In this article, you'll learn about:

• How crucial it is to the success of your learning community to choose the right learning management system
• Five alternatives to Kajabi we recommend considering first:
• Disco
• Teachable
• Thinkific
• Podia
• Teachfloor
• How to get started on Disco for free (and where to book a discovery call with our rockstar team!)

Founders of learning communities as well as virtual bootcamps, academies, and micro schools are always looking for the best platforms to host their programs. Kajabi is one platform course creators and entrepreneurs in learning often turn to.

Kajabi helps people create unlimited courses plus operate and scale membership to their digital products. They offer tiered pricing multiple courses and levels of support to generate revenue, but community seems to come second to profit with Kajabi's suite of offerings.

Kajabi, rather, could be classified as an online course platform because their main objective is to help founders create unlimited courses and sell online courses as well as other digital products. It boasts all the essential features one would need to both create courses and sell their course content, like a website, page builder, and other advanced marketing features.

You need a platform that can do it all: operations, sales pages marketing automation, creating and hosting events, and managing courses, all in one platform, while supporting your community members and their personal or professional development through student engagement.

While Kajabi ticks a number of those boxes, consider these five Kajabi alternatives before settling on the learning management system and community-building platform that's best for your growing community and any supplemental learning online courses you may offer (whether you offer them a kajabi alternative currently or you plan to down the line).

The 5 Best Kajabi Alternatives

DISCO

Disco, a modern platform for learning communities, provides an all-in-one solution for all sizes and scales best online course platform. It offers a blend of learning and community features that support your community and any courses — self-paced or cohort-based — events, masterminds, or other series you might offer.

Disco Course Creation

Disco allows you easily design and create online courses unique to you with drag and drop features, including a course builder and course duplication, make online course creation simple and enjoyable.

Disco Community Features

Disco enables you to create different channels for members to engage and collaborate. This includes threads, feeds, and direct messaging chats dedicated purely to communication. Member profiles and progress reports also allow you to track individual progress as they work through video lessons and other digital products.

Disco Marketing Features

Disco offers marketing tools such as email marketing features like bulk invites to specific events or acceptance to your membership site. It also supports video hosting capabilities with integrations to create supplemental marketing tools for your community plan, upselling new course bundles and creating additional revenue opportunities for your business plan.

Disco Payments and Affiliate Management

With Disco, you can award course completion certificates anywhere, collect payments for any paid plans you offer, and manage your affiliate program without any transaction fees for you nor your members.

Disco is an excellent alternative to Kajabi and alternative as it supports learning communities at every stage in their business lifecycle, whether you're simply hosting a community and bringing together kindred learners or building out premium online courses and advanced learning opportunities.

Pricing Plans for Disco

Disco offers tiered pricing depending on the size and needs of your learning community. Every new member gets 14-days of free trial time to check out all of the features and get familiar with the Disco platform.

1. Basic: This includes basic branding, channels & DM's, deep Slack integration, basic analytics, event hosting, member groups, and Stripe, Zapier, and Zoom integration.
2. Organization (Most Popular): This includes everything in Basic, plus full custom branding, a powerful AI co-pilot, advanced communication tools, the ability to sell memberships, custom profile fields, multiple Zoom accounts, advanced analytics and reporting, and HD video streaming.
3. Max: This includes everything in Organization, plus advanced AI co-pilot (coming soon), and migration support.
4. Enterprise: This is built for large enterprises and includes unlimited learning products, a dedicated success lead, quarterly strategy reviews, custom training, integration services and support, product roadmap shaping, and SAML SSO (coming soon).

Learn more about our pricing plans and what's included in each tier here.

Pros: Disco

• Disco is a comprehensive learning management system that integrates community and learning into one platform, eliminating the need for multiple tools.
• The platform is highly customizable, allowing you to create a unique learning environment that reflects your brand and vision.
• You have total control over your platform, community, and how you build, market, and monetize it, giving you the freedom to shape your learning community according to your needs.
• Disco's user-friendly interface simplifies the learning process for your community, removing the need for multiple tools and confusing workflows.

