In this blog post, let’s review Podia closely 🧐 considering different use cases in mind.
As someone who’s into course creation and instructional design, I have tried and tested dozens of different course platforms over the years.
I’m a SaaS-junkie.
The ONE all-in-one platform that truly stands out for me is Podia!
It offers many features and is a great alternative to other platforms like say Kajabi for a much lower price.
Let’s dive into the review of Podia.
Here’s a quick overview
Features | Podia |
Type | Online product selling platform |
Starting price 💲 | The lowest plan costs $39/mo. |
Best for selling | Courses, digital products, coachings, website builder, and communities |
Mobile app 📱 available? | No |
Podia examples | 👀 See 12 live examples |
Competitors 🏹 | Kajabi, Teachable, and Thinkific |
Quick decision
👍 What do I like about Podia?
- Clean and simple design: Listen, I’ve tried tons of course platforms, and Podia’s interface is a breath of fresh air. No clutter, no confusion – just what you need to get started.
- No limits on your stuff: Here’s what’s cool – you can create as many courses and products as you want. Unlike Teachable or Kajabi that put caps on everything.
- Email marketing built right in: You get a solid email system that handles broadcasts, campaigns, and automation. Pretty handy to have everything in one place.
- Sell anywhere: Want to sell on your WordPress site? No problem. You can embed checkouts and even set up upsells wherever you want.
- Basic community tools: Look, it’s not fancy, but you get what you need – topics and posts to keep your people talking.
- Chat with customers: There’s a live chat feature built in. You can save some cash on those pricey chat tools!
👎 What bugs me about Podia?
- No mobile app: This one’s a real head-scratcher. It’s 2025, and they still don’t have a mobile app. Not even in the works!
- Limited community features: The community feature is pretty basic. No gamification, no real customization – just the basics.
- Website builder needs work: Don’t expect much here. You can’t even add custom CSS/HTML if you want to get fancy.
- Missing course features: Want different types of quizzes or detailed student analytics? Yeah… you won’t find those here.
Upfront bottomline ✨
Let me be straight with you – Podia is an all-in-one platform where you can sell courses, digital products, and run communities. Pretty simple, right?
Here’s the thing though – it’s a jack of all trades, master of none.
The website builder?
Basic.
Course creation? Missing some key features.
Communities feature? It’s really stripped down.
But you know what?
If you’re someone who just wants to get your stuff out there without getting lost in endless features, Podia might be perfect for you.
I’ve got to give them credit – they’re constantly rolling out new stuff. Their implementation of new features is pretty impressive.
Just recently, they launched Emails 2.0 to beef up their email automation game, and they’re working on improving their website builder too.
But here’s my biggest gripe – there’s no mobile app. In 2025, that’s kind of a big deal.
Overview

Podia is a New York based all-in-one digital selling platform that was founded in 2014 by Spencer Fry and has been profitable since 2019.
It initially started as an online course platform.
And later, down the line, it transformed into an all-in-one digital selling platform.
Now speaking of the product itself, it has a polished, intuitive interface with intricate attention to detail.
The interface of Podia is one of the most refined that I have ever seen in an LMS platform.

Now, with Podia you can sell products like:
- Courses
- Coachings
- Digital downloads
- Communities
To call it as an all-in-one platform, it also includes email marketing features (with broadcasts and sequences)
Additionally, it provides a website builder for customizing your website and a live chat functionality to convert prospects well.
Speaking of conversion, it also offers an affiliate marketing feature, which is only available in their higher plan (refer pricing section).
Let’s review these one by one.
Online courses
Content structuring
Podia has a course builder, where the curriculum is divided into sections and lessons.
It supports different lesson types like text, files, quizzes (basic multiple choice), embeds, and coaching.

