# Elements vs Kajabi

Kajabi is an all-in-one platform for creators and coaches who sell what they know. A creator sells [courses, coaching, communities, memberships, newsletters, podcasts and downloads](https://kajabi.com/), and runs the business around them in the same place: a website, landing pages and sales funnels, email marketing and automations, checkout with subscriptions and payment plans, upsells and order bumps, and analytics. Kajabi charges a monthly plan fee and no share of revenue: ["Kajabi does not take a revenue share as a platform."](https://kajabi.com/pricing) Its plans, Basic, Growth and Pro, are billed monthly or yearly and step up by the number of products and contacts they allow, with marketing email included ([pricing](https://kajabi.com/pricing)). Kajabi Payments charges a percentage plus a fixed fee on each card payment, and a creator who uses another processor pays Kajabi an added transaction fee.

Elements is not a creator platform. It is an environment for building web apps with an AI agent, and a course business uses many of its parts: a Postgres database for courses, lessons and students, sign-in, file uploads, email templates sent through an SMTP provider such as Postmark, scheduled background jobs, live updates for questions and discussions, and Stripe payments for one-time purchases and subscriptions. A creator can describe the course site, booking page and community they want, and an agent builds them as one app on the creator's own server.

With Kajabi you rent a finished school; with your own app you own the building, and its upkeep. On Kajabi, the platform, the page builder and the email sending belong to Kajabi, and the price steps up by plan as your products and contacts grow. An app you build is yours, at a fixed monthly cost that does not depend on how many products or contacts you have, and every part of it shares one database: a student, a coaching client and a newsletter reader are one person, in one list. What you give up is a polished platform someone else maintains, video hosting at scale, and a visual editor for pages and funnels. On Kajabi's entry plan the two can cost about the same; as products and contacts move you up its plans, your own app's cost stays where it was.

## What Kajabi Gives You That Is Hard to Build

Kajabi is a mature, integrated product, and some of what it does, an app you build cannot easily reproduce.

- **Video hosting.** Kajabi hosts and streams your lesson video. An Elements app stores uploads in Postgres, which suits a few short lessons; a large video library needs a separate video host and CDN, which Elements does not include.
- **Funnels and page building without code.** Landing pages, funnels, upsells and order bumps are built in a visual editor. In your own app, each page and each funnel step is something you ask an agent to build.
- **Email deliverability.** Kajabi sends unlimited marketing email on every plan and looks after the sending reputation. Sending from your own app means picking a provider, authenticating your domain with it, and paying more as the list grows.
- **A branded mobile app.** Kajabi's Pro plan includes a [branded mobile app](https://kajabi.com/pricing). An Elements app is a website, opened in a browser.
- **Marketing and AI tools.** Kajabi runs [Amplify](https://kajabi.com/), an ad network, and offers AI tools that draft launches and programs. These belong to Kajabi.
- **No upkeep.** Kajabi keeps the platform running and ships new features. A course site of your own needs looking after too, though an agent can take on most of it.

## What Building It Looks Like

A course business is a set of parts: courses, students, payments, email, bookings and a place to talk. Here is where each Kajabi feature would come from, in Elements or in Stripe:

| Kajabi feature | In an app you build with Elements |
|---|---|
| Courses with lessons, video and notes | Pages in Elements HTML with courses and lessons in your Postgres database, and videos uploaded through a form ([html](/learn/man/html), [database](/learn/man/database), [file upload recipe](/learn/man/recipes/file-upload)) |
| Selling a course | [Stripe Checkout](/learn/man/payments/checkout), with access granted when the payment is fulfilled ([payments](/learn/man/payments)) |
| Memberships and payment plans | Stripe Checkout in subscription mode, with Stripe Billing retrying failed cards and each subscription's status kept in your database ([subscriptions](/learn/man/payments/subscriptions)) |
| Student accounts and progress | Sign-in and sessions, with students and their progress as rows in your own database ([authentication recipe](/learn/man/recipes/authentication)) |
| Coaching sessions | Booking pages with emailed invites and reminders, scheduled as background jobs ([jobs](/learn/man/jobs), [email](/learn/man/email)) |
| Community | A forum or chat where new posts appear in every open browser ([live comments recipe](/learn/man/recipes/live-comments), [channel](/learn/man/channel)) |
| Newsletters and email automations | Email templates in Elements HTML, sent through an SMTP provider, with follow-ups scheduled for later ("in 3 days") ([email](/learn/man/email), [jobs](/learn/man/jobs)) |
| Website and landing pages | Public pages in the same app ([marketing page recipe](/learn/man/recipes/marketing-page)) |
| Revenue and completion analytics | Figures a background job recalculates, on a page that refreshes itself ([live dashboard recipe](/learn/man/recipes/live-dashboard)) |
| Cancel and update a card | Cancel from your app ([subscriptions](/learn/man/payments/subscriptions)), and Stripe's [customer portal](https://stripe.com/billing/pricing) for cards |
| Sales tax | [Stripe Tax](https://stripe.com/tax/pricing), computing and collecting tax in the places you have registered |
| Fraud screening | Stripe [Radar](https://stripe.com/radar/pricing) |
| Video streaming at scale, the visual funnel builder, the branded app and Kajabi's AI and marketing tools | No equivalent. These stay with Kajabi. |

Stripe publishes what it charges for Checkout, Billing, Tax and Radar at [stripe.com/pricing](https://stripe.com/pricing). Because courses, bookings, the community and the newsletter are tables in the same database, you can email everyone who bought one course but not another, or invite last month's coaching clients to the community, without exporting a list.

