Podia Review (2023) – Is the Platform Any Good?

Podia Review – Is It Any Good?

There are dozens of online course platforms in the market and some of the well-known ones include Kajabi, Teachable, and Thinkific. However, one platform that has gained a lot of attention in the last year or so is Podia.

Many creators who are interested in using Podia, ask me whether it is a viable option for creating an engaging, successful online course/membership site or not.

So I thought I will leverage my experience of working with hundreds of course creators on different platforms including Podia and do a comprehensive review.

This isn’t a typical Podia review that you’ll find on the internet and I won’t just tell you why it is a good or a bad option for hosting your online courses.

Rather I will evaluate the platform based on all the important features that course creators need in order to build a successful online business.

I will also do a direct comparison of Podia with some of the major course platforms like Teachable and Kajabi.

By the end of this review, you’ll have a clear idea about what Podia has to offer and whether it is the right online course platform for your business or not.

Podia Review Summary

Podia Logo

Podia is the simplest solution out there for creating and selling online courses and memberships. You can host and deliver your content, build a beautiful storefront and start selling them, and you can do all this in a few hours even if you have zero technical knowledge or coding skills.


Ease of Use
Course Creation & Engagement
Site Design & Customization
Sales & Marketing
Customer Support

Pros of Podia

  • Super easy to use and set up.
  • Both the storefront and the course player has a clean, modern design out of the box.
  • Ability to create individual “Posts” for your membership.
  • Ability to embed checkout/buy buttons on external websites.
  • Handles EU Digital Goods VAT.
  • Inbuilt live chat widget.
  • Ability to send autoresponders.
  • Friendly customer support.
  • Zero transaction fee on all plans.

Cons of Podia

  • The course builder lacks flexibility and doesn’t support cloud import.
  • Lacks essential learning tools like graded quizzes, assignments, certificates, course compliance, etc.
  • Doesn’t let you create a standalone community area on the platform.
  • No mobile app feature.
  • Reporting tools are basic.
  • Not suitable for building a fully-fledged website.

Now let’s take a deeper look at the Podia platform.

What is Podia?

Podia is an online platform that lets you create and sell online courses, memberships, and digital downloads (e.g. ebooks).

With Podia, you can host your course content, deliver it in a professional manner, build a storefront to sell your courses as well as accept payments on your website.

The first thing you need to understand about Podia is that it is very different from a marketplace like Udemy. So you own the student data (email addresses, etc.) and you get complete control over things like pricing, refund policy, etc.

What Podia provides you is the infrastructure and the tools you need to get your courses online and start selling them. 

What is Podia?

I first got to know about the platform back in 2016 when it was called Coach. It was still at an early stage at that time and had very little to offer in terms of features for course creation and marketing. 

Since then, the team has been constantly adding new features and has upgraded the platform in a big way. So Podia is definitely a much-improved platform now compared to what it was a couple of years back.

Here’s an overview of what the platform has to offer:

  • Create an engaging online course or membership.
  • Unlimited video hosting via Wistia.
  • Deliver your course content professionally through the inbuilt course player.
  • Create an attractive sales page for your products.
  • Charge a one-time fee, a recurring subscription or even a payment plan.
  • Easily accept payments through Stripe or PayPal.
  • Handle EU VAT digital taxes.
  • Create and manage your affiliate program.
  • Send broadcast or automated email campaigns.

The thing that stands out for me as far as Podia is concerned is its simplicity and ease of use. So you can quickly set up your courses and your storefront even if you’ve little technical knowledge, and everything looks elegant out of the box.

Podia Review Quote

However, this ease of use comes at the cost of flexibility. All the tools you use in Podia, whether it’s their course builder or the page builder, you’ll find that they always prioritize simplicity over customization options.

Another thing that you need to keep in mind is that Podia is still a relatively new platform and so there are certain essential features that are either completely missing or are kind of incomplete. 

We’ll discuss all the features including what’s there and what’s missing, in detail in the subsequent sections in this Podia review.

Course Creation & Engagement

Course creation and delivery is the most important job of any online learning platform and a good option should let you host your content, create course structure easily, deliver it professionally, engage your learners and enable you to track their progress.

In this section, we’ll see how Podia performs on each of these aspects of course creation. Let’s discuss content uploading and course structuring first.

Content Uploading & Structuring

With Podia, you get the ability to host your content including videos, audio files, etc. on the platform. As far as video hosting is concerned, Podia uses Wistia and offers unlimited video storage as part of your subscription.

