There has been no shortage of people flocking to online courses. Not only have e-courses presented a viable alternative to traditional schooling, but re-skilling has also become somewhat of a buzzword in the HR space.
All this to say, there’s an immense opportunity to sell online courses right now. So, if you’re an entrepreneur looking for your next venture and have skills to share, there’s no better time to start creating online courses.
That’s why today, we’re looking at two popular online course platforms, both of which make digital course creation a breeze: LearnWorlds and Kajabi.
We’re putting these heavy hitters side by side to give you a clear understanding of their features, pricing, and support options.
There’s lots to discuss, so let’s get started!
What Is LearnWorlds
LearnWorlds confidently calls itself “the best online course platform for creating, selling, and promoting online courses“. Founded back in 2014, LearnWorlds has steadily expanded ever since.
It offers users solid and intuitive online course creation, sales, and marketing features. But, where LearnWorlds shines is with its student interactivity and engagement tools. Course creators can build a genuinely stimulating learning environment through quizzes, certificates, student discussions, and more.
What Is Kajabi
Kajabi was also founded in 2014 and has gained lots of traction. In fact, over 40,000 entrepreneurs use Kajabi to manage their online business. Impressive, right?
You can use Kajabi to sell online courses, subscriptions, memberships, and digital products. It includes plenty of course creation, community management, email marketing, analytics, and pipeline creation features — to name a few!
Course Creation
As course creation is at the core of both LearnWorlds and Kajabi, we’ll look at these features first. Here we’ll review each platform’s course editor and determine how customizable, easy to use, and flexible they are.
LearnWorlds
Creating a course with LearnWorlds is as easy as clicking on “create a course” and working with LearnWorlds’ course wizard. You choose a title, edit the URL, and select the type of course you want to create. Your options include paid and free classes as well as drafts that aren’t yet published. You can even create courses labeled “coming soon”.
LearnWorlds provides a number of course templates to get you started. For example, the classic template allows you to clearly display your learning units on one page. Or, you could use a condensed template, showcasing the section summary instead. Overall, there are 10 templates to choose from.
LearnWorlds’ course editor comes with a rich text editor for designing paragraphs of text. You can add sections to your course and upload content to them, such as videos, ebooks, PDF documents, YouTube videos, SoundCloud links, and audio. You can also include questionnaires and add a certificate.
However, you don’t have much design freedom over your LearnWorlds courses. For instance, you can only include one content type per section. You also can’t edit the layout of that page. As such, your students have to jump from one piece of media to the next. But as you’ll come to see, this is a limitation also shared by Kajabi.
LearnWorlds’ course creation process heavily focuses on video content. It offers unlimited video hosting and provides a range of intuitive and innovative video-related features. For example, with just a few clicks, you can automatically generate a transcript of your video and use this to add subtitles. This is great for creating more accessible content and a more flexible learning experience. You can also add interactive elements to your videos, including titles, image overlays, links, interactions, and questions.
When it comes to creating and distributing courses, you have the option of drip-feeding and creating gated content. The latter requires students to pass an assessment or complete an assignment before they can continue. As such, LearnWorlds makes it easy to emulate the more traditional student experience. Of course, you can also enable students to access all of your content at any time — the choice is yours!
Kajabi
As I’ve already hinted at, Kajabi empowers you to sell a whole range of digital products. Alongside courses, you can also sell memberships, subscriptions, digital downloads, consultations, training programs, and more.
Kajabi offers convenient blueprints to help kick-start the creation of your product. For this review, however, I’ll only reference the course-related blueprints.
For starters, you could use the mini-course blueprint, which provides an organized structure for short courses that can be used as lead magnets.
Alternatively, there’s the online course blueprint. This is best suited for fully-fledged e-courses encompassing a variety of lessons, assignments, and quizzes. Of course, you can also disregard these templates and start from scratch. However, Kajabi’s blueprints certainly make it easier for you to plan your course’s layout — especially if you have no idea where to begin! This template provides a straightforward course composition, including an introduction, foundation stages, and more.
There are over 100 course templates to choose from, so you’re bound to find one that meets your needs. However, when it comes to the content editor itself, Kajabi isn’t the most advanced on the market. You can only upload one piece of content per lesson category. This means if you post a video in one lesson, you can only add a description. You couldn’t, for example, also add a homework download in the same section.
Like LearnWorlds, one of Kajabi’s most impressive features is its unlimited video hosting and bandwidth. So, if you’re planning on uploading lots of video content, you’ll be glad to hear you can upload as many videos as you care to.
