GoHighLevel vs Kajabi in 2026: $970 or $1,716, and the 1 Question That Decides It

GoHighLevel is the cheaper platform right up to the point where you need a 4th client account, and then it becomes the more expensive one. Starter is $970 a year with 3 accounts. Kajabi Basic is $1,716 with no client accounts at all, and Kajabi wins anyway if you sell courses.

Any GoHighLevel vs Kajabi comparison hits the same problem: both bundle courses, email, pages and a checkout, so the feature lists look interchangeable. What separates them is what each one counts, businesses for GoHighLevel and products and contacts for Kajabi. This prices both off their own pricing pages, on one annual basis.

Most of the guides I read landed on the same verdict: GoHighLevel for agencies, Kajabi for course creators. Then half of them quote a Kajabi entry price that stopped existing in January.

Kajabi raised every plan in January 2026 and dropped its cheapest tier. Most of page 1 has not noticed. A result still prices a plan Kajabi calls retired, and another puts GoHighLevel’s email cost at 15 times the real rate.

So this compares them on numbers read off both pricing pages, on a single billing basis, and works through the 5 situations where the answer actually changes. The short version is that the answer turns on what each platform counts.

Key Takeaways

• The 2 price ladders cross over each other. GoHighLevel runs $970, $2,970 and $4,970 a year. Kajabi runs $1,716, $2,388 and $4,788.
• A 4th client is the cliff. GoHighLevel Starter carries 3 client accounts with no overage, and crossing that line costs $2,000 a year.
• Kajabi holds 8 features back from Basic, including cohort courses, affiliate programs, webhooks and removing Kajabi branding from your pages.
• GoHighLevel bills sending separately from the plan. Email runs $0.675 per 1,000 from a wallet that refills itself off your card.
• 3 of the 6 guides ranking for this phrase quote $149 as Kajabi’s entry price. That was its price before the January 2026 rise.

GoHighLevel vs Kajabi: what a full year costs on both

The 2 price ladders do not sit one above the other. They cross over, and that alone breaks the flat verdict that GoHighLevel costs less.

Everything below uses the same basis: both vendors publish their own annual figures, so every plan price in this post is a year of platform fees. Where a figure is monthly or metered, it says so. GoHighLevel prints its annual totals on a toggle, and Kajabi’s reconcile exactly against its stated yearly savings.

If you are weighing 2 platform bills this size, the cheaper decisions are the ones that come earlier. The Online Selling Mistakes Challenge is 5 emails on those, and it costs nothing.

Sorted by what a year costs, Kajabi Growth at $2,388 undercuts GoHighLevel Unlimited at $2,970, and Kajabi Pro at $4,788 undercuts GoHighLevel Agency Pro at $4,970.

Paid monthly instead, the numbers are $97, $297 and $497 at GoHighLevel against $179, $249 and $499 at Kajabi.

Every tier at GoHighLevel saves exactly 2 months by paying yearly. Kajabi’s saving is $432, $600 and $1,200.

Most of the prices on page 1 are from before January

Kajabi put every plan up in January 2026 and retired the cheap Kickstarter tier that sat underneath Basic. Basic itself used to cost $149 a month, which is exactly where 3 of these guides still have it.

That figure has travelled further than page 1. Google’s own summary for this comparison puts Kajabi at “around $149 to $179/month” and says its funnels are capped, when funnels are unlimited on all 3 plans.

Every price on the 6 readable guides ranking for this phrase was checked against Kajabi’s and GoHighLevel’s live pricing pages. Those 6 are MihaCacic, CoursePlatformsReview, GHLExperts, BloggingX, BestCRMforCoaches and SupplyGem. The other 2 results are an r/CRMSoftware thread with no prices in it and a 2-year-old video, so neither is counted either way.

3 of the 6 print $149 as Kajabi’s entry price, 2 still price a tier Kajabi has retired, and not one of the 6 mentions the 2% Kajabi takes when you bring your own payment processor.

2 of those deserve their exact wording, because they point in opposite directions and both mislead.

GHLExperts states “0% transaction fees on all plans” for Kajabi, 3 separate times. Kajabi’s own pricing page charges 2% on Basic, 1% on Growth and 0.5% on Pro whenever you run payments through a processor other than Kajabi Payments or PayPal. A coach comparing on fees would pick Kajabi believing there is no cut to pay, and there is.

BloggingX, on a page titled “Don’t Be Deceived”, says “Each email costs $0.01 to send. This adds up fast, a 30,000 subscriber list costs $300+ monthly for just one email campaign.” GoHighLevel’s published rate is $0.675 per 1,000 emails, which is $0.000675 each. So the quoted rate is about 15 times too high, and that 30,000-email campaign really costs $20.25.

