If you’re a dietitian, nurse practitioner, physical therapist, or other health professional building your first course or membership, here’s the short version: Thinkific is the best fit for most practitioners, Teachable is the cheapest way to test a single course idea, and Kajabi only makes sense if you plan to run your entire business inside it — which I don’t recommend for private practice owners, and I’ll explain why.
I’ve spent 15 years building websites for health and wellness practices, and course platforms come up in almost every strategy conversation now. Practitioners aren’t “creators” chasing a cold audience with funnels. You have an existing client base, a referral network, and (hopefully) a website that ranks. That changes which platform features actually matter and which expensive ones you can skip.
Quick verdict: Which platform wins for private practice owners?
| You are… | Best fit | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Testing your first course idea | Teachable Starter | Cheapest entry ($29/mo annual), but a 7.5% fee on every sale and a 100-student cap mean it’s a test lane, not a home |
| Building a real course or membership alongside your practice | Thinkific Start | Memberships, certificates, payment plans, and assessments at $74/mo annual — the strongest teaching tools of the three |
| Running courses, email, and your whole site in one tool | Kajabi | Good all-in-one, but $143/mo minimum — and I don’t recommend the all-in-one approach for practices (more below) |
What do Thinkific, Teachable, and Kajabi cost in 2026?
Sticker prices changed a lot recently, so ignore any comparison post that hasn’t been updated this year. Kajabi raised prices in January 2026 for the first time in a decade and pulled its $89 Kickstarter plan. Teachable retired its free plan and restructured everything in 2025. Thinkific killed its free plan too. Here’s what’s real right now:
| Plan tier | Thinkific | Teachable | Kajabi |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry (annual billing) | Basic — $36/mo | Starter — $29/mo | Basic — $143/mo |
| Mid | Start — $74/mo | Builder — $69/mo | Growth — $199/mo |
| Upper | Grow — $149/mo | Growth — $139/mo | Pro — $399/mo |
| Free plan? | No — 30-day trial | No — 7-day trial | No — trial only |
| Platform transaction fee | 0% with Thinkific Payments; 5% (Basic), 2% (Start), or 1% (Grow) if you use your own Stripe | 7.5% on Starter; 0% on Builder and up | 0% with Kajabi Payments; 2% (Basic), 1% (Growth), or 0.5% (Pro) if you use your own Stripe |
Monthly billing runs about 25% higher on all three. Standard payment processing (roughly 2.9% + $0.30 per card transaction) applies everywhere, on every platform — that part isn’t a platform fee, it’s just how card payments work.
The fee math, using a realistic practitioner example
Say you’re a dietitian selling a $197 gut-health course, and 50 clients buy it this year. That’s $9,850 in gross sales. Here’s what each platform’s fees do to that number (card processing of about $301 applies on all three, so I’m only comparing the platform cut):
- Teachable Starter: 7.5% platform fee = $739 gone, on top of your $348/year subscription. You’d also be at 50 of your 100 allowed students.
- Thinkific Basic with Thinkific Payments: $0 platform fee. With your own Stripe account instead: 5% = $493. (Thinkific waives the surcharge after your first $1M in annual sales — a nice problem to have.)
- Kajabi Basic with Kajabi Payments: $0 platform fee — but you paid $1,716/year for the subscription to get there.
The takeaway: Teachable’s low sticker price is real, but the Starter fee means it stops being cheap the moment your course sells. If you’re past the “will anyone buy this” stage, Thinkific Start or Teachable Builder is where the math lands for most practitioners.
Which platform has the best course builder for structured, clinical-style content?
Thinkific. Health professionals usually aren’t selling a loose bundle of videos — you’re teaching a protocol, a progression, a program with a right order. Thinkific is the only one of the three that lets you require a quiz pass or a percentage of video watched before the next module unlocks. If your course walks someone through an elimination diet phase by phase, or a post-op rehab progression, that compliance control matters. Teachable’s drip is time-based only (“unlock after 7 days”), which doesn’t know or care whether your client did week one.
Thinkific also gives you surveys, assignments, a reusable video library, and customizable completion certificates. Certificates matter more in this niche than most — if you ever teach other practitioners (a CEU-style course, a clinician training), a branded certificate is table stakes.
Kajabi’s builder is polished and fast, and honestly, the finished courses look the best of the three, I’ve said for years that I prefer the look of Kajabi’s course player. Its assessments are serviceable but shallower: quizzes exist, but the progression controls and assignment grading aren’t at Thinkific’s level.
Teachable is the fastest from zero to published. If your entire goal is “get a simple self-paced course live this month,” it does that with the least friction.
Do these platforms handle private client health information?
No, and don’t try to make them. None of these platforms sign a Business Associate Agreement, which means none of them are appropriate for protected health information. Your course platform is for education and general wellness content, full stop. Intake forms, symptom tracking, one-on-one clinical communication, and anything tied to a specific patient’s care belongs in your HIPAA-compliant EHR or telehealth stack, not in a course comment thread or community DM.