👍 Podia lets you add coaching lessons directly to the course curriculum. Students can book paid coaching classes with you by scheduling a calendar slot (more details later).
However, there are some downsides with their course creation workflow 👎:
- You can’t add multiple content types inside the same lesson (say quiz along with video file).
- Doesn’t support custom codes inside the lessons.
- It doesn’t support cloud uploading (like Drive or Dropbox)
Due to these restrictions, when I create courses on Podia, most of the time, I end up creating text lessons.
When creating text-based lessons, there are various building blocks available, similar to those in Notion.

However, the building blocks available here when you type in the “/” command are very limited. I hope they add more blocks like quizzes, coaching, and others in the same lesson.
🏆 Bottomline: Podia’s lesson editor keeps things simple but lacks advanced content blocks. Great for basic content, limiting for complex interactive lessons.
Quizzes
When creating your course, you can also set “Quiz” as a lesson type in Podia.
This feature allows you to provide multiple-choice questions for your students to answer.

Podia only offers a basic multiple-choice quiz feature.
It lacks advanced features such as assessments, question banks, grading, and other functionalities found in platforms like Kajabi or Thinkific.
🏆 Bottomline: Podia keeps the quiz stuff super basic. You only get multiple-choice questions. Nothing fancy like grading and assessments, what you’d find in other platforms.
Content compliance
Let’s talk about getting your students to actually finish your course.
You want them to go through all the content, right?
That’s where course compliance features come in – they help make sure students actually complete courses.
Now, Podia keeps things simple with their drip content feature.
This feature lets you release your course content bit by bit over time, instead of binging everything at once.

The cool thing?
It automatically sends personalized emails whenever new content is released.
Pretty neat, right?
This comes in super handy if you’re running something like a 30-day challenge (great for nurturing those sales).
But here’s the catch.
Apart from setting delays after someone enrolls, you can’t set specific dates to unlock modules.
Kind of a bummer if you’re running a seasonal challenge and want content to drop on exact dates.
👎 Other than this, it lacks other course compliance features like course locking, enforcing video watch duration, lesson completion, and order/quiz completion (often helpful in academic contexts).
🏆 Bottomline: Podia doesn’t come with advanced course compliance features. While you get basic drip content, it lacks essential features like enforced video watching and lesson completion tracking that you’ll find in other platforms.
Student analytics and certification
Let’s talk about the #1 thing that matters – getting your students to actually finish your course.
It’s super important to track those course completion rates.
But, how do you know if your students are actually going through your content?
You need solid analytics for this.
But here’s where Podia falls short.
Unlike Teachable, Podia can’t automatically track how far students have gotten in your course.
Instead, students have to manually click a “complete” button to mark their progress.
Not ideal, right?

Also, Podia does not offer any additional video analytics and heatmap reports unlike other platforms like Thinkific or Kajabi.
However, for course compliance, Podia does provide course completion certificates, but these are only available in its Shaker plan, which costs $89/month.

🏆 Bottomline: With Podia, you get simple completion tracking (that students have to mark themselves) and basic certificates in higher plans. It doesn’t come with detailed analytics or automated progress tracking.
Frontend experience for students
Let me walk you through what it’s like to actually take a course on Podia.
The student interface?
Super clean and easy to use.
No confusing menus or complicated navigation here.
Everything you need – your sections, lessons, all that stuff – sits right there in a sidebar.

And here’s a neat feature: there’s a full-screen button in the top-right corner that lets you hide the sidebar when you want to focus on the content.
Here’s something neat:
When you’re in full screen mode, you get these handy previous and next lesson buttons. Just click those to move through your lessons one by one.
Way better than getting lost in that big sidebar menu, right?
Each lesson comes with its own comments section too. Students can chat, reply to each other, and even mark their favorite comments.
🏆 Bottomline: Podia’s student interface keeps things straightforward with a clean design, easy navigation, and basic interaction features like comments. It does exactly what students need in a simple way.
Coachings
Podia offers a coaching feature that allows you to conduct 121 or group sessions.
This feature is only available in the Shaker and Earthquaker (even a name?) plans

To help users book the sessions easily, it gives integrations with SavvyCal, Acuity, or YouCanBookMe.
You must embed these on your service page or add a custom calendar link.
🚨 Quick heads up: Once you book a coaching session, you’ll need to hop into your calendar app (like Calendly) to manage your bookings. Took me a while to figure this out when I first started using Podia!

