Explore a detailed New Zenler vs Kajabi comparison. Understand their features, pricing, and user experience to select the best platform for your needs.
By Joanna Taylor • Updated 21 August 2023
If you're a content creator or an educator, you know that choosing the right platform to share your knowledge is vital. New Zenler and Kajabi, both giants in the realm of course creation platforms, are among the top contenders.
But at first glance, both platforms don't seem all that different from each other, and trying out both yourself will cost money and time.
Luckily, we put in the legwork and tested both to determine which came out on top. Our criteria included analyzing the ease of use, pricing, marketing features, and other crucial factors course creators will need when working with a reliable platform.
Let’s get started.
New Zenler and Kajabi both come with several different pricing plans, Zenler with two and Kajabi with three different options.
Zenler comes with the Pro and Premium options:
While they don't advertise it on their main pricing page, Zenler also has a free, BETA plan. This plan is not time-limited but does come with certain feature limitations compared to their paid offerings.
Both are fairly similar, primarily differing in the limits they impose. If your course demands greater resources or features, the Premium plan would be ideal. Here's where the differences between the two lie:
On the other hand, Kajabi has three different pricing models and is comparatively more expensive.
You also get a 14-day free trial if you want to test it out and see if it meets your needs.
Here’s a comparison of the cheapest plans of Zenler and Kajabi side-by-side to give you a clearer picture:
Aside from the monthly email limit, New Zenler outshines Kajabi in all other aspects. It's not only cheaper but also offers greater limits for websites, leads, admins, funnels, and various other features within the plan.
However, don't rush to judgement just yet. There are other aspects that make a good course creation platform, let’s have a look at these.
Getting started on both platforms is as straightforward as it can be. You will be prompted to fill in a few essential details and the platform will do the rest.
Upon creating your account on New Zenler, you will be asked to pick from a few different options about what you want to use the platform for.
Once you’ve selected “Create Courses”, you can then go ahead and enter the primary details about your course, including the Title, Subtitle, and Summary.
You can also opt for New Zenler's Ai tools to create a curriculum for you by taking information from your course summary.
The process is almost identical in Kajabi. Start by entering your course details and uploading a cover picture.
Like New Zenler, Kajabi will automatically draft an outline for your course, which you can then edit as you please. Your course structure typically comprises Modules, with Sub Modules and Lessons branching under them.
New Zenler operates on a similar principle, albeit with a slight terminology change. Instead of modules and lessons, you work with Sections and Lessons. You don't, however, get a substitute for Sub-Modules.
In New Zenler, you have the flexibility to incorporate various types of content within each section, including videos, text, quizzes, and more. There are no restrictions on the number of items you can upload.
Conversely, Kajabi offers a different approach. You can choose to upload either a quiz or a video/audio lesson but not both simultaneously. Within each non-quiz lesson, you have the option to include either a video or an audio file, along with text and a downloadable file.
Both platforms provide a comments feature (or discussions, in Zenler's case) for lessons. The decision to enable or disable this feature is entirely at your discretion.
You also get the content dripping feature where you can choose to release the course gradually after student enrollment instead of all at once.
Both platforms offer a variety of tools designed to keep your students engaged and continuously assessing their progress.
Both platforms offer quizzes and assessment features that enable students to periodically test themselves throughout the course.
In New Zenler, this functionality is categorized into two sections: quizzes and assignments. Quizzes typically feature multiple-choice questions (MCQs), while assignments involve text-based responses to questions.
Select the "Graded" option to set the percentage that your students must achieve to pass the quiz. You can also opt to enable the "Pass this quiz before continuing" checkbox, preventing students from progressing in the course until they successfully pass the quiz.
Your students can also interact directly with instructors through the comment section under their assignments. You can manually grade assignments, leave feedback and mark them as approved or rejected.
Kajabi follows a similar structure with a few nuances. Both assignment questions and multiple-choice questions are categorized under the "Quiz" section. When creating a lesson for a quiz in Kajabi, you have the flexibility to choose the question type, and you can even incorporate multiple question types within the same quiz.
You can manually grade the assignments, and mark a passing grade for automatically graded ones in Kajabi as well. However, it's worth noting that, unlike New Zenler, Kajabi lacks the option to request student resubmission; you can only mark assignments as either Pass or Fail.
Both platforms offer the option to conduct live classes and hold 1-1 sessions with slight, but notable differences.
