SamCart vs Kajabi

If you are down to SamCart and Kajabi, you already know the shape of what you are buying: a place to take the money for a digital product, a course or a coaching offer. Both do that. Both host a checkout with order bumps and upsells, both sell subscriptions, both can host a course behind a login. The reason the choice is hard is that they are built for two different jobs, and the wrong pick leaves you either bolting a community platform onto a simple offer or running a growing course business through a checkout that was never meant to deliver it.

SamCart is a conversion-focused checkout. Its whole design points at one number: the value of the order as it is placed. Kajabi is a creator business platform, built from the delivery end, where the product is your knowledge and the course, the membership and the community matter as much as the sale. That is the fork, and everything below follows from it.

The one question that decides it

Are you optimizing the sale, or the whole business around it?

If the money turns on the moment of purchase, on a checkout that converts the traffic you send it, an order bump, a one-click upsell and a higher average order value, that is SamCart's home ground. If the money turns on what happens across the whole relationship, a course people finish, a membership they renew, a community they keep coming back to, that is Kajabi's. Each can technically reach into the other's territory. Neither does the other job as well as the one it was built for, and paying for the wrong strength is the most common regret with either.

The case for SamCart

SamCart has been selling checkouts since 2014, and the company says more than 75,000 businesses and over $8 billion in transactions have run through it. This is an established, dependable place to put your sales, and long-time users describe it that way: one calls it "no frills but fine", which is exactly what you want from the page where the card is charged.

What sets it apart is that it is built to raise order value, not just to accept the payment. Order bumps add a companion product with one checkbox at checkout, and one-click upsells charge the same card again after the first purchase without re-entering details. SamCart reports up to a 98% lift in average order value when a seller runs both. Subscription Saver retries failed payments and handles dunning, cart abandonment emails are included, and Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal, Venmo and Buy Now Pay Later are all supported, with payment routing across processors on Pro.

The catch is cost and gating. Core is $79 a month, well above a single-purpose cart, and the features that justify buying SamCart, the upsells, the bumps, A/B testing, Subscription Saver and the Affiliate Center, are all locked to the $199 Pro plan. So the honest price is $199, not $79. It is also checkout-first by design: there is no built-in email marketing, no CRM and no multi-step funnel management, so anything before or after the buy you connect yourself. Billing and refund friction, not the software, is the recurring complaint in its Trustpilot and BBB records, so read the renewal terms before the trial ends.

The case for Kajabi

Kajabi comes at the same buyer from the delivery end. Since 2010 it has become one of the most complete homes for a knowledge business, and the consistent praise from long-time users is having everything in one place: courses with cohorts and drip content, communities, memberships, podcasts, email, landing pages, a checkout with subscriptions, order bumps and upsells, and a branded mobile app on the top plan. If your product is a course people should actually finish, or a membership they should renew, Kajabi's delivery is the strongest in this pair, and it takes no revenue share either.

Its weak spot is cost, and it got worse in 2026. A January restructure raised plan prices and cut the entry Basic plan's contact limit to 2,500, and long-time customers lost their grandfathered rates, which drew a visible backlash. The entry plan is now $179 a month, about $143 billed annually, with no free plan, and affiliates and advanced automations are locked to the $249 Growth plan and up. Kajabi only pays off once you are genuinely selling. Its checkout is also lighter than SamCart's on the sales mechanics: it has bumps and upsells, but fewer of the aggressive AOV and page-testing options SamCart is built around, because that is not where Kajabi spends its effort.

If you buy your own traffic, a third option

Both of these assume you are selling to an audience you build: a list, a following, a community you already have. Neither is built around the paid ad click, and if your growth comes from buying traffic on Meta, Google or TikTok, there is a gap both leave that is worth naming before you commit.

ElasticFunnels is a funnel platform built for that buyer. Its lead feature is same-URL split testing: page variants rotate server-side under one campaign link, so the ad platform keeps its optimization and a test never sends the ad back through review. Around that it builds the pages, with an AI builder that can clone a page from a URL, hosts a checkout with order bumps and one-click upsells, and keeps the click, the order, the rebill and the refund on one record with a CRM and attribution on the same data. For a media buyer, that single record is the point: you see which ad and which angle made money without reconciling exports from separate tools.

Set against these two, it is wider in one direction and narrower in another. It is not a course and community home the way Kajabi is, so if delivering a membership experience is your product, Kajabi remains the better-fitted tool; and where SamCart is a dedicated, battle-tested standalone checkout you can bolt onto anything, ElasticFunnels is the whole build-and-sell layer, not a cart on its own. What it adds over both is the testing that does not reset ad learning and one source of truth for paid campaigns. The honest caveat is proof: ElasticFunnels is newer than either of these, and there is very little independent third-party review coverage to check its claims against, so until you run real volume through it you are largely taking the vendor's word for it. That is what you would expect of a platform this recent next to a checkout selling since 2014 and a platform running since 2010. Its 14-day trial needs no card, every feature is on every plan from $97 a month, and it adds 0.5% only on revenue through its own hosted checkout, so you can prove the split testing and the checkout on your own campaigns before you pay.

Which one for you

Pick SamCart if you have the offer and the traffic and want a checkout that converts and lifts the value of every order, without paying for course and community tools you will not open. Pick Kajabi if you are building a knowledge business and the course, the community and the membership are the product you want people to keep, and you will grow into its higher price. And if the engine is paid traffic rather than an audience you already own, weigh a funnel platform like ElasticFunnels alongside both, then read our full SamCart review and Kajabi review before you commit. Still deciding? Browse our other head-to-heads and the full ranking.