Disclosure: Our site is supported by our readers. This post may contain Amazon Affiliate Links or links from other affiliate programs that pay us a small commission for purchases referred through them. Thank you in advance for your support!
ClickFunnels and Kajabi are two powerhouses of digital sales funnel creation. If you’re serious about selling something online (and you aren’t a genius web developer with a ton of time on your hands), you want to use one of these platforms to create your digital presence. You probably only want to pay for one though, so which should you invest your money and your time in?
Is ClickFunnels or Kajabi better for you? This depends on what you’re trying to market and what you expect your website to do. ClickFunnels is designed to create beautiful, high-converting sales funnels. Kajabi is perfect for generating revenue from courses and media content. If you’ve got something to sell, use ClickFunnels; If you’ve got something to teach, use Kajabi.
ClickFunnels and Kajabi have extremely similar features, but they both excel in different areas. Let’s breakdown some of the most useful features of each platform and see how they compare.
Sales Funnels
No matter what your product is, the goal of your website is to make you money. A sales funnel converts visitors into leads, and those turn into customers. The goal of a sales funnel is always to take your audience to the next step.
If all you can get from them is an email address, that’s enough. You can market to them over email and hopefully convert on the next attempt. Maybe you can convince them to sign up for a magnet offer or make some other small purchase and become a believer in your brand.
Essentially a sales funnel guides prospects through the process of interacting with your company and presents them with what you have to offer. Sales funnel are necessary if you’re trying to sell something online.
ClickFunnels
Everything on ClickFunnels is built around sales funnels. All of ClickFunnels’ best features involve making funnels easier to build, easier to interact with as a consumer, and easier to manage. Sales funnels are what ClickFunnels does best, and nobody does them better. The best features of a ClickFunnel are
- Pre-built templates
- Drag-and-drop editor
- Upsell, downsale, and cross-sell pages
Pre-Built Templates
You don’t need to be a master designer to get a page that looks impressive and professional when using ClickFunnels. ClickFunnels includes tons of pre-built templates that look great and are proven to convert. Kajabi has templates as well, though not nearly as many. Just select what type of funnel you need, find an aesthetic you like, and customize from there.
Drag-and-Drop Editor
Editing your template is almost as easy as selecting one. ClickFunnels’ drag-and-drop editor is simple to use, even for someone with no HTML experience. You can add images, video, and countdown timers just by pulling from a sidebar menu. Edit the text to promote your product, and you’re off. You can have your first funnel ready to publish live in just minutes.
Upsell, Downsale, and Cross-sell pages
Having multiple offers allows you to capture a greater segment of the market. However, you can maximize the profit you make from that segment by making those offers in a strategic order. Rather than simply laying out all the options you have available, sell them a magnet offer and then move them to an upsell page and then a down sell if they don’t bite on the big are.
The ability to lead your customers strategically through the sales process is one of the most powerful elements of ClickFunnels. Following ClickFunnels’ formula will allow you to get people through the door (so to speak) without intimidating them and then top-down sell to maximize revenue.
Kajabi Pipelines
Pipelines are Kajabi’s sales funnel builder, and like everything else on Kajabi, it’s tailored towards selling courses and content. Pipelines isn’t going to be as powerful or as versatile as ClickFunnels, but it’ll get the job done, and it’s got some neat features. The best features are
- Email integration
- Course layout
Email Integration
Kajabi’s entire sales funnel system is built around email integration. Most of Kajabi’s pipelines pull people off the website and into their email and back into the website once they’ve accepted the offer.
Kajabi also includes pre-written emails that you can adjust to fit your needs. ClickFunnels makes you write all your emails yourself.
Course Layout
Kajabi’s system is already laid out with courses in mind. You won’t have to build out your course from scratch with multiple classes or training sessions. Kajabi is already optimized for delivering course material and content. This can save you a lot of time relative to setting up this structure within ClickFunnels.
Email Marketing
Email is still one of the most popular ways of getting ahold of leads, customers, and clients. Email can help you inform, advertise, and convert. However, you want your email platform to be as intelligent as your funnel. Segmentation, autoresponder, and broadcasting capabilities can all give you an edge in email marketing.
If you can make your emails well-directed, well-written, and well-timed, you’ll be able to cut through the clutter of someone’s inbox. Once you’ve grabbed their attention, you can grab their wallet. Smart email marketing tools help you take your business from passively waiting for sales to actively reaching for them.