New Zenler offers integration with Zoom to provide its live session feature. This means you will be able to access all of Zoom's features, including comments, the ability to turn the camera on or off, and more, directly through Zenler.
You also have the option to host 1-1 sessions. Simply mark your availability on the calendar, specify whether the session is paid or free, and your students can effortlessly book their preferred time slot.
Besides these, you can also host webinars and interactive webinars, where participants can turn on their cameras and mics.
Kajabi follows a similar structure for live classes. Go to the settings of your product and scroll down to enable the Live Rooms feature. Provide a title, description, schedule, and decide whether you want the recording to be available once the class is over – and that's all there is to it.
Unlike Zenler, where you can integrate a live class directly within a lesson, Kajabi treats your live sessions separately. Although they are still part of the course, they remain distinct from any of your modules or lessons.
Rather than integrating with a third-party platform to host your sessions, Kajabi conducts them directly on their proprietary video communications tool. It's similar in functionality to Zoom and doesn't have any significant flaws; your decision will ultimately come down to personal preference.
Kajabi also allows 1-1 sessions but these are separate from your course entirely and fall under the “Coaching” tab.
Both platforms provide a community feature, with Kajabi's offering notably excelling in terms of the range of features and the quality of website design.
Right off the bat, you'll notice that Kajabi's community feature boasts a significantly more appealing aesthetic. The design is clean, user-friendly, and everything is neatly displayed for a seamless user experience.
Kajabi communities have Groups and Circles. You use "Groups" to organize discussions by topics, similar to Discord channels. And "Circles" are like private, exclusive areas for a subset of your community, akin to creating a private server within Discord.
Neither of these features are available in Zenler. Their community tool is essentially nothing more than a standard group chat. Even the site design feels a little 2013-esque.
Both Zenler and Kajabi come with an easy-to-use, drag-and-drop website and page builder that doesn't require technical expertise to work with.
However, the user experience and the flexibility of how much of the website you can customize varies between the two platforms.
When it comes to templates, your choices on Zenler are rather limited. While you can customize your website font and its theme colors, that is as far as your options go without having to pay extra.
New Zenler does offer pre-built templates for sale, but they come at an extra cost. For $197, you gain access to approximately 100 templates, and this is the sole option available; there is no lower-priced plan for a smaller selection of templates.
On the other hand, Kajabi offers 11 different website templates for you to select from, all included at no extra cost.
Besides these, both platforms provide essential functionalities, including the ability to upload your logo, customize your domain, and add your own favicon.
The page builder on the two-course creation platforms is pretty similar and very easy to use, even if you don't have much website-building experience. You can choose the page you want to edit and drag and drop “Blocks” or “Elements” you wish to add.
And if you do have technical knowledge, you can put it to use as well. Kajabi and Zenler both offer the feature to add your own custom code to alter parts of the site as you please.
New Zenler and Kajabi come with a series of marketing tools to help you sell your course and keep your existing customers interested. Let's put these head to head to determine which of the two platforms does it better.
Both platforms offer email marketing features, but the functionality, convenience, and additional features you receive vary.
Starting with New Zenler, you get everything you need to get the job done. You can create email lists, send broadcasts, and automate the essentials.
The email automation tool includes everything you might need for a basic campaign. You can create sequences, send webhooks, add tags, and choose a trigger.
A few downsides include the lack of trigger options, you can only choose from the following triggers:
Another drawback is the absence of organization and structure in all email marketing features; everything appears scattered. For instance, you'll find the broadcast and email list options under the “Email Broadcasts” tab, while automations are located under “Courses.”
Kajabi is both similiar and diffrent. You can choose from a series of different templates or use the classic editor to create your own.
You can send broadcast or sequence emails, and there's an upcoming option to send Event emails as well. These Event emails encompass registration emails, reminder emails, and follow-up emails.
Kajabi's email automation options are notably more versatile. You have access to a wide range of triggers and can determine a series of actions that occur when a trigger is activated.
Overall, we found Kajabi to be better in terms of functionality, ease of use, and the number of features available.
You have the option to create funnels on both platforms. You can find these labeled as “Marketing Funnels” on the top bar on Zenler and as “Funnels” in the Marketing tab on Kajabi.
To get started on New Zenler, you have the option to choose from two types of funnels: lead magnet or video series. Once you've completed that step, you can proceed to provide some details about the funnel and then select from seven different themes.
