Kajabi vs Kartra 2021 Review

Both Kajabi and Kartra are great tools and you can use them to replace a number of tools for online marketing and use these instead. Without knowing the full details of how these products compare to each other, it’s difficult to say which product is most suited for you.

Here’s the most comprehensive review of the two tools that you must go through to understand which is better in Kartra vs Kajabi.

We’re going to go into the details of each and every feature in the two platforms and how these might help you in running an online business. Based on these reviews, you’ll know which one to choose.

At the end of the article you will have a clear-cut idea regarding which of the two platforms is going to work best for you.

Kajabi vs Katra

The two platforms are extremely different, Kajabi is a course creation and selling platform that offers tools to build a website and offer marketing tools. Kartra is a marketing platform that gives you space to host and deliver content for courses and for memberships.

What I like about Kajabi vs Kartra?

It’s easy to use
You get to host unlimited videos and content
Supports over 10 different themes for the course player.
Has an iOS and android app
Offers engagement tools like quizzes and community management.
Create a full site or blog
Conduct webinars on the platform
Has a visual sales pipeline building tool
Offers 24/7 live chat support

What I like about Kartra vs Kajabi?

There are over 200 pre built landing page templates to pick from
Has a full fledged checkout page builder
There are a number of email marketing and automation tools at play
POwerful video marketing tools
Handles EU vat payment
Inbuilt scheduling system. Helpdesk present.

Let’s take a better look into the two tools to find out whether Kajabi or Kartra is a better solution for online business. This is a good comparison and you need to read it until the end to find the truth.

What are Kajabi and Kartra?

Kajabi and Kartra are fully cloud-based tools that let you run your whole business from one place.

The idea to capture is to get you to use all the different tools to run an online course so you don’t need different solutions.

The platforms let you create and deliver digital products courses and memberships. You can create marketing funnels and run email campaigns.

We should get inside the details in more sections but here are the further details on Kajabi vs Kartra.

Kajabi is foremost an online course creation platform. The primary audience consists of coaches, course creators and people creating membership sites.

The most important important thing to keep in mind is the platform delivers best learning experience to members online.

You can think of the platform and everything on offer be it tools for creating sites, for sales or running promotions.

Kartra is first a marketing platform which also offers you prospects to create online course. The primary thing you can do with Kartra is to know that about the number of extensive number of marketing tools there are.

Plus Kartra doesn’t possess a big niche audience like Kajabi. It’s created for only digital course creators and targets audience creating physical and dropshipping goods.

1. How UX friendly is Kajabi vs Kartra

Considering usability as one of the prime factors you should consider when choosing an online business platform, you should consider how the two platforms compete with each other on this respect.

Kajabi comes with clean and minimal UI. When you go to the admin dashboard you see all the relevant stats for your business to the right and menu options to the left to access a bunch of different tools.

Whatevertools you offer is divided into these four spheres: There’s the website, products, marketing and people.

Once you click these options you see all the different tools inside the category. The UI is minimalist and isdesigned not to overwhelm you with multiple options

Once you click one among the options you see all the listed tools in that category.

There’s the interface to start setting up things beginning from products to pipeline and other things.

Moreover, using the software is easy and it’s actually an enjoyable experience. The interface for setting up everything, be it Products, Pipelines, Website, etc. is drag-n-drop and all the clients I have worked with find the process to be super intuitive.

So, once you get a high-level understanding of how different things work on Kajabi, it is pretty easy to set up.

Now let’s talk about Kartra. Again the user interface is clean and when you log into your dashboard, you’ll see your account stats on the right and all the different Kartra tools listed in the left panel.

Kartra User Interface

Having said that, I am not a big fan of how difficult it is to use the software, be it setting up campaigns or memberships or even building pages.

In fact, the biggest complaint that I have heard from my clients and other users about Kartra is regarding usability.

There are multiple steps needed to configure something with Kartra and this can feel too overwhelming for someone who doesn’t have plenty of experience using some of these tools. There’s very little in terms of UX and doing a simple can lead up to a mountain of work.

