Today, I’m presenting you with a very insightful review of Podia with different use-cases in mind.

Podia is one of the best all-in-one digital content selling platforms, which allows you to sell online courses, coaching, webinars, community, and other digital products. It is really a great affordable online course creation platform with quite a good number of features 🔥.

Unlike other platforms like Thinkific or Teachable, Podia allows you to accomplish far more things for a much lower price.

Who Podia is for? 👇

You may want to check out Podia if you’re considering Kajabi (premium price) but don’t want such a commitment. Additionally, if you plan on selling memberships, webinars, and digital products, Podia is the product for you. 👍

I’ve been testing out the Podia platform for quite a while, and now let me present my review on Podia.

Features	Podia
Type	Online product selling platform
Free plan ✨	Available
Transaction fees	8% on its free plan
Starting price 💲	The lowest plan costs $39/mo – Visit the Podia pricing page
Best for selling	Courses, coachings, memberships, and digital products
Mobile app 📱 available?	No
Podia examples	👀 See 12 live examples of the sites built with Podia
Live demo	Watch weekly live demo: Every Tuesday at 2pm ET
Weekly Q&A sessions	Join free live weekly Q&A sessions 📷 to get answers to your questions live!
Podia videos	Want to master Podia to grow your business? Then watch Podia videos and skyrocket your sales
Webinars in Podia	Podia comes with a webinar feature. It integrates with YouTube Live and Zoom.   Podia will automatically store the replays so that customers can access it at any time. – Explore Podia webinars
Integrations	Podia integrates with: email service providers Payment processors Webinars and live streams Zapier, etc – View all Podia integrations
Podia updates ✔	View all the new features and improvements to Podia
Competitors 🏹	Teachable, Thinkific, Kajabi, LearnWorlds

Upfront bottomline ✨:

Podia is an affordable all-in-one platform best suited for course creators, entrepreneurs, and marketers. With this tool, you can sell your courses, coaching, communities, memberships, webinars, and other digital downloads.

Choose Podia if –
➡ You are a course creator and need an affordable LMS solution.
➡ You are a marketer and you want to sell your digital products.
➡ Need a built-in community feature to increase student engagement.
➡ No don’t need a mobile app and your target audience is marketers.
➡ Basic marketing features like discounts, coupons, and pre-launces would be enough for you.
➡ You don’t need a custom coding feature.

What do I like about Podia 👍?

• Podia has a very refined UI/UX, and is easy to use. It doesn’t have any learning curve. You’ll find it intuitive to set it up.
• With Podia, you can sell various products like courses, memberships, webinars, bundles, community, or other digital downloads.
• Podia supports unlimited courses and products 🙌, unlike Kajabi, which puts a cap on the number of products you can create depending on the pricing plan.
• It gives you unlimited storage and bandwidth to host your videos so that you don’t need to use Vimeo or Wistia.
• Podia has a built-in affiliate program for your audience. But this feature is available only on its Shaker and Earthquaker plans.
• Its built-in email marketing supports broadcasts and campaigns 📧. You can add entrance and exit conditions for campaigns to begin and end.
• It has a good number of integrations with various email service providers, payment gateways, and analytics tools. Their Zapier integration is available with plenty of triggers and actions.
• Podia has a pre-launch mode that allows you to build buzz around the product and capture the email addresses of potential buyers.
• With Podia, you have a 0% transaction fee on sales (on paid plans), whereas Teachable charges you 5% even in their premium plan. In this regard, they highlight that they are creator-centric.
• Podia comes with built-in certificates, community, and quizzes. Its community can be used as memberships.

What I don’t like about Podia 👎?

• Podia’s email composer lacks personalization fields which may result in fewer conversions. Its email marketing tool lacks pre-made templates, drag and drop editor, split testing, etc.
• Podia lacks when it comes to course-compliance features, unlike Teachable.
• Podia is very poor when it comes to customization features. It has just a basic builder with very few modules. It doesn’t support custom CSS/HTML customizations.
• It doesn’t come with landing page builders or funnels to consider as a full alternative to Kajabi or Kartra. You may need to use WordPress or ClickFunnels to create your sales funnel.
• It lacks a free plan like that of Thinkific and Teachable.
• The course blueprints are not available with Podia, unlike Kajabi.
• Podia supports a few lesson types. It lacks Adobe Captivate, Articulate Storyline & HTML5 content, assessments, etc.
• Podia lacks marketing features like order bumps, downsells, cart abandonment, etc.
• Its affiliate program lacks multiple affiliate commission tiers and affiliate-specific commissions.
• It doesn’t have a mobile app.

Podia latest updates:

Podia has recently introduced a free plan, similar to tools like Teachable. This plan comes with a website, email marketing, 1 coaching product, 1 download, and a community. It also charges an 8% transactional fee.

