Kajabi Price Increase 2026: 7 Real Alternatives Worth Switching To

My inbox got noticeably busier this year, and not with new project enquiries. It was the same question asked five different ways: the Kajabi price increase just landed on my renewal, do I stay or do I move? Every one of those messages came from someone who had built their whole business inside Kajabi and suddenly found their monthly bill rewritten without a vote.

So this is not another list of nine platforms with a paragraph each. This is what actually changed, what the real alternatives cost right now, and the honest test I use with clients to decide whether switching is worth the disruption or whether staying put is the cheaper answer.

What Actually Changed in the Kajabi Price Increase for 2026?

Before working through alternatives, it helps to separate what Kajabi actually announced from what got repeated secondhand across creator groups. I checked both of Kajabi’s own pages directly rather than trusting the roundup posts, because the numbers being quoted around this vary a lot depending on who is writing.

On its own pricing update announcement, Kajabi describes the change as a price increase across all plans, taking effect on 13 January 2026 for existing customers on their first billing date on or after that date. Kickstarter, Basic, Growth and Pro were all named. Founder and Beta Invite plans were the stated exceptions, and those customers keep their existing pricing. The cost of an extra 5,000 contacts went from $20 to $25 in the same change.

Here is what Kajabi’s public pricing page shows at the time of writing. Basic is $179 per month, or $143 per month billed annually, with 2,500 contacts, 5 products, 2 admin users and 1 website. Growth is $249 per month, or $199 annually, with 25,000 contacts, 50 products and 11 admin users. Pro is $499 per month, or $399 annually, with 100,000 contacts, unlimited products, 26 admin users and 3 websites.

The contact allowance on Basic is the number worth staring at. At 2,500 contacts, a creator with a modest email list can outgrow the entry plan on list size alone, long before their revenue justifies the jump to $249 per month. That is the mechanic that pushes people up a tier, not their course catalogue.

Does the Kajabi Price Increase Actually Justify Switching Platforms?

Being annoyed at a price rise is not the same as having a business reason to move. I have talked several people out of migrating this year, because once we added up the real cost of the move, staying was clearly cheaper. Here is the test I use.

Take your platform subscription for a year and divide it by your annual revenue from that platform. If the answer is under 5 percent, the subscription is not your problem and a migration will cost you more in disrupted launches and rebuilt automations than you will ever save. Between 5 and 15 percent, it is a genuine judgement call that depends on how much of Kajabi you actually use. Above 15 percent, the maths stops being subtle.

The second half of the test is usage. Kajabi bundles courses, email, funnels, a website, payments and a community into one bill. If you genuinely use most of that, the price stops looking unreasonable, because replacing it means paying for four separate tools and doing the integration work yourself. If you use Kajabi purely as a place to host course videos and take payments, you are paying all-in-one prices for a fraction of an all-in-one product.

I want to be fair to Kajabi here, because I build on it as well as away from it. One of the projects in my portfolio, eTrek, is a full Kajabi build with a community and automated onboarding serving over 1,200 members, and Kajabi was the right call for it. When the community and the automated onboarding sequences are the product, having all of that under one roof is worth real money. The problem is not that Kajabi is overpriced in the abstract. It is that a lot of people are paying for the bundle while using one item from it.

What Do the Real Alternatives Cost in 2026?

Every price below was taken from each company’s own pricing page at the time of writing, not from a comparison article. Transaction fees matter as much as the headline number, because a low monthly plan with a percentage cut can quietly cost more than an expensive plan with none.

That last row is the one people misread. LearnDash Essentials is $259 for a year, Pro is $399 and Elite is $599, and those are annual figures rather than monthly ones. Add sensible hosting and you are typically looking at somewhere between $500 and $900 for a full year, against $2,388 for a year of Kajabi Growth billed annually. The gap is not marginal.

What that gap buys back, though, is work. Self-hosting means you own updates, backups, security and the integration between your course plugin and your email tool. That is genuine ongoing responsibility, and pretending otherwise is how people end up unhappy six months after a migration they were sold as a pure saving.

Which 7 Kajabi Alternatives Are Actually Worth Considering?

1. WordPress with LearnDash

This is the option I get asked to build most often, and it is the one with the biggest cost difference over a three year horizon. You own the site, the content, the student data and the URLs. LearnDash handles course structure, drip content, quizzes, certificates, groups and progression logic, and it sits inside a WordPress install you can extend in any direction you like.

The honest trade is that nothing is bundled. Email automation is a separate tool, checkout is a separate plugin, and someone has to keep the stack updated. If you have a developer, or you are comfortable paying for a few hours of maintenance a month, this is usually the strongest long term answer. If you want to touch nothing technical ever, it is the wrong pick.

