Our pick for societies and professional bodies · Verified 18 August 2026
Circle — the only one that keeps the courses and the membership in one member record
Professional $89/month (2% transaction fee) — 14-day trial, no card
For a membership body, the course is not the product — the membership is, and the CPD is one of the things it entitles you to. Circle includes courses on every paid tier alongside spaces, sub-groups and per-group moderators, so a member enrols, discusses, completes and renews against one record rather than being reconciled across two systems by a volunteer committee. Professional is $89/month with a 2% transaction fee, Business is $199/month at 1%, and Circle Plus is custom-priced at 0.5%; all tiers carry unlimited members and Circle AI. The 14-day trial needs no card and there is a 30-day money-back guarantee, so you can build one CPD module and test the whole flow before committing a budget line. Verified 18 August 2026.
Start a Circle trial Opens on the vendor’s site · CASRAI referral link
Is your training accredited, with audit requirements? → — Then none of these three is the right answer and you need a real LMS. We say so plainly in that section, because getting this wrong is expensive to unwind.
Editorial disclosure: CASRAI has commercial referral arrangements with some of the vendors named on this page, and may earn a commission if you subscribe to them. We name them here regardless of whether a link is present. We only recommend tools our editorial team has independently researched. Read our full disclosure policy.
In summary
- Kajabi vs Teachable is the wrong frame for a membership body: both are built to sell a course to a stranger, not to serve a member who already belongs to you.
- Circle: Professional $89/mo (2% transaction fee, 3 admins, 10 moderators), Business $199/mo (1%), Circle Plus custom (0.5%). Courses and Circle AI on every tier, unlimited members, 14-day trial with no card, 30-day money-back. Verified 18 August 2026.
- We publish no Kajabi, Teachable, Thinkific or Podia prices — we only print figures we have read off a vendor pricing page ourselves.
- Honest trade-off: Kajabi bundles email marketing and funnel tooling that is genuinely more than Circle offers, and Teachable is the cheaper place to start.
- Do not buy any of them for accredited training with audit and evidence requirements. That needs a proper LMS.
Judged on what a membership body actually needs
Only the Circle prices here are verified against a vendor pricing page (18 August 2026)
| Dimension | Circle | Kajabi | Teachable | Thinkific / Podia |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Built around | A membership with courses attached | A creator business with funnels attached | Selling an individual course simply | Course catalogues; Podia leans to the small creator |
| Courses beside the member record | Same platform, same login, same member | Community exists but is secondary to the funnel | Course-first; community is thin | Communities added on; course remains the primary object |
| Completion certificates | Confirm current behaviour in trial — see the certificates section | Available; check what appears on the certificate | A long-standing feature; check customisation limits | Thinkific has historically been strong here |
| Cohorts and drip scheduling | Drip plus live spaces, so a cohort can talk while it learns | Drip supported; cohort discussion is weaker | Drip supported; self-paced is the default assumption | Varies — verify against your own academic calendar |
| Sub-groups with their own moderators | Core capability — 10 moderators on Professional, 15 on Business | Limited | Limited | Limited |
| Invoicing an institution | Card checkout natively; purchase orders handled off-platform | Card checkout; PO handling off-platform | Card checkout; PO handling off-platform | Card checkout; PO handling off-platform |
| Fit for accredited training | No — use a real LMS | No | No | No |
| Published price | $89 / $199 / custom per month, verified 18 Aug 2026 | Not quoted — we have not verified it | Not quoted — we have not verified it | Not quoted — we have not verified it |
Vendor pricing and feature tiers change frequently and vary by region and promotion. We only print prices we have read directly off a vendor pricing page and stamped with a date, which is why three of these four columns carry no figures. Check the others yourself before you decide.
Why the standard comparison does not answer your question
Search this comparison and you will find the same page a dozen times: Kajabi is the all-in-one for creators who want funnels and email in the box, Teachable is the cheaper, simpler way to put a course online. Both statements are true and neither is useful to a professional body, because both are answering a question you are not asking.
The creator’s question is how do I sell a course to a stranger. Everything both platforms are good at follows from that: landing pages, checkout optimisation, upsells, abandoned-cart email, affiliate tooling. Your question is different. You already have the audience — they are your members, they are in your database, they pay you annually, and the CPD is one of the things that membership is for. You are not acquiring; you are serving.
That changes which features matter. Funnel tooling drops in value, because you are not running paid acquisition to your own members. Certificates rise sharply, because members need evidence of the hours for revalidation or professional registration. Cohort scheduling rises, because societies teach in terms and around conferences rather than continuously. Invoicing rises, because a substantial share of your delegates will be paid for by an employer with a purchase order. And the member record rises above all of them, because the worst outcome of this decision is a second parallel list of humans that nobody reconciles.
Judged that way, the honest answer is that the two are close to each other and both slightly wrong-shaped — and the right-shaped platform treats the course as an entitlement of membership rather than as the product.
Completion certificates and CPD hours
If your members are clinicians, engineers, accountants, lawyers, chartered scientists or research administrators with a professional registration, they are not buying your training for the content alone. They need to evidence it. That means a certificate with the right things on it, retrievable months later without emailing your office.
