Kajabi and Circle are both popular platforms among course creators, coaches, and community builders. But despite their similarities, they serve very different purposes, and that’s where things can get confusing. Kajabi wants to be your all-in-one knowledge monetization platform and Circle is mainly focused on building vibrant, engaged online communities.
While Kajabi is good for the sales and marketing stuff; sales funnels, email sequences, and A/B tests, Circle brings your community to life with live events, active discussions, and a far better member experience.
Choosing between these two depends on what kind of creator you are, what your business needs, and how you want your students or members to experience your product. In this guide, we’ll walk you through the pros, cons, and everything in between.
Comparison Table
Brief Overview
Kajabi
Kajabi is a true all-in-one product. Users get course hosting, a website builder, email marketing, funnels, checkout pages, and even a basic community area, all bundled together in one clean dashboard.
With Kajabi, you can build, sell, and deliver online products in one place. It has a fantastic course builder, with assessments and tracking built-in, email automation, user segmentation, trigger actions, A/B testing and other features. With its Pipelines feature, you can build full marketing funnels without the need for another tool.
But Kajabi is not perfect. Its community feature is basic, it feels like a forum added to a course, not a proper social space for good engagement. It is also quite expensive for beginners and takes more time to fully learn because of its many features.
Circle
Circle was built for engagement and connection. It is not trying to be an all-in-one tool like Kajabi, its goal is for users to build real communities that drive growth.
Circle has great features like live calls and events, discussion threads, an interactive mobile app and well structured membership features. The bad side is that it does not have marketing and sales tools built-in like email marketing, sales funnels and others which means users need to pay for other software for their marketing and sales needs.
Course Creation
Kajabi gives you everything you need for structured, traditional online learning. Courses feel polished and professional. You can drip lessons, lock modules, build quizzes, and even automate follow-up emails based on student behavior.
Circle takes a more social approach to learning. You don’t really “build a course” in the traditional way, instead you organize lessons and content inside a “Space” with discussions, events, and resources. This works really well for cohort-based programs or collaborative learning, but not really for evergreen, standalone courses.
If you want an online course with the structure: video lessons + assessments + tracking + a clean user path → go with Kajabi but if you want a structure like this: live discussions + member interaction + community-driven learning, Circle is a better fit.
Community
Circle was built for community while Kajabi added it because people asked. This means that you can feel the difference clearly. With Circle, you get: taggable members, space organization by topic or membership level, live event scheduling with RSVPs, personalized onboarding, push notifications that don’t feel spammy and more.
In comparison, Kajabi’s community area feels like a traditional forum. It works but does not engage users nearly as much as Circle’s. If your business thrives on member engagement and relationship building, Circle wins here by a landslide.
Marketing & Sales
Kajabi is all about conversion. It is made for selling digital products, and its marketing and sales tools reflect that. With Kajabi, you can build email sequences and automation that respond to how your users interact with your content. You can also create pipelines to help you map out complete journeys, from opt-in to checkout to upsell. Once you pay for Kajabi, you don’t need ConvertKit, Leadpages, or Gumroad because Kajabi has features that do what they do.
Circle on the other hand, does not provide marketing tools. It assumes you’re bringing people in from elsewhere such as your email list, socials, or other platforms.
If you want to build high-converting funnels, track clicks, test copy, and sell without paying for multiple tools, Kajabi is the top choice.
Mobile Experience
Kajabi has a student mobile app that gets the job done. Students can watch lessons, comment in the community, and track their progress.
Circle’s student app actually feels good to use. It has smooth and modern navigation, and conversations feel alive, like in a private Slack or Discord group. It also allows users to send push notifications that drive real engagement.
If your audience is mobile-first, Circle offers a better mobile experience.
Integrations
Because Kajabi wants to be the everything tool for creators, it does not have many integrations. It provides integrations with major tools like Zapier and Stripe but not much else.
Since Circle focuses on community and leaves everything else for other tools to do. It allows users to integrate with many popular tools. Some of the integrations allowed include: Stripe for payments, ConvertKit or ActiveCampaign for emails, Zoom for events, Zapier for automations, Slack for team communication and more. It provides more flexibility in terms of integrations, but this also means more things to manage which might increase complexity.
Analytics
Kajabi provides a full business analytics dashboard for revenue tracking, email open and click rate tracking, course analytics and funnel conversion analytics
Circle’s analytics is focused more on community metrics such as who is posting the most, which topics are getting traction, how members are interacting and so on.
If marketing and sales data are more important to you, Kajabi gives you better numbers. If you’re more interested in community performance data, Circle is your best bet.
Pricing
Kajabi
- Kickstarter: $89/month
- Basic: $149/month
- Growth: $199/month
- Pro: $399/month billed
Circle
- Professional: $89/month
- Business: $199/month
- Enterprise: $419/month
- Full Branded App: Custom Pricing
Both start at the same price but Circle becomes more expensive on higher plans. Because you’ll most likely need to pay for email marketing, landing pages, checkout, and automations separately, Circle might be way more expensive than Kajabi in the long run.
So if you’re looking for lower pricing, Kajabi is the better deal.
Can You Use Kajabi and Circle Together?
Yes you can and it works really well provided you can afford the cost of running both platforms at the same time.
You can use Kajabi to handle your sales pages, checkout, email automations, and course delivery and then automatically send users who sign up on your Kajabi website to Circle for community access using Zapier.
This way, you get the marketing power of Kajabi with the community strength of Circle. It requires a bit more setup, but it works beautifully.
Which One Should You Choose?
Choose Kajabi if you:
- Sell courses or coaching
- Want everything in one place
- Care about funnels, email, and automation
- Prefer structured learning programs
- Want to cut spend on multiple tools
Choose Circle if:
- Community is core to your business
- You want good engagement and conversations between your community members
- You host live events or cohort-based programs
- You have preferred tools for email, checkout, etc.
- You care more about connection than conversion
Final Verdict
Both Kajabi and Circle are excellent platforms, but they serve different purposes. While Kajabi is built for selling, Circle is built for connecting. If you are just getting started, Kajabi’s lower overall cost and all-in-one features make it a good start but If you are an established creator running a community-first business model, Circle is hard to beat.
Or better still, try both of them with their free trial and decide which one works best for your needs or maybe use both of them together.
(can change CTA here to "start free trial")
