Framekit templates
Start from a designer-made template
Use template
Use template
Use template
Use template
Use template
Use template
Use template
Use template
Teachable's entry plan is $29 a month. Kajabi's is $143. That is a difference of nearly five times, and it is the reason most people stop comparing after about ninety seconds.
Then you sell $1,520 of courses in a month, and the two platforms cost exactly the same, because Teachable's $29 plan also takes 7.5 percent of everything you sell and Kajabi's $143 plan takes nothing when you use its own payments.
Neither company is hiding this. Both print it. Almost nobody reads it in the order that matters.
A course platform is software that hosts your lessons, gates access to them, takes the payment, and runs the marketing around it.
Teachable and Kajabi are the two most-compared products in that category, and they are priced on opposite principles: Teachable sells a low floor with a percentage attached, and Kajabi sells a high floor with the percentage removed.
Teachable is cheaper than Kajabi at every sales volume once you are on the right Teachable tier, because Builder at $69 a month billed annually charges no transaction fee and stays flat while Kajabi Basic costs $143.
The catch is that Teachable's $29 Starter plan charges 7.5 percent, which makes it more expensive than Kajabi Basic above $1,520 a month in sales.
Kajabi is the better buy only when you would otherwise pay separately for email marketing, because Growth at $199 a month includes 25,000 contacts, and when you need more than two admin users.
Full disclosure: Framekit sells digital products, so we compete with both companies at the edges, though we host no courses at all and our store cannot bill recurring subscriptions. We have kept this comparison to Teachable and Kajabi and confined our own position to one clearly marked section near the end. Every figure below comes from each company's published pricing page, read in August 2026 and linked at the point of use.
How We Compared Teachable and Kajabi
We priced one product rather than comparing feature lists, because the feature lists in this category converged years ago.
The test product is a $249 course on studio lighting, sold by a working photographer, and we priced it at four monthly volumes: $500, $2,000, $5,000, and $15,000. Those correspond roughly to two sales a month, eight, twenty, and sixty.
All prices are annual-billing rates read on each vendor's own pricing page in August 2026, on a fresh account with no promotional code. We use annual rates because both platforms price a serious course business that way, and we state the monthly rate wherever the gap is material.
Measured means we built the product and ran the flow. Verified means we read it on the vendor's published pricing page and are reporting it with a link. Community sentiment means creators report it consistently and we did not reproduce it.
We quote no third-party star ratings in this comparison.
The large review aggregators blocked automated access during this round of research, and rather than repeat numbers we could not confirm we have linked every price to the page it came from.
In a comparison that turns entirely on arithmetic, that is the more useful kind of evidence.
In one lineone $249 course priced at four monthly volumes across every tier of both platforms, using each vendor's published August 2026 annual rates.
The Cost Table
This is the comparison in one screen. Every figure is the monthly platform cost at that sales volume on annual billing, using each platform's own payment processing so no third-party gateway fee applies, and before card processing which both charge separately at similar rates.
| Plan | Fee on sales | $500/mo | $2,000/mo | $5,000/mo | $15,000/mo |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Teachable Starter | 7.5% | $66.50 | $179.00 | $404.00 | $1,154.00 |
| Teachable Builder | None | $69.00 | $69.00 | $69.00 | $69.00 |
| Teachable Growth | None | $139.00 | $139.00 | $139.00 | $139.00 |
| Kajabi Basic | None via Kajabi Payments | $143.00 | $143.00 | $143.00 | $143.00 |
| Kajabi Growth | None via Kajabi Payments | $199.00 | $199.00 | $199.00 | $199.00 |
| Kajabi Pro | None via Kajabi Payments | $399.00 | $399.00 | $399.00 | $399.00 |
Read the first row across and the story tells itself. Teachable Starter is the cheapest option in this comparison at $500 a month and the most expensive one at $15,000 a month, by a factor of sixteen against Teachable's own Builder plan. Nothing else in the table moves at all.
In one linethe only plan whose cost changes with your success is the cheapest one, and that is precisely why it stops being cheap.
Where Teachable Wins
In one lineTeachable Builder at $69 a month billed annually is cheaper than every Kajabi plan at every volume, and it is the single best-value tier in this comparison.
Teachable's pricing page lists Starter at $39 a month or $29 billed annually with a 7.5 percent transaction fee and a 5-product limit; Builder at $89 monthly or $69 annually with no transaction fee when using Teachable Payments and a 10-product limit; and Growth at $189 monthly or $139 annually with 50 products.
Annual billing saves 22 percent against monthly. Card processing is 2.9 percent plus 30 cents for US cards and 3.9 percent plus 30 cents for international ones.
Builder is the plan that matters. At $69 a month it is $74 a month cheaper than Kajabi Basic and it does the core job: unlimited students, no cut of your revenue, a genuinely good lesson player, quizzes, and certificates. Over a year that gap is $888.
