Kajabi was originally an idea by Kenny Reuter, who wanted to start a side-business teaching people how to make toys online. He was not passionate about teaching online but he was passionate to make it easier for people who wanted to share their knowledge online.
The vision was simple. Kajabi founders Kenny Rueter and Travis Rosser knew they wanted to help people monetize their knowledge and premium digital content online. They needed a platform that made it easy for entrepreneurs to do this.
Kajabi is a popular online course creator. It is one of the most popular online learning platforms today. Kajabi has grown to be the online learning platform it is today since its inception in 2010. It has helped thousands of people escape from jobs that don’t suit them anymore and have enabled them to realize their dreams.
This overview will provide a basic understanding of Kajabi. This includes online course creation, marketing, pricing, and so much more. This will give you a clear idea of the benefits you’ll get if you choose Kajabi.
For those of you who prefer a more visual experience, here is a video review from Lane Sebring’s YouTube channel. Do check out our article below, however, because it has a comprehensive overview of Kajabi.
General Overview Free Kajabi Alternative
Pros
- A highly integrated platform featuring a lot of built-in tools
- Intuitive marketing tools that help you promote and sell your products.
- User-friendly
- Great customer support
- Intuitive course builder and highly customizable themes
- Wistia is used as a video host
Cons
- Kajabi prices are higher than average
- Users cannot create custom certificates of completion for students on the platform
- Assessment customization is limited.
What is Kajabi?
Kajabi, in a nutshell, is an online course platform that allows its users to take care of their business using only one site. From course creation to marketing and so much more, Kajabi will take care of it for you.
How does Kajabi work?
Kajabi is built to sell. It boasts how simple it is to use. You can start by purchasing a plan. You have three options: Basic, Growth, and Pro. These options will be discussed later in this review.
Once you have selected a plan, you can easily set up your account and upload your content. You can upload your video lectures, give lesson titles and descriptions using the lesson editor.
Assessments are easily done by typing the questions and giving options (if you have chosen the multiple-choice type ).
Assuming this is all done, you’re now ready to market your products. In Kajabi, you can build pipelines. You can use these mechanisms to increase conversion rates and turn prospects into potential students through efficient marketing channels. Landing pages can be added, as well as freebies to get leads to submit their email addresses. Video marketing is another option.
When the prospect becomes a student, you can process payments through the site. All without having to leave Kajabi. Free Kajabi Alternative
Kajabi is almost an “all-in” platform. These features will be discussed in the next sections. Kajabi is able to compete with most online courses platforms, thanks to the many features and benefits it provides.
Why should you choose Kajabi:
As an entrepreneur, of course, you would want to make sure that you make the most out of your investment. Kajabi can help you market valuable content. This guide will help you launch your business and keep it growing.
The business is more than just uploading your course content and waiting for students to sign in. It requires you to build out a curriculum, develop assessments or goals for your students, design your course website, and market it to your target audience. You can do the following and more with Kajabi.
- Create a website
- Make course offerings
- Keep track of student progress
- Manage subscriptions/payments
- Run email marketing campaigns
Kajabi’s price is one thing that has been criticized. It is more expensive than other alternatives, but that’s okay. But, take into account that this takes away the hassle of using expensive plug-ins for your business. There is also the added stress of figuring out how to seamlessly make these plug-ins work with each other. This takes time, effort, and money. All of which could be avoided under one single platform.
Platforms that are well-designed consider what their users need and want. These platforms can be used to create sales pages, email your students, or do all kinds of marketing activities.
If you are a professional looking for ways to market your knowledge, Kajabi is the right choice. It’s a powerful all-in-one solution for creating, marketing, and selling online courses.
Kajabi: A Beginner-Friendly Tool
Not all great teachers are technologically inclined enough to share their knowledge and information online. Even with the willingness of some to learn, the process can be complex and confusing too. Kajabi creators created the platform so that it is accessible and easy to understand even for those with problems with computer work.
It uses a visual layout which makes it easy to use and intuitive. Kajabi’s drag-and-drop editor will make it easy to start an online business, even if you don’t know how to code.
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Almost “all-in-one”
Kajabi can be used for most things, with the exception of a few features that are still being developed by developers. As mentioned earlier, you would not need to spend a lot of time finding out which plug-ins or extensions work together well. Imagine, one update could cause these plug-ins to disrupt your business processes.
