Unfortunately for my wallet. I use both. Fortunately for you? You can learn about the differences without blowing money on one that doesn’t work for you. Also newsflash: I’m not a religious cult follower of either one.
They’re the well known name on the block in this sector of sales page builders plus course creation. But does this mean they are better? BIG maybe.
First off, if you’re new to this whole world the books behind the company are fantastic reads. It’s their software that I question at times. Why?
Well let me easily put it into perspective for you. I attended Funnel Hacking Live in 2018. Good times meeting people! But I also learned that Clickfunnels was developed by only one developer. The co-founder. No not Russell Brunson. Todd.
That means if there are problems, there are problems. If there are planned updates? Expect them 2-3 years later.
Oh yeah… still waiting on a true native paypal checkout solution and not using a 3rd party. (yes there is a “native” workaround)
Oh, sorry got a little sidetracked! Yes, clickfunnels… They help you build effective sales pages and have numerous templates in about any industry you could think of. I would say for a drag and drop builder it’s pretty easy to use once you go through the initial trials of noobness.
Although there is some stuff to be desired here. Even as simple as wanting to use an emoji. Nope. Can’t do that. But overall? It’s not bad and you have quite a bit of control over what you design.
I do ABSOLUTELY LOVE the control of mobile vs desktop design. This way you can design specifically for each one in mind without one or the other looking like trash. I wish this was a standard thing across all softwares in the selling product realm.
Also… the split test feature? Pretty slick I must say. Let’s say you’ve come up with two different headlines and don’t know which one to choose. Well… now you can choose both and let the data tell you which one is the winner.
As for course creation. Well, it does the job. It’s nothing fancy by any means. It’s more like Clickfunnels tacked it on as a side dish rather than a main course meal. It definitely ain’t the prettiest either no matter how much tidying up you try to do. But it does work and I’ve used it for selling dance classes.
Overall thoughts on Clickfunnels? It’s definitely catered to marketers. There are lots of slick features such as sharing and importing funnels so that you can plug and play. But there’s also many things missing like what I mentioned with Paypal above. Somethings are hard to overlook. Also I’d argue unless you hire a crazy developer that really knows what they’re doing. Your pages will load piss slow comparatively especially if you need to go over 5mb.
While yes, 5mb is a large page by our standards. Sometimes you need to have some pretty crazy amount of testimonials or before and afters. Whether it’s in gif, or video format. You gotta have them for credibility. This is why many companies who start on Clickfunnels eventually move over to their own server, wordpress, of even shopify if selling physical products.
What a kool word. Which apparently means to “Take Flight” as an aboriginal word. I mess with that! But does Kajabi strike all of my needs?
Well, we were just talking about page speed with Clickfunnels so on that topic Kajabi does a much better job. True story, I made an INTENSE amount of before and after gifs that my page was 97mb. With Kajabi it would still load within 2-3 seconds despite how huge it was.
Obviously a 97mb is unacceptable to me but I didn’t change it till after I managed several sales. So I decided to transform them into movies on autoplay on autoloop with no sound. This reduced it to a still large 21mb but much more acceptable.
Speaking of movies… Kajabi is partnered with Wistia so you get to have Wistia video service for free for all the videos you upload to Kajabi. In case you didn’t know Wistia is pretty bleeping expensive for a video hosting company. Yes they are a sexy option compared to Vimeo which I have to use for Clickfunnels but you’re getting a lot of savings here with Kajabi.
Okay okay… how about building pages? Well, it’s not bad but not great either. It’s definitely not as flexible as clickfunnels but it is certainly more easy to understand and use. There’s also only a handful of templates to choose from which kind of sucks especially if you’re new and don’t know what you’re doing.
One major downside here in my opinion compared to Clickfunnels is that you can’t really adjust for mobile vs desktop pages. You can adjust some margins, but that’s it. Clickfunnels definitely takes the cake on that feature.
But for course building? Oh yes. Kajabi does it right here. Kajabi courses look professional, clean, and sexy. Plus there’s plenty of features to encourage students to continue their education built in. Pretty sure the main course meal for Kajabi is the course builder and the side dish is the sales page builder. It’s pretty much a flip flop with Clickfunnels!
Look… I could probably talk for an entire hour in person about the differences. There’s so many different features to talk about that one does or one doesn’t. Ultimately it’s gonna be up to you to decide which one is right for you based on what you need.
BUT WAIT!
You can actually connect the two of them. Yup and you’ve been able to since at least 2017.
You can use clickfunnels as the sales page builder and seller and Kajabi as the course platform.
I will say Kajabi’s checkout kind of sucks in terms of customizability in comparison. So this may be something you will want to look into.
If I had to choose from scratch all over again?
If we’re strictly speaking for course creation like the title of this blog says. Then I’d likely be leaning towards Kajabi over Clickfunnels by a smidge. I’m kinda lazy nowadays and Kajabi just makes the overall experience easier to set up. Also hence why I'm not using wordpress and using shopify for this blog instead. No one wants a single plugin update to ruin an entire site.
Would love to hear your thoughts!