When it comes to uploading your content, you can either do it one-by-one or you can bulk upload multiple files at once and Podia will create lessons from them automatically.

Podia Content Uploader

While the content uploading process is pretty straightforward, what I don’t like is that you can’t import files directly from Google Drive/Dropbox/OneDrive. 

Cloud import is much faster than uploading files from your computer and is really an essential feature. This becomes even more important because Podia doesn’t have a video library. 

When it comes to creating your course structure, you have two levels in Podia — sections and lessons. Lessons are where the actual content lives and sections are nothing but used to organize your course lessons. 

Every file that you upload in Podia basically becomes a lesson and then Podia’s course builder allows you to easily reorder your lessons and move them within a section or between sections as well.

Podia Course Builder
Podia’s Course Builder

The course builder is super easy to use but it lacks flexibility in terms of adding multiple content items to the same lesson.

For example, you can’t add a video and a PDF download in the same lesson. Similarly, you can’t have a quiz and a video in the same lesson.

Say if your course has downloadable resources that you want to go alongside your videos, you’ll have to create separate lessons for all of them which isn’t good.

Apart from this, there are a couple of other essential things that are missing from Podia’s course builder:

  • You can’t make your course videos downloadable.
  • You don’t have an option to show PDF files as an embed.
  • You can’t turn off the download option for your audio files.
  • The text editor is really basic and has very limited formatting options.

To summarize, the process of setting up a course in Podia is easy and it won’t take you much time to get up and running. It’s just that their course builder isn’t very flexible and lacks essential features like cloud import.

Course Player & Content Delivery

The course player is where your students watch your content and so its design influences your learners’ experience to a great extent.

The good thing about Podia is that it has course player which is very well-designed from a user experience point of view and at the same, it looks aesthetically quite attractive.

Your students can watch the course in the content area on the right. Then you have the “Table of Contents” in the left sidebar which your students can use to navigate through the course.  

Podia Course Area
Podia’s Course Player

Plus there are the next and the previous lesson buttons below your content which make navigation further easy for your students.

If you have turned “Comments” on for your course, the comments area will appear nicely at the bottom so that your users can ask questions and leave a comment without leaving the course player which is how it should be.

Another thing that I like about the course player is that your students can click on the little icon at the top which hides the navigation sidebar, and the content area takes the entire space on your screen which is great for distraction-free learning.

Podia Course Player - Full Screen Mode
Podia’s Course Player in Full-Screen Mode

Now, Podia has another product type called “Membership” which allows you to not just bundle your courses but you can also create individual “Posts” for your members.

These “Posts” appear separately in the membership area and they work great for delivering one-off content which doesn’t have a linear structure like online courses. 

Memberships in Podia

Plus you have additional options to schedule your postssend an email notification, etc. and overall, this is a really handy feature for a membership website builder.

Another cool feature about Membership Posts is that you can them public and use them as a public blog for your brand. Just keep in mind that it’s more of a workaround than a real blogging tool.

Otherwise, the only downside of the course area design in Podia is that there is just one default template and you can’t customize any of the design elements.

So if you don’t like the design for any reason or want to give a unique look and feel to your course area, that won’t be possible on Podia.

Otherwise the course area design is mobile responsive (even though Podia doesn’t have a mobile app) and looks professional and should work well for most course creators.

Learning & Engagement Tools

Course creators use all sorts of learning tools to engage their students and help them achieve the transformation they were promised. 

Some of the popular learning and engagement tools include quizzes, course compliance, certificates, etc. Let’s start with the learning tools that Podia offers.

Firstly, it allows you to drip your course content. You can define a schedule for your course sections and you can create emails that will be sent to your students automatically when the content is available to them.

Drip a section in Podia

One handy dripping feature that Podia offers is the ability to unlock dripped course modules for specific students. If you want to grant immediate access to certain modules or even the entire course to certain students, you can easily do that.

Another very popular learning tool that Podia offers is Quizzes. So you can create a multiple-choice quiz that can be useful to test your students.

Design-wise, a quiz created in Podia looks elegant but that’s all. There are many features like the ability to add images to your questions, add other question types, import questions from an external file, etc. which are missing from Podia Quizzes.

Podia Quizzes
Editing a quiz in Podia
Podia Quiz Front-end
This is how a quiz looks in the front-end on Podia

However, the biggest limitation for me is that you can’t set a passing grade for your quizzes which means you can’t automatically evaluate your students and this is the reason I call Podia’s quizzing feature incomplete.

