Kajabi vs SamCart: A Definitive Comparison (November 2023)

Kajabi is a general-purpose platform for online course businesses but it works best as a digital classroom because of its excellent student engagement features and community tools. On the other hand, SamCart provides the best marketing tools for promoting your products and optimizing the sales process so it’s best for digital product creators that want to increase their sales efficiency and conversion rates.

I made this article to help you pick the best tool for your specific situation, so I broke the features down into 6 distinct categories and compared each tool’s approach to:

• Marketing Automation
• Website Creation
• Online Courses
• Integrations
• Community
• Price

Let’s dive right into Kajabi vs SamCart…

Comparison Summary: Kajabi vs SamCart

Kajabi	SamCart
Price
⭐⭐⭐⭐ No free plan, 14-day free trial. Annual billing saves 20%. Basic plan is $119/mo, while Growth plan is $159/mo.	🏆 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ No free plan, 7-day free trial. Annual billing saves 33%. Launch plan is $59/mo, while Grow is $119/mo.
Online Courses
⭐⭐⭐⭐ Courses are easy to create and organize into modules and submodules. Provides templates for quick and easy course creation.	🏆 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Offers similar tools to Kajabi. But it is easier to use and offers more customization options.
Community
🏆 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Offers several community engagement features, like challenges and meetups. Communities are standalone websites with posts and forums.	⭐⭐⭐ No built-in community feature. Provides membership lists that can be used with third-party community tools.
Website Creation
🏆 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Can create complete websites using a drag-and-drop builder. Offers several website templates.	⭐⭐⭐⭐ Provides a drag-and-drop builder for creating web pages. Building a complete website not enabled. Instead, web pages can integrate with pre-existing websites.
Marketing Automation
🏆 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Automates nearly every aspect of the customer journey. Provides excellent email marketing tools and a pipeline builder.	⭐⭐⭐⭐ Relies on third-party tools like HubSpot and Klaviyo for marketing automation and email campaigns.
Integrations
⭐⭐⭐⭐ Provides integrations with 16 third-party apps. However, it relies more on built-in tools.	🏆 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Offers several native integrations and more than 750 Zapier integrations.
Best for
Large and medium sized-teams that offer a wide variety of e-learning products and services.	Digital entrepreneurs that want to optimize sales and increase conversion rates.
Try free for 14 30 days	Try free for 7 days

What is Kajabi?
“The all-purpose content-creation tool”⚒️

While Kajabi’s founders weren’t passionate about teaching online themselves, they were interested in helping entrepreneurs monetize their knowledge. Since its creation in 2010, this platform has helped thousands of users sell online courses, coaching, and other digital content.

Kajabi excels as an all-in-one platform that serves as the central hub for all your online business activities. It provides the tools to create and market online courses and other knowledge-based products like podcasts and manage the communities that inevitably form around them. It has several community features like physical and virtual meetups, webinars, challenges, and forums to keep your customers engaged and includes top-notch marketing automation tools to help you sell your content and reach a wider audience.

Kajabi’s fully-fledged white-label websites make it an excellent option for entrepreneurs, influencers, and experts that need an all-in-one online platform for their knowledge-based business.

What is SamCart?
“Sell anything you can think of”💰

SamCart was created as a direct-to-consumer eCommerce platform that increases conversions and maximizes profits. While it provides the tools to help you create digital content, it’s more concerned with promoting your products and increasing your customer count.

SamCart’s most prominent feature is the drag-and-drop page builder that lets you create stunning web pages. It includes several conversion-optimized templates, allowing you to sell countless products to your target audience. In addition, SamCart provides several revenue optimization features, including A/B testing, one-click upsells, order bumps, shopping cart abandonment recovery, and advanced reporting. Its powerful integration engine allows you to connect it with other business software, seamlessly integrating it into your existing tech stack.

While it doesn’t have a fully-fledged website-building feature, SamCart’s A/B testing tools help users determine what works best on their landing pages, allowing content creators to optimize their sales processes, increase conversion rates, and sell courses to a wider audience.

Kajabi vs SamCart: Pricing

SamCart is much cheaper than Kajabi and it doesn’t have limits on the number of courses and memberships.

Kajabi offers a 14-day free trial while SamCart offers a 7-day free trial.

The free trials allow you to test all the features both software have to offer. However, you’ll have to subscribe to one of the plans and provide your credit card information. You won’t be charged until the trial has ended.

Kajabi’s plans are more expensive than SamCart’s but include more admin seats.

Kajabi’s pricing plans have hard limits on the maximum number of courses and students you can have. So top subscription tiers increase the limits and unlock some additional features like custom branding, advanced automation, and a custom code editor.

