Podia is a good all-in-one digital product selling platform.

But it may not be for everyone.

While it offers a lot of features, its features lack depth. It’s almost like a jack of all trades and master of none.

Look no further! In this blog post, we’ll present some of the best alternatives to Podia.

Here are our top 5 picks, if you’re in a hurry:

Product name	All-in-one platform	Community support	Mobile apps	Pricing
Kajabi	Yes	Yes	Yes	From $149/month
Circle	No	Yes	Yes (iOS & Android)	From $39/month (4% transaction fee)
Thinkific	No	Limited	Yes (iOS & Android)	$49/month (Basic Plan)
Teachable	Yes	Limited	Yes	Free plan: 5% transaction fee; Paid plans: from $29/month
LearnDash	Yes	Yes	Yes	From $199/year

Kajabi – Premium alternative

Kajabi is a more powerful all-in-one digital selling platform compared to Podia.

It comes with:

• Online courses
• Coaching
• Gamified communities
• Email marketing
• Webinars
• Website building.

The best part about Kajabi is that all these features are tightly integrated with each other, with the automation engine on top, so you can set triggers and actions.

For instance, you can link the course feature with the email marketing feature so that whenever a lesson is completed, it will trigger an email encouraging students to keep it up.

Despite being an all-in-one platform (like Podia), Kajabi has great depth in its features.

👍 Pros

• Superior accountability with course compliance and automated progress tracking.
• Engaging community features with points, badges, leaderboards, and challenges.
• Robust email marketing with templates, automation, and a mini CRM.
• Versatile page builder for websites, landing pages, and blog posts.
• Solid automation features across all its features/tools.

👎 Cons

• Even their Beginner plan, which costs $149 per month, comes with the ability for you to create only 3 products.

🏆 Bottomline: Kajabi is the best alternative to Podia and it comes with real depth to its features. However, it’s more of a premium alternative.

Explore Kajabi

Circle – Community-centric course platform

Circle is one of the newest community-centric course platforms out there.

It was launched in 2019 by Sid Yadav, who is Teachable’s first designer, and later backed by Ankur Nagpal (invested 90% of his liquid net-worth), the founder of Teachable.

I have high conviction regarding this platform because the founders, with a great track record with Teachable, are now modeling the success patterns of cutting-edge startups like Slack and Notion.

They aim to help you build highly customizable and flexible community-centric courses.

The future is in communities, and people are no longer interested in just pre-recorded videos. Circle nicely captures this segment.

They have great emphasis on:

• Community building (with live streaming, gamification and, AI)
• Advanced course features
• Automation workflows (trigger and actions)
• Integrations and APIs

I really appreciate that they are placing emphasis on the right aspects of their business, which matters a lot to the end users.

When it comes to features, their basic plan only supports up to 100 members. However, if you want access to course creation, live streams, and support for unlimited members, you need to opt for their plan that costs $99 per month.

If you want to gain access to their automation workflows to automate various actions, as well as perform bulk actions for maintenance in your community, you need to choose the business plan that costs $199 per month.

👍 Pros

• Intuitive and clean UI and UX
• Advanced course functionalities
• User-friendly mobile apps for both iOS and Android
• Built-in live streaming abilities
• Automation workflows for saving time with repetitive tasks in the community
• Community AI and gamification features for enhanced community engagement

👎 Cons

• Lacks landing page building abilities
• Lacks email marketing abilities
• Their basic plan at $49 per month comes with support of only 100 members also 4% transaction fee (it’s hard to discover these limitations)

🏆 Bottomline: Circle is a promising community-centric course platform that I have high confidence in, as it is spearheaded by the founding team of Teachable. Although it is not an all-in-one platform, it has really strong features when it comes to communities, courses, and workflow automation.

Thinkific – LMS-centric cheap alternative

Thinkific is a dedicated course building platform that can be considered a reliable alternative to Teachable. It specializes in course creation, rather than being an all-in-one platform.

It has the ability to host course videos, superior assessment features, quizzes, and improved course compliance features. This allows you to track progress on a student level, as it has advanced analytics, including per-student video retention rates.

It offers good range of integrations with various products for eCommerce, automation tools, analytics, and email marketing.

In terms of pricing, Thinkific offers a few different options depending on your needs. The lowest plan costs $49/month, while the Pro plan costs $99/month and includes unlimited courses and landing pages.

🏆 Bottomline: Thinkific is a great specialist course platform. With its robust features, integrations, and affordable pricing, Thinkific truly stands out as a top Podia alternative.

Teachable – Specialist in course creation

Teachable is a popular online course platform that specializes in course creation.

While it is not an all-in-one platform like Podia, Teachable offers superior course creation features such as course compliance mechanisms, support for multiple content types within a lesson, quizzes, and more.

Teachable provides a more comprehensive and flexible design experience compared to Podia.

Also it comes with advanced marketing features, such as one-click upsells, affiliate marketing, and email marketing, make it a great alternative to Podia.

With professional templates, advanced coding options ($119/month plan), and various integrations, it offers more control and customization.

Teachable offers a free plan that allows you to publish one product, but it comes with a 10% transaction fee. Their basic plan, which costs $39 per month, charges a 5% transaction fee and only supports up to 5 published products.

To waive off the transaction fee and publish up to 50 products, you need to upgrade to their Pro plan that costs $119 per month. However, at that price point, you may be better off with an all-in-one platform like Kajabi or even Podia, which offer more advanced features for a similar price.

