Kajabi was originally an idea by Kenny Reuter, who wanted to start a side-business teaching people how to make toys online. Although he was not that passionate about teaching people online, he was passionate about making it easier for people to sell their knowledge online.
The vision was simple. The Kajabi founders, Kenny Rueter & Travis Rosser, knew that they wanted to help others monetize their knowledge online. To do so, they would need a platform that makes the process painless and seamless for entrepreneurs.
Kajabi is a popular online course creator. It is one of the most popular online learning platforms today. Since its launch in 2010, Kajabi grew to become the powerhouse that it is today. It has helped thousands of people escape from jobs that don’t suit them anymore and have enabled them to realize their dreams.
This review will cover the basics of what you need to know about Kajabi. These include marketing, pricing, online course creation, and much more. With this, you will have a good idea of what you will get should you choose Kajabi as your platform.
For those of you who prefer a more visual experience, here is a video review from Lane Sebring’s YouTube channel. To get a comprehensive overview of Kajabi, you may still want to check out our article below.
General Overview Kajabi Sucks
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
- Uses Wistia as a video host
Cons
- Kajabi pricing is higher than average prices
- 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. Kajabi can take care of everything, from course creation to marketing and much more.
How does Kajabi work?
Kajabi is built to sell. It boasts how simple it is to use. The first thing you can do is to purchase a plan. You have three options: Basic, Growth, and Pro. These options will be discussed later in this review.
After you’ve selected a plan, you can set up an account and upload your content. Using the lesson editor, you can upload your video lectures and give the lesson description and titles.
You can easily complete assessments by simply typing the questions and selecting the options (if you’ve chosen the multiple-choice option).
Now you can 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. You can add landing pages, freebies that get leads to enter their email addresses, video marketing, and so on.
Once the prospect is enrolled as a student, payments can be made through the site. All without having to leave Kajabi. Kajabi Sucks
Now, some features make Kajabi an almost “all-in-one” platform. I will talk about them in the later sections of the review. Kajabi is able to compete with most online courses platforms, thanks to the many features and benefits it provides.
Why choose Kajabi?
You want to maximize your investment as an entrepreneur. If you have valuable content that you would like to market, Kajabi provides excellent support for your needs. It includes what you need to jumpstart your business, keep it running and growing.
It’s more than simply uploading course content and waiting for students sign in. You will need to create a course curriculum, set goals and assess your students, make sure your website is attractive to your target audience, and market it. You can do the following and more with Kajabi.
- Create a website
- Create course offerings
- Keep track of student progress
- Manage subscriptions/payments
- Run email marketing campaigns
One criticism Kajabi has is on its price. Admittedly, it is pricier than some alternatives. This eliminates the need to purchase expensive plug-ins and saves you time. You also have to figure out how to make the plug-ins seamlessly work together. 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. Kajabi is a powerful, all-in-one tool for creating, marketing and selling online courses.
Kajabi: A Beginner-Friendly Tool
Many great teachers don’t have the technology skills to share their knowledge online. The process can be complicated and confusing, even for those who are willing to learn. 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. Even without learning how to code, you will be able to create an online business in no time with Kajabi through its drag-and-drop editor.
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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. To entice students to your courses, you can offer discounts, follow up leads, and manage payments from 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. Kajabi Sucks
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. First, the Kajabi Assistant Bar provides access to a lot of searchable tutorials. Simply head over to the top and type out whatever query you might have. It will show you related tutorials.
You can also find videos and tutorials on the Kajabi University to help you get started in creating and growing your business. These topics include creating online courses, marketing on social media, setting up payments, and creating your product pages.
These tutorials come in both video and text format 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. This challenge will teach you everything about the platform and give you strategies to market your products.
If your queries aren’t answered, Kajabi has one of the best customer support out there. Now, if you have the Growth or Pro Plan, you get access to 24/7 round-the-clock customer chat support. Customer chat support is only available during business hours for Basic Plans. Despite this, the support team responds very quickly. I have had no problems so far with their handling of 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. Kajabi Sucks
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. It functions as a ticket system, but you will find an answer within the day. Even with this, they always reply promptly. They never take too long to reply.
