Which Platform Is Best For Selling Courses: Kajabi vs. Thinkific vs. Teachable?

4 min readAug 25, 2023

Originally published on e-learningpartners.com

Which platform should you pick for creating, marketing, and selling your online course? While there are thousands of LMSs out there, a few are as well-known as Kajabi, Thinkific, and Teachable. We’ve tested these most popular course platforms, and here’s what we know now.

Kajabi vs. Thinkific vs. Teachable: What They Have in Common

Before getting into the differences between these platforms, let’s look at what they have in common.

#1. They Are All Externally Facing LMSs

The most important thing to keep in mind is that all three of these are externally-facing LMSs, meaning they are best for selling courses, not creating internal training. If you need an LMS to create internal training, you will want to consider a different LMS, such as TalentLMS or TalentCards, unless you also plan on selling the course, in which case comparing Teachable vs. Thinkific vs. Kajabi will still make sense.

#2. They Are Not SCORM Compliant

The other major thing to keep in mind is that neither one of these platforms is SCORM-compliant. If you need SCORM compliance for an external course, look into LearnWorlds as a potential LMS.

Comparing HTML5 Compatibility

It is also worth noting that Kajabi and Teachable also don’t support HTML5, but Thinkific does. But LearnWorlds also supports HTML5 and is worth considering.

Kajabi vs. Thinkific vs. Teachable: Products You Can Offer

When you start comparing the products you can offer your students with these platforms, it starts to become clear why Kajabi is our preferred platform when comparing it to Teachable and Thinkific.

Products You Can Offer With Kajabi

With Kajabi, you can offer your students the following products:

Courses
Coaching
Community
Podcasts
And more

It’s worth noting that Kajabi always improves and adds additional products you can offer to your learners. It also has templates, and even AI features that can help you to build your products faster.

Products You Can Offer With Teachable

Meanwhile, Teachable lets you offer the following two products:

Courses
Coaching

Products You Can Offer With Thinkific

Finally, Thinkific only lets you offer a single product: courses. This LMS falls behind in a comparison of Teachable vs. Thinkific vs. Kajabi.

Teachable vs. Thinkific vs. Kajabi: Features

Website and Website Builder

When studying Thinkific vs. Teachable vs. Kajabi, you’ll see that all of them help you create a website and have a website builder. That being said, Kajabi has the best website builder of the three.

You can create landing pages on any of these LMSs, but you are stuck with a few boring templates for Thinkific or Teachable. By contrast, Kajabi has a landing page builder, so you can customize a landing page completely.

Email Marketing

Kajabi includes email marketing with enough functionality that you won’t need another program. By contrast, Teachable has a basic email marketing system that doesn’t let you do much. You can only email students, not potential customers. Thinkific doesn’t even have email marketing features at all.

Mobile Apps

Kajabi and Teachable both have mobile apps so that your learners can access classes on the go. Thinkific does not. If you want a white-label mobile app without the Kajabi or Teachable logo, consider LearnWorlds instead.

Thinkific vs. Teachable vs. Kajabi: Pricing

Kajabi is more expensive than Thinkific and Teachable, but it delivers a much better value. If you use Teachable or Thinkific, you will need to get a separate email marketing platform. You will also need to get a separate landing page builder. That adds to the cost when comparing Kajabi vs. Thinkific vs. Teachable. It also adds to your workload because you have to find ways to coordinate different software for your website, funnels, and email marketing with Zapier or similar technology.

Thinkific and Teachable have free versions that you can try before upgrading. Meanwhile, you can get an extended 30-day free trial (instead of a 14-day trial) of Kajabi with our link.

Conclusion

After trying these platforms, we chose Kajabi because it includes robust email marketing and website-building features, it has everything we need to market and sell our course, and it saves us time by not having to worry about working with different software.