Mighty Networks and Kajabi are both major players in the online course and community space. Both platforms are great for online learning, but they have different approaches.
In this article, we’ll compare Mighty Networks vs. Kajabi on the following things:
- Course platforms
- Communities and memberships
- AI tools
- Business features
- Apps
Try the platform with the most $1 million communities.
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Kajabi vs. Mighty Networks: Overview of the platforms
Kajabi
Kajabi is an online course platform that emphasizes the marketing and selling of asynchronous online courses. With a synchronous LMS and lots of features like dripping content, quizzes, and custom landing pages, Kajabi has a good set of course-building tools.
Kajabi was launched in 2010 by Kenny Rueter. He wanted to sell a lawn sprinkler he built and couldn’t find any digital platform to do it. And so, the infrastructure for Kajabi was born. Over the past decade, it’s evolved into a go-to platform for asynchronous courses. And Kajabi has added some options for selling different kinds of digital products, programs, and communities.
Kajabi is known for its focus on marketing and funnels: they’ve created tools for email, landing pages, and sales features that creators can use to get more eyes on their work.
Well-known creators on Kajabi: Natalie Ellis, Graham Cochrane, Brendon Burchard, Dominique Broadway, Roberto Blake, and Patricia Nikole.
Mighty Networks
Mighty Networks is a course and community platform that hosts asynchronous or synchronous courses (AKA live-taught or pre-recorded). And these can be seamlessly built into vibrant communities, memberships, events, and other points of engagement.
Mighty was founded by Gina Bianchini; she’s spent 2 decades building community platforms–first Ning (launched in 2004) and then Mighty Networks (launched in 2017). Mighty Networks builds community-first tech, leveraging advanced technology and AI to bring people together and help them make friends. It calls the technology—and the connections it creates—people magic.
And it has features for running and monetizing communities & memberships, courses, live and virtual events, and other digital products.
Mighty Networks also has a branded app feature (AKA white-label apps), meaning you can get an app and put your community and courses under your own brand.
Well-known creators & brands on Mighty Networks: Tony Robbins, Marie Forleo, Mel Robbins, TED, Matthew Hussey, Jim Kwik, BODi, and Keap.
Kajabi vs. Mighty Networks: What's the difference?
Is Kajabi or Mighty Networks right for you? The answer might be simple, depending on what you want.
There’s some overlap on the features and what you can do with each, but the design philosophy is different:
- Kajabi is a great asynchronous (pre-recorded) course platform that has marketing systems and funnels built into the software. The result is a great course marketing platform that’s playing catch-up on engagement and live community features.
- Mighty Networks is a community platform with tech designed for member-to-member engagement and connections. The result is incredible community experiences and both live and pre-recorded courses that are built for user engagement, but a focus on organic growth from members inviting members over paid marketing funnels.
Kajabi vs. Mighty Networks: Comparison chart
Features | Mighty Networks | Kajabi |
|---|---|---|
Build Asynchronous Courses |  | |
Build Communities + Memberships | | |
Course & Community Together | |  |
AI Course Outlines + Text Improvement | | |
AI Member Engagement + Connection | | |
Built-In Events | | |
Native Livestreaming | | |
Basic Landing Pages | | |
Advanced Landing Pages | | |
Advanced Marketing Funnels | | |
Email Marketing | Native ConvertKit Integration | Basic Native Email |
Branded Apps | | |
Premium Branded Apps | | |
Kajabi vs. Mighty Networks
Teaching Courses
Both Mighty Networks and Kajabi do online learning. That means most creators who use them are looking for ways to teach what they know at scale. And–for many of these–this means earning an income from teaching.
When you judge a teaching platform, you’re probably asking these questions:
- Will it be hard to get a course up and running?
- Can I create what I want and teach in a way that fits me?
- Will I feel good about charging for what I know?
With these questions in mind, let’s compare these platforms.
Kajabi
Integrates marketing and asynchronous courses
Building a course in Kajabi is about putting content together. You can choose from video, audio, text lessons, quizzes and surveys, and downloads. Kajabi also lets you build around a course page, and Kajabi’s AI builder will even spit out a course outline:
You then build your course into the outline, customizing it with your own material. At the lesson level, Kajabi gives you helpful prompts to get you started with the right content. Each lesson can be either visible or hidden as you’re building.