Cons: Disco

• Disco offers a free 14-day trial, but does not have a free plan option.
• Currently, Disco does not have a mobile app, which some other learning management systems or community platforms offer.

Disco is the ideal solution for anyone looking to build and scale a learning community. It allows you to focus on your members, trusting that the operational aspects of your business are well-managed.

Disco combines learning with community, enabling you to bring your online business to life on a single platform. With its modular approach, you can build out your learning experiences creation tools and community in a way that is completely unique to you and your members. This makes Disco a powerful tool for creating and managing a thriving learning community.

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TEACHABLE

For six years, Teachable has presented course creators with a comprehensive platform for creating and selling online courses. Teachable is a solid choice for founders or operators of learning communities who are particularly focused on the online course creation facet of their business.

Teachable may not, however, be the best option for businesses that want to sell courses, create other offerings, like event series, or who want community at the core of their offerings. Often, you'll find you need another tool to expand beyond simply selling courses.

Pricing for Teachable

Free - $0 a month

Teachable does offer a free plan to small communities or creators who aren't ready to settle into a full paid plan. The options are quite limited, however, and are designed to give you just a taste of their full capabilities.

Basic - $29 a month

With Teachable's Basic plan, you have more freedom to create a custom domain for landing pages and integrate a small handful of other tools. You don't yet have theme customization abilities at the Basic level, of course platforms nor the option to integrate any tool you want.

Pro - $99 a month

Teachable Pro allots you five admin seats, so anyone on your team can have full access to the platform. You still can't unlock theme customization, but at the Pro level, Teachable doesn't take a transaction fee from your sales.

Business - $249 a month

At just under $250 a month, Teachable unlocks full access to their suite of integrations, customizations, and product features. You can also add up to 20 users, though Teachable does not differentiate between admins and instructors.

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Pros: Teachable

• Great capabilities for anyone looking to specifically market, host, and build online courses
• The interface is user-friendly and lets you move courses, lectures, and other features around easily
• Add media like videos, photos, and infographics

Cons: Teachable

• No brand or theme customization options until the top price tier
• Not beneficial to folks who want to host a community or other types of learning events, series, webinars, or masterminds — very course-specific
• Based in the United States, so main currency is $USD and users have mentioned difficulty in converting currency
• Some plans take a transaction fee of each sale you make, causing you to lose money

Teachable is great for folks looking to make active or passive income by teaching or hosting online courses, but it may not be suited for creators that want to build a learning community and generate a business with multiple revenue streams outside of running courses.

THINKIFIC 

For course creators who want to use a custom website for launching, marketing, and hosting their courses, Thinkific is a strong option if you plan to use mostly Thinkific features rather than integrate with your existing tech stack.

Their website course builder itself is highly customizable and lets you create and customize course features, though some reviewers claim those features could be a bit more interactive for students. Thinkific also offers built-in community features that foster conversation and connection.

Pricing for Thinkific

Free - $0 a month

Thinkific's free package is the most robust of the other free courses we've highlighted in this piece. For no cost, you can support one course, one administrator, and one community while taking 100% ownership over your content. You can use a good handful of their integrations, email marketing, features, widgets, and features from their app store like quizzes and surveys, all while enjoying email and chat support from Thinkific's team.

Start - $74 a month 

With Thinkific's Start plan, you get ownership over all of your learning content plus your custom domain. You also unlock membership capabilities with advanced features like individual profiles and setting members up on payment plans with monthly fee. You can host live lessons with multiple instructors, make additional revenue through affiliate selling, and enjoy more advanced web editing features for even better customization.

Grow - $149 a month, 

For nearly $70 more a month, Thinkific Grow customers get three 3x the communities, 2x the administrators, and the option to remove Thinkific branding from their individual platform. You also enjoy the bulk student emailer and enrollment features, though these premium features come standard in more affordable packages with other learning management systems. 

Expand - $374 a month

Larger learning communities and businesses looking to scale and support hundreds if not thousands of members might see value in Thinkific's Expand package with up to 10 communities, 5 administrators, and priority support.