Overall, the course builder is easy to use with a simple and intuitive interface. Content can be dragged in from your computer, so it’s effortless to upload videos and images and add a description.
Like LearnWorlds, you can display a featured image for each module. You can also drip-feed, lock, or leave your content entirely free for the student to peruse through. Again, the choice is ultimately yours!
Course Creation – Winner: LearnWorlds
Neither Kajabi nor LearnWorlds offers extensive customization options when it comes to course creation. While I like that Kajabi has a range of blueprints, I still think LearnWorlds is a little more innovative with its interactive video tools, which Kajabi is yet to offer.
Learning Experience
The learning experience offered to students has a considerable impact on whether they sign up for more courses with you. Of course, students may be looking for different things.
This section explores what LearnWorlds and Kajabi have to offer for both casual and more traditional learners.
LearnWorlds
We’ve already touched on some of LearnWorlds’ learning experience features, such as the interactive video types with subtitles and transcripts. Not every course platform offers an easy way to add text to videos like this, yet this kind of content makes it much easier for students to learn on the go when they can’t turn on the sound.
LearnWorlds also enables you to set quizzes and assignments. You can choose between quizzes, exams, assignments, and file assignments. When creating a quiz, you can create a question bank and use items from there to set students multiple-choice questions.
When it comes to exams, you can determine the total duration, include random questions, and set the maximum number of attempts students can have at taking the exam. You can also opt to immediately show students when they’ve made a mistake and set the passing grade as a percentage.
You can set a due date for file assignments and specify where learners need to upload the file. This is an excellent feature for anyone teaching more hands-on courses where the course creator might want to provide feedback.
You can also create and distribute course completion and questionnaire certificates. This is great for making your courses feel that bit more official. In contrast, Kajabi doesn’t offer this feature, so if you want to award students with certificates, you’ll need to create them using a third-party tool such as Canva.
LearnWorlds also comes with a built-in community feature. Here, you can create small groups and communities within LearnWorlds’ social network. Students can chat amongst themselves and encourage one another as they embark on your course. As the course creator, you can also tune in at any time to provide feedback and answer questions.
Another cool learning feature is that students can add notes and highlight text in their courses, making it easier for students to track and retain information in a way that suits them.
Finally, LearnWorlds is a mobile-friendly platform, so students can engage with your content while they’re on the go. They can also switch the course player to the distraction-free mode to really hone in on their learning materials free of other pesky diversions.
Kajabi
Kajabi allows you to create interactive quizzes and, like LearnWorlds, is limited to multiple-choice questions. Learners can also upload file assignments. However, unlike LearnWorlds, you can’t draw questions from question banks or randomize questions.
Also, similar to LearnWorlds, Kajabi enables you to create forum-like online communities where students can engage with one another and you. You could even offer this as an up-sell and make it exclusive to premium members. That said, unlike LearnWorlds, there isn’t an option to create individual groups, so Kajabi is a little limiting as a social network.
Kajabi also comes with a mobile version of its platform. So, rest assured, you can appeal to the many thousand students that prefer learning via their phones and tablets.
Learning Experience – Winner: LearnWorlds
LearnWorlds offers a bit more flexibility where the learning experience is concerned. Both platforms provide the essentials such as a community forum and mobile learning.
However, LearnWorlds comes with more quiz and assignment options. It allows you to create exams and question banks. LearnWorlds also doesn’t require a third-party tool to create and issue course completion certificates, and I love how easy it is to add subtitles and generate video transcripts.
Marketing and Sales
Once you have created your course, you need to get eyeballs on it for it to sell. LearnWorlds and Kajabi both provide marketing and sales tools to help you achieve precisely that.
But, what do these features look like?
LearnWorlds
Compared to Kajabi, LearnWorlds is noticeably more limited where marketing and sales tools are concerned. That said, you can create and use customer coupons to promote products and cross- and up-sell courses. You can determine how many times coupons are useable, when the promotion ends, and the code.
You can also build and publish high-converting sales pages and customize your checkout.
For this, LearnWorlds offers an extensive template library with over 170 designs to choose from. These designs are highly responsive, but you don’t get much in the way of design freedom. You can, however, shift sections around, add new sections, create call-to-action (CTA) links, embed videos, and more.
To appeal to various customer types, you can package products as memberships, subscriptions, or bundles. Like Kajabi, LearnWorlds comes with an in-built affiliate marketing platform. Here, you can build partnerships with loyal ambassadors and pay commission whenever they generate a sale. Affiliates can self-register for your program — just set the commission percentage you’d like to spend on sales, and you’re good to go. There is, however, a lack of granular control over your affiliates. You can’t, for example, set different commission percentages for different affiliates.
