LearnDash vs Kajabi in 2026: The 9 Differences That Actually Decide It

Every LearnDash vs Kajabi comparison I have read lines the two up as if they are the same kind of product with different feature checkboxes. They are not. One is a plugin you install on a website you already pay for. The other is the website, the email tool, the checkout, the video host and the support desk, sold as a single monthly bill. Comparing their feature tables is a bit like comparing an engine to a car.

That framing matters more in 2026 than it did a year ago, because both platforms changed underneath their customers this year. Kajabi raised prices across the board and deleted its cheapest plan. LearnDash’s owner folded the brand that had housed it since 2021 and now sells it from a different domain entirely. Neither of those shows up on a feature table, and both of them are the sort of thing you want to know before you commit three years of course content to one of them.

I build on both. I have shipped Kajabi course businesses and I have shipped WordPress and LearnDash builds, so I have no reason to sell you one over the other. Here are the nine differences that actually decide it, with the real 2026 numbers attached.

What Is the Real Difference Between LearnDash and Kajabi?

Strip the marketing off both and the LearnDash vs Kajabi question is a question about ownership, not software.

LearnDash is a plugin. You already have a WordPress site, or you set one up, and LearnDash turns it into a course platform. It brings courses, lessons, topics, quizzes, certificates, progress tracking and drip scheduling. Everything else on that site stays yours to choose: the theme, the checkout, the email tool, the video host, the hosting company.

Kajabi is a hosted platform. You sign up, and the courses, the sales pages, the checkout, the email marketing, the funnels, the community and the video hosting all arrive together, already wired to each other. There is nothing to install and nothing to keep updated.

This is the fork in the road, and almost every other difference in this article grows out of it. Owning a system means you decide every piece and you carry every consequence. Renting one means the vendor decides some pieces for you and carries those consequences on your behalf, in exchange for a monthly fee and the right to change the terms.

Both of those are legitimate answers. The mistake is choosing without noticing that you were being asked the question at all, which is what happens when you compare the two on a feature grid.

Difference 1: What Does LearnDash vs Kajabi Actually Cost in 2026?

Start with the published figures, because the gap is larger than most comparisons admit.

Kajabi’s own pricing page lists three plans. Basic is $179 per month, or $143 per month billed annually, and carries 2,500 contacts, 5 products and 2 admin users. 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 and 26 admin users.

LearnDash is sold as an annual licence for one site, now listed on Liquid Web’s LearnDash page. Essentials is $259 per year, Pro is $399 per year and Elite is $599 per year. Every tier allows unlimited courses and unlimited learners on that one site.

Multiply the Kajabi annual rates out and the year runs $1,716, $2,388 or $4,788. Against a $259 licence, the ratio looks absurd, and it is misleading. LearnDash needs WordPress hosting underneath it, and a course site with video and logged in members needs better hosting than a brochure site does. In my experience a sensible first year on LearnDash lands somewhere between $500 and $900 all in, before anyone’s time is counted.

Difference 2: What Changed on Both Platforms in 2026?

This is the part a feature table cannot show you, and in 2026 it is the most useful thing on the page.

Kajabi restructured its pricing in January 2026. The entry level Kickstarter plan was removed outright, so the cheapest way in went from a low double digit monthly figure to $143 per month on annual billing. Basic’s contact allowance was cut at the same time. Existing customers were not held at their old rates, which is why the change generated the volume of complaint it did. I went through the full picture and the realistic escape routes in a separate piece on the 2026 Kajabi price increase.

LearnDash had a quieter but structurally bigger year. Its owner, Liquid Web, consolidated its WordPress software portfolio in April 2026 and wound down StellarWP, the brand that had held LearnDash since 2021. LearnDash survived as one of the products Liquid Web kept. You can verify the shape of this yourself in about four seconds: type learndash.com into a browser and watch it redirect to a Liquid Web product page. The plugin still ships, licences still renew, and the documentation now lives on Liquid Web’s own docs domain.

Neither of these is a reason to rule a platform out. Both are reasons to check the current terms yourself rather than trusting a comparison article, this one included, that was written before your renewal date.

Difference 3: Which One Has the Better Quiz and Course Engine?

