Kajabi vs Patreon
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
Both sides assessedKajabi compared with Patreon
Patreon costs nothing to start and then takes 10 percent of everything plus processing, which at $50,000 a month is $6,750 or more against Kajabi's roughly $2,149 all in. Patreon brings discovery and an installed mobile app base that Kajabi cannot match; Kajabi brings courses, funnels, email marketing, a custom domain, a branded app, and near raw card processing. Start on Patreon, move to Kajabi once the fee exceeds the subscription, which happens around $2,500 a month in revenue.
Patreon compared with Kajabi
Not close on cost or capability. Kajabi at $179 a month takes near raw card processing rather than a platform cut, and includes courses, funnels, email marketing to 25,000 contacts, a website, and a branded mobile app. Patreon takes 10 percent and gives you a page. Kajabi becomes cheaper above roughly $2,500 a month in revenue and does far more. Patreon's only remaining advantage at that point is discovery.
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.
Choose Patreon if
Individual creators, podcasters, musicians, artists, and video makers who want to start earning from an audience today with zero fixed cost and zero setup, who value Patreon's installed app base and discovery more than owning the domain, and whose community needs are chats and comments rather than a structured forum.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Kajabi | Patreon |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Community | Community |
| Starting price | $179 per month (Basic), or $143 per month billed annually (free trial) | $0 to start, then 10 percent of earnings plus processing (free plan available) |
| Pricing model | 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. | No subscription. Patreon charges a percentage of creator earnings, plus payment processing, payout, and currency conversion fees, plus Apple's commission on in app iOS purchases. |
| Free plan | No | Free to create a page, publish, and build an audience. Fees apply only to earnings, so a creator with no paying members pays nothing. |
| Free trial | One month free, self serve, no sales call | Not applicable; the platform is free until you earn |
| Best for | 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. | Individual creators, podcasters, musicians, artists, and video makers who want to start earning from an audience today with zero fixed cost and zero setup, who value Patreon's installed app base and discovery more than owning the domain, and whose community needs are chats and comments rather than a structured forum. |
| Setup time | 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. | Twenty minutes to a live page taking money. Patreon is by an enormous margin the fastest product in this category to get from nothing to a first paying member, and that speed is a genuine part of what the 10 percent buys. |
| Learning curve | 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. | Very low. Tiers, posts, and chats are the only concepts. There is no domain to configure, no entitlement matrix to model, and no payment gateway to connect. |
| Platforms | Web, iOS and Android via the Kajabi app, Branded iOS and Android apps included on all plans | Web at patreon.com, iOS app, Android app, Private podcast feeds in any podcast app |
| Compliance | GDPR, PCI DSS handled through Kajabi Payments and Stripe | GDPR, PCI DSS handled by Patreon as merchant of record, Sales tax and VAT handled by Patreon |
| Founded | 2010 | 2013 |
| Headquarters | Irvine, California, United States | San Francisco, California, United States |
| Ownership | Venture-backed and growth equity backed | Venture-backed, privately held |
Strengths and limitations
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.
Patreon
Strengths
- Zero fixed cost. No subscription, no trial clock, and no bill until members pay you, which no other product in this category offers.
- The largest installed mobile app base in creator memberships, with millions of people who already have Patreon accounts and saved payment details, which removes real checkout friction.
- Genuine discovery. Patreon's directory, recommendations, and automated growth tools can bring you members you did not already have, which nothing else here does at all.
- Broad publishing for free: native video hosting, livestreaming, private podcast feeds with Spotify integration, email newsletters, and a digital shop.
Limitations
- Ten percent forever, on top of processing, payout, and currency conversion, with an effective rate of 13 to 20 percent depending on average pledge size. At scale this is the most expensive model in the category by a wide margin.
- Apple takes 30 percent of new memberships bought in the iOS app, and creators outside the United States cannot opt out; the workaround raises prices for iOS members by roughly 43 percent.
- No custom domain, no white labelling, and no way to remove Patreon's brand. Your community lives at patreon.com and looks like Patreon.
- The community layer is chats, comments, and DMs. There is no forum, no spaces with independent permissions, no useful search across history, and no way to build a knowledge base.
Pricing compared
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.
Patreon
No subscription. Patreon charges a percentage of creator earnings, plus payment processing, payout, and currency conversion fees, plus Apple's commission on in app iOS purchases.
- Standard (all new creators)10 percent
- Legacy Lite5 percent
- Legacy Pro8 percent
- Legacy PremiumApproximately 11 to 12 percent
Patreon is the cheapest option in this category up to roughly $1,000 a month in earnings and the most expensive one above roughly $5,000. Below the threshold, paying nothing until money arrives is genuinely valuable, and no subscription platform can match a zero fixed cost start when you do not know whether anyone will pay. Above it, the arithmetic becomes brutal: a page earning $50,000 a month hands over between $6,750 and $9,450 depending on pledge size, where Podia would charge about $1,900 and throw in a website, courses, and a real community. What you buy with that money is not software, because Patreon's community tooling is worse than everything else here. What you buy is discovery, an installed mobile app base with saved payment details, and the fact that setup takes twenty minutes and requires no decisions. That is worth 10 percent when you are starting and worth very little once you have an audience that would follow you anywhere.
Editorial verdict on each
Kajabi
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 profilePatreon
Patreon is the right first move and the wrong long term home. Nothing else lets you go from no infrastructure to a paying audience in twenty minutes at zero fixed cost, with native video, livestreams, private podcast feeds, an email list you can export, automatic Discord role granting, and an app that millions of potential supporters already have installed with a card on file. For a creator who does not yet know whether anyone will pay, that combination is worth 10 percent and there is no honest alternative. The problem is that the 10 percent never stops, processing pushes the effective rate to between 13 and 20 percent, Apple takes 30 percent of iOS signups with no opt out outside the United States, and the community layer is chats and comments rather than anything you could call a platform. At $50,000 a month you are paying Patreon between $6,750 and $9,450 while Podia would charge about $1,900 and include a website, courses, and a better community. Start here, build an email list off platform from day one, and treat the migration to Memberful, Podia, or Circle as a question of when rather than whether.
Read the full Patreon profileKajabi profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Patreon last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.