For every coaching product, you can set signup limits, access durations, and program start dates to encourage users to book sessions early.

These are really handy features 👆
Here’s the thing about coaching sessions in Podia – each one is treated as its own product.
You know what’s cool about this?
You can bundle these coaching sessions with your other stuff or use them as upsells.
Pretty handy!
But there’s a small catch:
If you’re offering different mentorship packages (like 3-month or 6-month deals), you’ll need to create separate products and sales pages for each one. Though you can use their pricing plans block to make it a bit easier.
🏆 Bottomline: Podia’s coaching feature keeps it simple – you can sell 1-on-1 or group sessions, integrate with booking tools, and bundle coaching with other products. While it works well for basic coaching setups, you’ll need workarounds for complex packaging options.
Digital product selling
With Podia, you can sell a variety of digital products such as templates, prints, workbooks, and more.
You don’t need to again make use of platforms like Gumroad to sell digital products.
When creating a new downloadable product, you can upload all the relevant files in the “files” section.

You can also add these files under different sections, which is especially useful if you are offering multiple files.
Also, you have the embed code for every product that you create, so you can use it on your WordPress site.

For example, you can easily embed digital products directly into your blog posts to maximize just-in-time sales.

You’ll likely use Podia’s embed feature, especially when using external platforms like WordPress, as Podia has limited website building capabilities.
🏆 Bottomline: I really like the ability to organize downloadable content into different sections. Additionally, I appreciate the feature that allows embedding the checkout process on third-party platforms using embed code and checkout links.
Communities and memberships in Podia
Podia just have basic community features.
It supports members, posts, topics, and likes/comments.
That’s it.
Though Podia’s community cannot replace dedicated community tools, it gets the job done.
You can create a community and organize topics within it.

Each topic can contain relevant content such as posts created by members of your community.
What if you want to restrict access to certain topics/products only to people in a specific membership level?
For this, you need to setup multiple plans under Community settings.

This allows you to set up various subscription levels to restrict content access.
Additionally, you can create multiple topics or channels to group the discussions in your community.

As you can see in the below screenshot, you can create exclusive topics to certain plan owners.
For example, the topic or community space – “Mastermind” is only accessible to people who subscribe to the “Gold” plan.
🏆 Bottomline: Podia doesn’t come with fully-fledged community features. For example, it lacks gamification features such as points, rewards, leaderboards, badges, rankings, etc. You’ll be stuck with topics and posts. If you want to build a thriving online community with features like live-streaming and gamification, you can consider going with dedicated community platforms.
Webinars
Unlike other platforms, such as Kajabi, Podia does not have native streaming capabilities.
However, it does integrate with Zoom and YouTube Live.

Here’s something cool – you can sell tickets to your live events, masterclasses, and webinars right through Podia.
Just connect your Zoom or YouTube Live, and you’re good to go.
Setting it up is super simple. Create your webinar product, plug in your Zoom or YouTube Live details, and boom – your customers get access as soon as they buy.
And make your webinar a success!
Want to know the best part?
You can upload your webinar recordings afterward as “Webinar Replays.” For folks who couldn’t make it live!

👎 As Podia does not have a built-in webinar feature, it does not have the ability to automatically send webinar event reminders. As a result, email broadcasts need to be set up manually to send follow-up emails at least 24 hours before the event, 1 hour before, and when the event starts.
🏆 Bottomline: Podia’s webinar feature keeps it simple – integrate with Zoom or YouTube Live, sell tickets, and offer replays. While it lacks built-in streaming and automated reminders, it covers the basics for hosting and selling online events.
Email marketing and automation
Podia comes with both one-off-email broadcasts and campaigns (sequences) that can be triggered based on conditions.

