The short verdict
Kartra is a genuinely connected all-in-one for people who sell courses, coaching and digital products through funnels. It earns its price when you use most of it. The 5% fee on Essentials, the contact-based upgrades and a learning curve that takes real time are the catches.
Start the 30 day free trial Is it worth it?Most Kartra reviews either list every feature on the sales page or repeat trial terms that stopped being true a while ago. This Kartra review comes from using the platform in a live account. It covers what each plan actually unlocks, how long the free trial really is, the two costs that change the price after you sign up, where the platform is strong, where users keep complaining, and which alternative fits better if Kartra is not the right call.
Short version
- Plans run from $59 to $549 a month, or $52 to $429 a month billed annually.
- The free trial is currently 30 days on Essentials, Starter and Growth, plus a 30 day money-back guarantee on paid plans.
- Essentials charges a 5% transaction fee on sales. Starter and above charge none.
- Plans are priced by contacts, and going over your limit moves you up a plan automatically.
- Affiliates, helpdesk, API access and advanced automations start on Growth.
What Kartra actually is
Kartra is an all-in-one marketing and sales platform. One account covers landing pages and funnels, email and SMS marketing, checkout and payments, membership sites and courses, video hosting, webinars, calendars, a customer helpdesk, an affiliate program manager and an AI assistant. Instead of connecting six tools with Zapier, everything shares the same contact records, tags and lists.
That shared data is the real product. A purchase on a checkout can tag a contact, start an email sequence, unlock a membership level and credit an affiliate, all without leaving the platform. The individual builders are not the best in their class. The value is that they talk to each other.
Kartra comes from Genesis Digital, the Las Vegas company behind WebinarJam and EverWebinar, founded by Andy Jenkins and Mike Filsaime. The website now names Kartra Inc. as the operating company. It has been on the market for years, which matters in a category where tools appear and vanish quickly.
How we reviewed it
This review is based on hands-on use of Kartra in a live account, together with a line-by-line check of Kartra's plans and pricing page and its help centre articles on fees, payment processors, limits and calendars. Where the reputation section quotes ratings, they come from public review sites, and we name them.
Where Kartra's own pages disagree with each other, we say so rather than picking the more flattering version. Prices are verified against Kartra's latest pricing page.
Who Kartra is for
A good fit if
- You sell courses, coaching, memberships or digital products
- You want funnels, email, checkout and memberships sharing one contact list
- You plan to run your own affiliate program
- You rely on tags and behaviour-based automation
- You will use enough of the platform to retire several other subscriptions
Look elsewhere if
- You run an agency with many client accounts
- You mainly need a better checkout for products you already market elsewhere
- You are just starting out on a tight budget
- You need a native blog or a design-led website
- Your team needs the software itself in a language other than English
The pattern behind both lists is simple. Kartra rewards people who use the connections between its tools. If you only need one piece, a focused tool will do that piece better for less, and you will not pay for the parts you ignore.
Kartra pricing and plans
Kartra has four published plans, plus custom Enterprise pricing through its sales team. Every plan is priced around a contact limit. Billing annually lowers the monthly price, with Kartra quoting savings of up to 22%.
| Plan | Monthly | Annual, per month | Contacts | Sales fee |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Essentials | $59 | $52 | 500 | 5% |
| Starter | $119 | $99 | 2,500 | 0% |
| Growth | $229 | $189 | 12,500 | 0% |
| Professional | $549 | $429 | 25,000 | 0% |
Paid plans come with a 30 day money-back guarantee, and you can cancel at any time. Subscriptions are billed in US dollars, and PayPal cannot be used to pay for the Kartra subscription itself, so plan on a card.
Does Kartra have a free trial? 14 or 30 days?
Yes, and right now it is 30 days. Kartra's free trial page offers 30 days free on Essentials, Starter and Growth, after which the plan bills monthly. You will still find 14 days in older reviews, and even in a leftover row of Kartra's own pricing comparison table, but the trial page and Kartra's billing FAQ both say 30 days.
