Is Kajabi's email marketing good enough?
Mostly yes, and that is not the answer you will get from anybody selling you something. The parts worth knowing before you decide are one hard limit on the cheapest plan, one thing Kajabi cannot do on any plan, and what happens when your contact count fills up.
Read off Kajabi's own help pages and pricing page, in a browser, on12 September 2026. The email prices used in the sums below are our own published figures, read off each vendor's pricing page on6 September 2026. We have not run Kajabi ourselves, and we sell nothing to Kajabi either way.
Why this question is hard to get a straight answer to
When we looked at what already answers this query on12 September 2026, the results were Kajabi's own feature page, Kajabi's own blog, and a run of Kajabi consultants and agencies. Every one of them has a commercial reason to say yes, and none of them has a reason to tell you the point where the answer turns into no.
We have no stake in your answer. We do not sell Kajabi, and Kajabi is not one of the email platforms we compare, so this page is the same to us whichever way you go.
What Kajabi's email actually does
More than people expect. A broadcast is a real broadcast: "An Email Broadcast is an individual email sent to a list of subscribers from your Contacts tab", and you "can choose to send the Email Broadcast to all of your contacts, or a segmented list", either now or scheduled for later.Source
The automation triggers are the part that makes this a genuine marketing tool rather than a notification system. Kajabi's own list includes "Offer is purchased", "Tag is added", "Form is submitted", "Lesson is completed", "Event is registered", "Email sequence is completed" and "Certificate is sent", plus quiz results and inactivity windows. The actions include subscribing somebody to an email sequence.Source
Conditional filters are there too, including "Owns any of these product(s)", "Does not own product(s)", "Previously owned product(s)" and tag conditions. That is enough to run a launch to people who own one course and not another, which is the thing most course sellers actually want.
The Basic plan gate, which is the sharpest limit here
Everything above describes Kajabi with the automation builder. On the Basic plan you do not have it. Kajabi says so directly:
"Basic plan: Only single-step automations (one When trigger, one Then action) are available. The visual Automation builder, multi-step flows, Wait nodes, and per-step Draft/Published controls require a Growth or Pro plan."Source
Read what that rules out. A welcome sequence is several emails with a gap between them, which is a multi-step flow containing wait steps. On Basic you cannot build it in the automation tool. The overview article says the same thing in plan language: "the Basic Plan includes Basic Automations, and Growth and Pro Plans include Advanced Automations", and "Growth and Pro Plans have access to create any Automation within the Marketing tab. Basic Plans only have access to create Automations in various other areas of Kajabi."Source
So the real question for a Basic subscriber is not "is Kajabi's email good enough". It is "do I pay Kajabi to unlock the builder, or pay somebody else for a better one". That has a number attached, and it is below.
The thing Kajabi cannot do on any plan
Kajabi publishes its own limitations section, which is unusually straight for a vendor, and two lines in it matter to course sellers.
- No abandoned checkout trigger. In Kajabi's words, there is "no native When trigger for a customer who starts checkout but does not finish", and no combination of triggers and filters reproduces it. Its own suggested fix is to connect a third-party tool and build the logic there.
- Automations are not retroactive. An automation "only runs for Contacts who trigger it after the Automation is published", so building a welcome sequence today does nothing for the people already on your list.
SourceThe first one is the single strongest argument for adding an outside tool, because checkout abandonment is money that already decided to buy.
Who you can email, and the silent shortfall
Kajabi can email people who never bought anything, which is the large difference between it and Teachable. Contacts arrive through forms as well as purchases.
The limit is consent. Kajabi: "If a user has not opted in to receive marketing emails, they will not be added to the recipient list when creating your Email Broadcast." It even spells out how this looks when it bites: "If you add a filtered selection of 200 people from your list to an Email Broadcast and only 98 recipients were added, the reason is most likely that more than half of those users did not opt in."Source
There is one carve-out, and it is worth knowing rather than discovering. Automation emails "reach your Contacts regardless of their subscription status", with only people who actively opted out skipped.Source
The contact cap, and what happens when you hit it
Kajabi's plans are priced by contacts, not by emails. Marketing emails are listed as unlimited on all three plans; the contacts are not. Read off the pricing page on 12 September 2026, billed annually: Basic $143/mo for2,500 contacts, Growth$199/mo for 25,000, Pro$399/mo for 100,000. Paid monthly instead, those are $179,$249 and $499.Source
The part people do not plan for is what the ceiling does. Kajabi warns you at "90% of your contact usage", then: "You will be given 30 days to update or remove your contacts before your account is locked. After the 30-day grace period, you will be unable to access your account and will be required to upgrade to a higher plan or reach out to our support team to help you delete contacts."Source
A lead magnet that works is the usual way a Basic account meets that wall, because every address it collects is a contact whether or not it ever buys.