When using tools like membership builders and you need to go through all the steps in the process sequentially.

If you wish to make any changes to the welcome email, go through each step before and click on save button. This makes editing even simple marketing emails an extremely difficult thing to do.

This is the case with all the individual tools inside Kartra. Plus you’ll find many more usability issues while using the Kartra platform.

We’ll talk about some of them in the subsequent chapters when we’ll discuss individual tools in detail.

Create an online course

In this section we are going to take a look at how easy or difficult it is going to be to create a cuourse from scratch on the platform.

Course/Membership Builder

How to create an online course doesn’t get simpler than any other. Once you create a product, you have a number of options to add structure and then add content to it.

Once you add lessons in the form of posts and modules as categories you can add content to themindividually.

You can also use the bulk-upload feature to import all videos at once and then Kajabi creates lessons for you.

It’s also possible for you to reoder lessons and modules with the drag-and-drop feature.

Another great thing about using the Kajabi platform is it supports the cloud import feature which means you can import content into products from either Google drive or Google dropbox.

The platform gives you flexiblity to modify the content inside the course, you can add downloads to the lessons, alter comment settings and more.

Kajabi lesson builder

Kajabi also hosts your entire content. You get full file storage on Wistia and also takes care of all the content hosting. You get unlimited video hosting and you get to upload audio and pdf files too.

The membership builder is fairly inadequate. It takes some time for you to do the needful with the tool.

You can add a new category, you can drag and drop category element from the left panel to the navigation bar.

To add new content choose category first and then choose the drag-and-drop post element to the sidebar.

Kartra doesn’t support a lot of features like bulk upload, cloud import and others that make it difficult for you to add content to the membership site.

The biggest problem? Kartra puts limits on the video bandwidth for the memberships site you create.

Unlimited video hosting is a good feature of the website builder and almost everyone can use the external video hosting like Vimeo resulting in additional cost for you.

Kartra membership builder gives you some flexibility with adding content to posts by helping you with 15 types of elements.

There’s a long configuration process before the membership site goes live.

The process of creating an online course or membership site is both easy in Kajabi Overall, the process of creating an online course/membership is much easier and quicker in Kajabi vs Kartra.

Course Player and Member Experience

The course player is part of the membership site on which students can access videos and get to see other content.

Members are going to spend the most time on your site’s course player and the design of the same plays no small role in how students tend to experience your entire course.

For Kajabi there are 10 plus course player themes that work for multiple digital products.

The themes are well designed and can give your course a fresh look and feel. You can choose a separate one based on the theme of the digital product you create.

The premier theme comes with great design and is also great for running most courses you can find.

Premier Theme

The momentum theme is equally good with a more traditional design and the navigation is to the left and content on the right.

Katra has templates even for the membership area. The 6 templates to choose

Now, Kartra also has templates for your membership area. The themes come with both clean UI and modern design so they look good when looked at the frontend.

All templates have similar design and look like blog posts. So if you want to deliver the course through the membership site there are problems.

The themes are not userfriendly either. It’s difficult navigating between the lessons. The lack of previous or next lesson buttons is evident and is a sorely missing point.

You need to add these buttons to posts which is a problem.

Another aspect with course delivery is mobile responsiveness. All themes from either brands are fully mobile responsive and students don’t face issues watching this content on their phones.

Kajabi offers mobile app for the users. The mobile app is listed for both iOS and Android devices too.

It’s easy to access the content through mobile app, letting you send push notifications to students and helps in engaging with them.

Kajabi does a far superior job compared to Kartra for course delivery and for delivering a good end-user experience as well.

Learning and Engagement Tools

Your online course should be about getting lessons to students. So make sure they engage with the content.

There are multiple learning management and engagement tools on Kajabi that cna help.

The first feature we have with Kajabi is the assessments feature with which you create quizzes, surveys, assignments and others for your courses.

If you want to create a graded quiz that wants to automatically evaluate student’s answers do that on Kajabi.

Another important tool with kajabi is the community section that creates a community area for members on the website.