Apart from content dripping and quizzes, Podia doesn’t really have any other learning tools. For example, you can’t create assignments and accept submissions from your students.

Similarly, it doesn’t have any content locking feature. So if you want to restrict the progress of your students unless they’ve completed certain lessons or passed a quiz, you can’t do that on Podia.

Even when it comes to student discussions and community, you have limited options with Podia. The only thing that Podia lets you do is to allow you to enable a comments area in your course lessons.

It doesn’t let you create a standalone community. While most course creators will be fine with embedded comments, it can be a limitation if you’re building a Podia membership site and want to host a community on your own website.

Another useful tool for student engagement that’s missing from the platform is certificates of completion which means you can’t create and issue certificates to your students natively.

So in terms of learning and engagement tools, Podia has very little to offer and this is probably the weakest aspect of the platform.

Course Creation – The Bottom Line

Overall, Podia does an average job as far as course creation and delivery are concerned. The course builder is super easy to use and the course player is very well designed from a user experience point of view.

I like the flexibility that Podia offers for creating a membership site. So apart from bundling courses, you can also create ‘Posts’ to deliver content to your members from time to time.

However, Podia lacks quite a few important course creation features:

  • Course builder lacks flexibility and you can’t upload content from Dropbox/Google Drive directly.
  • The quizzing feature is very limited and doesn’t even support automatic grading.
  • No support for features like content locking, certificates, community, etc.
  • No mobile app functionality for learners.

Having said that,  if you want to create a membership site or deliver a fairly simple online course, Podia will be a good option in that case.

Site Design & Customization

In this section, we’ll see how Podia performs when it comes to letting your create your website on the platform.

The biggest advantage of using a hosted platform like Podia is that you don’t need to buy website hosting or SSL certificate separately or worry about any of the technical things like security, updates or maintenance.

In addition, every school built on Podia gets a free subdomain (mysite.podia.com) and you also have the option to use your own custom domain (mysite.com).

Now let’s talk about the tools that Podia offers for building and customizing your website.

Website Themes

When it comes to site building, the first feature that comes to my mind is Site Themes. Now, Podia doesn’t have any site themes and there is just one template that all the stores built on the platform use by default.

The only thing that you can change at the site level is colors. You can set the main color and also colors for background, headings, text, and buttons.

In addition, you have the ability to change the default font for your body text and headings.

Podia Theme Settings

Apart from that, you don’t have any control over the high-level design or style of your site. For example, you can’t change the style of your site header or other elements like navigation menu or buttons.

Moreover, if you’re an advanced user, there is no place where you can access your website’s backend or add some CSS code to modify the styling.

However, the good thing is that the default template has a clean, modern design, and your storefront and sales pages will look good out of the box. 

Plus you’ll be able to customize your pages using their page builder which we’ll talk about next.

Page Builder

In order to customize your Podia storefront and your sales pages, you’ll have to rely mainly on their page builder. 

The page builder has several pre-built elements that you can add to your page with a single click. So you can easily create a product banner, add course description, show author bio, add FAQs, display testimonials, etc.

Podia's Page Builder

And then there are some basic elements like “Image with Text”, “Video with Text”, “Columns”, etc. which can be used to create custom sections for your sales page.

Plus they have these section themes which allow you to set colors for background and text at the section level and it is a really useful feature.

Overall, the page builder is super easy to use and you can create a nice looking sales page very quickly even if you have no design experience or coding knowledge.

Podia Sales Page
It took me less than 15 mins to build this sales page

However, not everything is so good about Podia’s page builder. First, their text editor is quite restrictive and it doesn’t let you, for example, change text size or, add images and adjust the spacing in between text.

Moreover, you don’t have the ability to modify the spacing of various elements, add animations, show/hide specific elements on mobile vs desktop etc.

Another thing that I don’t like about it is that there is no easy way to add enrol buttons in the middle or at the bottom of your sales page.

So the page builder isn’t very flexible and you can’t modify the standard design much. Otherwise, the page builder will work well for creating sales pages for your digital products.

Another thing that I would like to discuss before we close this section is site text customization. While Podia allows you to change the language for your storefront, it doesn’t allow you to change the default site text which isn’t good.

Website Creation – The Bottom Line

Site building in Podia is mostly about their page builder which is super easy to use and you can create a good-looking sales page with minimal effort.

