AXL vs Kajabi
One meters the size of your list, the other what you use. Every Kajabi figure below was read from Kajabi's own pages.
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The short answer
Kajabi is the safer buy for brand, podcast hosting and a branded learner app. AXL is the better buy for everything that happens after the course sells.
Kajabi read from kajabi.com/pricing; AXL from axl.tech/pricing the same day. A “Save 50%” promotion was live when we read it; a promotional price is not a list price, so this page quotes the list.
Who should actually choose Kajabi
The honest reasons to buy the other one.
If your show is the business, Kajabi's podcast hosting decides it: Kajabi sells it as a first-class product and AXL does not ship it. The same goes for a branded mobile app in the stores. Kajabi sells them, while AXL's student portal runs in a browser on your own domain. The 0% on Kajabi Payments is real: run money through Kajabi's own gateway and its platform fee is genuinely zero, card processing only. The surcharge people quote applies only when you bring your own processor, so both halves of that fee travel together. And if your business is one audience, one funnel, one catalogue, Kajabi does that shape well. Most of what AXL adds (pipelines, webinars, booking, nine channels) is weight you would not use.
The same shortlist usually holds two more: AXL vs Teachable, cheaper but capped at 100 active students, and AXL vs Thinkific, the LMS-first one.
What each one costs, and what each one takes
| What you are comparing | AXL | Kajabi |
|---|---|---|
| Entry price | From $49/month, with included usage and published overage rates | $179/month Basic, $143 billed annually. A cheaper Starter plan is listed without a price. |
| What the bill is metered on | Plan allowance plus $0.002 per extra contact | Contacts, products and admin seats |
| Contacts, products and communities included | No contact or product tier; unlimited spaces, permissions as CRM filters | Contacts 250 · 2,500 · 25,000 ($249) · 100,000 ($499). Products 1 · 5 · 50 · unlimited; 1 community, 3 on Pro |
| Cut of your sales on the platform's own gateway | No gateway of its own to protect | 0% on Kajabi Payments |
| Cut of your sales with your own processor | 0%, on all 20+ providers and on cash and bank transfer | 5% Starter · 2% Basic · 1% Growth · 0.5% Pro |
| Card processing | Whatever your provider charges, paid to them | 2.9% + $0.30 on Kajabi Payments; 2.8% Growth, 2.7% Pro |
| Marketing emails | The plan includes an email allowance. Usage above it is $0.0006 per email. | Unlimited on every tier, no add-on cost on the page |
Both read from kajabi.com/pricing and axl.tech/pricing. Annual billing takes ~20% off Kajabi's plan prices, so your quote may be lower.
| Scenario | Monthly | 12 months |
|---|---|---|
| Kajabi Basic on Kajabi Payments: 0% platform fee | $179 | $2,148 |
| Kajabi Basic keeping your own Stripe: $179 + 2% of $5,000 | $279 | $3,348 |
| Kajabi Basic, annual billing, own Stripe: $143 + $100 | $243 | $2,916 |
| AXL: the $49 Starter plan and 0% of revenue on any provider | $49 | $588 |
At contact 2,501 the Kajabi line becomes $249 before you have earned anything more. And AXL Starter is $49 for this reference business; usage above an allowance is billed at the published overage rate. Estimate your bill →
The comparison table
| Capability | AXL | Kajabi |
|---|---|---|
| AI agent access (MCP) | Every account. ~1,100 operations, ~110 verified recipes. | Every plan, monthly or annual, by Kajabi's own MCP page. |
| What a write actually does | Creates the live object; publishing and sending stay separate calls. | Writes “land as drafts”; you publish from the Kajabi admin. |
| CRM pipelines and segmentation | Kanban deals with per-stage money totals on the record that holds courses and payments; 74 condition types, 61 usable in segments and broadcasts. | Contacts, tags and segments; pipelines are not named on the two pages we read. A 100-tag ceiling per contact is reported by reviewers (ruzuku.com) and is not stated in Kajabi's own documentation. |
| Automation, webinars and booking | 139 node types, 27 of them listeners that park a run until someone buys or finishes a lesson; live and evergreen rooms; booking on the same canvas. | Automations are sold across the plans; no node inventory, and neither webinars nor booking, on the two pages we read. |
| Assessment and certificates | Six auto-graded question types with pass thresholds, a homework queue, certificates with a registry. | Courses are a first-class product; assessment detail is not on the pages we read. |
| Podcast hosting | Not a product AXL ships. | Yes: sold as a first-class product. |
| Branded mobile app for learners | Not shipped; the portal runs in a browser. | Yes: branded learner apps. |
“Not named on the two pages we read” means exactly that: kajabi.com/pricing and kajabi.com/product/mcp as they stood, not a claim that Kajabi has nothing of the kind. If we missed something, tell us and we will change the row and print the date. What our agent cannot touch →
The AI is inside the platform. The agent is your choice.
- Page builder From a prompt or a live URL.
- Email builder From a prompt.
- Form builder From a prompt.
- Onboarding Five questions, then it builds.
Or bring your own: Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Windsurf, VS Code and Cline connect in one line, no API key.
claude mcp add axl --transport http https://app.axl.tech/mcp
The AI page builder → · Every client, with its connect string →
Build the page in AXL, then connect the same account to the AI client you already use.
What an agent can never reach →What moves and what does not
- Contacts and custom fields, matched on email and phone.
- Products, prices, pages and courses: rebuilt by the agent.
- Progress, completion, email engagement, community posts; videos re-upload.
- Saved cards move on no platform; whether subscribers re-authorise depends on your Stripe account. Ask first.
- Contacts Same day
- One course Half a day to two
- Full catalogue One to three weeks
Run both in parallel; nothing needs a cutover.
What people ask before they switch
For most businesses, yes, but the tables above are the answer, and your own usage decides it. Estimate your own bill.
Yes, and a good one: an MCP server on every plan, across pages, emails, offers, courses, contacts, orders and site settings. Its own page states the limits: writes land as drafts, and analytics, payments and adding users are out of scope (kajabi.com/product/mcp). What an agent does on AXL.
Brand trust, podcast hosting, branded learner apps, unlimited marketing email on every tier, and a far larger library of case studies. If those are your buying criteria, Kajabi is the right answer. It is better known now than after a migration.
Run the numbers on your own account.
Import your contacts, rebuild one funnel and see the bill at your volume.
claude mcp add axl --transport http https://app.axl.tech/mcp
Plans start at $49/month with included usage and published overage
Leaving Kajabi rather than choosing between two? Five Kajabi alternatives, compared