Teachable vs Kajabi 2026: You’re Probably Overpaying for the Wrong Platform

In this Teachable vs Kajabi review, I give you a direct answer for every feature, show you the real math with all fees included, and tell you precisely who belongs on each platform.

What Is Kajabi?

Kajabi is an all-in-one digital business platform built for creators who want courses, coaching, community, email marketing, sales funnels, and payments under one login. 

It launched in 2009 when co-founder Kenny Rueter tried to sell a how-to video online and found the process so painful he built an entire platform to fix it. 

That origin story explains what Kajabi is today: a platform built by someone who needed to sell knowledge, not just host it.

Kajabi has processed over $6.5 billion in creator revenue since 2009. 

The pitch is consolidation. A creator currently paying for ConvertKit, Leadpages, a community platform, Calendly, and a course platform separately might find that Kajabi Growth at $199 per month annually saves real money when you run the full stack comparison.

What Is Teachable?

Teachable is a dedicated online course platform that launched in 2014 with a clear and narrow mission: give educators a clean, affordable platform to sell structured courses. 

No funnel builder, email marketing tool, or community product. 

Just a course platform that works well and does not get in your way.

That focus paid off because Teachable has hosted over 100,000 courses and paid creators over $1 billion in revenue. 

The platform is popular among language teachers, fitness coaches, finance educators, professional development trainers, and anyone whose primary product is a structured learning program.

The Teachable course builder is where the platform earns its reputation. 

Completion certificates, auto-graded quizzes, drip content scheduling, course compliance, and student progress tracking are all available on every paid plan. 

The course delivery tools are more developed than what Kajabi offers at the same price point.

Teachable vs Kajabi Pricing

Teachable Pricing Plans 2026

Teachable has four plans.

Plan	Monthly Price	Transaction Fee
Starter	$39/mo	7.5% on all sales
Builder	$89/mo	0%
Growth	$189/mo	0%
Sellers	Custom	0%

That Starter plan looks like a bargain, but if you sell a $200 course to 10 students per month, Teachable takes $150 in fees plus your $39 plan fee, which means you’ll pay $189 total.

The Builder plan at $89 with 0% fees would have cost you just $89.

The breakeven point between Starter and Builder sits at $681 in monthly revenue.

Above that number, Builder saves you more than the $50 price difference, and most course creators hit $681 in their first month of active selling.

A policy I consider creator-friendly is that once you exceed $10,000 in annual platform sales, the active student cap and imported student cap are automatically removed.

Kajabi Pricing Plans 2026

Kajabi offers three public plans.

Plan	Monthly	Annual
Basic	$179/mo	$143/mo
Growth	$249/mo	$199/mo
Pro	$499/mo	$399/mo

There used to be a Kickstarter plan at $89/month, but Kajabi removed it from the public pricing page.

The 5-product limit on Basic is the trap that catches most Kajabi Basic users.

A course counts as one product, and so does a coaching program, a community membership, a digital download, a podcast, and a newsletter.

If you’re running two courses, a coaching program, and a community, you’ve already used four of five slots before building a single lead magnet.

Now, Kajabi doesn’t advertise its transaction fees on the main pricing page.

That’s the first thing you need to know about Kajabi pricing.

Kajabi Payments charges 2.9% + $0.30 on Basic, 2.8% + $0.30 on Growth, and 2.7% + $0.30 on Pro.

It gets better.

There’s a 0.7% subscription surcharge on every single recurring payment. So if you run a membership at $97 per month, the real rate is 3.6% + $0.30, not 2.9%.

On 100 subscribers, that difference costs you $97 extra per month, and $1,164 over a year in fees that the pricing page never mentioned.

Kajabi Charges Extra If You Use Your Own Stripe

Using your own Stripe account with Kajabi instead of Kajabi Payments triggers an additional surcharge of 2% on Basic, 1% on Growth, and 0.5% on Pro.

PayPal is exempt.

The surcharge exists to push you toward Kajabi Payments, which puts Kajabi in control of your subscriber payment relationships.

And when you leave Kajabi, subscribers whose cards were stored in Kajabi Payments have to re-enter their payment information on the new platform (Kajabi’s own documentation confirms stored cards don’t carry over)

That means active subscriptions won’t renew unless you manually rebuild them elsewhere.

