Kartra vs. Kajabi In-Depth Comparison & Review (2020)

Looking for an objective review and comparison of Kartra vs Kajabi?

You’ve come to the right place. 

This is the most epic, up-to-date review on the internet for these two amazing pieces of software. 

But before we get too far along, there’s something I have to share with you: I’ve used both Kartra and Kajabi to grow my online business and have taken online courses on both platforms.

If you are reading this, then you are most likely trying to lay the foundations of a fledgling online business.

Or perhaps you already have one but are looking for ways to optimize it and cut down on the sky-high monthly bills for all those overpriced marketing tools like ClickFunnels you have subscribed to over the years.

Either way, you seem to have narrowed down your options to two platforms: Kartra and Kajabi.

Kartra Vs Kajabi – It’s An Easy Choice

I have good news for you — this choice is an easy one. Let me spare you a lot of unnecessary research and what could be endless hours of pondering and just tell you right off the bat: there is one clear winner on all accounts.

It is the ultimate all-in-one service for online businesses currently on the market.

Whether you are offering online yoga classes, language courses, or knitting and embroidery tutorials, this platform has everything you need and more.

Want to know who the winner is?

Read the full review of the Kartra and Kajabi service packages to find out.

If you make it to the end, you will also learn how to sign up for my favorite software. I even have some special bonuses and show you how to get a 50 percent discount by using my affiliate link!

What Is Kartra?

Kartra is an all-in-one ecommerce and marketing platform. It gives you all the tools you need to create and run a business online, from website hosting, email, and video marketing to tracking and analytics, affiliate management, ready-to-use sales campaigns, and more. For more information, check out my Kartra Review.

What Is Kajabi?

Kajabi is a similar all-in-one platform with various features that allow you to design a website, build pages, run marketing campaigns, create online courses, manage customers, and more. 

Kartra vs. Kajabi: Three Key Aspects

I will compare and contrast the individual features of Kartra vs Kajabi in just a moment. However, before we get into the nitty-gritty, I thought a more general overview could help you get the gist of things.

I mentioned above that Kajabi is great for building a membership website — but not for much else. You may find that somewhat surprising. After all, Kajabi does advertise itself as an all-in-one tool. But is it really?

Features and Functionality

Let’s take the helpdesk, a key feature and a must for any online business that wants to get somewhere, as an example. How does Kajabi fare? Well, it just doesn’t. Kajabi does not have any helpdesk features whatsoever.

Okay, what about scheduling tools? Perhaps you offer appointments or reservations to your clients. Maybe you host live events. Either way, you want your customers to be able to book, cancel, and pay for services through an integrated, user-friendly calendar tool. The problem is, Kajabi does not have one.

So, if you are a Kajabi user and want a helpdesk or a calendar tool, you would have to subscribe to additional services — and spend even more money just to ensure the basic functionality of your online business.  

In contrast, Kartra offers both helpdesk and calendar features — and a lot more — as part of its very affordable basic package.

Value for Money

Here is another problem. Even where Kajabi does offer certain tools, you may still have to pay extra to get them. Kajabi’s basic plan does not give you access to the platform’s full functionality. It excludes really useful features such as automation, affiliate tools, and a theme editor.

If you want any of these tools, you would need to either upgrade your Kajabi plan or subscribe to other service providers to fill in the gaps. Either way, your expenses will quickly add up — and for no good reason whatsoever.

What’s more, using different providers for different aspects of your marketing and advertising strategy can seriously mess up your analytics. What you want is an integrated and straightforward overview of how your business is performing. Instead, you will end up with all sorts of disparate reports that do not tie up to give you the full picture.  

Kartra, on the other hand, offers a comprehensive and budget-friendly starter package that includes all the essential tools and features your business needs to hit the ground running. More importantly, all these features work together and complement each other seamlessly. That means you can get detailed reports and analytics on every single aspect of your online presence, allowing you to closely track your performance across the board.

Quality of Analytics

Having ready access to high-quality reporting on demand is absolutely crucial for the success of your business. It is estimated that data-driven marketing can make companies six times more likely to be profitable year over year.

