Kajabi Alternatives for the "Graduated" and the "Just Looking"
Two people are reading this.
One of you is shopping for a course platform for the first time, and Kajabi keeps coming up as the one you “graduate into” once you're serious. The other already has Kajabi, built the course, and the all-in-one promise isn't covering what's actually missing at the mission level of your business.
You're both looking for a Kajabi alternative, and so are both in the right place. Here's how to read the rest:
If you're shopping first, skip down to the options and go check out the Kajabi full review. You don't need the teardown below.
If you're already in Kajabi, read the next bit first. It's short, then move onto the options.
If You're Already In Kajabi and Overwhelmed (the short version)
I put Kajabi through the same three questions I put every online learning platform through:
can you track something other than a complete click?
can you build different paths for different people?
how much friction is there between watching and doing?
It's genuinely easy to set up if you know what you want, and the all-in-one piece, coaching, community, sales, website, is handy. But it fails in letting you create learning pathways and fails in the amount of student friction there is; straight up, and tracking anything beyond a click means routing everything through the quiz builder as a workaround.
If you want the whole thing with screenshots, that'sthe Kajabi review. If you want to see how it stacks against all 16 platforms, that's theoverview of why they're all garbage.
You already know why you're leaving, and I”m not here to convince you to go. But…if ya found this it’s cause you’re thinking about it. Let's talk about what’s out there.
Your Best Options for Kajabi Alternatives
These are the best three Kajabi alternative online course platforms, depending on what you actually need for your course and your clients.
Option 1: The Honest Twin (Go High Level)
This is mostly for the leaver whose problem with Kajabi is the price or the business tools. First-timers, skip this one. There are much better options.
Go High Level knows exactly who it's competing with. When you create a course, one of the two starting options is literally "import from Kajabi." So if you're leaving over cost or you want the CRM and pipelines Kajabi doesn't do as well, this is the swap that exists for you.
Here's what you need to know going in: it scores the same as Kajabi on all three of my questions. Same conditional on tracking, same fail on pathways, same fail on friction. You are not fixing the learning experience by moving here. You're changing which business tools come in the box.
The one place it differs is how it fails. Kajabi makes you run activities through the quiz builder. Go High Level gives you a real assignment tool, which sounds better until you find out it runs on pass/fail, even when you set it to ungraded. You can't pass/fail a brain dump. You can't pass/fail a reflection. Kajabi's workaround is awkward; this one is awkward and asks you to grade people on things that just need feedback.
Go High Level is also so un-user friendly entire businesses exist to help you figure it out (they’ve white labeled it and you can label it whatever you want; it still smells the same).
Go High Level is for you if you're already running your business in it, or if you're building something closer to a certificate where evaluation is the actual point.
It's not for you if the reason you're leaving Kajabi is the course experience, because you'll land in the same place with a different bill. Still can’t decide? Check out the full Go High Level review.
Option 2: The Structure Trade (systeme.io)
This one might be a good fit no matter why you’re here. If you’re leaving and want control over how lessons are built but still want the all-in-one it’s not a bad fit, of if you’re the first-timer who wants to test an idea before paying for anything, they’ve got that too (and their customer service is pretty good and pretty quick).
This is the one that flips Kajabi's scorecard instead of matching it. Kajabi gets a conditional on tracking and fails pathways and friction. systeme.io does the opposite: it fails tracking outright and gets conditional passes on both pathways and friction.
There is a real trade off and you need to go in eyes wide open:
You give up Kajabi's quiz-builder workaround, which was the only thing letting you see more than a click. What you get back is the ability to build a genuine pick-your-path inside a single lesson using anchors, and a builder that works in rows and columns so you can drag and drop a lesson into whatever shape it actually needs. Kajabi caps you at one media type per lesson. Here you can stack text, audio, video, and an FAQ block on the same page.
The free course with unlimited students and no transaction fees is what makes this workable for a first-timer. You can put people in and see what's landing before you spend anything.
systeme.io is for you if the lesson-level limits are what's making you crazy and you're willing to send people out to a workbook to do the actual work.
It's not for you if you need to see what's happening inside the platform, because it counts mark-as-complete and nothing else.Check the full review.
Option 3: The Community Pick (Heartbeat)
For both the “I need out” and the “I’m just lookin’,” if community is the point.
Straight up, Heartbeat scores worse than Kajabi on my three questions. It fails tracking where Kajabi squeaks by with the quiz workaround, and it fails pathways the same way Kajabi does. It only beats Kajabi on friction, where it takes a conditional pass because everything can genuinely stay inside the platform, discussions, voice notes, file uploads, feedback, and chatting with the instructor from the same lesson page.
It's on this list anyway, because those three questions measure learning mechanics and they don't measure community. If community is what you're actually building around, the scorecard didn’t quite answer that one.
What Heartbeat gives you that Kajabi doesn't: the assignment and feedback experience is the best I've seen in this entire series. Real submissions, past submissions a learner can go back and look at, actual back-and-forth in the comments.
It was a question I didn’t ask because I assumed I wouldn’t find it. Kajabi asks you to hold that conversation inside a quiz-grading tool. Heartbeat built a space for it.
The tradeoff: the platform still won't tell you learning happened. Even after a student submits and I approve it with feedback, progress reads none until they separately click mark complete. Their tagline is "monetize your audience," and that's worth taking at face value.
Heartbeat is for you if you're building community first and want the course to feel integrated instead of bolted on. It's the strongest community platform in the series.
It's not for you if what broke Kajabi for you was not being able to see whether anyone did the work, because this doesn't solve that either. You can see for yourself in the full review of Heartbeat.
Making a Choice for the Best Kajabi Alternative for YOU
Not a single platform in this comparison is a clean win. Every single one fails something. So the question isn't which platform is best, it's which problem you actually need solved, then picking the one that solves that one.
Check out thereviews for all 16 platformsonce you know what you need. Or schedulea strategy sessionand we can hash it out together.
Not sure if you’re ready to pick a platform? I’ve got a quiz for that.