This one is not close, and it is the clearest case where LearnDash wins on merit rather than on price.

LearnDash’s own documentation lists eight quiz question types: single choice, multiple choice, free choice, sorting choice, matrix sorting choice, fill in the blank, assessment survey and essay or open answer. Around them sit question banks, time limits, pass marks, retake rules, certificates tied to results and progression that will not let a learner move on until they have passed.

Kajabi’s help centre documents four question types in an assessment: multiple choice, paragraph, file upload and multiple selection, plus a section divider for grouping. Multiple choice and multiple selection support automatic grading. An assessment holds up to 100 questions, and uploaded files are capped at 10 MB each.

For a lot of course businesses, four types is genuinely enough. A knowledge check after a video module does not need matrix sorting. But if you are running certification, compliance training, cohort based teaching or anything where the assessment is the product rather than a garnish on it, the gap is immediate and you will feel it in week one.

Difference 4: What Does Each Platform Take From Every Sale?

Here the honest answer surprised me, so it is worth showing the arithmetic rather than repeating the usual line about platform fees.

Kajabi’s pricing page lists its own payment processing at 2.9% plus $0.30 on Basic, 2.8% plus $0.30 on Growth and 2.7% plus $0.30 on Pro. Use a third party payment provider instead and Kajabi adds a platform fee on top: 2% on Basic, 1% on Growth and 0.5% on Pro, with PayPal excluded.

LearnDash charges nothing per sale. It connects to Stripe or PayPal directly, so you pay the processor and nobody else. Stripe’s published US rate for online domestic cards is 2.9% plus 30 cents.

Run $100,000 of sales through both at an average order of $200, so 500 transactions. LearnDash with Stripe costs $2,900 in percentage plus $150 in fixed fees, which is $3,050. Kajabi Growth using Kajabi Payments costs $2,800 plus $150, which is $2,950. Kajabi is the cheaper one, by $100. Bring your own gateway to that same Kajabi plan and the extra 1% adds $1,000, which flips it hard the other way.

Difference 5: Who Fixes It at Two in the Morning?

On Kajabi, they do. Servers, uptime, security patches, browser compatibility and video delivery are Kajabi’s problem, and if the platform breaks you open a support ticket and wait. You have no ability to fix it and no obligation to.

On LearnDash, you do. WordPress core updates, plugin updates, PHP versions, backups, security hardening and the odd conflict between two plugins that were both fine yesterday all land on whoever owns the site. A LearnDash site with a caching plugin, a membership plugin and a page builder has more moving parts than a Kajabi account has in total, and moving parts is where failures come from.

This is not an argument against LearnDash. It is an argument for being honest about who is doing that job. Most of the LearnDash rescue work I get called into is not a LearnDash problem at all. It is a site where nobody was ever assigned the maintenance, updates ran themselves for two years, and something finally gave. If you want the detail on what good looks like there, I wrote a full guide to hiring a LearnDash developer.

Difference 6: Which One Gives You Email, Funnels and a Community?

Kajabi, plainly, and this is its strongest argument.

Email marketing, sales pipelines, landing pages, a website, a community area and coaching products are all included in the subscription and already connected to your course data. Someone finishing lesson four can trigger an email sequence without you wiring anything together, because the platform already knows both facts about that person.

LearnDash covers the teaching side. Its licence includes the course and quiz engine, certificates, Stripe and PayPal payments, membership and subscription handling through the bundled MemberDash, and forum discussion through bbPress. Email marketing and video hosting are not included, so you connect an external tool for each. That is normal on WordPress and there is a mature connector for every major email platform, but it is still integration work that somebody has to do and keep working.

The trade is control against convenience. Kajabi’s email tool is decent and it is right there. A dedicated email platform will outperform it, and will also cost more and need connecting. Neither answer is wrong, and the right one depends on how much of your business is marketing automation rather than teaching.

Difference 7: How Far Can You Customise Before You Hit a Wall?

Kajabi gives you themes, a page editor and settings. Inside that, you can make a genuinely good looking site quickly. Outside it, you stop. If you need a custom enrolment flow, a bespoke learner dashboard, a specific integration with a system nobody else uses, or a data structure the platform does not have a concept for, there is no version of Kajabi where that gets built.