Read the conditions before you start, because they shape what you can test:
- You add a card before the account is created, and the plan bills once the 30 days are up unless you cancel.
- It is one trial per person, per product.
- Trial accounts are limited to 1,000 emails.
- Kartra's terms say API access and automation features are not available during the trial, so anything that relies on Zapier or the API has to wait until you pay.
- The 30 day money-back guarantee covers new customers on paid plans. Kartra's terms say trial payments are not refundable.
The 30 day length comes from Kartra's free trial page and its billing support FAQ. The conditions come from Kartra's terms and conditions. Kartra sets these terms and changes them, so confirm the length on the signup screen before you add your card.
What each plan unlocks
The headline prices hide how differently the plans are built. Essentials is a tightly capped entry plan, Starter is the first one most sellers can actually run a business on, and Growth is where the tools that make Kartra distinctive switch on. Growth also adds surveys and quizzes, funnel simulation, custom code pages, unlimited languages and agency capacity.
| Feature | Essentials | Starter | Growth | Professional |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Contacts | 500 | 2,500 | 12,500 | 25,000 |
| Email and SMS | 10,000 a month | No limit | No limit | No limit |
| Pages, products, courses | 5 pages, 1 product, 1 course | No limit | No limit | No limit |
| Domains | 1 | 1 | 3 | 5 |
| Sales fee | 5% | 0% | 0% | 0% |
What each plan adds: Essentials covers checkouts, forms, the funnel mapper and 100 pre-built campaigns. Starter adds video hosting, calendars, webinars and 5 team members. Growth adds affiliates, the helpdesk, API access, advanced automations and 10 team members. Professional adds helpdesk live chat and real-time funnel analytics.
Kartra AI comes with a usage allowance that grows with each plan, starting at 30 uses on Essentials and 100 on Starter. The higher-tier figures are not shown consistently across Kartra's pricing page, so check the current allowance in the plan details if AI usage matters to you.
The plan you need is decided by two things: how many contacts you have, and whether you need affiliates or a helpdesk.
The costs that change the price
The monthly price is easy to compare. Two other mechanics decide what you actually pay, and most reviews mention them in passing, if at all.
The 5% Essentials transaction fee
On Essentials, Kartra charges 5% on every sale and every subscription rebill processed through your Kartra checkouts. According to Kartra's help centre, the fee is worked out as your sales plus rebills, minus refunds, chargebacks and partial refunds, multiplied by 5%. It is invoiced monthly, and that applies even if you pay for Essentials annually.
Two details are easy to miss. Refunds issued after the fee was charged become a credit against future fees rather than a cash refund. And if you upgrade from Essentials, any fees you already owe still have to be paid. Upgrading stops new fees, not old ones.
| Monthly sales through Kartra | 5% fee on Essentials | Essentials total | Starter total |
|---|---|---|---|
| $500 | $25 | $84 | $119 |
| $1,200 | $60 | $119 | $119 |
| $3,000 | $150 | $209 | $119 |
| $10,000 | $500 | $559 | $119 |
On monthly billing the break even sits at $1,200 a month in sales. Below that, Essentials is cheaper. Above it, Starter wins, and the gap widens quickly. On annual billing the two plans are $47 a month apart, which moves the break even down to $940 a month. If you expect to sell seriously, Essentials is a place to build, not a place to sell.
Kartra's help article on payment processors says Kartra does not add any transaction fees, while its dedicated Essentials article sets out the 5% fee in detail. The Essentials article and the pricing page both show the fee, so treat it as real and budget for it if you choose that plan.
Contact limits and automatic upgrades
Every plan has a contact ceiling, and Kartra does not let you sit above it. Its pricing FAQ explains that going over the limit upgrades you to the next plan automatically, with a reconciliation charge for the rest of the billing cycle. Your bill rises when your list does, whether or not your revenue has caught up.
| If you pass | You move from | To | Monthly price change |
|---|---|---|---|
| 500 contacts | Essentials ($59) | Starter ($119) | +$60 |
| 2,500 contacts | Starter ($119) | Growth ($229) | +$110 |
| 12,500 contacts | Growth ($229) | Professional ($549) | +$320 |
The practical defence is list hygiene. Remove contacts who never open, avoid importing old lists you do not mail, and be careful with lead magnets that attract sign-ups you will never sell to. Every unengaged contact counts against the same ceiling as your best customer.
