HighLevel vs Kajabi: creators or agencies?

HighLevel and Kajabi both call themselves all-in-one, but they were built for different people. Kajabi is built for creators who sell courses, coaching, communities and memberships [5]. HighLevel is built for agencies and service businesses who manage clients, messaging and pipelines, with a course builder alongside [1][3]. If you sell your own expertise, start with Kajabi. If you run marketing for other businesses, start with HighLevel.

How we researched this

This page is research-based. We read both vendors’ pricing pages and the relevant HighLevel help center articles on 2026-10-31. We did not build a course or run a client account on either product, so we make no claims about how pleasant either is to use. Where a page does not say something, we say so.

Who is each platform built for?

Kajabi’s own description is “the operating system for human expertise”. Its home page lists courses, coaching, communities, memberships, podcasts and newsletters, plus email marketing, funnels and automations [5]. It has a contact CRM in its product menu [5], but the products it leads with are the things a creator sells.

HighLevel’s pricing page frames Starter as “perfect for smaller businesses and solo marketers”, Unlimited as “built for growing agencies” and Founder as for “founders, agencies, consultants, and service providers looking to scale” [1]. Its course builder is documented in the help center [3], but the product’s structure (sub-accounts, rebilling, snapshots) is agency-shaped [1][2][6].

That difference matters more than any single feature.

How do HighLevel and Kajabi pricing compare?

	HighLevel	Kajabi
Entry plan	Starter, $97/month ($970/year) [1]	Basic, $179/month ($143/month on annual) [4]
Middle plan	Unlimited, $297/month ($2,970/year) [1]	Growth, $249/month ($199/month on annual) [4]
Top published plan	Founder, $497/month ($4,970/year) [1]	Pro, $499/month ($399/month on annual) [4]
What the tiers limit	Sub-accounts (3 on Starter, unlimited above); unlimited contacts and users on Starter [1]	Products (5 / 50 / unlimited), contacts (2,500 / 25,000 / 100,000), admin users (2 / 11 / 26), communities (1 / 1 / 3) [4]
Usage billing on top	Email, SMS, calls and some AI features [1][2]	Payment fees per sale (below) [4]
Free trial	14 days on any plan [1]	Offered; 14 days per the page’s structured data [4]
Refund	Not stated on the pricing page [1]	30-day money-back guarantee on every plan [4]

Both sets of prices were read from the vendors’ pricing pages on 2026-10-31 [1][4]. Kajabi’s annual prices are per month, billed annually; HighLevel’s annual prices are per year [1][4]. Check both live pages before you decide.

What the Kajabi tiers limit

On Kajabi, the plan decides how much you can sell and to how many people: products, contacts, admin users, communities and websites [4]. The Basic plan includes 5 products, 1 website, 1 community, 2 admin users and 2,500 contacts; Pro includes unlimited products, 3 websites, 3 communities, 26 admin users and 100,000 contacts [4]. The page lists funnels, landing pages and marketing emails as unlimited on all three, and sells extra contacts in blocks of 25,000 for $125 a month [4].

What the HighLevel tiers limit

HighLevel’s tiers limit the number of client accounts, not contacts or users. Starter allows 3 sub-accounts and Unlimited removes the cap [1]; you can compare HighLevel’s current plansaffiliate (opens HighLevel in a new tab) on its own page. Rebilling with markup and SaaS mode sit on the $497 Founder plan (the same page’s FAQ calls it the “Pro Plan”) [1][2]. See the HighLevel pricing guide for the usage rates that sit on top.

Per-sale fees

Kajabi’s page lists payment processing at 2.9% + $0.30 on Basic, 2.8% + $0.30 on Growth and 2.7% + $0.30 on Pro for Kajabi Payments (US entities), and a 2%, 1% and 0.5% fee if you use a third-party provider instead (PayPal excluded) [4]. Fees vary by country [4]. Kajabi also says it takes no revenue share as a platform [4]. We did not find a per-sale platform percentage on HighLevel’s pricing page [1], but your payment processor charges its own fees on any platform. Model your own sales volume before you assume either is cheaper.