Plus their team takes care of all the technical aspects like hosting, security, etc. which is awesome.

Apart from that, it has very limited capabilities. There are no site themes available and the page builder has very limited customization options.

So Podia is good for hosting only your sales pages but it’s not really the platform for building a fully-fledged website.

Sales & Marketing

When it comes to sales and marketing, Podia offers you the essential tools to process payments and sell your courses.

It doesn’t offer a sales funnel builder or a full-blown email marketing solution and it makes sense because Podia isn’t really an all-in-one solution.

With that in mind, let’s explore what the platform has to offer in detail.

Product Pricing & Payment Processing

When it comes to payment processing, Podia supports both Stripe and PayPal, so your students can pay via credit/debit card as well as PayPal. Plus the money goes straight into your account (instant payouts).

As far as pricing options are concerned, it works differently with “Products” and “Memberships” in Podia.

Your “Products” (Courses, Digital Downloads, and Product Bundles) can have a one-time price and/or a payment plan.

Course Pricing Options in Podia
Pricing options for courses and product bundles in Podia

One problem with pricing “Products” in Podia is that you can’t have multiple price points. So if you want to sell the basic version of your course for $99 and the premium version for $199, there is no easy way to do that in Podia.

When you create a “Membership”, you do have the ability to have multiple plans and choose what Products and Posts will be available under which plan but that only works for subscriptions.

Plus you can price your membership either as a monthly subscription or as an annual subscription and even create a free trial.

Podia Membership Pricing Options
Membership Pricing Options

However, there are a few problems with Membership pricing as well:

  • You can’t charge a setup fee for your membership upfront.
  • Not possible to offer lifetime pricing for memberships.
  • PayPal isn’t supported as a payment option for subscriptions.

Another limitation of pricing your products in Podia is that you can choose the currency at a store level only and all your products will be priced in the same currency.

One useful tool that Podia offers for product pricing is coupons which let you discount your products either by an amount or by a percentage. You can choose to create coupons that apply to all your products or specific products only.

Plus you can create direct links to your sales page that automatically applies the coupon on the checkout which is awesome.

Checkout Process

Podia has a multi-step checkout process but it’s well-optimized. Your users don’t need to create an account before making a payment plus they’re required to enter only enter a few details in order to complete the payment.

There is no real checkout page and the entire checkout happens in a popup. The upside of this type of checkout process is that your user can complete the payment without leaving the page. 

Podia Checkout Step2
Podia Checkout Step3

Plus you can add this checkout experience to external pages outside your Podia website as well. 

So you can embed a buy button or a product card or text link on your main website and your customers can complete the checkout without leaving that website.

Embed Podia Checkout
You can embed Podia checkout on any website

Another thing that I like about the checkout process in Podia is that it allows you to collect EU VAT for your courses. Under settings, you can turn on the “Collect EU VAT” option and Podia will automatically add the correct VAT amount to your course.

Podia EU VAT

The EU VAT feature in Podia works like a charm which means you don’t need to use an external solution like Quaderno for EU VAT handling.

Finally, you can add a 1-click upsell to your checkout and apply a discount as well. The best part is that you can add multiple upsells for the same product.

Podia Upsells
You can add multiple upsells to the same product

However, there are a few downsides of the checkout process in Podia as well. 

Firstly, you can’t add any conversion elements like testimonials, money back guarantee badge etc. to the checkout page. Similarly, you can’t add any videos, custom message, etc. on the upsell page.

Another criticism of the checkout process and this is totally debatable is that while the popup checkout works very well for lower-priced digital products, it might not work as well for higher ticket items.

I don’t have any data to back this up but I have never seen a top course creator using a checkout popup for their flagship courses. They all have some sort of a checkout page.

Email Marketing Tools

To start with, Podia offers some basic lead generation tools. You can add a pre-launch signup form to your sales page or you can also add a newsletter signup form to the storefront and collect email addresses.

When it comes to email marketing, Podia allows you to send both one-off emails as well as automated emails. So you can send an automated email campaign to your course buyers or those who join the course waitlist. 

Using their campaign builder, you can create a series of emails, set the schedule for them to drip out, and also define the trigger when the emails will be sent.

You can also set entry conditions and exit conditions for your campaign. For example, you can sign someone up for the campaign when they join one of the pre-launch or newsletter forms and unsubscribe them when they buy one of the products.