The classroom itself is also better, and this is a qualitative judgement rather than a number, so treat it as ours rather than as fact.
Teachable's student-facing experience is cleaner and less busy than Kajabi's, the video player behaves more predictably on mobile, and completion tracking is easier to read.
If your product is judged on whether students finish it, that matters more than a feature comparison suggests.
The detail worth knowingTeachable removes its active and imported student caps once a school passes $10,000 a year in platform sales. That is an unusually sensible structure, in that the limits exist to stop the cheap tier being abused and stop applying once you are demonstrably a real business.
Where Kajabi Wins
In one lineKajabi's price includes an email marketing platform sized for a real list, and once you add a standalone email tool to Teachable's bill the gap narrows sharply or disappears.
Kajabi's pricing page lists Basic at $179 a month or $143 billed annually with 5 products, 2,500 contacts, 2 admin users and 1 website; Growth at $249 or $199 annually with 50 products, 25,000 contacts, 11 admins and 1 website; and Pro at $399 billed annually, or just under $500 monthly, with unlimited products, 100,000 contacts, 26 admins and 3 websites.
A Starter tier sits below Basic with 1 product and 250 contacts.
The contacts allowance is the whole argument and it is systematically underweighted in comparisons like this one. Kajabi Growth includes 25,000 contacts and full email marketing.
If you run a course business on Teachable and send email to a list of that size, you are paying an email platform separately, and that bill grows with the list rather than staying flat.
We are deliberately not quoting a third-party email platform's price here, because we did not verify one for this article and a made-up figure would undermine the rest.
Instead, run it yourself: open your email platform's pricing page, find the rate for your current subscriber count, and add it to Teachable's monthly figure in the table above.
For a lot of readers that single addition closes most of the $74 gap between Teachable Builder and Kajabi Basic, and at 25,000 contacts it usually reverses it.
The second thing Kajabi winsadmin users. Basic gives 2, Growth gives 11, Pro gives 26. If you have a virtual assistant, an editor, and a customer support person, seat availability stops being an abstraction. Teachable's tiers are organised around products rather than people.
The thirdPro carries 3 websites. Anyone running more than one brand from one business is otherwise buying two subscriptions.
The Two Fees Neither Homepage Leads With
In one lineTeachable's 7.5 percent on Starter and Kajabi's third-party gateway fee are the two numbers that decide this comparison, and both are one click below the headline price.
Teachable's 7.5 percent. It applies to the Starter plan only, and it is charged on your sales in addition to card processing. On a $249 course that is $18.68 a sale.
Ten sales a month is $186.80, which is more than double the price of the Builder plan that would have charged nothing.
The crossover is $533 a month in sales, calculated as the $40 monthly gap between Starter and Builder divided by 7.5 percent. Above that number, every month you remain on Starter costs you money for nothing.
Two sales of a $249 course is $498, so most creators cross this line in their second decent month and many never notice.
Kajabi's third-party gateway fee. Kajabi charges 5 percent on Starter, 2 percent on Basic, 1 percent on Growth and 0.5 percent on Pro when you take payments through a third-party gateway rather than Kajabi Payments.
Kajabi Payments itself processes at 2.9 percent plus 30 cents on Basic, 2.8 percent on Growth and 2.7 percent on Pro.
That structure is a soft form of lock-in and it is worth pricing before you commit.
If you have an existing Stripe account with history, chargeback records, and integrations you would rather keep, staying on it costs 2 percent on Kajabi Basic.
At $5,000 a month that is $100 a month, or $1,200 a year, purely for continuing to use the processor you already had.
Every figure in our cost table above assumes you switch to Kajabi Payments, because that is the cheapest way to run Kajabi, and it is a real constraint rather than a free choice.
The rule that comes out of bothon any plan in either platform, find the fee, divide the price gap to the next tier by it, and write the resulting monthly sales figure somewhere you will see it.
That number is the only thing standing between you and overpaying, and it never appears in either company's marketing.
The Crossovers, Precisely
In one linethree numbers decide which plan you should be on, every one of them is a single division you can do on a phone, and between them they account for almost all of the money wasted in this category.
$533 a month in sales. Above this, Teachable Builder at $69 is cheaper than Teachable Starter at $29. The gap is $40 and the fee is 7.5 percent.
$1,520 a month in sales. Above this, Kajabi Basic at $143 is cheaper than Teachable Starter at $29, because 7.5 percent of $1,520 is $114 and $29 plus $114 is $143.
This is the number that surprises people, because it means the platform everyone calls expensive undercuts the platform everyone calls cheap at a volume most working course creators reach.
