# Kartra vs Kajabi · CheckoutScale > Source: https://checkoutscale.com/compare/kartra-vs-kajabi ## Kartra vs Kajabi Head-to-head [All head-to-heads →](/compare) Pick Kartra if you want a marketing suite that leads with funnels, campaigns and a capable checkout at a lower monthly cost, and you can live with a slower page builder; pick Kajabi if your product is a course, coaching program or membership sold to a warm audience and you want the most polished course player, community and student experience under one login. By [Marcus Reyes](/authors/marcus-reyes), Editor. Updated 27 September 2026. **Disclosure:**We may earn a commission when you buy through links on this page. It never affects our rankings. Quick answer **Kartra** is our top pick for most people. Kartra is the pick if you are a coach or creator who wants pages, email, checkout, courses and memberships on one login, and you can live with a slow builder. It is not built for paid-traffic direct response, where same-URL split testing and payment routing matter more. * **Kartra.** Best for coaches and course creators who want one login instead of a stack of tools. From $59/mo. * **Kajabi.** Best for established coaches and creators running their whole business from one dashboard. From $179/mo. ### Side by side | | Kartra | Kajabi | | --------------------- | ------- | ------- | | From | $59/mo | $179/mo | | Same-URL split test | No | No | | Multi-MID routing | No | No | | Order bumps & upsells | Yes | Yes | | Free trial | 14 days | 14 days | Kartra and Kajabi keep landing on the same shortlist because they sell the same promise: one login that replaces a stack of separate subscriptions. Both give you pages, email, a checkout with order bumps and upsells, courses and a membership site, and on a feature grid they look almost interchangeable. The difference is what each was built to lead with, and that decides which one you will be glad you picked. Kartra is a marketing suite with a funnel and a capable checkout at its centre. Kajabi is a course and community platform that happens to include a checkout. If you are genuinely down to these two, the question is not which has more features. It is whether your business runs on offers and campaigns or on the course experience itself. #### Kartra: the marketing suite Kartra leads with marketing. One login gives you pages, email, a checkout, courses and memberships, plus a funnel mapper and simulator and a large library of done-for-you campaigns, so a solo operator building offers is not starting from a blank page. Its checkout is genuinely capable: order bumps, one-click upsells, coupons and subscription billing, with no platform fee on your sales once you are on the Starter plan. That combination, campaign tooling plus a real checkout at a lower monthly cost than Kajabi, is why marketers who think in funnels tend to prefer it. The recurring complaint is the page builder. Long-term users describe it as slow and laggy, with simple edits taking longer than they should, and support that can take days to answer. #### Kajabi: the course platform Kajabi comes at it from the creator side, and its strength is the course itself. Courses, coaching, memberships, a community, email and a checkout run under one login, and the student experience is the most polished in this pair out of the box. It takes no cut of your sales, and it has run since 2010 with the vendor claiming more than 100,000 businesses and $12 billion in sales, so it is not going to disappear mid-launch. What you pay for that polish is a higher price and a narrower marketing toolkit. The checkout runs a single payment processor, there is no same-URL split testing and no multi-MID routing, and long-term users report support that is slow and largely automated when a launch breaks. Prices rose across every plan in January 2026, so the gap over Kartra widened. #### Where each one wins If your business is offers and campaigns, Kartra is the closer fit. You want to map a funnel, build the pages, and run a checkout that adds bumps and upsells, and you want the campaign templates and the marketing automation without paying course-platform prices for them. Kajabi can build a sales page too, but the community, the membership tiers and the course player are weight you are paying for and may not use if your product is an offer rather than a curriculum. If your product is a course, a coaching program or a membership sold to a warm audience, Kajabi wins on the thing that matters most to you: the experience your buyer actually has. If your traffic is your email list, your webinar attendees and your community rather than cold clicks, the polished course player, the community and the memberships being built in beats stitching Kartra's slower builder to a separate course