Kartra vs Kajabi: Which is the Best Choice?

If you are looking to start or grow your online business, the best foundation is building with the right tools. If you have been looking for marketing tools and resources, you may be wondering…should you use Kartra or Kajabi?

Which is the best choice?

Both software offer a lot of features. You just have to determine which features align best with your goals.

As we explore Kartra vs Kajabi, you can learn about what each platform offers to find the best marketing software for your business.

What Is Kartra?

Let’s kick off our Kartra vs Kajabi comparison with all the details you need about Kartra. 

Kartra

  • Simplifies online business
  • Create landing pages
  • Build membership sites
  • Start email campaigns
  • Build sales campaigns
  • Price: Starts at $99 per month
  • 14-Day trial for $1

Founded in 2018 by Genesis Digital, who also run WebinarJam, Kartra integrates everything needed to run your business:

  • Email marketing
  • Hosting
  • Webinars
  • Video
  • Cart checkouts
  • Split tests

Since it’s a cloud-based platform, you’ll gain access to your back office by simply connecting to the Internet and opening up your favorite. This means you don’t need to download any updates and are always working with the most up-to-date version of the software.

Below, you can watch a complete demo courtesy of Kartra.

Who Does Kartra Work Well For?

Kartra is a quality choice whether you’re brand new to the online marketing world or have been around for a while and feeling frustrated with integrating several tools.

Kartra allows you to invest more time working on a winning sales funnel than figuring out how to get different types of software to speak to one another.

Let’s dive into Kartra’s features.

Kartra Page Builder

Your business needs a professional-looking website and the page builder’s WSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor makes the process simple. Templates are available to help you build your:

  • Home page
  • Product pages
  • Landing pages
  • Coming-soon pages
  • Sales pages
  • Thank you pages
  • Opt-in pages
  • Downsell pages
  • Upsell pages
  • 404 error pages
  • Check-out pages

The builder’s editor has simple drag and drop functionality. It’s intuitive and it shouldn’t take long to feel comfortable building your pages block by block. Adding content, images and video doesn’t take much effort once you get used to the format.

Split Testing

You need to split test your landing pages in order to understand which copy and layouts bring the best results. This means you’re creating two different variations of a page while Kartra randomly shows one or the other to visitors.

Use Kartra’s split-testing feature to compare which headline works best or whether video brings increased conversions.

Selling Your Products

Kartra’s shopping cart feature allows you to add a main product and then add in upsells and downsells.

If you’ve previously used any other type of shopping cart, then the process will feel familar. You can set up cart options, such as:

  • Payment gateways
  • Trial choices
  • Pricing options
  • Thank you pages
  • Cart abandonment rules
  • Checkouts

You’ll enjoy the membership functionality if you’re selling a coaching program, premium content or a course. You can help customers move through your content by showing them the percentage completed or which lessons they’ve previously viewed.

Affiliate Portal

Keeping track of affiliates is often a pain point for online marketers. Kartra’s affiliate portal solves this problem.

Set up affiliate screening by setting up terms & conditions and detailed questionnaires. The portal generates an affiliate’s tracked URLs and you have the option to base commissions off a fixed rate or percentage of the total sale amount.

View important analytics like payout histories, refunds, sales, visits and customer value so you can identify your best affiliate performances.

Email Marketing

Kartra makes it simple to create tags, employ automation, build broadcasts and deliver email sequences. This means you can get rid of extra costs that come with paying for dedicated email service providers like MailChimp, AWeber or Drip.

You have the option to add new leads by import, manual input or via your opt-in landing pages. The Broadcast feature lets you send emails to your entire list or only those marked with specific tags.

The only drawback you might possibly notice is a slight lag when working through Kartra’s automation features. You’ll get used to it, however, and enjoy the money saved by no longer needing to pay for a separate ESP service.

Opt-In Forms

The opt-in form builder is simple to use so that you can set up landing pages that convert. Build your list bigger using the available templates inside your back office.

You’ll have the option to select variations, such as:

  • A welcome message
  • Single or double opt-in
  • Form behaviors
  • Tagging
  • Automation

Embeddable forms are easy to create. There is also the “smart” aspect to Kartra’s forms.

