In this review, let’s compare Teachable and Podia.
Teachable is a specialist in course creation.
On the other hand, Podia is an all-in-one platform. It can be considered as a jack-of-all-trades but master of few.
This blog post is very comprehensive and in-depth comparison (based on my 3+ years of course design experience with both these platforms).
Let’s explore these two platforms!
| Features | Teachable | Podia |
| Advanced course features | Specialist with features like better course compliance, assessments, and course analytics. | Limited |
| Community | Newly launched with limited features | Pretty good |
| Selling digital products | No | Yes with checkout embeds feature |
| Emails | None. | Has email marketing and automation abilities |
| Free migration | No | It is possible with Shaker and annual Mover plan |
⚡ Quick Decision
What I like about Teachable compared to Podia? 👍
- Better course features: Specialist platform with improved course compliance, assessments, and analytics.
- Better analytics: Includes improved course-level analytics, per-student engagement metrics, heat maps, and retention graphs.
- Customizable design: Offers superior design and customization options, including a power editor on their highest plan.
- Powerful certification mechanisms: Includes powerful certification mechanisms with liquid templating abilities.
- Mobile app for students: Provides an iOS app for students, unlike Podia.
- EU VAT handling: Has inbuilt EU VAT handling capability, eliminating the need for integration with services like Quaderno.
What I like about Podia compared to Teachable? 👍
- Unlimited products: Podia allows unlimited product creation, Teachable limits to 5 on their $59/month plan.
- Digital downloads: Podia offers a feature for selling digital products with embedded checkouts.
- Email marketing: Podia provides a superior email marketing platform with various features.
- Integration: Podia integrates with Zoom and YouTube Live, also offers good customer support and migration service.
Upfront bottom line 🎈
If you’re seeking an all-in-one platform to sell courses, create communities, sell digital products, and utilize robust email marketing software, Podia is an excellent choice.
On the other hand, Teachable is a specialist in course creation.
But one thing to note is that it has recently raised its subscription costs and now only supports up to 5 courses on its beginner plan, leading to criticism from existing customers who were forced out of the platform.
Both of these platforms lack a comprehensive community feature and do not offer any mobile apps.
However, if I would be picking one platform, I would pickPodia as they have an impressive track record of rolling out new features and are more creator-friendly.
Interface
Both these platforms are highly refined and have great UI/UX.
When you log in to Teachable, you can see the below screen.
It’s nothing exceptional, but it’s good.
And, now let’s look at Podia.
When you first log in to Podia it’ll ask you whether to create:
- Membership
- Online Course
- Digital Download
You can create any of these.
Unlike the sidebar-centric UI of Teachable, Podia has a navigation-bar-centric UI which is more familiar; at least to me 👍
🏆 Winner: Podia. Feels intuitive and easy on eyes. Nevertheless, both of these platforms have really good UI/UX and feel modern.
Course creation
Course uploading and structuring
In both these apps, you just need to create a new course and give it some details.
Once you create a course, you’ll be presented with the curriculum builder.
Here you can add sections, and under each section, you have your own lectures.
Teachable offers flexibility when it comes to adding content to your lectures.
You are not restricted to just one lesson type, and can add various types of content such as files, texts, quizzes, and custom code (say embed a survey tool) on one lesson.
Now let’s look at Podia:
With Podia, each lesson can only have one content format, meaning that each lesson can only be a video, text, or quiz.
For example, you cannot have the lesson video and the quizzes related to it in a single lesson.
As a result, you might end up with a lot of lessons for each content type.
Now let’s talk about course delivery:
Both Teachable and Podia have drip content features for “sections”.
You can consider dripping the sections of your training course over a period of time to ensure that students don’t binge-watch your lectures.
And also, on both these platforms, you can set email announcements/notifications to the students whenever a new section/module is unlocked. This is a great feature to have.
👍 All of the course creation features available in Podia are also present in Teachable.
But 3 features of Teachable I would like to see 🤔 in Podia are:
- Automatic student progress tracking: Currently, when issuing certificates with Podia, students need to manually click the completion button.