Plus - Custom

For enterprise-level customers or massive communities with large memberships to support, Thinkific offers custom pricing and dedicated customer support that can address your every need at any time.

Pros: Thinkific

• Largest span of different price points for growing businesses to upgrade to
• Option for affiliate selling to generate more revenue
• Create landing pages to market and sell online courses more efficiently
• Reviewers note that Thinkific has a robust community and opportunity for more learnings and webinars

Cons: Thinkific

• Reviewers note the marketing options are severely lacking, like not being able to send push notifications to members and no bulk email capabilities within the platform until the most expensive price point
• No mobile app
• Lack of available/additional plug-ins (WordPress being one) in lieu of using Thinkific-specific plug-ins and widgets

Overall, Thinkific has created a name for itself in the space, and the customization options within the course platform will allow business owners to create a course that feels tailor-made. However, it lacks the same marketing capabilities as Disco and other comparable options.

PODIA

While Podia is a neat platform for creating and marketing digital learning products like online courses, digital downloads, and community and membership sites, it's not an all-in-one learning community platform the way is. Podia is a content management software that supports endeavors like coaching, digital asynchronous courses, and workshops.

If you want to scale a learning community and create a business that supports it, Podia wouldn't be the right choice. It is, however, more affordable than your typical learning management software, if you don't need the additional functionality that an LMS provides.

Pricing for Podia

Free - $0 a month

Podia's free plan, while a nice option for budding course creators, isn't actually free. They collect an 8% fee plus a transaction fee from Stripe (their preferred payment processor). You get a free Podia subdomain, invite your community into the platform, and draft courses for when you're ready to upgrade and sell them. 

Mover - $39 a month

For nearly $40 a month, Podia removes many features the transaction fees and allows you to link video courses to your own domain name, if you choose. With the Mover plan, you're in the business of selling not only your custom courses but coaching, as well. You're able to draft webinars that you can sell when you upgrade.

Shaker -  $89 a month

Podia's Shaker plan unlocks affiliate generation and lets you create and sell community access to your webinars.

Earthquaker - $199 a month

At $200 a month, Podia brings its creators into their fold with a monthly mastermind, priority support from their team, and a dedicated onboarding call that helps you better shape and monetize your community.

Podia: Pros

• The use cases for Podia are broad, and creators of all kinds may find the platform to be conducive for their business
• It can be more affordable, depending on what you hope to achieve with your business
• The user experience is beginner-friendly and very clean

Podia: Cons

• Podia is not built for learning communities — you don't get to unlock those key features and integrations you would from other learning management systems that could be crucial to fostering a learning community

For creators and operators of cohort-based courses, Teachfloor is a really great end-to-end option for onboarding members, running live classes, supporting their journey, and collecting payments. 

While cohort-based courses are wonderful, they're only one of many different learning experiences founders can offer their members. Self-paced courses, masterminds, and event series only add to the learning enrichment, and Disco supports all types of learning experiences. Disco also supports learning after course completion by fostering space for your community to gather and collaborate asynchronously.

Teachfloor allows deep integration with Zapier, Zoom, and Stripe so you have what you need to create and host your course. With email automations, live chat, and student reporting decks, you'll have tools in place to support your members throughout the course page and their experience.

- $69 a month

Teachfloor jumps right into their Pro plan, where some other platforms offer a free pricing tier with limited functionality. With this plan, you can run unlimited courses and invite up to four instructors, but that's where the features end.

- $349 a month

For over 5x the price, Teachfloor allows you to add up to 15 instructors, attach a custom domain, and customize your platform with your logo and brand identity. 

- Custom

Teachfloor then jumps right into Enterprise-level custom pricing where you have more of a tailor-made plan fit for your business.

Teachfloor: Pros

• Great for cohort-based courses that offers comprehensive student support with peer and instructor review, chat function, white labeling, and email automations
• Offers a free trial

Teachfloor: Cons

• Doesn't support other types of learning experiences like event series, self-paced courses, and masterminds
• No free pricing tier
• No built-in community
• Only two pricing tiers that are vastly different in price before you have to select custom Enterprise pricing — no room for growth

Cohort-based courses can be life-changing experiences for the students who enjoy them, but they're just one of many different learning experiences that founders of learning businesses can and should offer. Teachfloor doesn't support those additional experiences.

