If you’re building an online course business, two names come up constantly: Teachable and Kajabi. Both let you sell courses, but they’re built around fundamentally different philosophies — Teachable focuses on being a great course-delivery platform at a reasonable price, while Kajabi bundles courses together with email marketing, sales funnels, and website building into one all-in-one system. That difference shapes their pricing dramatically, and picking the wrong one can mean either overpaying for tools you don’t need or underpaying and getting hit with fees that eat your margins. Let’s break both down.
The Quick Comparison
Here’s the high-level picture as of 2026:
- Teachable: Plans generally range from around $39/month (Starter) up to $189+/month (Growth), with a 7.5% transaction fee on the entry tier that disappears once you move to Builder and above.
- Kajabi: Plans generally range from around $179/month (Basic) up to $499/month (Pro), with zero platform transaction fees on every tier, though small surcharges apply depending on your payment method.
At first glance, Teachable looks dramatically cheaper. But as we’ll get into, that comparison isn’t quite fair once you factor in transaction fees and what each platform actually replaces.
Teachable Pricing Explained
Teachable structures its plans around course creators who want a focused, no-frills selling experience. Its tiers typically include:
Starter Plan (~$39/month)
The entry-level plan covers the basics: course hosting, one product, and access to Teachable’s course-building tools. The major catch is a 7.5% transaction fee on top of standard payment processing. That fee sounds small until you do the math on real revenue — sell a $200 course to 10 students in a month, and that 7.5% fee alone adds up to $150, on top of your $39 subscription.
Builder Plan (~$69-89/month)
Builder removes the transaction fee entirely, dropping it to 0% platform fee (you still pay standard payment processing costs). It also unlocks mobile apps for your courses, more advanced customization, and additional integrations. This is where most serious Teachable users end up, because the fee savings alone often outweigh the higher subscription price once you’re generating consistent revenue.
Growth Plan (~$189/month)
Growth adds more advanced features aimed at scaling course businesses: bulk student management, more sophisticated analytics, and additional customization options for course delivery and branding.
Advanced / Unlimited Plans (Higher pricing, often quote-based at the top tier)
The highest tiers add API access, more advanced integrations, and features aimed at course businesses managing large catalogs or teams.
The Breakeven Math That Matters Most
The single most important calculation for Teachable users is figuring out where the Starter plan’s 7.5% fee stops being worth it compared to Builder’s flat monthly price. Based on the price difference between the two tiers, the breakeven point tends to land somewhere around $650-700 in monthly revenue. Below that, Starter’s lower base price wins. Above it, Builder’s 0% fee saves you more than the extra subscription cost — and most course creators cross that threshold within their first couple of months of active sales.
Kajabi Pricing Explained
Kajabi’s pricing structure was significantly overhauled in early 2026, replacing its older tier system. Kajabi bundles course hosting together with email marketing, landing pages, sales funnels, and a website builder, all under one subscription. Its current plans include:
Basic Plan (~$179/month, or roughly $143/month billed annually)
Basic supports a limited number of products (often around 5) and a capped contact list (commonly around 2,500 contacts). It includes the full Kajabi stack — course hosting, email marketing, funnels, and a website — just with lower ceilings on volume.
Growth Plan (~$249/month, or roughly $199/month billed annually)
Growth is where Kajabi’s value proposition tends to click for a lot of creators. It adds affiliate management tools, more advanced marketing automations, removal of Kajabi branding, and significantly higher limits — commonly around 50 products and 25,000 contacts.
Pro Plan (~$499/month, or roughly $399/month billed annually)
Pro is aimed at established, high-volume businesses that need the highest limits on products, contacts, and team members, along with priority support and more advanced customization across the platform.
Kajabi’s Fee Structure
Unlike Teachable’s Starter plan, Kajabi doesn’t charge a platform transaction fee on any tier. However, if you use your own Stripe account instead of Kajabi’s built-in payment processor, a surcharge applies — commonly around 2% on Basic, dropping to roughly 1% on Growth and 0.5% on Pro. If you use Kajabi’s own payment system instead, that surcharge disappears, but you’ll pay Kajabi’s standard processing rates, plus small additional surcharges on subscription transactions and international cards.
