AccessAlly vs Kajabi: A Definitive Comparison (May 2023)

I tested AccessAlly and Kajabi to figure out how they help with creating, monetizing, marketing, and selling online courses and other digital products… It turns out they’re both awesome learning management platforms but they each have their strengths and weaknesses.

AccessAlly is a WordPress plugin that includes pretty much everything you need in an LMS platform: courses, monetized memberships, communities, and affiliate marketing tools. It’s designed for experts that want to share knowledge on their own sites.

On the other hand, Kajabi is an all-in-one platform for infopreneurs that want to create courses, boost sales, and manage large communities that form around their products.

They’re pretty similar, so it’s tempting to make your decision based on subscription costs alone. However, both platforms have subtle (and not-so-subtle) differences that make them better suited for different needs. So, let’s do an in-depth analysis of AccessAlly vs Kajabi and see which tool is best in terms of:

• Marketing and Sales,
• Course Building,
• Gamification,
• Integrations,
• Products,
• and Price.

Comparison Summary: AccessAlly vs Kajabi

AccessAlly	Kajabi
Price
🏆 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ No free plan. Pricing starts at $99/month for unlimited courses and students. 60-day money back guarantee.	⭐⭐⭐⭐ No free plan, 14-day free trial. The Basic plan is $119/month, while the Growth plan is $159/mo. Annual billing saves you 20%.
Course Building
⭐⭐⭐⭐ Uses the WordPress LMS plugin to create courses. Intuitive drag-and-drop course builder. Built-in multimedia tracking to monitor student progress.	🏆 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Courses are easy to create and customize. Excellent organization system with modules and submodules. Lots of course templates.
Marketing and Sales
⭐⭐⭐⭐ Offers 1-click upsells and order bumps. Provides Paypal and Stripe payments with recurring payments and automatic plan upgrades.	🏆 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Built-in marketing and sales automation. Provides excellent email marketing tools and a drag-and-drop pipeline builder.
Gamification
🏆 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Uses a customizable point system. Offers discounts and special offers as incentives for student engagement.	⭐⭐⭐ Limited gamification tools. Offers a barebones community leaderboard with a point and quests system.
Integrations
⭐⭐⭐ Requires third-party accounts for email, e-commerce, shopping carts, and WP themes.	🏆 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ All-in-one platform for website builders, marketing tools, and shopping carts. Allows webhooks + Zapier integration
Products
⭐⭐⭐ Leans on integrations and additional plugins for product options.	🏆 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Includes course building, coaching, podcasts, and community.
Best for
Building customized courses around your brands.	Creating and scaling a serious info-business.
Try free demo	Try free for 14 30 days

What is AccessAlly?
“Streamline your digital offerings” 🕶️🎉

Natalie Russier created AccessAlly after she couldn’t find an LMS platform that satisfied her unique online course requirements. AccessAlly aims to provide a seamless and integrated platform, bringing a simplified process to users so they can focus on providing value to their students.

It offers several WordPress plugins and other integrations that equip your websites with powerful online learning tools. The Learning Management System (LMS) plugin provides a course builder, gamification, quizzes, dripped courses, and auto-generated certificates. Meanwhile, the Community plugin lets you create global communities (with groups that revolve around each course) and works seamlessly with the Membership and Member Directory plugins to monetize them.

AccessAlly is best for experts that want to use the WordPress ecosystem to create course content and seamlessly market it to their site traffic. Its advanced gamification tools and customization capabilities help you engage students and build a personal brand.

What is Kajabi?
“Leading the LMS pack”💪🐕‍🦺

Kajabi was founded in 2010 by Kenny Reuter and Travis Rosser after facing monetization issues on YouTube. It’s an independent platform for entrepreneurs that want to monetize their passion and achieve success online. And it’s been largely successful — helping its users make over $4 billion in sales since its inception.

Kajabi is an all-in-one platform that provides centralized and integrated tools for all your business activities. It helps you create, promote, and sell online courses and other knowledge-based products. Furthermore, it provides the tools to effectively manage and monetize the communities that arise from your product sales. The advanced chat service, virtual meetups, challenges, and forums all work together to keep your customers engaged.

