Accessally and Kajabi are two of the very best choices that you could make for software that you use for your online course or membership. So, which course platform is right for you – Kajabi vs Accessally? That’s what I’m going to help you decide.
What you’ll learn about each course platform if you keep reading
I’m going to start by giving you a quick summary of everything I’m going to teach you in this video. I’m going to give you the quick answer, but I want you to stay through the entire video. It’s a little more complicated than this quick answer is going to make it seem.
Before I go on to any more details between the differences between Kajabi vs Accessally, I want you to know that I only build courses and memberships on Accessally (affiliate link). I believe in it. I love it. It’s the platform that I know the best.
However, I know that Kajabi is going to be better for some of you. I have reached out and found a really good resource if you want to build your website on Kajabi. Her name is Courtney and that’s all she does – she builds courses and memberships on Kajabi. So if you have follow up questions about Kajabi after watching this video, you can contact her by following this link.
If you have follow up questions about Accessally, go ahead and send me an email: misty@designedforgoodness.com or DM me on Instagram.
Kajabi vs Accessally: What is the difference?
Kajabi is simpler to use, but it is less customizable. You’re stuck with the templates that they provide you, whether that’s a template for a coaching portal, membership or a course. There are some customizations you can make, but they’re limited.
Accessally has a bigger learning curve than Kajabi, but you can do anything you can dream up. There are very few, if any, limitations when it comes to building a course, membership or coaching portal inside of Accessally.
Ultimately, you have to decide which one is more important to you: the easy tech OR the ability to create any type of custom experience for your students that you can dream up.
Pricing
The first thing I’m going to jump into is the price difference between Kajabi vs Accessally. Before I do that, however, I want you to know that I don’t think price is the best way to choose your course platform. Learn more about why in this video.
Both Kajabi and Accessally have three different plans and I recommend at least the middle plan for both course platforms. So the following pricing is for that middle plan.
With Kajabi you are either going to pay $199/month or $1,908/year.
With Accessally, you are going to pay $149/month or $1,296/year.
This, however, is a little deceiving because Kajabi also hosts your website and is your email service provider. Whereas, if you’re going with Accessally, you will need those things separately. Not everybody uses Kajabi for their website, a lot of people already have a website somewhere else and they come to Kajabi just for their courses. So if that’s what you’re doing, then those prices are very comparable.
Accessally is a WordPress plugin, which means if you’re already on WordPress, you probably already have a separate email service provider and your website host. If that’s the case, then those price differences are accurate. However, if you are just starting out then you will also need to pay for website hosting and an email service provider if you choose to go with Accessally.
I recommend Convertkit (affiliate link) for your email service provider. I recommend WPMUDEV (affiliate link) for your hosting. Once you add in those two platforms, the price up for Accessally is $156/month or $1,548/year.
In both cases, Accessally is slightly less expensive than Kajabi, but the difference isn’t quite as large when you consider adding in the hosting and email provider fees.
How many products can I list on Kajabi vs Accessally?
One other thing you should know about the difference between Kajabi vs Accessally, when it comes to pricing, is that Accessally does not limit the number of products you can sell. Even on the least expensive plan, you can sell as many products as you want. With Kajabi, you can only have three products on their least expensive plan. If you have more than 15 products, you’re going to have to upgrade to their top tier plan.
Now, why does this matter?
Most people don’t have 15 courses or 15 memberships. However, there are times where it could matter.
For example, you could have a ‘choose your own adventure’ type membership where it’s not full of courses, but small PDF type eBooks or downloads or printables. If you’re in that situation and you have 20, 30 or 200 products, Accessally is going to be better for you because you can have an unlimited number of products. You could then sell them in a choose your own adventure type membership where people get to choose the next item they have access to.
What does the customer support look like?
Kajabi offers 24/7 support. Anytime or anywhere you need access to support, you can get it. However, Kajabi’s frontline support will sometimes have to ask the supervisor above them so you may end up with a longer wait time for those more complicated questions.