It’s a useful feature that will help you fuel discussions and build a community around the program.

The great thing about the community feature on Kajabi is that you can access it through the mobile app as well send push notifications that begin community discussions as well.

Kajabi also supports the content dripping or the content locking feature. If you want to release course modules based on schedule or unless the learner completes a desired set of activities then you can do that on Kajabi.

Kartra doesn’t offer the same set of learning tools for engaging with students.

You don’t have the ability to create quizzes or surveys or assignments meaning you need to rely on external solutions for this.

Kartra doesn’t create a community area for the program. Use either facebook groups or external discussion for the same.

There’s capability for you ti drip content and run a linear progress on the course but that’s pretty much the whole ball of wax for learning and engagement tools.

Another useful feature with Katra is one that’s not related to learning or engagement. It’s customer service and there’s good ticketing system in place. If you’re running a large membership site you can deliver quality support to users in this manner.

Course Creation – The Bottom Line

We told you about all the necessary details to start creating engaging courses. The platforms have plenty of features. However the big winner in all cases seems to be Kajabi itself.

The process with which you create a membership site in Kajabi is simpler.

There are 10 templates to choose from and the support of mobile apps helping deliver great learning experience on the move for every digital product you can conjure up.

Finally, you can also create quizzes and surveys as well as assignments to build the community area on the website. This is helpful for engagin the students.

Website Creation and Blogging

In this section here are the details of what Kajabi can help with website and blogging.

Both platforms have free hosting and SSL certificates.

The team takes care of technical aspects beginning from secrutiyt to updates.

You get a free subdomain for the site and can create the custom domain as well.

There are 6 themes of choice. The themes decide the look of your site and are the easiest way to create a grand website.

In addition to this, Kajabi provides you the option to import custom themes as well. Hire someone to create a good looking theme and get started with this.

Installing a site theme is like the first step in the process and in order to build pages and further customize your website, you’ll need to use the page builder.

The builder has 20+ pre-designed templates for your pages. While the templates are clean and modern, the range is not very extensive and I hope they add more templates to it.

Kajabi Landing Page Templates

Once you choose a template, you are taken to the drag and drop builder where you make changes to current design or create a design from scratch.

You can choose from 40 of the pre build sections listed in the page editor. These sections are listed for a number of reasons.

When you create a hero section with a background image or video, a multi column layout shows features, adds pricing tables lists blog posts and optin forms as well.

Pre-built sections in Kajabi

You can also make changes to the sections within the pages. Click on the specific element in the area to the right and an editing section opens up.

Here you modify the text, change colors, add animated elements and do more things.

If you remove few sections the elements change order. You can do that and you will see the changes happening in real time on the next pane.

The design flexibility is the chief area where Kajabi gives you freedom to create any design you prefer. Its also quite intuitive at the same time.

As far as we see Kartra there aren’t any present themes to build your site. But the page builder offers plenty of features from which you can do things.

There are 200 or more templates for different pages, including home page, sales page, and others. The number of page template designs are refreshing to say the least.

You can customize the templates with the page editor. The page editor is again drag and drop which is a live editor and you can see the changes being made in real time.

The building block on Kartra is called sections and there are several for the hero, the testimonials, the pricing tables and more.

Kartra gives you plenty of templates to modify.

Once you add a section, further modify by deleting individual templates like text and headlines. Chante the buttons, videos and other sections, modify the style and add animation on them.

Another feature with the Kartra page builder is that you get sites that lets you share headers, footers, custom styles and more.

The page builder The page builder on Kartra isn’t a smooth ride and it sometimes loads slowly.

Considering blogging, Kartra doesn’t have any wild features. Only a few templates for blog posts and they don’t replace a blog.

Kajabi lets you create and amange a blog on their platform. This lets you create fresh blog posts and you can add new content and videos on to them.

Kajabi lets you create an index page as well that you can further customize the wya you want it to.

Kajabi also lets you finalize seo settings, set categories for blog posts, set up optin forms and run a functional blog too.