Practically, that means two things when you set up. First, write community guidelines that tell members not to post personal health details, and moderate accordingly. Second, keep your course marketing claims educational rather than clinical — “learn the framework I use with clients,” not “this course will treat your condition.” This isn’t a platform limitation you can shop your way around; it applies to all three equally, and to Skool, Circle, and every other alternative too.
Which platform is best for a membership or ongoing client community?
This is where the decision gets interesting for practitioners, because a monthly membership (ongoing support after a program ends, a recipe club, a monthly Q&A) is often a better business model for a practice than a one-and-done course.
Thinkific: memberships and subscription payments start on the Start plan ($74/mo annual) — the Basic plan can’t do paid memberships at all, which trips people up. You get 1 community on Basic and Start, 3 on Grow. The community tool is solid for course discussion, lighter than a dedicated community platform.
Teachable: communities are included even on Starter, but the membership and subscription tooling is the weakest of the three, and you’ll feel the product caps (1 product on Starter, 5 on Builder) quickly if you run a course and a membership and a download.
Kajabi: its community product is good — feeds, live rooms, challenges — and it bundles cleanly with courses in one offer. If community is the heart of your model and you’re committed to Kajabi’s price, it delivers.
The wildcard: if community is the main thing and courses are secondary, look at Circle or Skool before any of these three. Circle is the strongest pure community product; Skool is the cheap-and-simple option a lot of solo practitioners are moving to. Podia’s also worth a glance for simple free/paid community tiers. I’d rather you pick the right tool than force a course platform to be a community platform.
Do you actually need Kajabi’s marketing suite?
Kajabi’s real pitch isn’t courses, it’s replacing your email tool, funnel builder, and website in one subscription. The email and automation tools are legitimately the best of the three; that part of the sales pitch is true.
Here’s why I still don’t recommend it for private practice owners: your website is a long-term asset, and Kajabi shouldn’t own it. A practice site built on WordPress ranks in Google, publishes a blog you control, and stays yours no matter what platform you use for courses. Move your whole site into Kajabi and your web presence is now renting space inside a $143+/month subscription — cancel it, and you’re rebuilding everything. I’ve watched practitioners paint themselves into exactly this corner.
There’s also a fit problem. Kajabi’s funnel machinery is built for creators selling to cold traffic. Most practitioners sell courses to warm audiences — current clients, past clients, referral partners, newsletter readers, people who found your site through search. You don’t need a five-step evergreen webinar pipeline to sell a course to people who already trust you. You need a good sales page, a simple email sequence, and a checkout that works — all three platforms have that.
My recommendation: keep your practice website on WordPress (or wherever it ranks today), keep your email list in a dedicated email tool you own, and let the course platform do the one job it’s great at — hosting and delivering the course.
Does a mobile app matter for course completion?
It matters more for memberships than for courses, and it’s priced very differently across the three. Teachable includes its student app on every plan. Thinkific’s branded app is a $199/mo add-on — more than the Grow plan itself. Kajabi gives Basic and Growth customers the generic Kajabi app; a branded app is reserved for the Pro plan ($399/mo).
For a self-paced course, the browser experience is fine and I wouldn’t pay a dime extra for an app. For an ongoing membership where you want people checking a feed weekly, an app measurably helps engagement — but at Thinkific’s add-on price, that’s another argument for a community-first tool like Circle or Skool, both of which include mobile apps in their normal pricing.
What are the content and student limits?
The word “unlimited” is doing a lot of dishonest work on these pricing pages, so here are the actual numbers from Thinkific’s own plan table:
- Thinkific caps current students at 10,000 on Basic, Start, AND Grow. Truly unlimited students requires the custom-priced Plus tier. Ten thousand is a lot for a practice, but it’s not “unlimited.”
- Thinkific video bandwidth: 100 GB/month on Basic, 200 GB on Start, 400 GB on Grow. A video-heavy course with an active student base can bump into this.
- Thinkific Basic allows only 5 digital downloads and 5 coaching/webinar sessions. Unlimited on Start and up.
- Teachable Starter: 1 published product, 100 students. Builder: 5 products, 1,000 students. These caps force upgrades faster than the fee math does.
- Kajabi Basic: roughly 2,500 contacts (cut down from 10,000 in the January 2026 restructure) and a small product allowance. Your email list growth — not your course sales — is usually what forces the upgrade to Growth.
So which platform should you pick?
Pick Thinkific if you’re building a real education arm for your practice — structured programs, certificates, assessments, a membership. The Start plan at $74/mo annual is the sweet spot; skip Basic if memberships or certificates are anywhere in your plan, because you’ll be upgrading within months anyway. (This is the platform I like for its simplicity in updating courses, and where I’d point most practitioners.)
Pick Teachable if you’re validating one course idea and want the lowest commitment. Go in eyes-open on the Starter plan’s 7.5% fee and 100-student cap, and plan to move to Builder ($69/mo annual) the moment sales are consistent — above roughly $550/month in revenue, Builder is already cheaper than Starter plus fees.
Pick Kajabi if you’ve decided to run courses, community, email, and marketing in one system and the $143–$199/month is a conscious trade for consolidation. The tools are excellent. Just don’t move your practice website into it — keep that asset on a platform you own.
Pick none of these if community is your actual product — look at Circle or Skool first.