tool. Ask which of those two businesses is yours, because the platforms answer different questions. #### On the checkout itself This is where the two are more alike than their marketing suggests, and it is worth slowing down on if you sell to paid traffic. Both give you order bumps and one-click post-purchase upsells, both do coupons and subscription billing, and both run through a single payment processor you connect yourself. Neither lets you split-test a whole checkout, and neither routes payments across more than one merchant account. Kartra gives you finer control over discount rules and pricing options and a funnel simulator to model the flow; Kajabi ties the checkout tightly to its course and membership products. For a single-offer sale the difference is small, and what decides it is everything around the checkout, not the checkout itself. #### Pricing, tier by tier Kartra has four tiers. Essentials is $59 a month but caps you at one product, five pages and 500 contacts, and it charges a 5% fee on your sales on top of your processor fees. The first plan a real business runs on is Starter at $119 a month, which drops the sales fee to 0% and lifts the caps, with Growth at $229 and Professional at $549 above it. There is a 14-day trial that asks for a card, plus a 30-day money-back guarantee. Kajabi is a flat subscription and the more expensive of the two. Basic is $179 a month ($143 billed annually), Growth $249 ($199 annual) and Pro $499 ($399 annual). It takes no revenue share, though card processing still applies, and prices rose across all plans in January 2026\. There is a 14-day free trial with a card required and a 30-day money-back guarantee. So the fair comparison is $119 Kartra Starter against $179 Kajabi Basic, and Kartra is the cheaper way to run the same kind of business, before you weigh Kartra's 5% Essentials fee or Kajabi's polish. #### If you run paid traffic: a third name to weigh Both of these leave the same two gaps open, and for a media buyer those gaps decide the whole thing. Neither Kartra nor Kajabi does same-URL split testing, and neither routes payments across more than one merchant account. If you buy media at volume, those two absences matter more than a course player or a funnel simulator, and they are what ElasticFunnels is built around. ElasticFunnels is a funnel platform for teams that live on paid traffic. Same-URL split testing is its lead feature, and it is the one both Kartra and Kajabi lack: variants rotate server-side under a single campaign link, so Meta, Google and TikTok keep their optimisation and a new test never sends the ad back through review. It is not only a testing tool. It builds the pages, with an AI builder that generates one from a prompt or clones an existing page from a URL, and its checkout runs order bumps, one-click upsells, subscriptions and multi-MID routing, so a hold on one processor does not stop the money coming in. The click, the order, the rebill and the refund land on one timeline with a CRM and attribution, which is the reconciliation work a paid-traffic team usually splits across four tools. Every feature is on every plan, and the plans differ by traffic: $97, $197 and $497 a month, with a 14-day trial and no card. EF-hosted checkouts carry a 0.5% fee on the revenue you route through them, and sales you run on outside platforms are not charged. The honest catch is age. ElasticFunnels is newer than both Kartra and Kajabi, and there is very little independent third-party review coverage to check its claims against, so until you push real volume through it you are largely taking the vendor's word for it. That is what you would expect of a platform this recent, and the no-card trial exists precisely so you can prove the split testing and the checkout on your own traffic before you move any spend. The thin outside coverage limits how much you can lean on other people's reviews today; it does not change what the pages, the split testing or the routing do once your own numbers are running through them. For the detail, read our [ElasticFunnels review](/reviews/elasticfunnels), or [ElasticFunnels vs Kartra](/compare/elasticfunnels-vs-kartra) and [ElasticFunnels vs Kajabi](/compare/elasticfunnels-vs-kajabi) if one of those was the tool you were leaning toward. #### The short version The two-way answer holds, because these platforms are built for different businesses. Pick Kartra if you want a marketing suite that leads with funnels, campaigns and a capable checkout at a lower monthly cost, and you can live with a slower page builder. Pick Kajabi if your product is a course, coaching program or membership sold to a warm audience and you want the most polished course player, community and student experience under one login, and the higher, flat price