Kajabi vs Circle: A Definitive Comparison (September 2023)

I tried out Kajabi and Circle to figure out where each platform excels and lacks, so let’s see how they measure up.

Kajabi is an all-in-one business platform designed for digital entrepreneurs looking to create a thriving business around their digital products. It features an online course builder, a community platform, and robust marketing tools that can replace most tools in your martech stack.

But rising up the charts is a new contender — Circle. It’s a community-focused platform best suited for creators and knowledge entrepreneurs looking to build a thriving online community around their expertise.

This comparison piece will show you how the tools compare in the following areas:

• Pricing
• Ease of use
• Course creation
• Reporting and analytics
• Business marketing tools
• Online community building

Let’s dive deeper into Kajabi vs Circle and see how they compare!

Comparison Summary: Kajabi vs Circle

Kajabi	Circle
Price
⭐⭐⭐⭐ 14-day free trial. Pricing starts at $149/mo. Higher-priced plans offer more contacts, funnels, active customers, and admin users. The standard price caps at $399/mo.	🏆 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 14-day free trial. Its lowest plan starts at $49/mo and goes up to $399/mo. Higher-tier plans grant access to advanced features like workflows, API access, and email white-labeling.
Online Courses
🏆 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Easy-to-use online course builder featuring an AI course outline generator for quick course creation. Includes free templates and has inbuilt course assessment tools.	⭐⭐⭐⭐ Less intuitive but still powerful course builder. Allows you to organize content into Lessons and Sections, create different course formats, and drip schedule content.
Community Engagement
⭐⭐⭐⭐ Offers challenges and meetups, encouraging members to participate actively and collaborate. Includes a mobile app for communities.	🏆 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Facilitates engagement through interactive elements such as group chats, live streams, and live rooms. Offers a free mobile app for community members.
Website Management
🏆 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Well equipped website builder. Offers several customizable templates. Full websites with landing pages, sales pages…	⭐⭐⭐ Basic landing page builder for community spaces.
Marketing Automation
🏆 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Advanced funnel builders to streamline course sales. Provides excellent email marketing tools.	❌ Doesn’t have built-in email marketing, sales funnels, and automation tools.
Integrations
🏆 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Native integrations with 12+ apps. Allows webhooks and Zapier integrations.	⭐⭐⭐⭐ Offers Single Sign-on (SSO) integrations with popular platforms like WordPress. Allows API and Zapier integrations.
Branding
⭐⭐⭐ Offers themes and templates to customize your course appearance.	🏆 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Integrates branding into the entire community experience, creating a white-labeled ecosystem that reflects your brand.
Best for
Large- and medium-sized businesses that offer a wide variety of digital products.	Knowledge entrepreneurs and creators looking to create an engaging community around their expertise.
Try free for 14 30 days	Try free for 14 days

What is Kajabi?
“The Online Business Supercenter”🌟

Kajabi is an all-in-one e-learning platform for creators and eduprenuers. It’s the brainchild of Travis Rosser and Kenny Rueter, who saw a need for a unified platform offering a streamlined solution for creators to share expertise effectively.

Today, Kajabi offers a tech stack solution to enable digital entrepreneurs to monetize their expertise on one single platform. This includes tools like an online course builder, community platform, website builder, email marketing, and even a podcast platform. Kajabi also has exciting features including the AI Creator Hub that allows you to create course outlines, sales copy, video scripts, and social media content in no time.

Kajabi is the ideal choice for online creators, edupreneurs, and influencers seeking an all-in-one platform to create and sell online courses, manage membership subscriptions, offer coaching services, and cultivate a vibrant online community around their brand.

What is Circle?
“The space for your circle!” ⭕👪

Circle.so is an online community platform and online course builder. Sid Yadav, Rudy Santino, and Andrew Guttormsen co-founded Circle to empower creators with an online community platform with all the essential tools they need to build a highly engaging and thriving online community.

Circle allows you to organize your community into intuitive spaces and promote interaction through live streams, online courses, and group discussions. The platform also offers impressive features, including automation workflows, drip scheduling, and Content Co-Pilot, which is an AI tool that assists you in creating community posts.

Circle is a compelling solution for content creators and businesses looking to create a strong online community and engage it with online courses, live streams, group chats, and community discussions.

Kajabi vs Circle: Online Course Creation

Kajabi makes building online courses easier than Circle.

Kajabi allows faster course creation with AI tools, while Circle offers more course design flexibility.

Kajabi is designed for fast course creation. It features an AI-powered course outline generator that creates outlines at the click of a button — based only on the course title and description you provide.

In addition, you also get access to over six pre-built templates to customize the appearance of your course interface.

Meanwhile, Circle has a cleaner, more customizable user interface compared to Kajabi.

From the outset, it empowers you with diverse course formats that you will offer to your learners:

• Self-paced,
• Structured,
• Scheduled.

