VERDICT: ActiveCampaign is an email marketing and automation platform at the core, Kajabi is designed to power your online knowledge business (online courses, digital products, coaching programs, memberships, and more).

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You’re going to discover the best solution between ActiveCampaign vs Kajabi.

ActiveCampaign and Kajabi are inherently different products that provide different solutions but do have some functional overlap, most notably email marketing and marketing automation.

You maybe finding it hard to choose between ActiveCampaign and Kajabi (or both). We will be making it easier for you to make a decision.

This ActiveCampaign vs Kajabi review will show you how both platforms stack up against each other and also help you pick the best fit for your business.

Let's jump right in and take a look at both platforms!

ActiveCampaign Vs Kajabi - Summary

ActiveCampaign is an email marketing platform that offers various tools to run email campaigns, grow your email list and manage your audience.

Kajabi is an online platform that gives you the tools you need to build, promote and sell online courses and memberships in one place.

Take a look at this google trends graph to get an idea of the relative popularity of these two tools over the last year:

activecampaign vs kajabi google trends

ActiveCampaign Vs Kajabi - Side By Side Review

A side-by-side comparison of ActiveCampaign vs Kajabi created with a horizontal layout so you can compare both platforms with ease based on their features, pricing, ratings, and more.

NOTE: the side-by-side horizontal layout below is best viewed on a desktop, not mobile.

ACTIVECAMPAIGN™

ActiveCampaign is an advanced email marketing automation tool.

How we rated ActiveCampaign

Overall Rating

Ease of Use

Value for Money

Pricing

Customer Support

What is ActiveCampaign?

ActiveCampaign is an email marketing platform with powerful automation capabilities, landing page creation tools, and CRM tools to send personalized messages to your audience, run incredible email marketing campaigns, nurture your email list and automate your marketing processes to save time. 

Who is ActiveCampaign for?

ActiveCampaign was built for individuals, small and large businesses, or companies to send better-automated emails, nurture their leads, and provide an incredible, optimized email experience. The platform comes with powerful automation tools to run automated email processes, save time, and make more money for your business. If you're looking for the best in email marketing, go with ActiveCampaign.

Notable feature: a ton of intelligent tools to run automated email marketing campaigns and grow your business online.

ActiveCampaign Pros and Cons

Pros
  • 14-day full trial
  • Best in class for email marketing
  • CRM is great for pipeline development
  • Affordable pricing for the value
  • Best email automation features
Cons
  • Clunky user interface and email editor
  • Not friendly to affiliate marketing links
  • Not beginner friendly
  • Customer service is not great on the "Basic" plan
activecampaign dashboard

ActiveCampaign Pricing - How much does it cost?

ActiveCampaign pricing options start at $39/month - $187/month

Lite Plan - $39/month - pay $29/mo (billed annually) and comes with basic email marketing features for 1000 contacts

Plus Plan - $70/month - pay $49/mo (billed annually) to get automation maps, built-in CRM, and custom audiences for 1000 contacts. If you want 2,500 contacts in this plan, you would have to pay $99/mo (billed annually).

Professional & Enterprise Plan - $187/month - pay $149/mo (billed annually)- unlimited and custom features with custome audiences for 2,500 contacts.

ActiveCampaign Annual Discount: You pay $29, $49, $149 per mo (billed annually) for each of the plans above respectively, price may go up with the increase in custom audiences.

ActiveCampaign Pricing Info

Free 14 Day Trial Available

Free Trial For 14 Days

No Credit Card to Start

Monthly Subscription

Annual Discount

Cancel Anytime

30 Day Money Back Guarantee

ActiveCampaign Features

Landing page builder

Visual editor

Landing page templates

Sales funnel templates

Complete page hosting

Mobile responsive pages

A/B Split Testing

Funnel builder

Share funnels

Custom webhooks

Email Auto-responders

Affiliate tracking software

Membership Sites

Behavioral Adaptive Marketing

Included subdomain

Use your own domain

Checkout forms, shopping cart

Full website builder

Video marketing tool

Customer Helpdesk

Calendar scheduling tool

Agency Portal

ActiveCampaign Integrations

Editor's Note: ActiveCampaign was built to help you manage your email marketing campaigns and automation and you can connect to 290+ third-party apps to get results with email marketing for your business.

