Teachable vs Kajabi vs MemberPress: Which One Fits You Best in 2026?

Teachable works best for creators who want to launch a single course fast and don’t need marketing tools built in.

Kajabi works best for creators who want courses, email marketing, funnels, and a website bundled into one subscription.

MemberPress works best for anyone who wants to keep courses, memberships, and community on their own WordPress site instead of renting space inside someone else’s platform.

Somewhere tonight, a course creator has six pricing tabs open and a credit card in hand, trying to work out why three platforms that all claim to do the same thing charge such different amounts for it.

The honest answer is that they don’t do the same thing. Each platform was built around a different bet about how creators should run their business.

This guide compares Teachable, Kajabi, and MemberPress on pricing, core features, and who each one actually fits. Use it to choose based on what you’re building instead of which sales page was more convincing.

Teachable, Kajabi, and MemberPress at a Glance

Three Different Products Wearing One Label

Teachable, Kajabi, and MemberPress get compared constantly, but they weren’t built to solve the same problem. Understanding what each one is for makes the rest of this comparison easier to read.

Teachable is a hosted course platform.

Teachable focuses on getting a course online and sold with as few decisions as possible. It handles hosting, video delivery, checkout, and student accounts, and it adds AI tools for quiz generation and course outlines. What it doesn’t do is double as a marketing suite, since email marketing, funnels, and site design stay basic on purpose.

Kajabi is an all-in-one business platform.

Kajabi treats the course as one product among several. It bundles email marketing, sales funnels, a website builder, community, and coaching scheduling into every plan. The tradeoff is a higher entry price and a steeper learning curve: you’re managing a small marketing department’s worth of tools inside one dashboard.

MemberPress is a membership and LMS plugin for WordPress.

MemberPress runs on a WordPress site you already own or set up, which means your content, customer data, and payment history live on your own server instead of inside a vendor’s account. It adds course delivery, community features through ClubSuite, and coaching tools through CoachKit on top of the access control system it was originally built around.

Pricing Compared: Plans, Fees, and Hidden Costs

Sticker price is the least useful number on any of these pricing pages. Transaction fees, contact caps, and what’s actually included at each tier tell you more about what you’ll really pay.

Teachable Pricing

The Starter plan looks cheapest until you do the math on the 7.5% fee. A creator selling $2,000 a month in course revenue on Starter pays $150 in transaction fees alone, on top of the $29 subscription, which is more than the Builder plan costs outright with 0% fees. Certificates of completion don’t unlock until the Growth plan.

Kajabi Pricing

Kajabi doesn’t charge a platform transaction fee on any plan when you use Kajabi Payments. The number on the pricing page is close to what you’ll actually pay, aside from standard card processing costs.

The practical limit is contacts, not courses. Every subscriber, lead, and student on your list counts toward the cap, and Basic’s 2,500-contact ceiling is usually the first wall solo creators hit.

MemberPress Pricing

MemberPress prices per year instead of per month, and it doesn’t cap members or students on any plan, which is unusual among the three.

The gatekeeping happens by feature instead. Community tools and coaching stay locked to Growth and Scale, and the REST API and Zapier integration require Scale at $499.50 a year.

Remember that MemberPress is a plugin, not a hosted platform. You’re also paying for WordPress hosting and a domain separately, typically $5 to $15 a month.

None of these numbers account for what you’re replacing. If Kajabi’s $199 a month replaces four separate subscriptions you’re already paying for, it isn’t expensive. If MemberPress’s plugin fee replaces a $50-a-month community tool and a $99-a-month coaching platform, the WordPress setup pays for itself fast.

Total Cost of Ownership: Three Realistic Scenarios

A pricing table answers what a plan costs. It doesn’t answer what you’ll actually pay once fees, add-ons, and hosting get added in. Here’s what that looks like at three stages of the same business.

Stage 1: Early Creator, $2,000 a Month in Sales

MemberPress looks cheapest on the license alone, but Launch’s 4.9% transaction fee closes most of that gap once real sales start coming in. Teachable’s Builder plan and Kajabi’s Starter plan land within a couple of dollars of each other at this stage.

Stage 2: Growing Business, $10,000 a Month, 5,000 Contacts

This is where MemberPress’s flat, feature-based pricing separates from the other two. Kajabi and Teachable both charge more as contact counts and student numbers climb. MemberPress charges the same $349.50 a year whether the list holds 5,000 contacts or 50,000.

Stage 3: Established Business, $50,000 a Month, 30,000 Contacts, Wants a Branded App

A branded mobile app shifts the math again. Kajabi builds it into the Pro plan at no extra charge. MemberPress charges $1,199 a year for its AppKit add-on on top of Scale. Even with that add-on stacked on, MemberPress still comes in as the least expensive of the three at this stage.

These figures are built from each platform’s published pricing as of September 2026, meant to show the pattern rather than serve as an exact quote for any specific business. Run your own numbers, especially around transaction volume and hosting, before committing to a plan.

Feature Comparison: What Each Platform Actually Does Well

Pricing tells you what you’ll pay. These six areas tell you what you’ll actually be able to build.

Course Creation and LMS Depth

Kajabi’s course structure goes deeper, with modules and lessons organized in a way that holds up for large, multi-part curricula.

Teachable’s builder is simpler and faster to use, and its AI quiz generator saves creators from writing assessments by hand.

MemberPress covers the fundamentals well: drip content, quizzes, assignments, and certificates, but it has no SCORM or xAPI support, which rules it out for corporate compliance training or anything that needs to report into an external LMS standard.

Community and Coaching Tools

Kajabi’s community is the most developed of the three, with gamification, access-group segmentation, and direct messaging available across plans.

