Quick disclosure before anything else: I work on Crownerr, and this is the Crownerr blog. So treat me as an interested party, not a neutral referee. I have tried to keep the comparison honest anyway, because pretending Kajabi is bad would not help you, and it is not true.
Kajabi is a strong product. It bundles courses, memberships, email, landing pages and funnels into one place, and for a certain kind of creator that bundle is worth real money. The reason people search for a Kajabi alternative is rarely that Kajabi is broken. It is that the monthly bill feels heavy relative to what they actually use.
Why creators start shopping around
At the time of writing, Kajabi sits at the premium end of the market on price, with tiered plans that cap things like the number of products, contacts or admin users. If your email list is busy and your funnels are doing real selling, those caps and that price can pay for themselves. If you have two courses and a quiet list, you are renting a marketing suite you barely open.
That is the honest fault line. Kajabi is priced like a marketing platform that happens to host courses. Plenty of creators just want to host courses and take payments without a marketing platform attached. If that is you, there are cheaper places to land.
If you have already decided to move, the mechanics of getting out are worth reading first. We covered the export, migration and email-list logistics in how to leave Kajabi.
The course-first contenders: Teachable and Thinkific
Teachable and Thinkific are the obvious like-for-like swaps. Both are built around hosting and selling courses, both have been around long enough to be stable, and both generally undercut Kajabi on monthly cost. They lean less on the all-in-one marketing pitch, which is exactly why they cost less.
The trade-off: you get a tidier course experience and a lighter bill, but the email and funnel features are thinner than Kajabi's. Some plans also carry a transaction fee on lower tiers, so read the small print. If your selling happens off-platform anyway, through your own emails or socials, that thinness is not a loss. If you were relying on Kajabi to do your marketing, you will feel the gap and need to bolt on a separate email tool.
Pick Teachable or Thinkific when courses are the core product and you want the monthly number to drop without relearning everything.
The simpler, cheaper end: Podia
Podia aims at creators who find Kajabi overwhelming. It bundles courses, digital downloads and a bit of email into a cleaner, usually cheaper package. The pitch is fewer knobs and a friendlier price.
The catch is the ceiling. Simpler tools are simpler because they leave things out. If you grow into needing serious automation, granular membership tiers or heavy funnel logic, you can outgrow Podia and find yourself shopping again. For a lot of creators that day never comes, and paying for restraint is a perfectly good decision.
Community-first: Mighty Networks and Skool
Mighty Networks and Skool are a different category, and it is worth being clear about that. They are built so the community is the product. Courses exist, but the centre of gravity is members talking to each other, not a course player.
Skool in particular has become popular with creators running cohort-style programmes and paid groups, where the feed, the leaderboard and the sense of a room full of people doing the work is the thing people pay for. Mighty Networks has been at it longer and goes wider on membership and event features.
If your offer is really a community with some learning attached, these beat a course-first tool. If your offer is really courses with a bit of chat, they are the wrong shape, because you end up paying for community machinery you do not need. Be honest about which one you are selling.
For a wider sweep of where each tool fits, including the ones that did not make this post, see our roundup of the best platforms to sell online courses.
The owned-platform route
There is a fourth option that does not slot neatly next to the others: stop renting a marketing suite and run an owned storefront where you keep the fee structure simple. This is the consolidation play. One Space holds your courses, memberships, paid community and products under your own brand, and instead of a premium monthly subscription you pay a low platform fee on what you sell.
Crownerr works this way. Space Plans are Free at 6% on £0/mo, Creator at 3% on £79/mo, and Studio at 0% on £149/mo, with payments running through Stripe at the UK rate of 1.5% + 20p per transaction. So you trade a fixed high subscription for a percentage that scales with revenue. At low volume the Free plan costs you nothing but takes a slice. As you grow, moving up a tier to cut the fee starts to make sense.
The reason this matters against Kajabi is the maths flips. Kajabi charges roughly the same whether you sell two courses or two hundred. A fee-based model charges almost nothing when you are quiet and more when you are busy, which is the shape most creators actually want early on.
How to actually choose
Forget feature checklists for a minute. Two questions sort most of this.
- What are you really selling? Courses point you at Teachable, Thinkific or an owned Space. A community points you at Skool or Mighty Networks. A simple catalogue of downloads and a course or two points you at Podia.
- How much fee can you tolerate, and in what shape? If you have strong, steady revenue and use marketing automation hard, Kajabi's fixed price can be the cheapest option per pound earned. If revenue is lumpy or just starting, a percentage fee that sits near zero on a slow month protects your downside.
There is a third, quieter question: how much do you want to own? Renting a platform is fine until pricing changes or the product shifts under you. Running your own Space means the brand, the audience relationship and the storefront are yours, which is worth something that does not show up on a pricing page.
When Kajabi is still the right call
I will say it plainly. If your business runs on mature funnels and a hard-working email list, and Kajabi is the engine behind that, switching to save on the subscription can cost you more than it saves. The revenue those funnels generate dwarfs the monthly fee. In that situation the smart move is to stay and use it properly, not to chase a cheaper logo.
The creators who should leave are the ones paying premium prices for features sitting idle. If that is you, the alternatives above will serve you better for less.
Where Crownerr fits
Crownerr is the owned-platform option in this list. It suits creators who want courses, memberships and a paid community under one brand, with a fee that stays low while you are small and a path to 0% platform fee as you scale. If you want to see how the numbers land against your revenue, the Crownerr pricing page lays out the three Space Plans, and the head-to-head on Crownerr vs Kajabi goes deeper on the trade-offs. If Kajabi is earning its keep for you, keep it. If it is not, you now know the shape of the alternatives.