Email Marketing Integrations

Actionetics

ActiveCampaign

ConvertKit

Aweber

MailChimp

HTML forms

+ many more

Other Integrations

Zapier + Webhooks

Membership software

Checkout software

Analytics

Webinar software

SMS / Texting software

Bot software

Calendar tools

Custom integrations / API

+ many more

ActiveCampaign Affiliate Program

Yes, you can become an ActiveCampaign affiliate partner and earn a 30% recurring monthly commissions. Sign up and join the program here.

Company Information

Owner / Founder: Jason VandeBoom

Location: Chicago, USA

Customer Support: help@activecampaign.com

Founded: 2003

Website: Visit Website

What we love about ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is an affordable, email marketing automation tool and one of our favorites amidst the many good options out there (In fact, it’s the tool we use for our own business). With features such as a drag-and-drop email editor to create beautiful emails with ease and a smart sales CRM to manage and nurture your leads. You also get better, smarter marketing automation features to build smart automated workflows with few clicks, nurture your contacts, and enable a better experience for them. 

KAJABI™

Kajabi is an advanced membership site creation tool.

How we rated Kajabi

Overall Rating

Ease of Use

Value for Money

Pricing

Customer Support

What is Kajabi?

Kajabi is an all-in-one platform that makes the creation, hosting and launching of online courses a breeze for entrepreneurs and course creators. Kajabi make it super easy to create, host, launch and sell online courses. While more expensive, Kajabi is beginner friendly.

Who is Kajabi for?

Kajabi was built for course creators, infopreneurs, digital products creators, internet marketers, authors and entrepreneurs who want to create and host their content online. It is one of the best platforms for building and running your online course or membership site business and allows you to host your online programs and deliver them to your students in a professional manner. You can build websites, funnels, online courses, and more.

Notable feature: Kajabi membership sites are best in class for the online business marketing software category. 

Kajabi Pros and Cons

Pros
  • 14-day full trial
  • Best in class for membership sites
  • Great all-in-one system for course creators
  • Best community building platform
  • Great customer service
Cons
  • Less affordable than the competition
  • Very few  3rd party integrations
  • Funnels, AKA, "Pipelines" are not great
  • Customer service is not great on the "Basic" plan
kajabi dashboard

Kajabi Pricing - How much does Kajabi cost?

Kajabi pricing options start at $149/month - $399/month

Basic Plan - $149/month - the basic plan is restrictive but gives you all the basic course building features of Kajabi and is perfect for beginners.

Growth & Pro Plan - $199/month - $399/month the higher kajabi pricing plans come with extra features such as automations, affiliate marketing and white labelling along with everything from the basic plan.

Kajabi Annual Discount - Kajabi let's you pay with a 20% discount on any plan if you choose the annual payment option

Kajabi Pricing Information

Free 14 Day Trial Available

$1 Trial For 14 Days

No Credit Card to Start

Freemium Account

Monthly Subscription

Annual Discount

Cancel Anytime

30 Day Money Back Guarantee

Kajabi Features

Landing page builder

Visual editor

Landing page templates

Sales funnel templates

Complete page hosting

Mobile responsive pages

A/B Split Testing

Funnel builder

Share funnels

Custom webhooks

Email Auto-responders

Affiliate tracking software

Membership Sites

Behavioral Adaptive Marketing

Included subdomain

Use your own domain

Checkout forms, shopping cart

Full website builder

Video marketing tool

Customer Helpdesk

Calendar scheduling tool

Agency Portal

Kajabi Integrations

Editors note: Kajabi’s mission is to help you run your online business and sell your digital content better. Currently they only integrate with 10 other services, including ClickFunnels, analytics, email software, and Zapier.

Email Marketing Integrations

Actionetics

ActiveCampaign

ConvertKit

Aweber

MailChimp

HTML forms

+ many more

Other Integrations

Zapier + Webhooks

Membership software

Checkout software

Analytics

Webinar software

SMS / Texting software

Bot software

Calendar tools

Custom integrations / API

+ many more

Kajabi Affiliate Program

Yes, but you have to be a paying Kajabi customer in good standing to be accepted as an affiliate. 

