If you’re thinking of creating online course platform easily and make recurring income, you want to pay special attention. There are many platforms available, but I have narrowed down to five best ones.
If you’re new, it’s not easily to find out which ones are best. It can be very confusing.
You will quickly find out that the cheapest ones are not always the best one and has some serious limitation.
The following guide will help you decide the best online course platform in 2020.
At this point, you need to understand that each competitor of Kajabi has its own way of solving the aspect of building an online business. Kajabi differentiates from its competitors by coming with a more straightforward approach, offering a plethora of tools to keep people engaged.
Let’s look at the competition of Kajabi and see how it differentiates from our company. Let’s start with a company called Teachable.
Kajabi vs Teachable
Teachable is a pretty big company, being quite comparable to Kajabi in terms of reach and branding. This is a mostly online course platform that tries to handle the end to end online course business. More specifically, they handle everything from the creation end to the delivery & sales end of courses.
They are specifically focused on creators as their target market, which are people that are constantly publishing to their YouTube channels or who are blogging. They also target people who are experts in a certain subject matter. Additionally, they are strongly focused on diving into the wave called “creator evolution”, where people are realizing that they can quit their day job and start a YouTube channel, a blog or a podcast.
Teachable is focused on preaching this message that online courses are another legit way of getting revenue. Their core message is that “everything is teachable”. They focus on people who have very little business experience, which is a key aspect where Kajabi differs from Teachable.
On Kajabi, you basically need to have a certain level of experience and need to handle a larger chunk of your business, while on Teachable the platform will handle most of the business side. Kajabi acts as a middleman and handles most of the aspects related to your money, taxes and contracts. Kajabi is more about giving you your business. It’s more of a white label platform that allow you to run your business as you see fit.
An aspect teachable is really great at is that it makes the online course solution really simple and straightforward to build out. They’ve done a pretty good job at refining the core product and they focus on simplicity over capabilities.
If you jump into Teachable, you’ll notice that it’s going to be really easy to start and to set up your business. However, you’re going to bump into certain edges and problems once your business starts to scale out. Many customers who have migrated from Teachable to Kajabi declared that they had a fantastic experience getting on boarded, but as their businesses scaled out, they started to experience a lot of dysfunctionalities and weren’t able to automatize their businesses and put things on autopilot.
Teachable is missing the idea of a robust site builder. Teachable promotes the idea of sales pages for your online courses, but they lack the idea of the brand building from a website perspective. Even their sales page builder is very simple and straightforward, because they want to keep all things simple and to the point.
Teachable also doesn’t provide users any sort of blog or community, plus they lack any kind of email marketing. As a rule of thumb, they’re trying to push you towards their partner with Convertkit. However, some of their users are using an active campaign or a very specific soft called Infusionsoft.
This platform doesn’t have a robust page or funnel building. However, funnel building is quite useful for info products. When Kajabi was first introduced on the market, they were really close to what Teachable offers, which is this online store mentality where people will go and visit your store and buying your product.
However, what the experts from Kajabi found out is that the one thing that is having a stronger impact on a business and driving more sales than a store is a funnel. Having a funnel in place is what is going to warm up your customers through e-mail marketing. At the end of the day, that’s what’s going to make you sales, especially on a premium product.
Talk to People About Their Needs
If you are a partner of Kajabi or you are just considering launching a business on this platform, I strongly advise you to talk to your customers about their needs. As part of your incipient conversation with your client who wants to use Kajabi, you can ask them what they actually want to accomplish.
If they just want to launch an online course and start from scratch, maybe Teachable is the right platform for them in the beginning, since this platform does not have enough tools built-in to help them scale up their business. However, if they want to expand their business and grow, then direct them to try Kajabi.
Kajabi has a higher cost than Teachable, because it comes with many more features and targets people who want to scale up their companies. However, going through every individual feature that Kajabi has to offer and stacking it against what our competitors are offering makes you realize that Kajabi is superior in terms of website building, product building, email marketing and funnel building. Once people understand the power and true potential of Kajabi, they realize that it’s totally fair that this tool does not have a free pricing plan and doesn’t come with a low price.
Another key benefit of Kajabi to point out is that you get unlimited Wistia hosting. This is a key feature, because no other platform pays for the hosting of your videos. If for example you want to produce a lot of video content, you can store them all on Wistia servers, and it’s all included in the Kajabi pricing. Again, you can use this information as a selling point to your potential customers.
Kajabi vs Thinkific
Thinkific is another online course platform that, unlike Teachable that focuses on the creator space, they are focused on the learning management niche. They are working up market to start capturing all those large customers who are focusing on LMS. Thinkific focuses mainly on educational businesses, but they are looking to expand in new areas.
Just like Teachable does, Thinkific strives to make online courses simple and straightforward. They now offer website building, surveys and quizzes. However, they are missing out on a blog, funnel building and email marketing. A lot of customers from Thinkfic realize that what they offer is not enough for scaling, so they migrate to Kajabi in order to leverage the benefits offered by the funnel builder tool.
Of course, there are other customers who are not aware of Kajabi’s features, so they choose to pay $800 a month to get a good funnel from the Edison Suite by Clickfunnels. With Kajabi, they can get access to all these features with just the basic plan.