The sum nobody publishes: upgrade, or add a tool
If you are on Basic and you want the automation builder, you have two ways to get one. Upgrade to Growth, or stay on Basic and put a dedicated email tool beside it. At 2,500 contacts the sums look like this, using our own published prices read on6 September 2026.
| Kajabi Basic, plus | That tool | Total a month | Against Growth |
|---|---|---|---|
| Systeme.io | $17 billed monthly | $160 | $39 less |
| MailerLite | $29.70 billed annually | $172.70 | $26.30 less |
| AWeber | $35 billed monthly | $178 | $21 less |
| beehiiv | $61 billed annually | $204 | $5 more |
Kajabi Growth is $199/mo billed annually. So at this list size most pairings cost less than upgrading, and the dearest one costs slightly more. That is the whole finding, and it cuts both ways depending on which tool you pick.
One thing that would make this comparison dishonest if it were left out: Growth is not only an email upgrade. It also takes you from 5 products to 50, from 2 admin users to 11, and from 2,500 contacts to 25,000. If you need any of those, upgrading buys them too and the sum above stops being the right comparison. If you need none of them, you are paying the Growth price for an automation builder alone.
You do not need a second tool if
The paragraph no Kajabi consultant will write for you. Kajabi's email is enough, and buying anything else is a waste, when all of these are true:
- You are on Growth or Pro, so you already have the builder.
- You are comfortably inside your contact allowance and not running a lead magnet that will fill it.
- You can live without chasing abandoned checkouts, or you are happy to bridge that one job through a third-party connector.
- You want your emails to know what somebody bought, which Kajabi knows natively and an outside tool only learns through a connection you have to build and maintain.
That last point gets skipped in most comparisons. Kajabi holds the purchase record. A separate email tool has to be told, and that link is one more thing that can quietly break.
If the answer is that you do need one
The decision is your list size and whether it has to automate without paying. Both come off each vendor's own pricing page, with the date we read it.
Kajabi email, answered
- Is Kajabi's email marketing good enough on its own?
- For most course sellers on the Growth or Pro plan, yes. You get broadcasts to a segment, scheduling, email sequences, and automations triggered by a purchase, a tag, a form, or a completed lesson. The honest exception is the Basic plan, where automations are capped at one trigger and one action, and the exception nobody can fix: Kajabi has no abandoned checkout trigger.
- What is missing from Kajabi automations on the Basic plan?
- Kajabi states it plainly: "Basic plan: Only single-step automations ... are available. The visual Automation builder, multi-step flows, Wait nodes, and per-step Draft/Published controls require a Growth or Pro plan." A welcome sequence that waits three days between emails is a multi-step flow with a wait in it, so on Basic you cannot build one in the automation tool.
- Can Kajabi email people who have not bought anything?
- Yes, which is the big difference between Kajabi and Teachable here. Contacts arrive from forms as well as purchases. The limit is consent, not purchase: Kajabi says marketing emails only send to subscribed contacts, and a filtered send will silently reach fewer people than you selected if some of them never opted in.
- What happens when I hit the Kajabi contact limit?
- Kajabi warns you at 90 percent of your contact allowance, then gives you 30 days to remove contacts or upgrade. After that grace period its own article says you will be unable to access your account until you upgrade or get support to delete contacts for you. Worth knowing before a lead magnet fills your list.
On a different course platform? The same question for Teachable is on does Teachable have email marketing, and the answer there is much less generous. The short version for Podia and Thinkific as well is ondo you need a separate email tool. Thinkific is worth its own page, because it is the one platform where the pricing runs backwards:Thinkific email marketing optionsshows the automated sequence sitting on the cheapest plan while the plain broadcast needs Grow.