Company Information

Owner / Founder: Kenny Rueter, Travis Rosser


Location: California, USA


Customer Support: support@kajabi.com


Founded: 2010


Website: Visit Website

What we love about Kajabi

When it comes to creating and hosting online course content, no other platform comes second to Kajabi. No wonder digital content experts like Amy Porterfield and Brendan Burchard use and recommend the platform. It's that good and refers to itself as the only complete tool with features you need to run a successful online business. You are able to access your website, products, marketing, community and everything from a single dashboard and you can get started with a 14-day FREE trial. Kajabi is definitely the best tool around for membership sites. 

What Stands Out For Us When Reviewing ActiveCampaign Vs Kajabi?

While comparing ActiveCampaign to Kajabi, here's what stood out for us.

Both platforms are great solutions for running your online business. And they can be integrated together as they actually complement each other perfectly.

ActiveCampaign is a popular email marketing and automation platform. The platform gives you the tools to run automated email campaigns and manage your audience.

You can build opt-in forms (and landing pages), collect leads, grow your email list, and send email (and SMS messages) to your audience.

And that's just the start!

ActiveCampaign has a robust automation system that lets you automate your marketing process so you can do less repetitive work and focus on other important parts of your business.

The platform also gives you a built-in customer relationship management (CRM) tool to manage your audience and sales processes.

Overall, ActiveCampaign is in a league of its own when it comes to powerful email marketing and marketing automation tools.

On the other hand, Kajabi is simply a platform that gives you tools to run your knowledge business all in one place. A knowledge business could be selling online courses via the Kajabi membership sites, digital products, or a coaching program.

Kajabi provides you with the tools you need to build and sell your online courses, digital products, memberships, and coaching programs.

Kajabi is also very beginner-friendly. You don't need any coding experience or the services of a tech guru to use Kajabi for your business.

Kajabi is intuitive enough for you to set up your knowledge business with just a few clicks. The platform provides you with a stack of tools and features bundled in one including:

  • Products - build your online courses and digital products with ease
  • Websites - create a website for your knowledge business
  • Email - create and send beautiful email messages to your audience
  • Payments - get paid easier and faster with seamless integration
  • Pages - build, customize and publish landing pages fast
  • Pipelines - automate your processes so your business can scale
  • People - keep track of your audience and manage them the right way
  • Analytics - make smart, insightful business decisions with better data
  • Communities - connect better with your audience by building a community
  • Mobile - provide access to your products on the go with the Kajabi app

Overall, Kajabi will be much more useful to you if you're selling online courses and digital products and you need a single place to run your business from. 

Which Is Best For Marketing Automation?

When it comes to marketing automation capabilities, ActiveCampaign is far ahead of Kajabi.

As a platform that provides everything you need to optimize and scale your knowledge business, Kajabi is more focused on giving you a well-rounded feature set. ActiveCampaign is more focused on marketing automation features.

You get automated, ready-to-use funnels called Blueprints and can pick a Blueprint for any desired purpose (webinar, lead gen, product launches, and more), customize it in a few minutes and launch.

ActiveCampaign comes with powerful marketing automation features. They give you a built-in visual workflow builder to build automation workflows for running email campaigns.

Inside your workflow, you can set (and combine) actions, conditions, and triggers to achieve your desired result. You can also automate your sales and audience management processes, when you combine the automation system with the built-in CRM.

WINNER: ActiveCampaign wins this category by offering you flexible, superior automation functionality. Kajabi only provides pre-made automated funnels which are limited in functionality.

Which Has The Best CRM Solution?

Having a CRM attached to your marketing platform (instead of getting a third-party CRM tool) is a big deal and will save you time and money.

And ActiveCampaign comes with an impressive, built-in CRM tool for helping you keep track of your audience - however, you’ll need to upgrade for this feature if you’re on one of the lower tier plans.

With ActiveCampaign's built-in CRM tool you can manage your audience, track leads and manage your sales processes in one place. You are also able to segment your audience the right way and score leads to know which contacts will respond best to your marketing efforts.

ActiveCampaign also lets you combine its CRM tool with the automation system so you can automate your endless tasks and processes seamlessly.

