Back in 2021, when Meredyth officially joined the business, she took one look at our tech stack and dropped this bombshell:

“I think we should leave Kajabi.”

I practically laughed in her face. Leave Kajabi? Impossible. We were too embedded, too established. I’d built my entire coaching empire on that platform. Why on earth would we even consider such a behemoth project?

“I’m tired of listening to you complain about it.”

Oh damn. She had a point.

Here’s the thing — I wasn’t just complaining for the sake of it. As a very jealous of Founders non-Founder using Kajabi all those years, I constantly hit limits on products and tags. And the next tier up would have doubled our already substantial monthly fee. With more than a dozen new offers on deck for 2024, we saw the wall coming — and fast.

Fast forward to when we were building something new. Meredyth, ever the persistent voice of reason, said those magic words: “We’re building from scratch anyway. Why not explore other options?”

She was right, and the timing was right. I had built up the Coach Jennie website and platform on Kajabi back in 2016. But in 2023, we made the bold move to rebrand as Jennie + Meredyth and decided to create a whole new online presence and repackage only parts of the Coach Jennie offer stack. This was the perfect opportunity to rethink everything.

Both Kajabi and Systeme are “all-in-one” platforms designed for course creators like us, handling everything from website hosting to shopping carts to course delivery.

After exhaustive research of Kajabi alternatives, we landed on Systeme.io. Sure, the price caught our eye — cutting our costs almost in half was no small thing — but it’s the features that keep us thankful every single day for the switch. Let me break down the seven features that made Systeme the obvious choice.

[Sidebar: A quick word about email marketing] While both platforms offer email tools, we’re ride-or-die ConvertKit users (which just rebranded to “Kit” — don’t get me started). No “all-in-one” platform can hold a candle to this dedicated email marketing tool for us. But for everything else? Keep reading.

We use this feature all the time, but it became particularly helpful when running the recent Make It Happen Summit. Once we laid out how we wanted the speaker bios to look, we saved it as a Block and dragged the blocks into wherever we needed them. Then we simply swapped out the speaker's headshot and deets. In Kajabi, we could have duplicated sections on the same landing page, but we'd have to recreate it once we moved to another page — and we would not be able to design the same block inside a product.

And omg we love Master Blocks! When you save a Block as a Master Block (like say our header in this video), everywhere you put that Master Block can be updated in one swoop. So if we were to make a change to this header (saved as a Master Block) on any page it lives, the changes will automagically be updated everywhere. Such a time saver! Headers. Footers. The freaking copyright date. Update once and you're done.

Recently, we completely reorganized our sales page layout in minutes. No rebuilding, no fighting with rigid templates, just drag, drop, and done. In Kajabi, we would've spent hours rebuilding entire sections just to make these simple changes.

You could find the images you recently uploaded, but you could not reuse something with a transparent background because of some ongoing bug and had to upload the images again and again. Might sound like a small thing, but it's a huge PITA that wasted time.

Each of our courses and programs can look and feel how we want them to. Sure, the left hand side of the course pages are less-than-customizeable (aside of font and color). But that's just the syllabus. The entire right side of the page (y'know, where the clients actually learn) is a blank canvas for you to make your own.

No more wrangling with custom CSS or living with “good enough.” We can make it look and feel exactly how we want to without loads of extra software holding it all together. And everything stays perfectly on-brand — without endless tweaks or calling in a developer for backup.

And all the details for the order form are built and selected right inside that funnel — pricing, tags, courses they get, order bumps, coupon codes. No running around the entire platform to make things happen.

We pay for the Unlimited Plan — which costs LESS than the $1000/year Kajabi Founders deal that I was too late for when I signed up in 2016. This alone makes it a no brainer for the move.

Oh, and you can sign up FOR FREE and play with Systeme with zero time limit. Sure there are limits for the free version, but you can build an entire funnel (even sell a thing) to see if you like how Systeme before you invest.

Is Systeme perfect? Of course not. But it's made our business run smoother, our content creation faster, and our stress levels lower. Plus, we're paying less than what those Kajabi Founders even pay!

The platform keeps evolving, adding features based on what users actually need (wild concept, right?). Unlike some platforms that shall remain named (cough, Kajabi, cough), they're building what helps us run our businesses better, not just what looks flashy in marketing materials.

And much to Meredyth's delight, I no longer complain about our website and course home. In fact, I can't shut up about how much I love it!

Want our insider tips for making the most of Systeme? When you sign up using our affiliate link, you'll get access to our growing "Systeme Secrets" video library – showing you all the clever tricks and workarounds we've discovered while building our programs. These are the same tips we've been sharing one-on-one so far, now compiled in one convenient place.