ClickFunnels Actionetics
The Actionetics tool is ClickFunnels complete marketing suite. On the email side of things, Actionetics allows you to use the emails you’ve captured through their funnel to their greatest potential. Actionetics’ most useful features are
- Segmentation
- Autoresponder
- Action funnels
Segmentation
Having an email list is a great first step towards keeping in touch with your audience. But if all you have is a single list, what do you do when you have a message for some of your base that isn’t intended for others?
Segmentation tools will allow you to divide up your email list according to a number of factors. You can divide up your email list according to whether or not they’ve purchased from you before, if they purchased a certain product, if they opened your last email, etc. ClickFunnels captures all the ways your audience interacts with you and ties that information to a profile.
Segmentation tools make it easy to target your messages. Your messages will be more likely to reach their intended audience, and the people on your list will be more likely to open and read your emails when they aren’t constantly getting a bunch of spam that doesn’t apply to them.
Autoresponder
Sometimes when you’ve got a big campaign or promotion running, you’ll want to manually send emails to your contact list, but most of the emails you send you’ll want to be automated. ClickFunnels’ autoresponder is built right into the funnel and can make your marketing efforts loads more efficient.
Tailor the emails you send to the actions your visitors take (or don’t take) on the site. For example, if a customer makes a purchase—send them a thank you email and then maybe a promotion for additional offers in a few days. If they don’t buy, thank them for visiting and remind them of why your offering is such a great value.
An autoresponder can help you be a lot more engaged with your visitors, and once it’s set up the way you want it, you won’t have to lift a finger.
Action Funnels
Action funnels are where your custom funnels and your custom autoresponder emails meet. Use your autoresponder to target a certain segment of your customers and bring them into a customized sales funnel. Action funnels is where it all comes together.
Kajabi Pipelines
The Pipelines feature also runs Kajabi’s email services. Just like with ClickFunnels, automating the process of email marketing is the real strength here. The less work you have to do on a day-to-day basis means, the more your business can become a reliable revenue stream.
Tagging
Tagging is Kajabi’s form of segmentation. While much of the segmentation process can be automated based on what information Kajabi has captured about your customers, you may also want to custom tag your list. Create multiple custom tags to separate clients into groups. This obviously requires a little more elbow grease, but it allows limitless customization of your lists.
Email Automations
Email automation allows you to build email responses directly into your funnel. Kajabi often uses email to pull leads back into the site once they’ve accepted an offer or are claiming a deliverable.
Kajabi also includes sequencing which can allow you to run an automated sequence of emails over several days. Say a customer purchases a 10-day course on how to become a master digital marketer; you can set the sequencer to send an automated email reminding them to move to the next section of the course (and maybe pitching a relevant upsell) each of the ten days.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
A CRM tool allows for automated marketing to specific customers through the customer’s life cycle. Some of the aspects of a CRM, we’ve already talked about under the email marketing section. However, a CRM can be so much more than sending emails.
Email is a prevalent format for marketers to use, and it has a lot of advantages. The reality is, consumers don’t prioritize looking at their email the way they look at their texts or social media messages. A powerful CRM can give you access to these mediums of communication.
By expanding your customer contact beyond email, you can get out of the promotions tab and onto the eyeballs of your customer.
ClickFunnels Actionetics
Actionetics is amazing in terms of how many options it gives you for customer relationship management. Actionetics is easily the most powerful CRM tool built into a website builder on the market. You’ll need to upgrade to the ClickFunnels Etison Suite, but the CRM capabilities alone are well worth the price of admission. The best features are
- Contact profiles
- Multi-channel marketing
- Broadcasts
Contact Profiles
As soon as you capture customer personal information, Actionetics springs into action. Using the email address and other information, Actionetics sweeps the web searching for matching social media profiles and matching demographic information.
When the sweep is complete, you’ll have a contact profile full of not only the information you pulled from your site, like how long they spent on the page or whether or not they purchased, but also a full list of their social media profiles, their age, approximate income, marital status, etc.
This information can allow you to segment down your customer base and market to them individually.
Multi-Channel Marketing
Those social media profiles you gathered aren’t just for pulling demographic information. You can market to your customers through social media directly. You can send direct messages through most major social platforms and advertise directly to their social accounts. Actionetics allows you to market through the following platforms:
- Text messaging
- Desktop notifications
You can set different types of messages in an automated flow depending on whether or not the customer has responded to or viewed the last message. This can allow you to really maximize the reach of your marketing campaigns.
Say a contact doesn’t respond to an email within 24 hours, you can send a Facebook message inviting them to check out the email. If the email hasn’t opened in another 5 hours, use your advertising budget to blast them with ads on all their social accounts for 36 hours.