- Enforcing lesson order: It’s important for better student compliance and dictating how they consume the course.
- Enhanced course analytics: For example, the ability to view per student course analytics for better accountability is an essential feature.
Student experience
Teachable is known for its familiar course interface and feature-rich player.
Students can view the curriculum in the sidebar, adjust the player settings, take lesson-specific notes (like Udemy), and join discussions with other students in the discussion area.
Podia also comes with a similar interface.
But unlike Teachable, Podia lacks a note-taking feature for students.
All in all, both Podia and Teachable have good course interfaces, very intuitive and feels at home.
Neither platform offers multiple templates for the course experience, resulting in a uniform course page design for all instructors using the platforms.
🏆 Winner: Teachable. It has a more feature-rich experience for students.
Theme and page builder
With Teachable, you have a default theme that you can customize. This theme will be applied across your entire site.
There are several options to tweak like colors, fonts, logos, buttons, etc.
And also, there’s a more powerful editor for editing the course sales page, checkout page, and thank you page.
👍 The higher plans of Teachable also come with the Power Editor feature. It allows you to directly edit the design files of your site, resulting in much more customization possibilities for developers and designers.
But for course creators like me, I found it to be an overkill!
Now about Podia:
Unlike Teachable, Podia doesn’t have various themes that can be applied site-wide.
But it offers various templates.
These give you a nice little head start!
Podia’s page builder provides various blocks and sections for effective page creation.
However, the number of blocks is relatively limited compared to platforms like WordPress or Kajabi.
Additionally, Podia lacks a separate feature for including multiple blocks in a single section.
But, many might find Podia’s page builder limited and opt for dedicated page building software like Elementor for WordPress or LeadPages.
🏆 Winner: Using Podia’s page builder is easier since it is visual, unlike Teachable’s power editor which is only available in their highest plan and involves technicalities and coding.
Community feature
Conventionally, Teachable lacked a specific community feature.
But recently, in 2023, Teachable has also rolled out community feature, but it is pretty basic.
You can create a community and select students that are enrolled in specific courses to get access to the community.
And also you can create various categories and also tags for your community to categorize the content.
There’s nothing more to this.
In Podia, you can set up a community where you can create plans with different pricing and restrict access to the content for a specific plan.
Although their community feature is limited, it still has all the essential features for good engagement from the students.
🏆 Winner: Tie. Both Teachable and Podia have basic community features. However, if you are interested in a more community-centric learning approach, you may need to consider dedicated community building platforms like Circle. Even Kajabi, which has recently rolled out a lot of community gamification features, could be a good choice.
Digital products
Teachable lacks features for selling digital products.
In contrast, Podia is an all-in-one platform offering course creation, membership, and digital product selling capabilities.
So if you are thinking of selling your own digital products, along with your online courses, then Podia maybe a way to go.
However with Teachable if you want to sell your own digital products in the future, you may need some separate shopping cart apps like Samcart or ThriveCart to enable this.
🏆 Winner: Podia (Teachable does not have digital product selling)
Checkout experience
Both Podia and Teachable offer one-page checkout functionality that is useful for selling high-ticket offers also supports upsells feature.
Here’s Teachable:
The Teachable checkout page is optimized for conversions, allowing you to write bullet points, add guarantee badges, and overall provides a more conversion-friendly aspect to this.
It also allows you to add order bumps for add-on products, maximizing profits.
This order bump functionality is not available in Podia.
Podia recently upgraded their checkout process, now offering a single-page option!
Additionally, Podia has a feature called embedded checkout functionality, which enables users to embed a specific button or link that triggers a pop-up.
This can significantly maximize your earnings, especially if you have a blog that receives a lot of traffic.
👉 For instance, if you have a travel blog and you share some trip-related information about Switzerland, you can upsell them to purchase (right in the popup) your complete guide on a trip to Switzerland!
