Kajabi to LearnDash Migration Without Losing a Student
Moving from Kajabi to LearnDash means taking every course, lesson, video, quiz and student record out of Kajabi and rebuilding it on a WordPress site you own, with LearnDash running the courses and WooCommerce or Stripe running the checkout. Done properly, your students log in the morning after the switch with the same email, the same progress and a better course to look at. Done badly, they get a password reset email and a reason to ask for a refund.
Femmy Creative Hub is an LMS systems studio serving course creators across Europe and worldwide. We count everything first, build the new platform beside the old one, move and check every lesson, then switch over in a quiet window. From $1,500 USD, agreed in writing before we touch anything.
Still deciding whether a move is justified? Compare Kajabi and LearnDash before you plan a migration.
Why people leave Kajabi
It’s rarely one thing. It’s usually the fourth thing in the same month.
The bill climbs as you grow. On Kajabi’s own pricing page, checked on 29 August 2026, Basic is $179 a month, or $143 a month if you pay for the year, and it caps you at 5 products and 2,500 contacts. Cross either line and you’re on Growth at $249 a month, or $199 paid yearly. Pro is $499 a month. Kajabi Payments also takes between 2.7% and 2.9% plus 30 cents on every sale depending on your plan. LearnDash, checked the same day, starts at $199 a year for one site. You add hosting on top, and we’ll be honest about that number further down, but the shape is different. One is rent that rises with your success. The other is a tool you bought.
You can’t change the thing you want to change. You know the feeling. The button colour, the lesson layout, the way the course page looks on a phone. You’ve watched the tutorial twice and it still isn’t possible.
The pipelines are the only reason you’re still there. Kajabi Pipelines are good. They are also the thing that makes leaving feel impossible, which is a strange reason to keep paying.
You own none of it. Your course, your students and your sales live on a domain and a database that belong to someone else. If Kajabi changes a plan, a price or a feature, you find out in an email.
Half your business already lives outside Kajabi. Live classes in Zoom, bookings in Calendly, community somewhere else, and Zapier holding it together until the day it doesn’t.
If you read that list and nodded three times, keep reading. If you nodded once, try the four question Platform Finder first. It might tell you to stay, and we’d rather you heard that now.
What moves, and what doesn’t
Nobody else on this page of Google will tell you this part plainly, so here it is.
Kajabi lets you export your contacts as a CSV, export a course product template as a manual backup, and download the videos inside a course. That’s the raw material. Everything else is rebuilt by hand, by us, from that material and from your admin screens.
Moves cleanly
- Your courses, modules and lesson structure
- Text lessons, PDFs and downloads
- Videos, which we host again on Bunny Stream or Vimeo and embed in LearnDash
- Quizzes, rebuilt in the LearnDash quiz builder
- Student accounts, their emails, and which products each one can access
- Your email list and tags
- Coupons, recreated in WooCommerce
- Your domain, with 301 redirects from every old URL that matters so Google and your bookmarks keep working
Rebuilt, not copied
- Pipelines, which become proper funnels on your own site using CartFlows or FunnelKit
- Checkout pages, rebuilt on WooCommerce or Stripe
- Email sequences, moved into whatever email tool you keep
- Certificates, rebuilt in LearnDash
- Community, in LearnDash Groups, BuddyBoss or a tool like Circle, depending on how you actually use it
Does not move
- The history inside a Kajabi community. We archive it; it does not come across as live posts.
- Your sales history. It stays in Kajabi. We show you what to download before you cancel.
- Lesson level progress is the fiddly one. Kajabi’s exports cover contacts and course templates, not a tidy file of who finished which lesson. We capture what your reports show and set it on the new site, and before anyone is switched we tell you exactly how much detail survived. No surprises on cutover morning.
- Active payment plans and subscriptions. These get a plan of their own, see the questions at the bottom.
| Item | What happens | What you need to do |
|---|---|---|
| Courses, lessons and downloads | Rebuilt in WordPress and LearnDash from exported material and admin screens. | Give us Kajabi admin access and flag recent changes. |
| Students and product access | Student emails and access rules are mapped and checked before cutover. | Nominate real students to test their new login. |
| Videos and quizzes | Videos are re-hosted or embedded; quizzes are rebuilt in LearnDash. | Confirm hosting and identify special rules. |
| Pipelines, checkout and email | Rebuilt as owned funnels, checkout flows and automations. | Choose the email tool and payment setup to keep. |
| Community, sales history and lesson detail | Community history is archived; sales history stays in Kajabi; available detail is assessed before cutover. | Download identified reports and approve the written map. |
The migration, in five steps
- Inventory and map. We export and count everything in Kajabi: every course, lesson, video, quiz, download, product, offer and contact. Each item gets a destination on the new site. You see the map before we build anything. What we need from you: admin access to Kajabi and a list of anything you know is messy.
- Build beside Kajabi. The new WordPress and LearnDash platform goes up on its own domain or subdomain while Kajabi keeps selling. No downtime, no half moved course, no pressure. What we need from you: hosting, brand assets and an hour to walk through the student experience with us.
- Move and verify. Lessons, media, quizzes and students come across. Then we check them by hand: sample logins, progress records, certificates, access rules. What we need from you: a few real students who’ll try the new login before the switch.
- Students and passwords. Students keep their email. They set a new password once, through a link in an email we write for you, and the email says what actually changed, which is almost nothing. We time it so nobody gets locked out between the two platforms.