## The Demos: Lecturemint, Slotnook, Letterhearth and Threadmoor

Four demos show the parts, each built with Elements by an AI agent from one prompt:

- [Lecturemint](https://elements.dev/demos/01a0f469-f275-7996-aabe-5ae0c9242bdc): online watercolor courses. Students buy a course by card, watch lessons with notes below, mark them complete and see their progress, and ask questions under a lesson that the instructor answers live. The instructor sees students, revenue and completion rates per course.
- [Slotnook](https://elements.dev/demos/01a0f40a-56f5-7ef5-b1d1-beeab4e2ca36): booking pages for coaching calls. Meeting types, weekly hours and date overrides, times shown in each guest's own time zone, and emailed calendar invites with reminders, reschedule and cancel.
- [Letterhearth](https://elements.dev/demos/01a0f455-f25d-784c-a9d9-35a5841308ce): a paid newsletter. Free or $8 a month subscriptions by card, and posts the writer schedules and emails, with a teaser of paid posts for free readers.
- [Threadmoor](https://elements.dev/demos/01a0f3f6-d2c9-742c-b9f5-f4a6f72cf35a): a community forum. Topics with photos, quoted replies, likes, marked solutions, live topic lists, a daily email digest and moderator tools.

Each demo page has the exact prompt. Give one to your agent and it builds that same app on your computer, for you to reshape around your own courses. Built together, they are one app with one list of people.

## Adding It Up

Every course business is different, so this section shows how to make the comparison for your own rather than making it for you.

*This is an example, not a customer.* A coach sells two online courses, books paid coaching calls and emails a list of past and prospective students. They pay for two subscriptions:

| Subscription | What it charges by |
|---|---|
| [Kajabi](https://kajabi.com/pricing) | By plan, stepping up with products and contacts, plus a fee on each card payment |
| [Calendly](https://calendly.com/pricing) | By plan, per seat |

To compare, add up what you pay for these each month and set it beside the cost of your own app:

- Elements: $100 a month for two licenses, one on the computer the coach builds with and one on the server the app runs on ([pricing](/pricing)).
- A server from [DigitalOcean](https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/droplets).
- An email provider such as [Postmark](https://postmarkapp.com/pricing), priced by the number of emails sent each month, or [Amazon SES](https://aws.amazon.com/ses/pricing/), metered per email.

Card fees apply either way: Kajabi Payments and [Stripe](https://stripe.com/pricing) each charge a percentage plus a fixed fee per card payment, and Stripe Billing adds a fee on recurring charges.

Where it usually turns:

- **Plans that step up with your business.** Kajabi has you [add capacity or move up a plan](https://kajabi.com/pricing) as products and contacts grow. Your own app's cost does not change with products or contacts; email is the part that grows with your list.
- **Several flat subscriptions add up.** If you also pay for a booking tool, a community platform, a form builder or a CRM, add those, since each becomes a table in the same app.
- **A single plan that covers you is often cheaper to keep.** On Kajabi's entry plan with nothing alongside it, the two can come out about even, and Kajabi includes the email and the upkeep.

The [subscriptions overview](/vs/subscriptions) works through a coach's stack with a separate email tool.

## When to Keep Kajabi

- **You are on Basic and it covers you.** Kajabi's entry plan, billed yearly, can cost about what running your own app does, and it includes the email and the upkeep.
- **Video is the product.** If you host hours of lesson video for many students, Kajabi's streaming is real infrastructure to replace.
- **You build pages and funnels yourself.** If you like changing sales pages in a visual editor without asking anyone, Kajabi's tools are the point.
- **You want the branded app.** Kajabi Pro includes one, and an app you build is a website.
- **You would rather not run software.** Kajabi does the upkeep.

## Questions

### How much does Kajabi cost?

Kajabi charges a monthly plan fee, Basic, Growth or Pro, billed monthly or yearly, and each plan allows more products and contacts than the one below it. Kajabi does not take a revenue share; Kajabi Payments charges a percentage plus a fixed fee on each card payment. The current figures are at kajabi.com/pricing.

### Is my own course app cheaper than Kajabi?

It depends on your plan. Your own Elements app costs $100 a month for the license, plus a server, an email provider and Stripe's fees. Compare that with your Kajabi plan at kajabi.com/pricing, and add any booking, community or email tools you pay for alongside Kajabi. The higher your Kajabi plan and the more tools beside it, the more likely your own app costs less.

### Can an Elements app host course videos?

An Elements app can take video uploads and store them in Postgres, which suits a small number of short lessons. For a large video library or many students streaming at once, use a separate video host and CDN, which Elements does not include. Kajabi hosts and streams video for you.

### Can I move my Kajabi students and content to my own app?

An agent can import students, courses and lesson content into your app's database from exports. Before you switch, confirm with Kajabi and your payment processor how existing subscriptions and payment plans move, since recurring billing is tied to the processor.

### Does Elements send email on its own?

No. Elements renders email from templates written in the same HTML language as your pages and sends it through an SMTP provider you choose, such as Postmark or Amazon SES. The build or buy overview at /vs/subscriptions covers what that adds to the monthly cost.