Kajabi Community Review 2026: Pros and Cons

If you’re thinking of selling coaching programs or cohort programs, a community isn’t just a feature. It’s the heartbeat of your learning business. It’s what keeps people accountable, engaged, and connected beyond just content.

Now, if you’ve been platform shopping, you’ve likely come across Kajabi Community. It’s part of a broad platform (Kajabi) built for selling digital products, courses, memberships, downloads, and more.

And while Kajabi is good at packaging and selling content, its community approach reflects what it is at its core: a product-first platform, not a community-first one.

The question here is, how does Kajabi’s community feature hold up when a community isn’t just a nice-to-have, but central to the experience you’re building?

In this post, we’ll have a closer look at Kajabi Community features. Plus, we’ll talk about Kajabi pricing, pros, and cons.

And if you’re looking for a community-first alternative built specifically for learning communities, I’ll also share a bit about how we approached this differently at GroupApp.

Kajabi Community Features

Here’s a full breakdown of what Kajabi offers under the “community” tab.

Channels

Kajabi Community is structured around Channels (formerly called Circles). Each Channel is a space where you choose between two formats, a feed, which works like a basic thread-style post layout, or a chat, which is more like a group message thread.

You can set Channels to be public (available to all access groups) or private (invite-only). The post editor inside each Channel allows for standard formatting and lets you upload media or files.

That said, Channels in Kajabi are limited to just posts and chats. There’s no way to layer in learning content, events, or other program elements directly into a Channel, so the experience stays pretty surface-level.

With community-first platforms like GroupApp, Channels go further, offering more structure and depth.

You’re not just creating discussion spaces, you’re creating focused spaces that function like mini-communities inside your larger one.

Each Channel can include discussions, courses, and events in one place, so you can run coaching cohorts programs, focused groups, or program-specific spaces without sending members off to separate tabs or tools.

It’s more integrated, more flexible, and ultimately, offers more value for you and your members.

Sign up to test GroupApp Channels for free, just click here!

Meetups

Kajabi Community includes a feature called Meetups, which is essentially their version of events. You can use it to schedule virtual or in-person sessions with the basics like the title, date, time, and description.

They also offer a built-in Live Room, which lets you host sessions directly on the platform. It’s similar to Zoom or Google Meet, just with fewer features and less flexibility.

Now, I get why some creators lean on this. If you’re running live coaching calls or sessions, it’s convenient. But here’s the tradeoff: you’re getting events, but not a full community infrastructure and control behind them.

You can’t manually manage RSVPs. You can’t cancel or confirm someone’s attendance yourself. And if you want to charge for an event, you can’t lock it inside the community feature. Instead, you’ll need to create a separate product in the main Kajabi platform and send people out of the flow to access it.

This is where the difference between a product-first and a community-first platform really shows.

That’s not the case with GroupApp! With GroupApp, events are built into the community experience and even into Channels. You can run paid or free events, control RSVPs, and keep everything in one space where your members already engage. This helps to gain community-led growth.

And it’s not just theory, community builders like Richie Soares have already used this setup to run their Homeschool Moms Virtual Summits and host over 2,200 attendees.

Get started with GroupApp for free

Challenges & Gamification

Challenges and Gamification are fairly new to the Kajabi community family.

Challenges let you create time-bound activities, like a 10-day fitness sprint, a social media detox, or even a recurring challenge. You can also go with the advanced option of adding a prize to your challenges.

Gamification adds points, leaderboards, badges, and titles based on actions members take inside the community.

These tools can be a nice layer to encourage participation, especially in the short term. But features like these aren’t what should make or break your decision when choosing a platform.

They’re add-ons, not foundations.

If the core community structure isn’t strong, if people don’t know where to go, what to do, or how to stay plugged in, no amount of badges or challenges will fix that.

Courses Integration with Community

Kajabi gives you the option to link a community to your course, but not the other way around. In other words, you can add a community to a course, but you can’t embed your courses inside the community experience. That means no separate tab for courses.

That creates a gap. Members inside your community can’t easily browse your course range, discover new programs, or enroll in additional programs without jumping out and navigating through the rest of the products they have access to (if any). You’re essentially losing cross-sell opportunities right inside your most engaged space.

Kajabi also allows you to embed a Channel (not the full community) inside a course, but only public Channels are supported. meaning it’s visible to everyone in that community space. You can’t embed a private or invite-only channel, which limits how you’d support closed cohorts or segmented groups inside a specific course.

On top of that, this embed option only works on the web, not on the Kajabi mobile app, where a good chunk of engagement usually happens.

Yes, you can adjust some branding for these channels, like changing fonts and colors and uploading a banner (no logo option), but it’s a limited win. If members can’t access the full community experience from inside a course, then what’s the real benefit of tweaking how an embedded channel looks?