SamCart’s plans are much cheaper than Kajabi’s and they don’t have any limits on the number of courses and customers you can have. Instead, the upper subscription plans unlock more tools and features. For example, the Grow plan allows you to integrate CRMs and the Scale plan unlocks A/B testing.

If you need more contacts, courses, or students than the Pro Plan offers, Kajabi allows you to negotiate with their sales team for an affordable solution. Similarly, SamCart’s VIP plan also allows you to contact the sales team for a custom-fit solution.

It’s also worth noting that both take 0% transaction fees.

Winner: Choose SamCart if you want unlimited products and customers, and if you want a higher discount on your yearly subscription. Kajabi is better if you want advanced features and tools in the lower subscription plans.

Kajabi vs SamCart: Online Courses

Both tools provide easy-to-use course creators but SamCart has more customizations.

SamCart’s course creator is more intuitive for beginners than Kajabi’s.

Kajabi offers a straightforward approach to creating courses. It lets you organize your courses into modules and provides a user-friendly interface to fill courses with content. You can add audio, video, images, and other downloadable content to your lessons. What’s more, it allows you to add subtitles and closed captions to your video lessons. As it goes for video hosting, Kajabi doesn’t host video content, but they did partner up with Wistia for hosting with no additional charge. SamCart, on the other hand, provides built-in video hosting, so you’re not dependent on any other platforms.

Kajabi allows you to schedule courses for automatic publishing and drip content over time to your customers. You can also lock courses and modules until students complete a certain lesson.

SamCart’s course creator works similarly to Kajabi, offering all of the same features and functionality. However, it has a more intuitive interface for adding a custom domain, downloadable content, and quizzes, which will make onboarding a lot smoother for beginners.

Unlike Kajabi, where you can only add assessments as separate lessons, SamCart allows you to embed quizzes and worksheets within the same lesson, which will help you provide students with a more systematic learning flow. Also, the text editor offers more text formatting options for a better visual distinction between some more and less important parts of your learning materials.

Both apps provide templates for creating course pages.

Kajabi offers several built-in and user-made templates for creating web pages to represent your courses. These templates allow you to introduce your courses in various styles, such as blog-like, gamified, creative, bright, and more.

SamCart also offers pre-designed and pre-tested templates for creating your sales pages. These templates contain built-in widgets that have been tuned to help increase your conversion rates.

SamCart provides more payment options for online courses.

Unlike Kajabi, which only natively supports Stripe and PayPal as payment options, SamCart supports several payment processors. In addition to Stripe and PayPal, you can speed up the checkout process with digital wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay, or offer payment with Visa, Mastercard, and many more.

Additionally, SamCart supports free trials and a “pay what you want” pricing model for your customers. Allowing people to choose how much they pay for your product can help you build trust with your audience.

Winner: Choose SamCart if you want an easy-to-use course creator, page optimization, and more payment options. Kajabi doesn’t offer as many customization options but its course templates can help you build courses faster.

Kajabi vs SamCart: Community

Kajabi provides community tools with features to keep members engaged, while SamCart has no built-in support for communities.

Kajabi allows you to build communities around your online content and provides features to keep members engaged. Each community is a standalone website that hosts all groups, forums, posts, and membership sites.

Community members can create posts and communicate with other members using a sophisticated chat system. They can also participate in community events like polls and challenges.

Furthermore, Kajabi allows you to organize physical and virtual meetups for community members. It provides a live room where you can share your video, audio, and screen during online meetings. You can also record meetings and chat with other participants as you would using any other designated conferencing app.

In contrast, SamCart doesn’t offer any built-in community features. Instead, it lets you create membership lists for your online courses, which allows you to leverage third-party community tools like Slack and Discord for any desired community activities.

Winner: Kajabi is best if you want built-in communities with dedicated websites, engagement tools, and a sophisticated chat system. With SamCart, you must rely on third-party tools to create communities around your courses.

Kajabi vs SamCart: Marketing Automation

Kajabi offers built-in automation tools, while SamCart relies on third-party apps.

Kajabi provides built-in tools for automating email campaigns, events, and offers. It also allows you to automate courses and execute specific actions when your customers fulfill preset conditions.

Furthermore, Kajabi provides a drag-and-drop pipeline builder which you can use to create sales funnels that nurture your leads. This tool allows you to set up email sequences, broadcasts, and other marketing campaigns.

SamCart doesn’t offer any built-in automation features. Instead, it relies on third-party integration with apps like HubSpot, Ontraport, and Klaviyo to run email campaigns and other marketing automations.