It’s also worth noting that LearnWorlds doesn’t offer any email marketing features. For this, you’ll have to rely on third-party integrations.
Kajabi
One of Kajabi’s most significant selling points is its marketing features. First off, Kajabi offers email marketing automation, which already puts it far above LearnWorlds’ marketing offer. Kajabi provides a selection of 15 easy-to-customize email templates to help kickstart the design process. These templates are helpfully organized into categories such as event announcements, product showcases, and more.
Kajabi’s visual email editor makes building and previewing email campaigns easy. It even offers automatic subject line validation, which helps ensure your message lands in your recipient’s primary inbox rather than spam.
You can also include rich content elements such as countdown timers, videos, and even personalization (such as the recipient’s name).
Kajabi also comes with basic email segmentation. You can organize your list by members, subscribers, inactive users, or build custom segments from Kajabi’s “People” tab to target students according to course progress, product purchases, tags you have assigned them, and more.
You can even combine several filters for more granular segmentation.
Kajabi’s affiliate marketing program is also a little more advanced than LearnWorlds. Most notably, you can edit commission rates for individual affiliates. You can also generate reports on how affiliates are performing.
Like LearnWorlds, all these efforts are supported by coupons and discounts that you can use to encourage cross- and up-selling. You can determine the lifespan of your coupons and set usage limits (for example, apply coupons for single-use or bulk use).
You can also create landing pages using Kajabi’s customizable templates and intuitive drag-and-drop editor. This uses a 12-grid layout where you can place content blocks and elements anywhere on the grid. With a whopping 12 rows and columns to populate, it’s easy to snap content into place while enjoying lots of layout freedom. Kajabi’s templates are organized by category to make it simpler to find a good fit. For example, opt-ins, custom homepages, about us pages, customer videos and testimonials, announcements, and more.
Plus, you can integrate your landing pages with your email campaigns, product promotions, and offers.
Finally, Kajabi enables you to create basic pipelines to automate marketing and sales funnels. You get access to a visual workflow editor where you can combine landing pages, email campaigns, product pages, and more to help you automate and optimize the entire customer journey.
Marketing and Sales – Winner: Kajabi
Kajabi offers a more comprehensive range of marketing features. In fact, it covers so many areas of marketing and sales that depending on your needs, you might not even need a third-party tool at all.
LearnWorlds, on the other hand, has some neat marketing basics but doesn’t come close to Kajabi’s level of flexibility and usefulness.
Analytics
With advanced analytics, you can fine-tune your marketing and teaching strategies for better results.
So, let’s see what LearnWorlds and Kajabi offer in this department.
LearnWorlds
In the summer of 2020, LearnWorlds expanded its analytics capabilities to include progress reports. These reports include the following info about individual students:
- When they last logged in
- When they last enrolled
- Their total study time
- How many courses they have signed up for
- How many certificates they have earned
- Their average score
These insights allow you to track student progress and help you to recognize any pitfalls in your training. Suppose students keep falling away at a particular point. In that case, you can respond by investigating why that is the case and work to improve.
You can also build custom progress reports using filters such as course, average score, status, email, user name, and more. Plus, you can combine several criteria with “and”/“or” statements to create a report that matches your exact requirements.
LearnWorlds also provides stats for your videos to help you analyze the success of your video content. You can observe metrics such as average engagement, total plays, play rate, a heat map, and an engagement graph.
Finally, you benefit from course insight reports that show activity on individual courses. This includes how many users completed the course, how many viewers it has, the average and total study time, and the average course score.
Kajabi
Kajabi’s analytics tools allow you to review reports on lecture completion, course completion, and assignment and quiz results.
You can easily track each student’s performance, engagement, and progress. You can also look at each course or lesson within that course to monitor completion and engagement rates. This lets you identify where students might be dropping off and losing interest. You can also generate reports on individual members to see where they are at with each course they are enrolled in.
Like LearnWorlds, Kajabi also populates detailed video stats. This includes total plays, play rate, and average engagement. You can observe how these metrics change throughout the video with a heatmap or graph.
Kajabi provides extensive sales and marketing reports, too, where you can quickly review your net revenue and affiliate earnings.
There are also reports on your opt-ins, offers sold, page views vs unique page views, subscription metrics, and audio stats.
Because Kajabi boasts email marketing functionality, you can review some basic metrics for your email campaigns, including emails sent, delivered, opened, clicked, hard bounced, and unsubscribed. These statistics are available for both individual emails and sequences.