The 5 Best Alternatives to Kajabi

Disco

For learning communities of all sizes and scales, Disco provides an all-in-one platform with all the features you need to support your community and any courses — self-paced or cohort-based — events, masterminds, or other series you might offer.

Disco Course Creation

You can do it all on Disco.

First, you can integrate your existing tools like Zoom, Zapier, and Slack to create a course page that is unique to your brand. Next, our drag and drop features like our course builder, course duplication, and other important creation tools make online course creation simple and — dare we say? — fun. The page builder is highly intuitive and allows founders to create multiple courses at a time.

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Disco Community Features

Next, you can begin to create different channels in which members will engage and collaborate. This includes threads, feeds, and direct messaging chats so your members have many features dedicated purely to communication.

Member profiles and progress reports also allow you to track individual progress as they work through video lessons and other digital products associated with your online courses.

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Disco Marketing Features

For founders wanting to market and sell online courses, there are certain marketing tools you'll need in an online course platform. As an alternative to Kajabi, Disco offers email marketing features like bulk invites to specific events or acceptance to your membership site.

You can also access video hosting capabilities with integrations like Zoom and Vimeo to create supplemental marketing tools for upselling new course bundles and creating additional revenue opportunities for your business plan.

‍

Disco Payments and Affiliate Management

Award completion certificates, collect payments for any paid plans you offer, and manage your affiliate program without any transaction fees for you nor your members.

Disco is the best online course platform because it supports learning communities at every stage in their business lifecycle, whether you're simply hosting a community and bringing together kindred learners or building out premium online courses and advanced learning opportunities. 

Simply put: Disco helps you sell courses and build, operate, monetize, and scale a successful learning community.

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Pricing Plans for Disco

Disco offers tiered pricing depending on the size and needs of your learning community. Every new member gets 14-days of free trial time to check out all of our features and get familiar with the Disco platform.

Pro Plan - $75 a month

With our basic plan, you'll receive one admin account, three instructor accounts, plus everything you need to deliver unlimited courses and other learning experiences and host your community on one platform.

Organization Plan - $399 a month

The Organization Plan is perfect for businesses and learning communities that are ready to level up. With five admin accounts and ten instructor accounts, dedicated customer success support, and the ability to customize the Disco UI with branded colors, photos, and logos, your team can take the guesswork out of operational management and focus on creating a life-changing learning experience for your members for an affordable monthly fee.

Enterprise Plan - Custom

With Disco's Enterprise Plan, we custom-build a plan that fits the needs of your business and your learning community. Our platform can carry the weight of corporate customers or large-scale learning communities that are running a large catalog of different learning experiences or courses. We also make the migration from your current LMS or tool stack to Disco pain-free with the help of our expert customer support team.

Learn more about our pricing plans and what's included in each tier here.

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Pros: Disco 

• Your one-stop learning management system that seamlessly blends community and learning all in one platform, eliminating the need for multiple tools
• Customizable with thousands of integrations and true-to-you branding 
• Total ownership: you control your own platform, community, and how you build, market, and monetize it
• User-friendly interface that makes learning easy for your whole community and removes the need for multiple tools and confusing workflows

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Cons: Disco

• Only offers a free 14-day trial rather than a free plan
• No mobile app (some other LMS or community platforms offer one)

Disco is the answer for anyone looking to build and scale a learning community that wants to focus on members and trust that operationally, your business is sound.

There's incredible power in combining learning with community and having that experience brought to life on a single platform. Disco allows you to take a modular approach to building out your learning experiences and community to create something completely unique to you and your members.

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Disco is the most inclusive and comprehensive platform while also being affordable (when you calculate time, money, and resources saved) compared to other course platforms.

