Do not skip this article if you are evaluating options for an online course creation platform that can support you in creating and selling courses. We will be comparing two popular software, SamCart vs Kajabi.
SamCart is popular as an online shopping cart solution, and Kajabi is an all-in-one online course creation software. So why are we comparing SamCart vs Kajabi?
It is true; Kajabi is an online course platform created to help course creators teach and monetize courses.
It does not only help you build courses; it also helps you create websites, membership sites, coaching classes, and communities and provides email marketing tools to promote your courses. In other words, Kajabi is an all-in-one course creation platform.
SamCart, on the other hand, started as an online shopping cart software to help its customers to sell physical or digital products through their website, and if you do not have a website, it lets you create a one-page website to sell products.
This still does not help us understand why we compare these platforms.
You might have noticed that I mentioned SamCart “started” as an online shopping cart software, but it has not restricted its capabilities to that. In June 2021, they started offering online courses and entered the knowledge-based business industry.
This is why we compare SamCart with Kajabi to help you pick the right software.
SamCart Vs Kajabi
The Overviews of SamCart
Let’s start by learning about both software.
SamCart is an eCommerce solution founded by two brothers, Brian, and Scott Moran, in 2014 out of necessity. They were facing difficulties in creating a product page, as most shopping cart platforms at that time were complicated.
SamCart is a reliable platform that has the trust of over 30,000 businesses. It has helped its customers process about 2+ billion dollars in sales. In addition, some well-known online course creators use SamCart for their courses, including Lewis Howes (The School of Greatness), Cara Dumaplin (Taking Cara Babies), Nicole Walters (NicoleWalters.com), etc.
Read my in-depth SamCart Review.
Pros and Cons of SamCart
Pros
- SamCart has zero processing fees.
- SamCart is both an eCommerce solution and a course creation platform.
- It offers unlimited courses.
- The features list includes upselling, A/B testing, custom domains, and detailed reporting.
- It supports mobile-responsive pages.
- SamCart provides good material support.
- It has an uncomplicated interface that features drag-and-drop functionality.
- It has a 99.9% uptime.
- SamCart provides a free trial.
- It is SCA, GDPR, and PCI compliant, which means it is safe and secure.
- SamCart is less expensive than Kajabi.
Cons
- SamCart does not have a free plan.
- Some great features, like subscription saver, cart abandonment, and affiliate center, are available only in the higher plans.
- Unlike Kajabi, SamCart relies on integrations for email marketing functionalities.
Key Difference between SamCart and Kajabi
The following are the key difference between SamCart and Kajabi:
The Overviews of Kajabi
Kajabi was founded in 2010 by Kenny Rueter and Travis Rosser. Kajabi could have been a toy company because, in 2009, Kenny built a sprinkler toy for his sons, which attracted the neighbors’ interest.
Over a meeting, Kenny shared with his friend Travis that they could sell the toys online. Soon after realizing that the production, inventory, and shipping could be overwhelming, they decided to sell videos on how to build a toy.
However, they did not find an easy way to sell knowledge online, so they created a platform. This is how Kajabi was born.
Since its launch, Kajabi has helped more than 100,000 entrepreneurs sell 300,000+ products worth over 3.5 billion dollars. Kajabi’s customer list includes big names in the knowledge industry, such as Brendon Burchard (personal development coach), Amy Porterfield (online marketing expert), Brian J. Dixon (business coach), etc.
Read my in-depth Kajabi review.
Pros and Cons of Kajabi
Pros
- Kajabi also has zero transaction fees.
- The Kajabi courses are responsive.
- As compared to SamCart, Kajabi is a step ahead in support, in both material and customer care support.
- Kajabi’s interface is as good as SamCart’s.
- Its uptime status ranges from 99.68% to 100% and is 100% most of the time.
- Kajabi provides a 14-day free trial for all its plans.
- It offers good marketing capabilities.
- Kajabi has a mobile application.
- Kajabi supports 100+ integrable apps.
- It has been included in the 5,000 list of California’s fastest-growing private companies five times in a row.
Cons
- Kajabi is expensive.
- It does not have a free plan.
- Even the higher plans have major restrictions on the number of products and pipelines.
Let’s review the key features of both software.
A Comparison of Features
SamCart Features
Course Creation
SamCart’s course creation interface is sleek, clean, and handy for setting up a course in minutes.
If your course material is a video, text, image, or even audio, you can easily upload it and make it available to your students. In addition, you can also provide downloadable material to your students.
