If you’re looking to sell courses online, you’ve more likely come across Squarespace and Kajabi. These all-in-one platforms offer website builders that let you create websites and landing pages without coding knowledge and sell courses and memberships directly through the platform.
Kajabi is dedicated to selling digital courses and its premium features come with a premium price tag. Meanwhile, Squarespace lets you sell both physical and digital products and memberships at a much lower cost, but it’s lacking some tools you might need if your focus is online course creation. To help you choose the platform that better suits your business and your resources, keep reading our in-depth comparison below.
Contents
Squarespace vs Kajabi Comparison Chart
| Model | Squarespace | Kajabi |
 |  | |
| Price | Check Price on Squarespace | Check Price on Kajabi |
| Standout Feature | Professionally-designed templates, All-in-one platform | Intuitive all-in-one platform for course creators |
| Ease of Use | Moderate | Moderate |
| Free Trial | 14 Days | 14 Days |
| Monthly Cost | From $12 to $40/month | From $119 to $399/month (a custom plan is available for enterprises) |
| Hosting | Yes, Unlimited | Yes |
| CMS | Built-In | Yes |
| SSL Certificate | Yes | Yes |
| Templates | 60+ templates | 6 |
| Pipelines | No | Yes |
| Quizzes & Progress Bar | No | Yes |
| Affiliate Program | No | On Growth and Pro plans |
| E-Commerce Features | Yes on select plans | N/A |
| SEO | Built-in | N/A |
| Domain Name | Free for one year | N/A |
| Customer Support | 24/7 email support and live chat, help center, community answers | Live chat, email, Kajabi University |
Pricing & Monthly Cost
Squarespace offers more affordable plans for selling memberships
Both Squarespace and Kajabi claim to be all-in-one platforms that will let you get rid of a couple of third-party tools to run your business. Looking at the photo above, you’ll immediately notice the significant difference between the Squarespace and Kajabi plans. Even Squarespace’s highest-tier plan, the Advanced Commerce Plan which lets you sell memberships and subscriptions, only cost a fraction of Kajabi’s Basic Plan.
Meanwhile, Kajabi’s plans vary in terms of the number of products, pipelines (their version of sales funnels), number of admin accounts, contacts, and active members. All of Kajabi’s plans include webinar and event set-ups, quizzes, chat support, and ready-to-use templates.
With Squarespace, you get unlimited storage with all the plans, but its membership features are quite limited compared to Kajabi’s. To be able to create a robust membership platform for your students, you’ll need a third-party plugin like MemberSpace. With that said, even with an additional plugin to consider, Squarespace is still overall more affordable than Kajabi.
Website Builder & Interface
Kajabi lets you design landing pages within its platform
Even if you don’t have prior coding experience, you can easily design website pages using Squarespace and Kajabi’s drag-and-drop website builders. Squarespace offers more free templates to choose from while Kajabi only offers six pre-made layouts that you can play around with to achieve the look that you want. For both platforms, however, you’ll need coding knowledge if you really want to be able to add features that are not pre-built within the templates.
Where Kajabi edges out Squarespace is in its landing page builder. You can easily create a landing page for your sales funnel within Kajabi itself. On Squarespace, you can’t easily get rid of the navigation if you need a sales page for your funnel as doing so will affect the whole site. You’ll need third-party landing page builders like Unbounce or LeadPages for this purpose.
Course Creation Tools
Kajabi has more robust tools for course creators
Squarespace can’t compete against Kajabi when it comes to tools for course creation. As we have mentioned above, you’ll need a third-party tool like MemberSpace to be able to enjoy more features and protect your content on Squarespace. With Squarespace, your paid members get a password to the members’ area. The downside to this is if someone shares that password, your paid content will be compromised. Squarespace also lacks tools such as surveys, quizzes, and webinars–features that are included in Kajabi’s plans.
One of Kajabi’s best features is it lets you add videos and webinars without the need for third-party software like Zoom or EasyWebinar (for evergreen funnels). Kajabi’s quizzes and progress bars are also helpful tools to encourage students to actually digest the content in your course. From the backend to user experience, Kajabi simply wins in the course creation department.
Marketing Tools
Kajabi’s email marketing tool comes with its plans while Squarespace requires an additional (but minimal) fee for this feature
The caveat with most all-in-one marketing platforms is you can’t expect them to be the best at everything. Email marketing is one of the common features where most all-in-one platforms like Squarespace and Kajabi fall short compared to dedicated email marketing software like ConvertKit or ActiveCampaign. With that caveat aside, Kajabi is slightly ahead as it lets you create more automated sequences through its pipelines feature. Kajabi lets you visually design your sales funnel and add the emails that correspond to certain steps in your funnel.
Squarespace’s email marketing tool is quite limited and most users still end up having to use a third-party email marketing software for their business. With that said, if you only require simple automations, then Squarespace is probably more than enough. You’ll need to add an email marketing plan from Squarespace’s four tiers–Starter, Core, Pro, and Max–to be able to start designing and sending broadcasts directly from your Squarespace dashboard.
Third-Party Integrations
Squarespace has more integrations, including e-commerce marketing tools
Integrations is where Squarespace has the edge over Kajabi. It offers more third-party plugins, called Extensions, that let you add a dropshipping store or connect your site with tools like FreshBooks or EZ Texting.
If you want to sell physical products or shirts for your students, Squarespace has better tools for this than Kajabi. With Kajabi, you’ll need to subscribe to Shopify Lite to be able to start selling through your website. With that said, both Squarespace and Kajabi are compatible with Zapier, which opens up a world of automations for either LMS.
Verdict
Squarespace is better for users who are not focused on selling online courses, while Kajabi is one of the best choices for online course creators
If you’re only after a website where you can also sell physical and digital products, Squarespace can do the job–and at a lower cost at that. Squarespace is especially good if you’re on a budget as even with the added third-party tools you might need for your course, Squarespace is still more affordable than Kajabi.
Meanwhile, if you have the budget and a profitable course, go for Kajabi. Kajabi’s robust funnel builder, course creation and marketing tools within its platform save you time from piecing things together. Its built-in webinar feature is super helpful, too. Although, don’t forget that most users still end up getting third-party software like ConvertKit and Drip as Kajabi’s inbuilt tools tend to be lacking.
If you’re looking for an affordable alternative to Kajabi, you may want to consider other learning management systems like Thinkific, Podia, Teachable, or LearnDash (for WordPress websites).
FAQs
If your budget allows, go for Kajabi. If you want to save on monthly costs, however, you can use Squarespace and its MemberSpace plugin.
Yes, Squarespace comes with built-in e-commerce tools that let you sell physical and digital products with ease.
Kajabi doesn’t have an inbuilt e-commerce tool, although you can subscribe to Shopify Lite and embed your store within your Kajabi website.
Yes, both let you try out their platforms for 14 days. Squarespace doesn’t require payment information for you to try it out while Kajabi does.