LearnDash has no such wall, because it is WordPress. Hooks, filters, custom post types, custom plugins and direct database access are all available, and any developer you hire already knows how to use them. The cost of that freedom is that somebody has to exercise it responsibly, and a site with fifteen half understood plugins is the usual result when nobody does.

Most course businesses never need to go past what Kajabi offers, and I say that as someone who builds custom WordPress work for a living. The businesses that do need it tend to know already, because they are the ones with an existing system that the course platform has to fit alongside rather than replace.

Difference 8: What Happens to Your Content If You Leave?

Ask this before you sign up, not after, because the answer is very different on each side and it is the one nobody checks.

Leaving LearnDash is a database and a media folder. Your courses, lessons, quizzes, learners and progress records live in your own WordPress install, on hosting in your name. You can export them, move them to another host, or hand the whole thing to a developer, and no vendor has to agree to any of it.

Leaving Kajabi is an export project. Text and structure come out reasonably. Video, learner progress, active subscriptions and the automation logic that ties everything together do not simply lift and shift, and subscriptions in particular have to be rebuilt with your payment processor and re-consented by your customers. I went through what a real move off Kajabi involves, and where each alternative lands, in my piece on Kajabi alternatives worth switching to.

None of this makes Kajabi a trap. Plenty of businesses stay for a decade and are glad they did. It does mean the cost of being wrong is asymmetric, and that asymmetry deserves a place in the decision rather than being discovered on the way out.

Difference 9: Which One Gets You Selling Faster?

Kajabi, by a distance, and if you have not launched anything yet this deserves more weight than you are probably giving it.

A first Kajabi course can be live and taking payments in a weekend. Sign up, use a template, upload the videos, connect payments, publish. There is no hosting to buy, no SSL certificate to configure, no plugin conflict to debug and no decision to make about which of six checkout options to use.

A LearnDash build takes longer, because the choices are yours. Hosting, theme, page builder, payment setup and email connection are all real decisions, and each one is a place a first time builder loses a day. Done properly, the result is better and cheaper to run. Done in a hurry by someone learning as they go, it is a site that works but nobody quite understands.

Both approaches produce serious platforms in the end. The Jen’s Cook cooking education platform on my portfolio runs seven courses on Kajabi with membership access, subscription billing and drip content, and it is a genuinely good business on a platform that suits it. The question is not which platform can support a real business. Both can. It is how much of your first ninety days you want to spend building infrastructure instead of finding students.

How Do You Decide Between LearnDash and Kajabi?

Work through these in order. Each step settles part of the LearnDash vs Kajabi question for a concrete reason, which is faster and more honest than weighing two feature lists against each other.

Step 1. Count your real products. Not planned ones, real ones. Kajabi Basic allows 5 and Growth allows 50. If you sell three courses, the cheapest Kajabi plan fits and the product limit is irrelevant to you. If you sell sixty small products, it decides your plan before anything else does.

Step 2. Name who maintains the site. A person, not an intention. If there is no name, LearnDash is a liability rather than a saving and you can stop here.

Step 3. Price the whole stack, not the licence. For LearnDash add hosting, an email tool, video hosting and either your hours or a retainer. For Kajabi add anything you keep paying for outside it. Compare those two totals, because those are the numbers you will actually pay.

Step 4. Test the assessment you actually need. Build your hardest quiz in a Kajabi trial. If you cannot build it with four question types and automatic grading on two of them, LearnDash is your answer and the rest of this list is confirmation.

Step 5. Ask what leaving looks like. Send the export question from difference 8 to both. Read the replies with the assumption that you will need them one day.

Step 6. Run one real checkout on each. Buy your own course for a dollar on both platforms and watch the whole thing: the payment, the receipt, the welcome email, the login, the first lesson. Fifteen minutes of that tells you more than any comparison table, this one included.

Why Do So Many Creators Pick the Wrong One?

Because they choose against the wrong version of themselves.

The most common mistake I see is a first time creator choosing LearnDash on price, having read that it costs $259 against Kajabi’s $2,388, and then spending four months building a site instead of a course. The licence was cheaper. The launch was a year late. Nobody counts that as a platform cost, but it was one.