If you want to save yourself the headache, Kajabi already has excellent tools for creating landing pages and sales funnels and converting visitors into customers. You can create and market courses using this platform. You can provide coupons for discounts to entice your potential students, follow-up leads, and handle payments without leaving the Kajabi website.
As a busy entrepreneur with not a lot of free time on my hands, I enjoy the email marketing and funnel creations of Kajabi. I could easily automate follow-up sequences, and it’s effortless to do too. Free Kajabi Alternative
Overall, Kajabi fulfills more than other platforms can do with what it offers.
Tutorials
For people who are complete beginners, there could be some doubt on the truthfulness of this “easy-to-use” claim. But they will be pleasantly surprised to find out that it is indeed true.
Kajabi offers a lot of support to its users. The Kajabi Assistant Bar gives you access to many searchable tutorials. Simply head over to the top and type out whatever query you might have. It will show you related tutorials.
Second, under the Kajabi University, you can check out a catalog of tutorials and videos to get you started with creating and developing your business. These topics include creating online courses, marketing on social media, setting up payments, and creating your product pages.
These tutorials are available in video and text formats for your convenience.
Third, one unique feature about the onboarding process is the 28-day “Hero Challenge.” It is essentially a month-long crash course to help you get your website launched and your business making its first sale. The challenge covers all you need to know about the platform, as well as some strategies for successfully marketing your products.
If your queries aren’t answered, Kajabi has one of the best customer support out there. If you are a member of the Growth or Pro Plan you will have access to live chat support 24 hours a day. Customer chat support is only available during business hours for Basic Plans. Despite this, the support team responds very quickly. So far, I have not had any problems with how they handle things.
Lastly, there’s a rewards program in Kajabi that is designed to provide incentives for creators who reach their revenue levels and offers some exclusive perks.
Customer Support
If you have got a query that cannot be found in the Kajabi online guides, the next thing you can do is contact customer service. If you have any questions, they can help you. Free Kajabi Alternative
The Growth and Pro Plan gives you access to the Kajabi customer service team 24/7 via live chat.
The Basic Plan does not have 24/7 customer support if you choose to opt for it. However, staff members will only be available Monday through Friday from 9 AM to 7 PM. Although it functions as a ticket system you will receive an answer within one day. They always respond promptly, even with this. They never take too long to reply.
If you’re not confident in your computer skills, the more expensive plans can be worth it. The other two Kajabi plans offer around-the-clock access to support, while the Basic Plan does not.
How to use Kajabi:
Creating a Class:
Course creation in Kajabi is fast, efficient, and customizable. Once you provide a name for the product, head over to the upper right side of your screen, and you can see “New Product.” There are 3 pre-built product blueprints for various digital products. You also have the option to create a custom listing. Let’s go through them one by one:
- Mini-course
- A mini-course contains lesser material than the Online Course, but it is pretty easy to complete. This can be used to gauge customer interest as well as build your brand’s value.
- Online course
- These are full-blown courses your students can take, from workshops to seminars and lectures about your expertise.
- Evergreen Training
- The Evergreen Course will help you keep your product in front of people and make sales. Essentially, after you launch it, it will keep creating passive income for you. Marketing aside, this option allows you to trickle feed your content to your students and keep them interested.
- Blank
- This is an excellent option if you are an advanced user who wants to customize your content.
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To upload your courses, you can use Kajabi’s intuitive editor. These can be uploaded from your computer, Dropbox, or Google Drive.
Kajabi supports a wide variety of file types, so you can include videos, audio, pdf, and text documents in your lessons. Wistia provides video hosting for Kajabi, and it is great because you can upload in bulk too. Free Kajabi Alternative
How to Upload Your Content
Videos
Kajabi provides built-in streaming through Wistia as a video host. You will see an icon and be asked to upload a video or assessment.
You can upload multiple videos at once without worrying about bandwidth. In all the Pricing Plans of Kajabi, you are provided with unlimited bandwidth. Uploads can be made from your computer, Dropbox or Google Drive. You can also upload via URL links. It will not accept URLs from Youtube and Vimeo. The uploader searches for the file type in URLs.
