Kajabi vs Simplero: A Definitive Comparison (May 2023)

After testing both Kajabi and Simplero, and comparing how they help with developing, monetizing, and promoting digital products while building communities, I worked out their differences in every way — and put them into this article 🙂

Kajabi is designed for content creators — it’s an affordable platform, focused on course creation, increasing student engagement, and managing large communities. Meanwhile, Simplero is best for sales teams that want to run automated sequences on segmented customers and create targeted content for them.

It’s easy to just look at subscription costs and make the call. But I want to help you make the best decision for your specific needs, so in this article, I’ll dive deep into the tools’ features and highlight the differences in their approach to:

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

Let’s dive right in and see how Kajabi vs Simplero measure up.

Comparison Summary: Kajabi vs Simplero

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

Kajabi was created in 2010 by Kenny Reuter and Travis Rosser to help entrepreneurs monetize their knowledge and maximize profits. Interestingly, the founders weren’t passionate about teaching online themselves but they’ve helped over 50.000 users teach more than 60 million students.

One of Kajabi’s best features is the community. It includes interesting features like community challenges, polls, blog posts, and virtual meetings to keep your members engaged. Kajabi offers far more than a simple LMS: a full set of tools to create different types of online content, including coaching programs, online courses, and even podcasts. It’s an all-in-one platform that helps you create beautiful websites and high-converting landing pages and tops it all off with excellent marketing automation to sell courses effectively and increase profits.

Kajabi is a great option for content creators who want to manage large communities. It has an impressive track record of empowering entrepreneurs and influencers that are passionate about monetizing their knowledge.

What is Simplero?
“Your business, all in one place”🌎

Simplero is more than just business software, it aims to help entrepreneurs solve some of humanity’s biggest challenges. Remarkably, the company runs on its own software, from the website and billing to customer onboarding — this not only highlights the company’s integrity but also keeps developers in touch with the product.

Simplero is an all-in-one tool for online courses and communities, customer relationship management, email marketing, and sales funnels. It’s simple but very powerful. For one, the website builder allows you to create beautiful websites and landing pages that rival dedicated builders like WordPress. It also gives you the tools to create online courses and other digital content and build communities around them. Finally, it helps you monetize your content and increase profits. Simply set your prices and Simplero handles the rest automatically.

Simplero is great for entrepreneurs that need an integrated tool for all their online business activities. Its marketing automation tools help you personalize your content for target audiences.

Kajabi vs Simplero: Pricing

Simplero provides more value for smaller communities, while Kajabi is best for large communities.

Simplero’s plans are fairly cheaper than Kajabi’s, but they have hard limits on the number of contacts you can have. If you want to increase those limits, it costs an additional $10 per 500 contacts on the starter plan and even more on higher ones.

Kajabi also limits the maximum number of students you can have and, while its entry-level plans are more expensive, it turns out much cheaper than Simplero for large student counts. For example, Simplero’s starter plan is nearly twice as expensive as Kajabi’s highest plan for 100.000 contacts.

Ultimately, Simplero’s pricing favors small businesses that need to manage a small number of contacts and subscribers. However, if you’re confident in your community’s growth and are looking to future-proof your business, it’s worth making the investment into Kajabi. It’s also worth noting that both take 0% transaction fees.

Both offer 14-day free trials.

Kajabi and Simplero offer 14-day free trials that let you test the product risk-free, build trust in its value, and become familiar with the full range of their features. Also, don’t miss out on the opportunity to get a 30-day free trial for the Kajabi starter plan, if you join through an affiliate program 😄

Winner: Simplero is cheaper than Kajabi for small subscriber counts. However, its price increases rapidly as your community grows, so look into Kajabi for subscriber counts above 1000.

Kajabi vs Simplero: Online Courses

Simplero’s course creator allows more customization, but Kajabi provides course templates to help you out.

Kajabi’s course creator is more straightforward than Simplero’s.

Kajabi streamlines the course creation process by allowing you to easily design course outlines within modules.

Once you build the outline, you can effortlessly populate each course with content. It also offers pre-designed course structure blueprints to make content creation even faster. Additionally, the platform features a convenient import function, enabling you to efficiently share content between modules and courses.

Kajabi’s course builder provides dedicated sections for audio and video files that aid your teaching and includes a download section for additional learning material. It also lets you lock modules until students complete lessons or set drip days to control when course content gets released.

