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

Who owns your course content and student data?

LearnDash is a WordPress plugin. Your courses, student list, grades and payment history live in your own database, on hosting you control. You can export reports as CSV, and because it is your database, you can back up or move everything whenever you like. If you ever want to leave LearnDash (unlikely, but possible), your data comes with you.

With Teachable and Kajabi, the data lives on the platform. The content is yours and you can export student lists and sales records, but the school itself — the course player, progress history, automations and analytics — runs only there. Cancel the subscription and the school goes offline, so export before you leave. For Israeli course creators, it also means customer data is held by a foreign company, typically on US infrastructure — something to account for in your privacy policy.

What will each platform actually cost you?

All prices here are in US dollars, from each vendor's own pricing page in October 2026 — they change often, so check before you decide. LearnDash: an annual license of $259 (Essentials), $399 (Pro) or $599 (Elite), with unlimited courses and learners and no revenue share. You keep every sale, minus your payment gateway's own fee. Add hosting and maintenance (see the FAQ below); even so, once a school has steady sales it is usually the cheapest of the three to run.

Teachable: Starter costs $39 a month ($29 billed annually) and takes a 7.5% transaction fee on every sale. Builder ($89 a month, or $69 billed annually) and Growth ($189, or $139 billed annually) take no transaction fee. On every plan, Teachable's own payment processing adds 2.9% + $0.30 per sale on US cards and 3.9% + $0.30 on international cards. Teachable Payments is available to creators based in Israel.

Kajabi: Basic costs $179 a month ($143 billed annually), Growth $249 ($199) and Pro $499 ($399). Kajabi takes no cut of sales that go through Kajabi Payments or PayPal. Kajabi's own processor, Kajabi Payments, charges 2.7%–2.9% + $0.30 per sale in the US depending on the plan, but it is offered only to businesses in a few regions — the US, Canada, the UK, select European countries, Australia and the UAE — not Israel. With a third-party payment provider other than PayPal, Kajabi adds its own fee on each sale: 2% on Basic, 1% on Growth, 0.5% on Pro, on top of what the provider charges.

Which is easiest to set up and maintain?

Teachable and Kajabi: a basic school can be live the same day. You upload a video, write a lesson description, set a price and publish. There is no technical maintenance on your side. The trade-off is flexibility: you work within the page templates, checkout and automations the platform gives you, and anything it doesn't offer is simply not there.

LearnDash: roughly 4–8 hours of setup if you're building on an existing WordPress site (design, plugin configuration). Starting from scratch, add roughly another 8–16 hours for WordPress itself, SSL, backups and security hardening. You also have to handle hosting, updates and plugin compatibility yourself. But once it's set up, you control the enrollment flow, email drip campaigns, gamification and the whole student experience.

Which handles advanced features and customization?

LearnDash on WordPress lets you add almost anything: Israeli payment gateways (sell the courses through WooCommerce with a local gateway such as Cardcom, Tranzila or Grow — including installment payments), member-only content, multilingual courses with WPML, lessons released on a schedule or after prerequisites, CRM integrations (Pipedrive, HubSpot) and automations through Make or Zapier.

Teachable and Kajabi both offer email sequences and basic integrations (Zapier, webhooks), but you work inside their platform. Want an enrollment flow or a local payment method the platform doesn't support? You adapt to the platform, not the other way round.

Which platform is right for you?

Choose Teachable/Kajabi if: you have 1–20 courses, you need the site up in hours (not days), and you prefer "set it and forget it." You're trading control for convenience.

Choose LearnDash if: you plan to scale (100+ students), you need custom integrations (CRM, email marketing, payment gateways), you want to own your data outright, or you already run WordPress and want to minimize platform lock-in. You trade convenience for control.