Kartra Review (2026)The $59 Tier Costs 5% of Sales
If your core need is polished course delivery, Kajabi's creator features are stronger; Kartra wins on all-in-one breadth, not course depth. Throughout this review we weigh it against ClickFunnels.
Visit Kartra → Affiliate link — we may earn a commission if you sign up; it does not change what this page says.
Watch the 2-minute review
The video version of this review, from our YouTube channel.
⚡ Short on time? Watch the 30-second verdict Short.
Pricing (2026)
✓ Pricing re-verified 5 Sep 2026
Four tiers, monthly against yearly: Essentials $59 / $52, Starter $119 / $99, Growth $229 / $189 and Professional $549 / $429, with yearly billing advertised as saving up to 22% and a 14-day trial. The tier names moved since our August reading — the $119 plan is now called Starter and the $229 plan Growth — while every amount stayed the same.
The line that changes the arithmetic and is missing from most summaries: Essentials charges a 5% transaction fee on your sales, and the tiers above it charge 0%. On $10,000 a month of sales that fee is $500, which makes the $60 step from Essentials to Starter trivially worth taking. Contacts are capped at 500, 2,500, 12,500 and 25,000 across the four tiers; Essentials sends 10,000 emails and texts a month against unlimited above it and includes 1 custom domain.
Kartra never blocks new leads: it upgrades you automatically to the tier that fits and charges a mid-cycle reconciliation fee for the move — two answers above that one, the same FAQ says a Kartra subscription is flat-rate and there are never any extra fees. Plans change — always verify the live price on their site.
What the price did
We capture Kartra’s own pricing page every month and keep the figures, so this is our record of the page — not a forecast, and not someone else’s summary.
The plan prices held between our July and August 2026 captures — $59/$52, $119/$99, $229/$189 and $549/$429 in both — and were unchanged again on 17 August 2026. What did change is the trial messaging: the July capture repeatedly advertised '14 days free, then $119/mo Starter' and '$1,188/yr Starter', wording that is absent from the August capture. The offer around the plans moved; the plans did not.
Kartra’s pricing page, as we read it
What Kartra does
All-in-one platform for selling online: landing pages, email automation, funnels, memberships and checkout in one tool — no plugins to stitch together.
What buyers report about Kartra
Recurring themes from the buyer-review sites listed at the foot of this page, read in August 2026. We have not run Kartra ourselves, so this is other buyers' experience rather than ours. We summarise it here because the complaints are usually the part a vendor page leaves out.
- • Cancel, upgrade or downgrade from the billing portal at any time — no lock-in, no penalty, plus a 14-day $1 trial and a 30-day money-back guarantee. In this category that is rare and worth naming.
- • Pages, email, checkout, membership and automation genuinely in one system rather than five subscriptions.
- • Contact limits are the recurring frustration — the plan you start on stops fitting sooner than expected. Essentials $52/month annually, Starter $99, Growth $189, Professional $429.
- • First response is slow on the lower tiers. One reviewer describes a fault Kartra acknowledged and never fixed, support offering little beyond clear-your-cache, and their support tickets being deleted from the portal.
- • The page builder is limited compared with dedicated tools.
- • Onboarding takes two to four weeks before it is productive.
When the paid plan is worth it
There is one line in this pricing that changes everything and it is missing from most summaries: Essentials charges a 5% transaction fee on your sales, and every tier above it charges nothing. The step from Essentials to Starter is $60 a month ($59 against $119). At 5%, that $60 is covered by $1,200 of monthly sales — so above roughly $1,200 a month in revenue, the cheapest plan is the most expensive one.
At $5,000 a month Essentials costs $309 against Starter's $119; at $10,000 it is $559 against $119. Below that crossover Essentials genuinely is the cheaper plan, which makes it a tier for people who are building rather than selling. What upgrading does not fix is the contact ladder underneath it. The four tiers hold 500, 2,500, 12,500 and 25,000 contacts, and Kartra never refuses a new lead — it moves you to the tier that fits and charges a mid-cycle reconciliation fee for the move.