Never. There is no volume at which Kajabi Basic becomes cheaper than Teachable Builder on plan price alone, because $143 is always more than $69 and neither charges a percentage.
The only way Kajabi wins the arithmetic is by absorbing a cost you would otherwise pay someone else, and for most readers that cost is email.
Here is the test, on your own numbers, in about three minutes. Take last month's course revenue. Multiply it by 0.075 if you are on Teachable Starter, or by 0.02 if you are on Kajabi Basic with an outside gateway. Add your plan price.
Then add whatever you pay for email marketing each month. Compare that total against $69 plus your email bill, and against $199 with email included.
Whichever of those three is smallest is the plan you should be on, and for a surprising share of people it is not the one they are on now.
Product Limits and Admin Seats
In one lineTeachable's tiers are limited by how many things you sell and Kajabi's are limited by how many people work with you, so the right platform partly depends on the shape of your business rather than its size.
Teachable allows 5 products on Starter, 10 on Builder, and 50 on Growth. Kajabi allows 1 on Starter, 5 on Basic, 50 on Growth, and unlimited on Pro.
Those numbers describe two different assumptions. Teachable assumes a creator with a handful of courses and a growing audience.
Kajabi assumes a business with staff, several offers, and funnels running between them, which is why its seat counts climb steeply while its product counts do not.
The practical consequence: a solo creator with three courses and no staff is being asked to pay Kajabi for eleven admin seats they will never use.
A four-person studio with two courses is being asked to pay Teachable for products it does not have while sharing a login, which is the workaround people actually adopt and should not.
The one to check before you buyKajabi Basic and Growth both carry 1 website. If you run two brands, the tier that solves it is Pro at $399 a month billed annually with 3 websites, and that is a large step for a small reason.
Migration: What Moves and What Does Not
In one linecourse content moves, everything built around it does not, and the parts that do not move are the parts that took longest to build.
What moves reasonably well. Video files, lesson text, and student lists all export and import. Expect to re-upload video rather than transfer it, which is a bandwidth and time cost rather than a technical obstacle.
What does not move at all. Email automations, tags, and behavioural triggers are configuration rather than content, and no export contains them.
Funnels and landing pages rebuild in a day or two but their conversion history and split-test results do not follow, so you restart the learning. Certificates, drip schedules, and access rules are all re-entered by hand.
What costs you customers. Existing members on active payment plans or subscriptions have to be recreated on the new processor, which in practice means asking people who already pay you to enter a card again. Some will not.
Plan the announcement, give plenty of notice, and expect a churn spike in the switching month rather than being surprised by it.
The honest conclusionbudget three to five working days and a bad month. For a creator at $5,000 a month, moving from Kajabi Basic to Teachable Builder saves $888 a year, which is roughly what those days are worth.
The move is clearly right over two years and roughly break-even over one, and anyone telling you it is a quick win has not done it.
Where Framekit Fits, and Where It Does Not
We sell digital products and therefore compete with both companies at the margins, so rather than salt that interest through the analysis above, here is our position stated once, in full, including the part that argues against us.
Framekit is an AI website builder for photographers, filmmakers, designers, and creators, with a portfolio, client galleries, and a store on one domain.
On the job this article is about, we do not compete: there is no course player, no lesson progress, no drip scheduling, and our store rejects recurring prices outright, so memberships and payment plans are not supported at all.
We include this section for one specific reader. A meaningful share of people comparing Teachable and Kajabi are selling something that is not really a course: a set of videos and a PDF, delivered once, with no pacing and no completion.
If that is you, both platforms are selling you a classroom you will not use, and a store on your own site does the job at $9 to $39 a month with a 5 to 0 percent fee.
The test is simple and unkind: if you removed the lesson player, would the buyer receive anything different? If the answer is no, you are paying for a classroom as a delivery mechanism.
For everyone whose answer is yes, buy Teachable or Kajabi. We are not a substitute and it would be a poor article that pretended otherwise.
If you want the wider field, our guides to Kajabi alternatives and Teachable alternatives cover platforms that genuinely replace both.
Which Should You Buy
In one linework down these questions in order and stop at the first one that describes you, because the later questions only change the answer if the earlier ones did not already settle it.
- Are you selling under about $530 a month? Teachable Starter at $29 billed annually. The 7.5 percent costs you less than the upgrade would, and you should revisit the moment you pass $533.
- Do you have staff, a virtual assistant, or contractors who need their own logins? Kajabi. Basic gives 2 admin seats, Growth gives 11. Teachable's tiers are not organised around people.
- Do you email a list of more than about 10,000 people? Kajabi Growth at $199 with 25,000 contacts included, once you have added your current email platform's bill to Teachable's number and compared honestly.
- Do you run more than one brand? Kajabi Pro at $399 billed annually is the only tier here with more than one website.