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Teachable

For six years, Teachable has presented course creators with a comprehensive platform for creating and selling online courses. Teachable is a solid choice for founders or operators of learning communities who are particularly focused on the online course facet of their business.

Teachable may not, however, be the best option for businesses that want to create other offerings, like event series, or who want community at the core of their offerings. Often, you'll find you need another tool to expand beyond simply selling courses.

Pricing for Teachable

Free - $0 a month

Teachable does offer a free plan to small communities or creators who aren't ready to settle into a full paid plan. The options are quite limited, however, and are designed to give you just a taste of their full capabilities.

Basic - $29 a month

With Teachable's Basic plan, you have more freedom to create a custom domain for landing pages and integrate a small handful of other tools. You don't yet have theme customization abilities at the Basic level, nor the option to integrate any tool you want.

Pro - $99 a month

Teachable Pro allots you five admin seats, so anyone on your team can have full access to the platform. You still can't unlock theme customization, but at the Pro level, Teachable doesn't take a transaction fee from your sales.

Business - $249 a month

At just under $250 a month, Teachable unlocks full access to their suite of integrations, customizations, and product features. You can also add up to 20 users, though Teachable does not differentiate between admins and instructors.

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Pros: Teachable

• Great capabilities for anyone looking to specifically market, host, and build online courses
• The interface is user-friendly and lets you move courses, lectures, and other features around easily
• Add media like videos, photos, and infographics

‍

Cons: Teachable

• No brand or theme customization options until the top price tier
• Not beneficial to folks who want to host a community or other types of learning events, series, webinars, or masterminds — very course-specific
• Based in the United States, so main currency is $USD and users have mentioned difficulty in converting currency
• Some plans take a transaction fee of each sale you make, causing you to lose money

Teachable is great for folks looking to make active or passive income by teaching or hosting online courses, but it may not be suited for creators that want to build a learning community and generate a business with multiple revenue streams outside of running courses.

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Thinkific 

For course creators who want to use a custom website for launching, marketing, and hosting their courses, Thinkific is a strong option if you plan to use mostly Thinkific features rather than integrate with your existing tech stack.

Their website builder is highly customizable and lets you create and customize course features, though some reviewers claim those features could be a bit more interactive for students. Thinkific also offers built-in community features that foster conversation and connection.

Pricing for Thinkific

Free - $0 a month

Thinkific's free package is the most robust of the other free courses we've highlighted in this piece. For no cost, you can support one course, one administrator, and one community while taking 100% ownership over your content. You can use a good handful of their integrations, marketing features, widgets, and features from their app store like quizzes and surveys, all while enjoying email and chat support from Thinkific's team.

Start - $74 a month 

With Thinkific's Start plan, you get ownership over all of your learning content plus your custom domain. You also unlock membership capabilities like individual profiles and setting members up on payment plans. You can host live lessons with multiple instructors, make additional revenue through affiliate selling, and enjoy more advanced web editing features for even better customization.

Grow - $149 a month, 

For nearly $70 more a month, Thinkific Grow customers get three 3x the communities, 2x the administrators, and the option to remove Thinkific branding from their individual platform. You also enjoy the bulk student emailer and enrollment features, though these premium features come standard in more affordable packages with other learning management systems. 

Expand - $374 a month

Larger learning communities and businesses looking to scale and support hundreds if not thousands of members might see value in Thinkific's Expand package with up to 10 communities, 5 administrators, and priority support.

Plus - Custom

For enterprise-level customers or massive communities with large memberships to support, Thinkific offers custom pricing and dedicated customer support that can address your every need at any time.

‍

Pros: Thinkific

• Largest span of different price points for growing businesses to upgrade to
• Option for affiliate selling to generate more revenue
• Create landing pages to market and sell online courses more efficiently
• Reviewers note that Thinkific has a robust community and opportunity for more learnings and webinars

‍

Cons: Thinkific

• Reviewers note the marketing options are severely lacking, like not being able to send push notifications to members and no bulk email capabilities within the platform until the most expensive price point
• No mobile app
• Lack of available/additional plug-ins (WordPress being one) in lieu of using Thinkific-specific plug-ins and widgets

Overall, Thinkific has created a name for itself in the space, and the customization options within the platform allow business owners to create a course that feels tailor-made. However, it lacks the same marketing capabilities as Disco and other comparable options.

