Kajabi vs SamCart Comparison: Which Ecommerce Platform is Better for Your Business?

Kajabi is an all-in-one platform and it gives you tools to market and sell your courses, coaching and more. SamCart is an e-commerce platform that manages the payment process for your products and services. Both are feature-rich industry-leading platforms.

Are they competitors? What are their strengths and weaknesses? What overlap in features do they have? In this article, we’ll take a detailed look at SamCart and Kajabi to help you understand what they do and answer these qestions.

SamCart vs Kajabi: Overview

SamCart is primarily used by small and medium-sized businesses to create high-converting checkout pages and sales pages. SamCart’s main features include easy-to-use templates, one-click upsells, order bumps, A/B testing, support for Taxes and VAT, and third-party integrations.

Kajabi is an all-in-one online business platform that is designed to help digital entrepreneurs and small business owners create and sell online courses, membership sites, and digital products. Kajabi’s main features include website and landing page building, course creation tools, email marketing, and community building.

Where these two platforms overlap is in the area of selling: checkout pages and sales pages.

SamCart vs Kajabi: Functionality

SamCart is focused on building checkout pages and connecting to your other platforms via built-in integrations or through Zapier. It is designed to be an easy-to-use checkout platform that focuses on this crucial step of the sales process and offers many tools that can be used to try and increase sales. 

It offers features like: 

1. One-click upsells
2. Order bumps
3. A/B testing (Only available in the Scale plan which requires a sales call to start and doesn’t have a price listed so this plan is probably pretty $$)
4. Support for Taxes and VAT
5. Multiple types of payment options including pay what you want
6. Localization for language and currency support
7. Cart abandonment
8. Coupons and discounts
9. Customizable templates to help businesses optimize their checkout pages and sales pages.

Kajabi, on the other hand, is designed to be an all-in-one platform for creating and selling digital products. It offers website building, course creation tools, email marketing, and community-building features. Kajabi is great for businesses that want to create and sell online courses or membership sites, with features like drip content, quizzes, and assessments. Kajabi’s feature offering is much broader than what SamCart offers which doesn’t really make the two platforms outright competitors.

You wouldn’t use SamCart instead of Kajabi, but you might use SamCart with Kajabi, to replace the checkout pages that Kajabi provides. Here is a list of some of the similarities and differences in Kajabi Checkout Pages and some reasons why you may want to use SamCart for the checkout process.

Kajabi Checkout Pages Can:

1. Upsells
2. Order Bumps
3. Multiple types of payment options including pay what you want
4. Cart abandonment
5. Coupons and discounts

Kajabi Checkout Pages Can’t:

1. A/B Testing
2. Support Taxes and VAT
3. Localization for language and currency support
4. Templates for checkout page design. 

The Kajabi checkout page design abilities are more limited than SamCart. In the areas of features and design of the checkout pages, SamCart wins, which you should expect because the company is built around the checkout page.

That being said, Kajabi checkout pages are very functional and can be relied on. From my experience working with many coaches over the last few years and seeing what people post on social networks, the number one reason people decide to ditch Kajabi’s checkout page and use SamCart or a similar provider is because they need support for taxes and VAT in their payment collection.

The second reason that I see people talking about is not having the type of control over the upsell process and overall design to suit the nature of their funnels and sales process.

SamCart vs Kajabi: User Experience

Many budding entrepreneurs find that one of the most intimidating parts of building an online business is the “online” part. In the past, building a website was hard and required some very specific skill sets. If you didn’t have them, you had to go to the expense of hiring somebody who did. Both SamCart and Kajabi are designed from the ground up with that person in mind. 

They both offer intuitive and easy-to-use interfaces, making them accessible to users with different levels of technical expertise. SamCart’s interface is clean and straightforward, with drag-and-drop functionality and easy-to-use templates. Kajabi’s interface is also user-friendly, with a visual editor that allows users to create and customize their own website or course and the benefit of the fundamentals of that editor being the same across all features making lots of cross-over for throughout the platform.

If you have web development skills that’s great. But you don’t need them to use either SamCart or Kajabi. 

SamCart vs Kajabi: Pricing

Pricing is always an important consideration when choosing an e-commerce platform. 

SamCart offers three pricing tiers: Launch, Grow, and Scale:

• Launch plan starts at $79 per month and includes one-click checkout, checkout anywhere and templates. You can start the Launch plan with a 7-day free trial.
• Grow plan costs $159 per month and includes features like checkout automations, upsells and order bumps, subscription management and cart abandonment. You can start the Grow plan with a 7-day free trial.
• Scale plan offers done-for-you account set up, A/B testing, access to the API and does not have a price listed, you need to book a call with a sales representative to get into the scale plan.

Kajabi offers three pricing tiers: Basic, Growth, and Pro. In the area of checkout pages where Kajabi and SamCart have crossover functionality, there is no difference in the features you get between the three plans. Look a my full review of Kajabi pricing for more details on the pricing for the different plans.

• Basic plan starts at $149 per month.
• Growth plan costs $199 per month and includes advanced features like automations, pipelines, and affiliate programs.
• Pro plan costs $399 per month and includes all of the Growth features plus additional features like membership site themes and assessments.

Common Questions

What is the difference between Kajabi and SamCart?

The main difference between Kajabi and SamCart is the range of features they offer and the needs they try to meet. 

Kajabi is an all-in-one online business platform that is designed to help digital entrepreneurs sell and distribute online courses, membership sites, and digital products and manage the educational experiences of customers. 

SamCart is primarily an e-commerce platform that takes care of the checkout process and lets you manage your payments.

If you want to create online courses, Kajabi is the way to go.  If you’re looking for a platform that will let you sell anything and collect payments, SamCart is your better option.

Kajabi 30-Day Free Trial

If you think now is the right time to try out Kajabi you can sign up with my 30-day free trial link and I will give you 3 free sign-up bonuses. I am an affiliate for Kajabi and have helped over 100 people test it out and see if it is right for them. The help I give my referrals is designed to help you understand as quickly as possible if Kajabi is right for you and will meet your needs. The goal is to know if you want to keep using it before your trial is over. Check out my bonuses page, I’ll help flatten the learning curve for you and be there to answer your questions.

Happy Kajabi-ing Ahead

JD - Kajabi Expert