This is one of those features that sounds more flexible than it is. It may check the box on paper, but in reality, the lack of control and cohesion makes it hard to build the kind of seamless, structured experience most creators actually want.

This is where GroupApp and Kajabi take two very different paths. In GroupApp, your courses live inside your community by default, because that’s where the learning happens. And you decide whether to sell them on their own or make them part of a community membership experience.

You can see how that looks in GroupApp for free. Click here.

Analytics

Kajabi refers to it as Community Insights, but at the end of the day, it’s their version of basic analytics for the community side. You can track these stats: event attendance, challenges joined, new members, active members, and messages sent. That’s pretty much the extent of it.

Since Kajabi doesn’t embed courses into the community experience, there’s no visibility into course progress from within the community itself. You’d need to switch to your main Kajabi analytics dashboard to check that data, and even then, it’s separated from what’s happening in your community.

For creators building learning communities, this disconnect matters. You’re not just looking for course stats or community stats; you need visibility into how members are progressing and engaging as part of a single experience, in a unified dashboard.

Customization & Branding

Kajabi Community gives you very limited control over branding. You can just change your brand colors and pick a font, but that’s about it. Surprisingly, you can’t even add your logo, which makes it hard to create a space that truly feels like yours.

There are a few other options, but they don’t offer any real value. You can say these are nice to have, but not game-changing:

• Custom reactions let you label emojis, but they’re inconsistently applied. For example, Challenge entries only support a thumbs-up, no matter what label you assign, which makes the feature more confusing than helpful.
  
• You can rename community features (like “Channels” or “Meetups”) to better fit your brand language.
  
• Custom pages let you embed a Kajabi page or external resource into your community sidebar. It’s useful for linking out to templates, webpages, or any content, but it’s still just an embedded link, not a native part of the platform.
  

If you’re looking to fully brand and structure your community experience, Kajabi just gives you surface-level control.

Admins & Moderation

Kajabi gives you two basic roles to manage your community: Admins and Moderators. Admins can create Channels, Meetups, and Challenges. Moderators can also create Meetups. In addition, they can delete posts and help welcome members.

There are no advanced permissions, and no ability to assign moderation by channel or access group and create custom labels. Moderators can’t flag posts, review content before it’s published, or manage access for members.

Community Notifications

Kajabi gives you and your members basic control over notifications, covering email, in-app, and mobile push alerts.

Members receive updates for key activities like Announcements, Meetups, Challenges, Live Room activities, and DMs. By default, all notifications are turned on when someone joins, but each member can adjust their preferences anytime.

Admins can manage the default settings at the community level, but members ultimately control what they want to receive.

It’s a simple setup that gives you just enough control to keep things manageable.

Other Kajabi Community Features

Here’s a quick look at a few remaining pieces of the Kajabi Community experience:

• Automation: Kajabi doesn’t offer any automation for community-specific actions. You can automate workflows across other Kajabi products, but not for things like joining Channels, RSVPing to Meetups, or tagging based on engagement. That means more manual work, especially as your community grows. No automation means more time spent on repetitive tasks instead of focusing on your members.
• Mobile App: Kajabi does have a dedicated mobile app for communities, available on both iOS and Android.
• Integrations: Kajabi’s integration library is small, with around 10 direct integrations. When it comes to community, there’s no way to track behavior or connect insights to external tools for segmentation, targeted email marketing, or CRM workflows.
• Support: There’s no dedicated support for community users. Everything runs through Kajabi’s main Help Center and chat. 24/7 live support is only available on their highest-tier plan.
  

Kajabi Community Monetization

Kajabi doesn’t let you monetize your community directly. Instead, you have to use the main Kajabi Offer feature, just like you would with a course or membership.

Here’s what you can do:

• Create offers (one-time, recurring, multi-pay, or free)
• Add upsells and coupon codes at checkout
• Show offers inside the community to promote your other Kajabi products
• Set the duration of the offer
• Create multiple offers for the same community (or any Kajabi product)

But, that’s about it.

You can’t sell access to specific Channels, Meetups, or Challenges. And you can’t unlock features based on member behavior or plan level. Everything runs through the main Offers system, which is great for selling products, not so much for community experiences. If you’re building a paid community or want to monetize engagement natively, that’s a gap.

When talking about monetization, the aspect of fees, taxes & processing is crucial. So, let’s get into that.

Kajabi doesn’t charge platform transaction fees, but you’re still paying.

Here’s what to expect:

• Processing fees through Stripe, PayPal, or Kajabi Payments (these vary by location and payment type)
• A 2% currency conversion fee if you’re outside the U.S. using Kajabi Payments
• Sales Tax usage fees on every successful transaction (even if tax isn’t collected)
• Chargeback/dispute fees if a customer files a payment dispute

These fees don’t show up on your product pricing page, but they do show up in your Payouts section in your account, and they add up, especially at scale.