Once your files have been uploaded, Kajabi can automatically transform these uploads into articles that you can edit later on. This saves you the hassle of going through the posts and uploading videos one by one.
Now, with Wistia as the video host, rest assured that alone makes your subscription worth it. Wistia standalone subscriptions can cost $99 per month. If you take a look at the cost, with $20 more, you can already get Kajabi’s Basic Plan at $119/year with its features. This is a great bargain.
Assessments
Assessments can be a great tool to measure student engagement and learning. Students can gauge their understanding of the material by seeing how they do with lessons. This can motivate them to work harder. This feature can be used to receive feedback from students on your products, and for content locking.
It takes less than two minutes. You can create assessments by opening the People tab from the Dashboard. Choose Assessments and then +New Assessment and finish the prompt to begin customizing.
A nifty feature is that when students do not fully succeed on the assessments, it can be set to automatically send out additional materials to help them.
There are some limitations. First, I have observed that the user cannot include both a video and an assessment under the same category.
It does not support randomizing questions, nor question banks. It does however support assessment such as multiple-choice and paragraph-style questions.
Your students can also upload files for you to check through its assignment submission feature.
Photos
For your lessons, you can upload a poster photo. Having pictures help set the tone of your website and gives your student a visual preview of what you have to offer.
Click on the Pick File button to upload images.
Certificates
I would consider Kajabi as an almost “all-in-one” platform because of its inability to natively provide certificates to students who complete the courses. Kajabi allows creators to issue certificates of completion but they cannot be issued onsite.
To create these certificates, you would have to rely on third-party services like Canva, Google Slides, Accredible, or SmartDraw.
Personally, I do not mind this for my business, but some would find it a minor hassle.
Another thing, Kajabi does not indicate the amount of time spent studying the courses or any continuing education credit. This can be a huge deal for people who wish to choose eLearning to earn credit. This should be something that Kajabi creators ought to seriously consider.
Downloads
Even if we call it online students, some do not necessarily stay online for the whole duration of the course. Others opt to download the course materials and do the tasks offline. To make it easier for your students, Kajabi included this feature. This can be found in the Downloads section on the right side of the page.
Students will be able download any material that you have placed while they are in a lesson.
Body
You can choose to add a description or even a transcript for your videos. Some students prefer to read transcripts rather than watching entire videos when they review.
If you choose to only add a description, it will help students know what the lesson is all about and what topics will be discussed in the video. Free Kajabi Alternative
Student Interactions
Community
With eLearning, it would be great for platforms to provide an avenue where students and members can engage with each other and discuss subjects in their course materials, similar to how they would do if they were in a traditional classroom setting. Some have used Facebook groups over the years. To join the group, you will need to be a member of Facebook.
You don’t need to leave Kajabi in order to interact with your students or with each other. Kajabi offers a fully integrated feature called Community. This is one of their tools for student engagement.
You can even set your Community behind a paywall for patrons to gain access. This will enable you to address student questions directly and allow students to share their experiences with one another.
Because the Community can be used as a standalone product. You can also buy access to the discussions for those who don’t want to purchase the whole course.
Organizing Your Topics
One problem that forums have is the lack of organization. It may be hard for both the creator and the students to keep track of specific topics. This is what I observed in a lot of Facebook groups. This makes it difficult to understand your audience and listen to them.
In Kajabi, the page administrator is allowed to organize and reorganize the feeds. They can organize the posts by topic or pin specific posts to improve viewability.
Overall, Kajabi’s Community feature is a significant advantage over its competition. It is beneficial for entrepreneurs with an online course business.
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Content Access
Kajabi allows you to choose how your students will receive your courses. You can either allow them to receive all the classes and resources at once, drip-feed them on a schedule, or lock your content. The last one tends to increase student engagement as there is a requirement to finish the lesson first before accessing the next one. Free Kajabi Alternative
Dripping Course Content
You can choose to drip-feed your courses after a pre-set duration instead of allowing your students to receive everything all at once.
When you drip-feed your content, you can keep your student interested in returning to your page to check for new content. This will also prevent your student from skipping important parts of the course.
It is also a useful feature when choosing a type of membership.
Content Locking
Your student must complete a lesson before they can access the next. An assessment can be given at the end of lessons. You can increase their participation and keep track of how they understand the lesson material.