SupplyGem is the only one of the 6 that shows annual totals for both platforms.

Its 2 columns now tell a story nobody intended.

Its GoHighLevel column is still exactly right at $970, $2,970 and $4,970, because GoHighLevel has not repriced. Its Kajabi column reads $660, $1,428, $1,908 and $3,828, the pre-2026 card fossilized in place. Put the 2 columns side by side and you are looking at the price rise itself.

Our Kajabi vs Circle breakdown traced the retirement through Kajabi’s archived pages. The note is still sitting in the pricing page source today, in the words of whoever built it: Starter and Kickstarter are retired and intentionally not offered, and Basic is the floor plan.

If you bill other businesses and each one needs its own login

GoHighLevel, and the gap is not close.

Its billing unit is the sub-account, which is 1 client business with its own contacts, calendars and funnels. Starter carries 3.

Kajabi has no equivalent. Basic gives you 1 website and 2 admin users, Growth gives you 1 website and 11, and Pro gives you 3 websites. None of its 3 published plans lets you hand a client their own walled-off account.

A marketer on an r/gohighlevel thread put the arithmetic better than any comparison guide does. Before switching, his customer journey needed a ClickFunnels landing page, an Acuity calendar, ActiveCampaign for email and Zapier to connect them, and in his words, “I needed that FOR EACH CLIENT.” After: one payment of $297, unlimited sub-accounts.

Starter’s 3 sub-accounts have no overage option.

You cannot buy a 4th. The next stop is Unlimited at $2,970 a year.

So a 3-client agency pays $970 and sits $746 under Kajabi Basic. A 4-client agency pays $2,970 and sits $1,254 over it. 1 client moves you $2,000 a year, and only 1 of the 6 guides even mentions the 3-account cap.

What you give up by choosing GoHighLevel here is the polish.

Its quiz builder takes single-choice and multiple-choice questions only.

The course area runs on the same page builder as the rest of the platform, so the student experience is something you assemble yourself.

If your money comes from people finishing something you recorded once

Kajabi. BloggingX, SupplyGem and BestCRMforCoaches all land on that verdict, and so does this page.

The usual reason given for it is wrong, though. GoHighLevel does score quizzes: its own documentation walks through setting a Passing Grade percentage, learners see their score and which answers they got wrong, and a certificate can be issued from a workflow once someone passes.

What Kajabi adds for the money is narrower and more real.

Cohort courses on Growth and up, video transcriptions and translations on every plan, and a customer app your students log into.

8 features are withheld from Kajabi Basic, and 3 of those need Pro at $4,788 a year.

So its 3 tiers are separated by more than capacity.

Read that against the tier you were planning to buy. At $1,716 a year, Kajabi Basic runs your pages with Kajabi’s branding on them and gives you no affiliate program, so there is no way to track or pay commissions inside Kajabi.

Funnels are the row that goes wrong in the other direction. GHLExperts prints caps of 3, 15 and 100 funnels, and BloggingX says 5 on Basic. Funnels are unlimited on all 3 Kajabi plans, and so are landing pages, marketing emails and access groups.

What you give up by choosing Kajabi here is reach. There is no sales pipeline and no native texting.

And the 2% cut applies if you would rather keep your own Stripe account.

When the follow-up is a text message, only GoHighLevel can send it

GoHighLevel, because Kajabi has no native texting. Kajabi’s own help documentation has nothing at all on sending a text message.

This is also the situation where the wallet starts to matter. Texts, calls, phone numbers, email and AI usage are paid from an Agency Wallet, a prepaid balance that automatically charges your card to top itself up when it drops below a minimum you set.

The rates are published, just not on the pricing page. Email is $0.675 per 1,000. Phone and SMS start at Twilio’s published rates, which vary by country, then carrier fees and a 5% markup land on top.

Email validation is $2.50 per 1,000, and premium workflow steps are $0.01 per run.

Our GoHighLevel pricing breakdown works through a light month against a busy one.

Of the 6 guides ranking for this phrase, exactly 1 prints a usage rate that is correct. CoursePlatformsReview says “Sending 1,000 emails will cost you around $0.67”, which is right. The 2 guides that recommend GoHighLevel as the cheaper option mention usage charges nowhere at all.

Metered pricing catching buyers out is well documented. In its 2026 index, Zylo surveyed 218 IT leaders and 78% reported unexpected charges tied to consumption-based or AI pricing. Those are enterprise buyers rather than solo creators, so read it as the worry rather than the answer. A wallet that refills itself means no invoice arrives for you to approve, and whether that matters is arithmetic, which comes a few sections down.

