CourseOS vs Teachable vs Kajabi

What is the main difference?

Teachable and Kajabi are all-in-one course platforms. You rent a place for your course inside their product, and they handle hosting, checkout and student accounts. CourseOS is a website template for Framer. You own the site, the design and the student experience, and a membership tool called Outseta handles login, payments, CRM and email in the background.

This affects cost over time, how much you can customize and who owns your student relationships.

How much does each option cost?

• CourseOS: $149 once for the template. You pay for your Framer site plan and Outseta separately, and standard payment processing fees on each sale.

• Teachable: monthly plans, with a 7.5% transaction fee on every sale on its Starter plan.

• Kajabi: plans start around $180 per month, whether you sell or not.

Platform pricing changes, so check the current pricing pages before you decide. Platform fees grow with your sales, while a template you own costs the same whether you sell ten courses or ten thousand.

How much control do I have over design?

In CourseOS, every lesson is its own Framer page. You can design each one however you like, add video, audio, text, downloads and FAQs, and make the whole course feel like your brand. Teachable and Kajabi give you themes and page builders inside their product, which is faster at the start but makes every course on the platform look similar.

Who owns my students and content?

With CourseOS, the site and its content are yours, and your student list lives in your own Outseta account. On Teachable and Kajabi, your content and student data sit inside the platform. You can usually export them, but leaving becomes harder the longer you stay.

How long does setup take?

Teachable and Kajabi win on day one: you can create an account and upload a lesson in minutes. CourseOS takes longer to start, typically a weekend to connect Outseta and fill in your lessons, but the result is a finished, branded course site instead of a course inside someone else’s product.

What does the student experience look like?

On Teachable and Kajabi, students log in to the platform’s own dashboard, which looks similar across every course on it. In CourseOS, students log in on your site and move through lessons you designed, with your fonts, colors and layout. Each lesson can combine video, audio, text, downloads and FAQs, so you teach in the format that fits the topic. If you sell on your personal brand, students see the same design from the sales page to the final lesson.

Which should I pick?

Pick CourseOS if you care about design, ownership and keeping more of each sale, and are happy to spend a weekend on setup. Pick Teachable or Kajabi if you want to start selling today and prefer the platform to handle everything, even at a higher ongoing cost.

If you also want a personal brand site and a digital product store next to your courses, look at Dashfolio+, which combines all three in one Framer site.