Winner: Choose Kajabi if you want advanced automation tools that can run sales funnels and email campaigns without relying on third-party apps and services. SamCart is best if you have an existing marketing strategy on other platforms.

Kajabi vs SamCart: Website

Kajabi allows you to create full websites using a fully-featured builder, while with SamCart you can only create individual sales pages.

Kajabi provides the tools to build a complete website that connects every aspect of your business. Your website allows you to showcase your products, host your content, publish blogs, and more. Moreover, it has a responsive layout that can adapt to multiple screen sizes, providing a better user experience.

The website builder is easy to use and allows you to speed up the building process using ready-made templates. Each page is fully customizable with images, buttons, text boxes, custom fonts, and animations. In addition, Kajabi allows you to use a custom domain so customers can find your website easier.

SamCart also features a drag-and-drop builder which you can use to create stunning web pages. However, unlike Kajabi, it only allows you to create only individual sales pages rather than a fully featured website. These pages are designed to integrate with pre-existing websites.

SamCart offers built-in A/B testing on its web pages.

This feature allows you to test and optimize your landing pages to increase engagement and conversion rates. You can split test elements within your templates, including fonts, background color, buttons, and images, to determine what works out for your audience and what doesn’t. SamCart even allows you to test templates against each other.

SamCart automatically rotates the variants of each test page among customers and provides advanced reporting on subscribers, web traffic, conversions, and payments.

On the other hand, Kajabi provides basic analytics but relies on third-party tools like Optimizely for A/B testing on its web pages.

Both tools provide templates for building websites and web pages.

SamCart provides several templates for creating landing pages, pop-ups, and web forms. These templates are fully customizable and edits can be saved as new templates.

Similarly, Kajabi provides templates for several types of websites, such as cooking, coding, and fitness websites. You can customize these templates to match your taste and, if you’re savvy enough, you can use HTML and CSS to tweak their look even further.

Winner: Kajabi is better for building fully-featured websites quickly and easily using a drag-and-drop builder. Meanwhile, with SamCart you can only create individual sales pages.

Kajabi vs SamCart: Integrations

SamCart offers more than 30 native integrations, while Kajabi relies more on built-in tools.

In addition to more than 30 native integrations, SamCart lets you use Zapier to integrate up to 750 third-party apps and services. The integrations include Active Campaign, ConvertKit, AWeber, WordPress, and even Kajabi. SamCart also enables custom API integrations in the Scale and VIP plans.

Although Kajabi is designed to be self-reliant with little need for third-party apps, it still provides 16 integrations, including Zapier, Mailchimp, and ClickFunnels, to add any missing functionalities.

Both apps provide webhooks that you can use to create custom integrations. However, that’ll require some coding skills.

Winner: Choose SamCart if you want several native integrations with third-party tools. Kajabi, by design, relies on built-in tools.

Kajabi vs SamCart: Pros & Cons

Kajabi is best for student and community engagement, while SamCart is best for selling your courses and increasing conversion rates.

Kajabi Pros	Kajabi Cons
✅ Complete website builder with lots of templates	❌ Expensive for individuals and small teams
✅ Excellent community features	❌ Limited integrations
✅ All-in-one course creation platform with advanced marketing automations	❌ Lacks built-in A/B testing
✅ 24/7 Customer Support

SamCart Pros	SamCart Cons
✅ Lots of integrations	❌ No built-in community features
✅ Excellent online course features	❌ Doesn’t offer a complete website, only individual sales pages
✅ Affordable solution	❌ No built-in marketing automation tools
✅ Built-in sales optimization features

Final Verdict: Kajabi vs SamCart

Kajabi works best as an online course platform, with student engagement as its selling point, while SamCart is an eCommerce platform with sales efficiency as its focus.

So, which one’s the winner in the SamCart vs Kajabi throwdown? Despite their differences, Kajabi and SamCart share enough similarities to make choosing between them quite difficult. While they function similarly, both apps are designed to achieve different goals and appeal to different audiences. As such, you should…

Use Kajabi if:

• You need multiple standalone websites.
• You offer other products than online courses.
• You want better community engagement features.
• You love using templates to organize and speed up your activities.

Click here to get started with Kajabi!

Use SamCart if:

• You want to optimize your sales process.
• You want to build stunning landing pages with ease.
• You want an affordable, easy-to-use tool for creating and promoting courses.
• You want built-in A/B testing tools to help determine what works and what doesn’t.

Click here to get started with SamCart!

Note: If you’re still looking for the best fit for your needs, we compared Kajabi to some other great online learning platforms like Teachable, Thinkific, and more. For another shopping cart platform review, check out our ThriveCart vs Kajabi comparison.