Once the course is built, you can also customize the course page with a header, bio, etc. Kajabi’s course-builder is easy to use.
Live courses
You can also teach live on Kajabi. It uses the same software, but flips the approach to building an asynchronous course. In this case, you would still build a landing or sales page for the course, but select a live session as your delivery method.
When you’re ready to teach your live course, you just hit “Go live” in your Kajabi LMS and it will livestream to members.
Members get the option to join a livestream from your course page, and they can see recordings of past live sessions. They can also get a link in their email shortly before a live session starts, so they can jump right in.
Kajabi course features
- Visual LMS that’s simple for building courses and dripping content, adding photos and videos, and polls and questions.
- Create course landing pages (either from scratch or from templates), sales pages, email drip campaigns, and more (more below).
- Presell a course and teach live from your LMS. Members can see recordings of past live sessions.
- Can add a button to go to a Kajabi community for adding a forum to a course (more below).
Mighty Networks
Courses in a Mighty Network are built around something called a “Space” – these are the components of an online community.
A Space is like a bucket, it can hold eight different features:
- Members
- Chat
- Feed
- LMS (Course Content Outline)
- Page
- Events
- Single Event
- Hashtags
You can build your own Space to fit the type of course you want to teach. OR you can choose from a template.
This gives you the option to either teach a live or pre-recorded course, just like Kajabi. This could mean using the Table of Contents to build a traditional course, with any combination of videos, text, images, or downloads.
Or, you can create a Space around a livestream course, and then add the recording to your course outline after.
Like Kajabi, livestreams on Mighty automatically download when they are finished. Unlike Kajabi, Mighty Networks has native livestreaming built into the product.
You can also use the Table of Contents feature on Mighty to build and run a Challenge, create a Resource Library, or even a Habit Tracker.
But Mighty’s Spaces give you more than just live or pre-recorded courses.
The flexible design gives you total control over members’ learning experience.
You can deliver any combination of courses, community, events, and more. Community and courses together are amazing, and with Mighty you can choose either a pre-recorded asynchronous course within a vibrant community OR you can live stream and teach a cohort-based course.
Finally, Mighty Networks can give you your course on your own native app. This means Mighty lets you start a course business and grow to your own custom apps when you’re ready. Or, if you're an established brand, you can launch with this right away.
If you're a current Kajabi customer, we'll even handle the migration.
What’s the difference?
Both platforms let you teach courses. Both are intuitive to use, so you won’t have trouble building educational experiences that look and feel good.
But education is evolving all the time. There’s more than one way to learn something, and different teachers have different teaching styles.
Kajabi is great at one thing: pre-recorded courses. But Mighty Networks isn’t JUST a course platform. It streamlines any kind of course with every type of community and engagement tool you can imagine.
For example, look at the difference it makes to have integrated discussions in your course (and not somewhere else).
This means you can create learning experiences on Mighty you’ll never get on Kajabi. Choose to livestream a course, build in events (with RSVP), offer premium course discussion groups (and even charge more for them). And only Mighty has native livestreaming with multispeaker settings (up to 9 speakers at once) with a running chat on the side.
Communities and memberships
Both Kajabi and Mighty have different types of digital products you can build. In the last section, we talked about learning products. But let’s talk about products to connect people and deliver live experience: think communities, memberships, group coaching, masterminds, etc.
Communities and courses go together like PB & J. As an educator, your community lets you get hands on, giving your students direct help. Communities also have a network effect–they can scale from members’ interactions (not just your content).
And, as a business model, communities and memberships give you recurring revenue. While selling a course one-time is great, getting members to pay monthly over years (for something that’s valuable to them) is usually more profitable.
Here’s what this looks like for your business.
Pricing
- Course - $150
- Community - $49/mo (based on our average community price)
- OR Course + Community $150 + $49/mo.
Just at a glance, you can see why communities and memberships make sense.
So which of these platforms will help you run a thriving community or membership?
Kajabi
Although it’s known as a course platform, Kajabi does have a community option.
Kajabi’s community used to be a basic discussion forum: basically a running list of simple text posts. But Kajabi has improved their community functions by purchasing a chat app called Vibely.
The result is what Kajabi calls "Community 2.0." This means a more comprehensive forum--newsfeeds, events, and chat & DM. It also has “live rooms.”