Analytics – Winner: LearnWorlds
Both LearnWorlds and Kajabi boast impressive analytics capabilities. They offer advanced video reporting tools such as heatmaps and graphs and enable you to examine course progression. For further insights, both also integrate with Google Analytics and other reporting tools.
However, LearnWorlds takes the victory because they offer custom reporting, which isn’t something that Kajabi provides at the time of writing.
Integrations
No platform does it all perfectly, which is why integrating your existing tech stack with your chosen course platform is a huge bonus.
That said, what native integrations do LearnWorlds vs Kajabi offer?
LearnWorlds
LearnWorlds’ focus is on providing a powerful and easy-to-use LMS (Learning Management System), and consequently, it falls short in other areas — such as marketing and sales.
As such, LearnWorlds relies on a variety of integrations. There are a total of 32 native integrations to choose from, including Shopify, PayPal, Stripe, Zendesk, Hubspot, Google Analytics, and others.
LearnWorlds also provides an API and a Zapier integration, making it possible to connect with tons of other apps with a little extra effort.
Kajabi
Where integrations are concerned, Kajabi falls a bit flat.
However, as Kajabi comes with so many in-built tools, this might not matter to you. Nonetheless, it’s nice to have the flexibility, and Kajabi, in this case, doesn’t. It only offers eight native integrations, including Mailchimp, Drip, Google Analytics, Convertkit, and others.
Like LearnWorlds, Kajabi also features a Zapier integration and API access.
Integrations – Winner: LearnWorlds
When it comes to the number of integrations on offer, LeanWorlds has Kajabi trumped. While both provide a Zapier integration and API access, Kajabi doesn’t have many native third-party apps to choose from.
Pricing Plans
Both LearnWorlds and Kajabi adopt subscription-based pricing models, so you’ll need to pay a monthly fee to access these platforms. Needless to say, this can add up pretty quickly.
So, below we’re exploring whether these tools provide value to match their price tag.
LearnWorlds
LearnWorlds offers four premium plans with a 30-day satisfaction guarantee and a 14-day free trial. Also, if you pay annually, you’ll save 20% compared to monthly pricing.
Each plan comes with basic features such as unlimited courses, access to a branding and theme editor, a video library, a page builder, learner analytics, and more.
The Starter plan costs $24 per month if paid yearly and is intended for newbie course creators. On this plan, you’re charged a $5 fee per course sale.
The Pro Trainer plan is best for professional trainers and will set you back $79 per month. The transaction fees fall away on this plan, and you can register up to five admins or instructors. You can now offer free courses, build unlimited pages and popups, and more.
The Learning Center plan is LearnWorlds’ most popular package at $249 per month. You can register up to 20 admin users or instructors, make use of full white-label options, and more.
The High Volume & Corporate enterprise plan allows you to add further admins, handle custom bulk enrollments, and more. To get a quotation, you’ll need to contact LearnWorlds’ sales team.
Kajabi
Kajabi offers three premium options with 20% savings on annual billing. It doesn’t, however, offer an enterprise plan. All plans grant access to the Kajabi University, 0% transaction fees, website and product templates, live chat support, and more.
The Basic plan costs $119 per month with annual billing. You can create three products (including courses), three pipelines, and one website and have 1,000 active members.
For $159 per month, the Growth plan unlocks 15 products and pipelines, 25,000 contacts, 10,000 active members, and more. You can also remove Kajabi’s branding from your website.
Finally, the Pro plan costs $319 per month. You can create 100 products and pipelines and three websites with up to 100,000 contacts and 20,000 active members. You’ll also get access to the code editor to unlock even more customizability.
Pricing – Winner: LearnWorlds
Kajabi comes in at a high premium price that most newbie course creators probably can’t justify. In contrast, LearnWorlds is the more affordable option. But with a $5 transaction fee imposed on LearnWorlds’ cheapest package, this will cut deeply into your profits once you start generating more sales.
Still, LearnWorlds’ Pro Trainer option could be a good compromise for newer creators with a smaller team. It still comes in cheaper than Kajabi’s Basic plan and doesn’t limit your course or website creation, and you benefit from an affiliate marketing platform (and a range of other features).
Kajabi’s pricing is much more suited to larger schools and businesses wanting to expand across multiple websites to earn a steady income from their courses.
Customer Support
Stuck with a technical issue? Have a question? This is where high-quality customer support comes into its own.
Let’s see what you can expect from LearnWorlds and Kajabi’s customer care teams.
LearnWorlds
LearnWorlds offers 24/7 support. However, with LearnWorlds’ cheapest plan, you only get access to this five days a week (Monday to Friday).