Creators describe this as a real source of churn during migration

“They introduced ‘Kajabi payments’ which is basically stripe but you’re kind of forced into it and if you leave Kajabi, you lose all your subscription customers.” Alex Welsh, Kajabi Trustpilot review, January 2026 

Teachable vs Kajabi Cost Calculator

Running group coaching, cohort courses, or selling training programs to corporate teams? GroupApp was built for exactly that with 0% transaction fees, group subscriptions, graded assignments, and certificates on every plan from $24/month.

Teachable vs Kajabi: Online Course Creation

Kajabi built a course tool alongside 11 others, while Teachable built a course tool and spent a decade perfecting it. 

The Teachable Course Builder

Teachable organizes courses into sections and lectures. Each lecture supports video, text, PDF, audio, code snippets, and quizzes.

The course interface is simple: a curriculum on the left, a preview on the right, and publishing with a single click.

Course compliance on Teachable is strong enough.

You can require students to complete each lesson before unlocking the next, and set minimum video watch percentages, so any student who clicks play but switches to another tab can’t mark the lesson as complete. 

Teachable even lets you set a minimum passing score for quizzes before allowing progression.

Completion certificates are also available on every Teachable paid plan, including Starter at $39 per month.

Students get a branded certificate the moment they finish the course, and they can share it on LinkedIn, download it as a PDF, or display it in a portfolio.

The certificate is a must-have for professional development programs. In fact, research from the University of Michigan and the University of Chicago found that paying for the certificate and the motivation to earn it led to a 10- to 12-percent rise in student engagement.

For your quizzes, Teachable offers auto-graded quizzes in multiple-choice and short-answer formats, available on every paid plan.

The gradebook tracks each student’s quiz performance individually, showing you who understands the material and who’s stuck on Module 4 quiz question 3.

Teachable’s AI course creation tool, available on all plans, generates a curriculum outline from a topic description.

It’s a starting scaffold, though, and not a finished curriculum.

But for creators who face the blank-page problem when structuring a new course, it compresses the planning phase.

The Growth plan provides free AI-generated subtitles and translations into multiple languages. 

You don’t have to pay $499 per month for automated transcription, which is a big advantage over Kajabi, where video transcriptions are locked to the Pro plan.

The Kajabi Course Builder

Kajabi organizes courses into modules, submodules, and lessons.

The curriculum builder is intuitive with drag-and-drop reordering and a visual hierarchy that shows the full course structure at a glance.

Video hosting is also native and unlimited on all plans.

The Kajabi AI course creation tool in Creator Studio generates outlines from topic prompts and helps with email copy, landing page text, and community post ideas.

The breadth of the AI tools in Kajabi is wider than Teachable’s, but their depth in any specific area isn’t necessarily deeper.

Cohort courses are a Growth and Pro feature on Kajabi.

On the Basic plan, you can only run self-paced courses, which becomes a problem for coaches who run structured cohort programs with shared start dates.

Moving from Basic to Growth costs an extra $70 per month on annual billing, just to unlock cohort delivery.

Video transcriptions and AI-powered translations into 30+ languages are included with the Pro plan at $499 per month.

So if video accessibility and multilingual content matter to your course library, get ready to pay $499 per month for the Kajabi course builder, which does what Teachable Growth does for $189 per month.

For streaming during class, Kajabi Live Rooms let you embed live sessions inside a course for up to 200 participants.

Students attend Q&A sessions and workshops inside the same platform they use to watch course content, so they don’t have to switch between Kajabi and Zoom. It’s a problem solved that would otherwise break learner immersion on most platforms.

Teachable vs Kajabi: Marketing Tools

This is where the two platforms stop competing and start existing in completely different categories.

Kajabi was built to market your programs, while Teachable was built to deliver them, and the difference isn’t subtle. 

Email Marketing

Kajabi includes a full email marketing system on all plans. Broadcasts with A/B testing, automated sequences with behavioral triggers, list segmentation by tags and custom fields, and a drag-and-drop editor with 19 templates.

When a student completes a module, Kajabi can automatically send an email offering your coaching program.

That product-event trigger is where the real power lives.

Most course platforms send welcome emails, but Kajabi sends the right email at the right moment in the student’s journey, based on what they just did inside your product.