Collapsing a stack you already pay for

If the stack you are collapsing is a course host, an email tool and a checkout, Kajabi is the one that swallows it. If it is a website, an email tool and a booking calendar, GoHighLevel is.

The same r/gohighlevel thread has the cleanest real example. A marketer moved a client off WordPress hosting at around $60 a month, Mailchimp at $130 and Calendly at $20 to $30, onto a single $97 GoHighLevel plan. Call it $210 to $220 of monthly tools replaced by $97. Another user in the thread reduced GoHighLevel’s whole model to 5 words: “Unlimited everything except for usage.”

Either way the entry cost is the same 2 numbers, $970 or $1,716 a year.

The cost of that is the sharper single-purpose tool you just replaced.

There is a third case that neither platform fits, and it is more common than the comparison implies. If you already pay for an email tool you like and all you need is to take money for a file or a subscription, both of these are $970 or $1,716 a year of platform you will not open. A checkout-only tool plus the email tool you already have covers it. CartMango, Payhip and Gumroad all do that job, and they charge very differently for it: Gumroad takes 10% + $0.50 of every sale, Payhip 5% on its free plan, and CartMango no cut at all, though it caps products at 10 on its $10 plan, 25 on $20 and unlimited on $30. CartMango is mine, so I am biased, though those fee numbers are each company’s own.

If you sell 1 thing to a list you already own

GoHighLevel on price, and the annual figures show it plainly. Starter is $970 against Kajabi Basic’s $1,716, a gap of $746 a year. Spread across 12 months, that gap buys about $62 a month of metered usage before it closes.

Kajabi’s plans are gated on contacts, so anchoring on a real list size is fairer than lining tier 1 up against tier 1. GoHighLevel has no contact limit on any plan, so the only cost that grows with your list is the sending.

At 1 email a week to every contact, GoHighLevel Starter plus its metered email lands cheaper than Kajabi at every list size, by $658 at 2,500 contacts and by $2,765 at 30,000. The gap closes to $308 at Kajabi’s 100,000 ceiling.

That weekly cadence is doing a lot of work, and it is my assumption on GoHighLevel’s published rate rather than a number either vendor prints. At 100,000 contacts it means 5.2 million emails a year and $3,510 of wallet charges.

Push the cadence to 4 emails a week and the 30,000-contact row flips: $5,182 at GoHighLevel against Kajabi Pro’s $4,788. At the 100,000 row the $308 gap is about 4 extra emails per contact per year wide, so a little over 1 a week erases it.

Kajabi’s side of this never moves. Marketing emails are unlimited and included on all 3 of its plans, which is the real counterweight to the wallet. GoHighLevel publishes no cut of your sales on either page I read, while Kajabi’s outside-processor fee is printed on its pricing page.

At the small end the wallet barely registers. To erase the $746 that Starter saves against Kajabi Basic you would have to send 1.1 million emails a year, more than 440 to every one of Basic’s 2,500 contacts.

The catch on this row is that you pay for 3 client sub-accounts and will use 1.

Anything you want the software to do beyond taking money, you will be building yourself.

So which one, for which situation

GoHighLevel wins on price in 3 of these 6 situations and Kajabi in 2, and the cheapest option of all buys neither platform. The widest jump between 2 neighboring rows is the $2,000 a 4th client costs you.

Both run a free trial before any of this costs you anything. GoHighLevel gives 14 days on any plan and says so on its pricing page. Kajabi runs one too, though its pricing page does not name the length beside the plans.

The trades on both sides

GoHighLevel is cheap for what it does. A marketer in that Reddit thread with CRM experience called it “absurdly cheap” and then named the price: “lack of stability, poor support, and rushed features.” The learning curve is steep, the course delivery is thin, and your monthly total moves with your campaigns.

Kajabi is the calmer product and the more expensive one. Its bill barely moves, which is worth something real. What it costs you is hard ceilings at every tier, no texting, no pipeline, no client accounts, and a cut of every sale if you would rather run your own processor. Kajabi also offers no free migration on any plan, so moving a library in is your problem. GoHighLevel sells a done-with-you setup at $1,000 rather than including one.

Migration is a cost worth pricing before you commit, and I have paid it. I once moved my own Google Workspace account over to a different one and lost half a day just shifting files. The bulk copy tool had stopped working, so I bought a paid migration tool, and even then the forms would not come across and the big folders errored until I split them into batches. I would rather hand over money than hours, because money you can earn back.