Checkout related updates:

To increase the sales and conversions, Podia has released –

New payment methods – Apple Pay, Google Pay, and iDEAL(making it easy for users to purchase on their mobile phones).

A streamlined, single-page checkout experience:   In order to improve the user experience, they have revamped the checkout flow. Customers can view their purchase details, enter a coupon code, and more – all on one page.  

Added global tax support – You can collect EU/VAT taxes right inside the tools without having to depend on external tools.

Interface

When you log in to Podia, you will see the interface is very clean and minimal. All the features are accessible within three clicks. Also, Podia is straightforward and easy to use. It doesn’t have any learning curve.

You can access all its features straight from the dashboard, as you can see in the screenshot.

Under your profile, you can access site settings, account settings, billing, and site editing options.

Bottomline: The user interface of Podia is very straightforward. All the features offered by Podia are easily accessible without any long clicks. The interface is very refined and not at all overwhelming.

Course creation 📚

In this section, let’s discuss the course creation functionality offered by Podia.

To create a course, you need to head over to the “Products” section, here create a new online course. Your recently created course should be visible under the products section.

Let’s edit the course.

In the next step, you need to add the course content. Its course curriculum consists of sections (nothing but modules) and lessons inside it (like topics).

Podia supports text, embed, quiz, coaching, and files. Compared to its competitors like Thinkific, Podia supports very few lesson types. It lacks assessments, Adobe Captivate, Articulate Storyline, HTML5 content types, and custom codes.

But the best thing is that you can embed the content from over 1900+ platforms.

Here are a few of the top platforms it supports:

• YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion
• Spotify, Soundcloud, Podbean
• Speaker Deck, Slide Share, Presentation, Google Slides
• Twitter, TikTok, Pinterest, Behance
• Typeform, Paper Form, Google Forms
• Github, Codepen

With Podia, you can also have a drip access setup for each section.

Here in this example, if you want to drip/unlock the 2nd section only after one day of purchasing it, you can do it.

This is very helpful in forcing people to regularly log in to their course portal expecting new content. Depending on your marketing strategies, this feature is convenient if you don’t want your students to binge-watch the lectures.

You can also email your students when a new section is unlocked to keep them posted.

The quiz feature also comes in very handy. You can add multiple questions inside a single quiz lecture. Adding quizzes like this ensures that your students stay engaged.

Podia has recently released the certificates feature. When students complete their course, you can send them an email notification with a link to download the certificate. But as of now, Podia lacks certificate templates and also certificate design and customization options.

Let’s see the course pricing options. With Podia, there are three pricing options available – free, one-time payments, and monthly payments.

You can sell the courses in the customer’s native currency. You can also add upsells and offer them an additional discount to increase the cart value.

Bottomline: Creating courses in Podia is a breeze. It has excellent course creation functionalities. However, unlike Teachable or Thinkific, you don’t have features like retention reports, lesson forced completions, assignments, badges, etc.

Memberships and communities 👨‍👨‍👦‍👦

Podia lacks a memberships feature. But it comes with communities that can be used as a membership site. This feature is available on all Podia plans.

You can offer the community for free or create premium plans. You can create paid plans and give free access to your products. This motivates your members to sign up for your community. You can create multiple pricing plans with monthly or yearly subscriptions.

Community supports posts, topics, comments, and likes. You can create various topics for students to interact with.

Bottomline: Podia’s community feature is pretty basic. You can create various access levels, offer the products and let customers subscribe to your membership. Other than this, you don’t have any gamification features.

Other digital products

Apart from selling courses and memberships, you can also sell webinars, bundles, coachings, and other digital files. You can add multiple upsells for all these products. You need to have multiple digital products in your storefront for this feature to work.

You can add sections and files inside each section when it comes to digital downloads, similar to what you do while creating courses (except for the drip-feed feature).

Now let me explain the webinar feature.

To get started with webinars, you need to integrate Podia with Zoom or YouTube Live. You can access upcoming webinars and meetings from the dropdown as you can see in the screenshot. One downside is that the integration does not yet support recurring meetings so they won’t appear in this dropdown.

You can also add the replay videos, add the instructions for attendees, and choose to send reminder emails.

Similarly, you can sell coaching and product bundles.

To sell 121 coachings, you need to integrate with tools like Calendly, SavvyCal, Acuity, or YouCanBookMe and embed your meeting link. You can sell unlimited coachings with Podia. It is even possible to include a coaching module in your courses, allowing your students to book sessions directly through your Podia site.

Now, let me explain product bundling.

Bundling is one of the most effective ways to make people spend more buying your products. It works great if you offer various bonus products with the core product purchase.

You can add as many products as you wish. But note that draft, pre-launch products cannot be added for bundling. But indeed you can add upsells for bundles to increase product sales.