If you upgrade to the Pro Trainer plan, you also get a one-hour onboarding call. Seeing that some users find LearnWorlds’ interface a bit overwhelming (at least to begin with), this could be just the level of guidance you need. Your onboarding call covers topics such as branding, setting up, customizing your site, and more.
You can also access the online knowledge base, where you’ll find over 400 self-help articles. Then, there’s the LearnWorlds Academy, where you’ll find dozens of courses and lessons that cover in detail how to create courses, boost sales, and capture leads.
Kajabi
Kajabi offers an extensive array of online resources via its help center. Here, you’ll find detailed articles on each feature and function. You also get access to Kajabi’s regular webinars and events.
If you want to dive deeper, you can enroll in the Kajabi University. This free resource includes various courses and lessons that provide actionable advice on how to make the most out of the tool.
To speak to a member of Kajabi’s customer service team, there’s live chat support between 6 AM and 5 PM Pacific Time on every payment plan. If you upgrade to the Growth plan, 24/7 becomes available.
Customer Support: It’s a Tie
I love that LearnWorlds provides 24-hour support even on its cheapest plan, although only for five days a week. However, this is just email support. So although the contact hours are excellent, the contact method feels less direct.
Kajabi, on the other hand, doesn’t unlock 24/7 support until their Growth plan but offers more direct live chat support. Both platforms also have extensive online academies and knowledge bases to help get you started.
All in all, it’s too tough to call, making it a tie for this round!
Pros and Cons of LearnWorlds vs Kajabi
Before finishing this LearnWorlds and Kajabi review, let’s recap the main advantages and disadvantages of using these platforms.
LearnWorlds Pros
- Access to 24-hour customer support even on the cheapest plan.
- With the Learning Center plan, you get an onboarding call to help familiarize yourself with the interface.
- You can create and distribute custom course certificates.
- Its cheapest plan is much more affordable for new creators.
- You can sell unlimited courses straight away.
- It offers a great learning experience with advanced quizzing features and an in-built community.
- There are hundreds of customizable templates available.
- There’s a mobile version available for students to access your content on.
LearnWorlds Cons
- On the Starter Plan, you pay a $5 fee on every course you sell, which can severely cut into your profits. You’re also not able to offer free classes.
- Many key features are locked behind higher pricing tiers, such as affiliate marketing, selling subscriptions, and managing users in bulk.
- It doesn’t offer email marketing.
- Its affiliate marketing platform is quite basic.
Kajabi Pros
- Access to powerful course creation features, including assessments, plenty of design options, and easy-to-use templates.
- There’s no limit on video hosting and bandwidth, which is incredible for video-focused course creators.
- You can create a blog to accompany your course website.
- It comes with a robust affiliate marketing program.
- You get access to lots of helpful marketing features, including automation.
- The Kajabi University comes with plenty of practical courses and lessons.
- 24/7 chat support is available from the Growth plan upwards.
- Students can access your content via mobile.
- You can create a student community with your products at the center.
- Access to a flexible landing page builder.
Kajabi Cons
- It starts at an expensive price point, making it unaffordable for new creators on tight budgets.
- Its plans severely limit how many products and pipelines you can create. On the cheapest plan, you can only build three courses.
- You need to opt for the more expensive Growth plan to remove Kajabi’s branding.
- You can’t create course completion certificates.
- Its quiz options are relatively basic.
LearnWorlds vs Kajabi: The Final Verdict
That’s it! We’ve reached the end of our ultimate LearnWorlds vs Kajabi review.
To summarize, LearnWorlds is a learning management system (LMS) focused on providing fantastic student learning experiences with its in-built community features and video interactivity. You benefit from creating course completion certificates and get access to a broader range of quizzing features. LearnWorlds also integrates with a vaster range of third-party tools and starts at a more affordable price point.
Kajabi, on the other hand, is distinctly marketed at more established businesses and course creation veterans. It makes more sense to switch to Kajabi once you’ve already enjoyed some success with your online school. Kajabi doesn’t only facilitate online course creation, it also comes with a wide range of marketing and sales tools. However, the price tag is considerable. If your key focus is just creating a great learning experience, Kajabi is much more limiting.
The choice is as simple as this:
Do you want a one-stop shop for your marketing, sales, and course creation? Do you plan to expand your online course into a full-fledged online school with a thriving affiliate program? If so, Kajabi might be for you.
Alternatively, are you a new course creator hoping to deliver the best possible student learning experience? LearnWorlds focuses on what really matters for an LMS and is cheaper from the get-go. Just prepare to shell out some extra cash for various integrations later down the line.
What do you think? Have you found the right e-teaching platform for you in this review? Let us know your thought in the comments box below!