Kajabi however doesn’t come anywhere near WordPress or other blogging platforms. If blogging is a big part of what you do wordpress is ideal choice.

Both platforms come with handy site building tools. If you want to build sales pages and lead generation pages, Kartra vs Kajabi has plenty to offer.

On the other hand if you want a platform where you build landing pages and fully fledged websites witha bblog then Kajabi vs Kartra will be a better option.

4. Sales and Marketing Tools

Here we are going to see all the details between Kajabi and Kartra for sales and marketing.

The two platforms are great for accepting payments and selling products and let you build out end to end marketing funnels as well.

So you get tools to use for lead generation, for email marketing, to create checkout pages, affiliate marketing and more.

Product Pricing and Checkout Pages

The pricing of products is called setting an offer on Kajabi. This offer can either be ofr a one-time product or recurring subscription or a payment plan.

You can create monthly, weekly, quarterly or yearly subscriptions if you want.

Kartra gives you a set number of options for pricing that Kajabi offers. There’s something called recurrent installments as well which let you create a pricing structure based on both recurring payments and payment plans as well.

If you want to charge monthly installments fo $99 eveyr year you can do that with Kartra.

Both platforms give you a ton of flexibility to access which products are available and which are not. You need to see which are great for multi-tier courses or even memberships.

Kartra also supports physical products while Kajabi is a pure digital product selling platform.

With Kajabi you can’t charge additional shipping fees. The workaround is to include shipping fee in product price. That has limitations.

Another good feature with Kartra is that you can collect sales taxes on EU VAT and you can configure a percentage of tax for different regions and Kartra automatically adds the correct amount depending on customer locations.

Kajabi doesn’t do that and you need an external tool to make this happen. Kajabi supports Stripe and paypal payment process to get both one time and recurring payments.

With Kajabi you can access only one checkout page template. The template is designed from conversion rate optimization. The template is designed and you can also customize it more.

You can add a sales video, display product details, show testimonials and highlight the refund policy and other details.

You can also collect all relevant information.

Kajabi supports important features like 1-click upsells and order bumps.

Kartra has more to offer than simply building checkout pages. There’s a library of 30 checkout page templates as well.

Kartra also supports multiple checkout features beginning from 1 click upsells to order bumps. You can also create downsells in the funnel.

Kartra vs Kajabi is the clear winner for pricing the product and building the checkout page.

Lead Generation Tools

Now that went over the page building features on both these tools lets look deeper into lead generation abilities of both platforms.

Both page builders are flexible in terms of what they can offer, the Kartra library of templates is more extensive. You get 200 plus templates to pick from.

Kartra also lets you a/b test landing pages and is something kajabi doesn’t help you with.

Another feature is the forms feature. Create opt-in forms and you can use the same on the landing pages or embed them to external websites.

You can display the forms based on time delay or when user exits the page.

The forms feature isn’t very complex and sets you with simple basic options. No tempatles and only basic customizations to start with.

Kartra has dozens of templates for optin forms and customize them for the page builder.

We’ve discussed about Kajabi Assessments in one of the previous chapters but the nice thing about it is that it also allows you to create marketing quizzes.

So, you have the ability to create quizzes and add them to your landing pages so as to collect leads and segment your visitors.

Kartra currently doesn’t have inbuilt support for creating lead generation quizzes but they’re already working to add this feature to the platform.

Similarly, one feature that Kartra offers is Videos. So, Kartra Videos let you use videos to collect leads, show timed CTAs, display share buttons, etc.

Now, Kajabi also lets you host marketing videos and you can also show CTAs at the end but that’s pretty much it. You don’t have the ability to show opt-in forms and collect leads.

Email Marketing Tools

When it comes to email marketing, both Kajabi and Kartra allow you to manage your email list, send broadcast emails as well as autoresponders and automate your entire email marketing workflow.

In order to create automated email campaigns, you can use the sequence builder. You can add a new email by clicking on the “Add New Email” button at the top and you can define the amount of delay after it should be sent.

Moreover, you can define triggers for when someone should be added to or removed from your email sequence.

