Leaving Kajabi? Decide it, don’t drift into it.
Owners leave Kajabi over the fee, a quiet community, or a layout that won’t bend. Here’s what you own, what moves, and when to stay.
Danica LouweUpdated 5 min readMove only if moving fixes your real problem. A rising fee, a quiet community and a layout that won’t bend are different problems, and only one is solved by leaving. Contacts, tags and purchase history export, while pages and automations get rebuilt. If you go, we build beside Kajabi and switch once the new site has taken real money.
Kajabi is a rental. The question is whether the rent still buys enough.
Kajabi does the thing it promises: courses, pages, email, checkout and a community in one login for one monthly fee. Owners start thinking about leaving when the fee keeps rising, the community goes quiet, or the one thing they need is the one thing the layout will not do. Those are different problems, and only one of them is solved by moving.
The fee grows with you
Basic is $179 a month, Growth $249, Pro $499 (about 20% less paid annually), and the plan steps up as products and contacts grow. As your list grows, so does the plan. Decide whether what it adds is worth the step up.
The community is the weak room
Members call it clunky and go quiet, so owners bolt on Circle or Skool. Now there are two logins, two bills and a seam between them where access breaks.
What you see is what you get
Layouts, member dashboards and progress views are Kajabi’s, not yours. The first time you want a Duolingo-style path or a leaderboard, you are waiting on a feature request.
Cancel, and it is gone
Pages, courses, automations and the member experience live on Kajabi. The contact list exports; the business does not. That is the real reason owners feel stuck, and the real reason to decide deliberately.
First we test whether you should move at all.
A migration is the most expensive way to fix a problem that was never about the platform. Before anything moves, we answer these, in writing.
- What is actually hurting: price, the community, the layout, or a payment-to-access leak that would follow you to WordPress.
- What Kajabi will let you take: contacts and tags (CSV), purchase history, course structure. What it will not: lesson progress, page designs, automations.
- What your members would notice on day one, and whether a redesigned member area on Kajabi would get you most of the way for much less.
- Your real monthly number: Kajabi plan plus the add-ons, against hosting, licences and the hours to run WordPress yourself or with us.
- The stack that fits you: LearnDash or Tutor LMS for courses, MemBuild Community or BuddyBoss for the room, WP Fusion or MemberPress for access, FluentCRM or your existing CRM for email.
- The stay-put answer. If our answer is stay and fix three things, that is the recommendation, and you have lost nothing.
What comes with you, and what doesn’t.
Comes with you
- Contacts and tags, as a CSV
- Offers and purchase history
- Course outlines
- Your video files
Rebuilt or left behind
- Lesson progress
- Page designs
- Automations
If you move: build it beside Kajabi, switch on one day.
Nothing is turned off until the new site has taken real money and let real members in. The order below is the one we use on every hosted-platform migration.
- 1
Export everything Kajabi gives you
Contacts with tags, offers and purchase history, the course outlines, every video file. This is also the inventory: you will delete some of it on purpose.
- 2
Build the course and member area on WordPress
Courses rebuilt in LearnDash with the same names and order so links in old emails keep making sense. Member dashboard designed for the member, not for the plugin.
- 3
Wire payments and access, then test the chain
Stripe or PayPal into the membership plugin, tags into the CRM, the access rule on every course. A test purchase, a failed card, a cancel, as a member on a phone.
- 4
Import members and send one email
Users created from the export with their plans attached. One “set your password” email, sent in batches, with a reply address a human reads that week.
- 5
Run both for one billing cycle, then close Kajabi
Subscriptions move at renewal so nobody is double-charged. Old Kajabi links redirect to the new pages. Then the Kajabi plan is cancelled, and the rent stops.
How owners describe it
“I use Kajabi now but am not in love with the community feature... am considering Circle for that but not sure I want to have two systems to run my business... might be confusing to my clients?”
“I’m trying to decide on a software like GHL, Kajabi, Kartra etc where I can have everything for my business in one place like funnels, calendars, courses, communities etc.”
Watch it done
The honest comparison: what Kajabi gives you for the monthly fee, what you give up, and when LearnDash on your own WordPress is the better trade. If you cancel Kajabi, your site is gone; if you stop renewing LearnDash, your site keeps running.
Questions owners ask
Will my members have to make new accounts?
No. Members come over as WordPress users from the Kajabi contact export, and they set a password through a “welcome back” email on the day we switch. Their email address is the key; nothing else changes for them.
Do I lose my course progress data?
Kajabi does not export lesson-level progress, so completions are rebuilt from the export we can get (enrolments and purchase dates) plus a one-time “mark what you have finished” page for members. Most owners decide the clean start is worth it; we tell you before you commit.
What about my Kajabi email list and automations?
Contacts and tags export as a CSV and import into FluentCRM, Keap or ActiveCampaign. The automations are rebuilt, not moved, which is the moment to delete the ones nobody remembers writing.
How long does it take, and can I keep selling during it?
It depends on how many courses, offers and automations you have; we give you the timeline in writing before you commit. And yes, you keep selling: the Kajabi site stays live until the switch day, and the new site is tested with real purchases first.
What if the answer is to stay on Kajabi?
Then that is what we tell you, in writing: stay, and fix these three things. It happens often.