Email Campaigns in Podia

However, Podia’s email capabilities are really basic and it’s far from a stage where it can act as your email marketing platform. In fact, it’s not meant to replace your email service provider.

Firstly, you don’t have any real landing page capability on Podia and if you use an external lead generation tool like Leadpages, the only way to bring your subscribers in Podia automatically is via Zapier.

Secondly, Podia doesn’t have any features for list management — so you can’t tag your users or create segments which is a huge drawback.

Thirdly and most importantly, you only have the ability to create basic automation rules and if you want to do anything beyond adding someone to or removing them from an email campaign, you can’t do that in Podia.

So Podia’s email marketing features are good for sending notifications to your students or sending an onboarding campaign but that’s pretty much it. 

Affiliate Marketing

If you want to leverage affiliate marketing to promote your courses, Podia has got you covered. With Podia, you can add affiliates to your store and create unique affiliate links for all your products.

Plus your affiliates get a private dashboard where they can access their affiliate links and track the sales and commissions. 

Podia Affiliate Dashboard

When it comes to affiliate commissions, you can give your affiliates either a % of the sale amount or a flat commission. Plus you can customize the commision at a product level which is really handy.

Podia_Affiliate_Commissions

Now, there are a few things about the affiliate tools that can be improved. Firstly, there is no way to upload any swipe files or assets for your affiliates.

Secondly, all your products will show on the affiliate dashboard by default and there is no way to hide specific products from showing up. The workaround obviously is to set a 0% commission for those products.

Thirdly, you can’t change the cookie tracking period for your affiliate links.

Finally, there is no easy way to collect and manage tax forms from your affiliates.

Apart from that, Podia’s affiliate system is simple and has all the basic features, so it should work well for most course creators.

There are a couple of other useful sales and marketing tools that Podia offers. The first one is the native ‘live chat’ feature which allows your site visitors and students to start a conversation with you via the widget.

The second one is the ability to create webinars through the native Zoom integration or by embedding Youtube Live. You can set a price for your webinar or offer it for free and moreover, Podia takes care of sending reminder emails which is great.

Third-Party Integrations

Since the inbuilt email marketing capabilities in Podia is pretty basic, you will in all likelihood use a third-party email service provider. The good news is that Podia integrates with many of the popular email marketing platforms.

It has native integration with MailChimp, ConvertKit, Drip, ActiveCampaign, GetResponse, and MailerLite.

When a user enrolls in one of your courses, you can pass the user information to your email service provider and add him/her to a specific list or tag.

Now, Podia has a Zapier integration as well. So if you use any of the email solutions that Podia doesn’t integrate directly with, you will still be able to pass user data via Zapier.

Plus you can use Zapier to integrate with thousands of third-party apps including Accredible (certificates), FreshBooks (small business accounting software), ClickFunnels (funnels and checkout), etc.

Finally, Podia allows you to add third-party scripts to your website which will allow you to integrate with tools like Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, ConvertBox, Deadline Funnel, etc.

Sales & Marketing – The Bottom Line

Overall, Podia does a decent job as far as sales and marketing is concerned. What I like is that it has a well-optimized checkout process and that you can embed it even on an external website.

In addition, you can offer 1-click upsells, handle EU VAT, do basic email marketing as well as run your affiliate program.

However, there are a few things that I would like them to offer/improve:

  • More flexible pricing options including setup fee for subscriptions and multiple pricing options for regular courses,
  • Offer PayPal as an option for memberships,
  • Ability to use a checkout page apart from a checkout popup,
  • Improve email marketing capability.

Having said that, Podia offers you all the essential features you need to sell your courses and it should work fine for most people.

Reporting & Administration

With any online course platform, you would want to be able to manage your courses and students as well as track your course revenue as well as engagement. In this section, we’ll evaluate what Podia has to offer for the same.

Reporting & Analytics Tools

To start with, Podia’s course reporting capabilities are limited, and some critical components are missing. The only thing that you can really do is to can track the student progress for an individual course.

So you can see the completion rate for individual students and you can also track what lessons in the course they have completed.

Track Progress in Podia

But that’s pretty much it. There are no reports available for course completion rates or lecture completions, or even for your quizzes.

Similarly, there is no analytics available for your course videos. Podia doesn’t provide you data for any of the video metrics like video engagement or play rate and you can’t track the performance of any of your videos.

Now, these are some very essential course reporting tools that we’re talking about here and most of Podia’s competitors do a much better job at it.