Teaching is a two-way process. Therefore, there needs to be more than providing material or knowledge. It is also important to check if students are absorbing the knowledge.
To do this, you can set up quizzes and worksheets and evaluate their learning on SamCart.
SamCart has a “featured course” option, which means you can highlight any course in the course library.
Not only can you manage your courses, but you can also maintain and manage your students, track their progress, import students, automate functions, etc.
Auto Enroll Technology
SamCart does not like using a login and password to access an area. Hence, they have provided an auto-enroll feature. Once your students buy your course, they can access your member area automatically.
Course Cross-Sells
Here, you can show your other courses on your students’ dashboards. It is like advertising your other courses. If the course material looks promising to the students, they will buy it.
Sales Page
You cannot create a website here, but you can create sales landing pages with almost every element you wish to add. For example, pick up a template from pre-designed templates and replace it with your content.
Content Tier
Here, you can limit access to your content with the help of tiers which can boost your revenue.
Say you have created a course and have included seven lessons on a particular course topic.
You also created two more courses on the same topic, one containing fourteen lessons and the other with twenty-one. You have labeled the tiers “launch,” “plus,” and “advanced” and set three different prices for them.
This is how you can limit the content in the tiers and encourage students to purchase the higher level to access exclusive content.
Subscription Saver
This is my favorite SamCart feature. As its name suggests, a subscription saver helps you save your subscription sales.
When a recurring account defaults on its payment due to card blockage or expiration issues, SamCart immediately lets customers know about it and provides them with the necessary links to change their payment method.
This is how SamCart saves your subscription sales.
Affiliate Center
Affiliates help you sell your products in return for a commission. You can create an affiliate center and manage them right from SamCart.
Digital Payment
Along with traditional payment methods like credit cards, Stripe, or PayPal, SamCart provides digital payment wallets. For example, you can give your customers the option to pay for your courses using Google Pay, Apple Pay, or Microsoft Pay.
PWYW (Pay What You Want)
As the name suggests, Pay What You Want lets you give your customer control of the payment for your products, services, or causes. In other words, this feature allows your customers to pay what they wish for your products.
You might think it is an absurd feature, but let me tell you that some businesses offer PWYW. For example, non-profit organizations use this feature to let donors decide on donation amounts. And businesses can use this feature to build a connection with their customers.
It is a great marketing tool. How? You know that businesses provide one-on-one product offers or sometimes even give away products for free.
Instead of giving away products, you can give customers a PWYW option and have some income.
Businesses or course creators that have recently started can utilize this option to build bonds with their visitors and turn them into customers.
Payment Plans
If you want to provide various payment options to your students, for instance, a free trial, a subscription, or bundles, you have this flexibility in SamCart.
Drip Courses
If you want to sell a course and provide access on specific dates, a drip course schedule can help you do this.
Commerce
SamCart understands the benefits of coupons and discounts, so it lets you create coupons for your courses. It also takes care of the applicable sales tax based on location and other determining factors.
Kajabi Features
A Digital Home
On Kajabi, you can create a complete website to host your courses. In addition, you have many website templates to select and edit with Kajabi’s drag-and-drop content editor.
The editor has various elements, such as countdown timers, opt-in forms, pricing options, and related elements.
Products
Kajabi provides different products. One of them is, of course, a course creation product. You also can create mini-courses, coaching programs, and membership sites.
Drip Schedule
You can drip-schedule your courses. You can decide when to offer your course and how many days it should be accessible to your students.
Revenue optimization
Like SamCart, you can follow up with visitors who have abandoned a cart. You can also set up a one-click upsell to increase your revenue.
Automation
Making a sale requires a couple of steps, like sending an email to the customer or leading them to the thank you page, updating the sales team or a specific team, or providing an affiliate commission. You can automate these actions during the course creation process.
Checkout Page
SamCart is the best here, but Kajabi has done a good job too. You have various tools to edit your checkout page. For example, you can add testimonials or an order bump and edit it with different colors and text styles.
Email Marketing
This feature is the cherry on Kajabi’s online course creator cake. Kajabi allows you to create a pipeline. Pipeline steps include collecting leads, storing them on a list, tagging, sending emails, etc.
In Kajabi, you can build an email list, send them broadcast emails, and even set up an email automation workflow without leaving the Kajabi platform. You also get pre-designed email templates to start sending emails immediately.
That was for the features segment, so let’s move on to other key factors.
