Kajabi was originally an idea by Kenny Reuter, who wanted to start a side-business teaching people how to make toys online. He was not passionate about teaching online but he was passionate to make it easier for people who wanted to share their knowledge online.
The vision was simple. Kajabi founders Kenny Rueter and Travis Rosser knew they wanted to help people monetize their knowledge and premium digital content online. They needed a platform that made it easy for entrepreneurs to do this.
If you’re an online course creator, you have probably heard of Kajabi before. It is one of the most popular online learning platforms today. Since its launch in 2010, Kajabi grew to become the powerhouse that it is today. It has helped thousands of people escape from jobs that don’t suit them anymore and have enabled them to realize their dreams.
This review will cover the basics of what you need to know about Kajabi. These include marketing, pricing, online course creation, and much more. This will give you a clear idea of the benefits you’ll get if you choose Kajabi.
For those of you who prefer a more visual experience, here is a video review from Lane Sebring’s YouTube channel. To get a comprehensive overview of Kajabi, you may still want to check out our article below.
General Overview What Is Kajabi
Pros
- A highly integrated platform featuring a lot of built-in tools
- Intuitive marketing tools that help you promote and sell your products.
- User-friendly
- Great customer support
- Intuitive course builder and highly customizable themes
- Uses Wistia as a video host
Cons
- Kajabi prices are higher than average
- Users cannot create custom certificates of completion for students on the platform
- Assessment customization is limited.
What is Kajabi?
Kajabi is an online platform for creating courses that allow users to manage their businesses from one location. Kajabi can take care of everything, from course creation to marketing and much more.
How does Kajabi work?
Kajabi is built to sell. The platform boasts of how easy it is to use. You can start by purchasing a plan. There are three options available: Pro, Growth, or Basic. We will discuss them later in this review.
After you’ve selected a plan, you can set up an account and upload your content. You can upload your video lectures, give lesson titles and descriptions using the lesson editor.
You can easily complete assessments by simply typing the questions and selecting the options (if you’ve chosen the multiple-choice option).
Now you can market your products. You can create pipelines in Kajabi. You can use these mechanisms to increase conversion rates and turn prospects into potential students through efficient marketing channels. You can add landing pages, freebies that get leads to enter their email addresses, video marketing, and so on.
Once the prospect is enrolled as a student, payments can be made through the site. All without having to leave Kajabi. What Is Kajabi
Now, some features make Kajabi an almost “all-in-one” platform. These features will be discussed in the next sections. But, Kajabi can go head-to-head and over most online course platforms with the features and benefits it offers.
Why should you choose Kajabi:
As an entrepreneur, of course, you would want to make sure that you make the most out of your investment. Kajabi can help you market valuable content. This guide will help you launch your business and keep it growing.
It’s more than simply uploading course content and waiting for students sign in. You will need to create a course curriculum, set goals and assess your students, make sure your website is attractive to your target audience, and market it. Kajabi allows you to do all of these things and more.
- Build a website
- Create course offerings
- Track student progress
- Manage subscriptions/payments
- Run email marketing campaigns
One criticism Kajabi has is on its price. It is more expensive than other alternatives, but that’s okay. This eliminates the need to purchase expensive plug-ins and saves you time. You also have to figure out how to make the plug-ins seamlessly work together. This takes time, effort, and money. All this could be avoided by using one platform.
Good platforms think of what their users want and need. These platforms can be used to create sales pages, email your students, or do all kinds of marketing activities.
So, if you’re a professional looking to sell your knowledge, I would say, with Kajabi, you will be in safe hands. It’s a powerful all-in-one solution for creating, marketing, and selling online courses.
Kajabi: A Beginner-Friendly Tool
Not all great teachers are technologically inclined enough to share their knowledge and information online. Even with the willingness of some to learn, the process can be complex and confusing too. That is why the Kajabi creators designed the platform to be accessible and understandable even to those who have a problem with computer work.
It uses a visual layout which makes it easy to use and intuitive. Kajabi’s drag-and-drop editor will make it easy to start an online business, even if you don’t know how to code.
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Almost “all-in-one”
Kajabi is suitable for almost everything, save for a few minor features that developers are still working on. You don’t need to spend too much time trying to find the right extensions or plug-ins. Imagine, one update could cause these plug-ins to disrupt your business processes.