is worth it to you. And if the decision is really being driven by how you test creative against paid traffic and route payments, that is the signal to put a third name on the shortlist before you sign anything. If you are still weighing the funnel builders against each other, our [ClickFunnels vs Kartra](/compare/clickfunnels-vs-kartra) breakdown covers the closest pair, and the [Kartra review](/reviews/kartra) and [Kajabi review](/reviews/kajabi) go deeper on each. ### Kartra: strengths and trade-offs ##### What works * One login for pages, email, checkout, courses and a membership site, which for a solo coach replaces five separate subscriptions and the work of wiring them together. * The checkout is genuinely capable: order bumps, one-click upsells, coupons and subscription billing, with no platform fee on your sales from the Starter plan up. * Deep control over the details, like discount-code rules and pricing options, plus a large library of templates and done-for-you campaigns so you are not starting from a blank page. ##### What to watch * The page builder is the top long-term complaint: users report it as slow and laggy, with simple edits taking longer than they should. * Support can be slow. Long-term customers report responses that take days and some issues left open for weeks. * It is built for coaches and creators, not paid-traffic direct response: there is no same-URL split testing and the checkout runs a single processor, so it will not rotate whole checkouts under one URL or route volume across merchant accounts. ### Kajabi: strengths and trade-offs ##### What works * Genuinely one platform for the whole business. Courses, coaching, a community, memberships, email, landing pages and a checkout run under one login, so you stop paying for and wiring together five or six separate tools. * Kajabi takes no cut of your sales. You pay the plan fee and card processing, and the checkout handles order bumps, one-click upsells and subscriptions, so a higher-ticket coaching or course business keeps more of its revenue than on a percentage-fee storefront. * It is established and well-funded. Kajabi has run since 2010 and says more than 100,000 businesses have earned over $12 billion through it, so it is not a platform likely to disappear mid-launch. * The pages, checkout and student experience look polished out of the box, with a large template library, so a solo creator can ship a professional-looking course or membership without a designer. ##### What to watch * It is expensive, and prices rose again in January 2026\. Plans start at $179 a month, and the popular Growth plan is $2,388 a year before processing fees, which is hard to justify until you are already selling consistently. * Support is the most repeated long-term complaint. Even four-year customers describe chat that is mostly AI and replies that take hours or days, so do not count on fast human help when a launch breaks. * It is not built for paid-traffic direct response. The checkout runs a single processor, with no same-URL split testing and no multi-MID routing, so media buyers who need to rotate whole checkouts or spread volume across merchant accounts will hit a wall. For a coach selling to a warm audience, none of that applies. * Running the whole business inside one platform is its own risk. An outage or an account issue can take your site, courses, email and checkout down at once, and long-term users cite exactly that. Our pick ### Kartra Kartra is the pick if you are a coach or creator who wants pages, email, checkout, courses and memberships on one login, and you can live with a slow builder. It is not built for paid-traffic direct response, where same-URL split testing and payment routing matter more. ### Frequently asked questions Is Kartra or Kajabi better for paid traffic? Pick Kartra if you want a marketing suite that leads with funnels, campaigns and a capable checkout at a lower monthly cost, and you can live with a slower page builder; pick Kajabi if your product is a course, coaching program or membership sold to a warm audience and you want the most polished course player, community and student experience under one login. Which is cheaper, Kartra or Kajabi? Compare the "From" row in the table above. The cheaper sticker is not always cheaper at volume, once processing fees, add-ons and annual upgrades are counted. ### Related reading * [Kartra review](/reviews/kartra) * [Kajabi review](/reviews/kajabi) * [The full ranking](/best) --- We rank the platforms that build the pages and host the checkout for teams running paid traffic: order bumps, one-click upsells, split-testing whole checkouts, different checkouts per traffic source, and payment routing for high-risk verticals. 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