- Is your list small, your team just you, and your product a real course? Teachable Builder at $69 billed annually. It is the best-value tier in this comparison and nothing in the table beats it.
- Would removing the video player leave your product unchanged? Neither. Sell the files from a store instead.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Teachable cheaper than Kajabi?
On plan price, yes at every volume: Teachable Builder is $69 a month billed annually against Kajabi Basic at $143.
But Teachable's Starter plan at $29 charges a 7.5 percent transaction fee, which makes it more expensive than Kajabi Basic above $1,520 a month in sales.
Kajabi also includes email marketing for 2,500 to 100,000 contacts, and adding a separate email platform to Teachable's bill closes much of the gap.
Does Teachable charge a transaction fee?
Yes, 7.5 percent on the Starter plan, which is $39 a month or $29 billed annually. Builder and Growth charge no platform transaction fee when you use Teachable Payments or its monthly payment gateway.
Standard card processing applies on all plans at 2.9 percent plus 30 cents for US cards and 3.9 percent plus 30 cents for international cards.
Does Kajabi charge a transaction fee?
Not when you use Kajabi Payments. It charges a third-party gateway fee when you take payments elsewhere: 5 percent on Starter, 2 percent on Basic, 1 percent on Growth, and 0.5 percent on Pro.
Kajabi Payments processes at 2.9 percent plus 30 cents on Basic, falling to 2.8 percent on Growth and 2.7 percent on Pro.
When should I upgrade from Teachable Starter to Builder?
At $533 a month in sales. The price gap is $40 a month on annual billing and the fee you escape is 7.5 percent, so $40 divided by 0.075 is $533. Two sales of a $249 course already exceeds that, which is why so many creators are on the wrong tier.
How much does Kajabi cost per month?
On annual billing: Basic $143, Growth $199, and Pro $399, with a Starter tier below Basic. Monthly billing is $179 for Basic and $249 for Growth.
Basic includes 5 products, 2,500 contacts, 2 admin users, and 1 website; Growth includes 50 products, 25,000 contacts, and 11 admins; Pro includes unlimited products, 100,000 contacts, 26 admins, and 3 websites.
Which platform is better for a first course?
Teachable Starter at $29 a month billed annually, provided you set a reminder to move to Builder at $533 a month in sales. Kajabi's entry point is too high for an unproven course, and its Starter tier's single-product and 250-contact limits make it a poor place to test anything.
Which is better for memberships and recurring revenue?
Both support recurring billing and Kajabi's tooling around it is more complete, with funnels, offers, and access groups that assume subscriptions rather than treating them as a payment option.
If a monthly membership is the core of the business rather than an add-on, Kajabi Growth is the more natural fit despite the higher price.
Can I move my course from Kajabi to Teachable?
Yes, with effort. Video, lesson content, and student lists move.
Email automations, tags, funnels, and conversion history do not, and active subscription members must be migrated to a new processor, which means asking paying customers to re-enter a card.
Budget three to five working days and expect some churn in the switching month.
Do I need a course platform at all?
Only if pacing, progress, or completion change what the buyer receives.
If your product is a bundle of videos and a workbook that people download and use at their own speed, a storefront delivers it for a fraction of either platform's price.
The test is whether removing the lesson player would change the product.
What is the cheapest way to sell a $249 course?
Teachable Starter at $29 a month plus 7.5 percent if you sell under $533 a month, and Teachable Builder at $69 a month flat above that. Both assume annual billing.
If you also need email marketing at scale, price Kajabi Growth at $199 with 25,000 contacts against Teachable Builder plus your separate email bill before deciding.
We cover the wider pricing question in how to price digital products.
Final Verdict
Buy Teachable Builder at $69 a month billed annually if you are a solo creator with a real course, a small list, and no staff. It is the best-value tier in this comparison and no Kajabi plan beats it on price at any volume.
Buy Kajabi Growth at $199 if you email a large list, have people working with you who need their own logins, or run funnels between several offers.
Its price looks high next to Teachable and stops looking high the moment you add a separate email platform for 25,000 contacts to Teachable's side of the ledger.
Do not stay on Teachable Starter past $533 a month in sales, and do not run Kajabi on an outside payment gateway without pricing the 2 percent first. Those two mistakes account for most of the money wasted in this category.
Where Framekit does not compete. We host no courses, track no lesson progress, and cannot bill a recurring subscription at all, so neither platform in this comparison has a Framekit-shaped alternative.
We are only relevant to the reader whose course turned out to be a bundle of files, and for everyone else the right answer is one of the two products above.
Related readingthe best Kajabi alternatives, the best tools to sell online courses, and membership platforms for creators.
If the platform you are actually weighing Teachable against is Thinkific, that comparison is here, including the 533 dollar crossover between Teachable's two lower plans.