Hard limits with no add-ons
Custom domains, team members and languages are fixed per plan. Kartra's FAQ says there are no add-ons for them, so needing a fourth domain or an eleventh team member means moving up a full plan. Agencies and businesses running several brands hit this sooner than they expect.
Free 30 day trial + up to 22% off annual
Check the plan against your own numbers Use the trial to see where your contacts, products and team land before you pick a plan.
- Free trial
- 30 days
- Annual saving
- Up to 22% off
Kartra features, plan by plan
Here is what each part of the platform does, and where it sits in the plan line-up.
Pages and funnels
The page builder uses drag and drop sections and a large template library, and the funnel mapper lets you plan a full journey visually before you build it. Essentials caps you at five pages, which is enough for a simple opt-in and sales flow and not much more. Starter removes the page cap. Growth adds funnel simulation, which lets you test how contacts will move through a funnel before real traffic arrives. The builder is capable but not design-led, and user reviews regularly describe it as dated next to newer tools.
Email, SMS and automation
Email and SMS sit in the same system as your pages and checkouts. Essentials includes 10,000 sends a month across email and SMS, and Starter and above list sending as unlimited. Automated sequences use tags, list membership and behaviour, such as a page visit, a purchase or a video watched, to decide what happens next. Advanced automations arrive on Growth. This is the area where Kartra feels most complete, because the triggers reach every other part of the platform.
Checkout and payments
Kartra connects to Stripe, PayPal Business, Braintree, Square and Authorize.Net. Through Stripe on the newer checkouts, buyers can also pay with Google Pay, Apple Pay and Klarna. Checkouts can be shown in 24 languages, and accounts can sell in 21 currencies. You can sell one-off products, subscriptions and payment plans, add upsells and order bumps, and create discount coupons for your own products. For a platform that is not a dedicated checkout tool, this is one of its strongest areas.
Memberships and courses
Membership portals handle courses, gated content and multiple access levels, and access is granted or removed automatically by purchases and tags. Essentials allows one membership or course. Starter and above remove that limit. Course creators who want a polished student experience may still prefer a course-first platform, but the tie-in with checkout and automation is a real advantage.
Video hosting
Built-in video hosting starts on Starter. Videos can be embedded in pages and memberships, and viewing behaviour can feed your automations. That removes the need for a separate video host for most course and sales-page use.
Webinars
Kartra lists webinars as one of the features unlocked on Starter. If live events are central to how you sell, check attendee capacity and any limits in Kartra's current plan comparison before you choose. Given the company also makes WebinarJam, heavy webinar users sometimes run that alongside Kartra.
Calendars
Booking calendars are included on Starter, Growth, Professional and Enterprise, according to Kartra's help centre. Coaches can take bookings directly inside the same system that handles their funnels and follow-up emails.
Helpdesk and live chat
Growth adds a customer helpdesk with support tickets for your own customers. Live chat for that helpdesk is reserved for Professional. Most competitors in this price range do not include a helpdesk at all, so for businesses with a steady volume of customer questions it can replace a separate subscription.
Affiliate management
Kartra lets you run your own affiliate program, with affiliate sign-ups, tracking and commissions tied to your products. It starts on Growth. For course creators who sell through partners and launch affiliates, this is often the feature that justifies the higher plan.
Kartra AI
Kartra AI helps draft copy and content inside the platform, with a monthly allowance of uses on every plan. It is a useful time saver for first drafts. It is not a reason to choose Kartra over a rival on its own.
Ease of use and the learning curve
Kartra is not difficult because it is badly designed. It is difficult because so much is connected, and understanding how tags, lists, products, memberships and sequences interact takes time. The first funnel takes much longer than the fifth.
