The world gets smaller every day, and we all have to do everything we can to keep up with the ever-changing times.
Gone are the days when people would walk in your front door asking you to take on an apprentice. These days, people can do everything online—even teach.
Enter the Learning Management System, or LMS. The future of e-learning, LMS is everything you need in one neat package as you take on the world.
In this head-to-head comparison, we will be looking at two of the most popular LMS services available in order to figure out which one you should use.
Say hello to Kajabi and Thinkific.
Kajabi – All The Tools You Need… Under One Roof
Kajabi is an LMS developed by information marketers for information marketers. It’s a beautifully designed all-in-one product that you can use to market, sell, and deliver information products online.
Thinkific – Empowering Modern Course Creators
Thinkific, which is similar to Kajabi, is another LMS that caters to information marketers. This solution was created to simplify the process of building an online business for teachers so that teachers can focus on what they do best: share their expertise.
Let’s break down these two powerhouses to see which one is the better LMS.
Round 1: Websites
The website is the front door of your proverbial shop. A beautiful and neat front door means a great first impression for your prospective students. An ugly and messy one, though, is an instant turn off.
Your website’s aesthetic isn’t going to be one of your problems with Kajabi. Content creation with Kajabi is simple, easy, and beautiful. You can choose from a handful of customizable themes that make your website look amazing. And Kajabi’s themes are even mobile responsive. This is an important feature since people can do almost anything on their phones now and are moving away from using desktop computers.
Thinkific also provides multiple themes for your website that look really clean. It reminds me a lot of Google’s material design. Thinkific’s themes are also highly customizable and responsive to mobile.
Winner: Kajabi and Thinkific
Thinkific’s themes are clean and simple, while Kajabi’s are varied and aesthetically pleasing.
Both solutions provide options that allow you to create websites that are varied and diverse.
Kajabi and Thinkific tie for this round.
Round 2: Dashboard and Ease of Use
Your LMS is only as good as the amount of work you accomplish on it. If you have an LMS that’s difficult to use, clunky, slow, and frustrating, then you won’t get much done at all.
Thankfully, both of our contenders have intuitive and easy to use features that help give you a stress-free LMS experience.
Kajabi has a straightforward dashboard that gives you access to almost all of Kajabi’s powerful features in one or two clicks. Despite having truckloads of features, Kajabi’s platform doesn’t feel overwhelming at all and is very welcoming for beginners and advanced users alike.
Just like Kajabi, Thinkific also has a clean and user-friendly dashboard that gives you access to all of its features in just one or two clicks.
Thinkific also helps you get started by prompting you to add anything you lack and giving you step-by-step tutorials on how to use the software.
Winner: Kajabi and Thinkific
Both Kajabi and Thinkific are designed to give you a fun and a hassle-free LMS experience. Both offer user-friendly designs that encourage you to enjoy the time you spend creating content, instead of feeling that the process a chore.
This round is a draw.
Round 3: Content Creation
Let’s move on to the primary reason you’re looking for an LMS: creating and selling your content!
At the heart of a good e-learning course is the content you want to communicate to your students. You need an LMS that makes it easy for you to manage your content instead of bombarding you with features that you might not need just yet.
Kajabi allows you to easily upload video content that your users will be able to view without any lag or technical problems.
With Kajabi, you get an easy to use platform that offers a simple, step-by-step process. Even the most unseasoned techie wouldn’t have a hard time figuring out how to navigate the platform.
As a bonus, Kajabi offers themes for content creation that are just as amazing as the ones for your website.
Just like the rest of Thinkific, the content creator is clean and well-designed, with most options neatly arranged on the side. Many people appreciate the Thinkific’s ease of use and are able to take full advantage of Thinkific’s content creation features.
Winner: Kajabi and Thinkific
Both platforms offer an easy-to-use interface and many themes. You’ll be hard pressed to find anyone who can’t create a beautiful and amazing course with either.
Round 4: Additional Features
Here’s the icing on the cake!
A good LMS should provide many features that help you create, market, sell and manage your courses, making your path to a thriving online business easier.
Kajabi and Thinkific have a multitude of convenient features aimed to give you a fun and easy teaching experience.
Both platforms provide interactive course discussions, allowing your users to communicate with you and with each other. And both solutions run their own cloud hosting. They thus remove the need to look for other media providers, in addition to saving you time and money.
Kajabi offers the option to drip feed emails to your clients, giving them tidbits of content without showing them everything you have to offer.
Kajabi has a feature that doesn’t allow users to download videos until a certain time has passed. This safeguard can prevent users from obtaining your content until after the refund period is over. A feature like this will be appreciated by marketers concerned about people stealing their content.
Kajabi also lets you integrate with third party apps, which is yet another benefit of this platform.
Aside from those already mentioned, there’s a myriad of other useful elements Kajabi has up its sleeve. All of them are aimed at making your LMS experience a fruitful and enjoyable one.
Thinkific has its fair share of features as well. For example, it also has its own drip release feature that is (somewhat) similar to Kajabi’s.
Thinkific also gives you the ability to bundle similar courses at a discount to give your prospects more value for their subscriptions.
Lastly, Thinkific gives you multi-language options, letting your students learn through any language with which they feel comfortable. This is a great feature, in my opinion, as it broadens your market outside those who speak English.
Thinkific also provides downloads and integrates with over 500 other apps.
Winner: Kajabi and Thinkific
Both Kajabi and Thinkific have a wide range of features that help you get the job done. They each have a few different strengths, but both have the in-house marketing tools a business needs to grow quickly.
Who gets the grand prize? You decide!
Kajabi and Thinkific each have valuable marketing features, beautiful and easy to use themes, and intuitive content creation features, among other benefits. They are reliable solutions for setting up your website, creating digital products, and selling your courses online. I’m inclined, however, to lean slightly in favor of Kajabi because of the unique video content safeguard.
What’s Next?
What are your thoughts about both platforms? Are they equal, or is one better than the other?
Please share your ideas in the comments section below. Cheers!
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Hi Dana ,
Feels great to hear about Kajabi vs. Thinkific and “LMS” too. Intersting spoof, thanks to share this one to us.
Thanks for sharing this awesome piece of content. But I believe that Thinkific is much better than Kajabi when it comes to the features. It is a better solution as compared to Kajabi. Though Kajabi is a brilliant tool, but Thinkific can do wonders. You forget to highlight some good highlights of Thinkific tool.
Hi Shravani,
We haven’t personally used either one of them, but I do have more details on Thinkific that we will be adding to this content soon. They just came in yesterday and my editor takes weekends off, so we’ll be doing it this coming week.
If you have any specifics you would like to share, leave another comment for potential inclusion when we edit.
Gail Gardner would love you to read ..Your Email List Can Be Destructive to Email Delivery
hey
thanks for posting the article it will really helps me i wont go back without appreciating about the arcticle anyhave thank you very much for this article posting
Hi, Thanks for all the great tips and how-to’s in this article. Degital Media has become part of modern life. People can’t seem to live without their favorite networks such as E-coomerc website or scial sites like facebook and Twitter,Tumblr ,etc…. but other sites such as LinkedIn and Pinterest have also become popular.So many people spending so much time using social media has raised productivity concerns in the business community. thats we have hike our Enterprise Parallel with Digital Era.
Well I always thought to build LMS of my own but didn’t got any time so was planning to hire a good developer. Seems like this review is very useful.