GoHighLevel vs ClickFunnels vs Kajabi for coaches and course sellers

Coaches and course creators hear about all three of these platforms, often in the same week, and each one promises the same thing: everything you need to sell online, in one place. That's roughly true of all of them. You can build a sales page, take payment, deliver a course and email your list on GoHighLevel, ClickFunnels or Kajabi.

So the decision comes down to the part of your business the ads skip. Do your clients buy from a page, or after a call? Is your list 2,000 people or 20,000? Is the course the product, or a bonus that comes with coaching? Each platform answers those questions differently, and the price changes a lot depending on your answers.

Prices here come from each company's own pricing page, checked on October 21, 2026.

What each one was built for

Kajabi was built for creators. Its plans are counted in products, contacts, websites and communities, and its pricing page leads with what a course business needs: products, a community, email, landing pages and checkout. It takes no share of your sales.^⁠[3]

ClickFunnels was built around the sales funnel, the sequence of pages that takes a stranger from an ad to a purchase. Courses, email and contacts were added around it. If you've watched a "funnel hacking" webinar, you've seen the thinking behind ClickFunnels.^⁠[2]

GoHighLevel was built for marketing agencies running systems for local businesses. A coach can buy it directly and use one account for their own business. What you get is a CRM, a funnel and website builder, calendars, two-way texting, phone calls, email, courses, communities and workflow automation, with unlimited contacts on every plan.^⁠[1] Of the three pricing pages, GoHighLevel's is the only one that lists phone calls and texting as core features.

The plans side by side

Sources: the three pricing pages.^{⁠[1],[2],[3]}

GoHighLevel's annual price is $970 a year, which is where $80.83 comes from. Its next plan up, Unlimited, is for agencies with more than three client accounts. A coach running only their own business rarely needs it.

ClickFunnels' Scale plan at $197 ($164 billed yearly) raises the limits to 75,000 contacts, 300,000 emails a month and six courses. Optimize is $297 ($248 yearly).^⁠[2]

Kajabi's Growth plan at $249 ($199 yearly) allows 50 products, 25,000 contacts and 11 admin users. Pro is $499 ($399 yearly) with unlimited products, 100,000 contacts and three websites.^⁠[3]

The cost for a coach with 8,000 subscribers

Here's one coach, priced on all three. They have 8,000 people on their email list, send two emails a week (about 70,000 emails a month), sell one course and run a free community.

ClickFunnels. Launch covers 10,000 contacts but only 50,000 emails a month, so two emails a week to 8,000 people doesn't fit. Scale does, at $197 a month or $164 billed yearly. At one email a week, about 35,000 sends, Launch is enough at $97, or $81 billed yearly.

GoHighLevel. Starter is $97 a month. Email is metered at $0.675 per 1,000, so 70,000 emails add about $47, for a total of about $144. At one email a week it's about $121. On annual billing, take about $16 off either figure.^⁠[1],[4]

Kajabi. Basic stops at 2,500 contacts, so this coach starts on Growth: $249 a month, or $199 billed yearly. Email is unlimited, so sending more costs nothing extra.^⁠[3]

The price gap is real, but it's smaller than the gap in what you get. Kajabi at $199 includes a polished community and student experience. GoHighLevel at $128 includes a booking calendar, a phone number and texting. ClickFunnels at $81 is the cheapest way to run pages and email for a list this size.

Run the same sums for a list of 20,000 and the order changes. ClickFunnels needs Scale for the contacts alone, at $197 a month. Kajabi stays on Growth, which allows 25,000 contacts, at $249. GoHighLevel stays on Starter, and one email a week to 20,000 people is about 87,000 sends, or roughly $58 in usage, for about $155 in total. The bigger your free list grows compared with your paying customers, the more GoHighLevel's unlimited contacts are worth.

Payment fees

All three let you sell through a payment provider. Kajabi publishes its own rates: with Kajabi Payments, US card fees are 2.9% plus 30 cents on Basic, 2.8% on Growth and 2.7% on Pro. If you use a third-party provider instead, Kajabi adds its own fee of 2% on Basic, 1% on Growth and 0.5% on Pro, on top of what that provider charges.^⁠[3]

That 2% matters more than it looks. A coach on Basic selling $10,000 a month through their own Stripe account pays Kajabi $200 a month on top of the plan. Either use Kajabi Payments or move to a higher plan before your sales grow.

GoHighLevel connects to Stripe, PayPal, Square, Authorize.net and other providers, and you pay the provider's own fees.^⁠[1]

Where each one is strongest

Kajabi: the student experience

If your students will spend hours inside your course and community, Kajabi is the one that feels made for them. Its feature list includes communities, a customer app, and video transcription and translation, and Pro adds a branded mobile app of your own.^⁠[3] The setup is the simplest of the three. You can have a course, a sales page and a checkout running in an afternoon without touching an automation builder.

What you give up is reach beyond the course. There's no phone system or texting on the plan list, and the contact limits push you up a plan as your free list grows, even if most of those people never buy.

ClickFunnels: the sales page and the funnel

ClickFunnels is still the tool most marketers think of when they hear the word "funnel," and its templates and ecosystem reflect that. If your business runs on ads to a webinar to an offer, with order bumps and upsells along the way, it's the most direct path. Launch is also the cheapest entry point here once you bill yearly.

The limits to watch are emails and courses. Fifty thousand emails a month on Launch sounds like plenty until your list passes 6,000 and you email twice a week. Three courses is fine for most coaches, but not for one who sells mini-courses as lead magnets.

GoHighLevel: selling on calls

Most coaching above a few hundred dollars is sold on a call. Someone fills in a form, books a slot, gets a reminder, shows up (or doesn't), and then needs following up. GoHighLevel puts every step of that in one place. The form books the calendar, the calendar sends a text reminder, a no-show gets a "want to rebook?" message, and the lead moves through a pipeline you can see.

Texting is billed per use: a local number is $1.15 a month and each text segment $0.00747, plus carrier fees and A2P registration in the US.^⁠[5] For a coach booking twenty calls a month, that's a few dollars.

The downside is that GoHighLevel was built for agencies, and it shows. There's a lot of product, settings live in more than one place, and the course and community pages look plainer than Kajabi's. Plan on a few weekends to set it up well, or pay someone who already knows it.

Questions that settle it

Do people buy from a page or from you? Page: ClickFunnels or Kajabi. You: GoHighLevel.

How big is your free list compared with your buyers? A large list of free subscribers costs nothing extra on GoHighLevel's contacts, pushes Kajabi up a tier, and may push ClickFunnels up on email volume.

Is the course the product? If students judge you by the course and the community, Kajabi's polish is worth paying for. If the course is a bonus that comes with coaching, any of the three will do.

Do you want to run other businesses later? GoHighLevel's Starter plan covers three separate businesses. ClickFunnels' Launch has one workspace and Scale has five. Kajabi's Basic and Growth plans include one website.

Switching later

Moving a course is mostly copying videos and text. Moving a list is an export and an import. Moving automations is where the time goes, because none of these platforms imports another's workflows. Whichever you choose, keep a plain document listing every automation: what triggers it, what it sends and when. It'll save you a week if you ever move.

How to choose this week

All three have free trials. Don't spend them on a tour. Pick the one your answers point to, build your real sales page and your real checkout, send yourself through the whole flow from opt-in to purchase, and see how it feels.

If that's GoHighLevel, start with the 14-day trial on Starter. Our GoHighLevel pricing breakdown shows how usage adds to the bill, and the GoHighLevel review covers what the platform does well and where it struggles.