For example, when people enroll in my training course on the BloggingX Automation System, they should be immediately sent a welcome campaign.

Here’s what happens: You get a welcome email right away, and I check in with you a week later. Simple!
Before we dive into the automation stuff, let me show you the email builder.
The email builder in Podia just got a sweet upgrade. Now you’ve got way more control over how your emails look.
Want to save time?
They’ve added 10+ ready-to-use templates to help you get started fast.

They also have this drag and drop builder that lets you add images, change forms, adjust colors, or even insert buttons.

Along with that, Podia has introduced audience filtering and segmentation options.

So, when you are sending a broadcast, you can effectively segment the audience based on their tags, products that they have purchased, memberships, revenue, and more.

In this example, I’m targeting a specific group – “Pro” community members who opened my Black Friday emails.
Pretty smart way to send discounts, right?
Here’s what’s great about Podia email – you’ve got all your data right there. No need to mess with other email tools or Zapier integrations.
Want to track how your emails are doing?
You’ll get all the key stats: sends, opens, clicks, sales, revenue, bounces, and unsubscribes.

It is available as an add-on based on the number of subscribers that you have.
For example, you can host upto 10,000 subscribers with their $42/mo addon.
This can be more affordable compared to other email marketing platforms because you get integrative benefits when you have an email platform built into an all-in-one platform.
It is not uncommon to see people who are hosting their emails on ConvertKit switch to Podia emails.
🏆 Bottomline:Podia has a feature-rich email builder and automation features. Although it lacks advanced features like A/B split testing, site tracking, and other advanced features, it does the job well!
Design and customization features
Let me tell you about Podia’s website builder.
It’s pretty basic – you get what you need to create your website, landing pages, product pages, and checkout stuff.
Here’s the thing – some people find it too simple.
But if you like keeping things clean and minimal?
You’ll probably love it.
Getting started is easy.
Just pick from their ready-to-use templates – they’ve got options for email landing pages, link pages, and full websites.

When you choose a full website template, and Podia will generate essential pages for you, such as Home, About, Service, and ToS.
Below are the blocks available to design the pages. (Refer to the screenshot below)

When designing pages on Podia, each block you add becomes a section.
Here’s the thing about Podia’s website builder – it’s pretty basic. You can’t create those fancy container sections that hold multiple blocks like other builders let you do.
The grid-based layout means you’re kind of stuck with where you can put things.
Want to move something just a bit to the left?
Sorry, no it can’t do.
This makes it tricky to get creative with your design.
And when it comes to customization?
Well, there’s not much to work with.
You can’t even adjust simple stuff like spacing between sections or add your own CSS – not even in their top-tier plan.
🙃 I think options are kept to minimal so that the underlying complexity is hidden, which can be both good and bad for power users.
For more ideas, see this demo site.
🏆 Bottom line: Personally, for me, Podia can be considered just as a storefront builder, not as a complete website builder. If you are using Podia, you would still need to use a dedicated page builder like WordPress or Leadpages to complement it.
Checkout embeds
But fortunately, Podia offers good embed options for your products.

You can embed Podia products on your website easily.
To do so, simply copy the embed code from your product and paste it as custom HTML on the page where you want it to appear.
In the below example, I have selected the embed code format as “Link”.

Now I can include the embed code on my WordPress site. This way, when people click on the link, a modal will be triggered, allowing them to quickly purchase the product.

👍 Podia offers excellent embed features for easy checkout on external websites. This is ideal if you already have a website hosted elsewhere or if you find Podia’s design features too limiting.
🏆 Bottomline: Podia has limited options for page design blocks and does not offer the ability to customize with HTML or custom CSS. While power users may complain about this limitation, fortunately, Podia provides good website embed functionalities for those who want to use say WordPress.
Sales and marketing features
Prelaunch
Podia allows you to set up pre-launch waitlists for your digital products.
By pre-launching your course, you can build hype and interest before the launch date and even pre-sell your course to students at a discounted rate.