Broadcasts
Most times, you’ll want to strategically use the various forms of communication available to you through ClickFunnels. However, every so often, you’ll want to blast from every possible medium. This is great when you’ve got a big campaign, promotion, or event that everyone will want to hear about.
Use broadcasts sparingly as you don’t want to desensitize your audience to your messages. When you’ve got something big to say, broadcasts let you do just that on a large platform.
Kajabi Marketing Automation
Kajabi’s CRM falls way behind the one provided by ClickFunnels. The CRM hosted within Kajabi limits contact to email communications. If you need the kind of advanced communication methods provided by ClickFunnels, Kajabi can’t keep up. However, if you need a simple way to automate basic communications with your audience, Kajabi works great.
Built into Pipelines
The CRM tools inside Kajabi are included as part of the Pipeline system. This means that you can customize automated email responses as a part of your pipeline. Automated email marketing allows your pipeline to run itself as most of your customer contact happens without any input from you.
Broadcasts
Broadcasts allow you to send out an email message to your entire list or a segmented cross-section depending on your needs. When you need to get the word out, a broadcast can be just the trick.
Membership Builder
If you have a program with recurring content, regular product deliveries, or other incentivized programs, you may need a membership area on your website. Membership areas allow you to block content behind a membership paywall.
Once users are subscribed, they get full access to everything you have to offer. Many of the biggest marketing success stories over the last decade have used subscription-based platforms to make wildly successful businesses.
Think of companies like Netflix, Amazon, Dollar Shave Club, and Blue Apron. All of them have used membership programs in some form or another to dominate their respective markets. Whether you’re offering courses or some other subscription platform, a membership builder may be the ticket to you bringing home the big bucks.
ClickFunnels Wasabi
Wasabi is ClickFunnels’ membership area. The most significant advantage of Wasabi is that you can easily use the same sales funnel formula that ClickFunnels uses to capture email addresses and convert visitors to sign people up for your service. Leverage all the excellent marketing tools that ClickFunnels has to offer to make your membership service a success.
Membership Funnels
Perhaps you’ve used sales funnels to capture information on leads and to upsell, downsell, and sidesell various goods and service, but you can also use a sales funnel to gather subscribers for your membership platform.
Everything you need is built right into ClickFunnels through Wasabi. You can access pre-built templates and then edit them to suit your needs. Once you’ve got people signed up, you can build courses or other member benefits right into your site through ClickFunnels, no third-party software required.
Drip Content
It can be intimidating for your users to enter your member area and get slapped in the face with hours worth of content. Also, if you allow your users to access everything from the start, they’re more likely to burn through what you have to offer and cancel their subscription.
Keep your customers around a little longer by adding drip content which unlocks after a certain amount of time.
Kajabi Course Builder
Membership advantages and course building is where Kajabi really shines. In most areas, we’ve discussed ClickFunnels edges out Kajabi, but membership access is home turf for Kajabi. Building a member area is easy and painless in Kajabi.
Additionally, member areas have the capability for a lot more features through Kajabi—providing much better user experience. If your users aren’t impressed by the platform, they’ll take their subscription money elsewhere. Some of those extra features are
- User progress bars
- Native video hosting
- User forum boards
User Progress Bars
On Kajabi, users get access to percentages and progress bars to track their progress through the course. Seeing their progress through the course provides a sense of accomplishment and allows the user to visualize the skills that their learning and knowledge that their gaining by subscribing to your program.
ClickFunnels offers no progress visualization. This may seem like a small thing, but it’s these types of little enhancements that can make a user feel like they’re getting a premium experience. That extra bit of polish will keep them coming back to the site and happily paying their membership fees.
Native Video Hosting
Kajabi allows you to host videos directly to their site. ClickFunnels provides no video hosting, so you’ll need to post your videos on another video hosting site—like YouTube. While there isn’t any real disadvantage to having videos posted on YouTube (they can be hidden from searches and access restricted), it may look unprofessional to redirect your paying users to another site.
User Forum Boards
Members are more invested in their subscription if they feel that they are part of a community. Kajabi allows you to foster that community by creating message boards and forums within your member area. This will give your members a place to gather and discuss the content you’re providing them with.
Pricing
Now that we’ve broken down the best features of Kajabi and ClickFunnels, it’s time for the ultimate question: Which is a better value for you? ClickFunnels is more versatile with an impressive array of features in all categories, while Kajabi is specifically tuned for those selling courses and educational materials.
