Systeme.io vs Kajabi

Systeme.io and Kajabi both promise one login for courses, email, funnels and checkout, and neither takes a cut of what you sell. Systeme.io gets there by being one of the cheapest all-in-one platforms on the market and by capping how much automation you can run on its lower tiers. Kajabi gets there by charging far more from day one and, in exchange, refusing to cap your funnels, emails or landing pages at all. Every plan, limit and fee below comes from Systeme.io’s and Kajabi’s own pricing pages, checkout flows and help centers.

Which one is actually cheaper for a course creator just starting out?

Systeme.io’s Free plan costs nothing forever: no credit card, 2,000 contacts, one course for up to 500 students, and the same 0% transaction fee as every paid tier. Kajabi has no equivalent. Every Kajabi plan, including the entry-level Basic at $179 a month, starts as a 14-day trial that requires a card up front; cancel before day 14 and you pay nothing, but let it run and Basic starts billing automatically.

Systeme.io’s free plan has one catch its pricing page does not mention: its terms cap it at $10,000 in lifetime sales revenue. Cross that line and you get a 3-day window to upgrade before your payment pages stop accepting new sales — you are not charged automatically, but you also cannot keep selling on Free. A creator doing more than a few thousand dollars a month will reach that ceiling within a year and need to move to Startup, at $17 a month, still a fraction of Kajabi’s price. Kajabi’s help center also still names a cheaper Kickstarter tier, at $71 a month billed annually ($852 a year), but it does not appear on Kajabi’s current public pricing pages, and its contacts, products, websites and community limits are not published anywhere we could find; reaching it means using an old checkout link, with no guarantee it stays available.

Where does each one nickel-and-dime you as you grow?

Kajabi prices its plans mainly by contact count and admin seats, then charges separately for almost everything else you might need more of. Basic includes 2,500 contacts, and every 5,000 more costs $25 a month. Extra admin users are $5 a month each past your plan’s cap, and an extra website is $49 a month. Want the branded mobile app? That’s $199 a month on top of your plan, unless you’re already on Pro, where it comes included. Kajabi even prices extra funnels at $10 per 10 a month for accounts that need them, on a feature its own comparison pages otherwise market as unlimited.

Systeme.io does not sell room to grow as an add-on; it enforces hard ceilings instead. Go over a paid plan’s contact, tag or automation-rule limit and Systeme.io emails a 3-day warning, then auto-upgrades the subscription to the next plan and bills its full price — there is no option to just pay for a little more room the way Kajabi allows.

Which one takes a bigger cut of your card sales?

Neither platform takes a percentage of your sales itself, but each collects its piece a different way once a card is charged. Systeme.io connects to your own Stripe or PayPal account, so you pay that processor’s standard rate directly — Stripe’s US card rate is 2.9% plus 30 cents a charge, and Systeme.io adds nothing on top of it. Kajabi runs its own processor, Kajabi Payments, and its rate depends on your plan: 2.9% plus 30 cents on Basic, dropping to 2.8% on Growth and 2.7% on Pro. Kajabi then layers on two more charges no matter which plan you’re on: 0.7% extra on every subscription payment, including the first, and 1.5% more when a US-based account is charged with a card issued abroad. Skip Kajabi Payments for a third-party processor instead, and Kajabi still charges a surcharge — 2% on Basic, 1% on Growth or 0.5% on Pro — in any region where Kajabi Payments operates. A disputed charge costs a flat $15 on Kajabi, kept even if you win the dispute, and pausing a Kajabi account between launches instead of cancelling it costs $29 a month. Systeme.io publishes no equivalent dispute or pause fee.

Which one scales better once the business is real?

The bills above show Systeme.io staying cheaper at every size, but the two scale in different directions. Systeme.io caps funnels, tags and automation rules tightly on its lower tiers — Startup allows just 10 of each — and pushes you toward a pricier plan, or an automatic upgrade, once you outgrow them. Kajabi does not cap funnels, landing pages or marketing emails on any plan, including Basic, so a creator running a lot of campaigns never has to buy a bigger plan just for that. Kajabi also builds in a Cofounder AI assistant on every plan, including Basic, though Basic’s monthly AI-credit allotment is 0; Growth includes 500 credits a month and Pro 1,000. Systeme.io’s plans include nothing comparable.

Systeme.io pulls back ahead on team and reseller features. Every plan, including Free, includes unlimited assistant accounts, and every plan also allows unlimited sub-accounts, each carrying the main plan’s own limits; resell them white-labeled and you keep 100% of what you charge, as long as it’s not below Systeme.io’s own price. That makes Systeme.io a genuinely different tool for an agency reselling funnel or course sites to several clients; Kajabi has no comparable multi-client feature, and its admin-user limits (2 on Basic, 11 on Growth, 26 on Pro) are seats on one account, not separate client accounts.

The two also part ways on what you can sell. Systeme.io’s plans track physical-product variants as a capped resource — 50 on Free, 100 on Startup, 250 on Webinar, and up to 5,000 on Unlimited even though its pricing page calls that plan’s limit unlimited — so a small physical-goods add-on is possible, if limited. Kajabi’s plan limits list only digital product types: courses, coaching, memberships, downloads and podcasts. For how this fits alongside the rest of a course business’s tools, see the course-creator stack.

What happens if you want your money back, or want to leave?

Kajabi backs every plan with a 30-day money-back guarantee, stated at checkout on every signup flow captured. Systeme.io does not: its terms make every subscription non-refundable, so a wrong plan choice costs you until the current billing period ends. Downgrading works differently too. Kajabi lets you downgrade yourself at any time, once your usage fits under the lower plan’s limits; Systeme.io’s downgrades are not self-serve at all — you contact support, who send a custom order form built around the lower plan’s caps.

Moving between the two later is not a simple export. Systeme.io offers a free, done-for-you migration service with its Unlimited plan or with any plan billed annually, but that only covers moving in, not out, and neither company publishes a tool for exporting your funnels, courses or students to the other platform. Budget for a manual rebuild — pages, email sequences, course content and checkout links copied over by hand — if you switch either way, not a quick data transfer.

Where most advice gets this wrong

Most comparisons boil this down to “Systeme.io is cheaper, Kajabi is more premium,” as if the only thing that changes with growth is your budget. What actually changes is how each platform surprises you at the edge of a plan. Kajabi’s growth costs show up as a lot of small, separate charges — $25 more for contacts, $5 for a seat, $49 for a website — so you can see each one coming and choose whether to pay it. Systeme.io hides its edge differently: Startup and Webinar cap tags, automation rules and funnels just as tightly as they cap contacts, and going over any one of those, not just your contact count, triggers the same 3-day countdown to a full, non-negotiable jump to the next plan. A creator who reads only the contact limit on Systeme.io’s pricing page, and never checks the automation-rule or tag limit, can get auto-upgraded and rebilled for a reason that has nothing to do with list size. The real question is not which platform is cheaper on average; it is whether you would rather track several small, predictable add-on charges or watch every limit on the plan you are on, not just the one the pricing page highlights.