The demand for online courses has been on the rise over the past decade. More and more people have been choosing to learn online so that they can access a wide range of courses at affordable prices.
E-learning also eliminates the need for travel and going to a physical classroom. This makes it easier for those who are working and also studying or live far away from educational institutes to continue their education.
The health crisis has pushed the demand for e-learning even higher, as schools, colleges, universities, and workplaces have been shut down to meet lockdown guidelines.
If you are a content creator or wish to create an online course or digital product, you may have surely heard of Kajabi.
One of the top LMS platforms, Kajabi allows businesses, coaches, trainers, and content creators to create and sell their content under one roof.
But if the platform doesn’t suit your individual needs, there are a lot of options out there for you. Our list of the top 4 Kajabi alternatives will help you choose an LMS platform that fits your needs and budget.
Check them out below. But first, let’s understand the tools and features of Kajabi to be able to compare it with its competitors.
What Is Kajabi?
Kajabi is an all-in-one LMS platform that allows you to create, sell, and market online courses, without the need for extra plugins or integrations. It offers easy-to-use templates that enable you to create and design your products quickly.
You can create a range of products like e-learning courses, podcasts, communities, newsletters, membership sites, and so on.
Connect your own custom domain or get a free one from Kajabi. You can also create a mobile app for your users where they can access your products with a single click.
Track customer metrics using the analytics tool and generate reports and customer forecasts to understand how your courses are faring among your customers.
You can also create quizzes and surveys for your customers. You can get access to automated actions to help with your business. Moreover, the advanced plans allow you to remove Kajabi’s branding and get access to its code editor, affiliate program, and so on.
Kajabi doesn’t charge transaction fees, but payments processed via Stripe have a merchant processing fee of 2.9% and an additional 30 cents for every transaction.
Pricing
Kajabi provides 3 plans to its users. They include:
- Basic plan at $119/month
- Growth plan at $159/month
- Pro plan at $319/month
Kajabi offers a 30-day money-back guarantee. You can also choose to change or cancel your subscription whenever you want. Moreover, you can sign up for the 14-day free trial to get a feel of all its plans.
Customer Support
Kajabi offers a variety of customer support services and resources to help its users.
If you’re on the Basic plan, you can post questions to Kajabi’s Customer Support team using the live chat option on business days from 6 a.m. to 5 p.m. Pacific Time (PT), or submit a request outside of business hours. Users of the Growth and Pro plans get 24/7 live chat support.
You can also learn how to use the platform by checking out its in-depth courses on Kajabi University, or its articles, webinars, and Facebook community.
If you need one-on-one coaching sessions, get the Kajabi Access add-on, which will also give you early access to the LMS platform’s new features, products, and its code editor, among other benefits.
Who Is Kajabi Best For?
Kajabi is best for small businesses and first-time course creators who wish to create and market their content through online courses and products.
Drawbacks of Kajabi
- It is pricier than most other alternatives.
- Limited customization available.
- Course completion certificates are not issued.
Top 4 Kajabi Alternatives for LMS
- TalentLMS
- Thinkific
- Podia
- Skillshare
1. TalentLMS
TalentLMS allows you to start creating online courses in a few simple steps. You can also host live training sessions for a range of purposes like onboarding, compliance, marketing, sales, partner training, etc.
TalentLMS offers a wide range of features depending on the plan that you’ve selected.
Features
With TalentLMS, you can create course videos, presentations, and text files, or even reuse content that has been already added to other courses.
You can also create quizzes, surveys, tests, and assignments to evaluate and engage with your students and customers.
TalentLMS offers a higher level of gamification through points, rewards, badges, levels, and leaderboards.
It allows you to create learning paths to control how your courses are viewed and completed.
With TalentLMS’ white labeling features, you can use your custom domain and branding and completely customize your course design—with features like HTML, CSS, and Javascript for the finer details.
The platform lets you host video conferences and discussions for distance training with real-time communication.
