Kajabi alternatives in 2026

TL;DR. Kajabi is a marketing platform that happens to host courses — websites, funnels, email, a CRM, and lessons in one subscription running $179 to $499 a month, plus 2.7–2.9% on payments through Kajabi Payments and up to 2% through outside providers. A Telegram LMS is not that. It is a delivery layer: lessons arrive in the chat your students already have open, the sales cut is 0%, and there is no monthly floor. Most rows below go to Kajabi. Switch only if you use it for courses and not for the stack around them.

People search for Kajabi alternatives for one of two reasons, and they lead to opposite answers.

The first is price — $179 a month before a single sale, and transaction fees on top of it. The second is that they bought a marketing platform and only ever used the course part. Only the second reason survives contact with what’s below.

What Kajabi is chosen for

Not courses, primarily. Courses are one module of a bundle:

• a website and landing pages, hosted and templated;
• funnels — opt-ins, sales pages, upsells, checkout flows;
• email marketing with automation and segmentation;
• a contact database, priced in tiers (2,500 → 25,000 → 100,000);
• courses with video hosting, a branded player, quizzes and certificates;
• a community space.

That’s a business in a box, and the price makes sense once you use four of those six. The people who feel the price are the ones using one. The community half of that bundle is a market of its own, sold and priced differently — that comparison is Skool alternatives in 2026.

Where the job stops matching the tool

The mismatch shows up in a specific shape: your audience is already in a chat app, your course is the whole product, and email is something you maintain because the platform expects it rather than because subscribers read it.

Then you’re paying $179 to $499 a month for landing pages that get traffic from a Telegram channel anyway, and a contact tier for people you could message directly.

What is actually here

Lessons where students already are. A course delivered in chat rather than behind a login — no new account, no password reset, no “where was that link”. Drip content, live sessions with recordings, and an AI tutor that answers from your own lesson content rather than from a general model.

0% on sales. No commission from us and no per-contact pricing. Whether your list is 2,500 or 25,000 changes nothing about the bill.

0% is our cut, not the whole cost. Telegram’s own Star economics sit underneath: buyers pay $19.99 per 1,000 Stars as a store pack (Telegram’s own table) or $14.10 at Telegram’s sell rate, and Telegram’s developer terms put the payout at $0.013. Plan on the second number — the full arithmetic, with the withdrawal floor and the 21-day hold, is in what withdrawing Stars actually pays.

One place for the rest of the business. Courses sit next to a storefront, paid channel and bookings, on the same audience and the same balance.

What is genuinely missing, stated plainly

• No website builder, no landing pages, no funnels. Nothing here replaces them.
• No email marketing. No sequences, no broadcasts to a mailing list, no automations off email behaviour.
• No contact CRM in the Kajabi sense — no lead scoring, no pipelines. What exists instead is the buyer’s own record — orders, bookings and enquiries in one feed — and the difference between the two kinds is the subject of Telegram CRM.
• No video hosting or branded player. Video is a Telegram file.
• No quizzes and no certificates. If your course sells partly on a completion certificate, that gap is the decision.

Honestly, where Kajabi beats us

• It is a marketing platform and we are not one. If your revenue comes from a funnel and an email list, Kajabi is the product for that job and this is not a close call.
• Card checkout. Kajabi takes cards and PayPal. Course access is digital delivery, and Telegram policy puts that on Stars exclusively — so buyers who won’t pay in Stars are simply unreachable here.
• Course production features. Quizzes, certificates, progress tracking, a player you control.
• It doesn’t depend on Telegram. Your school exists at your own domain, independent of one messenger’s policies.
• Scale of the contact tiers. 100,000 contacts on Pro is a real number with real tooling behind it.

Who’s who

	Telegram LMS	Kajabi
What it is	Course delivery in chat	Marketing platform with courses inside
Monthly floor	None; Pro is optional	$179–$499 ($143–$399 annual)
Sales cut	0% from us; Stars pay out $13.00 per 1,000 of $19.99 (store pack) or $14.10 (Telegram’s rate)	2.7–2.9% via Kajabi Payments, up to 2% via third parties
Priced by contacts	No	Yes — 2,500 to 100,000 by tier
Payment rails	Telegram Stars only, per policy	Cards, PayPal
Website & funnels	No	Yes
Email marketing	No	Yes
Quizzes, certificates	No	Yes
Where students go	The chat they already use	A login on your school site
AI tutor on your content	Yes	No

Nine rows, and Kajabi takes most of them. That’s the honest shape of this comparison: the two rows that matter are the monthly floor and where the student ends up.

If… then…

If	Then
You use Kajabi for funnels and email too	Stay. Nothing here replaces that half.
Courses are the only module you touch	The monthly floor is buying you nothing. Worth moving.
Your audience lives in a Telegram channel	Delivery in chat removes the login step that costs completions
Your buyers won’t pay in Stars	Stars are the only rail for digital delivery — that decides it
You sell partly on certificates	Stay; we have none
You’re pre-launch, testing whether anyone buys	Start where there’s no monthly floor, move up if it works

Where to start

Don’t migrate a working funnel. Test the delivery layer with one course, on the audience you already have in Telegram, and compare two things: what you paid to run it, and how many students finished. Completion is where chat delivery tends to win — there’s no login between the student and lesson four.

If both numbers come out ahead, the rest of the migration is a decision about the marketing stack, not about courses.

Other Kajabi alternatives worth knowing

If the marketing stack is the half you actually use, the shortlist is other all-in-ones rather than course tools.

• Kartra — the closest like-for-like swap: funnels, email, checkouts, memberships and courses behind one login, from $59 a month with a 5% fee on Essentials and none above it, and contacts capped by tier at 500 on Essentials and 25,000 on Professional.
• Podia — the same bundle with a much lower floor: a site, a catalogue and email from $42 a month billed annually, though the list is capped at 100 to 1,000 subscribers depending on plan. Side by side in Podia vs Kajabi.
• Systeme.io — the budget end of the category, and the only one here with a permanent free plan: 2,000 contacts, three funnels and one course at $0, then $17 a month.
• Mighty Networks — for a business where the community is the product: spaces, courses and events from $79 a month, with a 2% cut on the entry plan that falls to 0.5% higher up.
• Thinkific — drops the marketing half and sells the course website: a custom domain and quizzes from $54 a month, certificates a tier above that. Compared in Kajabi vs Thinkific.
• Teachable — the course platform proper, from $39 a month, though that entry tier keeps 7.5% of every sale where the higher ones keep none. Compared in Kajabi vs Teachable.

Weighing the other course platform instead — Teachable alternatives. What Telegram protocol-level protection does about course piracy — protecting a course. The format itself — selling courses on Telegram. The same all-in-one idea in a gentler and cheaper form — Podia alternatives in 2026.

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Kajabi plan prices, transaction fees and tier limits: kajabi.com/pricing, checked September 2026. Star payout rate: Telegram’s terms for bot developers, section 6.2.4.