Email marketing delivers an estimated $36–$42 for every $1 spent, among the highest ROI of any digital marketing channel. A platform with stronger behavioral email automation directly affects monthly revenue, not just open rates.

Source: Litmus, State of Email / The ROI of Email Marketing

Teachable includes built-in email marketing on the Builder and Growth plans.

The system handles broadcasts and basic automated sequences, but it doesn’t match Kajabi on behavioral triggers, A/B testing, or segmentation depth.

If email is your primary sales channel, you’ll want to connect an external platform through Zapier on the Teachable Growth plan.

On Teachable Starter, there’s no built-in email marketing at all.

You get abandoned cart emails, but not marketing broadcasts. For $39 per month, that gap makes sense. Plan accordingly.

Sales Funnels and Landing Pages

Kajabi has a funnel builder with Blueprint templates.

These are pre-built funnel structures for product launches, sales pages, webinar campaigns, and coaching applications.

All you need to do is select a Blueprint, and Kajabi generates the opt-in page, email sequence, sales page, and checkout offer in a connected flow with one click.

Teachable, on the other hand, has no funnel builder. 

Instead, it has landing pages through the school page builder that handle course sales pages and checkout pages well.

For creators who want a complete funnel with opt-in pages, nurture sequences, upsells, and downsells working together, Teachable requires external tools like ClickFunnels or Leadpages.

In comparison, Kajabi landing pages are unlimited on all plans, use a section-based builder, and include templates for hero sections, testimonial blocks, FAQ sections, and opt-in forms.

The design flexibility has limits, though, because you can’t freely position elements pixel by pixel.

But the speed-to-launch is fast for creators without design backgrounds.

Checkout Pages, Order Bumps, and Upsells

Both platforms handle checkout pages, order bumps, and upsells, but Kajabi’s Enhanced Checkout works like a page builder: you can change fonts and backgrounds and add 15+ block types, including videos and countdown timers.

Multiple pricing options sit within a single checkout block, such as one-time, subscription, and installment plans, all visible at once.

Teachable’s checkout handles coupons, upsells, order bumps, and bundles on all plans, including Starter.

The checkout is clean and converts well, and the Student referrals, abandoned cart emails, and global tax handling work on every paid plan.

For course-focused creators, the Teachable checkout covers the essential sales tools without extra complexity.

One specific Teachable checkout advantage is that Stripe and PayPal both work on all Teachable plans with no platform surcharge.

Kajabi charges an extra 0.5% to 2% for using your own Stripe account instead of Kajabi Payments. So, at $5,000 in monthly revenue on Basic, that surcharge costs $100 per month or $1,200 per year.

Teachable vs Kajabi: Payment Gateway and Processing

Payment processing is where the platforms make decisions that directly affect how much of your revenue you actually keep.

But neither platform is completely transparent about this in their marketing. 

Let’s fix that.

Teachable Payment Processing

Teachable uses teachable:pay as its native payment gateway.

• US credit and debit cards process at 2.9% + $0.30
• International cards cost 3.9% + $0.30
• US PayPal transactions cost 3.49% + $0.49
• International PayPal runs at 4.99% + $0.49

There’s also a $15 chargeback fee.

The optional BackOffice fee of 2% to 2.8% applies to creators who want Teachable to handle payout scheduling, contracts, and tax form generation for affiliates and students.

This, however, is optional, and most creators don’t need it.

Teachable offers daily payouts through teachable:pay and monthly payouts through the monthly payment gateway.

Daily payouts are a practical cash flow advantage for creators who need fast access to revenue, something Kajabi doesn’t offer on standard plans.

Kajabi Payment Processing

Kajabi Payments processes cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Afterpay, Klarna, and Cash App Pay.

The Buy Now Pay Later through Afterpay and Klarna is a notable feature for selling high-ticket programs. A student who cannot afford $997 upfront can pay through BNPL, and you receive the full amount minus the BNPL surcharge.

That BNPL surcharge on Kajabi is 6% + $0.30 per transaction. For a $997 course sold through Afterpay, Kajabi takes $60.42.

On a platform with 0% transaction fees and standard Stripe processing, the same sale costs $29.20. That $31.22 difference per BNPL sale adds up fast at scale.

Kajabi also handles automatic tax calculation, QuickBooks Online, Xero sync, and sales tax compliance.