If you want to save yourself the headache, Kajabi already has excellent tools for creating landing pages and sales funnels and converting visitors into customers. This platform allows you to create courses and market them. You can provide coupons for discounts to entice your potential students, follow-up leads, and handle payments without leaving the Kajabi website.
As a busy entrepreneur with not a lot of free time on my hands, I enjoy the email marketing and funnel creations of Kajabi. It was easy to automate my follow-ups and it is very simple. What Is Kajabi
Overall, Kajabi fulfills more than other platforms can do with what it offers.
Tutorials
For people who are complete beginners, there could be some doubt on the truthfulness of this “easy-to-use” claim. But they will be pleasantly surprised to find out that it is indeed true.
Kajabi provides a lot to its users. The Kajabi Assistant Bar gives you access to many searchable tutorials. Just head to the top and enter any query. It will display related tutorials.
Second, under the Kajabi University, you can check out a catalog of tutorials and videos to get you started with creating and developing your business. Some of these topics cover creating your online courses, marketing your products on social media and other platforms, and setting up payments.
These tutorials are available in video and text formats for your convenience.
Third, one unique feature about the onboarding process is the 28-day “Hero Challenge.” It is essentially a month-long crash course to help you get your website launched and your business making its first sale. The challenge covers all you need to know about the platform, as well as some strategies for successfully marketing your products.
Kajabi offers one of the best customer service in the industry. Now, if you have the Growth or Pro Plan, you get access to 24/7 round-the-clock customer chat support. With a Basic Plan, customer chat support is available at limited times during the day. Despite this, I would still say that the support team is pretty prompt with responding. So far, I have not had any problems with how they handle things.
Kajabi also offers a rewards program that provides incentives to creators who achieve their revenue goals and includes some exclusive perks.
Customer Support
If you have got a query that cannot be found in the Kajabi online guides, the next thing you can do is contact customer service. So, if you are stuck on an issue, you can always rely on them to provide you with the answers. What Is Kajabi
The Growth and Pro Plan gives you access to the Kajabi customer service team 24/7 via live chat.
Although, if you opt for the Basic Plan, the staff will only be available on Mondays to Fridays from 9 am to 7 pm. It functions as a ticket system, but you will find an answer within the day. Even with this, they always reply promptly. They never take too long to reply.
If you’re not confident in your computer skills, the more expensive plans can be worth it. The other two Kajabi plans offer around-the-clock access to support, while the Basic Plan does not.
How to use Kajabi:
Creating a Class:
Kajabi’s course creation is quick, easy, and customizable. Once you provide a name for the product, head over to the upper right side of your screen, and you can see “New Product.” There are 3 pre-built product blueprints for various digital products. You also have the option to create a custom listing. Let’s take a look at each one.
- Mini-course
- A mini-course contains lesser material than the Online Course, but it is pretty easy to complete. You can use this to gauge customer interest and also build your brand value.
- Online course
- These are full-blown courses your students can take, from workshops to seminars and lectures about your expertise.
- Evergreen Training
- The Evergreen Course will help you keep your product in front of people and make sales. It will generate passive income for you even after it is launched. This option, aside from marketing, allows you to drip feed your content to students to keep them interested.
- Blank
- If you’re an advanced user and want to fully customize your content, this is a good option for you.
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To upload your courses, you can use Kajabi’s intuitive editor. These can be uploaded from your computer, Dropbox, or Google Drive.
Kajabi supports a wide variety of file types, so you can include videos, audio, pdf, and text documents in your lessons. Wistia offers video hosting for Kajabi. You can also upload bulk files. What Is Kajabi
How to Upload Your Content
Videos
Kajabi provides built-in streaming through Wistia as a video host. There will be an icon that you can spot immediately, and it will ask you to upload either a video or an assessment.
As mentioned earlier, you will be able to upload your videos in bulk without worrying about bandwidth. In all the Pricing Plans of Kajabi, you are provided with unlimited bandwidth. Uploads can be made from your computer, Dropbox or Google Drive. You can also upload via URL links. It will not accept URLs from Youtube and Vimeo. The uploader searches for the file type in URLs.
After your files are uploaded, Kajabi will automatically convert them into articles you can edit later. This eliminates the need to go through each post and upload videos one at a time.
