Kajabi alternatives
Kajabi is genuinely strong for selling courses and running marketing funnels, and its Coaching product has a built-in scheduler and live video — if that’s mostly what you do, it’s a serious tool. If that describes what you need, the honest answer is that you should probably stay where you are.
Kajabi is a course and marketing platform, priced at $179 to $499 a month, or $143 to $399 on annual billing. The $89 Kickstarter tier was pulled from the public pricing page in January 2026, which moved the entry point for a lot of solo coaches in one step.
Most people who go looking for a Kajabi alternative are not unhappy with Kajabi as a course platform. They are running a coaching business on a product built to sell recorded content, and the parts of coaching that happen between sessions have nowhere to live.
This page is about whether that gap is worth a migration, what you would give up by leaving, and what each route actually costs once the tools you still need are added back in.
The short answer
Kajabi is a course and marketing platform at $179 to $499 a month ($143 to $399 annual), genuinely strong at courses, funnels, email and — in its Coaching product — scheduling and live video, but it ships no contracts with e-signature and no habit tracking. Coachful covers the same course and website ground and adds the coaching layer from $29 a month, though if recorded content and marketing funnels are the business, staying on Kajabi is the better trade.
What it ships, and what it does not
The case for switching is almost never that a product is bad. It is that the parts you need are missing, and you are paying for those separately somewhere else. Solid parts below ship with Kajabi in full; hatched parts do some of that job but not all of it; ghosted parts are the ones you buy elsewhere.
- 1SchedulingIncluded
- 2Video sessionsIncluded
- 3PaymentsIncluded
- 4ContractsBuy separately
- 5ProgrammesPartial
- 6Habits and check-insBuy separately
- 7CoursesIncluded
- 8CommunityIncluded
- 9WebsiteIncluded
- 10Email marketingIncluded
- 11Client appPartial
- ProgrammesCoveragePartialInsteadTop up elsewhere
- Client appCoveragePartialInsteadTop up elsewhere
- ContractsCoverageAbsentInsteadBuy separately
- Habits and check-insCoverageAbsentInsteadBuy separately
Why do coaches leave Kajabi?
Three reasons, in roughly this order. The first is the floor price: $179 a month is a serious commitment for a coach with eight clients, and the $89 tier that used to absorb those buyers is no longer on the public pricing page.
The second is the shape of the product. Kajabi is organised around a content library and a funnel that sells access to it. Coaching is organised around a relationship that runs for months, and the work that makes it succeed happens in the week between calls.
Kajabi’s Coaching product covers sessions and milestones; it does not cover daily habits, check-ins or accountability, so those end up in a spreadsheet or in nothing.
The third is contracts. Kajabi ships no contracts or e-signatures, so a coach selling a six-month engagement adds a separate e-signature subscription — about $25 a month for a common entry tier — and then keeps agreements in a different system from the payments they relate to.
What do you lose by leaving Kajabi?
Genuinely strong, and you will miss it
- Course delivery depth. Kajabi is one of the most complete products in the category for selling and hosting recorded content.
- Marketing funnels and email at a level most coaching platforms do not attempt. If paid acquisition is your engine, this is the thing you are giving up.
- A built-in scheduler and live video inside the Coaching product, so sessions are not an afterthought.
- Kajabi Payments at a 0% platform fee, with processing at 2.9% + $0.30 on Basic, 2.8% on Growth and 2.7% on Pro.
- Community and a branded website in the same subscription as the courses.
Not shipped, so you are buying it elsewhere
- Contracts and e-signatures. Absent, and a separate subscription for most coaches.
- Habit tracking and daily check-ins. Absent, which is the part of coaching that produces adherence.
- Structured programmes and progress tracking beyond sessions, milestones and course completion. Partial.
- Two-way calendar sync, which we could not verify and therefore do not claim either way.
- A client mobile app built around the coaching relationship rather than the content library. Partial.
What does each route actually cost?
Subscription price is the easy half. The column that decides it is the third one: what you still have to buy once the product is in place.
| Route | Subscription | Still buy separately | Realistic monthly |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stay on Kajabi Basic | $179 ($143 annual) | E-signature, about $25. No common paid product replaces habit tracking. | $204+ |
| Stay on Kajabi Pro | $499 ($399 annual) | Same as above | $524+ |
| Coachful Solo, up to 20 clientsours | $49 | A dedicated ads or funnel tool if paid acquisition is the engine | $49+ |
| Coachful Pro, unlimited clients | $99 | Same as above | $99+ |
| Run both | $179 + $49 | Nothing, and you now reconcile two client lists | $228+ |
Vendor prices are published self-serve rates as of May 2026 and change without notice. Replacement costs are indicative entry prices drawn from the comparison registry and the 2026 Coaching Business Report, not quotes.
What is the honest case for staying on Kajabi?
