Kajabi vs WordPress: A Side by Side Comparison

Kajabi and WordPress are very popular solutions for hosting websites, online courses, and helping digital entrepreneurs manage their online businesses.

This review will discuss some significant differences between these two platforms that will impact which one will be the right solution for you.

What is the Difference Between Kajabi and WordPress

Kajabi is an all-in-one platform that is designed from the ground up to help online course creators, create, market, and sell their online courses.

WordPress is a content management system that is open to third party themes and plugins. These themes and plugins give WordPress a very wide range of functionality and customization.

A good analogy between these two is staying in a long term AirBnB compared to renting an apartment. When you stay in an AirBnB, it comes fully furnished will all the furniture and appliances you need and when you rent an apartment you get an empty space that you need to fill with the furniture and everything else.

With an empty apartment, you have more flexibility to get exactly the furnishings you want and to put them where you want, but you have to pay for them and sometimes the things you want to put in your apartment don’t fit perfectly together.

With a well-furnished AirBnB, everything is set up and ready to go. You don’t get to control what is in it or change things around, but it should have everything you need.

Kajabi Features

Kajabi makes a concerted effort to be an all-in-one platform for creating online courses. Emphasis on all-in-one. Kajabi has virtually all of the tools that a content creator would need to start their online business and be able to create, market, and sell their online courses and other content. For more details about what Kajabi is and does check out my Kajabi Review blog post.

Kajabi Courses

Kajabi enables users to create mini-courses or more comprehensive courses that can be completed at a student’s own pace. Your courses built in Kajabi can be used by your clients in the Kajabi app on their smartphones. Kajabi’s courses can be used for subscription-based products like memberships with the integrated live room for ongoing interaction with your group.

Coaching

Kajabi’s coaching product lets you sell one-on-one and group coaching packages that give you features like built-in video conferencing, private and shared notes, file uploads, and calendar integration.

Podcasts

Kajabi’s podcast product distributes episodes to Apple, Spotify, and Google. You can host public and private podcasts. With private podcasts you can offer your course content in audio as a podcast as well as in video.

Membership Sites

You can combine different features of Kajabi and create membership sites with regular content development and engagement with your group.

Communities

Kajabi acquired Vibely in the fall of 2022 and completely replaced their old community product. The new community product in Kajabi allows live group and individual meet-ups, challenges, a forum and chat room, and integration with courses and other Kajabi pages.

Payment Processing

Kajabi integrates with Stripe, PayPal, and offers its own Kajabi Payments for residents in the United States. Kajabi Payments can take payment from credit card, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and After Pay.

Business Management

Kajabi provides site analytics, customer management, and payment analytics to help you understand what is happening and who it is happening with.

Website and Landing Pages

Kajabi has the tools to create powerful, professional looking landing pages and websites and provides a simple user experience to potential customers. The templates are highly customizable and no programming or design skills are needed.

Email

Kajabi provides a fully functional email marketing solution comparable to standalone email platforms like Mail Chimp, Active Campaign, or Convert Kit. Email sequences, automatons, newsletters, and detailed email analytics are all part of Kajabi email.

Funnels

Kajabi has funnel templates to help you understand the flow of traffic from being a prospect to a client and make it easier to set up your funnels. All the tools you need are brought together into one space to build and connect your landing pages, forms, email sequences, automations, and checkout pages to help you sell your products.

Kajabi AI

Kajabi has integrated generative AI into many of its features and has a useful PDF guide to help you understand how to structure your prompts to get the best results. In general, you can use Kajabi’s AMA which stands for “ask me anything”. Or you can use the AI assistant in setting up new courses or landing pages.

WordPress Features

WordPress is a powerful website tool that lets you design almost any kind of content you want. Being so open and able to do anything does make it more complex to start using and requires more technical skills to use and understand. 

It’s also much more generalized. Whereas Kajabi is geared towards online course creators and designs its tools and applications with that in mind, WordPress can be used in any industry to make virtually anything.

Content Creation

WordPress has a massive library of free themes and patterns that can be accessed and then highly customized by users. This library receives new additions on an almost daily basis. Since WordPress is a general content creation platform as opposed to one specifically designed for online course content, you can find almost anything to start from but you’ll probably have to do a lot of customization in the layout to get just what you’re looking for.