Where Kajabi wins

• Courses, coaching and communities are the whole point. Kajabi’s home page leads with them [5]. HighLevel’s course builder article covers creating a course, setting Free, Recurring or One Time pricing, and publishing an offer, but says nothing about community features, drip content, certificates or a mobile app [3].
• Plan limits that match a creator’s business. Products, contacts and admin users scale with the audience [4]. If you have one audience and one brand, you are not paying for client-account capacity you will not use.
• A creator-facing product list. Podcasts, newsletters and coaching are named product types on Kajabi’s page [5]. HighLevel’s pricing page lists courses and communities among its core features but does not name podcasts or newsletters [1].
• Kajabi lists a branded mobile app and an API as included. Its comparison table describes the branded mobile app as “Included ($199/mo value)” and the API as “Included ($25/mo value)” [4]. We could not read which plans include them; the FAQ says Pro is for anyone “who wants their own app in the App Store” [4]. HighLevel lists a white label mobile app as a $497 per month add-on, included with Enterprise [1]; its help center gives the same price, or $1,491 a quarter [2].

Where HighLevel wins

• Client work. Unlimited sub-accounts from the $297 plan, and rebilling usage to clients, are the reasons agencies pick it [1][2].
• Reusable setups. A snapshot copies a sub-account’s configuration (pages, workflows, pipelines and similar assets) to another account. It does not copy contacts, conversations or Stripe connections [6].
• Messaging and pipelines. SMS, email, calling and workflows are part of the platform on usage-based billing [1][2].
• Fixed plan price for contacts and users. Starter lists unlimited contacts and unlimited users [1], where Kajabi caps contacts by tier [4]. Usage fees still apply to messages.

Who should not choose HighLevel

• You are one person selling one course, and you want the tool to feel built for that.
• You want a podcast or newsletter product inside the same system [5].
• You would rather pay a flat plan fee than a plan fee plus usage charges [1][2].

Who should not choose Kajabi

• You run several client businesses. Kajabi’s plan limits are products, contacts, communities and websites [4]; the page lists no client-account structure.
• You want to resell the software under your own brand at your own prices. That is what HighLevel’s SaaS mode is for [1][2].

What we could not verify

• Which Kajabi features come on which plan. The page’s feature list was not readable by plan [4].
• Kajabi’s trial terms in visible page text; the 14-day length comes from the page’s structured data [4].
• How good HighLevel’s course and community experience is for students. The help center documents the course editor, not the student experience [3].
• Whether Kajabi’s US prices match what a visitor in your country sees at checkout.

How to test both without wasting a month

Run the same small project in each trial rather than clicking around. Build one short paid course with two lessons and a checkout. Add one email follow-up that fires after purchase. Then look at what is left to do. Questions worth answering for yourself: how long did each step take, where did you have to leave the platform, and what would a student see?

For HighLevel, start the 14-day trial on HighLevelaffiliate (opens HighLevel in a new tab), then create a second sub-account and load a snapshot into it, because that is the feature Kajabi does not list [6]. For Kajabi, check the plan limits against your real product, contact and admin-user counts [4], and read the payment fee page for your country, since the pricing page says fees vary by country [4]. Write down the monthly total for each, including per-sale fees at your expected volume, and compare that with the cost of keeping your current setup. Neither vendor’s page can tell you which one you will finish a course in; a trial can.

Verdict

Choose Kajabi if you sell your own knowledge to your own audience and want a product made for that. Choose HighLevel if you serve clients, resell software or need messaging and pipelines at the centre. If you are both, an agency with a course business on the side, run a small course in HighLevel’s 14-day trialaffiliate (opens HighLevel in a new tab) and compare it with your Kajabi trial before you move anything. Your software stack savings will show what consolidating is worth, and the CRM quiz can narrow it down. For the closest sibling comparison, see HighLevel vs ClickFunnels.