Unlike Kajabi, where your course lessons follow the same structure and design, Circle gives you full control. Using the “/” command you can add “blocks” to your lessons and structure them however you want.

Circle allows you to add multiple content formats from different platforms.

Circle allows you to embed different content formats including videos, audio, and code snippets from over 700 content platforms. This includes YouTube, Loom, and Typeform, just to mention a few.

On the other hand, Kajabi allows you to add course content by either uploading it from your computer or from cloud storage like Dropbox and Google Drive. Additionally, you have the flexibility to capture content on the spot using a camera.

However, Kajabi doesn’t directly support third-party content embeds from platforms like Wistia, YouTube, or Vimeo, which can be quite a drawback. To add a YouTube video to your lesson, you’d have to add it as a new product and embed the code there.

Kajabi has built-in assessment tools, while Circle depends on third-party integrations.

Kajabi offers built-in grading and assessment tools to gauge your students’ progress. You can embed a quiz in each module and enable automatic grading for immediate feedback.

You can also issue certificates for your course, which are automatically emailed to your students upon their successful completion of the course.

On the other hand, Circle relies on third-party tools like Google Forms, Survey Monkey, and Typeform to gather feedback from your students. You can embed a form at the end of each lesson using its link embed functionality.

While Both Kajabi and Circle offer content drip scheduling Circle offers a more intuitive setup process.

Kajabi lets you schedule content releases in each module after a particular date.

When you set a module to drip, an email is sent to the student on the day the module becomes available to them.

Setting up content dripping in Circle is more straightforward than in Kajabi. During course setup, you can choose the structured course type to access content drip features. You can drip the content of each section based on specific time intervals.

Members will receive an email notification when the course content becomes available. Circle also allows you to customize the email notification for a personal touch.

Circle offers more live-streaming flexibility than Kajabi.

Both Circle and Kajabi support live streaming, albeit with distinct approaches.

With Kajabi, you have the option to schedule live video sessions within your course, making it an excellent choice for hosting interactive Q&A sessions. This feature enables you to gather real-time feedback from your students, thereby enhancing engagement.

During these live sessions, you also have the opportunity to initiate breakout groups, encouraging collaborative interactions among your students. Additionally, you can record these live sessions, effectively repurposing them as pre-recorded webinars or even course content.

On the other hand, Circle offers a high degree of flexibility by offering various live-streaming options. You can effortlessly schedule a live event, initiate a live room, or simply begin a live stream.

This versatility is particularly beneficial for launching live coaching sessions, workshops, and classes, as well as hosting Ask Me Anything (AMA) sessions with your members.

Winner: Course creators will like Kajabi more, due to its user-friendly interface, templates, AI integration, and assessment features that simplify course creation — particularly for beginners. However, if you need a platform with a sleek user interface and greater course structure autonomy, Circle is the better choice.

Kajabi vs Circle: Online Communities

Circle has sophisticated community features, while Kajabi’s Communities are more basic.

Kajabi’s “Circles” are intuitive while Circle’s “Spaces” are easy to curate.

Kajabi uses “circles” to segment and organize your communities into more refined spaces. Using these, you can create a feed, where members can post content and engage with it or a chat space that provides real-time messaging, allowing members to engage in group discussions.

Kajabi feed is basic, allowing administrators and members to share posts and embed rich media including images, videos, audio, and PDFs. Members’ interaction options include leaving comments or reaction emojis.

On the other hand, Circle uses “spaces” to help you organize and manage your online community. Since Circle is a community-first online platform it makes it easier to curate and manage each space without leaving the interface.

The platform allows you to mix and match various space types to create a dynamic community experience — including posts, events, chat, and a course space & member directory.

Unlike Kajabi Communities, which primarily offers feed and chat spaces, Circle broadens the scope by providing diverse interaction opportunities.

It also supports content locking and exclusivity.

You can put each Space behind a paywall and limit access for particular members. For example, if you’ve created a Course Space, you can make it available only to members who purchased a certain course.

Kajabi has basic member profiles while Circle’s are more refined.

Kajabi’s member profiles are pretty basic, showcasing basic information like members’ interests, links to their socials, and joined challenges & circles.

On the other hand, Circle offers more sophisticated profiles that showcase more detailed information like personal bios, the Spaces (sub-communities) they are engaged in, their recent posts, comments, and even a timestamp of their last interaction within the community.

Members can also message each other directly, which means Circle’s communities actually work kind of like social media — improving engagement and interaction in the community.

Both Kajabi and Circle have content-sharing capabilities but Circle offers a more robust post editor.

In Kajabi, members can share posts in various content formats, including text, video, audio, PDF, and images. They can then interact with the content via comments and reaction emojis.

Meanwhile, Circle’s content sharing is light-years ahead of Kajabi’s.

