Kajabi is for courses. Circle is for your whole business.

Kajabi’s entry plan looks affordable at $143/month — until you hit the 2,500-contact ceiling and get forced onto their $199/month plan just to keep serving your existing audience. 

Circle’s pricing scales with your community’s needs and membership size, so you’re not paying for a plan upgrade just because your audience grew. For creators with larger or fast-growing audiences, that difference in how pricing scales is often where Circle ends up being the more predictable investment.

Kajabi isn’t bad for course creation and marketing — but community is not where it was built to win. Kajabi’s community product requires members to use a separate login and access a separate area from your courses, which creates friction and fragments the member experience. It’s the same experience as if you were stitching multiple different tools together—not cohesive, not seamless, and not easy (or exciting) for your members.

Customers who’ve moved to Circle consistently describe the difference as moving from a “course platform with a community tab” to a platform where community is the entire product.

Kajabi’s branded app is an accessible choice (that only comes with their most expensive plan) if you’re sure that people will consume your courses on mobile.

Circle Plus is the premium, community-first option: a faster four-week launch versus Kajabi’s six to eight weeks, a 4.9/5 App Store rating across 69,000 reviews compared to Kajabi’s 4.4/5, native live streaming that Kajabi requires a third-party tool for, and a native desktop app for Mac and Windows that Kajabi doesn’t offer at all. 

If your members are showing up daily across devices — not just consuming courses — the experience difference is meaningful.

Kajabi uses a leaderboard-and-points model (via their Vibely acquisition) that rewards posting frequency and volume. Circle’s approach — Activity Scores and customizable rewards — is designed to measure engagement quality rather than just quantity, and benchmarks your community’s engagement against data from other Circle communities so you know where you actually stand. If you’ve found leaderboard-style gamification feels spammy or hollow in practice, Circle’s model is worth experiencing firsthand.

Circle was built with community at its core — email, courses, websites, and events were all added to serve that foundation, rather than community being bolted onto a course and marketing platform after the fact. Customers who’ve switched from Kajabi commonly cite fewer errors and a more stable day-to-day experience, particularly for community-heavy workloads. If platform reliability has been a frustration, it’s worth running a trial with your actual use case.

Yes, and Circle makes it more manageable than most people expect. You can export your Kajabi member list and import it directly into Circle, and Circle offers complimentary course migration on qualifying plans. The bigger migration challenge is usually internal process — things like automations, checkout flows, and access rules built up over years — and Circle’s onboarding team is set up to help you plan that transition in phases rather than all at once.