If neither set of trades fits, the honest next step is to stop shopping for an all-in-one. Our GoHighLevel alternatives roundup prices 7 options against the wallet charges, and the checkout-only route needs a fraction of either budget. CartMango sits in that lane: it takes payments, subscriptions and order bumps on the $10 plan, with upsells and downsells from $20, and it does not host a course today. Courses and community are not live on CartMango yet.

FAQ

Is GoHighLevel cheaper than Kajabi?

At the entry plans, yes, by $746 a year. GoHighLevel Starter is $970 and Kajabi Basic is $1,716. That flips in the middle of the range: Kajabi Growth is $2,388 against GoHighLevel Unlimited’s $2,970. And GoHighLevel’s figure is software only, with texts, calls, email and AI billed separately from a prepaid wallet.

What are the downsides of GoHighLevel?

There are 3, in order of how much they cost. The plan fee is not the bill, because usage meters on top from a wallet that refills off your card. Starter caps you at 3 client sub-accounts with no overage, so the 4th client costs $2,000 a year. And the platform is wide rather than deep, so course delivery, stability and support all draw complaints from people who use it daily.

What are the downsides of Kajabi?

The price is the obvious one, at $1,716 a year before you sell anything. Past that, 8 features are missing from the entry plan, including cohort courses and the affiliate program.

Contacts are capped on every tier and products on 2 of the 3, there is no native texting, and and an outside payment processor other than PayPal costs you 2% on Basic.

Does Kajabi charge transaction fees?

Yes, on an outside processor, and this is the claim page 1 gets wrong most often. Kajabi Payments charges card rates of 2.9%, 2.8% or 2.7% plus $0.30 by tier. Connect a different processor and Kajabi adds 2% on Basic, 1% on Growth and 0.5% on Pro on top of whatever that processor charges. PayPal and Kajabi Payments are excluded from the extra cut.

Can you sell online courses with GoHighLevel?

Yes, and more fully than most comparisons admit. Courses and communities sit in GoHighLevel’s core feature list on all 3 plans, its own documentation puts no per-plan cap on them, and its quiz builder scores submissions against a passing grade you set. A certificate can follow from a workflow. What Kajabi adds for the money is cohort courses, video transcriptions and translations, and a student app.

Is there anything better than GoHighLevel?

It turns on which part you are replacing. The client sub-account model is the harder half to find elsewhere at this price. If what you need is the funnels and the email, ClickFunnels and Kartra both cover that ground, and our GoHighLevel alternatives roundup prices 7 options against the metered wallet charges.

Is there anything better than Kajabi?

For course delivery, Teachable, Thinkific and Podia cover the same ground, and Circle or Skool are the usual picks when the community matters more than the course. Which one is better turns on the same question as this whole comparison, which is what gets counted. If your contact list is the expensive part of your business, check each one’s contact limits before you compare headline prices.

Can you use both together?

Some coaches do, running GoHighLevel for the pipeline and Kajabi for delivery, and it costs $2,686 a year at the entry plans. That is more than Kajabi Growth on its own, which lifts your product cap to 50 and turns on the affiliate program. Worth pricing the single-platform version first, because paying 2 subscriptions to avoid learning 1 tool rarely survives the second renewal.

Counting clients, or counting products

GoHighLevel vs Kajabi is a choice between 2 counters, and the counter you pick is the one you will eventually hit. GoHighLevel counts the businesses you run. Kajabi counts the products and the contacts you hold. Either way you are buying a ceiling along with the software, and the ceiling is what you feel first.

The third answer sits outside the GoHighLevel vs Kajabi question altogether, and neither pricing page offers it: keep the email tool you already have, keep your own processor, and pay for the checkout alone.

That route counts things too. It just counts fewer of them, and costs a lot less to uncap.

That third answer is what I build. CartMango counts products the same way, 10 on the entry plan and unlimited on the top one, so it is not ceiling-free either.

It does not host your course yet either, though that is planned for October 2026 on the $30 plan. What it does today is take the money, and raising its product ceiling costs that same $30 a year against Kajabi Pro’s $4,788.

About the Author

👋 I’m Welly, founder of CartMango (the site you’re on), a checkout platform for digital product sellers. We’ve previously processed $179M+. I also run BirdSend (email marketing tool, 3.1B+ emails sent). On the side I show other non-techie digital sellers how I use AI workflows to automate 50%+ of my operations. Find me on LinkedIn.

Related Reading

• GoHighLevel pricing: the full rate card, the Agency Wallet, and what a light month really costs
• Kajabi vs Circle: how the retired Kickstarter tier was traced, and what Kajabi charges per member payment
• ClickFunnels vs Kajabi: the same 2 questions asked of a funnel builder instead of a CRM
• GoHighLevel alternatives: 7 options priced against the metered charges the plan fee hides