Bottomline: Podia is perfect for selling digital products with a comprehensive product creation interface. You can sell whatever you want. Upsells and discounts help you sell more and skyrocket the conversions.

Email marketing ✉ and automation

Once you have built a solid list, you can leverage Podia’s email marketing to market your products and courses.

Podia supports broadcasts and email campaigns. Broadcasts are nothing but single emails, while the campaigns consist of a series of emails with a delay in sending them.

Podia just has a basic text editor to design your emails. It doesn’t have any pre-made email templates, say unlikeKajabi which provides email templates for affiliate announcements, cart abandonment, new community posts, community connect requests, and much more. Also, it lacks personalization tags and lacks email split testing features.

For campaigns, you can add entry and exit conditions to execute the campaign. You can add as many emails as you wish and add a delay.

Podia lacks advanced automation features for marketing, unlike Kartra or Kajabi (which come with pipelines).

Bottomline: Podia just has a basic email marketing tool with the ability to send broadcasts and email campaigns. It lacks a drag and drop editor, email templates, personalization fields, split testing, and automation features.

Design and Customization 🎨

Podia comes with a basic builder to design your pages and the storefront. It gives very few modules to design your pages, these include text, image, video, testimonials, FAQs, etc. The page builder is not so feature-rich as Kajabi which comes with more number of blocks and design options. Also, Podia doesn’t offer any pre-made templates/themes to design your product pages.

You can customize the colors & fonts, and optimize the design for mobile, tablet, and desktop devices. Also, you can choose to display the details like price, type, description, product availability, etc, for each of your products.

Using the builder you can create your own custom pages as well. There are also options available to add favicon images, add cookie popup script, and sticky product banners on product pages.

Bottomline: Podia offers a decent number of customization features. It provides very few blocks to design the pages. It doesn’t provide any templates to create the pages. Also, it doesn’t support HTML/Custom CSS customizations. But indeed for most non-techie people, the features may be enough.

Marketing features 💰

What’s the use of creating products if you don’t have a marketing strategy in place?

The main feature here is email marketing offered by Podia, where you can create drip and regular campaigns.

I’ve discussed it already.

Either you can use Podia to build your entire funnel (using custom pages, builder, and upsells), or have your funnel set up with WordPress or ClickFunnels and use Podia as an LMS or for product fulfillment.

I would prefer the latter route for more flexibility – say with WordPress.

Podia also has several other features that allow for effective marketing.

• Upsells
• Coupons
• Embed
• Prelaunch
• Affiliates

Upsell:

This option is available for all products. If you have multiple products in your storefront, you can encourage buyers of one product to buy other products immediately upon purchasing the previous products.

For the upsells, you can offer multiple products and an OTO discount to encourage an immediate sale. However, the upsells can’t be added to free, or 100% discounted products.

Coupons:

Coupons are a great way to encourage your audience to buy your products.

With Podia you can offer discounts on:

• All products and community plans
• Products only
• Community plans only
• Specific community plans
• Specific products

You can limit the coupon use, and add the expiry date as well. Note that with Podia you can’t create bulk coupon codes.

Embeds:

You can embed the products you created in Podia on your own website. You just need to head over to your product and copy the embed code.

You need to use the embed code in your website as custom HTML and display it.

In the below example, I’ve included the embed link on my WordPress site.

When you click on the embed link, it’ll trigger a modal popup where your audience can checkout If you already have a sales landing page on WordPress, ClickFunnels, or other platforms – embedding is a quick way to integrate Podia with your site.

Pre-launch:

Podia enables you to prelaunch your offer even before creating your core content.

Pre-launching is a great strategy to test out of the market with your MVP or build up the hype around the product even before the product is created.

When in prelaunch mode, you’ll be able to collect the emails of the prospective buyers and send them emails regularly to keep them warm using the drip emails feature present in Podia emails.

And also optionally, you can make use of survey tools like SurveySparrow along with Podia to know the nature of the audience which in turn will help you with value creation.

Affiliates:

With Podia, you can set up your own affiliate platform for your raving fans to promote your products and drive sales. You can make your affiliate program closed/open/invite-only.

You can set different commission rates for different products. If you want the specific product to be promoted more effectively by your affiliates, you can set it at a higher commission. But note that Podia lacks multiple commission tiers.

After that, you need to start inviting affiliates to sign up and promote your products. Affiliates will be sent an affiliate sign-up link.

With more and more affiliates joining, you can see how many sales and clicks were generated by each of them. Also, you have the option to selectively disable affiliates. You can export the affiliate’s data for manual analysis.

Apart from these, you can export the affiliate’s data for manual analysis. In the affiliates overview you will get metrics like sales, revenue, paid, unpaid, clicks, and conversions to analyze how your affiliate program is growing.