Kajabi is best for infopreneurs, tutors, and professionals that need a fully-customizable website to serve as a central hub for their knowledge-based business.

AccessAlly vs Kajabi: Price

AccessAlly has cheaper plans but lacks some tools, while Kajabi has higher prices but handles everything on its own.

Neither platform is cheap, even if you pay annually. AccessAlly has fewer features but each plan costs less than Kajabi’s, so if you’re looking to spend less and you don’t need advanced tools and functionalities, it’s a great choice.

Kajabi’s prices are higher but it accounts for nearly every conceivable aspect of an online knowledge-based business. With it, you pay for a centralized and fully integrated infobusiness platform.

AccessAlly’s plans are tailored for specific users.

Each plan is made for a specific user; Essentials for solopreneurs and small businesses, Pro for online educators and marketers, and In-House Training for internal teams and new hires.

Each plan’s features vary slightly from the next, but the Essentials plan is missing key components for a functional LMS. It lacks learning tools and analytics options like progress monitoring and assignment, and quiz submissions.

The Pro and In-House Training Plans ironically have more essential tools than the Essentials package. Also, the In-House Training plan includes team training and onboarding features, which is the only upgrade it offers over the Pro plan.

Kajabi’s pricing breaks down multiple products, not just course capabilities.

Yes, you’ll be paying a higher price for each of Kajabi’s plans, but there’s so much more included in them.

You get multiple products, landing pages, a website (three with Pro), and unlimited marketing emails in addition to all the course-building tools, drag-and-drop frontend builders, funnel builders, and many more.

The Growth and Pro plans both include affiliate marketing features and branding removal. Other than that the features are the same, with higher tiers increasing limits on the number of products, customers, and admin users.

Every plan has 0% transaction fees and access to Kajabi University — an entire training program to help you launch and scale your info business.

Pricing Breakdown:

Winner: AccessAlly has better prices. It’s more cost-effective and convenient to use it if you already have a WordPress site. Otherwise, go with Kajabi, the extra cost is worth all the extra functionality you get.

AccessAlly vs Kajabi: Course Building

AccessAlly brings complex yet robust customizations, while Kajabi keeps it simple with drag-and-drop templates.

AccessAlly relies on third-party platforms to create custom slides and videos while Kajabi is self-contained.

AccessAlly offers more customization options, allowing you to exercise your creativity in branding and personalization. However, only tech-savvy users with coding experience can make the most of it because it requires custom HTML and CSS code.

Luckily, AccessAlly’s creator Natalie created several tutorials on how to set up dripped content, create an online course, and enable affiliate marketing. Additionally, less experienced users can use Canva to design highly-customizable web and sales pages.

To create polished videos and screen recordings, you can integrate platforms like Camtasia or ScreenFlow which help you edit webinar recordings and streamline teaching. The process is a bit awkward and time-intensive but produces great videos with closed captions and subtitles, visual effects, time lapses, and more.

To sum up, AccessAlly offers a wide variety of essential course creation integrations but is not easy to master.

Kajabi has easy no code drag-and-drop features and templates.

Kajabi is less customizable than AccessAlly (but still one of the most customizable platforms out there). On the flip side, it’s way more user-friendly, which means you save time and effort with it and still get a top-of-the-line look.

Moreover, you have access to several built-in and user-created templates and you can also upload custom templates from your computer or cloud storage. This feature helps you focus on content by automatically creating the course structure for you.

In addition to templates, Kajabi provides tutorials to help beginners get up and going fast. After all, most infopreneurs are focused on building a profitable business and don’t have time to master complex tools.

Kajabi allows you to bulk transfer audio, video, images, and other downloadable content, and add them to your courses using a drag-and-drop interface.

What’s more, you can add closed captions, transcripts, and subtitles to make your lessons even more interactive. While it doesn’t offer native video hosting, it integrates with Wistia for hosting at no additional cost.