Kajabi’s Sequence Builder

For list management, Kajabi has the tagging feature. So, you can add a tag to your subscriber based on the lead magnet(s) they’ve signed up for, the offers they’ve purchased, the lessons they’ve completed and much more.

Finally, Kajabi has this Automations feature that allows you to take certain actions based on specific triggers and automate the entire process.

For example, when someone signs up for a lead magnet, you can add a tag to the user and subscribe him/her to an email campaign.

Similarly, when someone purchases one of your products in Kajabi, you can add another tag and remove them from the sales campaign.

Kajabi Automations

Now, things work very similarly with Kartra except that it has more features to offer. To start with, Kartra’s email sequence builder is more flexible and gives your more options than Kajabi.

For example, it allows you to delay sending an email by a certain number of hours (Kajabi lets you define delay in days only) and you can also specify the days of the week on which it should go out.

Similarly, it has a “Split” step which allows you to create parallel paths in your email sequence based on a certain condition. Now, something like this is possible in Kajabi but it isn’t easy to do.

Kartra’s Sequence Builder

Additionally, it offers features like email templates and A/B testing which are currently not supported in Kajabi.

The only complaint that I have with Kartra’s sequence builder is that it’s slow and kind of clunky as it keeps reloading after anything you do in the builder.

As far as list management is concerned, Kartra too has the tagging feature but it also lets you create “lists” which is useful if you run multiple businesses on the platform.

Also, Kartra has a more powerful Automations feature than Kajabi that you can use to automate various tasks within the app.

Kartra’s Sequence Builder

Finally, Kartra also enables you to send SMSs to your subscribers via services like Twilio and Plivo.

Overall, Kartra vs Kajabi has better email marketing and automation capabilities and it is one of the strongest aspects of the Kartra platform.

Sales Funnel Creation

With Kajabi, you have a Sales Pipeline Builder which is pretty intuitive and makes the process of building funnels super easy. When you get started, it asks you to select from one of the 6 available Pipeline Blueprints.

As soon as you select a blueprint, Kajabi will create all the pages, emails and even your offer for that campaign. And you can always add new pages and email campaigns to your pipeline from within the builder.

For example, if you select the Webinar blueprint, Kajabi will automatically create the registration page, the confirmation page as well as the reminder and follow up emails.

Pipeline Builder

Moreover, you can customize any of the steps involved in the process. For example, if you click on a page in the pipeline, it will open the page editor on the right where you can make changes to your page.

Similarly, if you click on an email campaign, you can make changes to it right here.

Edit a Kajabi Pipeline

So, you can build your entire sales funnel without leaving the builder at all which is an amazing experience.

Sales funnels are another area where katra might be lacking in several features. You can see powerful individual sales funnel builder but the visual building is missing from the scene.

To build the funnel, you start by setting up few pages, exit and build a product, set up email campaigns and go back to the pages once again.

You need to manually link together all pieces.

It may not be a big issue if you’re building a simple funnel but for complex funnale this is needless work that can be better avoided.

Kartra has something called campaigns that let you group together assets and inside a funnel and share them with other Kartra users.

Affiliate Marketing

Both Kajabi and Kartra have all the tools that help you create and manage an affiliate program.

Add affiliates, choose products to promote, set up affiliate links, set up commission rates for the product and create announcements to affiliates.

Plus track the performance of affiliate through the admin dashboard and export the payment reports to send them money.

You can also issue instant paypal payments for affiliates and set up a min threshold. You can magne the tax forms through kartra as well.,

Kartra Affiliate Features

As affiliate marketer you can set the commissions and As an affiliate marketer, you get several options. One such option is to set second tier commission and grant commissions when there are sales or leads.

There are other marketing tools that we haven’t approached here.

The first is Kajabi events which can let you set a date and time and a sequence of emails around the same. You can set up live webinars and virtual summits.

Kartra doesn’t have anything similar and uses their webinar tool called webinarjam.

Another feature is kartra calendars where you get a scheduling tool that lets you set th eavialaility book payments and mange cancellations.