It also offers automation, custom reports, multiple integrations, and high security that make it easy to use, secure, and productive.
TalentLMS allows you to create an LMS mobile app for Android and iOS devices. What we love most about the platform is that it’s available in over 30 languages, enabling you to present to a larger audience worldwide.
Pricing
TalentLMS offers 5 pricing plans that can be billed monthly or annually. They are as follows:
- Free Plan (up to 5 users and 10 courses)
- Starter Plan at 79/month or 59/month on the yearly plan
- Basic Plan at 159/month or 129/month on the annual plan
- Plus Plan at 329/month or 249/month on the annual plan
- Premium Plan at 529/month or 429/month on the yearly plan
If you need over 1,000 users on your courses, you can also request a custom quote for TalentLMS’ Enterprise plan.
Customer Support
TalentLMS offers unlimited email customer support on all its plans, with additional support given to Plus and Premium users through sign-on support and a dedicated account manager.
You can also get access to Product Advice, Learning Support, and TalentLMS’ Help Center, where you can check out its blogs and video tutorials for more resources.
The live chat feature is a part of TalentLMS’ Learning Support and is available from Monday to Friday between 6 a.m. and 11 p.m. Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).
TalentLMS promises an initial response to emails within 24 hours without using bots.
Who Is TalentLMS Best For?
TalentLMS’ features are mainly oriented towards creating different types of training modules. This makes it suitable for businesses, marketers, teachers, trainers, coaches, and other content creators.
Drawbacks of TalentLMS
- Their certification management needs improvement.
- Customization can be challenging.
- Reports are not very comprehensive.
2. Thinkific
Thinkific helps beginners in the content creation space create premium online courses at affordable rates. It is an online course software that allows you to create live lessons, on-demand courses, or a mix of both called blended classes.
You can also create communities and membership sites with the help of this platform.
Features
Thinkific enables users to create course templates, exams, surveys, product bundles, and more. It also offers a certain level of gamification of the courses through quizzes and certificates.
Built mainly for video courses, Thinkific lets you also create other content formats like text files, presentation slides, and PDFs that your students and customers can download.
You can import your existing content to Thinkific and retain ownership over your content.
Thinkific offers an easy interface for its website builder tool that allows you to drag and drop to create your courses.
It also gives you the option to host your courses on a custom domain and fully customize your storefront and courses to make it look as if you’re hosting your courses on your own website.
You can track orders, conversions, and also your students’ progress through Thinkific’s in-depth analytics and reporting tools.
What’s more, you can create sales widgets for your courses. You can then display them on your website, allowing your customers and students to directly register using them.
Thinkific’s advanced plans allow you to create unlimited courses, assignments, drip content schedules, and live lessons with Zoom. You can also install additional software packages on your Thinkific site via its App Store,
A few downsides to using Thinkific are that it doesn’t offer advanced automation, marketing, and selling tools as Kajabi does.
Pricing
Thinkific offers 4 plans that are billed monthly or yearly. They include:
- Free plan
- Basic plan at $49/month
- Pro plan at $99/month
- Premier plan at $499/month
If you opt for the annual plans, you get 20% off on the subscription rates.
Thinkific doesn’t charge any transaction fees.
Customer Support
Thinkific provides round-the-clock customer support online and by phone, and you can visit its Help Center for handy guides and video tutorials.
You can also join Thinkific’s Creator Community and interact with other course creators, or check out the courses on Thinkific Academy for more learning resources.
Who Is Thinkific Best For?
Those who are starting out with their online business or are new to content creation will benefit greatly from Thinkific’s LMS platform.
Drawbacks of Thinkific
- Integrated email marketing is not available.
- No option to enable discussions on a course by course basis.
3. Podia
Podia is another all-in-one LMS platform that allows you to create and sell online courses, coaching programs, webinars, communities, e-books, audiobooks, and other course materials.
It also allows you to reach a wider audience by marketing your courses and other products with the help of built-in email marketing, affiliate marketing, integrations, and more.