So the bill can rise without you choosing it, on a page whose own FAQ says there are never any extra fees.
How to actually use Kartra
Work out your monthly sales before you choose a tier, because Essentials carries a 5% transaction fee and every tier above it charges nothing. The $60 monthly gap between Essentials and Starter equals 5% of $1,200, so the moment you sell more than $1,200 a month, Starter is literally the cheaper plan. On yearly billing the crossover falls to about $940. Then check the caps while you are there. Essentials sends 10,000 emails and texts a month against unlimited above it and holds 500 contacts; Starter holds 2,500, Growth 12,500 and Professional 25,000.
Passing the contact cap does not stop your campaigns — Kartra upgrades you automatically and bills a mid-cycle reconciliation fee — so work out which tier your list will land in before it lands there. Use the 14-day trial to build one real funnel end to end: page, form, email sequence, checkout. Kartra's argument is breadth rather than depth, and a fortnight is enough to find out whether the whole loop works for your product.
Distilled from Kartra's own plans and pricing page (kartra.com/pricing), read 5 September 2026 — the four tier cards with their monthly and annual amounts, contact and email caps and transaction-fee lines, together with the pricing FAQ underneath, where the answer on reaching your plan limits sets out the automatic upgrade and its mid-cycle reconciliation fee.
The natural comparison is Kajabi or ClickFunnels — the course-first and funnel-first rivals. Weigh it against ClickFunnels on the job you actually need done.
Frequently asked questions
What does Kartra cost?
Essentials $59 a month or $52 billed yearly, Starter $119 / $99, Growth $229 / $189 and Professional $549 / $429, with yearly saving up to 22% and a 14-day trial. Read on 5 September 2026.
Why is Essentials cheaper than it looks expensive?
Because of the transaction fee. Essentials takes 5% of your sales; every tier above it takes 0%. If you sell $2,000 a month that fee is $100, already more than the $60 difference to Starter. Unless you are pre-revenue, the entry tier is usually the more expensive choice — work it out against your own monthly sales before picking it.
How does it compare with Kajabi?
That comparison is the single most-searched thing about Kartra on our pages. Both bundle courses, checkout, email and pages into one login, so the honest split is not features but what you give up: Kartra's entry tier is cheaper on paper but carries the 5% sales fee, and its email allowance is capped at 10,000 sends a month until you move up from Essentials. Compare the tier you would actually run on, including the fee, rather than the advertised starting prices.
Can I still run webinars in Kartra?
Not for long. Kartra's help centre says that from 1 November 2026 you can no longer create or edit webinars, and Kartra told its affiliates the feature is removed entirely on 1 December 2026. If webinars are part of your funnel, plan for a separate webinar tool. Read on 28 September 2026.
What should I weigh before buying Growth & Revenue software?
It depends on whether you have the bottleneck it solves. Small teams get the most out of this category when one clear problem is already costing real hours or revenue; buying ahead of that just adds cost and another login. Price it against the hours or lost deals it removes, not against its feature list, and start on the smallest plan that covers the job.
Is this a hands-on review of Kartra?
This is a researched assessment, not a hands-on test — where we've used a tool ourselves, we say so explicitly. We name what each tool is good and bad at, and we earn a commission only if you sign up, at no cost to you.
- Buyer reviews on G2, Capterra and GetApp, read August 2026.
- Re-verified 2026-09-05 on their own pricing page.
- A dated screenshot of that pricing page, kept on this site as the receipt.
Others in this category
Reviewed growth & revenue tools that share ground with Kartra — comparable in what they do, not drop-in swaps:
New reviews, price changes we recorded, and the cost conditions we found. No sponsored placements. Unsubscribe anytime.
This is our researched assessment — not a paid placement. The “Visit” links on this page are affiliate links: we may earn a commission if you sign up, at no extra cost to you, and it never changes our take. How we review →