Kajabi vs Kartra

What each one is, and why the choice comes down to what you value

Kajabi and Kartra land on the same shortlist because they promise the same thing: one login that replaces a stack of separate subscriptions for a creator selling their own offer. Each builds pages and funnels, takes payment, sends email, hosts courses and memberships, and neither takes a cut of your sales on its main plans. That overlap is exactly why buyers get stuck between them. But they lead with different strengths, and once you name what you care about most, the choice mostly settles itself.

Kajabi is the established, premium creator platform. It reports more than 100,000 businesses and over $12B earned on it, and long-time coaches treat it as the default. It folds courses, coaching, communities, memberships, a website, landing pages, email, automations, a checkout and even a branded mobile app into one system, and it is built so a polished course and a paying audience live in the same place. Its centre of gravity is the product experience: a clean course player, a community, and an app your buyers install.

Kartra has run since 2018 and reports more than 60,000 customers. It covers the same ground, but it leans harder into the marketing and sales machinery: native checkouts with order bumps and one-click upsells, deeper email and SMS automation, a built-in helpdesk, and its own affiliate program to recruit partners who sell for you. Where Kajabi leads with the polished delivery, Kartra leads with the tools that move a lead to a sale and then to a repeat sale.

So the real question is not which has the longer feature list. It is whether you are buying the most established, polished platform to host and sell your own courses, or the one that bundles more marketing tooling for less.

Pricing compared

Kajabi has three plans, billed annually or monthly. On the annual rate Basic is $143/mo, Growth is $199/mo and Pro is $399/mo; paid monthly the same plans run $179, $249 and $499. Kajabi takes no revenue share, so what you pay is the subscription plus card processing (2.9% + $0.30 on Basic, falling to 2.7% on Pro). The free trial runs 30 days and asks for a card.

Kartra prices across four plans, and the entry tier is a trap worth naming. On the annual rate Essentials is $52/mo, but it caps you at 5 pages and one product and takes a 5% cut of your sales, so the realistic starting plan is Starter at $99/mo, which drops the fee to 0% and adds unlimited pages, products and courses plus webinars. Growth is $189/mo with automations and affiliate management; Professional is $429/mo with real-time funnel analytics and API access. Paid monthly the plans are $59, $119, $229 and $549. There is a 14-day trial that asks for a card, and a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Read the realistic entry rows together and Kartra is cheaper: Starter at $99/mo against Kajabi's Basic at $143/mo. What the extra money buys on Kajabi is polish, the ecosystem and the branded app, not more raw marketing tooling. If your priority is the most proven platform and the best course experience, Kajabi earns the premium. If it is getting the most sales machinery for the least money, Kartra wins the price line outright.

Course delivery versus marketing machinery

This is where the two stop being interchangeable. Kajabi's strength is the delivery and the ecosystem. The course player, the community and the branded mobile app are more polished than Kartra's, and for a coach whose product is the learning experience, that polish is worth paying for. It is also the most established name in the category, which matters when you are asking buyers to trust you with a high-ticket program.

Kartra's edge runs the other way. Its checkout does order bumps and one-click upsells natively, its email and SMS automation goes deeper, and it ships its own affiliate program so you can recruit partners to sell your offer without a second tool. Because all of that sits on one data layer, a purchase can trigger a sequence and grant course access with no connector. For a creator who cares more about the selling than the course-player polish, that bundle is the value.

Both take payment natively, which separates them from a landing-page tool like Unbounce that hands the sale to a third party. Neither, though, is built for the one job this site cares about most.

The split-testing gap that matters for paid traffic

Here is the line that decides it if any of your traffic is bought. Neither platform runs same-URL, server-side split testing. Kajabi's A/B testing is basic and page-level, and Kartra's picks a winner for you at the page level. For organic, email or affiliate-referred traffic, that is fine.

For paid traffic it is a tax. When a test changes the destination URL, Meta and Google can drop the campaign back into the learning phase and reset the optimisation you paid to build, and a changed page can send the ad back through review. If you test constantly, which is the whole job of a paid-traffic buyer, that cost lands on every experiment. This is the standing reason a cold-traffic affiliate looks past both of these platforms, and it is worth naming before you commit to either.

What long-term users report

We do not run these platforms on live campaigns. We read what long-term users report, alongside each vendor's own docs and pricing pages, and we verify prices with the vendor. Kajabi users call it the default for a reason and praise the speed to launch and the consolidation, and the most common complaint is price: the fee only pays off if you run the marketing and sales side, not just host a course, and power users find the editor dated and the platform sticky once your site, list and products live inside it.

Kartra draws praise for the same consolidation, with users describing cancelling separate CRM, email and cart subscriptions after moving in. The steady complaint is support: multi-day waits and generic replies, with even satisfied users calling the team slow. New users also find the editor dated and slow to learn. Both are real, established products that are safe to trust. The risk with each is fit and support, not whether the software works.

Which one should you pick?

Kajabi, for the established, premium creator platform

Choose Kajabi if what you sell is your own courses, coaching or a membership and you want the most proven platform to host and sell it. You get a polished course player, a community, a branded mobile app, email, automations and a checkout in one system, backed by the biggest ecosystem in the category and no cut taken from your sales. Plan on Basic at $143/mo, budget for card processing on top, expect a dated editor, and know its A/B testing is basic and not built to protect a paid campaign's ad learning.

Kartra, for more marketing tooling at a lower price

Choose Kartra if you want the same one-login setup for less and you care more about the selling than the course-player polish. From Starter up it takes no cut of your sales and gives you native checkout bumps and upsells, deeper email and SMS automation, a helpdesk and your own affiliate program, and it has run since 2018 so it is a known quantity. Start on Starter at $99/mo rather than the thin Essentials tier with its 5% fee, plan around slower support and a dated editor, and know its page-level split testing is not made for the constant testing a paid-traffic buyer does.

ElasticFunnels, if you buy cold paid traffic

If your margin is conversion rate minus click cost, the honest answer is that neither of these is built for you, and a third platform fits the job better. ElasticFunnels is a funnel platform for teams that buy traffic: it keeps the pages, the split testing, the checkout, the CRM and the attribution on one data layer. Its same-URL split testing rotates variants server-side under one campaign link, so Meta and Google keep their learning and a test never sends the ad back through review, which is the exact gap that decides against Kajabi and Kartra above. An AI builder generates a lander from a prompt or clones one from a URL, the checkout carries order bumps and one-click upsells and routes payments across several merchant accounts, and because the click, the order and the rebill sit on one record you can see which ad actually paid. Multi-account routing matters most to sellers pushing real card volume across more than one merchant account; a creator taking a handful of orders a week will not lean on it, and still gets the same checkout, upsells and one-record reporting. Starter is $97/mo, every feature is on every plan, the 14-day trial needs no card, and EF-hosted checkouts carry a 0.5% fee. The catch is age: ElasticFunnels is newer than either platform here, and there is very little independent review coverage to check its claims against yet, so until you run real volume through it you are largely taking the vendor's word, which is what you would expect of a platform this new. That limits your outside proof, not the checkout or the testing themselves, so prove it on one test campaign before you move a business onto it.

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