A Comparison of Pricing
SamCart Pricing
Kajabi Pricing
Both SamCart and Kajabi have three pricing plans. They do not have a free plan but offer trials and discounts for annual subscriptions. But unfortunately, this is where the similarities end.
The pricing difference between the two is huge.
SamCart’s three plans, Launch, Grow, and Scale, range from 59, 119, and 299 USD per month and 39, 79, and 159 USD per month, respectively, on an annual subscription. SamCart also has an Enterprise plan that comes with all the features. You must contact their sales team to learn more about pricing.
On the other hand, Kajabi’s pricing plans, Basic, Growth, and Pro, stand at 149, 199, and 399 USD per month for the monthly subscription and are reduced to 119, 159, and 319 USD per month annually.
SamCart is more affordable than Kajabi.
Kajabi has tried to justify the high prices with its features, pool of products (courses, coaching, marketing, podcast, community), website, CRM, and marketing abilities, which reduce the need to integrate with third-party applications.
This is a fair point; however, the pricing increases with the number of active contacts or students.
In all the SamCart paid plans, you get unlimited courses, unlimited products and pages, unlimited memberships, 0% processing fees, sales, tax support, digital wallet support, a “Pay What You Want” pricing feature, pixel tracking, reporting dashboard, email support, etc.
With Kajabi, all three pricing plans include the following features: unlimited landing pages, unlimited marketing emails, 0% transaction fee, assessments (quizzes and surveys), 24/7 chat support, Kajabi University, ready-to-use templates, and so on.
You also get products, pipelines, and websites in the three plans, but there are restrictions on the number of users you can have.
The following table shows the pricing difference between SamCart Vs Kajabi.
In this section of SamCart Vs Kartra, SamCart wins as it is cheaper and offers huge discounts on yearly plans.
A Comparison of Support
Customer support is essential to users. Therefore, it becomes significant for software platforms to provide as much help as possible that caters to general and basic queries.
For more personalized needs, the customer support team can handle the questions.
With SamCart, you get training videos and tons of articles on getting started, creating courses, integrations, and everything. In addition, you receive a blog section updated with interesting income-increasing posts.
For customer support, you can email them at support@samcart.com or submit a message to them via their platform. They are available from 9 am–5 pm ET on weekdays. Their response time is within 24 hours. You will get priority support if you subscribe to plans higher than the Launch plan.
Now, Kajabi does a better job of providing support. There are more helpful articles, guides, training videos, webinars, and community support. They also have Kajabi University, which teaches you various beneficial topics related to Kajabi and course creation.
You get a 1-on-1 customer activation call and live 24/7 chat support in all three plans.
Key Difference Summary of SamCart Vs Kartra
Conclusion
Now that we have reached the end of this article, here are my concluding points.
In a nutshell, Kajabi provides you with:
- An Online Course Creation Product
- An Online Coaching Program Product
- A Membership Sites Product
- A Podcast Creation Product
- A Community Creation Product
- Website and Landing Pages
- Pipeline and Email Functioning
- CRM
- Kajabi University and Community
- 24/7 Live Chat Support
It has three plans ranging from 149 to 399 USD per month based on a monthly subscription.
Kajabi was started as a course delivery platform and had years of experience in this domain. It has everything you need to create, market, and sell courses.
I agree that the pricing is high, but as I said earlier, it removes the need to integrate with other email marketing tools and saves you from paying for their subscriptions. Kajabi will pay for itself, as it will surely help you earn more than you spend on it.
If we sum up SamCart, it is as follows:
- It is mainly an eCommerce cart solution that now offers a course delivery functionality.
- You can create a coaching program and a membership site.
- It helps you sell digital and physical products.
- It has great features such as cross-sell, auto-enroll, content tiers, drip courses, etc.
- It has a powerful integration interface.
This is understandable if you are drawn to both software, as we discuss two of the most capable software options. Your confusion is natural. Let me provide you with more clarity.
What should you do if you are a beginner and have no website to sell courses? I suggest you go with Kajabi since it has a website you can design with the help of the drag-and-drop builder.
You can create your course in minutes. You also get email marketing functionalities in the dashboard, so you do not need integrations or switch tabs. Overall, Kajabi is a better choice for beginners.
In contrast, if you have a website for product sales and want to enter the course-creating industry, you will benefit from SamCart’s cart solution and its year-old course delivery platform, which is there to cater to your needs for creating courses.
With this, I now conclude this SamCart vs Kajabi article. I hope you found it helpful.
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