Accessally only offers support from 9am to 5pm United States hours. Whether you’re on the East coast or the West coast, you should have access to their support from 9am-5pm and only Monday through Thursday. However, their frontline support knows all the answers. You will never have to wait for them to go to that next level support. If you plan things right and you work during those hours and have questions during those hours, then you really will not wait any longer than you would with Kajabi.
I will also say that I’ve been online since 2018 and I have never, in that time, found support that I like as much as I do Accessally’s support. That being said, I have never contacted Kajabi support because I don’t build on Kajabi. I leave that to Courtney.
But Accessally’s support? They’re smart as a whip. They understand your questions. They always get back to you within minutes. They all speak English. And they are super kind. They also have very extensive, detailed, well-written and easy to understand tutorials. I can almost always find an answer to my question without even contacting support.
Kajabi vs Accessally Analytics
If you’re looking for regular old analytics like conversion rates, how many people are opting in, the percentage of people who look at your sales page and purchase your course, your churn rate (meaning how long people stay in a membership) or the amount of money you’re earning per user then Kajabi does a better job of this.
Accessally doesn’t provide any of that type of information. However, because Accessally is built on WordPress you can install a Google Analytics plugin and have access to that information quite easily.
If you are looking for analytics that help you determine how to improve a course or membership, then Accessally wins. It will give you bulk quiz or test score results so you can see which quizzes and which questions people were really struggling with. With that information, you can then go and adjust your course curriculum accordingly.
You can also get bulk lesson completion statistics. That allows you to know which lessons people aren’t finishing. What are they finding boring or struggling through? Where are they dropping off? Do they only finish the first three modules and then not finish the rest? You can see those type of analytics in bulk inside of Accessally.
This information can be extremely helpful in improving your course. Why does that matter? Well, it matters because you’re likely a person of integrity who really wants people to get the result you promise from your course. But it also matters for you and the money you make because every time you improve your course, you can bump the price up a little bit because now it’s actually worth more.
What do both course platforms do well?
#1 – Dripped out courses & memberships
Both Kajabi and Accessally will allow you to build memberships and courses where somebody has access to all the content immediately or they can be dripped out over time. Dripped out means they get access to a different module or lesson on some type of regular schedule (3 days, weekly, monthly, etc).
With either course platform you can also have content released based on quiz scores. So somebody has to get a certain percentage correct on Module 1 before they can graduate to Module 2.
Accessally allows one other option, and this is based off objective completion. Say you have 10 different homework assignments that a student needs to do or turn in before they’re able to move on to the next module.
You can also build memberships on both platforms.
#2 – Funnels
Both of these allow you to build funnels. This means you can upsell, downsell, add order bumps, things like that. These strategies can help you make more money than you would otherwise if you were to use a different course platform.
#3 – Affiliate Programs
You can ask other people, other influencers and creators, to market your course and they get a kickback, or percentage, of whatever that sales price is. This, again, can help you sell more of your course than you could on your own. Both programs are really good at doing that.
#4 – Graded Quizzes
#5 – Blog
#6 – Create a community
You could have a Facebook-like community that is inside of and part of your program. This is a great idea to help people stay on task and engaged. There aren’t any distractions to scroll.
#7 – Q&A
Each course platform allows for students to submit questions to a teacher and get responses.
#8 – Cross selling dashboard
I do like Accessally’s a little bit more so let me explain why.
Inside of Kajabi somebody needs to actually navigate over to the dashboard of all your products. So if you have more than one course, there’s a place in Kajabi where you can list all the courses that that person does not yet have access to. They can go buy that without you having to send them an email and sell the course to them. They can find that inside of your portal. However, only the courses they don’t have access to are there.
In Accessally, that dashboard has all the courses that they do and don’t have access to. The ones they have access to are in color and the ones they don’t have access to are in black and white. So every time someone logs in they’re seeing what they don’t have access to. They go to that homepage, that dashboard, and click on the course they want to log into. While they’re on that page they see everything they don’t have access to. The curiosity alone can encourage them to purchase more from you.