If the business is recorded content with coaching attached rather than coaching with content attached, stay. Kajabi does the thing you make money from better than a coaching platform will, and moving a working funnel to save $80 a month is a poor trade against the revenue that funnel produces.
Stay too if your paid acquisition runs through Kajabi’s funnel and email tooling and it is converting. Coachful includes a website builder, funnels and multi-step email automations with triggers, delays and conditional branching, which is enough for most coaching businesses and is not as deep as Kajabi’s marketing stack. That is a real difference and pretending otherwise would be the sort of claim this site exists to avoid making.
And stay if you have one product, one funnel and no live coaching at all. Everything this page is arguing for is a solution to a problem you do not have.
How do you migrate off Kajabi without losing anything?
Run the old system until the new one has taken a real payment. Every step below assumes you have not cancelled anything yet.
Export your contacts and purchase history first
Before touching anything else, take the contact export and a record of who bought what and when. Renewal dates and purchase history are the things that hurt most when they go missing, and they are the easiest to take with you.
Download your course assets
Videos, PDFs, worksheets and any email sequence copy you want to reuse. Rebuild is quicker than it looks once the assets are on a drive; it is the missing source file that costs a weekend.
Rebuild one course and one offer, not all of them
Pick your best-selling offer and rebuild only that. If the new system cannot carry your most important product, you want to discover that in week one rather than after you have migrated nine.
Move payments deliberately, not silently
Existing subscriptions do not transfer between platforms. Decide whether to let current payment plans run to completion on Kajabi and start new sales on the new system, which is the least disruptive path, and tell affected clients before their card statement does.
Wire the coaching layer you came for
Contracts, programmes, habits and check-ins are the reason for the move, so set them up before the cosmetic work. During Coachful onboarding the team imports a client list and helps rebuild courses, programmes and the website.
Run in parallel for one full billing cycle
One month of both subscriptions is cheap insurance against discovering a missing export after the account is closed. Cancel only when a new client has been through the whole path: booked, paid, signed and working.
Where we pick something else, and Kajabi is the alternative
Others in the same category
Common questions
How much does Kajabi cost in 2026?
Kajabi is $179 to $499 a month on monthly billing, or $143 to $399 on annual, as published in May 2026. The $89 Kickstarter tier was removed from the public pricing page in January 2026. Kajabi Payments charges a 0% platform fee with processing at 2.9% + $0.30 on Basic, 2.8% on Growth and 2.7% on Pro; bringing your own Stripe or PayPal account adds a 0.5% to 2% surcharge on top of processing following the 2026 restructure.
What is the cheapest Kajabi alternative for a coach?
That depends on how much of the stack you need. If you only sell recorded courses, cheaper course platforms exist and are listed in the directory at coachplatforms.com. If you need courses plus the coaching around them, Coachful is $29 a month for up to five clients, $49 for up to twenty and $99 for unlimited, and we make it. Cheapest on the invoice is rarely cheapest once the tools each option still requires are added back.
Does Kajabi do coaching, or only courses?
Kajabi has a Coaching product with a built-in scheduler and live video, so sessions and milestones are covered. What it does not ship is contracts with e-signature or habit tracking and daily check-ins, and its calendar sync is something we could not verify. If your coaching is sessions plus content, Kajabi covers it; if it depends on what clients do between sessions, that part lives outside the tool.
Can I move my Kajabi courses to another platform?
The assets move; the structure is rebuilt. Download videos, PDFs and worksheets, export contacts and purchase history, then rebuild the course structure in the new product. There is no one-click transfer between platforms in this category, in either direction. Coachful’s onboarding includes help importing a client list and rebuilding courses and the website.
Will I lose my email list and funnels if I leave Kajabi?
The list exports. The funnels and sequences do not transfer and have to be rebuilt, which is the single largest hidden cost of leaving Kajabi and the main reason to keep the account running for a billing cycle after the new system is live. Copy your sequence text out before you cancel anything.
Is Kajabi worth it for a coach with fewer than ten clients?
Usually not on price alone, and that is a statement about fit rather than about quality. At $179 a month, Kajabi has to be carrying a content business to make sense. A coach with eight one-to-one clients and no course is paying for the half of the product they are not using, which is exactly the buyer the removed $89 tier used to serve.
The verdict
Kajabi is a strong product being asked to do a job it was not built for. If courses and funnels are the business, it is the better tool and leaving it to save subscription cost is a false economy. If coaching is the business, you are paying $179 a month for a content platform and still assembling contracts and accountability somewhere else.
We make Coachful and recommend it here, so weigh that accordingly. The check you can run without trusting us is arithmetic: add up what you pay Kajabi, plus every tool you bought because Kajabi does not ship it, plus the hours you spend joining them. If that total is comfortably under $179, stay where you are.