It enables you to share content in formats like text, audio, video, images, and even GIFs. Meanwhile, its post editor offers content formatting tools for adding headlines, sub-headlines, numbered lists, and bullet points.

In direct comparison, Circle’s content-sharing capabilities are notably more diverse than Kajabi’s.

While both platforms enable content sharing in various formats, Circle’s support for GIFs, more advanced content formatting tools, and an array of content types offer a more versatile and engaging content-sharing experience.

Compared to Kajabi, Circle offers more flexibility when it comes to hosting online events.

Events provide a structured way for community members to engage with each other. They offer a reason for members to visit the platform regularly and interact with one another, fostering a sense of community and belonging.

Creating events in Circle is pretty straightforward.

You can create an event with Circle’s native live streaming tool or via third parties like Zoom and YouTube Live, or schedule one at a physical location.

When it comes to live events, Circle offers the flexibility to host livestreams and live rooms. This is ideal in case you want to host webinars, live Q&As, live coaching sessions in your community, or small discussions with a specific group or audience in your space.

Circle also enables members to join the events via mobile phones and hosts to host the events using the Circle’s mobile app — available for iOS and Android users.

Kajabi relies on gamification to engage students, while Circle offers an AI tool called co-pilot.

Kajabi helps you boost student engagement and participation with gamification features. You can initiate challenges—whether as standalone or recurring events—to encourage participation and interaction among community members.

Circle, on the other hand, doesn’t have any gamification features.

Instead, it has an AI tool called Content Co-pilot that helps you generate content ideas and content to post in your communities and keep members engaged over the long term.

The Kajabi app offers the best mobile learning experience while Circle’s app delivers the best community experience.

Both Kajabi and Circle offer mobile applications to help you engage with your audience on mobile devices.

The Kajabi Mobile App is available for both iOS and Android devices.

It has an intuitive design that enables students and members to access learning materials, participate in online events, and join community conversations.

Additionally, you can keep your community informed through push notifications.

But Kajabi also goes further by providing a separate app called the Kajabi Creator App — which focuses on admin features.

Using the Creator App, you can manage your Kajabi site, track its performance, review recent transactions, manage your contacts, update your account, create AI-generated content, and add videos to lessons.

Meanwhile, the Circle App is primarily focused on community members and less on admin privileges. Members can engage in new discussions, access courses, and attend live streams & message other members online.

Winner: Circle takes the lead with its community-building-focused approach, offering interactive features such as dynamic live streams, group chats, and events. On the other hand, Kajabi just about falls short because of its forum-style community builder that lacks robust tools for long-term community engagement.

Kajabi vs Circle: Business Tools

Circles offers limited business tools while Kajabi is an all-in-one digital business platform.

Kajabi supports funnels and automation, while Circle’s workflow automation is focused on community management.

Kajabi provides robust funnels and automation to create automated sequences of pages, emails, and actions that guide leads through their conversion journeys. You also get access to its selection of funnel templates that you can customize to match your workflow needs.

On the other hand, Circle allows you to automate tasks through trigger-based automation workflows.

Administrators can set up conditional statements that respond to specific events within the community. For instance, new members joining a community can be greeted with a tailored welcome message, members creating posts can receive direct messages, and individuals completing courses can be tagged for recognition.

Kajabi’s website builder can replace professional ones, while Circle only allows simple landing pages for your community spaces.

Kajabi’s website builder enables you to create professional-looking pages that act as the storefront for all your digital products.

The builder is intuitive to use, allowing you to drag-and-drop widgets and blocks to your page and preview the appearance of your site across four different screen devices.

You also get access to 10+ sleek and responsive website templates that you can customize to match your branding. Each template comes with its own unique layout, typography choices, color palettes, and design elements that set the tone for your website.

Meanwhile, Circle offers a feature called “Lock Screen” that lets you build simple landing pages for your private spaces.

The page builder centers around four predefined sections:

• Banner,
• Course lessons,
• Space description,
• Call-to-Action section.

However, the design options are more limited compared to Kajabi’s website builder.

For instance, customization within the Banner and Call-to-Action sections only includes adding a background image, modifying text, and inserting a button.

Kajabi’s analytics focus on financial aspects whereas Circle’s offers insights into community growth and engagement.

Kajabi provides users with proprietary tracking tools that allow them to monitor and assess various aspects of their website’s performance, including net revenue, subscription metrics, product progress, opt-in rates, page views, the number of offers sold, and even affiliate statistics.

Kajabi’s analytics leans more on delivering insights related to the financial aspects of your:

• Online business,
• Product performance,
• User engagement.

In contrast, Circle’s analytics approach is geared towards offering a deeper and more granular view of the health and growth of your community.

This includes member activity, engagement patterns, interaction trends, and participation levels across different areas of the community.

