Leaving Kajabi is a bigger job than signing up for it was, and that is exactly why coaches put it off. You have client data, course content, email automations, and a working setup that, whatever its faults, is currently running your business. The risk is not the new platform. The risk is the move itself: a gap in client communication, a lost contact list, an automation that quietly stops firing. Most of that risk disappears if you check the right things before you commit, rather than discovering them halfway through.

This is a practical guide to those checks. It assumes you have decided Kajabi is the wrong shape for a practice-based business, which is a common conclusion once coaching, not courses, is where your income comes from. If you are still deciding, SWITCH Stack vs Kajabi makes that case directly.

Export everything before you go anywhere

The first rule of migration is to get your data out before you do anything else, while you still have full access. Export your full contact list with all the fields, not just names and emails. Export your course content, including the lesson copy, the file uploads, and the structure of each programme. Write down your automations, even the simple ones, because a list of “what currently happens automatically” is the thing most coaches forget to capture and most miss once it is gone.

Keep these exports somewhere safe and separate before you cancel anything. A surprising number of migration disasters come from cancelling the old account a day too early and losing access to the one export you needed.

While you are in there, take a few screenshots of how your current automations and email sequences are set up. Exported data tells you what your contacts are, but a picture of the actual flow tells you how the pieces fit together, which is the part that is genuinely tedious to reconstruct from memory later. Ten minutes of screenshots now saves an afternoon of guessing in a fortnight.

Check what the new platform does with email

Email is where migrations most often go wrong, because sending reputation does not move with you. When you switch platforms, you are sending from new infrastructure, and that needs setting up properly or your carefully written welcome sequence lands in spam. Before you commit, check how the new platform handles domain authentication, whether it walks you through verifying your sending domain, and what its general sending reputation is like.

Get this right at the start and your clients never notice the change. Get it wrong and the first thing your list experiences after the move is your emails vanishing into junk folders, which is a poor advertisement for your shiny new system.

Confirm your data is portable, both ways

Before you move in, find out how you would move out. It sounds pessimistic, but a platform that makes it easy to export your data is telling you something good about how it treats you, and one that makes it hard is telling you something you want to know now rather than in two years. Check that contacts, content, and records can be exported in a usable format whenever you want them.

Data ownership should be clear and in your favour. Your client list and your course content are your assets. Any platform worth moving to will treat them that way and let you take them with you without a fight. This is part of the wider cost of a fragmented or locked-in tech stack that is easy to underrate until you hit it.

Plan the timeline so clients feel nothing

A clean migration has an overlap, not a hard cutover. Keep the old platform running while you set up and test the new one. Move your content, rebuild your key automations, verify your sending domain, and send yourself test sequences before a single client is affected. Only when the new system is genuinely working do you point bookings and forms at it and wind the old one down.

The goal is that your clients experience nothing at all. Their reminders keep arriving, their programme keeps working, their emails keep landing. A migration done well is invisible to everyone except you.

How SWITCH Stack handles the move

SWITCH Stack is built to make this less daunting than it sounds. The onboarding includes a checklist that walks through the exact order of operations, and step-by-step courses cover the parts that usually trip coaches up, including importing contacts and setting up your sending domain. Because the platform arrives pre-configured for coaching, with pipelines, emails, and an agreement already in place, you are adapting your practice to a working setup rather than building one from an empty account.

The part most coaches dread most — moving their course content — turns out to be the easiest part. GoHighLevel includes a native Kajabi import that brings your courses across in a couple of clicks. The thing that looks like the biggest obstacle to leaving is not an obstacle at all. You keep the content you built, you stop paying Kajabi’s price to keep it, and you land in a platform that was designed for the practice you are actually running rather than the course business you are not.

Migrating off Kajabi is a project, but it is a finite one. Export early, protect your email reputation, confirm your data is yours, overlap the timeline, and the move becomes a quiet weekend’s work rather than a risk to your practice.