For creators running a professional business with proper accounting, those integrations save meaningful admin time.

In comparison, Teachable handles US sales tax, global VAT, and GST natively on all plans.

Teachable vs Kajabi: Community Features

Community is a feature on Kajabi, and an afterthought on Teachable.

Teachable was never designed to be a community tool, but if you’re comparing the two for community use, the gap is significant enough to change your decision.

Teachable Community

Teachable includes a community on all paid plans.

The feature covers basic discussion boards where students can post and comment, while lesson comments let students ask questions directly on the lesson page they are watching.

The experience is mostly useful for course communities.

However, the Teachable community lacks gamification, live events within the community, access to groups for different membership tiers, or a social feed for media sharing.

For a course community where discussion is secondary, it gets the job done. 

But if community engagement is the primary product, Teachable can’t compete with Kajabi.

Kajabi Community

The Kajabi community includes threaded discussions, real-time group chat, challenges, gamification with points and leaderboards, live rooms for instant streaming, event scheduling with RSVP, and access groups for tiered membership experiences.

Access groups are the most powerful community feature. 

You can create different membership tiers and control exactly which content, discussions, and spaces each tier can see. 

For example, a free member can access basic discussions, while a premium member can unlock exclusive courses, private events, and 1-on-1 coaching.

Access control is automatically applied when a purchase completes.

The community customization limit is the main complaint. You can add a cover banner, pick a brand color, and toggle light or dark mode, and that’s it. 

What you can’t do is change the layout, apply a custom theme, or use custom fonts, so every Kajabi community ends up looking the same. 

Teachable vs Kajabi: Mobile App and Branded App

Both platforms have iOS and Android apps, and both apps give students access to courses, community, and notifications.

The gap, however, is in what creators get and what happens when your brand is on the line.

Kajabi Mobile App

Kajabi’s student app is available on iOS and Android at no extra cost on all plans.

Students access courses, join live events, participate in community discussions, and receive push notifications.

The app experience closely matches the desktop version, so mobile-first learners don’t feel like second-class students.

The Kajabi-branded mobile app is the feature that justifies Growth plan pricing for many creators.

On the Growth plan at $249 per month, a branded app is included, with a stated value of $199 per month.

The branded app means your program appears in the App Store and Google Play under your business name, not under Kajabi’s name.

For a $5,000 high-ticket coaching program, that App Store presence is a credibility signal that generic student apps cannot replicate.

Teachable Mobile App

Teachable offers iOS and Android student apps on all paid plans.

The apps include one feature that Kajabi’s app lacks, such as offline lesson downloads. 

For learners who consume content on planes, trains, or in areas with unreliable connections, this is a big advantage.

Still, Teachable doesn’t offer a white-labeled branded mobile app.

Students download the Teachable app, and your brand appears inside it.

Compared to Kajabi, that’s a massive gap for creators at the premium end of the market, where app store brand identity matters.

Teachable vs Kajabi: AI Tools

AI course creation tools are now standard across every platform in this category.

So the question is whether those tools save you real time or produce output you spend an hour rewriting.

Teachable AI Tools

Teachable’s AI course creation tool generates curriculum structures from a topic description on all paid plans.

It does one thing and does it at the right moment in your workflow: when you’re staring at a blank outline and need a starting structure.

The output is generic enough to edit quickly and specific enough to be useful.

Free AI-generated subtitles and translations are a Teachable Growth plan feature.

You get automated caption generation and translation without paying Kajabi’s $499/month for it.

For creators building multilingual course libraries or accessibility-focused programs, Teachable Growth at $189 per month beats Kajabi Pro at $499 per month on this specific feature.

Kajabi AI Tools

Kajabi’s AI tools are available in Creator Studio and on all plans.

The system generates course outlines from topic prompts, drafts email sequences, suggests landing page copy, and creates community post ideas.

You can use AI across email, courses, landing pages, and community from one place.

Video transcriptions and AI-powered translations into 30-plus languages are the most distinctive AI features Kajabi offers.

However, they’re locked to the Pro plan at $499 per month.

For most creators, paying $499 per month specifically for automated transcription doesn’t make financial sense when competing platforms include it at lower prices.

Teachable vs Kajabi: Integrations

Neither Kajabi nor Teachable is a wide-open integration marketplace.