So while I love that you can at least access those things inside of Kajabi, that’s a thing that not all programs offer, I like the way Accessally does it a little better.
#9 – Opt-in Quizzes
#10 – Discounted Trial period
Both course platforms allow you to offer not just free trials, but discounted trials. Why does that matter?
Well, if you give a free trial for a week, people have to then come back and enter their payment information in order to continue that trial.
If you give a $1 trial, they’re entering their payment information.The default is that they are going to stay in the membership and they have to cancel in order to not get charged. It shows more confidence and it’s more likely that people are going to continue in the membership when you can offer a discounted trial instead of just a free trial. Not all platforms offer that, but both Kajabi and Accessally do.
#11 – No sales cut
In the Kajabi vs Accessally comparison, neither are going to charge you a percentage of what you sell. There will be a credit card processing fee, which will be the same anywhere you go, but they are not charging a percentage of what you sell on top of that credit card processing fee. There are a lot of programs out there that allow you to sell courses, but they’re going to take a cut of your profits.
#12 – Tagging
You can tag your students in different ways, like when they complete a quiz or when they complete a module you can add a tag to them that can then fire off emails that you want to send them. Accessally allows you to do more than just that with tags, you can actually show and hide content on your website or inside your course/membership based on the tags that people have. This makes it really fun to create a completely customized experience for people.
#13 – Award Points
You can award points to people when they complete certain actions inside of your course or membership. Kajabi is a little bit more limited than Accessally. You can award points for pretty much anything you can dream up instead of Accessally, but both allow points.
Inside of Accessally, you can award pretty much anything you want:
- free coaching
- free access to a different product
- an automated gift card that you send out to somebody saying “High five! You just earned this prize. Here’s a $5 gift card for you to go get yourself some ice cream at Coldstone.” So there’s more that you can do with the reward.
#14 – Leaderboards
Leaderboards help play on our natural desire for competition. It can encourage people to really use your course and progress through it.
#15 – Visual Editor
In both cases, you can use a visual editor for your website pages. With Accessally, it does not come with that, you have to buy a separate plugin. I recommend Elementor Pro (affiliat link) but there are others that you can use, like Devi or BeaverBuilder, and they integrate really well with Accessally. Kajabi, on the other hand, comes with that builder as part of the package.
Elementor Pro costs $60/year. So it doesn’t significantly increase your expense, but it is an increased expense. You should know that Kajabi’s website builder is far more limited, you’re kind of stuck with the templates they give you. You can change things like colors, but you can’t really move things around a whole lot. They have a lot of different templates you can choose from, but there’s not full customization available. With Accessally, no matter what website builder you choose, you can customize it to look exactly like you want without any type of coding.
What Kajabi does well
Now I want to talk about the things that Kajabi gives you that Accessally does not. If these things are important to you, then you will want to go with Kajabi.
First of all, Kajabi has an app. So people can access your course or your membership via an app. The last time I checked with Courtney, she said the app is pretty darn glitchy, so she doesn’t recommend it. But even the fact that they have it means that over time it is probably going to get better. A lot of people want that for their course or membership.
That being said, as long as your course or membership is mobile friendly people can still access it on their phone. They’ll just have to go to their web browser, Chrome or whatever, and type in your URL and access it there. There is an extra step but it’s still accessible inside of Accessally that way.
When you buy a plan with Kajabi, you aren’t buying just a course platform, they also host your website or blog and provide you with email marketing software. That is not true of Accessally, those things are separate. Kajabi also offers webinars and will host your podcast. So if you have a podcast, and you want everything in one place, Kajabi can be a really great option for that.
Those things are not part of Accessally. AA doesn’t try to do everything, it’s just really, really good at doing courses and memberships. With Kajabi, their main selling point is that it’s everything you want in one place.