Data is key — and yet, Kajabi does not come with split testing. That means you can’t know which campaigns work and which do not. As Kajabi does not offer tracking links either, you also won’t be able to know where your traffic is coming from or what your visitors are doing once they get to your page. To do all that, you would have to get a separate split testing tool from another provider.

To ensure that your analytics are up to standard, in addition to split testing, you would also need to factor in all the other tools that do not come with Kajabi or with your personal subscription plan — and get your reporting on their performance elsewhere.

As a result of all this, you will not only end up with subpar analytics but also risk serious data transfer errors that could mislead you as to where your business is going.

You will not have such issues with Kartra. Kartra offers the full set of essential online business tools, coupled with detailed and well-integrated analytics in real-time.

With Kartra, you can see at a glance if people are watching your videos and if your forms are making conversions. You will know how many visitors and sales you have, each complete with a lead history report detailing all the interactions every lead has ever had with you — and a lot more.

Kartra vs. Kajabi: In-Depth Comparison Feature by Feature

The previous section was meant to give you a general idea of the three major areas in which Kajabi lags behind Kartra. In this section, I will go over each of Kartra’s twelve built-in functionalities in detail and compare them to those of Kajabi.

1. Page Building

Any online business needs a website, and any website needs to have pages. And you want to have all sorts of pages. A home page, landing pages, product launch and coming-soon pages, long sale pages, upsell and donwsell pages, check out and thank you pages… The list is practically endless.

So unless you do coding for a living and are really good at it, you definitely want a tool that does your page building for you. Both Kartra and Kajabi offer page builders as part of their basic packages. However, they do not provide the exact same services — and the devil is, as always, in the details.

The good news is that both platforms will get you:

• A built-in landing page builder
• A built-in web form builder
• Landing page personalization

So far, so good. Compared to Kartra, however, Kajabi only offers limited custom “Thank You” pages. You also don’t get a landing page template marketplace as you do with Kartra.

Both Kartra and Kajabi come with an intuitive drag-and-drop editor that allows you to easily create all sorts of pages. With Kartra, however, you get a lot more templates and customization options. There are dozens of templates of calls to action, countdown timers, and other features to choose from.

More importantly, though, Kartra has built-in A/B split-testing features. These allow you to compare and contrast the performance of up to four page variations. You also have the option to split set percentages of the visitor traffic between the different variations.

2. Email Marketing

The importance of email marketing to doing business online simply cannot be overstated. Studies show that email brings nearly 40 times more new customers than social media outlets such as Twitter or Facebook combined. It is, therefore, absolutely essential that you incorporate emails into your marketing strategy.

Both Kartra and Kajabi offer the following features:

• A built-in email editor
• Automated follow-up and re-engagement                      
• Automated sequences
• Broadcasts             
• Email personalization options
• Lead importation
• Message open tracking               
• Native email automation
• Segmentation                    

Unlike Kartra, however, Kajabi only offers limited click-through tracking. On the other hand, Kajabi allows you to send unlimited emails per month. That is something that you do not get with Kartra.

The following features you only get with Kartra:

• Lead scoring
• List cleaning
• Email split testing
• Email templates
• Expiring tags                      
• SMS sequences                

Having a wide range of gorgeous email templates to choose from is vital for building a successful email marketing strategy. Kartra gives you all that plus endless ways to customize your emails so that they fit your brand. You can add add-ons such as countdown timers, content blocks, thumbnails, customer testimonials, and more.

And then there is email split testing. As I mentioned before, Kajabi’s plans do not offer split testing. In contrast, Kartra comes with automated advanced split testing, which allows you to split-test both your email subject lines and the content of your messages. This way, you can optimize every single one of your emails and set your email marketing campaign up for success.

What’s more, Kartra’s email lead scoring tool automatically scores your leads based on their history, behavior, and interactions with you. That can greatly improve your analytics and help you make better and data-driven decisions for your business moving forward.

3. Tracking and Analytics

Kartra’s in-depth tracking and analytics do not just stop at email marketing. They are incorporated across the board and cover every single feature of the platform.

