What actually sends people looking
Almost nobody leaves Kajabi because the software failed. The reasons are more practical.
The first is the bill. A monthly subscription is easy to start and easy to forget, and it looks different once a year of it is added up against what you actually use. If you built the course in Kajabi but your email already runs somewhere else, you are paying for a bundle and using a slice of it.
The second is ownership. A hosted platform decides what the templates can do, what the export contains and when a plan changes. Some people are fine with that trade and some discover they are not, usually when they want something the platform does not offer.
The third is that your business moved. A creator who started with one course and now runs a community, a blog and a shop on WordPress often wants the course on the same site as everything else.
How the field splits
There are really four directions, and they solve different problems.
Another hosted platform. Teachable, Thinkific and Podia keep the same shape: you rent a site, and someone else looks after it. If your complaint is Kajabi’s price or its size, one of these may be all you need. If your complaint is that you do not own the thing, they will not help.
A newsletter-led platform. Tools such as beehiiv start from the email list and the writing, and add paid subscriptions and digital products around it. If most of your audience arrives by newsletter and the course is one product among several, this shape can fit better than a course-first site.
A creator storefront. Marketplaces such as Whop sell access, memberships and digital downloads from a storefront, usually without a deep course builder. They suit people selling a community or a bundle of files more than a structured curriculum with quizzes and certificates.
An LMS on your own WordPress site. Learnomy, LearnDash and Tutor LMS are plugins. The course lives on a site you control, with a theme and hosting you choose. You get more freedom and you take on more work. This is the one real difference from a hosted platform, and it is the whole decision: more control, more upkeep.
Unbundle the subscription on paper
The cleanest way to judge a move off Kajabi is to split what you pay for into separate jobs and ask who would do each one afterwards. Take a sheet of paper and list what your business actually uses in a normal month.
Most creators find five or six jobs. Delivering lessons and quizzes, taking payment, sending email, building landing pages, running a community, and reporting on all of it. Some of those you use daily and some you set up once and never opened again.
Next to each job, write down where it would live on a WordPress site. Learnomy covers lessons, quizzes, certificates, checkout and memberships. The other jobs go to a theme or page builder, an email tool, and a community plugin if you want one. If you cannot name a replacement for a job you rely on, that job is your real cost of leaving.
Email, audience and the tools around the course
Email is the job people worry about most, and rightly. Learnomy sends the messages that belong to the course: purchase confirmations with a receipt, enrolment notices, announcements you broadcast to students, and notifications about progress. It does not send marketing sequences, nurture campaigns or funnel emails.
So the marketing side is a separate tool that you choose. Learnomy can push events out through outgoing webhooks, so another system hears about an enrolment or a completion. Pro adds a bridge to WP Fusion, which grants course access from CRM tags and writes tags back as students buy, progress and finish. That lets an email or CRM tool you already use react to what happens in the course.
Before you cancel anything, export your subscriber list from Kajabi and check kajabi.com for what the export contains. A list without its tags and history is a smaller asset than the list you see on screen.
Landing pages, themes and the look of the thing
On a hosted platform the pages come with the product. On WordPress they come from your theme and page builder, and Learnomy adds the course pieces. The catalog, course pages, student account and checkout use the site’s own layout. A single course can use a different layout from the rest of the site when it needs one.
Learnomy ships blocks and matching shortcodes for the parts you place by hand, such as the course grid, My Courses and search. That means you design a sales page with the tool you like and drop a block where the course belongs. Pro adds an Elementor theme builder if you design with Elementor.
Expect to spend real time here. A Kajabi site arrives looking finished, and a WordPress site arrives looking like whatever theme you chose. The result can be more yours, and it is also more work.
What Learnomy does and does not cover
Learnomy runs on your own WordPress site. The free plugin ships courses, six quiz question types, certificates with a public verification page, memberships, coupons, instructor commissions, and built-in Stripe and PayPal checkout. Pro adds content drip, cohorts, SCORM, xAPI, H5P and AI authoring. For the full list see the free versus Pro page.
What it does not have is the marketing half of Kajabi. There is no built-in email marketing, no funnels and no website builder, and no course marketplace to send you students. You bring the traffic and connect the email tool. If that is your whole reason for being on Kajabi, read the rivals’ strengths above twice before you go anywhere.
How you can sell it once it is rebuilt
Rebuilding is also the moment to rethink how each course is sold. Learnomy gives every course one of eight pricing models: free, one-time, fixed-term access, recurring, members only, one-time or members, closed, and invite only. There is no price ID to paste from a payment dashboard. You enter the price and the gateway product is created at the first purchase.