Openverse

The Openverse is a massive library of stock images, audio and video that can be used by content creators for free. Some of the content on the Openverse does have restrictions that either regulate or prohibit their use in commercial content but with such a large library, WordPress users can find almost anything they need here.

Business Management

WordPress itself features very few business management tools. Distribution, marketing, funneling, payment processing and analytics are possible on the platform but they require the use of plugins that may cost the user extra. While these plugins can be very powerful, the costs of purchasing them (more on that below) and integrating them can make it difficult to understand from the beginning the full scope of what is going to be needed to make everything work the way you will need it.

Plugins

For virtually any WordPress user, the plugins are a key feature that enables them to make quality content. Plugins set WordPress apart from other applications and make it the extremely powerful content creation tool that it is. It’s also one of the features that can make it more complicated and potentially expensive.

The right combination of plugins can enable the user to create highly customized content. However, sometimes finding the right plugin can be time-consuming. Also, while many plugins are free, others are paid and some adopt a hybrid model wherein basic features are free but more advanced ones are behind a paywall.

There is also the additional issue of tying all of your content and plugins together and making them work. Through the use of plugins, WordPress users can do anything that Kajabi users can and more, but it’s not holistically integrated into one platform meaning that it may require more technical skills on the part of the user to make it all work together.

Kajabi vs WordPress Pricing Comparison

Kajabi has 3 price plans: Kajabi Basic is $149/month, Kajabi Growth is $199/month, and Kajabi Pro is $399/month. If you sign up for an annual subscription you get a 20% discount on the total price.

For a full price breakdown and what is included in the different plans check out our Kajabi pricing blog post.

Pricing with WordPress is more complicated. WordPress itself is free to use.  That being said, WordPress is not a webhost so creating a website will require users to pay a provider like GoDaddy or Bluehost for that service. Also, you may end up paying for themes and plugins to achieve the functionality and design that you want for your content.

For online course creators, you are going to need to look for website hosting, themes/plugins for video hosting and course creation, and an email marketing platform. There are so many options for each of these that it becomes a bit overwhelming to choose and impractical for me to put a price here that can be easily compared to Kajabi’s plans.

Kajabi vs. WordPress: Final Thoughts

A side-by-side comparison of Kajabi and WordPress is challenging given the sheer difference in purpose between the two digital platforms. Kajabi was created for online course creators to host, market, and sell their courses. All of its tools and features are designed and integrated to fulfill that purpose. This makes it easier to start using and learn and with Kajabi, it is easier to know what your monthly fee is goint to be.

WordPress on the other hand is designed to be used by anyone in any industry for their unique needs. It is an empty apartment that you can furnish any way you want. To this end, the platform is very open and flexible and heavily leans on third-party plugins and themes to provide specific features and services. This is perfect if it is what you need, but it requires more research and technical skills to find and use and can also lend itself to unforeseen costs.

What does all this mean for you?

Here are some questions to ask yourself if you still aren’t sure if you should use Kajabi or if you should use WordPress for your online content needs:

• Are you willing to work within design constraints or do you need complete control over design?
• When thinking about Kajabi, how many of its features do you think you will use? The more you use, the more you will benefit from the simplicity of their integration.
• How this work is going to be done. Are you doing it, or are you hiring someone else to do it? 
• Do you want to be able to make adjustments to your content yourself or will you have someone on your team do this or hire a contractor?

If you are willing to work within some design constraints and are planning on using 2 or more of Kajabi’s features:  Website, Courses/Community, Email Marketing, Checkout pages (collecting payment), Landing pages, and Funnels; then I recommend Kajabi.

If you aren’t willing to work within some design constraints, and you are going to be hiring out all the work or are very technically included and want to put your time into setting everything up; then I recommend WordPress.

Kajabi 30-Day Free Trial

If you think now is the right time to try out Kajabi you can sign up with my 30-day free trial link and I will give you 3 free sign-up bonuses. I am an affiliate for Kajabi and have helped over 100 people test it out and see if it is right for them. The help I give my referrals is designed to help you understand as quickly as possible if Kajabi is right for you and will meet your needs. The goal is to know if you want to keep using it before your trial is over. Check out my bonuses page, I’ll help flatten the learning curve for you and be there to answer your questions.

Happy Kajabi-ing Ahead

JD - Kajabi Expert