🏆 Winner: Tie. While Teachable has good customization options, Podia has checkout embed functionality. I personally like Podia in this regard though!
Email marketing
Teachable comes with quite a few basic email marketing features. It allows you to email your course students to keep the communication going regularly.
On the other hand, Podia has dedicated email marketing features like:
- Drip campaigns
- One-off newsletters
The Drip campaign enables you to send your students or pre-launch offer signups a series of emails over time.
When creating emails, Podia offers a wide range of customizable templates. They are continuously enhancing their email marketing capabilities by adding new features.
For instance, they recently made a significant update which enables you to send highly-targeted emails to a specific audience segment.
You can create segments based on tags, purchased products, memberships, and even the revenue they generate.
In this case, you can’t overlook the presence of integrated email marketing software inside an all-in-one platform, as it leads to many emergent benefits that may not be possible when using separate, siloed apps.
🏆 Winner: Podia. Teachable doesn’t come with any email marketing features.
Integrations
Podia has a larger number of direct integrations with various email marketing, community engagement, and analytic services.
It also integrates with Zoom and YouTube to let people host webinars directly on the platform.
However, Teachable has fewer direct integrations compared to Podia.
With Teachable, you may need to rely more on Zapier to connect with external apps.
Payment processors
To start receiving payments from your students, you need to set up your payment processors with both Teachable and Podia.
With Teachable, students can pay through their credit cards (via Stripe Express) or PayPal. With Teachable payments, you can choose to receive funds daily, weekly, or monthly.
Since this is Teachable’s proprietary payment gateway, you also get additional features such as automatic calculation, collection, and release of taxes on your behalf.
Also, the best thing about Teachable is that it handles EU/VAT tax, so you don’t have to worry about remitting the taxes. It has its own service called “backoffice” to handle complex payouts and affiliate payouts.
On the other hand, Podia integrates with Stripe and PayPal for payment processing.
Also, they recently added that customers can now pay with Apple Pay, Google Pay, and iDEAL.
Once the payment is made, it will be sent to your bank account or PayPal account within two business days.
🏆 Winner: Teachable. It does more compliance and back-office things for you.
Affiliate management
Both Teachable and Podia offer you to implement affiliate marketing functionality.
When it comes to managing your affiliates, both of these tools offer similar features.
👎 However, with Podia, there’s no ability to set affiliate-specific commission rates.
Also, you need to note that the affiliate marketing feature is only present in Teachable’s Pro plan, which costs $159/month, and Podia’s Shaker plan, which also costs $89/month.
It is available in the second-tier plans for both Podia and Teachable.
Pricing and support
Podia’s pricing structure includes two main plans: Mover at $39/month (with a 5% transaction fee) and Shaker at $89/month. They also offer a Podia Email plan.
For most users, the Mover plan provides sufficient features.
However, if you’re looking to avoid transaction fees or need affiliate marketing capabilities, you’ll need to opt for the Shaker plan, which comes at $89/month.
On the other hand, the Basic plan of Teachable comes with a 5% transaction fee.
Both Pro and Pro+ plans don’t have transaction fees.
Previously, Teachable had the capability for you to create unlimited products on their basic plan.
However, in 2023, they removed this feature, leading to a backlash from many users who felt they were being held hostage and forced to pay to upgrade to a higher plan to have the unlimited feature. You can read more details here.
🏆 Winner: Podia. Because it doesn’t have any limitations and offers live chat support with all their paid plans.
Bottomline
If you’re an online trainer who is solely focused on course creation and desires robust features such as superior course compliance, certification, and student analytics, Teachable is your best choice.
However, if you need an all-in-one platform for selling digital products and creating communities, and also want advanced email marketing automation, you should opt for Podia.
While Podia does offer features like email marketing, a website builder, and a community feature, they are quite basic, and they lack depth.
Furthermore, both of these platforms lack robust community features and don’t offer mobile apps, which are, of course, deal-breakers.
As a side note, if you’re looking for an all-in-one platform with more comprehensive features, you might want to consider Kajabi.