On the other hand, Kajabi has a feature called People which serves as the CRM. This feature helps you establish and strengthen your customer relationships with little effort.

Kajabi’s customer relationship management tool also works with automation so you can automate conversation with your audience, trigger emails, access to products, access to coupons, and more based on simple rules set by you.

Organizing and managing your contacts inside Kajabi is quite easy. The platform lets you import contacts via CSV or you can do it manually.

After importing your contacts, you can create various custom data fields for targeted segmentation. You're allowed to tag, segment, and filter your contacts based on any desired data fields.

WINNER: ActiveCampaign. Kajabi's People tool is impressive but doesn't come close to the powerful capabilities of ActiveCampaign’s built-in CRM tool.

Kajabi Email Vs ActiveCampaign Email Marketing - Which Is Better?

Kajabi’s email marketing offering is great but limited when compared to ActiveCampaign. They give you email marketing functionality that lets you create emails and send to your audience.

Just as expected, you get beautiful email templates of various types that you can choose from. And the visual email editor allows you to add various rich content elements (videos, images, timers etc.) so your email can stand out and look great.

With Kajabi, you can send one-time emails or automate an email sequence, based on how your audience behaves. And when you're done building, you can preview your email before sending it out to your audience easily.

ActiveCampaign gives you the necessary tools to create emails for your audience and send to the right people at the right time.

There are various types of email campaigns you can set up and send with ActiveCampaign, including: 

  • One-time broadcast emails
  • Triggered emails
  • Targeted emails
  • Email autoresponders
  • Email funnels
  • Scheduled emails

You get a drag-and-drop email designer to build beautiful emails in just a few clicks. No tech skills are needed to use the email builder.

Using segmentation and dynamic content (which is missing in Kajabi), ActiveCampaign makes it easy to send targeted emails to the right audience. You can also personalize your emails with data you've collected from your contacts.

WINNER: Both platforms give you email marketing tools but you get superior features from ActiveCampaign.

Which Is The Best For Landing Pages?

Both platforms have their native page builders for creating awesome landing pages to delight your audience.

Kajabi has a fast, flexible landing page builder for creating your landing pages. You only need to pick a template, customize, and publish with just a few clicks.

To save time and stress, Kajabi comes with included landing page templates streamlined for various use-case. The intuitive page builder makes it easy for you to customize your templates and create custom landing pages that look amazing on every device.

You can easily connect your landing pages with your marketing campaign inside Kajabi.

ActiveCampaign gives you a similar landing page creation experience. They have a zero-code, easy to use drag-and-drop designer for building awesome landing pages.

You also get a library full of beautiful, customizable landing page templates so you can build landing pages, easy and fast. Your landing pages can be infused in your marketing campaign to get sign-ups, grow your email list, deliver lead magnets and build your audience.

WINNER: It's a tie here. Both tools provide easy to use, drag and drop builders (along with great templates) for creating amazing landing pages that delight your audience.

Which Is The Best Price For The Money?

Kajabi is quite expensive (especially if you don’t need all the bells and whistles it comes with).

While ActiveCampaign is priced based on the number of subscribers you have, which means the bigger your audience becomes, the more you pay.

WINNER: This depends on your use-case. If you need ALL the tools in Kajabi, then it’s worth shelling out money for. But if email marketing and automation are your business’s greatest need, I’d say you stick with ActiveCampaign.

Final Thoughts - Which Is Better; ActiveCampaign or Kajabi?

Kajabi is a go-to platform for anyone running a knowledge business - whether its online courses, digital products, memberships or coaching programs.

Whereas, ActiveCampaign is an email marketing and automation platform. You get powerful tools for running automated email campaigns, tracking your audience and managing your sale processes.

if you’re just starting your online business and want to run it from one place, then Kajabi is a nice platform worth the trial. Although pricey, you’ll get a ton of valuable tools to run your digital business.

But if email marketing and automation is a core of your business and you need a standalone platform for it, you shouldn't hesitate to try out ActiveCampaign. You will enjoy powerful marketing automation (and a CRM tool) and experience a positive increase in sales for your business.

Both platforms can be integrated and used together. So if you have the budget for both, go for it and enjoy the best of both worlds.

About the author 

Sam Rexford

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