The platform is popular. Many people use it across all industries. This means that if someone has opted into a Kartra form on another marketer’s website, their browser cookies are saved. Their name and email will auto-populate on your website and all they need to do is click your form’s button to get added to your list.

Video Hosting

You don’t need to use a service like Wistia or bother uploading to Vimeo or YouTube. Use Kartra’s video hosting feature instead. There are calls to action that you can place on your videos as well.

Keep in mind that you might run out of storage depending on the plan you choose. One way around this is to upload sales page or opt-in landing page videos via Kartra and then use YouTube or Vimeo for your lead generation videos.

Kartra’s Customer Support

The onboarding support is strong, combining written and video content to help you get famliar with your back office.

There’s a Facebook group that allows you to speak with other Kartra users. There’s always someone willing to provide extra help when you feel stuck.

Lastly, you can pay a little extra for their concierge service, which gets the Kartra team to set up your entire platform. This includes your automation, product pages, landing pages, thank you pages, tagging and email sequences.

This information is pretty extensive, but if you still want to learn more about Kartra, you can look at the Kartra review article, Kartra 14 Day Trial article, or the Kartra vs ClickFunnels article.

Let’s now shift our Kartra vs Kajabi discussion over to Kajabi.

What Is Kajabi?

Kajabi was founded by Kenny Rueter and Travis Rosser in 2010, meaning it has longevity behind its name and service.

The biggest difference between Kartra vs Kajabi is that Kajabi is more focused on hosting your online course or learning content.

However, it also comes well-equipped with marketing elements that help attract the leads and sales necessary to build a thriving online business.

Kajabi

  • Launch digital products
  • Create online courses
  • Build subscription sites
  • Create websites
  • Integrate payment options
  • Price: Starts at $149 per month
  • 14-Day trial for Free

Uploading & Structuring Your Content

You’ll use Kajabi’s Product Blueprints when uploading and structuring your course content. These blueprints are basically templates that help turn your content into modules or courses. 

Kajabi labels modules as Categories and lessons as Posts. Think of your Categories as your chapters, while your actual lesson content resides inside the Post areas. 

Below, you can watch a demo courtesy of Kajabi.

Building Out a Curriculum

The interesting way Kajabi is laid out is that you don’t have to worry much about structure when uploading content. 

You can drag and drop the Categories and Posts around once the content is there. This makes re-arranging your course structure simple. 

Adding more steps inside a lesson is also easy. Simply click inside the existing lesson and upload new assessments, videos or written texts. 

Unlimited Wistia Hosting

Kajabi lets you upload unlimited Wistia videos into your account. Your uploaded videos aren’t limited only to course content. You can also embed them in your landing pages or on your blog. 

Be aware that only one video is able to get uploaded to any one lesson. Of course, you’ll simply use as many lessons as needed to get your point across. 

10+ Product Themes

This platform provides product themes that are quite intuitive right out of the box. There are various themes that work well with certain products that you might sell, such as:

  • Membership sites
  • Courses
  • Online coaching programs

Start with each theme’s general settings and customize them using your brand’s color scheme. 

Other Kajabi course-creation features to consider include:

  • Lesson comments
  • Mobile app
  • Certificates
  • Quizzes
  • Assessments
  • Student discussions
  • Community functionality
  • Ability to drip out lessons
  • Automations to bring back unengaged students

Website Design Functionality

As we talked about at the top of our Kartra vs Kajabi comparison, you need a website to do well online. Kajabi has interesting site-building features. 

Kajabi provides the hosting needed to get your site “live” on the Internet. While your domain name defaults to yourdomain.mykajabi.com, you can also select your own custom domain, such as yourowndomain.com. 

The platform provides a free SSL certificate and also takes care of any needed updates or maintenance issues. 

Themes

Pre-built themes are available, although most themes are built out from their Premier Theme. The other themes built on the Kajabi Premier Framework are called Layout Presets.

Select the Layout Preset you like best and edit it until you like everything about your page style, page elements, images, copy, videos, etc. 