Kajabi integrates with Stripe and PayPal so you can monetize your courses. This process only takes a few clicks and you can even add discounts and promo codes. Plus, you can integrate other third-party eCommerce services like Shopify and WooCommerce using Kajabi’s webhooks.

Simplero provides more customizations for online courses.

Simplero’s course creator is very similar to Kajabi, offering many of the same features. But there are more settings for modules, lessons, and courses. For example, you can embed surveys and choose what to display to customers that can access the lesson.

Simplero provides built-in support for certificates, while Kajabi relies on third-party software.

Simplero allows you to award course completion certificates directly from within the app. It extracts the relevant information from the student’s profile and automatically fills in the required fields. You’re also able to customize the congratulatory message and automatically display the passing grade after finishing assessments and quizzes.

Kajabi doesn’t issue certificates onsite. Instead, it relies on tools like Canva and Accredible to design and award certificates to students. Also, it doesn’t show the time spent studying the course either, posing a problem for students that want to use Kajabi to earn e-learning credit.

Nevertheless, these integrations allow you to design certificates completely up to your taste, unlike Simplero, which has limited customizations for certificates.

Winner: Kajabi, narrowly. While it offers similar features, creating courses in Simplero is not as straightforward as in Kajabi.

Kajabi vs Simplero: Communities

Simplero’s communities have more customization options, but Kajabi’s communities offer more options to increase engagement.

Community groups are easier to create and customize in Simplero.

Kajabi and Simplero both allow you to create groups for community members. However, Simplero provides more customization options. For example, you can use a custom URL for the group and set the default language for communication. Also, you can customize notification settings and even add a default prefix for all emails sent to group members.

There are several ways to restrict access to Simplero‘s groups. One way is to automatically add customers that purchase a specified product to a group, locking out other customers. Also, you can manually specify access levels for each community member.

Meanwhile, you can only edit the group name and payment options within Kajabi groups. As a result, you must create an entirely new group if you want different access restriction settings. Also, unlike Simplero, you can’t set custom domains for your groups and must rely on the built-in URLs.

Kajabi’s communities are more engaging than Simplero’s.

Kajabi’s community members can participate in polls and challenges to earn a spot on the leaderboard (the mobile version shown in the image below). Furthermore, they can create posts, comment on them, and reply to other members’ comments. Other community features include forums and a well-featured chat system.

Source: What Is the Community Leaderboard?

Kajabi allows you to organize physical and virtual meetups among members. It provides a live room similar to Zoom or Skype for online meetings or webinars. During meetings, you can share your camera feed, audio, and screen. In addition, you can record meetings and chat with other participants.

On the other hand, Simplero provides built-in engagement badges that display next to members’ names when they comment on posts, forums, and courses. You can also create custom badges and assign conditions for awarding them to members.

Simplero’s membership websites are more customizable.

Unlike Kajabi, which only provides blog posts and forums as user-created content on membership sites, Simplero allows you to add custom web pages to your website. These pages can contain welcome messages, testimonials, or a course catalog.

You can include pages for membership directories, terms of service, and customer service, and Simplero will automatically add the appropriate links to your website’s homepage. These pages are fully customizable and you can even limit which members can view a page.

Winner: Kajabi. While Simplero’s communities are easier to create and customize, Kajabi offers better engagement features, which is the ultimate goal of creating an online community.

Kajabi vs Simplero: Website Management

Simplero allows you to create complete websites using a fully-featured builder, while Kajabi’s websites are little more than storefronts for your products.

Simplero’s websites are highly versatile.

Simplero’s websites allow you to manage your email, product sales, online content, and membership sites from a single platform. These components all communicate with each other and share the same data, so you can control a cohesive system with a single login.

Furthermore, Simplero’s websites are feature-complete. They provide the following functionality without the need for plugins or third-party software:

• data hosting,
• secure logins,
• and many more.

You can also embed videos from YouTube, Dropbox, and other file-sharing sites but it requires edits to the source code.

In contrast, Kajabi’s websites are more like storefronts for marketing your digital content. Although the membership site is more sophisticated than the barebones web pages, it’s pre-built and lacks customization options. Moreover, each site is a standalone web app without any links to any other sites on your account.

Simplero provides a simple but powerful website builder.

All web pages on Simplero — including membership sites, landing pages, and blogs, use the same drag-and-drop builder which allows you to create sections and copy them into any page in your account. What’s more, the drag-and-drop interface allows you to construct web pages within minutes.

