You have read the comparison tables. Features down the side, three columns across the top, ticks and crosses. Kajabi, Kartra, ClickFunnels.
Every one of those tables scores the same thing: how good it is to arrive. Onboarding. Templates. Support ratings. Not one of them tells you what you walk out with.
This is the test that fills that gap. Six questions, one number, and a shortlist of what to fix first.
You are not choosing a tool. You are signing a lease.
A tool is something you pick up and put down. A lease is something you move your life into and then have to move back out of.
That single word changes the decision, because the cost of a lease was never the monthly fee. It is the exit.
Look at the two tables side by side.
The table you are shown: features, pricing tiers, templates, integrations, onboarding, support.
The table you need: your list, your content, your domain, your checkout, your community, your search equity.
They do not overlap. Not once. The comparison industry and the ownership question are having two completely different conversations.
And to be clear, none of these platforms are villains. They are landlords. That is a normal, functional relationship — millions of people rent, and renting is often the right call. But you would read the lease before you moved the furniture in. Almost nobody reads this one.
Why every feature comparison ends in a tie
Three reasons the standard comparison cannot help you.
They have converged. Five years ago these platforms did different things. Now all three do courses, funnels, email, checkout and community. The feature column is a draw. You are comparing three tools that have copied each other into roughly the same shape.
Price is the small number. There is maybe twenty pounds a month between them. That is nothing next to what a rebuild costs in time, lost subscribers, broken links, and customers whose card details you have to ask for a second time.
The exit is unpriced. Every comparison scores the demo. None of them score the door out. The single biggest cost of the decision is the one number nobody puts in the table.
The Exit Test
Six questions. Ask them of the platform you are on right now — not the one you are thinking about moving to.
For each one, score yourself:
- 1 — it leaves with you today, without asking anyone's permission
- half — partial
- 0 — it stays behind
Exit 01 — The list
Everyone assumes this one is safe because there is an export button.
But the addresses were never the asset. The relationship is, and the relationship is made of everything around the addresses. Your tags — who is a buyer, who is a hand-raiser, who opened the last nine issues. Your segments. The automations you spent six months tuning. Your sending reputation, which is attached to their domain rather than yours, so on day one somewhere new you start from zero and your first send lands in promotions.
And your consent records. In the UK and EU that matters more than people think — you need to be able to show when and how someone opted in. If that log stays behind, you have a list you cannot prove you are allowed to email.
Score 1 only if you could send tomorrow, from a sending domain you control, without rebuilding anything.
Exit 02 — The content
This is the one that catches people who have been building for years.
You think of your course as a thing you made. It is not a thing. It is rows in someone's database pointing at video hosted on someone's player.
The text comes out fine. The video masters are the problem — if you uploaded your only copy and never kept the original file, you are re-exporting from a compressed stream, assuming you can get it at all. Keep your masters on your own drive. That costs nothing and almost nobody does it.
Then there is the structure: module order, drip logic, release rules, quizzes, completion tracking. None of that is content. All of it is configuration, and configuration does not export.
And member progress. Everyone who is forty percent through your programme starts again at zero. That is not a technical problem, it is a refund problem.
Score 1 only if you hold the original files and could rebuild the structure yourself.
Exit 03 — The domain
The cheapest item on this list, and the one most people get wrong.
Whose name is on the registrar account? Not who built the site — who owns the registration. If you let a platform, an agency, or a friend who is good with computers register it for you, then the address your entire business lives at belongs to someone else. That goes wrong more often than you would think, and rarely maliciously. Usually somebody just stops replying to emails.
Then: can you edit your own DNS? If you cannot change where the domain points without asking permission, you do not control it.
Then: root domain, or yourname.theirplatform.com? A subdomain is not yours and never was. You cannot take it with you, and every link pointing at it dies the day you leave.
Score 1 if you can log in and point that domain somewhere else this afternoon. This costs about ten pounds a year to fix. It is the highest-return move on the entire list.
Exit 04 — The checkout
The expensive one.
Start here: who is the merchant of record? When someone buys from you, whose name appears on the customer's card statement — yours, or the platform's? If it is theirs, they own the payment relationship. You are being paid out by them, not by your customer.
Then your active subscriptions. Everyone assumes recurring revenue simply moves across. It does not.
Card numbers are regulated data. You cannot download them and you cannot email them. Moving live card credentials between processors is a formal, PCI-compliant migration — Stripe documents the process, and it runs through their migrations team, your old processor's migrations team, and then you remapping every subscription yourself from a mapping file on the other side. It is doable. It is not a button, and it takes weeks.
Here is the ownership part: you can only begin that process if you are a party to the merchant relationship in the first place.
The fallback is asking every customer to re-enter their card. Ask anyone who has done it what percentage they lost.
Score honestly. Half is common here. So is zero.
Exit 05 — The community
The hardest asset on this list to build, and the easiest to lose.
Member accounts do not transfer — people have to re-register, and every re-registration is a chance not to bother. Thread history rarely exports, and when it does it arrives as a structureless text dump, which is not a community. That is an archive nobody reads.
Notification settings, who follows whom, the member-to-member connections that actually are the community — none of that is portable anywhere.
Almost nobody scores a 1 here, including plenty of people who assume they are fine. Which is exactly why it is worth knowing before you build. If your community is the least portable asset you will ever create, that should change where you choose to build it.
Score 1 only if the relationships themselves would survive the move.
Exit 06 — The search equity
The slowest-burning one.
Search equity is not a file you own. It is attached to addresses. Google trusts a specific page at a specific URL, and other sites link to that URL.
So: is your blog on your root domain or a platform subdomain? If it is theirs, two years of authority belongs to an address that is not coming with you.
Can you write your own redirects? When you move, the fix is a 301 from every old URL to its new home — that is how you carry most of the equity across. Without redirect control, every one of those links 404s and the equity evaporates.
And your backlinks point at addresses you do not get to update. Other people control those.
This is the exit that punishes you a year later, quietly, and you blame the algorithm.
Score 1 only if your content sits on your root domain and you can write the redirects yourself.
Your Portability score
Add your six marks. Divide by six. Multiply by a hundred.
- Under 35% — Tenant
- 35 to 70% — Leaseholder. You have some rights, but you do not own the building.
- 70% and up — Owner
Nobody scores six out of six. Anyone who tells you they do is selling something.
Kajabi vs Kartra vs ClickFunnels: how to actually compare them
Now you can use the test as a comparison tool, and here is the important part — I am not going to score them for you.
Two people on the same platform can land twenty percent apart, because most of these six are determined by how you set it up, not by which logo is on the dashboard. Who registered your domain. Whether you kept your video masters. Whether your blog sits on your root domain. Whether you own the Stripe account.
So run the six questions against your own configuration on each platform you are weighing. That comparison is worth more than any feature table, because it is about your business rather than their roadmap.
One more thing worth doing. At least one of these three has published its own head-to-head comparison of all three platforms. Go and read it, then count how many of the six exits it scores.
That is not a criticism. They are a landlord writing a brochure, and brochures do not have a moving-out section. It is simply the reason you need your own table.
What to do this week
Fix the domain first. It is the cheapest exit on the list and the only one you can close tonight. Log into your registrar and check whose name is on the account.
Then move the asset that pays. Get your list onto sending infrastructure you control — not because the platform's email is bad, but because that is the asset that lets you rebuild everything else if you ever have to.
Control, then clarity, then consistency, then compounding. That order never runs backwards.
If the funnel disappeared tomorrow, what do you still own? The Exit Test is that question, itemised and given a number.
Anything you don't own can't compound.