Now, with Wistia as the video host, rest assured that alone makes your subscription worth it. Wistia standalone subscriptions can cost $99 per month. You can get Kajabi’s Basic Plan for $119/year if you add $20. This is a great bargain.
Assessments
Assessments can be a great tool to measure student engagement and learning. Students can gauge their understanding of the material by seeing how they do with lessons. It can also aid in motivating them to work harder. This feature can be used to receive feedback from students on your products, and for content locking.
It takes less than two minutes. You can create assessments by opening the People tab from the Dashboard. Select Assessments, then +New Assessment, and follow the prompt to start customizing.
A nifty feature is that when students do not fully succeed on the assessments, it can be set to automatically send out additional materials to help them.
Now there are some drawbacks. First, I have observed that the user cannot include both a video and an assessment under the same category.
Second, it does not allow users to randomize the questions or have question banks. Although, it does support assessments such as multiple-choice questions and paragraph-style questions.
Your students can also upload files for you to check through its assignment submission feature.
Photos
You can upload a poster photograph for your lessons. Pictures help to set the tone for your website and give your students a visual preview.
You can easily upload images by clicking on the Pick File button on the right side of the editor.
Certificates
I would consider Kajabi as an almost “all-in-one” platform because of its inability to natively provide certificates to students who complete the courses. While Kajabi does allow creators to give out certificates of completion, you cannot make them onsite.
These certificates can only be created using third-party services such as Canva, Google Slides and Accredible.
This is something I don’t mind doing for my business. However, it would be a hassle for some.
Another thing, Kajabi does not indicate the amount of time spent studying the courses or any continuing education credit. This can be a huge deal for people who wish to choose eLearning to earn credit. This should be something that Kajabi creators ought to seriously consider.
Downloads
Even if we call it online students, some do not necessarily stay online for the whole duration of the course. Some students download course materials and complete tasks offline. To make it easier for your students, Kajabi included this feature. This can be found in the Downloads section on the right side of the page.
Your students will be able to download whatever material you place there while they are on that specific lesson.
Body
You can choose to add a description or even a transcript for your videos. Some students prefer to read transcripts rather than watching entire videos when they review.
If you choose to only add a description, it will help students know what the lesson is all about and what topics will be discussed in the video. What Is Kajabi
Student Interactions
Community
With eLearning, it would be great for platforms to provide an avenue where students and members can engage with each other and discuss subjects in their course materials, similar to how they would do if they were in a traditional classroom setting. Some have used Facebook groups over the years. To join the group, you will need to be a member of Facebook.
You don’t need to leave Kajabi in order to interact with your students or with each other. Kajabi offers a fully integrated feature called Community. This is one of their student engagement tools.
You can even set your Community behind a paywall for patrons to gain access. This will enable you to address student questions directly and allow students to share their experiences with one another.
Because the Community can be used as a standalone product. Those who are not too keen on purchasing the entire course could just buy access to the discussions.
Organizing Your Topics
One problem that forums have is the lack of organization. Both the students and the creators may find it difficult to keep track of particular topics. This is something I noticed in many Facebook groups. This makes it difficult to understand your audience and listen to them.
In Kajabi, the page administrator is allowed to organize and reorganize the feeds. They can sort the posts by topic and also ‘pin’ specific posts for better viewability.
Overall, Kajabi’s Community feature is a significant advantage over its competition. It is beneficial for entrepreneurs with an online course business.
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Content Access
Depending on your style, Kajabi gives you the option of how your students receive your courses. You can either allow them to receive all the classes and resources at once, drip-feed them on a schedule, or lock your content. The last one tends to increase student engagement as there is a requirement to finish the lesson first before accessing the next one. What Is Kajabi
Dripping Course Content
You can choose to drip-feed your courses after a pre-set duration instead of allowing your students to receive everything all at once.
You can keep your students coming back to your page to see new content by drip-feeding it. Second, this will prevent them from jumping too far ahead and skipping possibly essential parts of your course.
Third, it is a valuable feature for when you decide on a membership type.
Content Locking
Your student must complete a lesson before they can access the next. You can end your lessons with an assessment to be completed. This way, they increase their participation, and you can keep track of their progress in understanding lesson materials.