Kajabi Page Builder

Create all your front-end website changes via the drag and drop page builder editor. 

The page builder has a clean interface that doesn’t require any special skills to operate. You’re able to view a live preview of each page as you’re going about your edits. Use the page editor to make adjustments to elements like:

  • Fonts
  • Font sizes
  • Colors

Add new sections to any page by clicking inside a new element on the left-hand side of the edit window. Some available sections include:

  • Feature columns
  • Hero section
  • Blog post links
  • Course listings
  • Pricing tables
  • Countdown timers
  • Opt-in forms

There is full functionality when it comes to updating these sections, changing text, adding different colors, using animation or eliminating any sections that are no longer needed. 

Mobile Responsive Themes

Any Kajabi theme is mobile responsive so you can be confident that your pages will show up properly on both laptops and mobile devices. It’s easy to see your page in desktop, laptop and mobile view while editing. 

Blogging Capability

Adding a blog is easy inside your Kajabi account. It’s possible to add on-page SEO elements like titles and descriptions, insert text and video content and include opt-in forms to your blog posts. 

To be fair, a WordPress blog comes with more functionality. However, it’s possible to build a blog with Kajabi that attracts targeted visitors who are interested in buying your products while keeping the site-building work simplified. 

Marketing Offers

Kajabi allows you to create what it calls Offers so that you can present your products for free, as one-time payments, subscriptions or on payment plans. 

Recurring plans can cycle weekly, monthly or yearly. Trial periods or set-up fees are also possible. 

List your prices in all major currencies, such as USD, AUD, GBP, CAD, etc. It’s possible to list one single product or multiple products. This helps when you’re bundling courses. 

Payment Processing & Checkout Carts

Checkout pages are easy to set up because they’re created as soon as you build out an Offer. 

Kajabi uses a 1-step checkout so customers don’t need to create an account to purchase from you. The page builder lets you customize these checkout pages so they match your site’s look and feel. 

Other checkout options include:

  • Order bumps
  • 1-click upsells
  • Abandoned cart tracking

Marketing Funnels

Kajabi’s Sales Pipeline Builder helps you build out marketing funnels even if you’re a novice in this area. 

Simply select one of the pre-built funnels based on your goals. There’s a lead  magnet funnel, webinar funnel or funnels that you can build from scratch. All the forms, email campaigns, landing pages and offers are automatically built for you with these pre-built options. 

All sales funnels are built without ever leaving the page builder. This means you aren’t constantly switching to different areas of your dashboard to build pages or funnels. 

Standalone Landing Pages

You can choose standalone landing page creation when you don’t need a complete funnel built. Use these on social media, your blog or as popups. 

There are over 20 landing page templates that you can customize inside the builder. 

Email Marketing Tools

Kajabi helps you build your list because you can create opt-in forms, email sequences, and send out broadcasts to your subscribers. 

You have the ability to tag subscribers and create automation segments so your marketing is targeted based on user preferences. It’s possible to move subscribers between email campaigns, add or remove tags and send emails based on subscriber actions. 

This makes it possible to remove subscribers from a marketing sequence the moment they buy your product, for example. 

Use Affiliates

Just like when discussing Kartra above, you should know that Kajabi makes it possible to create coded links for your affiliate partners. 

Add affiliates to your affiliate program, pick the products for them to sell, create their links, set up the commission structure and communicate with your affiliates. 

Analytics allow you to see which affiliates perform best and all related stats, such as sales, conversion numbers, etc. 

Customer Support

Kajabi comes with excellent support when you need help. They’re available 24/7 with chat support. Simply start a new chat request if you’re having difficulty with something and get the answers you need.

Final Thought

Sometimes it is easy to choose the right software for your business. When both online business software come with a ton a features, the choice can be a lot harder.

Now, you have a clearer idea of the features that each platform offers. You also had a chance to look at demos of Kartra and Kajabi.

By closely examining the features and demos, this should help you in making a decision.

Will it be Kartra or Kajabi for your business?

The choice is yours.

Once you choose, you can begin building your online business right away.

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