Kajabi vs Teachable: Is All-in-One Worth the Price?

Kajabi vs Teachable is not really a course platform comparison. Teachable sells courses. Kajabi replaces your course platform, your email tool, your landing page builder and your funnel software with one bill. Whether that is smart depends on one number: what you currently pay for the tools Kajabi would absorb.

Kajabi starts around $179/month. Teachable starts around $39/month. If you are pre-revenue, that settles it — start on Teachable.

Bottom line

• Teachable is the right choice below roughly $2,000/month in sales.
• Kajabi earns its price when it lets you cancel an email platform, a page builder and a funnel tool.
• Both charge you on top of payment processing, so compare total cost, not sticker price.

Quick comparison

Confirm live numbers on the Kajabi pricing page and the Teachable pricing page — tiers and caps change.

What Kajabi’s price actually replaces

Kajabi’s entry plan includes email marketing with unlimited sends, landing pages, sales funnels, a website, a community, and course and coaching products. Higher tiers raise product counts, contact limits, admin seats and the number of websites you can run.

Compare that to the stack most creators on Teachable actually run: Teachable at $39 to $89, an email platform at $29 to $79 once the list grows, a page builder at $0 to $99, and often a separate checkout or funnel tool.

Add it honestly and a working Teachable stack frequently lands between $120 and $220/month. At that point Kajabi is not expensive. It is the same money with one login and one support team.

The mistake is comparing Kajabi’s $179 to Teachable’s $39 and stopping there. The real comparison is Kajabi’s $179 against your whole tool bill.

What Teachable’s price actually buys

A course platform that does its job with very little setup, and a genuinely low floor.

Teachable’s entry plan gives you 5 products, 1 admin user and unlimited students, with a 7.5% transaction fee. Its middle plan removes that platform fee and raises you to 10 products. Its higher plan goes to 50 products and 5 admin users.

If your business is one flagship course plus a coaching offer, Teachable’s middle plan at roughly $89/month does everything you need and Kajabi’s extra features are things you will not open.

That is the fair case for Teachable, and it applies to more creators than Kajabi’s marketing implies.

The contact cap nobody reads

Kajabi’s plans are metered on contacts, not just products. The entry plan sits at a few thousand contacts, the middle plan at tens of thousands, the top plan at around 100,000.

This is the item that catches people. If you are building an email list aggressively, the contact ceiling — not the product count — is what forces your upgrade. A creator with one course and 30,000 subscribers is pushed to Kajabi’s middle tier by the list alone.

Teachable does not meter contacts, because it is not really trying to be your email platform. That is the trade in one sentence: Kajabi charges you for list size, Teachable makes you pay someone else for list size.

Check the current contact tiers on the Kajabi pricing page before you pick a plan, because this is the number most likely to have shifted.

Fees: read the fine print on both

Teachable’s 7.5% entry-plan fee is the loudest cost in this comparison. On $4,000/month in sales that is roughly $300 gone, which is more than Kajabi’s entry plan costs. Teachable’s answer is the zero-fee tier at around $89.

Kajabi does not take a platform cut when you use Kajabi Payments, and applies a small extra percentage if you bring your own processor — that percentage shrinks on higher tiers.

Payment processing applies to both regardless: roughly 2.9% plus 30 cents on US cards. If you want to avoid platform percentages entirely and own your checkout, a one-time-license cart is a different answer — see our ThriveCart review.

Email and funnels: the honest gap

Most course platforms ship an email tool you will abandon. Kajabi’s is the exception — segmentation, automation, broadcasts and funnel sequences are real enough to run a launch on.

It is still not the equal of a dedicated creator email platform on deliverability tooling, newsletter growth features or editor comfort. If your newsletter is the business and the course is secondary, run email separately regardless of which platform you pick. Our Kit vs beehiiv comparison covers that side.

Teachable’s email is for receipts and announcements. Treat it that way and you will not be disappointed.

Who should pay Kajabi prices

• You are past roughly $3,000/month in revenue and your tool bill is already over $120/month.
• You sell through funnels and launches, not a single evergreen sales page.
• You are one person or a small team, and consolidating four logins into one is worth real money to you.
• You run coaching, a membership and courses together and want them sharing one contact record.

If three of those are true, start the Kajabi trial and cancel the tools it replaces in the same month. The trial only tells you something useful if you actually migrate one live offer into it.

Who should stay on Teachable

• You have not made your first $1,000 from a course.
• You have one or two products and no funnel strategy yet.
• You already have an email platform you like and do not want to move it.
• You want the smallest possible monthly commitment while you test demand.

Start on Teachable, use the cheap plan to validate, and move to its zero-fee tier once sales are steady.

FAQ

Is Kajabi worth it for one course?

Rarely. One course and no email list means you are paying for a funnel and marketing suite you are not using. Validate on a cheaper platform, then buy Kajabi when consolidating tools saves you money rather than adding a bill.

Can I use my own email platform with Kajabi?

Yes, through integrations, but it undercuts the reason to pay for Kajabi. If you are keeping a separate email platform long-term, Kajabi’s value proposition shrinks to a nicer product builder, and Teachable or Thinkific will be cheaper.

Does Teachable’s 7.5% fee apply to every plan?

No. It applies to the entry plan only; the tiers above it carry no Teachable platform fee. Payment processing fees still apply on every plan, on both platforms.

Which one is easier to learn?

Teachable, clearly. You can have a course live in an afternoon. Kajabi has more surface area because it does more, and most people need a week before it feels natural. Neither requires a developer.

Our call

Do not buy consolidation before you have anything to consolidate. Launch on Teachable, prove the offer, and keep your tool bill small. When that bill crosses roughly $120/month and you are tired of four dashboards, move to Kajabi and cancel the rest in the same week — that is the month the price starts making sense, and not before.