Kajabi alternative: a different philosophy of marketing.

The 30-second answer

If you're running a marketing-led, funnel-heavy course business that depends on Kajabi's native automation, that's a real strength and we don't pretend to match it on day one. If your friction is the monthly bill, the lack of B2B path, or the US-hosting concern, we're a stronger fit.

What Kajabi does best

Kajabi's manual marketing toolkit is the deepest in this category. The email automation, the sales-funnel builder, the behavioural triggers, the segmentation — they've invested in it for years and it shows. If you already know exactly what funnels you want to build and you enjoy building them, Kajabi gives you the cleanest set of tools to do it.

Kajabi's brand recognition with US course creators is real, and the ecosystem of templates, agencies and consultants around it is the largest in the space. None of that is fake.

Where lernaura is different

Upload a video. The platform does the rest.

On Kajabi, uploading a video is the start of a process. Transcription is separate (Otter, Rev). Translation if you serve a multilingual audience is separate (DeepL, a freelancer). Subtitles in each language are manual. Regional pricing is set per-market by hand. Each new course repeats the whole cycle.

On lernaura, uploading the video is the work. The platform handles:

• Transcription (Gladia, EU-resident, no training on your content)
• Translation into your target languages
• Multi-language subtitles attached to the video
• Local-currency pricing across every market you sell into, based on purchasing-power parity
• Every artefact joins your reusable content catalog — searchable, repurposable, never re-uploaded

The Kajabi-equivalent workflow needs at least three separate subscriptions and a half-day per course. lernaura folds it into the upload step.

Pricing — we charge when you sell

This is the headline. Kajabi charges $71/month minimum whether you sold anything that month or not. lernaura charges 5% + €0.50 per sale, and zero in months where you don't.

For a creator at €5,000/month gross, that's €500 to lernaura vs $199/month + Stripe (€185 + €145 = €330) to Kajabi Growth. Kajabi is cheaper at this scale on platform fees alone.

For the same creator on a slow month with €500 gross, that's €50 to lernaura and $199 + Stripe (€185 + €14 = €199) to Kajabi. lernaura is cheaper by €149.

The math flips around €2,500/month gross revenue. Below that, lernaura is cheaper than Kajabi on platform fees alone. Above that, Kajabi's flat fee can win on the platform line alone — but that ignores what you must add to Kajabi to match lernaura, which is bundled into our 5% + €0.50: merchant-of-record (no VAT MOSS, no sales tax filing, no chargeback handling), AI semantic search, B2B per-seat licensing as additional revenue, and EU hosting.

What never changes: there is no month where you write a $199 cheque to lernaura because you forgot to cancel.

AI semantic search

Kajabi's search is keyword-based and limited to lesson titles. lernaura indexes every lesson, transcript, PDF, slide and community post as a single semantic surface. A student types "where did Sarah cover refund objections in the sales module" and gets the exact 90-second clip with surrounding context.

For your support load that means fewer "what lesson was that in?" messages. For students it means actually finishing your courses.

B2B per-seat licensing in a closed loop

Kajabi is pure D2C. lernaura does B2B per-seat licensing as a built-in flow: a licensee company pays lernaura for N seats of your content, we handle the transaction as merchant of record, the licensee gets their own delegated admin to self-manage users / branding / content controls / analytics, their team accesses your content through their own lernaura accounts, per-seat revenue back to you monthly. Mental-model clarification: the licensee isn't buying lernaura SaaS — they're licensing your content; lernaura is the rails plus the admin layer they manage themselves. You stay out of the user-management work entirely.

We hear from a lot of Kajabi creators who hit "we'd like to buy 30 seats for our team" emails and have to invent the workflow themselves. On lernaura the workflow exists. More on B2B licensing.

EU hosting and GDPR by default

Kajabi is US-hosted. lernaura is EU-hosted with the DPA embedded in our Terms of Use, accepted at signup on every plan including the free tier. After Schrems II this is increasingly a procurement requirement for European corporate buyers and a real concern for European audiences. More on EU hosting.

Merchant of record — we handle payments, VAT, tax and refunds

On Kajabi you are the merchant. You bring your own Stripe account, paying 2.9% + €0.30 per transaction. You handle EU VAT MOSS registration. US sales tax nexus tracking across the 50 states is on you. Refunds and chargebacks are on you.

On lernaura we are the merchant on every transaction. Card and bank processing (the Stripe equivalent — included, not billed separately), EU VAT, US sales tax in all 50 states (we collect, file, and remit), refunds, chargebacks — all included, not billed on top. The accountant bill that comes with running a European course business shrinks materially.

The comparison was never really the rate. Add Stripe (~2.9% + €0.30 per sale), a VAT engine, the cross-border filings and the hours you spend running them, and you are already at roughly 5% + €0.50 — which is exactly what lernaura charges, with the entire creator suite free on top.

Marketing — two different philosophies

Most comparisons frame this as a feature gap. It's actually a philosophy gap.

On Kajabi, marketing is manual and powerful. You build the email sequences. You design the funnels. You write the ad copy. You decide what to test against your competitors. Kajabi gives you the cleanest toolkit in the category to do all of that. If you already think like a marketer and want maximum control, this is the right tradeoff.