Simplero allows you to use custom domains for your websites and provides built-in hosting for them. Also, landing pages automatically synchronize with your email provider and payment service so you don’t waste time creating high-converting content.

On the other hand, you can only create and edit web pages when creating courses in Kajabi.

As a result, creating and previewing your website requires more effort than with Simplero. Also, Kajabi’s website builder feels more like an editor than a fully-featured builder. Creating new pages is not as intuitive and it often makes more sense to customize existing templates instead.

Kajabi offers few but varied website templates, while Simplero only offers landing page templates.

Kajabi provides templates for several types of digital content, from coding and fitness classes to cooking and financial advice. These templates are fully customizable and your edits can be saved as new templates. In addition, Kajabi allows you to import custom templates from your device or cloud storage.

If you’re tech-savvy, Kajabi allows you to use raw HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code to customize templates.

Simplero offers fewer built-in website templates than Kajabi. However, it allows you to create new templates from your custom-built websites. You can create reusable sections and web pages to save time when building websites.

Also, Simplero offers high-converting templates for building landing pages. Simply add your content and branding and you’re good to go.

Winner: Simplero’s versatile websites and fully-featured builder give it an edge over Kajabi.

Kajabi vs Simplero: Marketing Automation

Kajabi and Simplero offer similar automation tools but Simplero has better customer segmentation.

Kajabi provides automation for every feature it offers. You can automate email campaigns, events, forms, and offers. In addition, you can automate courses and execute various actions when your customers fulfill specific conditions. For example, you can send a coupon code when the customer completes the lesson.

Simplero also allows you to automate emails, courses, and offers. For example, you can send discounts and special offers to your customers on birthdays, anniversaries, and other special events. You can also send emails to a group and exclude customers if they have a particular tag.

Both apps allow you to create sales funnels, but Simplero is more powerful.

Kajabi allows you to create efficient sales funnels using a powerful drag-and-drop pipeline builder. You can use this tool to create email sequences and broadcasts, and other marketing automations. What’s more, you can save the best-performing automations as templates for later use.

Meanwhile, Simplero offers powerful segmentation tools that help you target the right customers with the right email campaigns. It provides several group types, tags, and sources that help you filter customers. You can also apply dynamic conditions to further segment customers so you can reach your target audience.

In addition to the segmentation tools, Simplero allows you to build sales pipelines that help you track your deals. You can define custom stages and fields that hold specific information about your deals. Furthermore, you can set up triggers that execute when your deals progress through pipeline stages.

Winner: Simplero. Simplero’s automation features are slightly more advanced than Kajabi’s. Also, it provides better customer segmentation tools.

Kajabi vs Simplero: Integrations

Both platforms rely on built-in tools but Kajabi offers more integrations.

Kajabi and Simplero are designed to be self-reliant with little need for third-party apps and services. Still, Kajabi provides 16 integrations, including Zapier, Mailchimp, and ConvertKit, to supply any missing functionalities.

Both platforms also allow webhooks which you can use to implement custom integrations. However, they require some technical expertise and coding knowledge.

Winner: Kajabi offers native integrations while Simplero doesn’t. These features aren’t vital because both tools are already feature-rich. However, they allow Kajabi to integrate with your existing tech stack.

Kajabi vs Simplero: Pros & Cons

Final Verdict: Kajabi vs Simplero

Kajabi works best as an online course platform, with student engagement as its selling point, while Simplero is a general-purpose platform with contact management as its focus.

 

Understandably, choosing between Kajabi and Simplero is a difficult decision.

At first glance, both platforms seem to offer similar tools, with only a few minor differences in user experience. However, it’s crucial to consider factors like community size, marketing requirements, and third-party integrations. Kajabi delivers an enhanced online course experience for both instructors and learners, while Simplero enables you to accurately sift through numerous contacts and customize your courses for your target audience.

All things considered — in my opinion, you should…

Use Kajabi if:

• You need multiple standalone websites.
• You offer other products than online courses.
• You want better community engagement features.
• You manage communities with over 10,000 members.

Click here to get started with Kajabi!

Use Simplero if:

• You want to nurture customers through a segmentation funnel.
• You want to build visually appealing websites with ease.
• You want a cheap, easy-to-use tool for small communities.

Click here to get started with Simplero’s Online Success Bundle!