What You’re Really Paying For
The price gap between Teachable and Kajabi isn’t really about one platform being “better” — it’s about what each one replaces.
Teachable: A Focused Course-Delivery Tool
Teachable does one thing very well: hosting and selling courses. Its course builder includes completion certificates, auto-graded quizzes, drip content scheduling, and detailed student progress tracking on every paid plan. If you already have an email marketing tool, a website, and a way to build landing pages, Teachable lets you avoid paying for redundant versions of those tools bundled into a pricier all-in-one platform.
The trade-off is that you’ll need to integrate third-party tools for email marketing and sales funnels, which can add its own monthly cost — often estimated at another $50 to $100 a month depending on which tools you choose.
Kajabi: An All-in-One Business Platform
Kajabi’s higher price reflects the fact that it’s trying to replace several separate subscriptions at once: your course platform, your email marketing tool, your funnel builder, and your website. For creators who are currently paying for all of those tools separately, Kajabi can actually work out cheaper in total, even though its sticker price looks steeper than Teachable’s.
The catch is that if you don’t need — or already have — those additional tools, you’re paying a real premium for capability you won’t use. Kajabi’s course delivery tools, while solid, are generally considered less developed than Teachable’s at a comparable price point, since Kajabi’s core strength lies in its marketing stack rather than its classroom experience.
Support and Reliability Compared
Support quality is worth factoring into the decision too, since course launches are exactly the moment things tend to go wrong.
Teachable offers strong self-service resources through Teachable University, and support response times are generally solid for common issues, though billing disputes and platform-wide problems can take longer to resolve. A 30-day money-back guarantee gives you a real window to test support quality before fully committing.
Kajabi offers 24/7 live chat support across all paid plans, though notably no phone support on any tier. Its help center and Kajabi University resources are thorough, and Pro plan users get priority routing for faster issue resolution. That said, some of the more serious user complaints center on billing disputes after free trials and technical issues during high-stakes product launches — worth keeping in mind if you’re planning a big launch on either platform.
Which Platform Should You Choose?
Choose Teachable If:
- You already have (or prefer) separate tools for email marketing and funnels
- You’re early-stage and want to keep monthly costs low while validating your course
- Course delivery quality — quizzes, certificates, drip content, progress tracking — matters more to you than marketing automation
- You expect meaningful revenue quickly and can move to the Builder plan to avoid the Starter tier’s transaction fees
Choose Kajabi If:
- You want courses, email, funnels, and your website consolidated into a single platform and bill
- You’re currently paying for multiple separate marketing tools that Kajabi could replace
- Your business already generates enough revenue to comfortably absorb Kajabi’s higher starting price
- Marketing automation and audience-building matter as much to your business as course delivery itself
A Word on Total Cost, Not Just Sticker Price
The mistake a lot of people make when comparing these two platforms is looking only at the base monthly price. That comparison genuinely misleads more often than it helps. A $39/month Teachable Starter plan with a 7.5% transaction fee can easily cost more in total than a $179/month Kajabi Basic plan once your revenue climbs past a certain point, simply because percentage-based fees scale with your sales while flat subscription fees don’t.
Before deciding, it’s worth actually running the numbers based on your expected monthly revenue and the tools you’d need to add on top of whichever platform you choose. Calculate your total realistic monthly cost — subscription plus fees plus any third-party tools — for both platforms at your expected revenue level, not just at your current, early-stage revenue. That comparison will tell you far more about genuine value than either platform’s advertised starting price.
The Bottom Line
Teachable and Kajabi aren’t really direct competitors so much as two different bets on how you want to run your business. Teachable bets that you’d rather keep costs low and assemble your own stack of tools around a focused course platform. Kajabi bets that consolidation is worth paying a premium for, especially once your business has grown past the early, cost-conscious stage.
Neither approach is objectively right. The best choice depends on where your business is today, what tools you’re already paying for, and how much you value having everything under one login versus keeping costs as lean as possible while you build. Both platforms offer free trials, so if you’re genuinely torn, testing each one with your actual course content for a couple of weeks will tell you more than any pricing comparison ever could.