Course Analytics
Kajabi prides itself on providing the best tools to help entrepreneurs handle their business with the course analytics. What it does is create heatmaps and video stats. Through it, you will get insights on which aspects of your courses are doing well and which ones need to improve on.
Therefore, it shows you information on your courses, affiliates, students, and sales transactions that can help you optimize your products.
Play Rate
Play rate is a way to see how many people have viewed a particular video. Early on, I mentioned how some students opt to read the transcript of the video and download the course material rather than watching.
Average Engagement
This data shows you the average percentage of video your students watched. Since some students prefer to skip some segments of the video, you can get an idea of how well you can keep your students engaged in what you need to say.
Visual Engagement Viewer
With this comes a graphical overlay in your video. This is a great feature for visual learners like me. I am not able to process information well when it’s all presented in blocks of text. I prefer to have my data presented in graphic form.
The Visual Engagement Viewer presents a report of your students’ engagement in specific points of the video. Usually, there is a general downhill trend wherein people tend to stop watching at the start of the outro.
Viewer Heatmaps
Now just because your students opened your videos does not mean that they are watching them. It could have been running in the background, while they did something else. Free Kajabi Alternative
The Viewer Heatmap allows you to see which parts of the viewers are not interesting to your students, and which ones they have viewed repeatedly. This could indicate that the students found these parts interesting or difficult. Thus, there was a need to rewatch to review.
You can trust that Kajabi will provide you with a valuable array of analytic tools to better your content. Your data can be used to create a strategy that will guide your business decisions.
Blogging
A strong blog can do wonders for promoting your business. Students can get updates and additional information about your products, while new customers are introduced. Having a solid blog boosts traffic for you and generates leads that would transform visitors into potential students.
Kajabi still has a lot to do in this area, however. It is not on the same level as what you would have with something like WordPress. But still, the fact that you can place everything in one place without needing to exit Kajabi makes up for its shortcomings.
Basic HTML Know-How
You don’t need to know how to code in order to create your website or customize any Kajabi-related items. However, it is a good idea.
You will need to learn basic programming to personalize your Kajabi blog’s photos. When you upload a photo on top of a blog post, it will show up in the recommended image size. Kajabi works with HTML. To change certain dimensions, you would need to play with HTML. This isn’t too difficult. You can find many tutorials for basic coding by doing a quick internet search.
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Another thing that would probably concern you is text wrapping. You cannot edit the way the text wraps around a picture in the body of your blog unless you deal with the HTML.
Lastly, there is a lack of an image bank in Kajabi. You would have to upload a photo you’ve used previously in another article. These are the things Kajabi will hopefully focus on in his subsequent updates.
Tagging
Kajabi has many great features. However, I find it frustrating that I can’t pick the tags I want to use in my posts. Unlike in other blogs where you can easily refer to previous tags, the tags themselves don’t appear even as suggestions when you type them down.
When you need to add a tag to a post you’re making, it is a pain having to remember which tag you used or put it on a separate list each time you make a blog post. Free Kajabi Alternative
Marketing Tools
These are Kajabi’s most important support for its customers. Kajabi is built to sell. Your business will be safe with so many marketing tools. There are automation, pipelines and many other features. In this section, we will discuss a few features.
Pipelines
Kajabi has a pipeline built into platforms that will simplify sales and marketing. The name itself refers to Kajabi’s goal of transforming the same number of leads to the same number of paying customers. You can have three, fifteen or 100 pipelines depending on which Price Plan you choose.
Kajabi will provide you with a visual representation for your schematics. Editing is simple and intuitive. There is a drag-and-drop editor for you to add videos, offers, images, and other elements that can help you achieve high conversion rates. There are suggestions if you don’t know where to start.
Kajabi provides blueprints to help you start your pipelines. The blueprint you choose will help you set up funnels including landing pages, email automation and offers. This template was carefully crafted by Brendon Burchard, one of the world’s leading high-performance coaches.
With the Pipeline Stats feature, you can monitor the progress of your marketing plans and use it to evaluate the areas that are lagging. This feature allows you to see each page and email of the pipeline and data on your earnings per view.