This validation process ensures that your course idea resonates with your audience, and you can even earn revenue before the course content is completed.
For example, John D. Saunders pre-sold his course on Podia, earning $10,000 on launch day.
Pricing the products
Once you have built your course or any product, Podia offers support for various pricing options including free, waitlist (for prelaunch), one-time pricing, and monthly payment plans (when you connect with Stripe).

👉 Subscription pricing can only be added in Podia communities, which I will explain later.
Upsells or order bumps
In the products pricing section when you scroll down, you can also specify the products to upsells
However, these are not traditional upsells.

Instead, these are order bumps (which they call upsells) that are presented on the checkout page, allowing customers to purchase additional products that they have not previously enrolled in.
For instance, when selling a training course, you can upsell customers with coaching products, e-books, and other items to increase the total value of their cart.
Product bundles
Product bundles are considered as a product type in Podia.

This means that all the options available for course products, such as pricing, embedding, and customization, will also be available for bundles.
This is a good thing!
When creating a product bundle, you need to associate various products that you want to sell together with that bundle.

Let me show you some super effective ways to use product bundles:
- Bundle multiple products together at a lower price than buying them separately. This simple trick boosts your average order value (AOV).
- Make bundles that match different types of customers. Think blogger bundle, LMS bundle, course creator bundle – you get the idea.
- Use bundles to level up your membership plans. When members see premium bundles in higher tiers, they’re more likely to upgrade.
💡 Pro tip: combine these bundles with upsells and watch your cart values go up.
Coupons
And when you sell product bundles, it’s really important for you to sell it at a discounted price . What’s the incentive for people to buy the bundle, right?
Podia supports coupons.
You can limit the coupon use and add the expiry date as well.

I really like how they support both “Amount” and “Percentage” based discount values.
Personally, I prefer to use percentage-based discount values. This would be the recommended option unless you are specifically involved in e-commerce.
Affiliates
Want to boost your sales without doing all the work yourself?
Here’s something cool – you can get other people to promote your products and earn a cut of the sales.
Just set up your affiliate program, and your biggest fans can start spreading the word about your products.
Getting started is straightforward.

Send out your affiliate signup links, and your promoters can hop right into their portal to start sharing.
Make your program open to everyone, keep it invite-only, or somewhere in between.
You can set different commission rates for different products.
But note that Podia lacks affiliate-specific commission rates and multiple commission tiers.
🏆 Bottomline:Podia just has basic marketing features. If you need tools like funnels, advanced email marketing, automations, mobile apps, etc. Kajabi would be the best choice. Even though it costs 4x that of Podia, it is worth the money you spend.
Payment processing
Before selling any digital products from Podia, connect your bank account or PayPal account to these payment processors.
Podia integrates with Stripe and PayPal to collect payments from your students.

You must also note that Podia doesn’t support PayPal for recurring/subscription community plans.
Here’s the thing – PayPal has some technical issues handling recurring payments.
That’s why you can only use Stripe for community plans right now.
The good news? Customers can easily pay using their credit cards.
And don’t worry about waiting – payments usually hit your bank or PayPal account within 2 days.
👍 Note: Podia supports EU/VAT tax calculation. You don’t have to remit the taxes if your students are from Europe.
🏆 Bottomline: Podia’s payment processing is straightforward with Stripe and PayPal support, though PayPal can’t handle subscription payments. The EU/VAT tax calculation is a nice bonus, saving you from tax headaches if you sell to European customers.
Podia integrations
Podia keeps things simple with built-in connections to payment systems, email tools, and calendar apps.
While Podia has its own email marketing features with basic automation, it plays nice with most other email platforms too.

If your email marketing platform is not on this list, you can utilize their Zapier integration.