Granted, some of Kartra’s analytics tools come with Kajabi too. These include:

• Broadcast analytics                      
• Detailed sales and transaction analytics
• Funnel conversion reports
• Membership site analytics
• Page analytics                  
• Page tracking
• Sequence analytics                      
• Video analytics

Other tools, such as:

• Custom date range reporting filters
• Detailed form analytics
• Lifetime value reports
• Visual performance reporting

… you also get with both platforms, but Kajabi supports limited functionality only.

And then there are the analytics tools that only come with Kartra:

• Analytics for affiliate sales for other brands     
• Detailed helpdesk analytics        
• Goal conversion rate reports                  
• Goal conversion time reports
• List analytics
• Split testing
• Tracked links                      

I’ve already touched on Kajabi’s lack of split testing and helpdesk tool. The other tools mentioned above, however, are no less critical when it comes to getting accurate, comprehensive, and actionable reporting on the performance of your business.

Take goal conversion rate and time reports, for example. These allow you to track your users’ behavior in real-time. Whether you want to see when they closed a sale, submitted a form, or clicked on a particular link or button — Kartra allows you to do all that and more.

High-quality analytics and a data-driven approach are a must for any online business. They are key to getting ahead of the competition and staying afloat in today’s market. Kartra’s comprehensive portfolio of reporting tools is the obvious choice for any entrepreneur.

4. Campaign Building

You simply cannot have a marketing strategy without well-thought-out and integrated marketing campaigns. Unless you are a seasoned marketing professional, you might want to have someone do your campaigns for you. Hiring an expert, however, can be expensive and time-consuming.

Fortunately for all us online entrepreneurs, the good news is that modern marketing platforms have excellent ready-to-use campaigns that we can customize to suit our brands. Kartra and Kajabi are no different. They both offer great campaign-building tools such as:

• A drag & drop page builder                     
• A pre-built campaign marketplace                     
• Campaign triggers
• Conditional filtering
• Custom domains              
• Done-for-you campaigns
• Goal-based automation               
• Page analytics                   
• Responsive design                      
• Web page templates

Unlike Kartra, however, Kajabi only allows for limited functionality when it comes to adding custom HTMLs. What’s more, Kajabi does not offer custom wait steps and marketing campaign split testing — both of which you can get with Kartra.

5. Video Marketing

Video marketing is a powerful tool that can really help boost your conversions and profit. However, you want to do it properly. I’m sorry to break it to you, but amateur YouTube channels or free video hosting providers will not do.

What you need instead is a professional video marketing service that goes above and beyond mere video hosting. You want to have advanced features such as video analytics and the ability to create playlists. Both Kartra and Kajabi offer these tools, although Kajabi’s playlist function is more limited.

Playlists allow you to organize your videos by topic, making it easier for viewers to navigate your content. Video analytics tools help you figure out which videos are good for your business and which are not. You can see, for example, how many people played or completed a given video or how many people clicked on a call-to-action button.

Speaking of clickable call-to-action buttons, Kajabi does not offer that feature. With Kartra, however, you can embed multiple call-to-action buttons on every video. These include subscribe and share buttons, “Buy Now” banners, clickable thumbnails for other videos, opt-in forms, and more.

Unlike Kajabi, Kartra also has a share-to-unlock function, which pushes viewers to promote your video content on social media. Essentially, that is free advertisement!

Both call-to-action buttons and the share-to-unlock function can encourage user engagement and boost your sales. To make the most of your video marketing, you should invest in a platform that comes with both of these features.

6. Helpdesk

I mentioned in the introduction that, unlike Kartra, Kajabi does not have a built-in helpdesk feature. I consider this to be a major weakness — so much so that, all other things being equal, I would still prefer Kartra over Kajabi just because it comes with a helpdesk.

The problem with tools like Kajabi or Teachable is that you would have to either buy third-party software or manually manage your clients’ queries yourself. None of these solutions is anywhere near optimal for your business.

In contrast, Kartra can fully automate and streamline your customer support queries, saving you both a great deal of unnecessary stress.