The 100 pre-built campaigns help. They give you a working funnel with pages, emails and automations already wired together, which you can adapt rather than build from zero. Taking one apart is one of the fastest ways to learn how the platform thinks.
Two things work against it. The interface is in English only, even though checkouts can be shown to buyers in 24 languages. And users regularly point out the lack of a mobile app, so expect to manage things in a desktop browser. Neither is a deal breaker, but both are worth knowing before you commit.
Support and reputation
Kartra's support runs through KAI, its AI assistant, backed by support requests to the team. There is also a large Kartra Facebook community with more than 18,000 members, where many questions get answered by other users. Kartra's pricing page does not set out different support levels by plan, so we would not assume a higher plan buys faster help.
Public reputation is mixed. Capterra scores sit around 4.5 out of 5, G2 around 3.9 and Trustpilot around 3.5. Scores move over time, so treat these as a general picture rather than exact figures.
The complaints repeat across review sites. Users frequently report slow or uneven support responses, a steep learning curve, price increases over the years, an editor that feels dated, no mobile app and no native blog. The praise repeats too: everything in one place, solid automation and a checkout that works without extra tools.
Kartra pros and cons
Strengths
- Funnels, email, checkout, memberships and video share one contact record
- No transaction fees from Starter upward
- Strong checkout with five processor options, 24 languages and 21 currencies
- Affiliate program and helpdesk built in from Growth
- 100 pre-built campaigns shorten setup
- HIPAA compliance at no extra cost
- 30 day free trial plus a 30 day money-back guarantee
Weaknesses
- 5% transaction fee and tight caps on Essentials
- Contact-based automatic upgrades can raise costs quickly
- Affiliates, helpdesk and API access require Growth
- Steep learning curve and a builder many users find dated
- Mixed support reputation
- English-only interface, USD billing, no PayPal for the subscription and, users note, no mobile app
- Hard caps on domains and team members with no add-ons
HIPAA compliance deserves a specific mention, because it is rare in this category. Health and wellness coaches who handle sensitive client information usually have to pay for specialist tools. Kartra includes it at no extra cost.
Kartra alternatives
If the fit section above made you hesitate, one of these is likely a better match.
| If you are | Consider | Why |
|---|---|---|
| An agency with many clients | GoHighLevel | Unlimited client accounts, CRM and white label |
| Funnel-first and running paid traffic | ClickFunnels | The most focused funnel builder |
| A course creator who wants simplicity | Kajabi | Course-first, polished student experience |
| Mainly in need of a better checkout | SamCart | Checkout pages, upsells and order bumps |
| Mostly focused on email marketing | ActiveCampaign | Deeper automation, segmentation and integrations |
| On a tight budget | Systeme.io | A free plan with funnels, email and courses |
GoHighLevel is the better choice if you manage marketing for clients. It adds a full CRM, pipelines, SMS and a sub-account structure that Kartra does not offer. Our GoHighLevel review covers the real cost, including usage fees.
ClickFunnels is the closest rival for funnel-led businesses. Its builder is more focused and has a larger template ecosystem. See how it compares with an agency platform in GoHighLevel vs ClickFunnels, or start from our ClickFunnels page.
Kajabi suits creators whose business is the course or community itself, and who value a polished experience over automation depth. Find the guides and current offer on our Kajabi page.
SamCart fits sellers who already have a website and email tool and just want a checkout that converts. Our SamCart vs ClickFunnels comparison explains when a checkout specialist beats a full funnel builder, our SamCart review covers it hands-on, and the SamCart page has the current trial.
ActiveCampaign suits businesses whose main need is email marketing and automation, and which already have a website or checkout. Our Kartra vs ActiveCampaign comparison prices both at matching contact numbers, including the cost of adding a checkout to ActiveCampaign.
Systeme.io is the low-cost route, with a free plan that includes funnels, email and courses. It is lighter than Kartra, and much easier to start on. See our Systeme.io review.
Is Kartra worth it?
For a course creator, coach or info-product seller who will use funnels, email, checkout and memberships together, yes. Starter at $99 to $119 a month replaces several separate subscriptions, removes transaction fees and unlocks unlimited pages and products. If you also run an affiliate program or need a helpdesk, Growth is where Kartra makes the most sense.
