Kajabi vs ClickFunnels (2026): Courses vs Funnels
Written by people who pay for this software · Pricing and offer terms checked August 2026 · Destination links auto-checked 21 August 2026
We have paid for both at the same time, which is an expensive way to learn they are not really competitors. Kajabi sells and delivers knowledge products; ClickFunnels converts traffic into orders. The right choice follows from which of those is your bottleneck, not from a feature count.
The one-line version: if the hard part of your business is making and delivering the product, take Kajabi. If the hard part is getting people to buy, take ClickFunnels. Both run a three-months-for-$99 partner offer at the moment, so this quarter the decision costs the same either way.
The two platforms in numbers
Vendor-published figures — Kajabi's August 2025 announcement and ClickFunnels' own marketing. Both describe the platforms' most successful users, not a typical customer, and neither predicts anything about your results.
Head to head
| Kajabi | ClickFunnels | |
|---|---|---|
| Built for | Selling and delivering knowledge products | Converting traffic into purchases |
| Entry plan | Kickstarter $89/mo; Basic $179/mo | Launch $97/mo |
| Mid plan | Growth $249/mo | Scale $197/mo |
| Top plan | Pro $499/mo | Optimize $297/mo; Dominate $5,997/yr |
| $99 partner offer covers | Basic, 3 months — save $438 | Scale, 3 months — save $492 |
| Revenue share | ✓ 0% on paid plans | ✓ 0% on all plans |
| Courses included | ✓ 5 products on Basic, unlimited on Pro | ✓ 3 on Launch, 6 on Scale, 10 on Optimize |
| Email marketing | ✓ Unlimited sends, visual automations | ✓ 50k–1.2M emails/mo by plan |
| One-click upsells & order bumps | ≈ Possible, but lighter tooling | ✓ Native — the core product |
| Funnels | ✓ Unlimited on every plan | ✓ Unlimited, with split testing across the flow |
| Community | ✓ Included on every plan | × Not a focus; membership areas instead |
| Coaching | ✓ Native product type with scheduling | ≈ Appointments and pipelines via CRM |
| CRM & sales pipelines | ≈ Contact-centric, light CRM | ✓ Full CRM with pipelines |
| Content & SEO | ≈ Basic blogging | × Not a content platform |
| Member mobile app | ✓ Unified member app | × No equivalent |
Monthly list price, plan for plan
KajabiClickFunnels
Choose Kajabi when…
- Your product is knowledge. Courses, coaching packages, memberships, a podcast, a community — Kajabi treats each as a first-class product type rather than a file behind a paywall.
- You sell repeatedly to the same audience. One contact database, behaviour-based segmentation and unlimited email make the second and third offer far easier than the first. Kajabi's own August 2025 figures claim multi-product creators earn around 4.5× single-product ones.
- You want the community and the coaching included. Since September 2025 both ship on every plan, which removes two subscriptions from a typical stack.
- Member experience matters. The unified member mobile app is something ClickFunnels simply does not offer.
Choose ClickFunnels when…
- You are buying traffic. When cold clicks cost money, checkout conversion is the number that decides profitability, and that is what ClickFunnels is engineered around.
- Your offer has an upsell path. One-click upsells, downsells and order bumps are native, and they change average order value more reliably than anything else on this page.
- You run several offers or clients. Scale gives you five workspaces and five team members; agencies and multi-offer operators live in that structure.
- You sell things other than courses. Physical products, services, high-ticket applications, webinars — ClickFunnels is indifferent to what is in the box, and includes a CRM with pipelines for follow-up by humans.
Where each one is genuinely weak
Kajabi's weak points: conversion tooling is a step behind — you can build a funnel, but you cannot tune it the way ClickFunnels users do; the blog is basic, so SEO belongs elsewhere; the Basic plan caps you at 2,500 contacts; and connecting your own Stripe adds a 2% surcharge on that plan.
ClickFunnels' weak points: it is not a content platform, so organic search is not a growth channel you can run inside it; course delivery is competent rather than excellent, with no member mobile app; there is no community product; and the concept load — funnels, workflows, workspaces, pipelines, products — is a real learning curve in the first fortnight.
The money, side by side
At list price for a year of the plan most people actually use: Kajabi Basic is $2,148 and ClickFunnels Scale is $2,364, close enough that price should not decide it. With the current partner offers, the first year is $1,710 for Kajabi Basic ($99 plus nine months at $179) and $2,070 for ClickFunnels Scale ($99 plus nine months at $197). Annual billing changes both again — roughly $143 a month on Kajabi Basic, $164 on ClickFunnels Scale.
What year one actually costs on the plan most people use
Kajabi BasicClickFunnels Scale
The decision is not price. It is which bottleneck you are paying to remove.
What we would actually do
What we tell people who ask us directly. Selling a course or coaching programme to an audience you already have, or are building through content and email: Kajabi. Selling anything to cold traffic where the offer, the checkout and the upsell decide whether the ad spend works: ClickFunnels. Not sure yet: pick the one matching how you expect to get your first hundred customers, take the 90-day offer, and revisit at the end of the quarter rather than paying for both.
Frequently asked questions
Kajabi vs ClickFunnels — which should I choose?
Choose Kajabi if you sell knowledge products and want courses, coaching, community, email and delivery in one place. Choose ClickFunnels if your revenue depends on conversion — landing pages, order bumps, one-click upsells and paid traffic. The tools overlap in the middle, but they are optimised for different bottlenecks.
Is ClickFunnels cheaper than Kajabi?
At entry level, yes: ClickFunnels Launch is $97 a month against Kajabi Basic at $179. Higher up they converge — ClickFunnels Scale is $197 and Kajabi Growth is $249. Both currently run a partner offer of three months for one $99 payment, on Scale and Basic respectively. Terms verified August 2026.
Can ClickFunnels host my course?
Yes. Every ClickFunnels plan includes courses — three on Launch, six on Scale, ten on Optimize — with membership access built in. The delivery experience is competent rather than best-in-class; Kajabi’s course player, drip logic and member mobile app are stronger.
Can Kajabi build funnels?
Yes, and unlimited funnels and landing pages are included on every plan. What Kajabi does not match is ClickFunnels’ depth on conversion mechanics: one-click upsells, order bumps, split testing across a whole flow and the checkout tuning that ClickFunnels treats as its core product.
Do I need both?
Almost nobody does, and paying two subscriptions to solve one problem is the most common expensive mistake in this category. The rare case that justifies both is a business running heavy paid-traffic funnels on ClickFunnels while delivering a large course and community catalogue on Kajabi — and even then, one of the two is usually doing less work than its bill suggests.
Do both take a percentage of sales?
Neither takes a revenue share on paid plans. You pay card processing either way. On Kajabi, note that connecting your own Stripe rather than using Kajabi Payments adds a surcharge of 2% on Basic, 1% on Growth and 0.5% on Pro.
Keep reading
- Kajabi 3 Months for $99
The offer, the savings math and how to claim it.
- Kajabi Pricing
Every 2026 plan, contact caps and the cheapest legitimate route in.
- Kajabi Review
Honest verdict on whether $179/month is defensible.
- ClickFunnels 3 Months for $99
Scale plan for one payment — what you get and what renews.
- ClickFunnels Review
Where it beats the competition and where it genuinely does not.