LearnDash vs Teachable vs Kajabi: Honest Comparison From a WordPress Developer

What each platform actually is

LearnDash is a WordPress LMS plugin. You host it on your own WordPress installation. You own the data. You control the infrastructure. The annual licence starts at around $199/year with no revenue share and no per-learner fees.

Teachable is a hosted SaaS platform. You upload your content, set your prices, and Teachable handles the rest — hosting, payments, checkout. The trade-off: on the Free and Basic plans, Teachable takes transaction fees (up to 10%). On higher plans, fees disappear but you are paying $119–$299/month. Your course data lives on their servers.

Kajabi is an all-in-one platform: courses, membership sites, email marketing, landing pages, and a website builder — all in one subscription. Plans start at $149/month. There is no transaction fee. But you are renting an entire ecosystem, and every feature — emails, pipelines, communities — is locked inside Kajabi's proprietary system.

The real cost comparison at scale

The sticker price comparison is misleading. What matters is the total cost at your actual revenue scale.

At £5,000/month revenue with 100 active students: LearnDash costs roughly £200/year in plugin licence + £15–30/month in hosting. Total: ~£380/year. Teachable Pro costs £1,428/year. Kajabi Growth costs £2,388/year. LearnDash is 4–6x cheaper at this scale.

At £20,000/month revenue with 500 students: the gap widens. LearnDash cost barely changes — hosting scales slightly. Teachable Business (£2,388/year) is now the minimum needed to avoid per-seat limits. Kajabi Pro (£4,788/year) is required for 100,000 marketing emails. Meanwhile, on LearnDash you have spent £380 on the plugin and whatever WooCommerce Subscriptions costs (~£180/year). Total: ~£560/year.

The economics only shift if you value Kajabi or Teachable for what they replace: a separate email platform, a landing page builder, a payment processor setup. If you are already paying for Mailchimp and a funnel builder, Kajabi might genuinely be cheaper than running all those separately. If you are not, you are paying for tools you do not use.

Where LearnDash genuinely wins

Data ownership. Every student record, every quiz result, every completion timestamp lives in your own WordPress database. You can export it, query it, build custom reports on it. With Teachable or Kajabi, you are dependent on their export tools — and their export formats — forever.

Customisation depth. LearnDash integrates natively with the WordPress ecosystem: WooCommerce for checkout, BuddyBoss for community, Gravity Forms for custom onboarding, Zapier and Make for automation. If you need something specific — a custom certificate generator, a corporate bulk enrolment system, an integration with your CRM — a WordPress developer can build it.

No platform risk. Teachable and Kajabi have both undergone significant pricing changes and feature deprecations in the past three years. When a SaaS platform changes its pricing model, you pay more or you migrate — neither is free. On LearnDash, you control the upgrade timeline.

Where Teachable and Kajabi genuinely win

Launch speed. A Teachable school can be live in a day. No hosting to configure, no WordPress to install, no plugins to conflict. If you are validating a course idea before committing to a full build, Teachable is the right tool. The transaction fees on the Basic plan hurt at scale, but for a first course with uncertain demand, speed matters more than margin.

Kajabi's all-in-one model genuinely wins for non-technical founders who do not want to manage multiple subscriptions. Email sequences, sales funnels, course delivery, and a community all in one interface with one login and one support line. The monthly cost is real, but so is the operational simplicity.

Integrated payments are genuinely easier on Teachable and Kajabi. You do not need to configure a payment gateway, handle webhooks, or debug WooCommerce subscription renewal edge cases. Payments work on day one. For a non-technical founder, this matters.

The migration problem no one talks about

Moving off Teachable or Kajabi is harder than moving onto them. Course content can usually be exported (as video files and text). Student records are harder. Completion data, quiz scores, and progress tracking are often locked in the platform's proprietary format — accessible via their dashboard but not fully portable.

The practical consequence: students who have partially completed a course on Teachable cannot easily continue where they left off on a new platform. You either lose completion data or run a manual migration. For a small cohort, this is manageable. For 2,000 students, it is a project.

This is the migration cost that is never included in "how much does Kajabi cost" calculations. The monthly fee is visible. The switching cost is not — until you want to switch.

The decision framework

Choose LearnDash when: you expect more than 200 students; you want to own your data long-term; you have (or can hire) WordPress development support; you have existing WordPress infrastructure or want to integrate with WooCommerce; you are building something that needs custom features.

Choose Teachable when: you are launching a first course and want to validate demand quickly; you are not technical and do not want to hire a developer; you expect to migrate to LearnDash or a custom solution once revenue justifies it.

Choose Kajabi when: you are a non-technical solo creator who wants email, courses, and community in one place; you have done the cost comparison against your current tool stack and Kajabi is genuinely cheaper; you are willing to pay the migration cost if you ever outgrow it.

The one question that simplifies the decision: Do you expect your course business to be your primary revenue source, or a secondary product? If primary: LearnDash. The economics and control matter too much at scale. If secondary: Teachable or Kajabi may be fine. The operational simplicity is worth the premium when courses are not your core focus.