Course Analytics
Kajabi prides itself on providing the best tools to help entrepreneurs handle their business with the course analytics. It creates heatmaps and videos stats. It will give you insights into which parts of your courses are performing well and which need to be improved.
Therefore, it shows you information on your courses, affiliates, students, and sales transactions that can help you optimize your products.
Play Rate
Play rate is a way to see how many people have viewed a particular video. I mentioned that some students prefer to download the course material and read the transcript rather than watch the video.
Average Engagement
The data you receive here is the average percentage of the whole video that your students watched. Since some students prefer to skip some segments of the video, you can get an idea of how well you can keep your students engaged in what you need to say.
Visual Engagement Viewer
With this comes a graphical overlay in your video. This is a great feature for visual learners like me. Information presented in text blocks is not the best way to process it. I prefer to have my data presented in graphic form.
The Visual Engagement Viewer displays a report on your students’ engagement with specific parts of the video. There is usually a downhill trend in which people stop watching the video at the beginning of the outro.
Viewer Heatmaps
Now just because your students opened your videos does not mean that they are watching them. They could have kept it running in the background while they do something else, in the guise of multi-tasking. What Is Kajabi
The Viewer Heatmap allows you to see which parts of the viewers are not interesting to your students, and which ones they have viewed repeatedly. It could mean that these are parts that they found interesting or they found difficult. This meant that they needed to watch the video again to make sure they understood what was going on.
You can trust that Kajabi will provide you with a valuable array of analytic tools to better your content. The best thing to do with your data is to help you develop a strategy to guide your business decisions.
Blogging
A strong blog can do wonders for promoting your business. Current students can receive updates and more information about your products and services while new customers are introduced to them. Having a solid blog boosts traffic for you and generates leads that would transform visitors into potential students.
Admittedly, Kajabi has plenty to improve on in this feature. It is not on the same level as what you would have with something like WordPress. But still, the fact that you can place everything in one place without needing to exit Kajabi makes up for its shortcomings.
Basic HTML Know-How
It is unnecessary for you to code to build your website and customize most things in Kajabi; it is still a good idea.
You will need to learn basic programming to personalize your Kajabi blog’s photos. When you upload a photo on top of a blog post, it will show up in the recommended image size. Kajabi works with HTML. To change certain dimensions, you would need to play with HTML. Of course, this is not too much of a problem. With a quick search on the internet, you will find plenty of tutorials to do some basic coding.
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Text wrapping is another thing you should be concerned about. You cannot edit the way the text wraps around a picture in the body of your blog unless you deal with the HTML.
Kajabi does not have an image bank. You would have to upload a photo you’ve used previously in another article. Hopefully, Kajabi will focus on these things in their subsequent updates.
Tagging
Kajabi has many great features. However, I find it frustrating that I can’t pick the tags I want to use in my posts. Unlike in other blogs where you can easily refer to previous tags, the tags themselves don’t appear even as suggestions when you type them down.
It can be a hassle to remember the tag you used, or to put it on a separate list for each blog post. What Is Kajabi
Marketing Tools
These are Kajabi’s most vital support for its users. Kajabi is built to sell. Your business will be safe with so many marketing tools. There are automation, pipelines and many other features. We will be discussing a few of these features in this section.
Pipelines
Kajabi has a pipeline built into platforms that will simplify sales and marketing. The name itself refers to Kajabi’s goal of transforming the same number of leads to the same number of paying customers. You can have three, fifteen or 100 pipelines depending on which Price Plan you choose.
Kajabi will provide you with a visual representation for your schematics. Editing is simple and intuitive. You can add videos, images and offers using the drag-and-drop editor. This will help you increase your conversion rates. There are suggestions if you don’t know where to start.
Kajabi provides blueprints to help you start your pipelines. The blueprint you choose will help you set up funnels including landing pages, email automation and offers. This template was carefully crafted by Brendon Burchard, one of the world’s leading high-performance coaches.
With the Pipeline Stats feature, you can monitor the progress of your marketing plans and use it to evaluate the areas that are lagging. This feature allows you to see each page and email of the pipeline and data on your earnings per view.
Affiliate Program
A disclaimer here: the affiliate program is only available with the Growth and Pro Plans. You and your partners will be able to market your products and the program together. It becomes easier for you to give them the agreed-upon commission. You will have access to a private affiliate dashboard. In it, you can see statistics of clicks, conversions, and other pertinent data to help you market your business.
