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
Optimizely Customized Commerce
Score 7.7 out of 10
N/A
Optimizely Customized Commerce is a headless PaaS commerce solution built to scale commerce results for enterprise brands.
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.
Our experience may be unique because we opted for an Epi core team to implement our website/console set-up and connection to our PIM and ERP. The experience may have been different with a 3rd party or it may not have. That said, we have been live with our primary website for almost 2 years and I still do not consider it was ever "done". We have been going back and forth on functionality issues and bugs since launch. I have low confidence that changes made the previous day will 100% be online the next - so my team rechecks the work they did the previous day to ensure everything is online. The addition of a second channel and enhancement requests have compounded the issues. I feel this product would work fine with singular or less complex market SKU offerings.
Episerver has a robust discount engine. This engine, combined with "visitor groups" allow our marketing department to categorize customers and offer a variety of discounts to targeted customers at specific times.
Episerver has a full-featured, storefront experience that can handle everything you might want for an e-commerce website.
Episerver offers A/B testing that can be helpful for trying out new content ideas and tracking the results.
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.
Support. Episerver used to have direct support and access to the tech team to discuss and resolve issues. The new support portal is not enough for developer needs.
Quality Assurance. We find issues in the Episerver code that should have been resolved in QA before release.
Sales. Episervers sells the framework as a solution while showing Alloy. While it helps Episerver sell more, it puts the implementation partner into trouble as the client thinks they bought the solution. Episerver does not provide a solution. It provides a framework that you can build a solution on.
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
Really want to be able to spend more time and resources on rolling out new things with Episerver but at the moment we seem to be fixing alot of issues and pain points with the way our system was setup.
Kajabi is very usable. But it is complex and if you haven't used it for a few weeks you have to remind yourself how to do things. It is very important to treat it like any major system and be very disciplined about how you file things and name documents
The administrative interface is largely intuitive and relatively easy to use. The complexity of business needs and ability to customize can affect this (i.e. you have to set up and develop with the user in mind), but the basic structure is largely solid. There are some areas of redundancy (such as Commerce Manager overlapping with other administrative areas) that can sometimes cause confusion or offer some functions in one place, whereas other related functions are managed on a completely different page.
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
We had an incredible team at Episerver Supporting us with the go live, reviewing our integration, and pushing our integration partner to deliver a quality product
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.
Fully understand what is OOTB feature of the platform before proceeding to develop. Then implement a customization of key features once you can prove they are working as OOTB to make them more user friendly and productive for the business. Eg pre order and e gift card
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
Optimizely Commerce Cloud offers a very wide range of features for admin users. There is less a need for an IT specialist or programmer to be involved when changes need to be made.
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.
