Kajabi started as a simple idea of Kenny Reuter wanting to begin a side business teaching people 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. The Kajabi founders, Kenny Rueter & Travis Rosser, knew that they wanted to help others monetize their knowledge 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 widely used online learning platforms. Kajabi has grown to be the online learning platform it is today since its inception in 2010. It has empowered thousands to escape the jobs that no longer fulfill them and help them realize their dreams.
This overview will provide a basic understanding of Kajabi. This includes online course creation, marketing, pricing, and so 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 Kajabi Discus
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
- Amazing customer service
- 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. From course creation to marketing and so much more, Kajabi will take care of it for you.
How does Kajabi work?
Kajabi is built to sell. It boasts how simple it is to use. The first thing you can do is to purchase a plan. You have three options: Basic, Growth, and Pro. 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).
Assuming this is all done, you’re now ready to market your products. You can create pipelines in Kajabi. These mechanisms allow you to achieve high conversion rates by turning prospects into potential students by giving efficient marketing funnels. You can add landing pages, freebies that get leads to enter their email addresses, video marketing, and so on.
When the prospect becomes a student, you can process payments through the site. All this without leaving Kajabi. Kajabi Discus
Now, some features make Kajabi an almost “all-in-one” platform. I will talk about them in the later sections of the review. But, Kajabi can go head-to-head and over most online course platforms with the features and benefits it offers.
Why choose Kajabi?
You want to maximize your investment as an entrepreneur. Kajabi can help you market valuable content. It includes what you need to jumpstart your business, keep it running and growing.
The business is more than just uploading your course content and waiting for students to sign in. It requires you to build out a curriculum, develop assessments or goals for your students, design your course website, and market it to your target audience. Kajabi allows you to do all of these things and more.
- Create 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. But, take into account that this takes away the hassle of using expensive plug-ins for your business. 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 will provide valuable tools for creating sales pages, emailing your students, and doing all sorts 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
Many great teachers don’t have the technology skills to share their knowledge online. The process can be complicated and confusing, even for those who are willing to learn. Kajabi creators created the platform so that it is accessible and easy to understand even for those with problems with computer work.
It uses a visual layout which makes it easy to use and intuitive. Even without learning how to code, you will be able to create an online business in no time with Kajabi through its drag-and-drop editor.
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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.
Kajabi’s email marketing and funnel creations are a great fit for me as a busy entrepreneur. I could easily automate follow-up sequences, and it’s effortless to do too. Kajabi Discus
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 offers a lot of support to its users. First, the Kajabi Assistant Bar provides access to a lot of searchable tutorials. Just head to the top and enter any query. It will show you 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. These topics include creating online courses, marketing on social media, setting up payments, and creating your product pages.
These tutorials are available in video and text formats for your convenience.
The third and most important feature of the onboarding process, is the 28-day Hero Challenge. It is basically a month-long crash program to help you launch your website and make your 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. Customer chat support is only available during business hours for Basic Plans. 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.
Lastly, there’s a rewards program in Kajabi that is designed to provide incentives for creators who reach their revenue levels and offers 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. Kajabi Discus
With the Growth and Pro Plan, you can access the 24/7 Kajabi customer support team live chat.
The Basic Plan does not have 24/7 customer support if you choose to opt for it. However, staff members will only be available Monday through Friday 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 go through them one by 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
- From short workshops to seminars to lectures about your area of expertise, these are full-blown courses that your students can avail.
- Evergreen Training
- The Evergreen Course will help you keep your product in front of people and make sales. Essentially, after you launch it, it will keep creating passive income for you. 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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You can use Kajabi’s intuitive editor to upload your courses. These can be uploaded from your computer, Dropbox, or Google Drive.
Kajabi supports many file types. You can add audio, video, pdf and text files to your lessons. Wistia provides video hosting for Kajabi, and it is great because you can upload in bulk too. Kajabi Discus
How to Upload Your Content
Videos
Kajabi provides built-in streaming through Wistia as a video host. You will see an icon and be asked to upload a video or assessment.
