Kajabi vs Thinkific in 2026

TL;DR. These are not two versions of the same product. Kajabi is a marketing platform with a classroom inside — $179 / $249 / $499 a month ($143 / $199 / $399 annual), 2.7–2.9% + 30¢ through Kajabi Payments or 0.5–2% on top of an outside provider, priced by contacts at 2,500 / 25,000 / 100,000. Thinkific is a course website — $54 / $109 / $219 ($40 / $82 / $164 annual, Plus by quote), 2.9% through its own processor, 10,000 students on every standard tier, custom domain on all of them. Both run a 30-day trial; neither has a free plan. Pick Kajabi if a funnel and an email list produce your revenue. Pick Thinkific if the course is the product. And if your students already read you in a chat, there is a third shape below that neither one sells.

Search interest in “kajabi vs thinkific” comes from people who have already decided to pay a monthly subscription and are now choosing between two numbers. That framing hides the actual difference, which is not price at all: one of these products prices your audience, the other prices your classroom.

Who each is built for

Kajabi is for a business whose revenue starts with a list. The pricing page counts contacts before it counts anything else — 2,500 on Basic, 25,000 on Growth, 100,000 on Pro — and every tier carries unlimited landing pages, funnels and marketing emails along with the website builder, community features, a universal inbox and comment-to-DM. Courses are one of several things you can attach to that machinery. If you run launches, sequences and paid traffic, this is the shape of the tool that matches the shape of the work.

Thinkific is for someone whose product is the course itself. Every paid plan gets unlimited courses, a custom domain, up to 10,000 students, and an assessment ladder that starts with quizzes. Marketing is present but secondary: the site builder, landing pages and email automation begin on Start at $109 — list growth, automated sales flows and abandoned-cart reminders, in Thinkific’s own description. What the pricing page never does is count contacts or subscribers, or name a funnel product. You are buying a school on the open web, and the tiers price the classroom rather than the audience.

That difference shows up in what the cheap plan withholds. Kajabi’s Basic limits you to 5 products, 1 website, 1 community and 2 admin users, but gives away marketing capacity. Thinkific’s Basic gives unlimited courses, 10,000 student seats and a custom domain, but withholds the completion certificate — and the site builder, landing pages and email automation with it. For a lot of course businesses that certificate is the exact thing the buyer thinks they are paying for.

The numbers side by side

	Kajabi	Thinkific
Monthly price	$179 / $249 / $499	$54 / $109 / $219, Plus by quote
Annual price	$143 / $199 / $399 per month	$40 / $82 / $164 per month
Platform fee on a sale	2.9% / 2.8% / 2.7% + 30¢ via Kajabi Payments	2.9% via Thinkific Payments
Bringing your own processor	+2% / 1% / 0.5% by tier	A gateway fee that varies by plan; none on Thinkific Payments
Priced by	Contacts — 2,500 / 25,000 / 100,000	Students — 10,000 on Basic, Start and Grow
Products	5 / 50 / unlimited	Unlimited courses on every plan
Admin seats	2 / 11 / 26	1 / 2 / 6, custom on Plus
Assessment	Quizzes and assessments, no tier restriction stated; certificate sent automatically on completion	Quizzes on all; certificates from Start; exams from Grow; SCORM on Plus
Marketing stack	Unlimited landing pages, funnels and marketing emails on every tier	Custom domain on every plan; site builder, landing pages and email automation from Start; the pricing page lists no funnels and no contact tiers
AI	Credits by tier — 0 / 500 / 1,000 — behind business-side tools	Thinker answers learner questions from your lessons; the pricing page puts the AI teaching assistant on Plus

Read that table as two columns of different products rather than a scoreboard. Kajabi wins the rows counted in contacts; Thinkific wins the rows about price and course capacity, and covers the marketing basics from Start rather than from Basic. Nobody wins the assessment row outright — Kajabi hands you certificates at $179, Thinkific at $109.

Where Kajabi wins

• Contact volume, with tiers built around it. 100,000 contacts on Pro, unlimited marketing emails and funnels on every plan, and a row the pricing page calls Advanced Automations. Thinkific’s pricing page counts no contacts and no subscribers at all, so this row has no number on the other side.
• Funnels as a first-class object. Landing pages, sales pages and email sequences are unlimited from the entry plan. If your launches are the business, they live here.
• Assessment without a tier climb. Quizzes and automatic completion certificates are documented as course features, and no plan restriction is stated on either page. On Thinkific the certificate costs an upgrade to Start.
• Team size. 11 admin users on Growth and 26 on Pro against Thinkific’s 2 and 6.
• One vendor for the whole funnel. Website, email, checkout, community and course under one login, which is worth more than it sounds when the alternative is four subscriptions wired together.