At the end of the day, Thinkfic is quite similar to Teachable, because it has a free plan. However, Kajabi offers more advanced features that help you ramp up your business like never before. I would recommend anyone who is serious about his business and want to scale out and attack new markets to choose Kajabi over Thinkfic.
Amazing Customer Support from Kajabi
In addition to having an amazing product thanks to the experienced product team from Kajabi, these guys are also very passionate about their clients’ success and referrals. As a Kajabi partner, you’ll get all the support needed to succeed.
So when you’re promoting Kajabi to your friends or colleagues, talk about the gold customer service and help people understand why you are so passionate about this platform.
Kajabi vs Clickfunnels
Clickfunnels is by far the most famous competitor of Kajabi. This world-renowned platform has huge reach thanks to their fantastic marketing and branding teams. I’m pretty sure most of you have heard of this platform, but in case there are some who haven’t, what you need to know is that it is a funnel building platform focused mainly on marketing and advertising.
What differentiates Kajabi from Clickfunnels is that our platform is not focused solely on marketing, but comes with an integrated approach. Kajabi has a holistic view of how you should build your business. Everything from our funnels to product delivery and email campaigns revolve around you acquiring customers and leads, and then nurturing them over time. Kajabi focuses on all aspects of growing your business, including branding, personalization and customer support.
Clickfunnels was created and is owned by Russel Brunson, a very smart marketer who thinks out of the box and likes to test a lot. You can see his own personality on the Clickfunnels platform. This platform is pretty simple and straightforward. You have several types of landing pages and templates that you personalize and you start selling right away.
However, Clickfunnels comes with some serious drawbacks. First off, the platform is not secured. You might find yourself being targeted by cyber criminals and lose your data. Second, it’s hard to manage, especially if you have a bigger course. Third, the platform does not run as smooth as it is marketed to be. The customer service experience is not flawless, and it might prevent some clients from doing business properly.
In terms of solutions, Clickfunnels has funnel building, page building, email marketing with Edison Suite, membership sites and webinars. However, they do not provide users with video hosting or any other real facilitation for video marketing.
However, Clickfunnels is missing quite a lot. First, they are lacking website building. They think that personal and company branding can be achieved with just a landing page or sales page. Conversely, on Kajabi, we want people to be able to ramp up their businesses, not just have some landing pages and sell a bunch of products.
At Clickfunnels, they also lack a blog or extensive email marketing. Their digital products are not considered as important as they should be. Moreover, they have no kind of video hosting whatsoever. What they are focusing on is personalization. You are basically pulling your own pages one by one and personalize them with your content and videos.
On Kajabi, we want you to build a real business, not just drag some pages around and personalize them. We also want to make it a cohesive process so you can have your business up and running with all the tools and help you can get.
Kajabi vs Keap
Keap is a complex platform that has a whole lot of features. However, it might not be the best tool you can use to scale your business. They are basing their business on automation and technology. However, no matter how much technology one uses, he cannot replace the strong need of finding a good niche and creating a good message that resonates with his audience.
On Kajabi, we want you to build your own businesses instead of trying to figure out how to use complex automation tools to grow and scale your company. Many clients who came over from Infusionsoft to Kajabi declared that they didn’t understand the tools they had at their disposal, so they had to spend even more money on hiring a consultant who could help them with using the automation tools from Keap.
Keap is focused on small business automation and offers sales automation, e-commerce features and consultants set up. This also includes a mandatory on-boarding fee, because they require their consultants to be paid separately by their clients. This sounds crazy, but in the eyes of the company it helps stickiness and client loyalty.
Keap lacks video hosting, course delivery & tracking, community or website integration. They are mostly focused on the front end of their business, which involves selling your product and automating the process.
Kajabi vs WordPress
WordPress has literally eaten the online world, being the most widespread solution in 2019. While we’re not going to deny that it is a fairly decent solution, Kajabi beats WordPress in many aspects. First, Kajabi is a solution that has done a lot of legwork for you, which you typically need to do it all by yourself in WordPress.
WordPress is easy and cheap to start, but it’s not the best platform to scale your business, especially if you’re not very techie. Managing the plugins, updating them and using custom code is a nightmare, even for the most experienced WordPress users. When we’re talking about the idea of holistic business design, Kajabi is the real deal.
On WordPress, you need to learn how to use and manage each plugin you install. Moreover, the whole business scale up is not as cohesive as what Kajabi has to offer. On Kajabi, you are part of the business process. You are co-creating with us and your opinion matters. We’re not just here to build a platform that we think it’s the best, but we’re here to be obsessed to help you succeed and to find solutions to any type of problems you might face.
Final Words
Kajabi has always been committed to bringing new game-changing features for entrepreneurs. You can use all the above information to ramp up your business and promote your knowledge business using Kajabi.
The product development team at Kajabi has been working hard to bring a holistic solution to scale up your business. Not a quick fix with simply a few landing pages and plugins like Clickfunnels or WordPress, but a SOLID all-in-one solution.
We hope that all the information presented above is helpful for you to choose the right platform for your business.
Lastly, if you're interested in making money online, you can also check out my Robby Blanchard's Project Platinum too.
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