Kajabi Vs MailChimp: Side-by-Side Comparison

kajabi vs mailchimp

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Kajabi Vs MailChimp: What Works For Your Business?

kajabi vs mailchimp

Published by Al Rose

Last Updated on August 30, 2024

Looking for an in-depth guide that will help you make the smart choice between Kajabi vs Mailchimp?

When it comes to building a successful online business, having the right tools in your toolkit is essential. 

Of course, every business is different. Your needs will vary based on the products or services you offer, your target market, your budget, and a host of other factors. 

That’s why it’s so important to do your research before investing in any software solution. 

You need to make sure you’re getting the best bang for your buck.

What works well for one business might not be the best fit for another.

This is especially true when you’re comparing two popular options like Kajabi and Mailchimp. 

Both platforms offer a lot of features and functionality. But which one is the right choice for your business? 

In this guide, we’re going to compare Kajabi vs Mailchimp, two of the most popular platforms in the online space. 

We’ll take a close look at the features and benefits of each, as well as the key differences that set them apart. 

By the end, you should have a good idea of which platform is the best fit for your needs.

For a short period ending soon, we have secured a special deal to extend Kajabi’s free trial from 14 days to 30 days for our readers. If you are interested in this special offer, click here for registration details

Table of Contents

What Is Kajabi And MailChimp?

Kajabi is a content marketing platform that allows you to create content, offer it through a membership system or as a standalone product, track your marketing campaigns, incorporate email marketing, create landing pages, get insights on performance, blog, and more. From an online course platform to a tool for building sales funnels, Kajabi handles a wide range of tasks for growing an online business.

MailChimp, on the other hand, is predominantly an email marketing platform that comes with built-in templates, the ability to send messages automatically in pilot mode, integrates well with all major platforms, gives detailed analytics, and more. So it’s not a true one-to-one Kajabi alternative.

Over the years, MailChimp has also included more capabilities to market itself as a full-fledged digital marketing platform for a little more than just email marketing campaigns. 

In all, Kajabi is a comprehensive digital marketing platform whereas MailChimp is a marketing suite with extra emphasis on email marketing. 

Let’s now compare the two platforms on specific parameters to help you make an informed decision.

Access Your Free Kajabi Strategy Meeting

Following the steps below, you can secure a free 1:1 strategic session with a member of the Kajabi Customer Success team to help build your business on Kajabi.

Step 1: Sign up for your free Kajabi trial by clicking on this link or other links on this page

Step 2: You’ll get an email from us providing instructions on how to schedule your free Success Session.

Step 3: Schedule Session with a Kajabi expert and use their knowledge to create a personalized action plan for your business.

Email Marketing

Kajabi makes it easy to send broadcasts to your entire contacts list and it allows you to have emojis and images to reflect your creativity. You can personalize emails and at the same time, put it on autopilot mode, so emails are sent out automatically.

Its advanced analytics gives precise information on performance and conversion rate of your emails, so you can make the necessary tweaks.

MailChimp is a specialized email marketing platform that comes with built-in templates, autopilot mode, analytics, and a host of other features to create newsletters, transactional emails, and more. Its email automation and segmentation methods are streamlined and the design is flexible enough to drag and drop the features you want.

Which Of The Two Is Better?

MailChimp edges out Kajabi simply because it started as an email marketing platform and hence, has all the features necessary to excel in it. But market segmentation is more intuitive and better defined in Kajabi than in MailChimp.

This doesn’t mean Kajabi is not comprehensive enough, but some of the additional features such as spam and design testing, bounce management, and authentication make MailChimp a better choice for a pure email service.

Automation

Kajabi is well-known for its sales pipelines or automation that help to market any digital product effectively. 

You can choose the right pipeline for your product, set the conditions if needed, create events/forms/posts, make offers, and start making money! It’s that simple.

MailChimp also comes with about 15 automation workflows, but they are tedious to edit, and the editor is not intuitive either.

Hence, Kajabi scores over MailChimp in automation. 

Landing Page Builder

Building the all-important landing pages is easy in Kajabi, thanks to its advanced drag and drop editor and its built-in templates. No coding knowledge is required and the end-product is sure to be visually appealing. 

MailChimp’s templates are also easy to edit and are highly responsive to all devices. But they are too few and don’t come with important functionalities such as A/B testing. Also, it’s not easy to add content blocks like testimonials and reviews.

Due to these reasons, Kajabi is the hands-down winner when it comes to building landing pages.