Both have intentional limits that reflect deliberate product decisions.

Here’s what actually connects at each tier.

Teachable Integrations

Teachable allows 1 third-party integration on Starter, 3 on Builder, and 5 on Growth. 

The Growth plan at $189 per month unlocks Zapier, Webhooks, and Public API with 10,000 requests per month, enough for most creator business automation needs.

Native Teachable integrations include ConvertKit, Mailchimp, Drip, Infusionsoft, Circle, Sumo, and Google Analytics. 

Creators who want to connect Teachable to a CRM, advanced email platform, or custom internal tools are satisfied with the Growth plan’s Zapier connection.

Kajabi Integrations

Kajabi has 13 direct native integrations: Mailchimp, AWeber, Segment, Stripe, PayPal, ConvertKit, Drip, ActiveCampaign, Google Analytics, Meta Pixel, Zapier, Zoom, and QuickBooks/Xero.

The number sounds reasonable until you compare it to platforms at similar price points.

WordPress, for instance, has 60,000 plugins, while Kajabi has 13 direct connections.

Webhooks and API access are Growth and Pro features on Kajabi.

The API scope is limited because you can’t programmatically create or modify courses, pricing, or checkout flows. 

Therefore, the Kajabi API is just a starting point for creators who need full API access for custom integrations.

Integrations Verdict: Kajabi Wins

13 direct native integrations versus Teachable’s 5 on Growth. Kajabi connects to more tools without Zapier middleware. Teachable’s API on the Growth plan is flexible, but most creators never use the API directly. For the majority of creator businesses, Kajabi’s native integration set covers more of the stack without additional tools.

Teachable vs Kajabi: Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate programs turn your happiest students into your marketing team. Done well, they generate sales at zero upfront cost. 

Both platforms have affiliate tools, but they gate them at different plan levels.

Teachable Affiliate Program

Teachable has an integrated affiliate program on the Builder and Growth plans.

You create affiliate links, set commission rates, and Teachable automatically tracks referrals and conversions.

Affiliates even get a dashboard showing their clicks, conversions, and earnings.

Student referrals work on all Teachable plans, including Starter, so you can reward existing students for bringing in new students.

If you want affiliate marketing as a growth strategy from the start, Teachable Builder at $89 per month lets you unlock affiliates.

Kajabi, however, makes you upgrade to Growth at $249 per month for the same capability.

Kajabi Affiliate Program

Kajabi affiliate programs are available as Growth and Pro features.

On the Basic plan at $179 per month, you can’t run an affiliate program.

The affiliate dashboard tracks commission totals per affiliate, and payouts are manual. While Kajabi calculates commissions, it doesn’t automate the actual payment transfer.

The affiliate tracking in Kajabi connects to your funnel and email automation.

An affiliate-generated purchase can trigger a specific onboarding sequence different from your direct-purchase sequence.

For most creators, it is more depth than they need.

Teachable vs Kajabi: Customer Support

Your course platform could break at the worst possible time, and the platform’s response matters a lot in those situations.

Teachable Customer Support

Teachable offers email support on all paid plans. 

Real-time live chat support unlocks on the Builder plan at $89 per month, while the Sellers plan gets priority support with SLA-based response guarantees and a dedicated account manager. 

Teachable University and the Launch Accelerator program are available on all plans as self-service resources.

The platform even has a 4.0 out of 5 rating on G2, based on thousands of reviews. 

Support response times on Builder and Growth are generally fast for common issues, but billing disputes and platform-wide errors take longer. 

The 30-day money-back guarantee means you can test the actual support quality before you are fully committed.

Kajabi Customer Support

Kajabi offers 24/7 live chat support on all paid plans. However, there’s no phone support on any plan.

The Kajabi Help Center and Kajabi University are thorough and well-maintained, and Pro plan users get priority routing with faster resolution times for critical issues.

Kajabi holds a 3.5 out of 5 on Trustpilot from over 2,300 reviews as of June 2026. 

The most serious complaints cluster around billing disputes after free trial periods, technical failures during product launches, and support agents who cite policy rather than resolve problems. 

The 24/7 availability may be real, but the resolution quality is inconsistent.