2. Thinkific

Thinkific is the closest thing to a like for like hosted swap. The course building experience is strong, the student side is clean, and Basic at $54 per month is roughly a third of Kajabi’s entry price. Its Start plan at $109 is where most serious creators land, and that is still well under half of Kajabi Growth.

The cost you have to watch is the 2.9 percent taken on sales through Thinkific Payments. On $100,000 of annual revenue that is $2,900, which wipes out the subscription saving on its own. Run that number against your actual sales volume before treating the lower monthly price as a saving.

3. Teachable

Teachable starts at $39 per month, or $29 billed annually, which looks like the cheapest way off Kajabi until you read the fee line. That Starter plan carries a 7.5 percent transaction fee, on top of standard card processing. Builder at $89 and Growth at $189 drop that to zero when you use their own payment routes.

So Teachable is genuinely cheap for someone selling a little, and reasonably priced for someone selling a lot, with an awkward middle where the fee structure decides the answer for you. Work out your monthly sales first, then pick the plan, rather than starting at the bottom and hoping.

4. LearnWorlds

LearnWorlds is the pick when the learning experience itself is the differentiator. Interactive video, built in assessments and a genuinely capable course player put it closer to a proper training platform than a creator storefront. Starter is $29 per month, Pro Trainer $99 and Learning Center $299, with a $5 per enrolment charge that applies on Starter only.

That per enrolment fee makes Starter unsuitable for anything high volume, and Pro Trainer is where the platform starts making sense. It is a strong option for training providers and certification programmes, and a slightly heavy one for a single course.

5. Podia

Podia is the simplest platform on this list, which is both the reason to choose it and the reason not to. Mover is $42 per month with 5 percent taken on sales, Shaker is $84 with no platform fee, and Earthquaker is $150. Courses, digital downloads, a community and email all sit in one place with very little setup.

You give up depth for that. Automation is basic compared to what Kajabi does, and if the reason you are on Kajabi is its pipelines and email sequences, Podia will feel thin. If you were only ever using Kajabi to sell and deliver, it will feel like relief.

6. A split stack instead of an all-in-one

This is the option almost nobody puts in a listicle, and it is frequently the right one. Rather than replacing one bundle with another bundle, you pick a course platform you actually like and pair it with a dedicated email tool, a dedicated checkout and a dedicated community product. Each part is chosen on merit, and each is replaceable without moving everything else.

The advantage is that no single vendor can reprice your entire business at once. That is precisely what caught people out this year. The cost is more moving parts and a real integration job at the start, which is why I would only recommend it to someone with the appetite to maintain it.

7. Restructuring your Kajabi plan rather than leaving

Sometimes the cheapest change is not a migration at all. If you were pushed up a tier by contact count rather than by revenue, cleaning a bloated email list of unengaged subscribers can drop you back down a plan. If you are paying monthly, switching to annual billing on the same tier is a meaningful reduction: Growth is $249 monthly against $199 annually, which is $600 a year for nothing but a billing change.

It is worth checking whether the new plans Kajabi mentioned, with their higher limits and lower processing fees, work out better for your specific mix of contacts and sales volume than the legacy plan you were moved onto. That comparison takes an afternoon and costs nothing.

How Do You Pick the Right One Without Guessing?

Work through these in order. Each step removes options, so by the end there are usually only one or two candidates left rather than nine.

Step 1. Calculate the ratio. Annual platform cost divided by annual revenue from that platform. Under 5 percent, go straight to option 7 and stop reading. Over 15 percent, keep going.

Step 2. List what you actually use. Open Kajabi and write down every feature you touched in the last 90 days. Not what you intended to use. What you opened. Most people find the list is shorter than they expected.

Step 3. Price the replacement honestly. Include transaction fees at your real sales volume, the email tool you would need separately, and hosting if you are self-hosting. A comparison that stops at the monthly subscription is not a comparison.

Step 4. Cost the migration itself. Count the videos to move, the automations to rebuild, the members to import and the URLs to redirect. Then put a real number on your own time or a quote against it. This is the step people skip, and it is the one that decides whether the switch actually saves money.

Step 5. Test with one course before moving everything. Rebuild your smallest course on the new platform and run a real enrolment through it end to end. You will find out more in that one afternoon than in a month of comparison tables, including this one.

What Does Migrating Off Kajabi Actually Involve?

There is no export button that hands you a working course on another platform, so it is worth knowing the real shape of the job before committing to it. In practice a migration breaks into five pieces, and only one of them is genuinely difficult.

Content. Videos have to be downloaded and re-uploaded, or better, moved to a dedicated video host and embedded. Lesson text, downloads and worksheets come across manually. Tedious, entirely predictable, and easy to hand to an assistant.