You can embed a link for the community into your landing page for a course, and members can jump there. And Kajabi has added the organizational feature of “Circles”--different containers for discussions. Each one can have different members to organize different conversations.
Unfortunately, Kajabi’s community feature still works in a separate place from its courses–requiring a second log-in and a second app. This hurts UX and confuses students.
Kajabi has member directories you can use to see who else is in the community and launch a chat. And with custom profiles, you can see people’s interests and accomplishments. (Members need to opt in to the member directory).
Mighty Networks
Mighty Networks runs communities and memberships with unique tech. It’s called people magic, and it’s software designed to introduce members to each other–which dramatically boosts your community engagement.
From the second someone joins your community, they’re prompted to engage; this starts with a welcome checklist you can customize.
Since Mighty is built to introduce members to each other, the “people explorer” is also front and center and infused with AI tools for connection.
As members join and fill out their profiles (they can use the AI profile generator if they want), they are sorted into interests. They can find each other with cool tools like “Top Members” or “Members Near You” or other custom categories, this makes it easy for them to make friends.
When you find someone interesting, you can click their profile. The AI tool will show what you have in common and even get you started on a conversation.
These are tools built for engagement and connection at every level, and you won’t find them anywhere else.
Mighty’s people magic software is layered on G2s top-rated community platform. We talked above how Mighty Spaces work for courses. And it’s these same buckets that organize a community. From running an all-member chat to hosting an event to a dedicated activity feed, these are community features that let you and members create any kind of content you want.
For example, this is what a chat looks like.
Or, you can host an event–whether it’s a simple virtual community function with RSVPs or a 1000-person conference. Mighty is powerful enough to run either.
What’s the difference?
Kajabi’s software is built for courses and marketing. Over the years, Kajabi has tried to tack on community features to a course platform. This makes it feel disjointed and hurts UX. For example, clicking a community link on a course page opens the community in a new window. It’s not in the same place. And if you’re running a course and community, Kajabi requires two different apps.
Mighty was built for communities. It’s always been designed for community. And Mighty’s cutting edge tech means that the software doesn’t stop with great community content, it also connects members in a way you won’t find anywhere else.
The end result is that Mighty Networks is home to more $1 million communities than any other platform.
It was built for this. It creates thriving, profitable communities and memberships with tools that rival top social media platforms, while Kajabi is still building clunky discussion forums.
There’s no comparison. If you want a community or membership, build on Mighty. Kajabi isn’t built for the kind of connection and engagement you can get with a proper community platform. And Mighty is ranked as G2’s top-rated community management software.
AI features
This is a new comparison feature for this year. But both Kajabi and Mighty Networks are doing some interesting things with AI. So which platform is creating the AI tools to help your course or community business thrive?
Kajabi
AI creator tools
Kajabi was an early adopter of AI tech, and they were quick to build AI content tools into their site. This includes:
- Course Outline
- Lesson Content
- Landing Page Copy
- Sales Email Copy
- Sales Video Script
- Social Media Content
You’re seeing a theme here–Kajabi has used ChatGPT to create text-based tools to make it easier for a creator to get started.
One cool thing about Kajabi’s AI tools is that anyone can use them, even without being a Kajabi customer.
But the downside to Kajabi’s AI tools is that they aren’t in-product. They are separate tools that you can use, but you’d have to copy/paste the text and outlines into your Kajabi course. And if you’re going to do this, you might as well use ChatGPT (where at least you can create your own prompts).
Mighty Networks
Mighty Networks’ AI is integrated into the product in a way that makes sense. And unlike Kajabi, most of Mighty’s AI features are not public facing. (Except for some tools like the Community Name Generator).
Mighty’s tools are designed to help automate community-building and engagement. They are:
- AI Set Up: Mighty’s AI can automatically build your community from a few words. You can be inviting your first paying members minutes after starting. This includes AI landing pages and a basic brand identity.
- AI Member Connections: AI can generate member profiles, show similarities members have, and start a conversation between members with one click.
- Course Outline Generator: Similar to Kajabi’s, this tool generates and builds a course outline from a brief prompt.
- Infinite Question Engine: Discussion questions that can be instantly generated and scheduled to keep the conversation going–even when you’re not online.
- Writing Assist: AI tools to help you write better content, suggest improvements, and add hashtags and video captions.