It may surprise you that although ClickFunnels has more features overall, Kajabi is significantly more expensive. However, if you fit into Kajabi’s niche, the extra cost may be well worth it for you to get something that is tailored to your industry.
Let’s run through the various packages for each.
Kajabi
When it comes to building courses and membership areas, there’s nothing better. Kajabi is intended for those selling courses and media subscriptions. If you’re selling subscriptions to tutorials or media content and want to give your members the best user experience possible, Kajabi is the way to go.
Basic
Price: $149/month or $1428/year
Basic is the trimmed down, entry-level version of Kajabi’s software. If you’re just getting started and want to get a feel for how Kajabi’s landing page builder and other tools work, Basic will get you on your feet. Here’s a look at what’s included.
- 3 Products
- 3 Pipelines
- Unlimited landing pages
- Unlimited marketing emails
- 10,000 Contacts
- 1,000 Active members
- 1 Website
- 1 Admin User
- Webinars and events
- Pre-built templates
- Quizzes
- Surveys
- Basic automations
Growth
Price: $159/month or $2388/year
Growth is Kajabi’s most popular product by a longshot. Growth will give you access to all of Kajabi’s best features without costing you an absurd amount of money. Some of the features we’ve hyped here are only included in the Growth package and above, including marketing and email autoresponder automation. The full list of features is
- 15 Products
- 15 Pipelines
- Unlimited landing pages
- Unlimited marketing emails
- 25,000 Contacts
- 10,000 Active members
- 1 Website
- 10 Admin Users
- Webinars and events
- Pre-built templates
- Quizzes
- Surveys
- Advanced automations
- Ability to remove Kajabi branding
- Affiliate program
Pro
Price: $319/month or $4788/year
Pro is the most advanced version of the software. Pro adds a few additional advantages, including the ability to custom edit HTML code but mostly increases the scalability of your platform.
- 100 Products
- 100 Pipelines
- Unlimited landing pages
- Unlimited marketing emails
- 100,000 Contacts
- 20,000 Active members
- 3 Websites
- 25 Admin Users
- Webinars and events
- Pre-built templates
- Quizzes
- Surveys
- Advanced automation
- Ability to remove Kajabi branding
- Affiliate program
- Code editor
ClickFunnels
Overall, ClickFunnels is more powerful and more versatile than Kajabi. However, it’s membership area tools, and features aren’t up to par with Kajabi. Other than membership functions, ClickFunnels is able to outperform Kajabi in most areas. ClickFunnels is directed towards using a proven formula to grow your business, and that formula works.
ClickFunnels
Price: $97/month
The baseline version of ClickFunnels isn’t messing around. While it doesn’t include all of the coolest features we’ve mentioned, ClickFunnels basic package will allow you to get started on creating your sales funnel, publishing it live, and selling your product or service. ClickFunnels includes
- 20 websites
- 3 custom domains
- 100 pages
- 20,000 visitors
- Unlimited contacts
- Unlimited A/B split testing
- Email Integration
- Opt-in forms and pop-ups
- Checkout forms
- Full library of landing page templates
- Unlimited members
- Upsell, downsale, and cross-sell pages
- Share funnels
Etison Suite
Price: $297/month
The Etison Suite unlocks the full power of ClickFunnels, giving you access to the amazing features of the Actionetics CRM and Email management tool and a host of other features. The Etison Suite is a bit cheaper than Kajabi Pro, and you get so much more
- 20 websites
- 3 custom domains
- 100 pages
- 20,000 visitors
- Unlimited contacts
- Unlimited A/B split testing
- Email Integration
- Opt-in forms and pop-ups
- Checkout forms
- Full library of landing page templates
- Unlimited members
- Upsell, downsale, and cross-sell pages
- Share funnels
- Actionetics analytics tools
- Manage email lists
- Visual email builder
- Send broadcast emails
- Track email opens and clicks
- Autoresponder
- Send emails based on location
- Send emails based on social media
- Advanced segmentation
- Unlimited affiliates
- Unlimited commission plans
- Subscription plans
Summary
If you compare prices here, it becomes pretty clear that ClickFunnels wins the value game. The base version of ClickFunnels costs less than Kajabi Basic and the Etison Suite prices out Kajabi Pro. For most businesses selling most products, ClickFunnels is going to make more sense.
However, ClickFunnels isn’t designed with courses, memberships, and subscriptions in mind the way that Kajabi is. If this is the business model you’re pursuing and you want to provide a top tier customer experience, then Kajabi may easily be worth a few extra dollars each month.
Evaluate your business and both software options, then make the purchase and start filling your bank account.