When it comes to sales analytics, Podia has a separate dashboard where you can see an overview of your store sales. Plus you can filter the sales report by specific products or plans.

Below that, you can see individual sales transactions which you can also export in CSV format.

Podia Sales Report
Sales Overview in Podia

However, the sales report in Podia is again basic. It doesn’t have filters for either date or other items like coupon codes, affiliates, etc.

Similarly, there are no visual tools available for comparing the performance of various products or see monthly sales over a period.

People Management

With Podia, you can easily see the list of your students in the Audience section of the app and filter the list based on whether they’re an email subscriber or a paid customer or a subscriber. 

However, the filter options are limited. For example, you can’t filter the audience based on specific course enrollments or their purchase value or course completions.

Another issue with how student management works in Podia is that there are no bulk actions. So if you want to enroll multiple students in a course or unenroll them, you can’t do that in one go.

Podia Audience

However, you can easily perform these actions by selecting an individual student. Here you can see the products and memberships a user is enrolled in and you can view their progress or revoke their access from here.

Plus Podia also lets you edit a user’s personal details like name, email, and password.

User Roles & Privileges

Apart from letting you add students and affiliates to your school, Podia gives you the ability to add your team members as well. 

So whether you have a VA who’s going to help you set up your website or you have a business partner who will work with you, you can invite them to your Podia store.

Adding team members to your Podia account is pretty straightforward. You just need to enter the name and email address of the team member and then select the sections inside your Podia app that you want them to have access to.

For example, if you want your VA to have access to everything but the sales reports, you can do that while sending them an invitation or even after they accept your invitation.

Invite Teammates Podia

One thing you should keep in mind is that you don’t have a ‘course author’ role in Podia. So if you want to work with other authors and sell their courses on your website and share revenue with them, you won’t be able to do that in Podia.

Overall, Podia does an average job when it comes to reporting and administration. The reporting tools are pretty basic and the people management aspect is weak as well.

Customer Support

If there is one thing that Podia has done really well right from the beginning, it has to be their customer support. 

I have always heard great things about Podia’s customer support from my clients as well as my ` readers. Even during my limited interactions with them, I have always found them to be very friendly and responsive.

In terms of support options, you can either reach out to them via email or you can just leave a message in the chat widget from your admin dashboard.

It’s not exactly a live chat option but it’s much better than going back and forth over email.

During work hours, you’ll generally get a response from the Podia team in 5-10 minutes which is amazing. Outside the work hours or during the weekend, you’ll have to wait slightly longer to get your queries answered.

On top of that, Podia has an extensive knowledge library that has a lot of resources on how to do different things on the platform. So you can simply search through the knowledge base and 

Podia Knowledge Base
Podia’s Knowledge Library

When it comes to course creator training, Podia has a lot of free guides on their website. So you can find articles on course creation, marketing, sales funnel, and several other topics. 

One thing that I would love to see Podia do is create a Facebook community for its users. Almost all of Podia’s competitors have these Facebook Groups for their users where they can ask questions and network with others which is awesome.

Finally, let me tell you about my favorite customer support feature. Podia offers free migration on their Shaker Plan ($79/month) under which they will move your content and audience from another platform to Podia free of cost.

This is huge if you’re planning to switch to Podia from another platform and I don’t know about any other course platform that offers a feature like this.

Pricing Plans

This Podia review won’t be complete without a discussion on pricing. Because unless you know how much does Podia cost, you won’t be able to make a decision about it.

Podia pricing plans are pretty straightforward. It offers two plans – the Mover Plan that costs $39/month and the Shaker Plan that costs $89/month

The best thing about its pricing though is that there are no transaction fees and you get instant payouts on both the plans.

In terms of what’s included in each plan, the Mover Plan offers you all the features that you need to create and sell online courses and digital downloads.

Podia Pricing: How much does cost?

What you don’t get is Memberships, Affiliate Marketing, Embedded Checkout, Zoom Integration, and Third-Party Code which are only available on the Shaker Plan. And free migration is also available only on the higher tier.

Podia pricing is pretty reasonable and I like how they have kept things simple. However, there are a couple of things that I don’t like. 

The first problem is that neither of these plans offer the ability to remove Podia branding from your school and you’ll have to pay separately for that.

Another problem is that none of these plans let you add your team members to your Podia account. In order to do that, you’ll have to pay $20 per month per user on top of your monthly subscription.

But the biggest issue I have with their pricing is the fact that they don’t allow to use any third-party scripts on their lower tier.

