Kajabi vs CartFlows

What they are, and why they barely compete

If you are down to Kajabi and CartFlows, the first thing worth saying is that they solve different problems, and the choice is really a choice about your business, not about two feature lists. Kajabi is a hosted, all-in-one platform for people who sell their own knowledge: courses, memberships, coaching and digital products, with the website, email, checkout and course delivery all under one login and nothing for you to host or maintain. CartFlows is a self-hosted WordPress plugin that bolts a real checkout onto WooCommerce, with order bumps, one-click upsells and funnel-step testing, and it assumes you already run your own store on your own hosting.

So the deciding question is not which has more features. It is what you sell and whether you want to run WordPress. If you sell an online course or a coaching program and want it delivered, marketed and charged for inside one system, Kajabi is built for exactly that. If you sell products through a WooCommerce store you already run, and you want that checkout to convert better without paying a monthly platform fee, CartFlows is the cheaper, lighter answer. A reader trying to decide between them usually has a knowledge product in mind and is weighing hosted convenience against self-hosted control and cost. Everything below follows from that.

Pricing compared

The price gap is large, and it is not the whole story on either side. Kajabi bills monthly and its plans start at $143 a month on the annual plan, which is $179 if you pay month to month. Growth is $199 a month billed annually, and Pro is $399. That fee covers the whole platform, and Kajabi takes no revenue share on what you sell, though its card processing runs 2.9% plus $0.30 on Basic, falling to 2.7% on Pro, and using an outside processor adds a platform fee by tier. There is a 30-day free trial, but it asks for a card.

CartFlows is the opposite shape. There is a genuine free version on WordPress.org, and paid licences bill annually: Starter is $99 a year for one site, renewing at $149; Pro is $199 a year for three sites, renewing at $299, or $699 once for a lifetime licence; Suite is $299 a year, renewing at $449, or $999 lifetime. There is no time-limited trial, only a 14-day money-back guarantee. The sticker looks tiny next to Kajabi, but it is not the true cost. CartFlows is a plugin, so you also pay for WordPress hosting, a theme, a page builder and the time to keep the stack updated and to add the email or membership tools Kajabi includes. Once you add those, the gap narrows, though CartFlows is still the cheaper route for someone already running WordPress.

What each one actually builds

Kajabi is a business in a box for a knowledge seller. In one place you get course and membership hosting, a website and blog, landing pages, email marketing and automations, and a checkout that handles one-time and recurring payments. You do not touch servers, you do not install plugins, and you do not stitch tools together. For a coach or creator who wants to launch a product, a sales page, an email sequence and a members' area in days, that consolidation is the point, and it is what long-time users say justifies the fee.

CartFlows does one job and does it well: it replaces WooCommerce's plain checkout with a converting one. You get optimized checkout layouts, order bumps at the point of sale, one-click post-purchase upsells and downsells, funnel-step A/B testing and revenue analytics, built with the page builder you already use, whether that is Elementor, Bricks, Divi, Beaver Builder or Gutenberg. What it does not include is the surround. There is no built-in email, no CRM and no course delivery in the core plugin, so following up a buyer, recovering an abandoned cart or hosting a course means adding more plugins or services and wiring them together yourself. That is a scope choice, not a fault: CartFlows keeps itself small and cheap. But it means CartFlows is a component, and Kajabi is the whole system.

Split testing, where both fall short for paid traffic

If you buy traffic, read this part carefully, because it is the same limitation on both. Kajabi offers basic A/B testing, and CartFlows offers funnel-step A/B testing on your own pages. Both let you split visitors between two versions and pick a winner, which is fine for optimising an offer you send organic or repeat traffic to.

What neither does is same-URL, server-side rotation. When a test changes the URL a paid click lands on, Meta, Google or TikTok can drop the campaign back into the learning phase and reset the optimisation you paid to build, and it can send the ad back through review. If your margin is conversion rate minus click cost, that reset is a hidden tax. Kajabi's page tools are not built to prevent it, and CartFlows' funnel-step tests run on your own WordPress pages, so they are not either. For a creator selling to a warm audience or an email list, that gap will not hurt you. For a paid-traffic buyer whose whole model rests on protecting ad learning, neither tool is built for the job, and that points to a different kind of platform, covered below.

What long-term users report

We do not run these tools on live campaigns. We read what people who have run them say, alongside each vendor's own docs and pricing pages, and we verify prices with the vendor. Both come out as real, established products where the regret is fit and cost, not the software.

Kajabi is the default for coaches and course creators, with the vendor reporting more than 100,000 businesses on it. The steady complaints are price, that it only pays off if you actually run the marketing and sales side rather than just hosting a course; the editor, which power users call dated and limited; and lock-in, because once your site, list, products and automations live inside Kajabi, moving out is painful. CartFlows shows the split you see with most WordPress plugins: WordPress.org is warm, around 4.8 from roughly 486 reviews and more than 200,000 active installs, while Trustpilot and Capterra run harder on support and billing, with reports of slow responses and friction cancelling or getting a refund. Neither pattern rules a tool out. They tell you the daily reality is fine on the software and rougher on cost and support, which is worth knowing before you commit to an annual bill that renews automatically.

Which one should you pick?

Kajabi, for selling your own courses and coaching

Choose Kajabi if you sell your own knowledge and want the whole business hosted in one place. It delivers courses and memberships, builds the website and landing pages, sends the email, runs the automations and takes the payment, all without a plugin to install or a server to maintain, and it takes no cut of your sales. For a coach or creator who wants to launch fast and follow up without assembling a stack, that is worth the fee, and it is why Kajabi takes our pick here. The costs to name: it starts at $143 a month on the annual plan and climbs to $399, the editor frustrates power users, and the platform is sticky once your business lives inside it. If you are selling knowledge products, those are prices worth paying for the convenience.

CartFlows, for a cheap WooCommerce checkout

Choose CartFlows if you already run WordPress and WooCommerce and want that checkout to convert better for a fraction of Kajabi's price. It adds order bumps, one-click upsells and funnel-step testing to the store you already have, works with your existing page builder and gateways, takes no cut of sales, and starts free or at $99 a year. It is the right pick for the seller who wants a better checkout, not a marketing platform, and who is happy to bring their own email tool and hosting. Just budget for the true cost of self-hosting, and note that the intro prices renew higher.

ElasticFunnels, if you buy paid traffic and never want to touch WordPress

Both tools here share a limit that matters to a paid-traffic buyer: neither rotates variants under one URL to protect ad learning, and CartFlows also asks you to run your own WordPress stack. If that describes your problem, a hosted funnel platform is the better shape, and ElasticFunnels is built for exactly this buyer. It is a funnel platform for teams that run paid traffic: it builds the pages, including an AI builder that can clone one from a URL, hosts a checkout with order bumps, one-click upsells, subscriptions and multi-MID routing, and keeps the click, the order, the rebill and the refund on one record with a CRM and attribution on the same data. Its same-URL split testing rotates variants server-side under one campaign link, so Meta, Google and TikTok keep their learning and a test never sends the ad back through review. That is one reason a paid-traffic team switches, not the whole of what the platform is, but for this reader it is often the deciding one. Every feature is on every plan, Starter is $97 a month, the 14-day trial needs no card, and EF-hosted checkouts carry a 0.5% fee on the revenue they process. The honest catch: ElasticFunnels is newer than both Kajabi and CartFlows, and there is very little independent third-party review coverage to check its claims against yet, which is what you would expect of a platform this new. That limits your outside proof, not the features themselves, so run a test campaign through the no-card trial before you move a whole business across.

Still weighing more than these two? Start from the full ranking, or read the Kajabi review and the CartFlows review in full.