Structure. Courses, modules, lessons and any drip or prerequisite logic get rebuilt on the new platform. On LearnDash this maps cleanly, since courses, lessons, topics and quizzes are native concepts rather than approximations.

People. Members and their access levels need exporting and importing, and existing subscriptions need handling carefully so nobody loses access or gets double charged. This is the part that deserves the most care, because a mistake here is visible to every paying customer at once.

Automations. Email sequences, tags and funnel logic do not transfer. They get rebuilt in whatever tool you have chosen. If you have years of accumulated automations, this is the piece that decides your timeline, and it is the reason people who feel locked in genuinely are.

Search visibility. If your sales pages ranked, the new URLs need redirects from the old ones. Skipping this is how a migration turns into a traffic loss that nobody connects back to the platform switch three months later.

Why Did Kajabi Raise Prices Across Every Plan at Once?

Kajabi’s own framing is that its prices had stayed the same since 2015, which after a decade of rising infrastructure and staffing costs is a reasonable thing to say out loud. Video hosting, email delivery and support all cost more to run now than they did then, and a platform that never adjusts eventually adjusts all at once.

The reaction had less to do with the amount than with the shape of it. Removing the cheapest entry tier changes who the product is for, and applying the increase without grandfathering long-term customers signals that tenure carries no weight. Those two decisions together are what turned a pricing update into a migration wave, rather than the percentage itself.

There is a broader pattern here worth noticing, because it is not specific to one company. All-in-one platforms compete on convenience early and monetise switching costs later. The more of your business lives inside one vendor, the less negotiating power you have when their pricing changes, and the more expensive it becomes to react. That dynamic is structural, not a betrayal.

How Do You Avoid Getting Hit by the Next Price Increase?

Whichever platform you land on, the goal is to be in a position where a pricing change is an inconvenience rather than an emergency. A few habits make that real.

Own your email list outside the platform. Export your subscribers on a schedule and keep a current copy somewhere you control. Your list is the single asset that determines how freely you can move, and it is the one most often left sitting inside a vendor’s database.

Keep original video files. Not the compressed copies your platform serves. The masters, in your own storage. Re-uploading from originals is a scheduling problem, whereas re-recording is a project.

Document your automations as you build them. A simple written record of what triggers what turns an automation rebuild from archaeology into data entry. This one habit shortens a migration more than any tool does.

Point your own domain at everything. Sales pages, course access and checkout should live on a domain you own, so the addresses your customers know survive a platform change even when the software behind them does not.

Re-run the ratio once a year. Platform cost against revenue, checked annually, catches this drift early. Prices rise gradually and revenue moves around, and a number that was comfortable two years ago quietly stops being comfortable without anyone noticing.

Frequently Asked Questions

When exactly did the 2026 Kajabi price increase take effect?

Kajabi’s own announcement states the new pricing applies from 13 January 2026 for existing customers, on their first billing date on or after that date. So the date your bill actually changed depends on your individual renewal date rather than being the same for everyone.

Was anyone exempt from the increase?

Yes. Kajabi named Founder and Beta Invite plans as keeping their current pricing. Standard Kickstarter, Basic, Growth and Pro plans were all included in the increase, with no grandfathering based on how long you had been a customer.

Is WordPress with LearnDash really cheaper than Kajabi?

On direct cost, clearly yes. LearnDash Essentials is $259 per year and Pro is $399 per year, plus hosting, against $2,388 for a year of Kajabi Growth billed annually. The fair comparison adds your maintenance time or a support retainer, since self-hosting moves updates, backups and security onto you.

How long does migrating off Kajabi usually take?

Content and structure move faster than people expect, often within a couple of weeks for a small catalogue. Rebuilding email automations and funnel logic is what sets the real timeline, because none of it transfers. A business with years of accumulated sequences should plan in months, not weekends.

Will my students lose access during a migration?

They should not, if it is sequenced properly. The new platform gets built and tested with real enrolments before anything is switched off, members are imported with their existing access levels intact, and the old platform stays live until the new one is confirmed working. Problems here come from rushing the cutover, not from the migration itself.

Can I move just part of my business off Kajabi?

Yes, and it is often the sensible first move. Plenty of people keep courses on Kajabi while moving email to a dedicated tool, or keep their marketing site on Kajabi while running the course itself on LearnDash. A partial move lets you test the new setup with far less risk than switching everything at once.

Staying on Kajabi and want it working harder instead? That is what Kajabi development covers. All plan prices in this article were taken directly from each company’s own pricing page, including Kajabi’s current pricing page, at the time of writing, and pricing changes often enough that it is worth confirming before you decide.