🙁 But it doesn’t integrate with Make.com (a much more powerful and affordable Zapier alternative, i.e the daily automation driver).
🏆 Bottomline: They are adding integrations rapidly. As of now, they have integrations with the major email marketing providers and also Zapier. I hope they’ll soon release the integration with other tools as well.
Pricing and discount
When it comes to pricing, Podia offers two different plans: Mover and Shaker.

Here’s something important – the Mover plan at $39/month comes with a 5% transaction fee.
That means Podia takes a cut from every sale you make. This is quite different from their earlier creator-friendly stance.
You know what’s interesting?
They used to market themselves as a platform with zero transaction fees just a couple years back.
And heads up – if you want to use their email marketing features, you’ll need to pay extra for their email add-on.
It costs you:
- $50/month for up to 10,000 subscribers
- $109/month for 20,000 subscribers
- $198/month for 50,000 subscribers
- $330/month for up to 100,000 subscribers
… in addition to your regular pricing plans.
Even though Podia’s email features are pretty basic, creators still love using them.
It just makes life easier having everything in one place – your courses, community, and email marketing.
Let’s talk about support.
Podia really shines when it comes to helping you out.
They’ve got it all – live chat for quick help, detailed support docs, helpful YouTube videos, and even weekly demos and Q&As to get you unstuck.
🏆 Bottomline: Podia’s pricing is straightforward but not the cheapest option out there. The 5% transaction fee on the Mover plan ($39/month) is a bummer, and you’ll need to pay extra for email marketing features. But hey, their awesome support makes up for it a bit – you get live chat, docs, videos, and weekly help sessions.
How Podia compares to competitors?
Throughout this blog post, I reviewed Podia.
Let me break down how Podia stacks up against other platforms that help you sell digital stuff.
- Podia vs. Kajabi: Here’s the deal – Podia is yours if you want something simple and budget-friendly for selling digital products. Kajabi? It’s for folks who need fancy marketing tools and don’t mind paying more for them.
- Podia vs. Gumroad: Think of Gumroad as Podia’s simpler cousin (close enough). It’s great for basic digital product sales, and their Discover feature can get you some organic sales. But if you’re big on marketing, you might find it a bit basic.
- Podia vs. Payhip: Want to save some cash? Payhip is one of the most affordable alternatives to Podia. It does pretty much everything Podia does, plus you can sell physical products – something Podia can’t do.
- Podia vs. ThriveCart: ThriveCart is a powerhouse for both physical and digital products. Their “Thrive Learn” tool handles courses well, and they’ve got some serious marketing features with sales funnels, order bumps, and split testing.
- Podia vs. Patreon: Here’s the thing – Podia is your all-in-one shop for digital products, courses, and community building. Patreon? It’s more about getting recurring support from fans. Great for steady income, but not so hot on the course creation and marketing side.
FAQs on Podia
- Is Podia better than Teachable? Teachable is only for courses, whereas with Podia, you can sell courses, memberships (using community), coaching, and other digital products.
- Is Podia better than Kajabi? Podia is cheaper compared to Kajabi. Also, it offers great features for the price. On the other hand, Kajabi is a very high-priced solution that offers more powerful marketing and customization features than Podia.
- What is Podia for? With Podia, you can sell courses and digital products like webinars, bundles, coachings, or any other digital files.
- Is Podia good for blogging? No. Podia doesn’t come with a blogging feature. You need to use external blogging platforms like WordPress or Ghost.
Is Podia really for you? 🏆
Looking for a budget-friendly alternative to Kajabi? Podia might be what you need.
Here’s the thing though – Podia tries to do everything, but doesn’t excel at any one thing. The features are pretty basic.
In this regard:
If you’re mainly interested in creating courses, check out Teachable or Thinkific. They’ve got more specialized course creation tools that’ll serve you better.
That said, Podia gives you good bang for your buck with its features.
One big drawback? No mobile app.
That’s a real pain point for me.
That wraps up my review on Podia.