Before you sign anything, write down what your certificate must contain and test it in a trial account. In practice the list is: the delegate’s name exactly as registered, the title of the activity, the date of completion, the number of CPD or CE hours claimed, your organisation’s name and logo as the accrediting or delivering body, and something resembling a unique reference. Then check three things the feature list will not tell you. Can a delegate re-download it themselves in a year, or must a staff member reissue it? Can you get a report of everyone who has completed, in a format your membership system can ingest? And what happens if someone completes the modules out of order, or you edit the course after issuing?
Teachable has offered certificates for a long time and Thinkific has historically been strong here; Kajabi supports them too. None of that is the same as being suitable, because customisation limits are where these come unstuck — a certificate that will not carry your accreditation statement is a certificate your members will query and your registrar will reject.
Our advice is unglamorous and it is the thing that will save you the most time: build one real module during the free trial, complete it as a test delegate, and look at the actual PDF. Every platform on this page will let you do that before you pay, and no amount of comparison-page reading substitutes for it.
Cohorts, drip and the academic calendar
Creator platforms assume self-paced enrolment: someone buys on a Tuesday and starts on a Tuesday. Membership bodies mostly do not work that way. Training runs as a spring series and an autumn series, it avoids the conference, it fits the doctoral training calendar, and it works far better when a group moves through it together and can talk to each other.
All the platforms here support drip release in some form — module two unlocks a week after module one. That is the easy half. The harder half is the cohort: a fixed start date, a group that knows it is a group, a live session or two, a discussion that is genuinely about this week’s material, and a facilitator who is present. Completion rates for self-paced online learning are notoriously poor, and the single most reliable intervention is other people and a deadline. If your training exists to develop the profession rather than to book revenue, completion is the metric that matters and cohorts are how you get it.
This is the point where the two obvious names separate from our pick. Kajabi and Teachable can both drip content on a schedule. Neither gives you a strong place for that cohort to actually talk while it learns — Kajabi’s community sits to one side of the funnel, and Teachable is course-first by design. Circle comes at it from the opposite direction: it is a discussion platform that includes courses on every paid tier, so a cohort space, its live sessions and its course modules are the same object, and the conversation does not die when the module ends. For a society where this year’s cohort becomes next year’s special interest group, that continuity is the whole point.
Getting paid by an institution rather than a card
Here is the practical problem that catches out almost every membership body launching paid training, and you will not find it on a creator-focused comparison page.
A meaningful share of your delegates will not pay personally. Their training budget sits with a department, a trust, a faculty or a grant, and the way that money moves is a purchase order raised in advance, an invoice sent to a finance shared-service address, a purchase-order number quoted on the invoice, and payment on thirty or sixty day terms. Many institutional buyers cannot use a personal card at all, and some will not use a card of any kind. If your only route to enrolment is a consumer checkout, you have quietly excluded the delegates with the largest budgets.
None of the platforms on this page solves that natively. They are all built around card checkout, and you should not believe any comparison that implies otherwise. What differs is how gracefully you can bolt the institutional route on beside it. The pattern that works: a short enquiry route for institutional bookings that produces a real invoice from your finance system, and then a way to grant the delegate access without them paying again through the front door — a manual add, a bulk import, or an automation triggered when the invoice is settled.
So the question to test in a trial is narrow and specific: can an administrator enrol a paid-up delegate manually, and can they do it in bulk for a cohort of twelve from the same trust? Ask it of whichever platform you are leaning towards. If the answer involves a spreadsheet and an evening, that is a recurring cost every term, forever. It is also worth checking your automation ceiling if you plan to trigger enrolment from your finance or CRM system — Circle’s Professional tier allows 20 automations, with unlimited automations on Business, and that limit binds sooner than people expect once invoicing is wired in.
Thinkific and Podia, since they are your next two searches
You are about to look at both, so let us be direct about where they land rather than pretend the shortlist is only two names.
Thinkific is the most credible of the creator platforms for anyone whose priority is structured courses with certification. It has historically been strong on certificates and course structure, and if your requirement is genuinely a course catalogue with completion evidence and nothing more, it deserves a look. What it is not is a membership platform: your members will still exist twice, once in your association database and once in the course tool, and somebody will still be reconciling them.
Podia is the simplest of the group and the most clearly aimed at an individual creator selling a course, a download and a small membership. If you are one academic monetising your own workshop, it is a sensible and unfussy answer. For a professional body with committees, sub-groups, volunteer moderators and a registration-driven certificate requirement, it is under-specified, and you will outgrow it in the first year.
We quote prices for neither, for the same reason we quote none for Kajabi or Teachable: we only publish figures we have read off a vendor pricing page ourselves and stamped with a date. Everything above is a statement about product shape, which is stable, rather than about price, which is not.
None of the four displaces our pick for the same reason in each case: they all treat the course as the product. A membership body’s product is the membership, and the CPD is a benefit of it.