This suite of AI features is focused on building human connections as well as helping with content.
What’s the difference?
Kajabi’s AI features are useful, but with a few clicks and a free ChatGPT account, you can do it yourself. There’s no secret to asking AI to create a course outline (most of us know how to do this by now). This means Kajabi’s AI is nice to have, but probably isn’t worth paying for.
Mighty’s AI tools are built into the product. People magic is designed to make it easier for you to launch and run a successful community. The result is Mighty’s software gets higher engagement and encourages members to engage with each other–putting your community’s growth on autopilot.
Marketing and monetization
When you create a course or community, you may also want to be able to sell it. Let’s say you want to build a business around it. What features do these platforms give you for business?
Kajabi
Kajabi’s business and marketing features are the strongest parts of its offer. They offer the infrastructure for getting your course in front of people and selling it.
Here’s a breakdown of what these tools do:
Website Builder
Kajabi’s website builder is drag and drop, and integrates with its marketing sequences. There are different templates to choose from, or Kajabi creators can style their own. The website builder is a great tool to get the feel of a traditional website for a course business: different sections, custom domains, etc.
These connect to landing pages which you can share and collect emails, offering giveaways or webinars to get your potential customers into a funnel. Kajabi’s presets include opt-in pages, sales pages, webinar pages, upsell pages, and download pages.
And Kajabi’s website builder connects into…
Marketing Funnels
This is where Kajabi really shines, offering creators a set of great marketing tools for selling courses. Kajabi offers sales funnels and landing pages, and these are pre-built to fit the type of product you choose to sell.
Kajabi also has things like audience segmentation and email management built-in.
Payment Infrastructure
Finally, Kajabi offers a good payment infrastructure with upsells, free trials, coupons, subscriptions, abandoned cart recovery, and options for a product payment plan. And you can also sell in different currencies and create different kinds of bundles. Online courses can be sold at a one-time, monthly (subscription model), or annual fee.
When it comes to monetization options. Kajabi offers a great range of tools for creators to sell and market their content.
Mighty Networks
Mighty Networks has a very different set of marketing and monetization tools.
Page Building
Mighty Networks focuses its page-building on landing and sales pages for Spaces and communities. The network landing page is the first point of contact for potential community members. It’s a customizable landing page you can reorder, add sections, and make to fit your brand. The landing page will also allow members to choose a plan to access your community.
For existing members who are signed in, the experience centers on a community or Space feed (Kajabi’s UX is built around the landing page).
Marketing Funnels
Mighty has a different approach to marketing online courses and communities. You still get things like course landing pages and sales pages. But many of our Hosts market courses to engaged communities, which sell at a much higher rate thanks to a community flywheel effect. There's no need for complex funnels and fake urgency, because community members are already engaged and ready to buy.
Mighty’s philosophy of growth is a bit different too. Mighty encourages “ambassadors” instead of “affiliates.” The ambassador program rewards members for inviting friends–without adding a financial incentive. (When you financially incentivize people to push memberships, you decrease the quality of your community. You get members for the wrong reasons.)
Mighty has built in tools to grow your community, but not at the expense of having the right people there. You can add a questionnaire before people join for screening.
Mighty has built-in notifications on mobile and email for your members. They’re designed to make sure people are coming back in to engage and respond. Members can opt in or out to different kinds of notifications from their profiles.
For email newsletters, Mighty has a deep integration with ConvertKit. You can use ConvertKit's amazing email and marketing tools: segmentation, visual automations, list-building and opt-ins, and easily combine them with your community. You can also connect a course and newsletter together easily.
And Mighty also comes with a simple-yet-effective data set that gives you useful analytics, member data, member management, and more.
Payment Infrastructure
Mighty gives you different ways to monetize and sell a course. As we said above, since you can teach both live and pre-recorded courses, some creators choose to:
- Mix an asynchronous course with community features like livestreaming, events, discussions, and more.
- Upsell into premium features like mastermind groups, group coaching or coaching, premium events, and more.
In short, there are a ton of different ways you can create and sell a course. And you can sell in 135 different currencies or bundle any of the above benefits together.
What’s the difference?
Of the two, Kajabi is definitely designed for building complex marketing funnels. If you want to run sales-funnels to a pre-recorded course, without community engagement tools–it’s designed for this. It works great.