You can upload multiple videos at once without worrying about bandwidth. In all the Pricing Plans of Kajabi, you are provided with unlimited bandwidth. You can choose to upload from your computer, Dropbox, Google Drive, or by 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 saves you the hassle of going through the posts and uploading videos one by one.
Now, with Wistia as the video host, rest assured that alone makes your subscription worth it. Wistia standalone subscriptions can cost $99 per month. If you take a look at the cost, with $20 more, you can already get Kajabi’s Basic Plan at $119/year with its features. This is a great bargain.
Assessments
Assessments can be a great tool to measure student engagement and learning. When they can see how well they are doing with their lessons, the students can determine whether or not they understand the course material. It can also aid in motivating them to work harder. You can also use this feature to get feedback from students about your products and if you opt for content locking.
It takes less than two minutes. Open the People tab in the Dashboard to create assessments. Choose Assessments and then +New Assessment and finish the prompt to begin customizing.
One of the coolest features is the ability to set it to automatically send additional materials to students if they fail to complete their assessments.
Now there are some drawbacks. First, I have observed that the user cannot include both a video and an assessment under the same category.
It does not support randomizing questions, nor 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.
Click on the Pick File button to upload images.
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. Kajabi allows creators to issue certificates of completion but they cannot be issued onsite.
To create these certificates, you would have to rely on third-party services like Canva, Google Slides, Accredible, or SmartDraw.
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 is a major problem for those who want to use eLearning to earn credit. This should be something that Kajabi creators ought to seriously consider.
Downloads
Some students are not always able to stay online, even if they are called online students. Others opt to download the course materials and do the 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.
Students will be able download any material that you have placed while they are in a lesson.
Body
You can choose to add a description or even a transcript for your videos. Students may prefer to review transcripts over watching the entire video.
It is best to add a brief description. This will allow students to understand the content of the lesson and the topics that will be covered in the video. Kajabi Discus
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.
Conveniently, you do not need to exit Kajabi to interact with your students and with each other. Kajabi has a fully integrated feature called the Community. This is one of their tools for student engagement.
Your Community can be protected with a paywall so that patrons have 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
Forums have a problem with organization. It may be hard for both the creator and the students to keep track of specific topics. This is what I observed in a lot of Facebook groups. This makes it hard to listen to your audience and understand 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, the Community feature is one advantage Kajabi has over its competitors. 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. This last option tends to increase student engagement because they must complete the lesson before accessing the next. Kajabi Discus
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. This will also prevent your student from skipping important parts of the course.
It is also a useful feature when choosing a type of membership.
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. You can increase their participation and keep track of how they understand the lesson material.
Course Analytics
Kajabi prides itself on providing the best tools to help entrepreneurs handle their business with the course analytics. What it does is create heatmaps and video 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
The play rate gives data on how many people have watched a specific video. I mentioned that some students prefer to download the course material and read the transcript rather than watch the video.
Average Engagement
This data shows you the average percentage of video 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 presents a report of your students’ engagement in specific points of the video. Usually, there is a general downhill trend wherein people tend to stop watching at the start of the outro.
Viewer Heatmaps
Your students may not be watching your videos just because they opened them. They could have kept it running in the background while they do something else, in the guise of multi-tasking. Kajabi Discus
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. This could indicate that the students found these parts interesting or 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
Strong blogs can make a big difference in promoting your company. 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. Despite its limitations, Kajabi’s ability to store everything in one place makes up for them.
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.
If you want to personalize the photos in your Kajabi blog, you need to do some basic coding. When you upload a photo on top of a blog post, it will show up in the recommended image size. Kajabi works with HTML. You would have to fiddle with HTML to change some of the dimensions. Of course, this is not too much of a problem. You can find many tutorials for basic coding by doing a quick internet search.