Affiliate Program
The Growth and Pro Plans are required to access the affiliate program. You and your partners will be able to market your products and the program together. It becomes easier for you to give them the agreed-upon commission. You will have access to a private affiliate dashboard. In it, you can see statistics of clicks, conversions, and other pertinent data to help you market your business.
Automation
Email Marketing
Kajabi makes it easy to start your own business. Depending on your schedules, you can launch email marketing campaigns quickly. This feature lets you choose the sequence of emails, add multiple emails to the set sequence and upsell additional products. Templates are also available to fit your email’s purpose. This freedom is not available in many other options.
Suppose a visitor adds something to their cart but has not yet decided to make the purchase final; you can set up Kajabi to send an email to remind them of your offer. This allows you to track sign-ups automatically from your email campaigns. Just relax and see the improvement in your conversion rates.
You can also use Kajabi to integrate with other email platforms.
Marketing Partners
Kajabi integrations allow you to manage your entire business from one platform. Currently, Kajabi has 10 native integrations. To name a few, it has ConvertKit, Aweber, MailChimp, and Active Campaign. Free Kajabi Alternative
How to Price Your Products
Pricing your courses should take into account several factors, including the time you spent creating and planning it, your fees for expertise, and operational costs.
Once you have determined the price, Kajabi gives a simple method for pricing your products. Head over to the Offers tab found on the left side and click ‘Add New Offer.’
You can sell them individually or package them as a set. After you create a new deal you will be prompt to enter title offers, product and cost. You will now only be able choose one product. However, there will be many options available for bundles and payment options. You can also decide on the currency of your product’s price.
If you are worried about people not being able to afford your course, you can set it up in multiple ways:
- Free
- One-time Payment
- Multiple Payments
- Recurring Payments
You can also generate coupon codes, bulk coupons codes and special offers to apply to your coupon from this page.
Payment Methods
Kajabi uses Stripe or Paypal to process payments. You will be able to customize checkout and create flexible payment options for your students. Kajabi doesn’t charge transaction fees so this comes with the convenience. But, you do have to answer to the cost of its payment method partners.
One convenient thing about partnering with Paypal is that it makes it easier to pay affiliates their commissions through Paypal Mass Pay with an exported list of all your affiliate sales.
Refunds are also made more straightforward. Kajabi allows you to do refunds without needing to leave the site.
Kajabi Pricing
As mentioned earlier, Kajabi’s pricing can seem higher than other platforms. \Most people would probably hesitate to use the platform because of its price.
Kajabi is a never-ending investment. Kajabi is not just a course-building platform. While pricing may be cheaper for other platforms, you may end up paying for three or more different tools for email services, blogs, and sales pipelines. All of these come with your Kajabi subscription. Prices are higher than competitors due to the large suite of tools. But, Kajabi still provides the best value for money out of all other platforms.
All three pricing plans offer unlimited bandwidth, unlimited video hosting via Wistia, and 0% transaction fees. It also has chat support and assessment features.
To check how the plans differ, below is a thorough discussion of each pricing plan. Free Kajabi Alternative
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Basic Plan
The lowest-priced plan starts at $149 monthly. You will only have to pay $119 if you are billed annually.
The basic plan is the most affordable option. However, you are limited to having only 3 products, 1 website, 3 sales pipelines, and around a thousand members. The Kajabi logo branding will remain on all products.
However, landing pages and marketing emails are unlimited. Some of the crucial marketing tools you’d like to use for your business might not be included in the Basic Plan. Despite Kajabi’s superb customer service, you’ll want to keep your questions to office hours. In contrast to the higher plans, who gets access to a live chat with customer care 24/7.
Growth Plan
For $50 more, you can upgrade to this tier and get five times more courses. The monthly payment sets you back $199, but if billed annually, it will cost only $159.
Fortunately, though, even the basic pricing plan has a lot of features to play with. Most plans have the same basic suite of functions, but they scale according to the pricing plan. For example, the Basic plan only allows for 3 products and 3 pipelines, while the Growth plan allows for 15 products and 15 pipelines. So when you buy a higher-tier plan, you are not paying for new functions but expanding the ones you already have. Kajabi also doesn’t charge a transaction fee for any sales made on the site.
The second level allows you to create more products and pipelines as well as members. More reasons to get this plan: white-labeling, affiliate marketing, and automation.