Furthermore, Kajabi also lets students download videos directly from your landing pages instead of redirecting them to a third-party video hosting site. This allows you to personally set restrictions on student downloads such as watermarks, copyright, and DMCA notices to protect your author rights.

The bottom line? Kajabi’s course creation tools simplify the building process, allowing you to create polished visuals, structure, and course navigation with little effort.

Winner: Kajabi. It’s a tough call, but when you consider the great features and ease of use, Kajabi has everything you want without a steep learning curve.

AccessAlly vs Kajabi: Marketing and Sales

AccessAlly requires third-party marketing integrations, while Kajabi has a built-in and fully-featured marketing platform.

AccessAlly provides essential integrations for increasing marketing capabilities.

AccessAlly provides several plugins and integrations to help you promote your products and sell courses to your customers, but it can’t do everything by itself. Instead, it relies on streamlined Customer Relationship Management (CRM) integrations to facilitate marketing and sales for your infobusiness.

Unlike other platforms, it centralizes the integrations to limit the vast number of additional accounts. This means you can use a single login for all plugins and integrations with third-party software. Moreover, you have access to multiple email marketing platforms to promote courses and automate content drips.

Along with email marketing, AccessAlly integrates with OptimizePress which is used to create landing and sales pages. It also tracks customer behavior and purchase history. However, it’s worth noting that although this integration includes great marketing tools and connects with Zapier, it costs additional $129/year at the minimum.

Kajabi offers an all-in-one marketing suite to create and drive online traffic.

Kajabi provides built-in tools for automating marketing campaigns, events, and special offers. For example, you can offer upsells, coupon codes, and discounts when customers fulfill preset conditions in courses.

You can also increase traffic to your websites with embedded SEO features, and promote products, courses, and events using landing pages.

Furthermore, Kajabi allows you to create efficient sales funnels using an intuitive drag-and-drop pipeline builder. You can also use this tool to create email campaigns, broadcast emails, and other automated sequences. What’s more, you can save the best-performing funnels as templates.

AccessAlly has great affiliate integrations, but Kajabi’s affiliate programs are more capable and user-friendly.

Since AccessAlly is an LMS plugin, it has affiliate marketing integrations. Users can track, manage, customize, and monitor affiliate programs through InfusionSoft. This includes customizable commission tiers and tracking options.

Unfortunately, the user experience is complex and has a steep learning curve.

Kajabi offers built-in affiliate marketing tools that don’t rely on third-party integrations. Its partner program provides customizable landing pages, commission tracking, and tiered commission structures to infopreneurs.

Winner: Go with AccessAlly if you want more flexible options and integrations, while Kajabi is the best choice if you want centralized features, a better affiliate program, and more ease of use.

AccessAlly vs Kajabi: Gamification

AccessAlly has advanced game mechanics to motivate students, while Kajabi emphasizes the “journey” to keep students engaged.

AccessAlly offers fully customizable gamification features, while Kajabi is more limited in capabilities.

With complete control over reward settings, AccessAlly Gamification users can decide what milestones students need to accomplish to earn or even purchase points. You can also set point submission approval or have them loaded automatically.

Points and badges are much more than superficial rewards — you can exchange them for bonus content, additional courses, and one-on-one sessions.

Furthermore, AccessAlly allows you to personalize badges to fit themes and set expectations for those rewards to be earned. Student points and badges can then be displayed on leaderboards that can be set to public or private.

For increased student engagement and indivialized learning experience, you can create a “Choose Your Own Adventure” learning environment based on past assessments and content choices.

On the other hand, Kajabi can create quests for students to complete as they progress through their learning journey. As students complete each module, they collect points, badges, tokens, and other rewards.

Beyond points and badges, students can earn public recognition, VIP course privileges, discounts, certificates of completion, and a spot on leaderboards.

They can also unlock specialty content after passing lessons or quizzes successfully. This includes white papers, webinars, or videos not included in the standard course.

Lastly, Kajabi promotes friendly competition through the leaderboards to build community and increase engagement.

Winner: AccessAlly. They both have gamified courses, but AccessAlly has better graphics, personalization, and overall engagement to motivate students.