MemberPress’s ClubSuite covers forums, member directories, and direct messaging too, but only from the Growth plan up, and it lacks live rooms or native video.

Teachable added community spaces but kept them simple, and its coaching tools still hand off to Calendly and Zoom rather than handling scheduling natively.

Marketing, Email, and Funnels

This is where Kajabi separates itself. Built-in email marketing, funnel building, and affiliate program management come standard on every plan, which matters if you’re not already running those tools elsewhere.

Teachable’s marketing stays basic: coupons and affiliates on Builder and above, with no native email marketing.

MemberPress isn’t a marketing suite by design, but because it’s a plugin for WordPress, it connects to whatever email or CRM tool you’re already running there, FluentCRM included.

Hosting, Ownership, and Student Caps

Teachable and Kajabi host everything for you, with no server to manage, but your content lives inside their account structure and your costs scale with student or contact count.

MemberPress runs on infrastructure you control, with no student cap on any plan, though you take on hosting, backups, and updates yourself.

Neither approach is wrong. One trades setup time for ongoing control, and the other trades control for convenience.

Just a heads-up: If owning your stack on WordPress is the direction you’re leaning, FluentCart’s free version is worth considering, especially if you also sell digital products or simple subscriptions alongside your courses.

Payments, Tax, and Who’s the Merchant of Record

Teachable acts as merchant of record through Teachable Payments. It calculates, collects, and remits sales tax and VAT across roughly 180 countries automatically, and it files 1099s for US-based creators and affiliate payouts without extra setup.

Kajabi doesn’t handle VAT or international tax filing natively. Creators selling outside their home country typically need a separate tool like Quaderno or TaxJar, or they register and remit manually.

MemberPress connects to Stripe Tax, which calculates the correct rate at checkout, but the site owner stays the merchant of record. You’re responsible for registering in the jurisdictions where you owe tax and filing the returns; Stripe only calculates the number.

Mobile Apps, APIs, and Automation Costs

Teachable includes a mobile app for students on every paid plan, rated 4.6 in app stores, though it carries Teachable’s own branding rather than yours. A public API is available for custom integrations.

Kajabi’s free Kajabi Mobile App works out of the box, but it carries Kajabi’s own branding rather than yours. A fully branded app with your own icon and name costs $199 a month as an add-on on Basic or Growth; it’s only bundled at no extra charge on the Pro plan.

MemberPress has no native mobile app. Its AppKit add-on builds one from your existing site for $1,199 a year, on top of whatever MemberPress plan you’re already paying for, and it’s cheaper than Kajabi’s branded app at most revenue levels shown above. MemberPress does ship a public Zapier integration and REST API on the Scale plan for creators who want to automate without an app.

Reading feature lists is one thing, but which of these three actually held up once students enrolled and support tickets started coming in? Join the FluentCart community, where plenty of course creators and digital business owners are around to help you figure out which one actually fits.

Who Each Platform Actually Fits

The comparison above points toward three different kinds of buyers. Here’s how that plays out in practice.

Teachable Fits

• Solo creators launching their first course who want to publish in a weekend, not a month
• Coaches who already use Calendly and Zoom and don’t need those tools rebuilt inside the platform
• Anyone who wants a simple course sale without also managing funnels, an email list, or a community

Kajabi Fits

• Creators building a full business around one identity: courses, coaching, community, and a website under one brand
• People currently paying for four or five separate tools who want to consolidate into one subscription
• Businesses with the budget and contact volume to justify $143 to $399 a month from day one

MemberPress Fits

• WordPress site owners who want to add courses or memberships without moving their content off their own domain
• Businesses with a large or fast-growing member base, since pricing doesn’t climb with student count
• Anyone who wants community and coaching tools bundled with membership access control instead of paying for three separate plugins or apps

How to Choose Between Teachable, Kajabi, and MemberPress

If the comparisons above still leave you undecided, these six questions usually settle it.

1. Do you already have a WordPress site? If yes, MemberPress avoids a second platform and a second login for your customers. If no, standing one up just for this decision may not be worth the setup time.
2. Are you selling one course or building a business? One course points toward Teachable. A business with email marketing, funnels, and multiple products points toward Kajabi.
3. How fast is your list growing? Expecting to pass a few thousand contacts within a year makes Kajabi’s contact-based pricing expensive quickly. MemberPress’s flat, unlimited-member pricing won’t move.
4. Do you need community and coaching, or just course delivery? Teachable is the weakest of the three here. Kajabi and MemberPress both build it in, at different price points and plan tiers.
5. Do you sell internationally and want tax handled for you? Teachable is the only one of the three that calculates, collects, and remits sales tax and VAT on your behalf. Kajabi and MemberPress both leave that responsibility with you, through a third-party tool or your own Stripe account.
6. Do you need a branded mobile app? Budget for it either way it goes. Kajabi builds it into Pro at no extra cost, MemberPress adds $1,199 a year through AppKit, and Teachable doesn’t offer a brandable option at all.

Still weighing a SaaS subscription against owning your stack on WordPress? Join the FluentCart community and get help from course creators and digital business owners thinking through the same decision.

Frequently Asked Questions

Close the Other Five Tabs

That creator with six tabs open doesn’t need a seventh comparison chart. They need to close five of those tabs and keep open the one platform that matches what they’re building, not the one with the loudest launch offer.

Pick Teachable if the goal is one course, sold fast, with as few decisions as possible. Pick Kajabi if the goal is a full business running on one subscription and the budget supports it from day one. Pick MemberPress if the goal is to own the content, the customer data, and the platform itself, with no student cap standing between this year and next.

Whichever tab that is, make it the one that only asks you to explain your business once.