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Podia

While Podia is a neat platform for creating and marketing digital learning products like online courses and community membership, it's not an all-in-one learning community platform the way is. Podia is a content management software that supports endeavors like coaching, digital asynchronous courses, and workshops.

If you want to scale a learning community and create a business that supports it, Podia wouldn't be the right choice. It is, however, more affordable than your typical learning management software, if you don't need the additional functionality that an LMS provides.

‍

Pricing for Podia

Free - $0 a month

Podia's free plan, while a nice option for budding course creators, isn't actually free. They collect an 8% fee plus a transaction fee from Stripe (their preferred payment processor). You get a free Podia subdomain, invite your community into the platform, and draft courses for when you're ready to upgrade and sell them. 

Mover - $39 a month

For nearly $40 a month, Podia removes the transaction fees and allows you to link your own domain name, if you choose. With the Mover plan, you're in the business of selling not only your custom courses but coaching, as well. You're able to draft webinars that you can sell when you upgrade.

Shaker -  $89 a month

Podia's Shaker plan unlocks affiliate generation and lets you sell community access to your webinars.

Earthquaker - $199 a month

At $200 a month, Podia brings its creators into their fold with a monthly mastermind, priority support from their team, and a dedicated onboarding call that helps you better shape and monetize your community.

‍

Podia: Pros

• The use cases for Podia are broad, and creators of all kinds may find the platform to be conducive for their business
• It can be more affordable, depending on what you hope to achieve with your business
• The user experience is beginner-friendly and very clean

‍

Podia: Cons

• Podia is not built for learning communities — you don't get to unlock those key features and integrations you would from other learning management systems that could be crucial to fostering a learning community

‍

Teachfloor

For creators and operators of cohort-based courses, Teachfloor is a really great end-to-end option for onboarding members, running live classes, supporting their journey, and collecting payments. 

While cohort-based courses are wonderful, they’re only one of many different learning experiences founders can offer their members. Self-paced courses, masterminds, and event series only add to the learning enrichment, and Disco supports all types of learning experiences. Disco also supports learning after course completion by fostering space for your community to gather and collaborate asynchronously.

Teachfloor allows deep integration with Zapier, Zoom, and Stripe so you have what you need to create and host your course. With email automations, live chat, and student reporting decks, you’ll have tools in place to support your members throughout their experience.

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Pricing for Teachfloor

Pro - $69 a month

Teachfloor jumps right into their Pro plan, where some other platforms offer a free pricing tier with limited functionality. With this plan, you can run unlimited courses and invite up to four instructors, but that’s where the features end.

Business - $349 a month

For over 5x the price, Teachfloor allows you to add up to 15 instructors, attach a custom domain, and customize your platform with your logo and brand identity. 

Enterprise - Custom

Teachfloor then jumps right into Enterprise-level custom pricing where you have more of a tailor-made plan fit for your business.

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Teachfloor: Pros

• Great for cohort-based courses that offers comprehensive student support with peer and instructor review, chat function, white labeling, and email automations
• Offers a free trial

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Teachfloor: Cons

• Doesn’t support other types of learning experiences like event series, self-paced courses, and masterminds
• No free pricing tier
• No built-in community
• Only two pricing tiers that are vastly different in price before you have to select custom Enterprise pricing — no room for growth

Cohort-based courses can be life-changing experiences for the students who enjoy them, but they’re just one of many different learning experiences that founders of learning businesses can and should offer. Teachfloor doesn’t support those additional experiences.

Try Disco today (and start for free!)

We're passionate about making the future of learning more accessible and community-focused.  It's the ethos on which we've built our platform, and Disco supports all different types of communities and learning experiences within them.

Try all of Disco's features with a free trial for 14 days before you land on one learning management system to see what sets us apart. You can also watch a free product demo and learn from our team how your business can thrive on the Disco platform.