Why is having a helpdesk so important? It’s rather simple, really. By solving your clients’ problems and responding to their queries in a timely and competent manner, you keep them happy. And happy clients are far more likely to stay and keep buying your products or services. What’s more, studies show that retaining existing customers can be 5 to 25 times cheaper than acquiring new ones.

Here are some of the features that come with Kartra’s built-in helpdesk:

• Customizable Wikis                      
• Detailed helpdesk analytics
• Embeddable helpdesks
• Helpdesk canned responses                                         
• Live chat      

7. Calendar Management

Here is yet another feature that only comes with Kartra. A great calendar tool is absolutely essential for any business that offers appointments or any type of bookings or reservations.

Whether you are a psychotherapist or own a beauty salon, you want your customers to be able to book, cancel, and altogether self-manage their appointments. You also want your availability to be clearly displayed, with time slots blocked out or open for booking as relevant. 

Automated reminder notifications are another feature that is essential for any good calendar tool. You want to make sure that your customers never miss an appointment.

Last but not least, a first-rate calendar tool should be able to automatically charge for sessions and process payments.

Lucky for you, all these functionalities are built-in Kartra’s calendar tool.

8. Ecommerce

If you are going to be selling products or services online, then you need an  ecommerce management system. Both Kartra and Kajabi offer some of the most essential ecommerce tools, including:

• Abandoned cart follow-up            
• Built-in checkout                
• Coupon creation                
• Free trials                
• Multiple payment processing
• Multiple price points with flexibility
• One-click upsells              
• Order forms            
• Page tracking
• Payment plans       
• Payment with international currencies  
• Subscriptions

The support for other key features, however, is limited in Kajabi. One such example is the generation of detailed sales and transaction analytics.

Another is the availability of ecommerce for digital or physical products. The basic Kajabi membership allows you to sell three products only. In contrast, Kartra’s basic plan will enable you to sell five products. After that, Kartra’s plan is unlimited, whereas Kajabi only lets you sell 15 and then 100 products. If you are looking for a free alternative to handle payments you can create a GrooveSell account instead.

Furthermore, there are ecommerce features that Kartra has, and Kajabi does not. These include:

• Automated tax calculation
• Credit card decline follow-up
• Link tracking

Having built-in automated tax calculation is a must — unless you are eager to do the math yourself or spend even more money on accountants’ fees. Whether it is sales tax or VAT, you want these calculated and added to the final price at checkout by your ecommerce tool.

9. Affiliate Management

Affiliates are an excellent way to both generate traffic and also withhold ad payment until the sale has been closed. If your business is at the stage where you are considering integrating affiliates into your marketing strategy, you want to get your hands on the best affiliate management tool out there.

The problem with Kajabi here is that, when it comes to affiliate management, the platform supports the following features only:

• Affiliate analytics
• Earnings reports
• Referral tracking links

Needless to say, these are nowhere near what you want in a great affiliate management system. 

What’s more, Kajabi’s affiliate portal is only open to higher-priced subscriptionplans. But even if you do get one of their pricier plans, you still won’t get many other features that are just as essential to effective affiliate management.

Compare this to Kartra, which comes with all of the above features and also:

• A built-in affiliate questionnaire
• Affiliate marketplaces
• Analytics for your affiliate sales for other brands
• Automated affiliate payments
• Promo tools

Automated Affiliate Payments

Kartra’s automated affiliate payments, in particular, have a lot more to them than meets the eye. The system allows you to set up automatic payments to all affiliates or only to those of your choosing. You can also set up payments to go out only after a minimum amount of sales has been made. All that ensures that your affiliates are premium quality and saves you all the time you would have otherwise spent moving payments around.

Affiliate Marketplace

Kartra’s affiliate marketplace warrants a special mention too. Unlike Kajabi, Kartra gives you access to an affiliate marketplace. There, you can both find affiliates to promote your products or services or become an affiliate yourself.

And if you love Kartra and would be interested in becoming a Kartra affiliate, the company offers a 40% commission on all affiliate sales. Compare that to Kajabi, where you only get 30%. The only affiliate program I like better then bother of them is GrooveAffiliate.

