Brightspace is an academic and corporate learning management platform. It provides core e-learning features, as well as mobile accessibility and granular personalization and analytics insights.
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Kajabi
Score 8.4 out of 10
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Kajabi is a web hosting platform for online learning or membership websites, featuring landing pages and support for email marketing, video hosting, and codeless web building tools.
$149
per month
Pricing
D2L Brightspace
Kajabi
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Basic
$149.00
per month
Growth
$199.00
per month
Pro
$399.00
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
D2L Brightspace
Kajabi
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
Must contact vendor for pricing information. 30-day free trial is available.
If you're an educational institution (K-12, Higher Ed, etc.), this is an amazing tool, and it will provide you all the functionality to support anything you may want and need it to do. If you are looking at Brightspace as a tool for corporate training, I'm not sure exactly how good or bad it will be for you. My guess would be that it likely depends on your organization's size. Along that line, what I can speak to is how we use it for our customized training and in-house professional development/training, and it works fantastically for that. While we primarily use it for normal higher ed coursework, we regularly do training and professional development for all of our employees and I manage those along with our HR department. Because we use it for many other things as well, all of our employees are familiar with the product, which makes our trainings go that much smoother and makes my job that much easier.
I wouldn't recommend Kajabi for someone that's starting to figure out what their product is going to be and who is the target audience. While one could argue the starting price point isn't high compared to having a brick and mortar store, it's also not practical pay between $100-$200 a month while the business figures out their offer. Kajabi is better suited for someone who has already tested their product, specifically courses, and can start selling it relatively soon after launching their Kajabi site. While Kajabi has come out with a coaching and community products, those are still in their infancy. The strength of Kajabi is in their course content delivery supported by the ability to have a simple website and email marketing system in the same platform.
Allowing users to embed content links from YouTube or Google Drive enables learners to experience a richer lesson.
Providing a powerful editor that allows developers to also include content from Adobe Stock as well as textbook publishers and cloud storage companies gives more power and creative ability to instructors.
Providing scaling for mobile and traditional computer systems ensures students will not have issues on the go.
The customization of home pages and groups enable courses to be used for small training sessions with breakout groups, large courses with separate sections, and even just more engaging courses that present themed icons and logos.
One can feel a bit rushed on the Brightspace platform during the log-out period. Security requirements may require this, but it makes end-users more conscious about getting through content than taking notes.
From my experience, there is not a direct connection between the platform and Outlook.
The inbuilt themes are excellent but sometimes a small change is required to improve it - that then requires a code change which must then be reapplied if Kajabi issue an upgrade.
Once you get the "hang" of it, Kajabi is a very powerful platform. But it does take an investment of time. Kajabi also has a best-practice way of doing things and I feel that it is worth paying for skilled support to get through the setup quickly.
I would never give any system a perfect score. In the technology environment today we need to be constantly looking at ways to improve the user experience and LMS companies like Desire2Learn need to know that we have options today with other systems and they need to stay current with features and listen to their customers.
We are committed to it and once we get "really good" at using it, I think it is a excellent platform and links well to Hubspot. At present, we are still just barely scratching the surface with our use of its features
Overall, the learning environment works as expected. However, there are plenty of bugs. For example, for a few versions, trying to print out a PDF from the Content screen in several browsers would produce a blank page. We inform D2L support about these issues, most of which are known issues. However, they are very slow to respond. D2L seems to spend more time selling than actually coding and testing their product. Most of the issues are not major -- however, there have been a few that are unbelievable. In fact, this past week we had a sudden issue where the "Submit" button in quizzes would not appear if users had a certain browser/operating system combination. This is a major problem, if students cannot submit their exams! D2L is slow to respond to these kinds of situations, which do occur more often than I would like.
In my opinion, it's not perfect, but it's better than anything else out there. There are frustrations with it's limitations, but almost any and all issues we've ever had have been solvable, which I think is key and important to note. Overall it's a generally robust system that supports digital entreprenuers selling digital products in a way that nothing else can. It's Kajabi or bust!
Both students and instructor enjoy the 24-hoiur access. After, all isn't that the point of online learning. As an instructor located in an Eastern time zone state it is great to connect with students located in a Pacific time zone state. I have gotten comments about the early hours I am in the course room grading assignments . . . 4:00 a.m. PST; 7:00 a.m. EST So, it's sleep time for my students and "first cup of coffee" time for me.
I have had excellent support from Desire2Learn. Any ticket that I submit is acknowledged immediately and the correction is usually almost as quick. We use this for thousands of classes and it is pretty well liked by both faculty and students. We have been using it for almost 4 years now and most of our instructors have become pretty proficient with it.
The Kajabi Support people are helpful, fast and knowledgeable. I usually call in a panic - because I have lost something, messed something or am on a deadline. Sometimes we speak, or we do a chat. Always my angst is eliminated. I often thank the person for being "so patient" with me. LOL
The training provided online did not, necessarily, fit the version of the system that I was using. Screens were somewhat different and not all options were readily available. This could have been due to customization on the part of my institution however, I rather believe it was due to version changes and training materials not yet being updated.
These platforms are big complex pieces of software. Mor recently - Kajabi provides a done for you example which you can borrow and customise - but those were not available when we started.
I have used Blackboard Learn 8 and 9. I am currently learning about Canvas. Blackboard is overall much clunkier and lacks the intuitive feel in some parts of D2L. Its grade book is much harder to control and manipulate than D2L's. Its navigation menu can be more radically modified from the default than D2L's, but this doesn't seem that useful to me. Discussions in Blackboard can be more easily reorganized than in D2L, but no grading of discussions is possible. Blackboard Assignments is a good innovation which allows markup directly in the students' submissions, but it displays student work in a confusing manner that doesn't allow for any customization, and its markup options need further tweaking. Furthermore, no rubrics can be used in Blackboard in any way to grade any kind of work (that I am aware of). Overall, I would choose D2L over Blackboard.
ClickFunnels is a great tool for funnel automation, landing pages, and lead generation but when it comes to product delivery for content creators it lacks functionality as it reality it was not meant for that purpose. Originally, we used ClickFunnels for our funnels but we found out that we could do exactly the same with Kajabi, so we migrated all of our funnels to Kajabi
During my first semester working with Desire2Learn the integrated learning management system was more down than up. This meant reconfiguring assignment due dates, frustration for both the instructor, students, and help desk staff. After an upgrade, Desire2Learn has been reliable.
I cannot speak to whether this system is less expensive than the more fully featured Blackboard, but employees are far less efficient, frustrated, and require frequent calls to the help center to set up fairly simple course templates.
I have been asked to consider teaching courses which will be completely online at my current institution. I have done such online courses several times at other universities, but I have decided Desire2Learn is too frustrating and cumbersome to do so. I am now exploring using Google Drive to teach a course online. Otherwise, I will not teach online until required or I find an alternate system.
When we used Kajabi to launch new programs we achieved the ROI of our monthly investment each time.
With Kajabi, the ability to offer old programs that have been offered in the past is easy to present to one-off customers or when not in a launch series.
