Flat monthly subscription across three published tiers with limits on products, contacts, admins, websites, and communities, plus transaction fees through Kajabi Payments or a surcharge for using your own gateway. |
| Free plan | No | No |
| Free trial | 14 days on Professional and Business | One month free, self serve, no sales call |
| Best for | Creators, coaches, and small businesses running a paid membership or cohort program who want courses, events, discussion, and billing in one branded product on their own domain, and who are doing enough revenue that a 1 to 2 percent platform fee is a rounding error rather than a tax. | Coaches, course sellers, and creator businesses already doing meaningful revenue who want courses, email marketing, a website, checkout, and a community on one bill under one brand, and who value the branded mobile app included at every tier more than they value best in class discussion software. |
| Setup time | A working community in an afternoon. Signing up, creating spaces, connecting a custom domain, and wiring Stripe are all self-serve and take a few hours combined. Getting the content and the onboarding sequence right is the part that takes weeks. | A weekend for a working store and community, a few weeks for a polished one. The account, domain, first product, checkout, and a community channel can be live in a few hours; the time goes into page design, email sequences, and course content. |
| Learning curve | Moderate for the admin, low for members. The spaces model, permission layers, and paywall rules interact in ways that reward reading the docs before you build, and communities that improvise their structure usually rebuild it once. Members need no instruction. | Moderate to steep, because the platform is large. Products, offers, access groups, pipelines, and automations are five separate concepts you have to hold at once, and new users routinely mis-model entitlements on the first attempt. |
| Platforms | Web app, Native iOS app, Native Android app, Branded iOS and Android apps on Circle Plus, Custom domain hosting | Web, iOS and Android via the Kajabi app, Branded iOS and Android apps included on all plans |
| Compliance | GDPR, Payment processing handled through Stripe | GDPR, PCI DSS handled through Kajabi Payments and Stripe |
| Founded | 2019 | 2010 |
| Headquarters | Remote-first US company | Irvine, California, United States |
| Ownership | Venture-backed | Venture-backed and growth equity backed |
Strengths and limitations
Circle
Strengths
- The broadest feature set on a published price in this category: discussion, courses, events, live streaming, chat, payments, affiliates, a website builder, and native mobile apps all on the $89 tier.
- Unlimited members on every plan, so growth does not trigger a pricing cliff the way it does on Heartbeat or Bettermode.
- Custom domain and a white-labeled member experience from the entry tier, which is the thing free chat platforms fundamentally cannot offer.
- Native iOS and Android apps with push notifications keep engagement materially higher than a browser-only forum.
Limitations
- No free plan at all, which makes Circle a poor fit for a small free community and a hard sell for anyone testing whether a community is worth running.
- The transaction fee stacks on Stripe and is charged on gross, so a low-margin membership business pays Circle more than the subscription costs and cannot reach the 0.5 percent rate without a sales conversation.
- Branded mobile apps and custom SSO are both locked behind the unpriced Circle Plus tier, so the two things a maturing community most wants next are exactly the two things with no published cost.
- Admin and moderator seat caps of 3 and 10 on Professional are tight for a volunteer-moderated community and force an upgrade for reasons unrelated to features.
Kajabi
Strengths
- Genuinely all in one. Courses, coaching, memberships, podcasts, community, website, blog, funnels, email, affiliates, and checkout in one account with one member record, which removes an entire class of integration work.
- Kajabi Payments is close to standard card processing rather than a platform tax, so the effective fee rate falls as revenue rises instead of scaling with it.
- A branded mobile app in the App Store and Google Play is included on every tier, including the $179 entry plan, which no other product in this category does at a published price.
- Custom domain and full white labelling on every plan, so members never see a vendor's brand anywhere in the experience.
Limitations
- The community product is competent but shallow next to a dedicated platform. Space level permissioning, member directory depth, and discussion culture all trail Circle, and the forum experience trails Discourse badly.
- No public search indexed community content. Kajabi communities are gated member areas, so discussion contributes nothing to acquisition and the blog is your only organic surface.
- Expensive floor. $179 a month, or $143 annually, before you have a single member, with no free plan and no lower tier.
- Basic is tighter than it looks: five products, two admins, one community, and 2,500 contacts. Many buyers discover the real price is Growth at $249.
Pricing compared
Circle
Flat monthly platform subscription with unlimited members, plus a percentage transaction fee on every paid membership, course, or event sold through Circle checkout, plus paid add-ons for email marketing.
- Professional$89
- Business$199
- Circle PlusCustom
For a community that is genuinely a business, Circle is fairly priced and hard to assemble from parts. Courses, events, live streaming, native mobile apps, a custom domain, recurring billing, affiliates, and search over unlimited history at $89 a month would cost more than that in separate tools, and the tools would not share a member identity. For a community that is not yet a business, Circle is expensive in a way the sticker hides: $89 plus 2 percent plus Stripe plus $99 of Email Hub is a real monthly commitment for a group that could sit on a free Discourse instance or a Discord server. The cutoff is roughly whether the community produces revenue. Above that line Circle is good value, below it the fee structure works against you.
Kajabi
Flat monthly subscription across three published tiers with limits on products, contacts, admins, websites, and communities, plus transaction fees through Kajabi Payments or a surcharge for using your own gateway.
- Basic$179
- Growth$249
- Pro$499
Judged as a community platform in isolation, Kajabi is bad value: $179 a month for a discussion product that Circle beats at half the price and Skool beats at a twentieth. Judged as the whole stack, it is often the cheapest option on the page. A creator running courses, email marketing to 20,000 contacts, a website, a checkout, an affiliate program, and a community would spend more than $249 a month assembling that from Teachable, Kit, Webflow, and Circle, and would spend it across four vendors with four sets of member data. The fee structure also favours scale in a way its competitors do not: near raw card processing rather than a platform cut means a business doing $50,000 a month keeps far more here than on Patreon or Podia's entry plan. Buy Kajabi for the bundle, never for the community alone.
Editorial verdict on each
Circle
Category LeaderCircle is the safe default for a community that is actually a business. Nothing else on a published price puts discussion, courses, events, live streaming, payments, affiliates, a custom domain, and native mobile apps in one product, and the company behind it is large, profitable, and shipping. Buy it if you are charging members and want the whole membership experience under your own brand without stitching five tools together. Do not buy it for a free community, because there is no free plan and the value proposition collapses without revenue to justify it. And go into the pricing with clear eyes: the honest monthly cost is the $89 plus a percentage of everything you sell plus Email Hub, and the exit cost is a discussion archive that will not move anywhere useful. Those are acceptable terms for a real membership business and bad terms for an experiment.
Read the full Circle profileKajabi
Kajabi is the wrong purchase if you want a community and the right one if you want a business. The discussion product is decent, with channels, chat, challenges, leaderboards, and native meetups, but Circle is better at it for half the money and Skool is better at engagement for a twentieth. What justifies $179 a month is everything around it: courses, coaching, memberships, private podcasts, a website, funnels, email marketing to tens of thousands of contacts, an affiliate program, near raw card processing, and a branded mobile app included at every tier rather than sold as a $199 add on. The fee model rewards scale, dropping from about 7 percent of revenue all in at $5,000 a month to about 4 percent at $50,000, which is the opposite of Patreon. Buy it when you have stopped assembling tools and want one system with one member record. Do not buy it to host a free community, and do not expect the community to bring you anyone new, because none of it is indexed.
Read the full Kajabi profileCircle profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Kajabi last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.