- White-labelling – With this, you can remove Kajabi branding from your website and fully make it your own.
- Affiliate advertising – A popular online sales tactic. Through your affiliates, your products will receive a wider reach. Your affiliates will receive commissions for recommending your products to their audiences.
- Automation – Automation, as previously said, makes it easy for you to follow up with your students. The system then uses a prompt to automatically send out the predetermined response. If a student is falling behind on examinations, for example, you can send them an automatic email with extra course materials. There’s no need for you to manually follow their progress.
As a creator, we are aware that you are not in the business to only make money. You want your products to be of value as well. Business-wise, this is valuable because if people are getting their bang for the buck, they will be more likely to return for more. It is a win-win situation.
Pro Plan
{This is the priciest plan Kajabi has to offer. But it does come with some pretty neat features. You can market up to 100 products, handle 3 sites and at most, have 20,000 members. Because of the number of courses you can market, you can have 25 admin users to help you manage. You also have access to round-the-clock customer support.|This is the most expensive plan offered by Kajabi. It does, however, have some interesting features. You can sell up to 100 products, manage three websites, and have a maximum of 20,000 members. You can have up to 25 admin users to assist you in regulating the amount of courses you can market. You also get access to customer service 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
These features plus all features you would enjoy from both Basic and Growth Plans are included. While there are unlimited landing pages, the advertising emails are limited to two million.
A bonus to getting the Pro Plan is access to the Experts Academy. In it, you will find more information on how to market your brand. Free Kajabi Alternative
If you chose Kajabi’s Pro Plan, you could set billing monthly for $399 or yearly for $319. Take note, this is a massive investment that you would need to consider. Most big companies or those with a good amount of courses to sell choose this option. But if you are just starting or your business does not warrant the need for a Pro Plan yet, then I would suggest the other two plans. Just my two cents in. You would still get to enjoy a lot of what Kajabi has to offer on the budget you set.
Moving to Kajabi
If you’re not new to course creation, you’ve probably utilized various platforms. It’s fantastic that you’re still researching company choices and looking for ways to improve. If you have decided to move to Kajabi, another concern would be how to move all of your data into the platform.
Not to worry, though. Fortunately, you can simply import your members’ names and email using a .csv file. But, you can only do this 500 members at a time. So it would require you to do multiple importations if needed.
Another thing to note is that your members will have to reset their passwords due to a security issue. This is good news for you and your members. Kajabi takes your business’ security seriously. This means that other platforms will not have access to their information once the move is made.
Conclusion
Kajabi is a popular choice for many creators, and it has a lot to offer to your business for the price you choose to pay. It has excellent support, a well-integrated system, and is highly beginner-friendly.
As previously said, Kajabi’s goal is to assist you streamline and profit from your business processes in one place. It gives you the advantage to take your products to new heights thanks to its numerous marketing capabilities.
Now, this review has given you some insight into the benefits and downsides of choosing Kajabi. Overall, I can still say that Kajabi is a wonderful tool to manage your business from creation to marketing. Free Kajabi Alternative
Frequently Asked Questions: Free Kajabi Alternative
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What does Kajabi mean?
- According to its founders, it is an aboriginal word that means “to take flight.”
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Is Kajabi free?
- Currently, Kajabi does not offer a free plan. However, it provides a 14-day trial for you to try out its features.
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Is Kajabi worth the money?
- This is dependent on your business requirements and how you can make the most of Kajabi’s features. Kajabi is well-known for being user-friendly and for having a number of built-in integrations that help streamline business processes. You also receive excellent support.
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Is Kajabi easy to use?
- Yes. Kajabi is easy to use. In fact, because of this, thousands of course creators have it as their platform of choice.
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Is Kajabi accessible via a mobile app?
- Yes. Your students have the convenience of accessing Kajabi via a mobile app. It is available in both iOS and Google Play.
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Can you use your domain?
- Yes. You may establish a custom domain using Kajabi’s branding with the Basic Plan (yourdomaintitle.kajabi.com). With the Growth and Pro Plans, you can opt to erase all traces of Kajabi’s branding and have a website solely focused on you.
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Does Kajabi have transaction fees?
- No. There are no transaction fees, but you can still be subject to pay the standard Stripe merchant processing fee.