Where Kajabi genuinely wins, and who should not buy Circle
Two things are true that do not help our recommendation, and you should have both.
Kajabi’s bundled marketing tooling is genuinely more than Circle offers. Email sequences, landing pages, funnels and checkout optimisation in one subscription is a real advantage, and if your training is a commercial revenue line sold to a cold audience beyond your membership, that bundle is worth paying for. Circle is not a marketing suite and does not pretend to be; if you go that route you will pair it with a separate landing-page and email stack, which is more moving parts and more money. And Teachable is cheaper to start — if you are testing whether anyone will pay for one course at all, the lowest-commitment route to finding out has real value.
Do not buy Circle — or Kajabi, or Teachable — if your training is accredited and carries audit requirements. If a regulator, a royal college, an accrediting body or a funder can ask you to evidence who completed what, when, against which version of the material, with assessment records and a retention period, you need a learning management system, not a course platform. Real LMS territory means versioned content with an audit trail, SCORM or xAPI, assessment and question banking, defensible completion records, role-based access and an integration story with your institutional identity provider. None of the four platforms here is that, and discovering it eighteen months into an accreditation cycle is an expensive way to learn it. If that is you, start at our learning management system guide instead of this page.
Circle is the right answer in a narrower band than the winner block alone suggests: when the community and the courses need to live together against one member record, when your training is CPD rather than accredited assessment, and when sub-groups with their own volunteer moderators are part of how your organisation actually works. That describes most learned societies and professional bodies. It does not describe everyone, and we would rather you knew which one you are.
Build one CPD module and test the whole flow before you commit
The 14-day trial takes no card and there is a 30-day money-back guarantee, so you can construct a real module, complete it as a test delegate, look at the actual certificate and try a manual bulk enrolment before a budget line is ever raised. Professional is $89/month with a 2% transaction fee; courses and Circle AI are included on every tier. Verified 18 August 2026.
From $89/mo · 14-day free trial
Start a Circle trial Opens on the vendor’s site · CASRAI referral link
Frequently asked questions
Kajabi vs Teachable — which should a professional body choose?
On the features a membership body actually needs, they finish close together and both are slightly wrong-shaped. Kajabi wins if you are selling training commercially to an audience beyond your membership and want email and funnel tooling bundled in. Teachable wins if you want the cheapest, simplest way to test whether one course sells at all. Neither treats the learner as an existing member, which is the thing that decides it for a society — which is why our pick is Circle, at $89/month on Professional with courses included on every tier and a 14-day trial that needs no card. Verified 18 August 2026.
What does Circle cost, and what do we get for it?
Professional is $89/month with a 2% transaction fee, 3 admins, 10 moderators and 20 automations. Business is $199/month at a 1% fee with 5 admins, 15 moderators and unlimited automations. Circle Plus is custom-priced at 0.5% with unlimited seats and an optional branded app. Courses and Circle AI with 2,500 credits a month are on every tier, members are unlimited on all of them, and there is a 14-day trial requiring no card plus a 30-day money-back guarantee. Verified 18 August 2026. Start the trial, build one module, and judge it against your own certificate requirement rather than a feature list.
Why will you not quote Kajabi or Teachable pricing?
Because every price on this site carries a date and a source, and we only print figures we have read directly off a vendor pricing page. We verified Circle. We did not verify Kajabi, Teachable, Thinkific or Podia, so we describe their positioning and product shape instead and recommend you check their current pricing yourself. Comparison pages that confidently print four sets of numbers are usually repeating figures that were accurate at some point in the past.
Can any of these issue CPD completion certificates?
All of them issue certificates in some form, and the differences that matter are not in the feature list. Test whether the certificate can carry your accreditation statement and claimed hours, whether a delegate can re-download it a year later without contacting your office, and whether you can export a completion report your membership system can ingest. Build one real module in a trial account, complete it as a test delegate and look at the PDF. That half-hour tells you more than any comparison page can.
How do we take a purchase order rather than a card payment?
Not natively — none of these platforms is built for institutional procurement, and any page implying otherwise is wrong. The workable pattern is an enquiry route for institutional bookings that raises a real invoice from your finance system, then manual or bulk enrolment once it is settled. Test specifically whether an administrator can enrol twelve delegates from the same trust in one action, and check your automation ceiling if you want enrolment triggered from finance or CRM — Circle allows 20 automations on Professional and unlimited on Business.
Is a course platform ever a substitute for an LMS?
For CPD, short courses and member training, yes — a course platform is usually the better buy, because an LMS is heavier and more expensive than the job requires. For accredited training with audit requirements it is not. If an accrediting body or funder can ask you to evidence who completed what, when, against which version of the material, you need versioned content with an audit trail, SCORM or xAPI, assessment records and defensible completion data. That is LMS territory and none of the platforms compared here belongs in it.
How is this different from your Circle vs Skool vs Mighty Networks comparison?
That page compares community platforms and asks which shape of community you are running. This page compares course platforms and asks whether a paid CPD programme can live on one. If you are choosing where the discussion happens, read that one; if you are choosing where training is delivered and certificated, this is the right page.