The second most common runs the other way. An established business with real revenue, a developer on retainer and a WordPress site it already likes moves everything to Kajabi for the convenience, then spends the next two years paying a subscription for tools it already had and losing the customisation it used to rely on. That one is harder to reverse, because by then the content is on the other side of an export.

Underneath both is the same error: choosing for the business you want to be in three years rather than the one you are running this month. Platform decisions are reversible, at a cost, and the cost is much lower early. Optimising your first launch for a scale you have not reached is a way of paying that cost up front for a benefit you never collect.

There is a third pattern worth naming, which is choosing on someone else’s numbers. A creator with fifty products and a compliance requirement reads a review written by someone selling one course to a warm audience, and takes the recommendation at face value. The review was not wrong. It was answering a different question.

How Do You Avoid Getting Stuck on the Wrong Platform?

Keep your email list outside the platform, whichever one you choose. Your list is the only asset that transfers cleanly, and keeping it in a dedicated email tool with its own export means a platform move never threatens your ability to contact your own customers. On Kajabi this costs you some of the bundle’s value. It is worth it.

Keep master copies of every video and every worksheet in your own storage, at full quality, organised by course. Platform video libraries are for delivery, not archival. This one habit turns a migration from a recovery operation into an upload.

Own your domain and your DNS directly at the registrar, never through the platform. It costs nothing, takes ten minutes, and it is the difference between a move that takes an afternoon and a move that involves a support queue.

Re-run the sum once a year, on renewal. Both platforms changed their terms in 2026, and the assumptions behind your original choice have a shelf life. Fifteen minutes with your real revenue, your real product count and both current pricing pages is enough to confirm you are still on the right one.

Last, be suspicious of any answer that arrives too easily, including mine. Anyone who tells you one of these platforms is simply better than the other has not asked you what you are teaching, who is maintaining your site, or what you sell. Those three answers decide it, and they are yours rather than anybody else’s.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is LearnDash actually cheaper than Kajabi?

On software alone, yes, by a wide margin. LearnDash Essentials is $259 per year against $1,716 for a year of Kajabi Basic on annual billing. Add WordPress hosting and a realistic LearnDash year lands somewhere around $500 to $900. The gap narrows once you price your own time or a maintenance retainer into it, and on a very small site with nobody to do that work Kajabi sometimes ends up cheaper in practice.

Does Kajabi take a percentage of my course sales?

Only if you bring your own payment provider. Using Kajabi Payments you pay 2.9% plus $0.30 on Basic, 2.8% plus $0.30 on Growth and 2.7% plus $0.30 on Pro, which is in line with standard card processing. Use a third party provider and Kajabi adds a platform fee on top: 2% on Basic, 1% on Growth and 0.5% on Pro, with PayPal excluded. LearnDash charges nothing per sale, so you pay only your processor.

Can I run LearnDash without knowing WordPress?

You can build a course with it, since the course builder is visual and reasonably friendly. Running the site around it is the harder part: updates, backups, security and the occasional plugin conflict. Plenty of non technical owners do this successfully by paying someone a small monthly retainer to handle maintenance. Doing it with nobody assigned to that job is where LearnDash sites get into trouble.

Is LearnDash still supported after the StellarWP changes in 2026?

Yes. Liquid Web consolidated its WordPress portfolio in April 2026 and wound down the StellarWP brand, and LearnDash was one of the products it kept. The plugin still ships, licences still renew, and it is now sold and documented under Liquid Web directly, which is why learndash.com redirects there. Check the current terms at renewal rather than assuming your original ones carry forward unchanged.

Which one is better for certification or compliance training?

LearnDash, clearly. It documents eight quiz question types against Kajabi’s four, and adds question banks, time limits, pass marks, retake rules, weighted grading on higher tiers and certificates issued on real results. If the assessment is the product rather than a check at the end of a video, that difference decides it on its own.

Can I move from Kajabi to LearnDash later without losing everything?

You can move, but not everything comes with you. Course text and structure export reasonably. Video files, learner progress and active subscriptions do not transfer cleanly, and subscriptions in particular have to be rebuilt with your own payment processor and re-authorised by your customers. Plan a migration as a real project with a communications plan for existing students, not as an export and import.