Kajabi Community Pricing

Kajabi’s pricing isn’t built around the community; it’s built around its all-in-one product model. That means the Kajabi community app counts as a “Product” in your plan, right alongside courses, coaching, and digital downloads.

Here’s the breakdown of Kajabi’s pricing

• Kickstarter – $89/mo: 1 Product + 1 Community
• Basic – $149/mo: 3 Products
• Growth – $199/mo: 15 Products
• Pro – $399/mo: 100 Products

So, to be clear, if you just want to run a community, that $89/month plan gives you only one. You’ll need to upgrade to create communities. Kajabi also requires a credit card to start the trial, which creates friction right out of the gate. If it’s not the right fit, you’re already heading into refund territory.

Looking at Kajabi Community Through a Strategic Lens

You’ve seen the features. But when I zoom out and look at the bigger picture, a few deeper questions start to surface, ones that really matter when you’re building something meaningful and member-focused.

So let’s break down these questions.

Can it scale with you, without slowing you down?

Kajabi Community can support both small groups and larger member bases, but its tools don’t evolve much as you scale. Channels remain limited to simple chats or feeds. That means you cannot create mini-communities within a big one. You will have to upgrade to create more, even if you have to create a small community of only 10 people.

Is it program-led or community-led?

I think this one’s very clear that Kajabi Community is built around delivering content, not designing interaction. It reflects, you can say, Kajabi’s core DNA: product-first, not people-first.

The community sits alongside your digital products, not as the center of the experience. That works if you just want a comments section next to a course. But if you’re building something member-led, relational, or cohort-based, this setup gets in the way.

Is the onboarding experience built in?

Not really. Kajabi doesn’t offer any onboarding features like introduction prompts, welcome messages, automated guidance, or prompts to get members engaged early. Plus, there’s no automation in Kajabi that lets you create a limited onboarding experience. You’ll need to build that manually, or outside the platform.

Where Do Learning Resources Live?

There’s no dedicated hub in your community to host learning resources that members can easily access. Your courses and learning content live on the product side, not natively in your Kajabi community. That means if you have to sell digital downloads, you can have to do so in the main Kajabi app.

Is It Worth the Price, If Community Is What You’re Paying For?

Kajabi Community is only accessible through Kajabi’s product-based plans. So if you’re buying it for the community alone, you’re paying for a lot you may never use, including features designed for content sales, not member connection.

With Kajabi, you get a decent group feature, but not a true community platform. And you’ll hit limits faster than you’d expect if the community is supposed to be central to your business.

Kajabi Community Pros & Cons

Kajabi Community Pros	Kajabi Community Cons
✅ Part of Kajabi’s all-in-one platform	❌ Community is treated as a “Product”
✅ Comes with live rooms for events	❌ Channels are limited to just chat or feed
✅ Offers challenges and gamification features	❌ No onboarding flows or automation
✅ Add custom pages to the community	❌ Courses aren’t integrated into the community
✅ Dedicated mobile app access for communities (iOS & Android)	❌ No direct monetization for events or channels
	❌ Limited analytics for learning impact and engagement
	❌ Limited admin and moderation tools
	❌ No dedicated tab for learning resources
	❌ Minimal customization and no branding options
	❌ No pricing specific to community use

Kajabi Community: Worth It or Not?

If you’re selling static content or running a product-led business where community is secondary, Kajabi Community might hold up fine. It gives you just enough to keep people loosely connected while they move through your material.

But remember, it’s just built to support the broader Kajabi ecosystem, not to lead the experience. And that shows. You get a few solid tools: channels, meetups, and gamification.

But once you start trying to run real programs, things fall short, especially if you want structure, control, and flexibility all in one place.

And for what you’re paying, that trade-off stings. Because you’re not just investing money, you’re investing your time, your systems, and the way your members experience your work. A platform should support that, not box it in.

If you’re selling coaching or courses, the real value isn’t just in delivering products, it’s in delivering experiences. That means having the freedom to sell standalone offers and weave them into a connected, community-led journey.

That’s exactly why I built GroupApp, where your community is not an add-on.

GroupApp – The Best Kajabi Community Alternative

GroupApp is the group learning platform for learning communities. With GroupApp, you don’t have to patch things together or force your community into a product-driven platform. You get a space that’s built for learning, engagement, and monetization, all in one place.

GroupApp is perfect if you want to:

• Sell standalone products and tie them into a connected community experience
• Run live events, courses, and discussions inside the same space.
• Onboard members with intention and lead them through programs that scale
• Automate the busywork with workflows, so you can focus on leading and growing
• Make the most of every feature, without stacking on extra tools or hidden costs.

GroupApp is a platform built from the ground up to put your community, programs, and growth in sync. So instead of choosing between what’s possible and what’s practical, you get both.