Mighty’s philosophy of growth is different. Instead of funnels, it builds around a community flywheel. This means your community grows organically through word of mouth–and you can add application screening to make sure you’re getting the right people in. Being more choosy about members might seem strange, but it leads to way better engagement when you have the right people in your community.
Apps
Finally, let’s compare how Kajabi and Mighty Networks each approach apps and user experience (UX).
Kajabi
Kajabi comes with decent apps for all devices. But it’s important to understand that Kajabi has different apps for different things:
Kajabi Courses App
Kajabi Courses is the flagship Kajabi app. It’s built for students in a Kajabi course to access their content. It has the course infrastructure, the videos and LMS, and the basic (legacy) Kajabi community on it. If you only have an asynchronous course, this app might be the only one your students need.
Kajabi Communities App
Kajabi Communities is the former Vibely app. It’s rebranded under Kajabi’s name and offers the more robust community, chat, conferencing, and real-time engagement features that the main Kajabi app is missing.
Kajabi Creator App
Finally, the Kajabi creator app is built for managing a Kajabi business. It gives you analytics, business statistics, and multi-site admin in an app form.
Kajabi Branded Apps
Kajabi has recently launched a branded app tool–meaning you can get your branded app in the App Store and Google Play Store. It’s early days, but here’s what Kajabi’s branded app is offering:
- An iOS and Android app with custom branding
- Branded push notifications, Apple Pay and Google Pay connections
- Get your course + community on the same app
Mighty Networks
Mighty Networks App
The Mighty Networks apps give you every element of your Spaces in a mobile version: courses, events, community, messaging, and more. And they're well-rated in the App Store and Google Play store. Unlike Kajabi, Mighty’s courses and community are on the same app. The app works the same as the web app, with identical UX and the same features for both members and Hosts.
So whether you’re a Host or a member—or both—you only need one app to engage and manage. You can even switch between multiple communities and courses you’re in from the Mighty Networks iOS and Android apps.
Branded Apps
Mighty Pro has been building branded apps for creators since 2017. Over 400+ creators and brands have used it. These include names like Tony Robbins, Marie Forleo, Mel Robbins, TED, Matthew Hussey, Jim Kwik, BODi, and Keap.
Mighty Pro offers weekly app releases, proactive upgrades, and a 4 weeks launch time. It comes with a branded app, plus a team of developers, account strategists, and community designers behind you. Most people who build on Mighty Pro find the additional revenue quickly pays for the cost of your own app.
- Example 1: A financial community that scaled FAST to $23K monthly from a $19.99 subscription.
- Example 2: The community of 2,500 members that introduced an add-on course, & unlocked an additional $100k in revenue within 2 months of launching!
There's something amazing about having your own branded livestreaming, branded app screens, and even selling courses from your own app. It leads to huge revenue gains and engagement.
There are two ways to get Mighty Pro: 1. “Do it with you” gives you white-label apps with design and branding support, and 2. “Do it for you” adds a dedicated community strategist and wrap-around service.
What’s the difference?
With the basic apps, the main difference is this: the Mighty Networks app puts everything in one place, while Kajabi requires 3 different apps for course, community, or business management. Since downloading 3 Kajabi apps is worse for UX and engagement than downloading 1 Mighty app, Mighty is better here.
When it comes to branded apps, the right choice will depend on what you want. Kajabi’s branded app is a simple, lightweight offering for a course or community. And it’s the only way to get a Kajabi course and community together in the same app. However, Kajabi doesn’t have a track record with branded apps, and they don’t offer the wrap-around support of Mighty Pro.
Mighty Pro builds premium branded apps for some of the world’s top creators and brands. And when you build on Mighty Pro, you'll work with a team of Account Executives and Community Strategists who have scaled 7-figure creator brands and 8+-figure subscription businesses.
Ready to build?
We’ve covered a lot here, but when it comes down to Mighty Networks vs. Kajabi, here are just a few of the many things you can do with Mighty:
- Build online courses the way you want: async or teach live (and sell a recording if you want). There’s no limitation from the platform and everything is native.
- Build communities and memberships that integrate with your courses (on the same platform & app), with G2’s top-rated platform and software designed for engagement. Add in integrated live events and native livestreaming.
- AI tools that help you create content, but also make it easier to manage your course and community AND to skyrocket engagement.
