What's the difference between Kajabi and Udemy?
If you’ve been in the online learning space for a while, you will probably have heard of Udemy. It has been around since 2010 and is a popular platform for learning online. It is in fact a marketplace with over 155000 courses and 40 million students worldwide. No matter what you want to learn about, chances are there is a course on that topic on Udemy. So, if you are looking to take a course, Udemy is a great place to start.
Kajabi on the other hand is a platform for creating, marketing and selling your own course(s). It is not a marketplace where people can choose courses to take. So, as a course creator you might decide to upload your courses to Udemy, which it is free to do, or sell them directly from your own site, which would be Kajabi. It’s a bit like the difference between selling an event on Eventbrite where your course gets listed on Eventbrite’s public calendar or selling an event from your own website.
Other differences between Kajabi and Udemy:
Price: Kajabi costs at least $149 while it’s free to upload courses to Udemy
Kajabi gives course-creators the tools for building a business/brand, Udemy does not
Kajabi gives course creators much more flexibility when designing their courses
Kajabi has a powerful array of marketing tools for course-creators to use to grow their audience and make sales. With Udemy you rely on Udemy’s own marketing activities to get your course found
Pricing Comparison
It is free to upload a course to Udemy but they do take a 50% commission on your course sales.
Kajabi has a 3-tiered pricing structure:
Basic – $149/mo
Growth – $199/mo
Pro – $399/mo
Each plan gets you access to all the basic features and unlimited marketing emails. Kajabi is a more expensive than some other course platforms or Learning Management Systems, but the beauty of it is that you don’t have to pay for separate platforms for your website, email marketing, marketing funnels, Zapier etc etc There are no transaction fees either with Kajabi.
Does Udemy make it easier to market your course?
It depends on how much control you want over the marketing of your course. With Udemy, you can sign up to a Marketing programme and they will push your content out but Kajabi is far superior when ti comes to giving course creators the tools to marketing their courses themselves. As well as offering your the possiblity of building your own website within Kajabi, Kajabi offers email automations that can trigger all sorts of email sequences depending on your audience’s actions on your website or within a course itself. You can tag and segment people too for effective one to one marketing campaigns. Udemy lists your course in its website, but that’s it.
What about the Course Interface? How do Udemy and Kajabi compare?
Kajabi’s course building functionality is very easy to use, with simple templates for you to follow to organise your course. There are different layout possibilities from a design perspective, but the organisation of lessons and modules is very straightforward.
Kajabi also offers a quiz or assessment functionality. These can be inserted into lessons and there are settings so that learners have to finish the quiz first before moving on to the next lesson. Read more about Kajabi quizzes here.
It’s also easy to upload a course to Udemy, but there is no quiz functionality. That said, you can see how many students are viewing your courses in Udemy.
What about Customer Support?
Kajabi users (or Kajabi heroes as they are known!) rave about Kajabi’s customer service. Indeed I have had at least one late night chat with it’s customer support team member who was helping me out. He was in the Philippines and it was about 3am his time! So the support is 24.7 is known by its users for excellent customer support with its 24/7. Kajabi customers also have access to the Kajabi University which is a huge online library of guides and videos about how to use the platform.
Udemy has minimal customer support but then it is not at all the same type of platform and you are not as likely to run into the same type of technical issues as you might in Kajabi. They really have very little in common other than they both host online courses.
If you want to start a business selling online courses, Kajabi is a better choice. You have everything you need to design, build and sell your courses, without paying huge commissions. Udemy will sell your courses for you, but with a whopping 50% commission on each sale.