For someone just testing an idea, Essentials looks cheap but rarely stays that way. Five pages and one product are tight, and the 5% fee overtakes the price difference to Starter at around $1,200 a month in sales. Use it to build and test, then move up before you sell at volume.
For agencies, businesses that only need one tool, or anyone who wants to be live by the end of the day, no. Kartra charges for an integrated system, and that only pays off if you use the integration. A focused alternative will cost less and feel lighter.
The deciding question is what you already pay for. Add up your page builder, email tool, checkout, course host, video host and any affiliate or helpdesk software. If the total is close to or above the Kartra plan your contact count lands you on, Kartra is worth a serious trial.
Current offerFree 30 day trial+ up to 22% off annual
- 30 day money-back guarantee on paid plans
Common questions
Is Kartra worth it?
For course creators, coaches and digital product sellers who will use funnels, email, checkout and memberships together, yes. It replaces several separate tools and charges no transaction fees from Starter upward. If you only need one of those pieces, a focused tool will cost less.
How much does Kartra cost per month?
Kartra costs $59, $119, $229 or $549 a month for Essentials, Starter, Growth and Professional. Billed annually, the same plans work out to $52, $99, $189 and $429 a month. Enterprise pricing is available through Kartra's sales team.
Does Kartra have a free trial? Is it 14 or 30 days?
Yes, and right now it is 30 days, not 14. Kartra's free trial page offers 30 days free on Essentials, Starter and Growth, billed monthly once the trial ends. You need a card to start, it is one trial per person, trial accounts are limited to 1,000 emails, and Kartra's terms say API access and automation features stay off until you are on a paid plan. Paid plans carry a 30 day money-back guarantee, but trial payments are not refundable.
Does Kartra charge transaction fees?
Only on Essentials. That plan charges 5% on sales and rebills, invoiced monthly even on annual billing. Starter, Growth and Professional have no Kartra transaction fee. Your payment processor still charges its own fees on every plan.
What happens if I go over my Kartra contact limit?
Kartra upgrades you to the next plan automatically and charges a reconciliation fee for the rest of the billing cycle. Removing inactive contacts regularly is the simplest way to stay on your current plan.
Who owns Kartra?
Kartra comes from Genesis Digital, the Las Vegas company behind WebinarJam and EverWebinar, founded by Andy Jenkins and Mike Filsaime. The Kartra website names Kartra Inc. as the operating company.
Is Kartra good for beginners?
It is usable for beginners, but not quick to learn. The pre-built campaigns help you start with a working funnel, but understanding how tags, lists, products and memberships connect takes time. Beginners on a tight budget may find a simpler tool easier to start with.
Is Kartra better than ClickFunnels?
It depends on what you need. Kartra includes memberships, video hosting, a helpdesk and affiliate management in one system. ClickFunnels has a more focused funnel builder and a larger template ecosystem. Course and membership sellers often lean to Kartra, while funnel-first advertisers often prefer ClickFunnels.
Can I cancel Kartra and get a refund?
You can cancel at any time. Kartra offers a 30 day money-back guarantee on paid plans. If you are on Essentials, transaction fees you already owe still have to be paid, even after you upgrade.
The verdict
Kartra earns 7.0 out of 10 from us. For a course creator or coach who uses funnels, email, checkout, memberships and affiliates together, it sits closer to eight, because few platforms connect those pieces as cleanly. For someone who needs one tool, or who runs an agency, it sits closer to five.
Skip Essentials if you plan to sell seriously, budget for the plan your contact list will grow into, and give yourself time to learn how the pieces connect. Take the 30 day trial, build one real funnel, and you will know quickly whether Kartra fits the way you sell.
Pricing, plan names, limits and fees are set by Kartra and change from time to time. The figures here are verified against Kartra's latest pricing page. Check the current terms on their site before signing up.
Some links on this page are partner links. How that works is explained on our affiliate disclosure page.