Automation
Email Marketing
Kajabi makes it easy to start your own business. Depending on your schedules, you can launch email marketing campaigns quickly. This feature lets you choose the sequence of emails, add multiple emails to the set sequence and upsell additional products. Templates are also available to fit your email’s purpose. Not a lot of alternatives offer this much freedom.
Suppose a visitor adds something to their cart but has not yet decided to make the purchase final; you can set up Kajabi to send an email to remind them of your offer. This allows you to track sign-ups automatically from your email campaigns. Just relax and see the improvement in your conversion rates.
You can also use Kajabi to integrate with other email platforms.
Marketing Partners
Kajabi integrations allow you to manage your entire business from one platform. Currently, Kajabi has 10 native integrations. To name a few, it has ConvertKit, Aweber, MailChimp, and Active Campaign. What Is Kajabi
How to Price Your Products
There are several factors that you need to consider when pricing your courses – time spent in planning the content and creating it, charging for your expertise, operational costs, and so on.
Kajabi provides a simple way to price your products once you have established the price. Head over to the Offers tab found on the left side and click ‘Add New Offer.’
You can sell them individually or package them as a set. Once you make a new deal, you will receive a prompt to enter the title offers, product, and cost. You will now only be able choose one product. However, there will be many options available for bundles and payment options. You can also choose the currency for your product’s pricing.
If you are worried about people not being able to afford your course, you can set it up in multiple ways:
- Free
- One-time Payment
- Multiple Payments
- Recurring Payments
From here, you may also create coupon codes or generate bulk coupon codes as well as special offers that apply to the coupon.
Payment Methods
Kajabi uses Stripe or Paypal to process payments. You can customize your checkout to create flexible payment options and offer custom payment options for students. This comes with the convenience of not paying for transaction fees as Kajabi does not charge you. But, you do have to answer to the cost of its payment method partners.
Partnering with Paypal makes it easy to pay affiliates via Paypal Mass Pay. This includes an exported list of all sales.
It is also easier to request refunds. Kajabi allows you to do refunds without needing to leave the site.
Kajabi Pricing
Kajabi’s pricing may appear to be higher than that of other sites as previously stated. Because of the platform’s cost, most individuals would undoubtedly be hesitant to use it.
Well, one thing I can say is that it is an investment that keeps on giving. Kajabi is not just a course-building platform. Even though it’s a bit more expensive than other platforms, keep in mind that you do not need to pay separately for three or more different tools for email services, blogs, and sales pipelines. All of these come with your Kajabi subscription. Prices are higher than competitors due to the large suite of tools. However, of all the platforms, Kajabi offers the most value for money.
All three pricing plans offer unlimited bandwidth, unlimited video hosting via Wistia, and 0% transaction fees. It also has chat support and assessment features.
To check how the plans differ, below is a thorough discussion of each pricing plan. What Is Kajabi
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Basic Plan
The lowest-priced plan starts at $149 monthly. If billed annually, you will only pay $119.
The basic plan is the most affordable option. However, you are limited to having only 3 products, 1 website, 3 sales pipelines, and around a thousand members. The Kajabi logo branding will remain on all products.
However, landing pages and marketing emails are unlimited. The Basic Plan might not contain some of the essential marketing tools you would like to use for your business. Despite Kajabi’s superb customer service, you’ll want to keep your questions to office hours. In contrast to the higher plans, who gets access to a live chat with customer care 24/7.
Growth Plan
You can subscribe to this tier for $50 extra and get five times the number of courses. The monthly price is $199, but if you pay it annually, it will just be $159.
Fortunately, though, even the basic pricing plan has a lot of features to play with. Most plans have the same basic suite of functions, but they scale according to the pricing plan. For example, the Basic plan only allows for 3 products and 3 pipelines, while the Growth plan allows for 15 products and 15 pipelines. As a result, when you purchase a higher-tier plan, you are not paying for new features, but rather for the expansion of existing ones. In addition, Kajabi does not charge a transaction fee for any sales made on the platform.
The second level allows you to create more products and pipelines as well as members. More reasons to get this plan: white-labeling, affiliate marketing, and automation.
