Kajabi vs Teachable
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 Teachable
Teachable is much cheaper at $39 to $189 and gets you a community from the Builder plan, but its community is a quiet forum bolted onto a course platform, and student caps apply until you pass $10,000 in platform sales. Kajabi costs more and delivers a materially larger business system. Teachable for a first course; Kajabi once the course is a company.
Teachable compared with Kajabi
Kajabi at $179 includes email marketing, funnels, affiliates, a website builder, and a stronger community with challenges and leaderboards. Teachable at $89 does the course and the checkout well and leaves the marketing to you. Both include branded apps. If you would otherwise buy Kit or Mailchimp anyway, the real gap narrows to about $60 a month, and Kajabi's community is clearly better.
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 Teachable if
Individual creators and very small businesses launching a first or second paid course who want a branded school on their own domain with branded mobile apps included, at the lowest credible monthly price, and who need a discussion area for students rather than a community as the product itself.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Kajabi | Teachable |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Community | Community |
| Starting price | $179 per month (Basic), or $143 per month billed annually (free trial) | $39 per month (Starter), or $29 per month billed annually (7 days trial) |
| 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. | Flat monthly subscription across three published tiers plus a custom tier, with caps on products, admins, active students, and imported students, and a transaction fee that applies only on the entry plan. |
| Free plan | No | No |
| Free trial | One month free, self serve, no sales call | 7 days, plus a 30 day guarantee |
| 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 and very small businesses launching a first or second paid course who want a branded school on their own domain with branded mobile apps included, at the lowest credible monthly price, and who need a discussion area for students rather than a community as the product itself. |
| 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. | Hours, not days. Teachable is the fastest platform in this category to get from signup to a live sales page, which is exactly why it remains the standard first course recommendation. |
| 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. | Low. Products, sections, lectures, and pricing plans are the only concepts, and the community adds two more (spaces and roles). There is no funnel or automation model to learn because there is no funnel builder. |
| Platforms | Web, iOS and Android via the Kajabi app, Branded iOS and Android apps included on all plans | Web, Branded iOS and Android apps included on every plan |
| Compliance | GDPR, PCI DSS handled through Kajabi Payments and Stripe | GDPR, PCI DSS handled through teachable:pay and its processors |
| Founded | 2010 | 2013 |
| Headquarters | Irvine, California, United States | New York, New York, United States |
| Ownership | Venture-backed and growth equity backed | Owned by Hotmart, a Brazilian creator commerce company |
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.
Teachable
Strengths
- Branded iOS and Android apps included on every plan including the $39 entry tier, which no other course or community platform matches at that price.
- Zero platform transaction fee on Builder and above with teachable:pay, so the effective cost falls to card processing plus a flat subscription as revenue grows.
- Custom domain on every paid plan with a genuinely branded member experience.
- The simplest course builder in the category, which is why it remains the usual recommendation for a first course.
Limitations
- The community is the weakest of any product in this category that charges for one: no leaderboards, no gamification, no serious events layer, no chat, and limited discovery within the discussion itself.
- Starter at $39 has no community at all and takes 7.5 percent of every sale, which makes it misleading as a headline price.
- One admin user on both Starter and Builder. The second team member costs $100 a month more.
- Imported student caps of 5, 50, and 1,000 make bringing an existing audience onto a cheap plan effectively impossible.
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.
Teachable
Flat monthly subscription across three published tiers plus a custom tier, with caps on products, admins, active students, and imported students, and a transaction fee that applies only on the entry plan.
- Starter$39
- Builder$89
- Growth$189
- CustomCustom
Builder at $89 a month with a 0 percent platform fee, a custom domain, branded iOS and Android apps, and a community is one of the best value packages in this category, and at high revenue Teachable is cheaper than almost everything else here because it takes no cut at all above Starter. The value collapses in two places. Starter at $39 is a trap for anyone with real sales, since 7.5 percent on $5,000 costs more than four Builder subscriptions and it has no community anyway. And the single admin seat on both Starter and Builder means a two person team pays $189, at which point Kajabi's much larger bundle is only slightly more. The community you get for the money is functional rather than good: no gamification, no real events layer, no chat. Judged as a course platform with a student forum, this is excellent value. Judged as a community platform, you are paying for something else and getting the forum as a bonus.
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 profileTeachable
Teachable is the cheapest credible way to run a branded course business, and its community is a fair bonus rather than a reason to buy. Builder at $89 a month, or $69 annually, gets you a custom domain, branded iOS and Android apps, ten products, coaching, an affiliate program, a discussion forum, and a 0 percent platform fee, which at $50,000 a month in revenue makes it one of the cheapest platforms in this category on total cost. The Starter plan should be treated as a demo rather than a plan, because 7.5 percent on real sales costs more than upgrading and it has no community anyway. The genuine reservations are the single admin seat below $189, the very tight imported student caps that punish anyone bringing an existing audience, the absence of any email marketing, and a community product that has barely moved in three years and is comfortably beaten by Circle, Skool, and Heartbeat. Buy Teachable for the course, the checkout, and the branded app. Do not buy it because you want people to talk.
Read the full Teachable profileKajabi profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Teachable last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.