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
X-Cart
Score 7.8 out of 10
N/A
X-Cart is an eCommerce and shopping cart platform built through PHP code.
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.
X-cart uses Smarty Templates in a PHP environment which means there are many developers who could probably pick it up relatively quickly to provide new features. The smarty template engine is very robust and well documented, and the cost of x-cart is very low which makes it easy for anyone to get started with their e-commerce business. It is a really great e-commerce software and suitable for every business. I actually cannot find any serious objection to what it does. They regularly update it, add new features, fix flaws, offer support. The software itself offers many integrations for shipping and payments, everything you need for sales. Although it covers many things, there will always be something missing, because many things happen in between customer visit and final delivery. Therefore, if you plan to expand your business, also plan to expand your X-Cart - but do not worry, it won't be hard.
For everyone. From small to huge business you get everything out of box. Just setup company details, payment and shipping methods and you are ready to go.
Upgradable. There are many plugins one can integrate with X-Cart. Over time, many of them became part of the software, and you are one click away to enable them.
Well organized code. It uses Smarty template engine, which I find great, specially for debugging (famous Webmaster mode).
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.
Creating new plugins the way X-Cart wants is maybe not complicated, but hard to implement because there are no hooks. One has to manually change each file. This is similar to patching the core and therefore one has to know basics of web development.
Even if you get everything styled correctly with base skin, there is a bunch of unused styles you have to cope with. Start skin should be much cleaner. You may find thousands excess lines of code.
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
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 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
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.
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
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.
Flexibility in presentation as well as functionality
Full open source software allows for unlimited possibilities with the store function, though some developers who create modules do encode their modules which have errors in their code which therefore can't be fixed
A fully functional professional level application at a fraction of the cost of similar applications such as magento.
