Kajabi vs FunnelKit

What they are, and why they barely compete

If you are down to Kajabi and FunnelKit, 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. FunnelKit is a self-hosted WordPress plugin suite that turns a WooCommerce store into a real funnel, with a converting checkout, order bumps, one-click upsells, and its own email, SMS and cart-recovery engine, 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 physical or digital products through a WooCommerce store you already run, and you want that checkout to convert better and to follow buyers up without paying a monthly platform fee, FunnelKit is the cheaper, more granular answer. A reader trying to decide between these two usually has one of those two businesses in mind, and once you know which, the choice is close to made. Everything below follows from that.

Pricing compared

The two price on opposite models, and neither sticker is the whole story. 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 the entry plan, falling to 2.7% higher up, and routing payments through an outside processor adds a platform fee by tier. There is a 30-day free trial, but it asks for a card.

FunnelKit is the opposite shape. There is a genuine free version on WordPress.org, and paid licences bill annually. Basic is $99.50 a year for one site, but it is checkout only. Plus at $149.50 a year for two sites is the tier that adds the funnels, order bumps, one-click upsells and A/B testing. The email, SMS and CRM automation that is the main reason to reach for FunnelKit only arrives on Professional, $199.50 a year for three sites, and Elite covers thirty sites at $299.50. The intro prices renew higher too: $99.50 renews at $129, $149.50 at $299, $199.50 at $399. There is no time-limited trial, only a 14-day money-back guarantee.

The annual sticker looks tiny next to Kajabi's monthly fee, and for a store already on WordPress it is genuinely cheaper. But it is not the true cost. FunnelKit is a plugin, so you also pay for WordPress hosting, a theme, a page builder and the time to keep the stack updated. And the automation that makes FunnelKit interesting sits on the $199.50 Professional tier, so if follow-up is why you want it, budget for that, not the entry price. Once you add hosting and the right tier, the gap narrows, though FunnelKit 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.

FunnelKit builds a funnel out of a store you already own. It replaces WooCommerce's plain checkout with a converting one, adds order bumps at the point of sale and one-click post-purchase upsells and downsells, and reads revenue analytics off the funnel. What sets it apart from a bare checkout plugin is the second engine it bundles, FunnelKit Automations, formerly Autonami: email and SMS broadcasts, a visual automation builder, cart-abandonment recovery and a 360-degree contact profile that acts as a light CRM. So a WooCommerce store can convert a buyer and then follow them up without adding and syncing a separate email platform. What FunnelKit does not include is the surround Kajabi takes for granted: there is no course or membership delivery, no hosted website in the platform sense, and you assemble the stack yourself on WordPress. It is a powerful component; Kajabi is the whole system.

Marketing and follow-up: both have it, on different terms

This is the part where the two look more alike than the rest, and it is worth being precise. Both can email a buyer and run automations, so neither leaves you reaching for a separate tool the way a bare checkout plugin would. The difference is where that lives and what it costs. Kajabi's email, automations and broadcasts are part of the platform on every plan, tied to the same contacts that buy your courses, so a launch sequence and a members' area are the same system. FunnelKit's live in the Automations engine, gated to the Professional plan and up, and they are built around WooCommerce orders and carts rather than course enrolments.

For a knowledge seller, Kajabi's version is the more natural fit because it is wired to the thing you sell. For a store owner shipping products, FunnelKit's is the more natural fit for the same reason, and reviewers do warn its automation side is not plug and play and carries a real learning curve. Neither is a marketing tool bolted on as an afterthought; they are just built for different sellers.

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 FunnelKit offers funnel-step A/B testing on your own WordPress pages. Both let you split visitors between two versions of a page or step 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 FunnelKit's funnel-step tests run on your own 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. FunnelKit shows the split you see with most WordPress plugins: WordPress.org is warm, around 4.9 with a large review count and tens of thousands of stores, while Trustpilot and support threads run harder on billing and support, including a WordPress.org thread titled Worst Ever Company and reports of friction cancelling or getting a refund before the renewal charged. 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 a bill that renews automatically, monthly for Kajabi and higher-than-intro for FunnelKit.

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 the more complete standalone of the two and the more likely fit for most people weighing this pair, which is why it 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.

FunnelKit, for a WooCommerce store that wants checkout and follow-up in one

Choose FunnelKit if you already run WordPress and WooCommerce and want that store to convert and retain better without a monthly platform fee. It adds a converting checkout, order bumps and one-click upsells, then bundles email, SMS, cart-abandonment recovery and a light CRM so you can follow buyers up inside the same suite, starting free or at $99.50 a year. It is the right pick for the seller who wants a funnel on the store they already own, not a hosted platform, and it is the decisive choice over Kajabi for anyone selling products rather than courses. Just budget for the true cost of self-hosting, plan for the $199.50 Professional tier if the automation is why you want it, expect a learning curve on that side, and note 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 FunnelKit also asks you to run and maintain 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 FunnelKit, 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 FunnelKit review in full.