This depth of data allows for a more thorough understanding of how members are interacting and contributing within the community.

Winner: Kajabi because of its advanced marketing features including funnels, marketing emails, and a website builder—features notably absent in Circle.

Kajabi vs Circle: Pricing

Kajabi offers different plans based on the number of products and funnels, while Circle’s plans are based on community size and features.

Kajabi limits the number of contacts and active customers in your community, while Circle’s plans have unlimited community members.

Circle shines in terms of community size, providing plans with unlimited community members across the board. This unrestricted scalability allows you to build a thriving community without worrying about hitting a member cap.

On the other hand, Kajabi sets limitations on the number of contacts and active customers you can manage, potentially hindering the organic growth of your community over time.

Circle is budget-friendly, while Kajabi provides more value for a higher price tag.

Circle offers cheaper entry plans than Kajabi but imposes hard limits on the number of administrators, moderators, and spaces your community can have.

Should your community require more than the limits, additional costs come into play:

• $10 per month for each extra admin,
• $20 per month for every 10 moderators,
• $20 per month for every 10 spaces.

This incremental pricing structure can quickly escalate, potentially removing Circle’s cost advantage.

Meanwhile, Kajabi’s price is higher but that’s because it offers more value.

Alongside community management, Kajabi equips you with robust marketing tools such as funnels, customizable websites, and unlimited landing pages. These can significantly contribute to the growth and monetization of your community, ultimately justifying Kajabi’s higher price point — especially for large communities.

Circle has transaction fees on revenue generated via the platform, while Kajabi doesn’t have any additional fees.

Circle charges a transaction fee on the revenue generated from your online course sales or membership subscription.

Its fees vary based on the pricing plan you choose and range from 4% for the Basic plan, down to 0.5% for the Enterprise plan. While the transaction fees decrease as you move to higher-priced plans, they’re still present and impactful, most noticeably on larger businesses.

On the other hand, Kajabi doesn’t charge any transaction fees on any of their plans. This means that regardless of the plan you select (Basic, Growth, or Pro Plan), you won’t incur any additional transaction fees on your sales or revenue generated through the platform.

Both Kajabi and Circle offer a 14-day trial but Kajabi has a catch.

Both Kajabi and Circle offer a 14-day trial period, allowing users to test their platforms before committing to a subscription. For Kajabi you can get a 30-day trial via our affiliate program 😉

Kajabi requires users to enter their credit card information to access the trial. Although this is common to ensure users are genuine and to ease the transition to a paid plan, be aware if you only want to try it out.

Winner: In most cases, for communities, Circle wins because of its budget-friendly entry plans that are more scalable than Kajabi’s. But Kajabi is more affordable for large, multi-faceted businesses because it doesn’t have any transaction fees and supports more product types.

Kajabi vs Circle: Pros and Cons

Circle is primarily community-focused, while Kajabi is focused on digital products and courses.

Kajabi Pros	Kajabi Cons
✅ All-in-one course creation platform	❌ Expensive for individuals and small teams
✅ A comprehensive suite of tools to build and market your digital product	❌ Limited options to add content
✅ Beginner-friendly user interface	❌ Limited customer segmentation
✅ AI course outline generator	❌ Limited live streaming capabilities
✅ 0% transaction fees
✅ Mobile apps for members and admins

Circle Pros	Circle Cons
✅ Excellent online course features	❌ Transactional fees on revenue generated
✅ Clutter-free user interface	❌ Basic plan has restricted features
✅ Excellent community features	❌ No built-in assessment tools in online courses
✅ Native live streaming and live rooms

Kajabi vs Circle: Final Verdict

Kajabi works best as an online course and membership site platform while Circle is a community software with online courses as its focus.

If you’ve read the whole comparison, you probably noticed that each platform has unique strengths tailored to distinct needs.

Kajabi shines as a versatile online course and membership site platform, perfect for larger teams seeking a comprehensive solution to deliver online courses and other digital products. On the other hand, Circle is a specialized community-building software designed for creators and coaches looking to build an engaging space where meaningful connections can thrive.

So choose Kajabi if:

• You want an online course platform with templates allowing you to launch your business fast.
• You’re a knowledge entrepreneur looking for an all-in-one business platform.
• You don’t want to pay for third-party email marketing and funnel tools.
• You offer other digital products other than online courses.

Click here to get started with Kajabi!

Use Circle if:

• You want to create an interactive hub for your audience around your expertise or product.
• You want to engage your community using online courses, group chats, and live streams.
• You want to create a white-labeled community platform and app.
• You want to create a large community.

Click here to get started with Circle!

Note: Still looking for a platform that will work best for you? We also compared Kajabi vs Thinkific, Kajabi vs Teachable, Mighty Networks vs Kajabi, and many more. Check out our comparisons here!