You can then proceed to add pages to your funnels as per your requirements. All of these are pre-made, so you only need to select the sequence in which they appear.
You can also choose to edit any page using the website builder, which can also be directly accessed through the funnels page, along with the email automation and lead generation tools for convenience.
When beginning with funnels on Kajabi, you'll immediately notice a significant difference: rather than just two options, you have the choice of eight distinct funnel types to select from, these include:
Once you choose a blueprint, the rest of the steps are pretty similar to Zenler. You can add pages, edit them with the page builder, rearrange the funnel, and add email automation.
All in all, while pretty similar, the marketing funnels on both platforms have their differences as well. If you want better funnels and a more detailed list of blueprints, Kajabi is the clear winner.
You can set up an affiliate program for your students to share and promote your course for a commission on both platforms. However, as with the other marketing features, there are a few notable differences.
The affiliate program option only comes with the Growth and Pro plans on Kajabi, while Zenler allows it on both the Pro and Premium Plans.
Getting started on New Zenler is as easy as putting in your affiliate's name, email address, commission, and a few other essential details. Or you could also import users in bulk from a CSV.
Zenler allows you the flexibility to determine the duration of the affiliate link's cookie, which essentially dictates how long a user can sign up for the course after clicking the link and still ensure the affiliate receives a commission for the referral. This is not possible with Kajabi where the cookie duration is 30 days by default and cannot be changed.
However, in Kjabi you can choose a different commission for the affiliate for each of your courses, this is not the case with Zenler.
Another difference that sets Kajabi apart is its capability to enable users to become affiliates without the need for manual intervention on your part. This is not possible with Zenler where you have to manually enter contacts as affiliates.
Overall, both platforms' affiliate programs come with their own set of advantages and disadvantages, making it challenging to declare a clear winner. Your decision will boil down to which of the two you personally prefer.
Creating blogs that rank on Google is essential if you want to spread the word about your courses through more than just email campaigns. Both Zenler and Kajabi offer the feature.
With Zenler you can navigate to the “Site” tab on the top bar and click on the “Blog” option on the left sidebar to get started. Kajabi has the option available under the “Website” tab on the left sidebar.
There are only a basic few necessities for creating an SEO-friendly blog post and both platforms fulfill these.
You can add the meta title, description, and images without much hassle on both Kajabi and Zenler.
You can also edit the slug of the URL according to your preferences. From an SEO perspective, these should be short and to the point.
However, Kajabi does have a slight advantage; you can upload audio or video content on the blog natively, while on Zenler you would have to embed it from YouTube.
On the other hand, if you wish to add your own custom code, you can do that directly from the blog page on Zenler, while with Kajabi you will have to navigate to the Pages tab from your left sidebar.
Both Zenler and Kajabi come with Android and iOS mobile apps.
Starting off with Zenler, you'll find the home screen to be your central hub, displaying all the courses you're enrolled in. With a simple click on a course card image, you can dive right into the course curriculum.
Once inside a course, the app allows you to pick up where you left off, ensuring a seamless learning journey. Additionally, the app integrates a built-in community feature, providing students with direct access to engage with their peers and instructors.
You can tailor the app's branding, including the app logo and theme color, to align it with your school's identity. One standout feature is the ability to send push notifications, enabling you to keep your students informed and engaged with your content.
Kajabi’s mobile app is similar. For course customers, accessing content is a breeze - they can simply download the Kajabi mobile app, sign in, and find their purchased course products hosted on Kajabi.
Though customization options are somewhat limited, users can personalize the app with their logo and color scheme. While the app initially sports Kajabi's branding, it adopts the course creator's branding once users log in.
A minor drawback is that users cannot access communities within the same app; they need to download a separate one for that purpose. This can be frustrating and eat up extra space on your phone.
Neither of the two apps lags behind when it comes to integrations. Here are all the apps Kajabi integrates with:
Here are all platforms Zenler integrates with:
Choosing between New Zenler and Kajabi boils down to your priorities as a course creator. If budget-friendliness, flexibility, and improved limits are your main concerns, New Zenler's offers a compelling option.
However, if you prioritize a more robust feature set, versatile marketing features, and a polished community experience, Kajabi may be the better choice.
New Zenler offers a free Beta plan, while Kajabi provides a generous 14-day free trial. If you're finding it challenging to make a decision, consider giving both a test run to experience them firsthand and make an informed choice.
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