Customer Support Winner

Kajabi wins on availability, with 24/7 live chat, versus Teachable’s chat, which starts at the Builder tier. Teachable wins on resolution quality in aggregate review scores. If you need support available at 3 am on a Sunday, Kajabi. If you need support that actually solves the problem when you get a human, Teachable edges ahead in the data.

Teachable vs Kajabi Pros and Cons

Teachable Pros and Cons

Kajabi Pros and Cons

GroupApp: The Best Teachable vs Kajabi Alternative for Group Programs

Here’s a scenario neither Kajabi vs Teachable runs well: you run a group coaching program or cohort course and you want to sell access to corporate clients.

One company wants to buy access for 20 employees, so the sale needs one invoice, one account manager, and zero per-seat transactions.

Kajabi and Teachable both process individual purchases.

That means every team member buys separately, so you have to chase 20 individual sign-ups or build a manual workaround outside the platform.

That’s the difference between a deal that closes in one call and one that dies in procurement.

GroupApp is the group learning platform built specifically for coaching programs, cohort courses, and structured training businesses that sell to teams and organizations.

Every lesson has its own dedicated discussion channel so students talk about Module 3 inside Module 3, and not in a general feed that combines everything.

Enforce Completion locks each module until a student finishes the previous one.

Graded assignments with instructor review, automatic certificate issuance, and individual student progress tracking (not just aggregate completion rates) also come on every GroupApp plan.

The GroupApp feature that closes corporate clients is group subscriptions.

One manager purchases access for an entire team, the team gets in immediately, and the manager controls the seats.

You collect one payment and never touch the billing again.

Now compare that to Kajabi, where every team member pays individually, and to Teachable, where per-seat billing becomes the ceiling on what you can charge an organization.

Group subscriptions remove that ceiling entirely.

A team of 25 at $97 per seat is 25 individual transactions, while a group subscription for the same team is priced at program value (what the outcome is worth to the organization), and not at headcount arithmetic.

Feature	Teachable Builder	Kajabi Growth	GroupApp Launch
Monthly price	$89/mo	$249/mo	$24/mo
Annual price	N/A	$199/mo	$18/mo
Transaction fees	0%	2.8% + $0.30	0%
Completion certificates	Yes (all plans)	Yes (all plans)	Yes (all plans)
Graded assignments	Basic	No	Yes (all plans)
Individual student tracking	Yes	Aggregate only	Per student
Group subscriptions for teams	No	No	Yes (all plans)
Lesson discussion channels	No	No	Yes (all plans)
Cohort courses	Yes	Growth+ only	Yes (all plans)

Teachable vs Kajabi: The Final Verdict

Choose Teachable if:

• Your primary product is a structured online course with quizzes, completion certificates, and student progress tracking
• You are in the early revenue stage and want a platform under $100 per month to test your offer before committing to Kajabi pricing
• You already have a preferred email marketing platform (ConvertKit, ActiveCampaign, Mailchimp) and do not want to switch
• Your students need offline lesson access for mobile learning without consistent internet connection
• You want AI-generated subtitles and translations without paying $499 per month for them
• You sell over $10,000 per year on the platform and want student cap restrictions removed automatically
• Affiliate marketing is a core growth strategy from the start and you want it at $89 per month instead of $249

Choose Kajabi if:

• You run multiple digital product types simultaneously: courses, coaching, memberships, newsletters, and digital downloads
• You currently pay for five or more separate tools and the consolidation into one platform would save you money or time
• Your coaching business needs native scheduling, video conferencing, and session management without external tools
• A branded mobile app in the App Store under your business name would improve your premium program positioning
• You need Blueprint funnel templates for product launch campaigns and want email automation connected to funnel behavior
• Your email marketing requires behavioral triggers that fire based on what students do inside your course and community

Choose GroupApp If:

• You run structured group programs with cohorts moving through content together
• You need lesson-level discussion built into each module, not a separate tab
• Cohort segmentation, group subscriptions, and B2B team sales are part of your model
• You want workflow automation built for program delivery, not just marketing
• You need automatic re-engagement when students go quiet
• You want 0% transaction fees starting at $24/month

Related topics:

• Kajabi vs ClickFunnels 2026
• Teachable vs Thinkific 2026
• Best Kajabi Alternatives 2026
• Thinkific vs Kajabi 2026

• LinkedIn