Features
Unlike Kajabi, Podia gives you access to host unlimited products, sales, messages, hosted files, and customers and is more affordable.
It offers unlimited membership plans, free migrations, Zapier triggers, and instant payouts and allows you to create product bundles and coupons for your customers.
Podia also allows you to connect your custom domain or use a Podia subdomain.
Like Kajabi, Podia doesn’t charge any transaction fees.
You can add team members at $20 per member per month on the Mover and Shaker plans. The Earthquaker plan automatically includes 5 teammates.
The advanced plans also include affiliate marketing, embeddable buy buttons for faster checkout, gamification through course certificates, Zapier actions, the ability to remove Podia branding, third-party coding, and more.
What we love about Podia is that you can first register for its live demo held every Tuesday at 2 p.m. Eastern Time (ET) to get your questions answered about using the platform and to get an idea of its varied features. This will help you understand if it’s the right fit for your business needs.
Pricing
Podia offers 3 plans that are billed monthly or yearly, as follows:
- Mover plan at $39/month or $390/year
- Shaker plan at $89/month or $890/year
- Earthquaker plan at $199/month or $1990/year
You can change or cancel your plan anytime. Podia also allows you to first check out the features of its Shaker plan using the 14-day free trial.
- Build your website
- Sell your course
- Grow your community and brand
“Sales page, emails and course all in one place, amazing!”
Customer Support
Unlike Kajabi, Podia offers daily customer support via live chat on all its plans between 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. ET on weekdays and 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. ET on weekends. You can also contact its customer support team via email or chat after business hours and they’ll get back to you within a day.
Moreover, the Earthquaker plan gives you access to a dedicated customer support agent, personalized onboarding calls, and monthly group calls with other course creators.
You can also check out Podia’s vast collection of articles on its Help Center page. Their weekly Q&A sessions, blog, guides, video library, and free content generator tools offer additional support.
Who Is Podia Best For?
Podia is popular among those who need to create a lot of online products within a cost-efficient budget. It is apt for small online businesses that need to market their digital services and products.
Drawbacks of Podia
- Course marketplace unavailable.
- Relatively limited course and site customization options.
- Email system needs improvement.
4. Skillshare
Skillshare is a novel kind of course creation platform where you don’t create branded content. Instead, you simply create and add courses to Skillshare’s website that users pay to access and watch.
This is great if you don’t want the headache or hassles of managing and marketing your content.
Features
Using Skillshare is rather easy. It’s free as you only upload your course content and let users discover your courses and pay for them.
Skillshare’s revenue model is also drastically different from Kajabi, as you earn per minute watched, and your earnings are transferred to you every month.
With Skillshare, you can’t market your courses or create branded and extensive courses.
These aspects may actually irk a lot of businesses and content creators. But Skillshare may suit creative professionals who don’t wish to constantly manage their courses or hire a team to do it but would love to share their skills, grow their online community, and make money off of it.
Pricing
As mentioned previously, Skillshare is free to use. So, it doesn’t have any pricing plans.
Customer Support
To get resources on teaching courses online, you can check out Skillshare’s Teacher Handbook or its Teaching Academy.
Who Is Skillshare Best For?
Skillshare is best for creative entrepreneurs, freelancers, and artists who want to share their knowledge or create learning resources on topics like writing, design, illustration, and photography.
Drawbacks of Skillshare
- Course completion certificates are unavailable.
- It is a smaller community.
Conclusion
A modern LMS platform that hopes to meet the needs of today’s businesses and content creators must go over and above regular content creation tools.
It must also offer marketing tools, integrations, analytics, customization, gamification, scalability, automation, extensive customer support, and collaboration, which most of the above Kajabi alternatives do offer.
We hope that our comprehensive guide helped you choose your next LMS platform to suit your content creation needs. Have you used any of them? What do you think are their pros and cons? Let us know in the comments below.
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