It seems like the web nowadays is replete with a never-ending supply of online course building tools and training management systems. Clearly, the e-learning industry is booming. People are more eager to learn than ever before, and they are constantly looking for new ways to grow personally and professionally through knowledge creation, sharing and application.

Today, when information is abundant on our fingertips, online training systems help reduce many operating costs associated with a typical classroom-style training, such as travel expenses, venue and catering and learning materials. Companies and individuals involved in training programs increasingly find that the advantages of e-learning greatly outweigh those of traditional classroom-based instruction.

E-learning and content marketing applications showcase tools that allow anyone to easily sell digital products online. Platforms like Kajabi, LearnDash, Thinkific and ClickFunnels are facilitating digital entrepreneurs and small e-learning businesses to turn their content into unique digital products, grow their audience and convert potential leads into a high-volume customer base.

Kajabi is a unique centralized platform that allows users to create, market, sell and deliver digital products in one place. As a popular all-in-one solution, Kajabi empowers thousands of individuals, entrepreneurs, infopreneurs and small and medium enterprises around the world to develop life-changing businesses and create a powerful online presence that reflects their business vision.

E-learning means no boundaries. Kajabi – literally meaning ‘to take flight’ – makes it easy to create engaging websites, develop and deliver online courses, deploy successful marketing campaigns and build dynamic products and brands. Some people are dubbing it the next leader in knowledge commerce.

With so many online course building tools and platforms available in the market, it is sometimes a challenge to sift through the madness. Kajabi is different in the sense that it gives users full customization control and some great solutions for revenue maximization, e-marketing and customer support.

It is quite easy to create, structure and upload your content with Kajabi using its feature called Product Blueprint. This functionality is actually a preconceived or built-in structure for building various digital products. Thinkific is another well-known platform that is geared towards instructors creating online courses. While Thinkific follows an intuitive flow – the user opens a new account, creates a new course and adds new chapters to each course – Kajabi takes a very different route. With the latter, a creator creates an account, then creates a new product, and then goes on to create new categories which contain posts generated with the help of a number of content options. This feature makes Kajabi more flexible as it does not solely focus on course creation, but allows the users to create and sell other types of content as well.

As far as the course creation process is concerned, the majority of online course platforms follow a single theme. Kajabi, on the other hand, gives its users a choice of more than 10 different product themes, so that they can use a different theme for each of the different products they create. This not only allows for increased personalization, it also makes each product stand out on its own and have a unique persona. However, for a very brand-conscious entrepreneur who might want full design flexibility, Kajabi has a full customization option included in the basic plan. In addition, for the lowest tier price plan, a user cannot remove the Kajabi branding from her website.

The Kajabi’s page builder has a clean interface with a visual, drag-and-drop editor where a creator can easily make changes and additions. From a user point-of-view, Kajabi page builder is  well-designed and enables you to define the overall page level settings including colors, fonts, font sizes etc. Furthermore, a user has the advantage of adding new sections to her page by simply clicking on the ‘Add Section’ link and selecting from a list of 40+ pre-built sections available with the platform. In fact, Kajabi’s page builder feature is quite flexible, offers a lot of editing options and is also fully mobile responsive.

In the Kajabi ecosystem, it is possible for users to promote their courses and trainings to affiliates, in exchange for a commission. In order to manage a successful affiliate program, the platform gives access to all kinds of features which help a creator select which courses to promote, add affiliates, create affiliate share links, send announcements and set a custom commission percentage. Through the admin dashboard, a user can also easily track the performance of each affiliate, export their payout reports and make payments.

After you have captured the leads from your sales funnel and affiliate marketing activities, it is time to exploit your email marketing tools. Email marketing enables a user to not only keep in touch with her audience, it also aids upsells and cross-sells by offering members valuable information and updates to new products and services. ClickFunnels operates Actionetics, an excellent email marketing service offered on its platform which allows the users to store useful information on leads, segment the data based on their usage patterns and send them emails and text messages with offers. Kajabi offers a similarly multipurpose and feature-rich email marketing service called the Pipelines, which lets the creator create a fully-automated sales funnel that readily converts website visitors into leads.

In order to have a sales pipeline that actually sells, a creator needs to build a funnel using a lot of tools and upfront investments. She will have to include half a dozen separate features, such as landing pages, upsell and down sell pages, an opt-in page, a Thank you page etc. just to keep it going. Platforms like Kajabi and ClickFunnels drastically cut the budget and effort involved in the process. Virtually no coding is involved here, and a sales funnel can be produced with just a click of your mouse. Now, Kajabi is a tool to help course creators sell courses, training material and membership sites. It also lets you develop the different types of sales pipelines such as webinar funnels, lead magnet funnels, product launch funnels etc. Kajabi is a great tool to sell educational content but if you plan to sell a variety of products, Clickfunnels may be the better option as you can get free books and training.

Building an e-learning platform should not require you to go find hosting or worry about website design. If a platform offers hosting, blogging, student access, website themes, automated marketing and integrated payment options all under one roof, then a creator is virtually free to put most of her time and effort into content creation. Being one of the most feature-rich applications for online course building, Kajabi is a good choice when it comes to launching and running a successful digital products business.

For a one-time fee with Kajabi, you get to place a recurring subscription and a payment plan that works for you. The team behind the scenes also takes care of everything else, like security, maintenance and updates on the platform. Whether a creator wants to build an interesting course complete with videos, quizzes and PDF files, or construct a community forum for students and members, Kajabi actually delivers.