- Cutover and the fourteen day watch. In a quiet window, usually a weekday night, we point the domain, turn on the redirects and switch the checkout. Then we watch the inbox with you for two weeks, because there are always three emails, and they’re always fixable in minutes if someone’s looking.
Will my students notice?
No, and that’s the whole point.
They’ll get one email from you, a few days before, that says the course is moving to a new home, their login email stays the same, and here’s where to set a new password. Then on the morning after the switch they open the same link they always open, log in, and land on the lesson they were halfway through. The course looks better than it did yesterday. That’s the only thing they notice.
The people who do notice are you and your support inbox, because the “where do I find my lesson” emails stop. At Puente Language Studio those arrived about nine times a week before the rebuild.
What it costs and how long it takes
From $1,500 USD. The final price depends on how much there is to move, and we put it in writing after the inventory, before any work starts. What moves the number up: the number of courses and lessons, hours of video to host again, the number of quizzes, active subscriptions that need handling, and how many pipelines become funnels.
Four to eight weeks from inventory to cutover for most course businesses. A single course with a few hundred students can be quicker. A twenty course academy with payment plans takes the full eight. You get a dated plan after step one.
You’ll also want to budget for hosting on the new site, which Kajabi used to include in the monthly bill. Decent managed WordPress hosting is a fraction of a Kajabi plan, and it’s the one cost people forget, so we’d rather say it here than on the invoice.
What’s not included: redesigning your course content (we move it faithfully, improvements are a separate conversation), Kajabi’s own contract terms, and ongoing email marketing, which lives in Ongoing Growth.
A migration we did, and a live site we inherited
Puente Language Studio teaches Spanish to 340 adult students and runs around $28,000 a month across a self paced membership and eight week live cohorts. Their courses lived on Teachable, bookings in Calendly, classes in Zoom, community on Mighty Networks, with Zapier passing messages between all four. Only 110 of 500 people had finished the beginner track in a year, mostly because nobody could tell whether “unit 4” on the calendar was “module 4” in the course library. We moved everything onto one WordPress platform with one login, one dashboard and one program spine, and removed about $343 a month in overlapping subscriptions.
We’ll be straight with you: that was Teachable, not Kajabi. The method is the same. Inventory, build beside, move, verify, cut over. The Kajabi specific bits are the pipelines and the community, and those are covered above.
YEO English Center is the other one worth knowing about if you’re nervous. We inherited a live WordPress site with 256 students and 22 teachers, a payroll query that crashed at 45 seconds, and no staging environment at all. We rebuilt billing and payroll on the production site with no downtime. In July 2026 the system produced 248 student invoices and 26 teacher payslips. Before that, both numbers were zero. If we can work inside a live site without breaking it, we can move yours.
Read the YEO case study See everything we’ve built
I’ve built the systems behind all three projects above: Puente Language Studio, YEO English Center and CodeSprouts. They are real, live course businesses with different platforms, student journeys and operational problems. That is why we start a migration with an inventory and verification plan, not a promise that every platform exports the same data.
Questions people ask before they book
Can I keep Kajabi for email and only move the courses?
You can, and some people do for a few months. Kajabi’s Basic plan still costs $143 to $179 a month though, so paying that for an email tool is expensive. Most clients move the list to a proper email tool during the migration and cancel Kajabi fully. We’ll show you both costs and let you choose.
Will I lose my Google rankings?
Not if the redirects are done properly. Every old Kajabi URL that has traffic or backlinks gets a 301 redirect to its new home on your domain, so search engines and bookmarks follow the move. If your Kajabi site was on a kajabi.com subdomain rather than your own domain, there is usually very little ranking to lose, and the new site on your own domain starts building something you actually own.
What happens to payment plans and subscriptions already in progress?
They’re the most delicate part, so they get their own plan. Depending on your processor we either move the subscriptions to the new WooCommerce or Stripe checkout, or let the existing ones run out naturally on Kajabi while all new sales go through the new site. Nobody gets charged twice and nobody loses access mid plan.
Can you migrate me to LifterLMS, Thinkific or something other than LearnDash?
Yes. We recommend one platform per client and we have no stake in which one. LearnDash is the right answer for most Kajabi leavers who want ownership and control, but if the Platform Finder or the call points somewhere else, we’ll say so and price that instead.
When do I cancel Kajabi?
Not until two weeks after cutover. You keep Kajabi running through the build and the switch, export your sales reports, and cancel once we’ve both watched the new site handle a fortnight of real students and real sales.
Does lesson by lesson progress survive a Kajabi to LearnDash migration?
Partly, and anyone who promises you all of it has not done the inventory. Kajabi exports contacts as a CSV and a course template as a backup, not a tidy file of who finished which lesson. We capture what your Kajabi reports show, set that progress on the new LearnDash site so nobody restarts a course they finished, and tell you in writing exactly how much detail survived before a single student is switched over. Course-level and module-level completion can be mapped from the available reports. Individual lesson timestamps usually need separate confirmation during the inventory.
### Final CTA block
Bring your Kajabi login. Or just your course list.
Book a free migration check. Forty five minutes, no pitch. You leave with a written map of what moves, what doesn’t, and a fixed price.
Prefer to write first? Send us your Kajabi site URL on the contact page and we’ll reply within a day.
Moving from somewhere else? Teachable to WordPress migration. Still deciding? Kajabi vs LearnDash, the honest version. The full service and its price live on LMS Migration.