This is one of the reasons why the more expensive plans are worth the extra money if you are not confident about your computer skills. 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
- Although it contains less material than the Online Courses, a mini-course is very 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 allows you to keep your product advertised and constantly making sales. Essentially, after you launch it, it will keep creating passive income for you. This option, aside from marketing, allows you to drip feed your content to students to 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 offers video hosting for Kajabi. You can also upload bulk files. Kajabi Sucks
How to Upload Your Content
Videos
Kajabi offers built-in streaming via Wistia as an 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. All Pricing Plans at Kajabi include unlimited bandwidth. Uploads can be made from your computer, Dropbox or Google Drive. You can also upload via URL links. However, take note that it would not accept URLs from Youtube or Vimeo as the uploader looks for the file type in the URL.
After your files are uploaded, Kajabi will automatically convert them into articles you can edit later. 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. You can get Kajabi’s Basic Plan for $119/year if you add $20. This is a fantastic deal.
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. It can also aid in motivating them to work harder. You can also use this feature to get feedback from students about your products and if you opt for content locking.
It takes less than two minutes. Open the People tab in the Dashboard to create assessments. 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.
Second, it does not allow users to randomize the questions or have question banks. Although, it does support assessments such as multiple-choice questions and paragraph-style questions.
Students can also upload files to be checked through the assignment submission feature.
Photos
You can upload a poster photograph for your lessons. 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. While Kajabi does allow creators to give out certificates of completion, you cannot make them onsite.
These certificates can only be created using third-party services such as Canva, Google Slides and Accredible.
This is something I don’t mind doing for my business. However, it would be a hassle for some.
Another thing, Kajabi does not indicate the amount of time spent studying the courses or any continuing education credit. This is a major problem for those who want to use 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. Some students download course materials and complete 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. Students may prefer to review transcripts over watching the entire video.
It is best to add a brief description. This will allow students to understand the content of the lesson and the topics that will be covered in the video. Kajabi Sucks
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.
Conveniently, you do not need to exit Kajabi to interact with your students and with each other. Kajabi has a fully integrated feature called the Community. This is one of their tools for student engagement.
Your Community can be protected with a paywall so that patrons have access. This will enable you to address student questions directly and allow students to share their experiences with one another.
Because you can make the Community available 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
Forums have a problem with 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 hard to listen to your audience and understand them.
Kajabi allows the administrator to organize and reorganize feeds. They can organize the posts by topic or pin specific posts to improve viewability.
Overall, the Community feature is one advantage Kajabi has over its competitors. This feature is very beneficial to entrepreneurs who run an online school.
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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. Kajabi Sucks
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.
Third, it is a valuable feature for when you decide on a membership type.
Content Locking
Content locking forces your student to finish a lesson before they can gain access to the next one. An assessment can be given at the end of lessons. This way, they increase their participation, and you can keep track of their progress in understanding lesson materials.
Course Analytics
Kajabi prides itself on providing the best tools to help entrepreneurs handle their business with the course analytics. It creates heatmaps and videos 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
The play rate gives data on how many people have watched a specific video. I mentioned that some students prefer to download the course material and read the transcript rather than watch the video.
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. I find this quite handy as a visual learner myself. 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
Your students may not be watching your videos just because they opened them. They could have kept it running in the background while they do something else, in the guise of multi-tasking. Kajabi Sucks
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. It could mean that these are parts that they found interesting or they found difficult. This meant that they needed to watch the video again to make sure they understood what was going on.
Kajabi can provide valuable analytic tools that will help you improve your content. Your data can be used to create a strategy that will guide your business decisions.
Blogging
Strong blogs can make a big difference in promoting your company. 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. This is not as good as WordPress. Despite its limitations, Kajabi’s ability to store everything in one place makes up for them.
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.
If you want to personalize the photos in your Kajabi blog, you need to do some basic coding. When you upload a photo on top of a blog post, it will show up in the recommended image size. Kajabi works with HTML. You would have to fiddle with HTML to change some of the dimensions. 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. Without HTML, you cannot change the way text wraps around images in your blog.
Kajabi does not have an image bank. If you wanted to add a photo that you have previously used in other articles, you would need to upload it from your computer or sites like Google Drive again. These are the things Kajabi will hopefully focus on in his subsequent updates.
Tagging
While I enjoy most of Kajabi’s features, one thing that gripes me is the hassle of being unable to pick from existing tags in my post. 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. Kajabi Sucks
Marketing Tools
These are Kajabi’s most vital support for its users. Kajabi is built to sell. With so many marketing features, your business will be in safe hands. 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. Depending on what Price Plan you chose, you can have 3, 15, or 100 pipelines.