A few of these match what Kajabi sellers already do. A single course with a one-time price is the plainest case. A subscription site uses membership plans, including trials and a lifetime tier, and coupons cover launch discounts. Closed and invite-only courses are for access you grant yourself, such as a cohort you sold some other way.
The pricing and access models guide lists each one, so you can map your current offers across before you build anything.
What it costs to run the WordPress side
You swap one subscription for several smaller costs. There is hosting, a theme or page builder if you want one, an email tool, and any plugins for the community or CRM side. Learnomy Free costs nothing, and Pro is optional, either annual or a one-time lifetime licence.
We have left prices out because plans move. Add up what you pay Kajabi in a year from its own site, then add your realistic WordPress costs for the same year, then do both again over three years. The WordPress total is often lower, but not always, and it never includes the hours you spend looking after the site.
Be generous about those hours. If your time is worth more than the saving, the subscription is the cheaper option.
What a normal week looks like on your own site
Running the site yourself adds a small amount of regular work. You apply plugin and WordPress updates, check that backups ran, and keep an eye on security and uptime. Your host may take some of that off you, depending on the plan you buy.
The course side is gentler. You check new enrolments and any failed payments, grade essay answers when students submit them, and answer questions that arrive in lesson comments. Reports show completions and revenue, and the email log shows whether a student’s message was delivered.
Nothing here is difficult. It is simply a list of jobs that a hosted platform does without telling you, and that now has your name on it.
Your first thirty days
A move works best as a gradual cutover rather than a weekend scramble. This is the order we would follow.
- Week one: build the new site on staging, install Learnomy and rebuild one course in full.
- Week one: connect Stripe or PayPal in test mode and buy that course as a stranger would.
- Week two: rebuild the remaining courses, starting with the ones that earn the most.
- Week two: set up the email tool and send yourself the purchase and enrolment emails.
- Week three: export your customer list from Kajabi and bulk enrol people into each course.
- Week four: point your sales links at the new checkout, and keep Kajabi alive until refunds and billing questions settle.
If you do decide to move
Be realistic about this part, because it is where people get surprised. There is no Kajabi importer. Learnomy’s importer reads LearnDash, Tutor LMS and LifterLMS, and that is all.
The route is manual and it works:
- Export your student list from Kajabi before you cancel anything.
- Rebuild the courses in Learnomy.
- Bulk enrol students into each course by pasting emails or uploading a CSV. This creates accounts for people who do not have one.
- For students who already finished, set the course to manual completion and mark them complete.
For a large catalogue, script the enrolments through the REST API or the incoming enrolment webhook, or treat it as a custom migration. Do it on a staging site first and check one full course and one real enrolment before you point students at it.
If you want the straight two-way comparison instead of the wider field, it is at Learnomy vs Kajabi.
Student data, privacy and ownership
On WordPress the records are rows in your own database: accounts, enrolments, progress, orders and certificates. You can back them up, query them and connect them to other tools without asking a vendor for an export.
Privacy requests run through the standard WordPress export and erase tools, which Learnomy plugs into for the data it holds. Learner data is deleted on an erase request, while financial rows are kept but unlinked from the person, and the settings include how long the audit log is kept. Read the data management settings before you promise anyone a retention period.
You are also now the one responsible for that data. Choose a host you trust, keep backups somewhere separate, and write your privacy policy to match what the site really does.
Telling your students
A move is also a message to the people who pay you. Send one clear email a week or two ahead saying what is changing, the date, and where they log in afterwards. New accounts get an invitation to set a password, so tell them to expect it and where to look if it lands in spam.
Keep the old login working for a short overlap, and give them a person to write to. Most of the support load in a migration comes from students who were surprised, not from the software.
Who should stay on Kajabi
Stay if the funnels and email sequences make your money. A course delivered perfectly on WordPress does not help if the thing that fills it stops working during a rebuild.
Stay if nobody on your team wants to touch a server, a plugin update or a backup. A subscription that removes that worry is doing a real job, and you should price it that way.
Stay if you are two weeks from a launch. Move after the launch, in a quiet month, and not in the middle of the busiest one. When you are ready to compare in detail, read the pricing and feature split and the payments page first.
Where this leaves the decision
Kajabi earns its place when you want one tool and do not want to run a site. Nothing in a comparison table makes up for that if it is what you need.
If you already run WordPress and the course side is what you came for, the free plugin is a cheap way to find out. Build one real course, put a price on it, and see whether the site you end up with is one you want to own.