- White-labelling – This allows you to remove the Kajabi branding from your website and completely customize it.
- Affiliate advertising – well-known online sales strategy. Your products will reach a bigger audience thanks to your affiliates. For suggesting your products to their audiences, your affiliates will be paid commissions.
- Automation – As discussed earlier, automation makes it easier for you to follow up with your students. With this, the system automatically sends out the programmed response through a prompt. For example, if a student is lagging on assessments, you can set an automated response of an email with supplemental course materials for them. No need for you to keep track of their progress manually.
As a creator, we are aware that you are not in the business to only make money. You want your products to be of value as well. Business-wise, this is valuable because if people are getting their bang for the buck, they will be more likely to return for more. It is a win-win situation.
Pro Plan
{This is the priciest plan Kajabi has to offer. But it does come with some pretty neat features. You can market up to 100 products, handle 3 sites and at most, have 20,000 members. Because of the number of courses you can market, you can have 25 admin users to help you manage. You also have access to round-the-clock customer support.|This is the most expensive plan offered by Kajabi. It does, however, have some interesting features. You can sell up to 100 products, manage three websites, and have a maximum of 20,000 members. You can have up to 25 admin users to assist you in regulating the amount of courses you can market. You also get access to customer service 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
These features plus all features you would enjoy from both Basic and Growth Plans are included. While there are unlimited landing pages, the advertising emails are limited to two million.
A bonus to getting the Pro Plan is access to the Experts Academy. In it, you will find more information on how to market your brand. What Is Kajabi
If you chose Kajabi’s Pro Plan, you could set billing monthly for $399 or yearly for $319. Take note, this is a massive investment that you would need to consider. Most big companies or those with a good amount of courses to sell choose this option. But if you are just starting or your business does not warrant the need for a Pro Plan yet, then I would suggest the other two plans. Just my two cents in. You would still get to enjoy a lot of what Kajabi has to offer on the budget you set.
Moving to Kajabi
For those who are not new to course-creating, you probably used other platforms. It is excellent that you are still considering options for your business and thinking of ways to improve. If you have decided to move to Kajabi, another concern would be how to move all of your data into the platform.
Not to worry, though. Fortunately, you can simply import your members’ names and email using a .csv file. But, you can only do this 500 members at a time. So it would require you to do multiple importations if needed.
Another thing to note is that your members will have to reset their passwords due to a security issue. This is good news for you and your members. Kajabi takes your business’ security seriously. This means that other platforms will not have access to their information once the move is made.
Conclusion
For many creators, Kajabi is a popular choice, and it has a lot to offer for the price you choose to pay. It comes with exceptional customer service, a well-integrated system, and is extremely user-friendly.
As previously said, Kajabi’s goal is to assist you streamline and profit from your business processes in one place. It gives you the advantage to take your products to new heights thanks to its numerous marketing capabilities.
Now, this review has given you some insight into the benefits and downsides of choosing Kajabi. Overall, I can still say that Kajabi is a wonderful tool to manage your business from creation to marketing. What Is Kajabi
Frequently Asked Questions: What Is Kajabi
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What does Kajabi mean?
- According to its founders, it is an aboriginal word that means “to take flight.”
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Is Kajabi free?
- Kajabi does not currently have a free plan. It does, however, offer a 14-day trial period during which you can test out its features.
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Is Kajabi worth the money?
- This is dependent on your business requirements and how you can make the most of Kajabi’s features. Kajabi is well-known for being user-friendly and for having a number of built-in integrations that help streamline business processes. You also receive excellent support.
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Is Kajabi easy to use?
- Yes. Kajabi is easy to use. In fact, because of this, thousands of course creators have it as their platform of choice.
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Is Kajabi accessible via a mobile app?
- Yes. Your students have the convenience of accessing Kajabi via a mobile app. It is available in both iOS and Google Play.
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Can you use your domain?
- Yes. With a Basic Plan, you can create a custom domain with Kajabi’s branding (yourdomaintitle.kajabi.com). You can choose to remove any traces of Kajabi’s branding and create a website that is purely focused on you with the Growth and Pro Plans.
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Does Kajabi have transaction fees?
- No. There are no transaction fees, but you can still be subject to pay the standard Stripe merchant processing fee.