On lernaura, marketing is AI-driven and intelligence-led. You set up your competitive landscape once — the 5-10 competitors you care about most. Every day, our AI monitors what they're publishing (ads, social posts, launches, pricing changes, content drops) and surfaces what's working. It then drafts campaign content for you: ads and posts across every major social platform, both copy and graphics, ready to schedule. You review, approve, and send. The system learns from what performs and what you reject.

What Kajabi doesn't do at any price point is the intelligence layer. There's no competitor monitoring. No daily campaign drafting. No graphics generation. To replicate the lernaura workflow on Kajabi you'd add at least three separate tools (a competitor tracking tool, an AI copy tool, an AI graphics tool, an ad scheduler), pay separately for each, and integrate them yourself.

The funnel-builder gap goes the other way. Kajabi has a deep visual funnel editor; lernaura's is lighter. If your acquisition runs entirely through multi-step funnels you've already designed, Kajabi's tooling is more mature. Most creators we hear from describe simplifying their funnels in the move and not missing the complexity.

Pricing — the apples-to-oranges comparison most platforms hope you don't run

Most pricing comparisons in this category stop at the platform fee. That comparison misses the point: lernaura's 5% + €0.50 already covers the payment processing, EU VAT, US sales tax and chargeback handling a Kajabi creator assembles separately — roughly $500/month in tools — so that software comes free, and the real question becomes who owns your rails.

A representative worked example for a creator at €5,000/month gross revenue (where most serious Kajabi creators sit — well above the long tail, below the rare six-figure-monthly tier):

* The ~$500/month "long list" we used as the baseline: Otter or Rev (transcription, ~$25), DeepL Pro (translation, ~$10), Jasper or Copy.ai (AI copy, ~$40), Canva Pro + Midjourney (graphics, ~$45), Buffer (social scheduler, ~$30), Visualping or SimilarWeb (competitor tracking, ~$50), ConvertKit or similar ESP (~$50), Calendly Pro (~$15), Zoom Pro (~$20), Quaderno (VAT MOSS software, ~$50), TaxJar (US sales tax, ~$50), plus a notional ~$65/mo in accountant time.

If your actual stack is shorter than this — say you skip the AI copywriting tool, or you're happy with the free tier of Canva — your number will be lower. Subtract whatever doesn't apply and re-run the math. The point of the table isn't the exact ~$460; it's that everything in this section is what you assemble on Kajabi and what lernaura ships included.

Where this changes the picture

At €5k/month gross — a realistic revenue point for serious Kajabi creators — lernaura is cheaper than Kajabi by about €590/month, or ~€7,000/year. Three more things tilt the actual decision:

1. The admin work isn't on the table at all. Quarterly VAT MOSS returns, US sales tax filings, juggling 8-11 tool subscriptions, switching between platforms to do one piece of work — none of that is in the spreadsheet, because it's measured in hours, not euros. A creator with a meaningful European audience and a half-serious US presence is spending 6-10 hours per month on this operational work. At €100/hour opportunity cost — what your time is worth as a creator — that's another €600-1,000/month of your own time you stop spending.
2. The cross-border ceiling lifts. Most European Kajabi creators settle for selling primarily in their home country because cross-border is operationally too painful. lernaura removes that ceiling with one workflow across all 27 EU markets. Even a small lift in addressable revenue from cross-border typically justifies the move on its own.
3. At lower revenue, the gap widens further. Below €5k/month, Kajabi's flat subscription bites harder — at €2k/month gross, a creator pays Kajabi €185/mo whether they sold or not, plus Stripe plus the stack plus the VAT admin. lernaura at the same revenue is €200/mo total, all-in.

The honest read on higher revenue: at €20-30k/month, with a creator who already has the tool stack running smoothly and doesn't sell cross-border, the gap between Kajabi and lernaura tightens, and at €50k+/month Kajabi can come out ahead on platform-fee-only math. That's not the buyer reading this page. For the vast majority of creators — the €0-15k/month range where most monetizing creators actually live — lernaura wins on full TCO and decisively wins once you count the admin time.

Best for Kajabi / Best for lernaura

Best for Kajabi:

• Marketing-led course businesses doing well over $10k/month with native funnel automation.
• US-centric creators with strong brand recognition needs.
• Anyone for whom Kajabi's deeper marketing automation is the dealbreaker feature.

Best for lernaura:

• Creators under ~$10k/month who don't yet need Kajabi-tier automation but are paying for it.
• Any creator with European students or a B2B opportunity.
• Anyone for whom the "$199 cheque whether I sold or not" is psychologically wrong.

Migrating from Kajabi

48-hour managed migration. We move your current content (videos, course lessons, modules, community archives, podcast episodes if any) and your contact lists (students, members, subscribers) — everything you need to keep delivering and selling on lernaura from day one. Your existing Kajabi URL can redirect.

What we don't move: payment methods stay with your existing payment provider; each student re-attaches their card the first time they log in to lernaura (deliberate safety boundary — cross-platform PCI migration is a category of risk nobody should agree to). Historical analytics and Kajabi pipeline state also don't move — they don't transfer cleanly and forcing them always breaks something. The AI marketing layer rebuilds the equivalent automation from scratch in your voice, usually within a week.