Kajabi is a very good platform for the business it was designed to serve. That business is selling online courses and digital products at scale. If that is what you do, Kajabi earns its price. The problem is that thousands of professional coaches sign up for Kajabi every year to run something that is not a course business at all, and they spend the next year paying for tools they will never open.

This is not a knock on Kajabi. It is a question of fit. A coaching practice and a course business look similar from a distance and behave very differently up close. Knowing which one you are running tells you almost everything about which platform belongs underneath it.

What Kajabi was actually built to do

Kajabi was built for creators who make their living selling content. Picture someone with a flagship course, a few smaller ones, an email list in the tens of thousands, and a sales funnel designed to move strangers to a checkout page. For that person, Kajabi is excellent. The course player is polished, the offer and funnel tools are deep, and the whole platform is organised around the idea that your product is content and your job is to sell more of it.

Every major decision in Kajabi flows from that assumption. The pipelines are built around product launches. The analytics centre on course completion and offer conversion. The marketing tools assume you are running broadcast campaigns to a large list. None of that is wrong. It is built for a content business, and a coaching practice is a relationship business.

What a coaching practice actually needs

A coaching practice runs on a much smaller number of much deeper relationships. You are not trying to sell a $200 course to ten thousand strangers. You are managing twenty or forty or sixty clients through programmes that last months, keeping track of where each one is, and staying close enough to notice when someone goes quiet.

That work needs a real client record, not a customer-of-a-product record. It needs booking that connects to that record. It needs coaching agreements that get signed and stored against the right person. It needs a pipeline that reflects how coaching engagements actually progress, from enquiry to discovery call to active programme to renewal. Kajabi can be bent toward some of this, but you are bending it, and you feel the resistance every time.

Where SWITCH Stack is the better fit

SWITCH Stack is built around the client relationship rather than the product. The centre of the platform is the person you are coaching, not the course you are selling. Booking, agreements, session history, email, and pipeline stages all attach to that person, so the record of a client is one record rather than five disconnected ones across five tools.

If you are an established coach running a practice, this is the difference between software that fits your day and software you have to manage around. You are not paying for an advanced course marketplace you will never touch. You are paying for the things a coaching business does every week. For more on why coaching relationships need a different kind of client system, the piece on what professional coaches actually need from a CRM goes deeper.

Where Kajabi might still win

Honesty matters here, because the answer is not always SWITCH Stack. If your primary income comes from large-scale online courses, and coaching is a smaller part of what you do, Kajabi is probably the right call. Its course and funnel tools are genuinely strong, and a content business benefits from that depth in a way a coaching practice does not.

The test is simple. Look at where your revenue comes from. If most of it comes from selling courses to a large audience, you are running a content business and Kajabi suits it. If most of it comes from coaching clients through programmes, you are running a practice, and you are very likely paying Kajabi for the wrong thing.

The price, plainly

Kajabi starts at $179 USD per month. SWITCH Stack is $97 USD per month. The dollar gap is real but it is not the main point. The main point is what sits inside each price. With Kajabi you are buying a course platform with some client features attached. With SWITCH Stack you are buying a coaching practice platform with course delivery included for the programmes you actually run. You end up paying less for the thing that matches your business, which is a better outcome than paying more for the thing that does not. If you want to see where a fragmented set of tools quietly costs even more, the real cost of a duct-taped coaching tech stack lays out the maths.

The decision is not Kajabi versus SWITCH Stack in the abstract. It is course business versus coaching practice. Work out which one you are, and the platform stops being a hard choice.