Affiliate Manager

If you are a newbie to affiliate marketing and think you need extra help, don’t worry. All of Kartra’s affiliates have a dedicated affiliate manager who can offer you any support you might need.

So, here again, the choice is a no-brainer — Kartra clearly offers a lot more value for your money.

10. Membership Sites

I mentioned earlier that Kajabi has been optimized for a membership experience — and that’s 100% true. Kajabi offers one of the best membership platform builders currently on the market. However, that does not mean that Kartra lags behind. In fact, both platforms come with the following features:

• A built-in membership site          
• A centralized membership portal           
• Comment control
• Drip content            
• Host files                 
• Membership site analytics          
• Multiple membership levels                     
• Page-by-page content protection

What’s more, unlike Kajabi, Kartra allows you to have unlimited locked posts.

All things considered, when it comes to creating a membership platform, I would say that Kartra and Kajabi both manage to deliver a great user experience. So this one is a tie.

That being said, though, consider this. I am certain that you love and put tons of work into your products, courses, or services. The sad truth, though, is this: no matter how beautiful your members’ platform is, only a handful of people will actually buy your product or complete your course. And the vast majority will not even open your content. 

That goes to show that Kajabi has been optimized for the wrong piece of the puzzle. You should keep in mind that there is a lot more that goes into the building and running of an online business than merely managing a members’ site.

Kartra, on the other hand, is optimized for all pieces of the puzzle across the board. It excels in so much more than its membership website builder capacity. And on top of all that, Kartra allows you to have unlimited members and is a lot cheaper than Kajabi.

11. Customer Relationship Management

Customer relationship management or CRM is crucial for the continued success of your business. Kajabi does rather well in this respect. Both Kajabi and Kartra offer the following features:

• An activity log
• Custom fields                    
• Notes
• Tags
• Visual contact workflow management              

However, Kajabi allows limited groups only and does not come with an automation log tool.

Here again, I would go with Kartra just because it offers better and increased functionality.

12. Additional Services

Both Kartra and Kajabi offer great customer support services to their subscribers. These include:

• Chat support                      
• Email support                    
• Live training events           
• Online training

Kartra vs. Kajabi: Pricing Plans

Now, let’s move on to the one question I know you’ve all been waiting for. I’ve been going on and on about how Kajabi is so much more expensive than Kartra but does not offer that many additional services. So how does Kartra stack up against Kajabi in terms of pricing?

Kartra Pricing Update May 2020

On May 20th AJ Roberts the CEO of Kartra announced that all restrictions for the numbers of emails and the allowed bandwidth for hosting Kartra videos are removed for the Kartra plans Silver, Gold and Platinium.

That means you can now host your complete online course in Kartra just like you can in Kajabi without paying extra for an external video hosting solution like Vimeo.

Kartra Pricing Plans 2020

Starter

• $99 per month OR
• $79 per month with annual billing (20% or $240 off)

Silver

• $199 per month OR
• $149 per month with annual billing ($600 or 25% off)

Gold

• $299 per month OR
• $229 per month with annual billing ($840 or 23% off)

Platinum

• $499 per month OR
• $379 per month with annual billing ($1440 or 24% off)

What’s Included in the Plans?

Kartra’s Starter Plan gives you:

• 1 custom domain
• 50 GB bandwidth
• Up to 2,500 leads
• 15,000 emails monthly
• Host 100 pages
• Sell 20 products
• 1 helpdesk
• 2 membership sites
• Add 1 additional team member

With the Silver Plan, you get:

• 3 custom domains
• Unlimited bandwidth
• Up to 12,500 leads
• Unlimited emails monthly
• Unlimited pages
• Unlimited products
• Unlimited helpdesks
• Unlimited membership sites
• Unlimited team members
• Kartra Agency

The Gold Plan has everything in the Silver Plan plus:

• 5 custom domains
• Unlimited bandwidth
• Up to 25,000 leads
• Unlimited emails monthly

The Platinum Plan comes with everything in the Golden Plan as well as:

• 10 custom domains
• Unlimited bandwidth
• Up to 50,000 leads
• Unlimited emails monthly

For a more comprehensive overview on Kartra’s pricing (including the fine print), check out my article.