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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. If you wanted to add a photo that you have previously used in other articles, you would need to upload it from your computer or sites like Google Drive again. Hopefully, Kajabi will focus on these things in their subsequent updates.
Tagging
While I enjoy most of Kajabi’s features, one thing that gripes me is the hassle of being unable to pick from existing tags in my post. The tags don’t show up as suggestions, unlike other blogs that allow you to refer to past tags.
It can be a hassle to remember the tag you used, or to put it on a separate list for each blog post. Kajabi Discus
Marketing Tools
These are Kajabi’s most important support for its customers. Kajabi is built to sell. With so many marketing features, your business will be in safe hands. You have pipelines, automation, and so much more. 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. If you do not know where to begin, suggestions are also provided.
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
The Growth and Pro Plans are required to access the affiliate program. 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. It will allow you to see statistics about clicks and conversions as well as other relevant data that can be used to 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 allows you to decide on the sequence of the mails, add multiple emails to be sent out in the set sequence, and upsell additional offers. 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. With this, you do not have to manually track the number of sign-ups from your email campaign. Just relax and see the improvement in your conversion rates.
Of course, if you choose to use other email platforms, you will find that you have many options Kajabi can integrate with.
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. Kajabi Discus
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. Click on the Offers tab to the left and select ‘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. Now, you will only be able to choose one product, but there will be some options for you to choose from in terms of bundles and payment options on the following pages. You can also choose the currency for your product’s pricing.
You have several options if you’re concerned about people not being financially able to pay for your course.
- 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. Kajabi doesn’t charge transaction fees so this comes with the convenience. But, you do have to answer to the cost of its payment method partners.
One convenient thing about partnering with Paypal is that it makes it easier to pay affiliates their commissions through Paypal Mass Pay with an exported list of all your affiliate sales.
It is also easier to request refunds. Kajabi allows you to do refunds without needing to leave the site.
Kajabi Pricing
As mentioned earlier, Kajabi’s pricing can seem higher than other platforms. 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. Because of the extensive tool set, prices are greater than those of competitors. But, Kajabi still provides the best value for money out of all other platforms.
Unrestricted bandwidth, unlimited Wistia video hosting, and 0% transaction fees are included in all three pricing plans. It also has chat support and assessment features.
Below is a detailed breakdown of each pricing plan to see how they differ. Kajabi Discus
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Basic Plan
The lowest-priced plan starts at $149 monthly. You will only have to pay $119 if you are billed annually.
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
For $50 more, you can upgrade to this tier and get five times more courses. The monthly payment sets you back $199, but if billed annually, it will cost only $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.
You can build new goods, pipelines, and members at the second level. White-labeling, affiliate marketing, and automation are just a few more reasons to acquire this plan.
- White-labelling – This allows you to remove the Kajabi branding from your website and completely customize it.
- Affiliate advertising – A popular online sales tactic. Through your affiliates, your products will receive a wider reach. Your affiliates will receive commissions for recommending your products to their audiences.
- 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.
Access to the Experts Academy is included as part of the Pro Plan. More information on how to sell your brand can be found there. Kajabi Discus
You could schedule billing monthly for $399 or yearly for $319 if you picked Kajabi’s Pro Plan. Take notice that this is a significant investment that you must consider. This is the option that most large firms or those with a large number of courses to sell pick. 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
Kajabi is a popular choice for many creators, and it has a lot to offer to your business for the price you choose to pay. It has excellent support, a well-integrated system, and is highly beginner-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. Kajabi Discus
Frequently Asked Questions: Kajabi Discus
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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?
- Currently, Kajabi does not offer a free plan. However, it provides a 14-day trial for you to try out its features.
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Is Kajabi worth the money?
- This depends on your business needs and how you can optimize Kajabi’s features. Kajabi is well known for being user-friendly and having a variety of built-in integrations for smoother 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.