Kajabi doesn’t have any inbuilding schedulers.

Third-Party Integrations

Both kajabi and Kartra let you integrate with analytics and facebook pixel.

You get convertbox, aweber, mailchimp and drip integrations.

As far as Kartra is concerned, it doesn’t have a direct integration with any third-party email marketing solution and anyways, it won’t make sense to use Kartra but not their email marketing tools.

Finally, both platforms have a Zapier integration which allows you to integrate with literally any other platform out there.

Sales & Marketing – The Bottom Line

Overall, Kartra has more powerful sales and marketing features than Kajabi and it is definitely a superior platform in this context.

It has better capabilities for building landing pages and checkout pages, more powerful email marketing automation features, has an inbuilt video marketing suite and even supports an inbuilt scheduling tool.

Having said that, Kajabi has pretty decent sales and marketing tools as well and in fact, it does a better job than Kartra in a couple of areas.

One such area is Kajabi’s visual sales pipeline builder which makes the process of sales funnel creation much easier and better than in Kartra.

5. Customer Support and Training

When it comes to customer service, Kajabi’s support is simply best-in-class. You get 24/7 live chat support and you will generally get your queries resolved in a few minutes.

Believe me, nothing beats 24×7 chat support. There have been a few instances when we needed urgent support in the middle of a launch and the chat support came as a lifesaver for us.

Kartra Live Chat Support

While you wouldn’t really need it but you also have the option to reach out to their support via email.

Now Kartra doesn’t offer live chat support to its users. The customer support is through emails, so you can create a ticket from the support portal and the Kartra team will get back to you via email.

Generally speaking, Kartra’s email support is pretty responsive and I find the quality of responses to be good as well. However, if you’re like me, you’ll definitely miss live chat support.

Kartra Customer Support

In addition, both platforms have a comprehensive knowledge base where you can find a how-to article/video for literally every feature on the platforms.

So, if you don’t like reaching out to customer support for every question, you’ll find their knowledge base useful.

Both platforms also have dedicated training portals for their users. So, Kajabi has something called Kajabi University and Kartra has something called Kartraverse Training Center where you can find training on how to use the software as well as other marketing stuff.

Finally, both platforms also have a private Facebook Group for their users where the users can ask their questions, seek help and feedback from peers, share their wins and network with like-minded professionals.

6. Kartra vs Kajabi Pricing

Now let’s discuss the pricing plans that the two platforms have to offer.

Kartra offers various pricing plans starting from $99/month. The good thing about Kartra pricing is that it doesn’t charge you any transaction fee plus everything that the platform has to offer is available on all the pricing tiers.

Where the plans differ from each other is limits on things like the number of contacts you can have, the number of emails you can send, bandwidth for video and other files storage:

Starter plan ($99/month): You get 2,500 contacts, 15,000 emails per month, 50 GB bandwidth, 1 custom domain, 100 pages, 20 products, and 100 automation.
Silver Plan ($199/month): You can have up to 12,500 contacts, 125,000 emails per month, 125 GB bandwidth, 3 custom domains, and unlimited pages, products and automation.
Gold Plan ($299/month): You get 25,000 contacts, 250,000 emails per month, 250 GB bandwidth, 5 custom domains, and unlimited pages, products, and automation.
Platinum plan ($499/month): With the Platinum plan, you get up to 50,000 contacts, 500,000 emails per month, 400 GB bandwidth, 10 custom domains, and unlimited pages, products, and automation.

Now, Kajabi pricing follows a similar model. It doesn’t charge any transaction fee and all the features except a couple of them are available on all the tiers.

The first tier in Kajabi is the Basic Plan that costs $149/month and it allows you to create up to 3 Products and 3 Pipelines, and have up to 10,000 contacts and 1,000 active members.

The second tier which is also their most popular plan is called the Growth Plan. It costs $199/month and it allows you to create up to 15 Products and 15 Pipelines, and have up to 25,000 contacts and up to 10,000 active members.

Kajabi vs Kartra Review 2021