Where Thinkific wins

• Price, by a wide margin. $54 against $179 at the entry tier, and $219 against $499 at the top of the standard range. Annually the gap is $40 against $143.
• Unlimited courses from day one. Kajabi’s Basic caps you at 5 products; Thinkific never counts them.
• Student capacity at the cheap tier. 10,000 students on the $54 plan, the same as on the $219 one.
• Custom domain on every paid plan, with no upsell attached.
• A cleaner fee story. 2.9% through its own processor with no gateway fee on top, rather than a percentage that changes with the tier and a second percentage for using an outside provider.
• Depth where courses get serious. Assignments and compliance tools from Start, exams from Grow, SCORM on Plus. Corporate compliance buyers ask for SCORM by name, and the word does not appear on Kajabi’s pricing or online-courses pages.

The third option: doing it inside Telegram

Both products assume the same journey: a student leaves the place where they found you, lands on a page, creates an account, and remembers to log back in. A Telegram LMS deletes that journey rather than pricing it more cheaply. Lessons arrive as messages in the bot’s own chat — text, images, video, audio and files — and unlock in sequence as the student marks the previous one done. Enrolment is a tap, an AI tutor answers out of your own lesson material, and content protection works at the Telegram protocol level so lessons cannot be forwarded out of the chat.

Our cut of a sale is 0% and there is no monthly floor. The rail underneath is the real cost: buyers pay $19.99 per 1,000 Stars as a store pack or $14.10 at Telegram’s sell rate, and Telegram’s terms for bot developers put the payout at $13.00 per 1,000 — a spread of 35% on a store pack (7.8% at Telegram’s own rate), wider than either subscription’s percentage. Price on the payout number; what withdrawing Stars actually pays has the 1,000-Star floor and the 21-day hold.

Who should not choose it: anyone selling on a certificate or a quiz score, because neither exists here, and anyone who needs to see who stalled on lesson four — there is no owner-facing progress roster. Anyone whose students arrive from search or ads, because there is no page to land them on. And anyone whose buyers pay by card, since Telegram policy puts digital delivery on Stars alone.

If… then…

If	Then
Email sequences and paid traffic bring your buyers	Kajabi. The contact tiers and funnels are the product you are actually buying
The course is the whole business and the list is small	Thinkific. You would be paying Kajabi $125 a month more for marketing you do not run
A completion certificate is part of the sale	Either — but budget Thinkific at $109, not $54; Kajabi attaches no tier condition to its certificate
A corporate buyer says the word SCORM	Thinkific Plus. The word is absent from Kajabi’s pages, and from ours
Your audience already reads you in a Telegram channel	The Telegram option. The website is a detour between trust and lesson one
You have not sold a single seat yet	Start where there is no monthly floor and no trial clock, then buy a subscription once the course sells

Where to start

If you are genuinely undecided, the tiebreaker is not a feature list — it is where your last ten buyers came from. Ten people who arrived from a search result or an ad campaign argue for Kajabi’s funnels or, more cheaply, Thinkific’s course site. Ten people who arrived because they already follow you somewhere argue that the site is overhead you would be renting.

Run one short module through whichever answer that gives you, for one month, and compare two numbers: what the month cost, and how many students reached the last lesson. Completion is where delivery format shows up, and it is the only figure a pricing page cannot tell you.

The longer versions of each half of this comparison: Kajabi alternatives and Thinkific alternatives. The gentler all-in-one that undercuts Kajabi is covered in Podia alternatives and, head to head, in Podia vs Kajabi. What chat-native delivery looks like from the student’s side: selling courses on Telegram. Run a course price through the Telegram Stars calculator to see that 35% store-pack spread on a real number.

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Kajabi plan prices, annual rates, transaction fees, contact, product, website, community, admin and AI credit limits, and trial length: kajabi.com/pricing; course quizzes, automatic completion certificates, drip scheduling and progress tracking: kajabi.com/features/online-courses; both checked September 2026. Thinkific plan prices, annual rates, processing and gateway fees, student, admin and community limits, custom domain on every plan, the site builder, landing pages and email automation rows starting on Start, and the tiers carrying certificates, exams, SCORM and the AI teaching assistant: thinkific.com/pricing; what that email automation does: thinkific.com/features/email-automation; Thinker, its learner-facing AI chatbot: thinkific.com/features/ai-at-thinkific; all checked September 2026. Star payout rate: Telegram’s terms for bot developers, section 6.2.4.