Bottomline: Podia has good features to boost the effectiveness of your marketing. Additionally, it also integrates with Zapier to uncover new use cases. Its upsells, product bundles, and coupons help you sell more. But it lacks features like downsells, order bumps, and advanced automations which take your marketing to the next level.

Payment processors 💸

Before selling any digital product from Podia, you need to connect your bank account or PayPal account to these payment processors.

Podia integrates with Stripe and PayPal for collecting payments from your students.

You need to also note that Podia doesn’t support PayPal for community plans. Because there are some API complications on PayPal’s end, especially when processing recurring payments. So, as of now, for the community plans, only Stripe is supported.

The customers can make use of their credit cards to do the checkout. Typically, payments get processed within 2 days and credited to your bank or PayPal account. This is pretty quick.

Integrations

Podia provides native integrations with payment gateways, email marketing services, streaming services, calendar apps, and also Zapier.

As of writing this review, Podia had integrations with:

• Zoom
• YouTube Live
• Stripe
• PayPal
• ConvertKit
• Mailchimp
• Drip
• AWeber
• ActiveCampaign
• GetResponse
• MailerLite

Its Zapier integration opens up a whole new realm of possibilities. It has 4 triggers and 4 actions for you to play with.

When it comes to sending and receiving payments, it has integrations with PayPal and Stripe. Do note that, accepting and making payments in installments is only possible with Stripe.

You can also integrate Podia with Google Analytics for tracking conversions and visits to the storefront.

You can also paste custom codes inside your Podia to track conversions and run retargeting advertisements.

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 have the integration with other tools as well.

Podia Pricing and Discount 💰

Podia recently released its free plan. But it is not feature-rich as the free plan offered by Thinkific. In the free plan, you can sell only 1 coaching product with 8% transaction fees. This plan doesn’t support courses. But you can create draft courses.

Its premium pricing starts at $39/mo, but it lacks features like affiliates, unlimited coaching products, and priority support. To avail the affiliates feature, you need to go with the Shaker plan at $89/mo.

For most of the users, the Shaker plan would be ideal.

Podia discount 🔖

If you want to save money, you can go with annual plans which offer a 17% discount. That means you can save up to $396 on the Earthquaker plan.

If you consider going for mover or shaker plan, you can save $72 or $168 respectively, on your purchase.

Bottomline: Podia’s pricing is affordable. Its free plan is not feature-rich as Teachable or Thinkific. But its premium plans are very affordable. Also, if you are an advanced marketer, its Earthquaker plan would be ideal for you. If you choose the annual plan you will get $396/year discount 🥰.

Support 👋

Podia provides good support. It has live chat, support documents, YouTube videos, weekly demos, and weekly QAs to assist its customers.

If you purchase its Earthquaker plan you will get priority support, onboarding calls, and monthly creator calls. With these, you can learn to use Podia effectively to grow your business.

Competitors of Podia 🎯 (Podia alternatives)

Podia has various competitors like Kajabi, Teachable, and Thinkific.

Let me discuss these and how they differ from Podia:

Kajabi: Kajabi is a great all-in-one alternative platform to Podia. Similar to Podia, it also comes with courses, memberships, digital products, and also email marketing. I would any day go with Podia instead of Kajabi due to affordable pricing. In Kajabi you have severe limitations. For example, you can create only up to 3 products even in their $119/m plan.

Teachable: If you wish to create only online courses, this is a good alternative to Podia.It excels in one thing – i.e online courses. It has unique features when it comes to courses like course completion certificates, forced completions, student-level compliance reports, forms, surveys, assignments, and much more. They also have a free plan with a 10% transaction fee and even their $39/month comes with a 5% fee.

Thinkific: If you are looking to only create courses, and don’t want to go for Teachable for its high fee then give Thinkific a try. Thinkific has a very generous free plan with no transaction fee, unlike Teachable. It has similar features to Teachable except for the course compliance feature. But you need to remember that Thinkific is not an all-in-one platform like that of Podia or Kajabi.

However, in my view having all the tools under one platform is definitely a way to go. It preserves the optionality for you to sell digital products and build community in the near future

FAQs on Podia ❓

Is Podia really for you? 🏆

If you are looking for an affordable all-in-one alternative to Kajabi, you need to try Podia.

You should consider Teachable or Thinkific instead of Podia if you’re destined to create only training courses. These platforms have a few more advanced features when it comes to creating courses.

For the price, the features offered by Podia are astounding. It’s definitely an excellent value for money.

Podia is for you if you:

• Need an affordable all-in-one platform to sell your courses, digital products, and also build community – without worrying about integrations much.
• Need community features to interact with students.
• Want to earn income by selling webinars and coaching.
• Need a built-in affiliate program.
• The basic marketing features are enough.
• Don’t need advanced automation and funnel features unlike Kajabi or ClickFunnels (not an LMS).

Hope you loved my Podia review.