Previously, their basic plan supported unlimited products, but they removed this support, leading to backlash from many existing users who were forced to upgrade to their plan for $599 per month.

🏆 Bottomline: Teachable is a great option for those looking for superior course creation and advanced marketing features. However, it’s not an all-in-one platform.

Sellfy – Best for digital products

Sellfy is a platform for selling digital products, physical products, and subscriptions. It offers more versatility in selling different types of goods, including print-on-demand capabilities.

This is something you can’t do with Podia, as it lacks inventory management and fulfillment abilities.

Additionally, Sellfy offers many marketing features such as the ability to set up upsells and one-click checkout.

You can also use embeddable buy buttons, which is especially useful if you are using WordPress and integrates with Stripe and PayPal for payment gateways.

👍 Pros

• Sellfy is a viable alternative to Podia for selling digital products.
• Print-on-demand capabilities
• Built-in shopping cart
• Offers more comprehensive features for effective upsells and storefront customization.
• Monthly fees ranging from $29 to $129, with annual plans offering savings.
• Embeddable buy buttons
• Offers a 14-day free trial.

👎 Cons

• Lacks specialized features in course creation.
• The decent plan costs $49/month if you want to remove Sellfy branding, need cart abandonment, and product upselling.

🏆 Bottomline: Sellfy caters to those who want a platform for selling digital and physical products with versatile selling options, print-on-demand capabilities, and many marketing features. It’s a viable alternative to Podia for those who value these features and don’t need specialized course creation features.

LearnWorlds – Academic centric alternative

LearnWorlds is an all-in-one platform designed for course creation and building communities.

The platform comes with a lot of features and customization options, but for me personally, I found its UI and UX seem cluttered and not quite intuitive enough to feature it at the top.

Its course functionality is mainly geared towards academic use cases.

It comes with powerful assessment and quiz features, and also supports SCORM and HTML5 packages to make your course industry compliant.

The main flagship feature of LearnWords is interactive videos, which enable you to add interactive elements on top of your course videos to increase student interaction, especially in academic use cases.

It also supports community feature. Its community has a classic, old Facebook-like feel to it. In fact, you can add other users as friends, create groups, react to posts, add comments, conduct polls, and more.

👍 Pros

• Interactive videos
• Superior quizzing and assessment options
• Live classes and webinars
• SCORM and HTML compliant
• Bundling, upsells, cross-selling and funnels supported
• Mobile app
• White labeling

👎 Cons

• Cluttered and date UI and UX
• Most of the best features only available in $249/month plan.

The interactive videos, course insights, mobile apps, white labeling, are only available in the highest $249/month plan

🏆 Bottomline: Although LearnWorlds comes with many features and is an all-in-one platform, its UI and UX leave much to be desired. Additionally, the features lack depth. Often, it feelsthat rather than focusing on the number of features that many people don’t use, such as the ebook builder, they need to focus of mastering the basics.

LearnDash – The most flexible WordPress LMS.

LearnDash is a WordPress plugin that is a popular choice among users looking for a flexible and customizable online course creation tool.

Key features:

• Online courses
• Memberships
• Quizzes and assessments

On top of these, it comes with a lot of 3rd-party add-ons and integration with WordPress plugins that can be used to extend its functionality and integrations. It integrates seamlessly with some of the most popular WordPress products like WooCommerce, Elementor, and others.

Personally, I use LearnDash – along with other plug-ins like CartFlows, WooCommerce, and Elementor – for more design customizations.

However, there may be instances where LearnDash could become slow due to conflicts with other plugins. You know, such situations are not specific to LearnDash but are common with WordPress plugins in general.

Their pricing is based on the number of sites you plan to use the plugin on. The pricing starts from $199/year for a 1 site license. If you want access to 10 sites, including their Propanel access for advanced analytics (student-level reports), it would cost you $229/year.

The purchase is one-time, and you will need to pay for ongoing updates and support.

🏆 Bottomline: LearnDash is a great plugin for those looking for a flexible and customizable course creation tool that integrates well with WordPress.

Memberful

Memberful is a full-featured, hosted solution for creating membership sites, offering access groups, optimized checkouts, analytics, and member management.

Also, it integrates with numerous email marketing platforms, including Zapier, and offers API and webhooks functionality.

For WordPress users, a plugin is available for easy implementation.

The pricing is simple. You will get full access for $49/month, which includes a transaction fee of 4.9% per successful charge. You can try it for free for as long as you like, and will only be charged when you go live and start accepting payments.

🏆 Bottomline: Memberful is a great Podia alternative if you are looking for memberships feature on a budget. But it doesn’t come with course selling features.

Verdict

In summary, Podia is an affordable all-in-one platform for the courses it offers. However, it lacks mobile apps, and its community feature is rather basic.

If you are willing to pay a premium for more features, Kajabi would be the ideal choice. Kajabi not only includes all the features that Podia offers, but it also has real depth to its features, replacing many specialist tools like community platforms, webinar platforms, and email marketing platforms.

On the other hand, if you don’t want an all-in-one platform but only a specialist course platform, Thinkific would be the choice.

If you want a community-centric course platform backed by the former team of Teachable, then Circle would be the best alternative. Although it’s not an all-in-one platform, I really like it because they are following the footsteps of new-age startups like Slack and Notion, enabling good customization options to build your community-centric course platform. However, note that you still need to use separate email marketing and landing page software along with Circle.