By combining all the features and functionalities in a single window, Kajabi takes away the need for you to pool together or even learn to use several different plugins or services. This means that as a user, you can focus on your core job of creating and selling digital products and online courses.

Unlike a marketplace structure like Udemy, Kajabi enables the user to enjoy complete control over student data, pricing and policies. However, Kajabi is not the cheapest of options out there to launch your online courses. So before you make up your mind about Kajabi, you might want to know how much it actually costs.

If only pricing is the criteria for selecting a platform, then perhaps ClickFunnels will lead. But pricing may not be the best factor upon which you take your decision. ClickFunnels has two pricing plans; the first one is priced at $97 per month, while the second one is much higher priced at $297/month but lets you avail every feature that the platform has to offer. On the other hand, Kajabi offers 3 different payment options for its users, all of which come with unlimited video hosting, unlimited bandwidth and 0% transaction charges.

The lowest plan, called the Basic Plan, is priced at $149 a month and allows you to create up to 3 products and 3 sales funnels. The second plan is called the Growth Plan and costs $199 a month. Growth Plan allows a user to create 15 products and 15 sales pipelines. On the other hand, upgrading to the Pro Plan – which costs $399/month – enables a user to build a hundred products with as many pipelines, unlimited landing pages, 100,000 contacts and 20,000 active members. Nonetheless, most users will be fine with either the Basic Plan or the Growth Plan which are feature-rich on their own and quite easy on the pocket.

In essence, ClickFunnels’ starting price is $97 and a user gets 20 funnels, 100 pages and 20,000 visitors a month. However, they do offer free training material for people looking to advance themselves in marketing. In contrast, Kajabi’s starting price is $149 and a user gets 3 products, 3 pipelines, 1,000 active members, 25,000 marketing emails and 1 website in the monthly package. It is worth noting here that although Kajabi’s starting price is higher, it offers almost all Pricing Comparisons Pricing Comparisons of its top features in the starting package. ClickFunnels does not offer its Actionetics feature which includes its most popular functionalities of email marketing service and sales funnel automation tools in its basic package.

Website creation using Kajabi is not only simple and quick, the platform has a lot to offer when it comes to product extensions, add-ons and plug-ins. Even if you are far from being a tech-wizard, there is everything on the Kajabi platform you will ever need to effortlessly create a complete and comprehensive website for multiple digital products using multiple sales pipelines. In contrast, platforms like LearnDash use a totally different approach. Using a proprietary Custom Post Type feature, LearnDash allows its users to designate lessons and modules within a course, and offers some degree of integration to extend on its core functionality. While LearnDash is a great plugin if you only want to sell one course and do not require a lot of additional functionality, the biggest disadvantage with the platform is that if you decide to cancel your LearnDash license, you will lose all of your content

For a platform which is primarily targeted towards students, it is important that students get maximum value from the courses or products being offered on it. Platforms like Kajabi and Thinkific give a clean, well-designed course structure with straightforward course objectives and progressions. There are also student support services available with both platforms, such as feedback from instructors, student discussion forums and community engagement. However, while Thinkific has been designed to specifically cater to student experience as a core element, Kajabi’s platform attempts to satisfy a broad range of customers with different types of digital products, not just online courses.

Rapid advancement, process improvement and operational efficiency are extremely vital to businesses today, and many companies are turning to e-learning and knowledge commerce to save money, time, and energy. In just a decade, e-learning has become an enormous, rapidly-expanding industrial sector as more and more organizations – businesses, governments, schools, and national militaries - come into its fold.

The worldwide market for digital products is worth more than $190 billion, growing at an unprecedented rate of $1billion per year. By the year 2022, an additional $275 billion will be added to the revenues of businesses operating in the sector. The real value of e-learning to education, business and society can be attained in the two areas of knowledge transmission and problem-solving. With e-learning revenues consistently growing year after year, a creator has the opportunity to monetize her content with an online course, a digital product or a training management system. All you needs are the right tools and a few time-tested strategies to turn your content into a roaring profit-generating business.

Platforms like Thinkific and LearnDash are popular among individual instructors as well as various multinational corporations. If you're considering Teachable as an option, we found this really in depth comparison article comparing Kajabi and Teachable. Most of these platforms are geared towards satisfying the needs and interests of a certain type of customer, like instructors, students and digital educators. On the other hand, platforms like ClickFunnels do not necessary target a narrow niche or a specific type of customer, but can work for almost anybody. ClickFunnels helps create amazing sales funnel automation that is intended for getting more and more sales for the user. However, a lack of focus on the customer may mean that the platform fails to grasp and incorporate individual customer needs and preferences and may not be ideal for educators and course-creators.

Kajabi is designed for individuals and companies that are serious about building a business around online courses and digital products, be them entrepreneurs, instructors, trainers, speakers, authors or small and medium enterprises. It caters to a much wider audience than Thinkific or LearnDash and focuses on providing a broad set of tools and features for creating, organizing, marketing and selling multiple types of products online. In this sense, Kajabai is more suitable for creators who wish to create a full-fledged content delivery system for online courses and content.

On the other hand, both Kajabi and ClickFunnels have almost the same or extremely similar features. Both offer CRM systems, website builders, all-in-one sales pipeline tools, pre-built sales funnels and email marketing automation tools. The difference lies in their core functionality and their target consumers. While ClickFunnels is geared towards entrepreneurial needs and helps entrepreneurs and companies create the best sales funnels for their businesses and maximize sales, Kajabi is a powerful course content builder for digital educators and aims to help them maximize revenues by marketing and selling educational content and courses. If you are going to be selling e-courses, then clearly you should consider Kajabi.