So if you were to use a popup solution like ConvertBox, a countdown timer like Deadline Funnel, or even integrate with Facebook Pixel, you can’t do it on the Mover Plan. 

This is something that almost everyone will need and I don’t see the point of restricting it only to the higher tier.

If you want to try out the platform, you can get a 14-day free trial on either of its pricing plans. The good thing is that you don’t need a credit card in order to start the trial.

You can also get an additional discount by switching to an annual plan where they offer you two months free.

Podia vs The Competition

Before we conclude this Podia review, let’s do a quick comparison of the platform with three of its main competitors – Kajabi, Teachable and Thinkific.

Podia vs Kajabi

Kajabi is one of the most popular online course platforms in the market. Unlike Podia, it is an all-in-one platform, so you can do everything including your website, blog, marketing funnels, email marketing, etc. on the platform.

What is Kajabi?

Even in terms of the course creation features, Kajabi has much more to offer than Podia. It offers a library of 10+ course player themes, a more flexible course builder, the ability to create a Community, iOS/Android mobile app, assignments, better quizzing feature, content locking, etc. 

Simply based on features, Kajabi will be a winner over Podia any day. However, it is not that simple.

Kajabi is priced much higher than Podia, its lowest tier — the Basic Plan costs $149/month. Unlike Podia, Kajabi pricing won’t work for everyone, especially the beginners.

So if you’re looking for an all-in-one solution to build your online course business, Kajabi should be a better fit for you. On the other hand, if you’re looking for a solution just to host and deliver your courses, Podia should work better for you.

If you want to explore the comparison between the two platforms further, you should check this Podia vs Kajabi guide.

Podia vs Thinkific

Thinkific is another popular course platform and like Teachable, it does a much better job at course creation and delivery than Podia. 

So you can create advanced quizzes, assignments, learning paths, certificates, etc. which aren’t available on Podia.

Another area where Thinkific does a better job than Podia is site building. So Thinkific offers a library of website themes and the page builder is more powerful as well, so you can create a fully-fledged website on the platform.

What is Thinkific?

However, Podia does a slightly better job than Thinkific doesn’t when it comes to sales and marketing tools.

Thinkific’s checkout process requires users to create an account before making a payment which isn’t optimal for conversions. Moreover, it doesn’t allow you to collect EU VAT from your customers.

Now, Thinkific pricing is very similar to Podia in a sense that there is no transaction fee on any of the plans. The first tier on Thinkific is the free plan while the next tier is called the Basic Plan and costs $49/month.

Their most popular plan is the PRO plan that costs $99/month and has most of the features that the platform has to offer.

Podia vs Teachable

Teachable is the market leader in the online course platform space and it is similar to Podia to a great extent in terms of the broader offering and pricing.

However, Teachable has much more to offer when it comes to course creation. You have a much more flexible course builder, graded quizzes, course compliance, certificates, better course analytics, etc.

One area where Podia does a better job is Memberships. While Teachable lets you only bundle courses as part of a membership, Podia is more flexible here, allowing you to create individual Posts as well. 

What is Teachable?

As far as website creation is concerned, both platforms have limited capabilities and there are only minor differences between the two. Moreover, they are very similar in terms of sales and marketing features.

When it comes to pricing, Teachable pricing starts from $0/month and the Basic plan costs $39/month (+5% transaction fee) while the Professional Plan costs $119/month (0% transaction fee).

If you would like to read more about how Teachable compares to Podia, you should check this Podia vs Teachable guide.

Podia Review – Final Verdict

In this Podia review, we’ve discussed everything that the platform has to offer and its shortcomings as well.

What stands out the most about the platform is how easy it is to use. Setting up a course (or membership) is really straightforward and the course player looks great out of the box.

Moreover, you can build a good-looking sales page for your products and start selling them very quickly. The checkout process is well-designed and you can embed it even on an external website which is really handy.

Now, not everything is so good about Podia. There are quite a few important course creation and engagement features like graded quizzes, certificates, community, etc. that are missing. 

Plus you don’t have a lot of design flexibility around how your website and your course area look.

Having said that, if you’re looking for an affordable solution to create a membership site or deliver a simple online course, Podia will work great for you.

If you want to give the platform a try, you can start a 14-day free trial (no credit card required) by clicking on the button below.

I hope you found this Podia review useful. If you have any questions about it or got some feedback, please let me know in the comments below.

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