CRM

Kajabi comes with powerful engagement tools like community, blogs, the built-in sales pipeline builder, and more – all within the same platform to engage your customers. 

More importantly, it comes with a well-developed contact management system that gives you complete information about every customer and their activities on your site so you can understand and engage with them better, make personalized offers, add them to email marketing lists, and come up with innovative ways to make them come back for more products. 

MailChimp, on the other hand, has steadily incorporated CRM to make it all a full-fledged marketing platform and not just a place for email marketing. But still, it is way behind Kajabi partly because MailChimp started as an email marketing platform and evolved to include other marketing tools.

That’s why when you compare the two, Kajabi is the winner!

Hosting

Kajabi offers free hosting with all its plans. In fact, its hosting service is reliable, fast, and secure as it uses some of the best servers and networks including Amazon AWS. The video content is stored on Wistia.

MailChimp gives its users the choice to purchase domains and build websites. You can also connect your existing domain or subdomain with MailChimp.

When you compare the two, Kajabi is better though MailChimp offers discounts from time to time on hosting and buying domains. 

Integrations

Kajabi integrates well with many leading services such as PayPal, ClickFunnels, MailChimp, Aweber, and more. It also has third party integrations with Zapier and connects well to other apps through it.

MailChimp also integrates with a host of services such as Adobe Photoshop, Slack, WordPress, Zapier, ShopSync, and more. At the time of writing this piece, MailChimp integrates with 1173 services including Kajabi.

MailChimp scores over Kajabi in the sheer number of services that it integrates with, but Kajabi does have the Mailchimp integration, allowing you to take advantage of both tools.

Analytics

Kajabi comes with an innovative dashboard that tracks the number of purchases, net revenue, and other parameters that tell you the performance of your online courses or digital content and marketing activities. 

Further, it gives information about the performance of your affiliates, opt-ins, page views, subscription metrics, and more. 

MailChimp also makes it easy to keep your marketing data in one place and analyze through them to get new insights into the performance of your pages, the behavior of your audience, and estimated ROI. 

Both services integrate with Google Analytics to give you advanced insights into visitors and their behavior on your pages. 

Kajabi and MailChimp stack well against each other and their integration with Google Analytics makes both of them winners in this category. 

Ease of Use

Kajabi scores high on usability as its advanced drag and drop editor makes it easy to customize landing pages within minutes.

Also, the setting up of pipelines, finding analytics, and modifying content is intuitive and easy for all kinds of users.

MailChimp also makes it easy to set up emails, customize them, and track their analytics. But its segmentation and workflow editor is tedious to use and may not be ideal for all users.

Due to this reason, Kajabi is the winner in this category.

Pricing

Kajabi offers three plans for its all-in-one platform and they are:

  • Basic ($149/month) – Supports 10K contacts, 1K members, and three products and pipelines.
  • Growth ($199/month) – Supports 25K contacts, 10K members, and 15 products and pipelines.
  • Pro ($399/month) – Supports 100K contacts, 20K members, and 100 products and pipelines.

Kajabi offers a 14-day free trial on all its paid plans.

MailChimp, on the other hand, offers four plans.

  • Free ($0) – Basic templates, seven marketing channels, and 2K contacts
  • Essentials (starting at $13/month) – Everything in free plan plus A/B testing, 50K contacts, and custom branding.
  • Standard (starting at $20/month) – Everything in Essentials plus 100K contacts, retargeting ads, behavioral targeting, and advanced insights.
  • Premium (starting at $350/month) – Everything in standard plus segmentation, phone support, and 200K+ contacts.

Conclusion

Now that we have seen the different features, does Kajabi replace MailChimp?

Yes, if you’re looking to sell online content and want a more comprehensive digital marketing platform, you can replace MailChimp with Kajabi. Also, MailChimp integrates well with Kajabi and this could be a big plus.

In general, choose Kajabi if you’re,

  • Looking to market/sell digital content
  • Need a well-rounded platform that can help you do everything from creating online courses and digital products to executing email marketing plans to building sales funnels and more
  • An experienced digital marketer who can afford to spend a little extra each month
  • On the lookout for a comprehensive digital marketing platform that handles all your digital marketing needs.

On the other hand, choose MailChimp if you’re,

  • Just starting and want to try the free plan first
  • Only looking for a reliable email marketing solution
  • Want an email marketing tool with API to integrate with your existing system

Overall, Kajabi is a much better and more comprehensive tool when compared to MailChimp. Even if it is a little pricey, it could be worth your money.