AccessAlly vs Kajabi: Integrations

AccessAlly is reliant on quality third-party integrations, while Kajabi is self-dependent on built-in tools.

AccessAlly did a great job connecting users to high-quality integration platforms. For example, you can connect with CRMs of your choice for course integrations and marketing, like ActiveCampaign and ConvertKit.

Or with e-commerce and shopping cart integrations to collect payments.

In addition, AccessAlly provides WordPress Themes to build a more dynamic course structure. However, since it’s a WordPress Plugin, integrations are more complex to set up and may have additional costs.

In contrast, Kajabi is designed to be self-reliant with little dependence on third-party software. As a result, the number of integrations it offers decreases with nearly every software update.

Instead of having to search for third-party add-ons, or sign up for new accounts, you get everything on one centralized platform — email marketing, e-commerce tools, marketing funnels, themes and templates, performance analytics, etc…

However, you don’t have to abandon your accounts if you already have them just to use Kajabi. That’s because it still allows you to use third-party software through API access, webhooks, and Zapier.

Winner: Kajabi for flexibility, centralization, and capability. Not only does it offer built-in tools but it also provides access to third-party tools that meet specific user needs and preferences.

AccessAlly vs Kajabi: Products

AccessAlly has solid product features, while Kajabi has multiple product features and types.

A “product” could refer to purchase options and offers, course creation, analytics… any feature, really. But it can also refer to components offered beyond the standard online course specs.

AccessAlly offers online courses as the sole product, while Kajabi offers courses, coaching, podcasts, and communities as separate products.

AccessAlly offers course creation and management, payments, marketing, analytics, gamification, and automation, but it can only create courses that integrate these components. It lacks robust product features beyond the standard online course, limiting creators to one monetization option.

On the other hand, Kajabi offers all of these components and also adds coaching, podcasts, and community to the products beyond course creation. Its users can use different categories and structures of content to build an info-business that fits their brand, style, and goals.

The coaching programs are designed specifically to provide one-on-one live coaching and interactive lessons for students.

Students can schedule sessions based on their preferred booking method. Once the offer is selected, they are automatically redirected to your coaching library and have access to agendas and resources connected to the purchased product.

If you’re interested in creating podcasts, Kajabi connects to Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify to reach customers across multiple platforms.

For each episode, you have access to the analytics and can include the RSS feed link to broadcast anywhere on the web.

Winner: Kajabi. It goes beyond course creation to bring more industry-specific products that can be used for a wide variety of applications.

AccessAlly vs Kajabi: Pros & Cons

AccessAlly Pros	AccessAlly Cons
✅ Great course builder	❌ Only offers online courses as products
✅ Extensive gamification features	❌ Few native integrations
✅ Great interactive learning tools	❌ Steep learning curve
✅ Advanced customization options
✅ Marketing and Sales add-ons

Kajabi Pros	Kajabi Cons
✅ Fully integrated marketing and sales platform	❌ Expensive for individuals and small teams
✅ Intuitive course builder	❌ Weaker student engagement capabilities
✅ Offers a variety of products	❌ Limited gamification
✅ Built-in and third-party integrations
✅ Clean and intuitive website builder
✅ All-in-one content creation platform

Final Verdict: AccessAlly vs Kajabi

AccessAlly is a highly customizable yet complex online course creator, while Kajabi is a full-service course building platform designed to manage an online business.

Both apps have undeniable strengths as online course platforms. As such, it goes without saying that your final decision depends on your unique needs and requirements. However, if you’re looking for my opinion to help you out, you should…

Use AccessAlly if:

• You are already using WordPress and willing to have multiple third-party accounts.
• You want advanced and complex customizations, branding, and gamification options.
• You only want to create and sell online courses.

Click here to get started with AccessAlly!

Use Kajabi if:

• You are a serious infopreneur looking for a trusted track record.
• You need robust features, marketing solutions, and sound analytics built-in.
• You want an elite, hassle-free solution to all your online course-building needs.

Click here to get started with Kajabi!