Kajabi Pricing Plans 2020

Basic

• $149 per month OR
• $119 with annual billing ($360 or 20% off)

Growth

• $199 per month OR
• $159 with annual billing ($480 or 20% off)

Pro

• $399 per month OR
• $319 with annual billing ($950 or 20% off)

What’s Included in the Plans?

Kajabi’s Basic Plan gives you:

• 1 website
• 1 admin user
• 3 products
• 3 pipelines
• 10,000 contacts
• 10,000 active members
• Unlimited landing pages
• Unlimited marketing emails
• Kajabi University
• 0% transaction fee
• Webinars and events
• Ready-to-use templates
• Quizzes and surveys
• Chat support
• Automations

The Growth Plan has all the features of the Basic Plan and:

• 10 admin users
• 15 products
• 15 pipelines
• 25,000 contacts
• 24/7 chat support
• Advanced automations
• Option to remove Kajabi branding
• Affiliate program

The Pro plan has everything that’s in the Growth Plan plus:

• 3 websites
• 25 admin users
• 100 products
• 100 pipelines
• 100,000 contacts
• 2,000,000 marketing emails
• Code editor

Sign Up for Kartra Using My Affiliate Link and Get a 50% Discount!

If you made it this far, well done! I’m proud of you — that’s precisely how you set up your online business for success in 2020.

As a reward and a token of my gratitude, please feel free to sign up for Kartra using my affiliate link to get a staggering 50% discount! I posted this article on my birthday back in February and wanted to do something really special for my readers. This is one of the absolute best possible Kartra discounts you can find anywhere.

However, please note that the discount is only available for new Kartra users. Unfortunately, old or returning subscribers will not be able to benefit from it.

But that’s not all. In addition to the 50% discount, I am giving you access to the full recording of the Pareto Summit. During that event, I got the chance to interview and pick the minds of some of the most successful online marketers. These include:

• AJ Roberts (Kartra’s Chief Revenue Officer)
• Mike Filsaime (the original Co-Founder of Kartra)
• Perry Marshall
• John Lee Dumas

… as well as more than 40 other experts, many of whom are Kartra users themselves.

You are also guaranteed full lifetime access to the Pareto Summit recordings for as long as you stick with Kartra as your all-in-one online marketing service provider.

You will not get this kind of deal anywhere else — so please consider subscribing to Kartra via my affiliate link. The 50% discount is going to be live for a limited amount of time only. Click here, claim your Kartra discount now, and take your business to the next level!

Kartra vs. Kajabi: A Recap

So, before you leave, let’s do a quick recap, shall we?

Don’t get me wrong: I actually think Kajabi is a great product — if all you need is to create a membership site. It offers one of the best members’ website services currently on the market and has been specially optimized for an excellent membership experience.

However, I don’t think Kajabi is your best choice when it comes to building and managing an all-round online business. There is a lot more that goes into that than merely building a great members’ platform, and that is where Kajabi fails to deliver. And it is certainly not the best choice in terms of value for money — as well as for anyone who might be on a tighter budget.

That is why, in my opinion, at least, Kartra is a superior product. For starters, it is much cheaper, which is always great. But more importantly, Kartra has been optimized to serve virtually all aspects of running a business online. From building your website, email, and video marketing to managing your affiliates, calendar, and customer support queries — Kartra has got you covered.

What’s more, all these various services are seamlessly integrated and fit each other like a glove. Every single aspect has been thought out through and through to complement all the rest. And best of all, you can get high-quality reports and actionable analytics on how your business is performing in real-time.

What’s not to like?

As far as I’m concerned, the Kartra vs. Kajabi comparison has a clear winner — Kartra.

Last but not least I want to mention something that you might not have considered.

Right now the former co-founder of Kartra created a new software called GrooveFunnels.

Right now it’s still in beta but it will combine the best of Kartra and Kajabi.

Because GrooveFunnels is still in beta you can still get a lifetime version that includes all the features from Kartra + WebinarJam + Everwebinar for less than the annual plan of Kajabi.