What Accessally does well
We’re going to finish up here with the things that Accessally offers and Kajabi does not offer.
One of my favorites (and one of my clients’ favorites) is objective lists.
When somebody watches a video inside of Accessally, I can provide them with a checklist of every single step that they need to take. This is particularly useful for me because I teach tech. So they’re watching a video, but then they can’t remember every single step, they don’t want to miss a step that they might need to take. Having an objective list that they can check off is really helpful.
But even for my clients who don’t teach tech, it has been really helpful for their clients to be given action items. You can do this in a simple text box inside of Kajabi, but people won’t be able to physically check it off. Inside of Accessally, they can check it off and there’ll be a little progress bar that tells them how far they are in that lesson based on those objectives. For some reason, this is really motivating for people and is the number one thing that my students and my clients’ students have given positive feedback on.
As mentioned earlier on, you can then release the next lesson based on the completion of those objectives. That’s not possible in Kajabi because they don’t have objective lists.
Another fun thing is that you can give outcome notes on a quiz. If someone chooses the wrong answer on a quiz question, you can then provide them feedback with why that answer was wrong and link to information where they can go back and review and learn more. I find this to be really useful for deepening my students’ understanding of what they’re learning.
If you have a membership or product that doesn’t include video, you’re going to want to go with Accessally because Kajabi requires you to have a video inside of every lesson.
Accessally allows you to require homework of your students. You can have a simple homework box where they just have to type an answer to a question or you can actually require them to upload and send something to you, a picture or a file that they’ve completed. You can even create a digital workbook where instead of requiring them to print out a PDF version of the workbook, they can just type into a form online and submit that to you.
Right along with that, you can also allow them to take notes inside of Accessally. As they’re watching the video, you can have a box where they can type in notes. They don’t have to do it on a piece of paper in front of them. Those notes are then saved for them and they can come back and access them any time to review.
Next is video bookmarks. You’ve seen this inside of YouTube. You can click and be taken to a very specific place in a video. This makes it so much easier to review a video.
As I mentioned earlier, you can do choose your own adventure inside of Accessally, but not Kajabi.
You can also show and hide content based on tags.
In addition, because Accessally is on WordPress that allows you to create almost anything you can imagine. There are hundreds of thousands of add-ons, which are called plugins, that you can add to WordPress to create a fully customized experience for your people inside of your course.
Last you can create cohorts inside of Accessally. This works really well if you are selling to teachers (or a university or a school or a family) and you want there to be sub-accounts.
For example, I have my kids take a course every year, about online safety, called Family Tech University. One thing that Accessally could do for that program is to allow each of my kids to have their own login. When they type in answers, instead of it going to the course creator, it goes to me, their parent. Then I can review and give them feedback on what they’re doing.
One other use for this could be if you want to have team members in charge of different courses that you offer. Those team members could be the leader of that course instead of you, the course creator. The team member could give feedback.
Two ways to continue learning about either course platform
We’re back where we started with the summary:
Kajabi is easier to use. It is simpler and quicker to learn. However it is less customizable. I will say that it is far more customizable than most of the course platforms I have engaged with online and I’ve used or seen or engaged with most of them. It is still a fantastic choice. It is my #2 recommendation, especially if you’re truly tech allergic but you have to DIY your course because you can’t afford to hire it out.
Accessally has a bigger learning curve. It does. I’m not going to beat around the bush – it is harder to learn. However, it offers great support and really good tutorials. If you want to learn it, you can learn it. And it will allow you to create any type of custom experience that you want your people to have inside of your course or membership.
If you choose Kajabi and you want help with it, Courtney has a course called Kajabi Kickstart that will walk you through the process of DIY-ing that. You can also hire her to do it for you.
If you choose Accessally, I have a course called Accessally Academy that will walk you through setting up AA one tiny step at a time. Or you can hire me to do that for you.
If you’re still considering other platforms, I recommend this video which will help you figure out how to choose a course platform and what really matters.