Kajabi will give you a visual representation of your schematics, and editing is easy and intuitive. You can add videos, images and offers using the drag-and-drop editor. This will help you increase your conversion rates. If you do not know where to begin, suggestions are also provided.
Kajabi offers some blueprints for its pipelines so that you do not need to start from scratch. Your chosen blueprint will guide you through the setup of funnels, including landing pages, email automation, offers, and much more. 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. You can now give your partners the agreed-upon affiliate commission much easier. A private dashboard will be available to you. 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. You can quickly launch email marketing campaigns depending on the schedules you have set. This feature allows you to decide on the sequence of the mails, add multiple emails to be sent out in the set sequence, and upsell additional offers. Templates are also available to fit your email’s purpose. Not a lot of alternatives offer this much freedom.
Let’s say a visitor adds a product to their cart, but they have not made a decision to buy. Kajabi can send them an email reminding them about your offer. With this, you do not have to manually track the number of sign-ups from your email campaign. Just relax and see the improvement in your conversion rates.
You can also use Kajabi to integrate with other email platforms.
Marketing Partners
You can run your business under one platform, and Kajabi’s integrations help make that happen. Currently, Kajabi has 10 native integrations. To name a few, it has ConvertKit, Aweber, MailChimp, and Active Campaign. Kajabi Sucks
How to Price Your Products
There are several factors that you need to consider when pricing your courses – time spent in planning the content and creating it, charging for your expertise, operational costs, and so on.
Kajabi provides a simple way to price your products once you have established the price. Click on the Offers tab to the left and select ‘Add New Offer’.
You can sell them individually or package them as a set. Once you make a new deal, you will receive a prompt to enter the 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. This comes with the convenience of not paying for transaction fees as Kajabi does not charge you. But, you do have to answer to the cost of its payment method partners.
Partnering with Paypal makes it easy to pay affiliates via Paypal Mass Pay. This includes an exported list of all sales.
It is also easier to request refunds. 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.
Well, one thing I can say is that it is an investment that keeps on giving. Kajabi is not just a course-building platform. Even though it’s a bit more expensive than other platforms, keep in mind that you do not need to pay separately 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. However, of all the platforms, Kajabi offers the most value for money.
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. Kajabi Sucks
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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. Take note, it limits you to 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. Although Kajabi has excellent customer care, you would need to limit your queries to office times. Unlike with the higher plans, they have access to a 24/7 live chat with customer support.
Growth Plan
You can subscribe to this tier for $50 extra and get five times the number of courses. The monthly price is $199, but if you pay it annually, it will just be $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.
You can build new goods, pipelines, and members at the second level. White-labeling, affiliate marketing, and automation are just a few more reasons to acquire this plan.
- White-labelling – With this, you can remove Kajabi branding from your website and fully make it your own.
- Affiliate advertising – well-known online sales strategy. Your products will reach a bigger audience thanks to your affiliates. For suggesting your products to their audiences, your affiliates will be paid commissions.
- 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. Kajabi Sucks
You could schedule billing monthly for $399 or yearly for $319 if you picked Kajabi’s Pro Plan. Take notice that this is a significant investment that you must consider. This is the option that most large firms or those with a large number of courses to sell pick. 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
For those who are not new to course-creating, you probably used other platforms. It is excellent that you are still considering options for your business and thinking of 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 keep in mind is that owing to a security issue, your members will need to reset their passwords. This is excellent news for you and your colleagues. Kajabi is concerned about the safety of your company. This means that after the switch is done, other platforms will no longer have access to their information.
Conclusion
For many creators, Kajabi is a popular choice, and it has a lot to offer for the price you choose to pay. It comes with exceptional customer service, a well-integrated system, and is extremely user-friendly.
As stated earlier, Kajabi aims to help you streamline your business process in one site and make it profitable. With its many marketing features, it gives you the edge to push your products to new heights.
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. Kajabi Sucks
Frequently Asked Questions: Kajabi Sucks
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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?
- Kajabi does not currently have a free plan. It does, however, offer a 14-day trial period during which you can test out its features.
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Is Kajabi worth the money?
- This depends on your business needs and how you can optimize Kajabi’s features. Kajabi is well known for being user-friendly and having a variety of built-in integrations for smoother 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. With a Basic Plan, you can create a custom domain with Kajabi’s branding (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.