In this post, we’ll be comparing Mighty Networks and Podia.

Mighty Networks is an all-in-one online community and course platform best suited for course creators, teachers, coaches, and marketers. While Podia is a one-stop digital platform for courses, digital downloads, memberships, webinars, and coaching.

Depending on the requirements, both tools target different audiences

Mighty Networks‘ main USP is its communities and custom-branded mobile apps. It calls its apps Mighty Pro. These apps are truly white-labeled and help in taking your business to the next level.

On the other hand, Podia lacks mobile apps.

Let’s get started with the review and see which platform is best for whom.

What do we like about Mighty Networks over Podia?

• Mighty Networks i s a powerful and feature-rich community tool. It has spaces, templates, customizable feed, events, polls, questions, welcome checklist for new members, and much more. If you want to build a thriving online community or want to scale your existing community, Mighty Networks is the best bet.
• Mighty Networks has match-making features to establish new connections among community members. The members can connect with others based on their category, locality (for offline events!), region, interests, etc. Establishing these online connections help in developing real-life relationships.
• Its community spaces are customizable. You can call spaces channels, groups, classes, or whatever you like. For these spaces, you can add your custom graphics, colors, and logos, to reflect your brand. You also have the ability to do text modifications i.e you can name spaces as classes or classrooms to reflect your brand well. It supports courses and memberships. You can create live cohort courses, content-only courses, or community-based courses. You can sell both courses and memberships as bundles to increase sales.
• It has a native live-streaming feature. This helps you offer coaching services. You can also create events and sell high-ticket masterminds, conferences, etc. If needed, you can even use its native integration with Zoom (for hosting large-scale webinars or events). Mighty Networks has a built-in ambassador program with various levels like bronze, silver, and gold. This motivates members to promote your community, invite new members, and get rewarded for their work.
• It is one of the few platforms that provides completely custom-branded mobile apps. You own these apps and have complete control over them.

What do we like about Podia over Mighty Networks?

• Podia’s course features are more powerful than Mighty Networks. With drip scheduling and pre-launch modes, it allows more content types, course completion certificates, and upsells. If you need more LMS features, choose Podia for courses.
• Podia supports marketing features like upsells, coupons, and discounts. You can add as many upsell as needed. But, Mighty Networks lacks these features.
• As Podia natively integrates with Calendly, SavvyCal, Acuity, and YouCanBookMe, users can easily book coaching sessions and see all appointments in one place.
• Podia has a built-in affiliate program where your audience can promote all your products and earn revenue. You can set product-specific commission tiers. While in Mighty, there is an ambassador program available, and not an affiliate program.

Common downsides:

• Both Mighty Networks and Podia lack community gamification features like points, rankings, and leaderboards. These help in increasing user engagement. If you need these, you can consider tools like Tribe.so or Skool.
• They lack community moderation tools like spam protection, keyword blocking, profanity checking, flagging posts, etc. You can choose Circle.so or Tribe.so to avail of these features.
• Unlike tools like Circle.so or Heartbeat, these don’t support block-based community building. Block-based community design gives you more control and flexibility in customizing the spaces you need.

Latest product updates

Mighty Networks latest update

• Highlighted hashtags – This helps in curating the content from all the spaces. As of now, you don’t have the flexibility to edit the hashtags but you can delete them from the system.
• Collections – These are nothing but folders you can create for organizing spaces for easier categorization. If you want to create spaces or channels on multiple niches this would help you.
• Customized welcome checklist – You can create a welcome checklist by adding gamification strategies to onboard the members and keep them in the loop.

Podia’s latest features.

• It has introduced a generous free plan you can use to explore the tool and get started. Once you grow you can switch to premium plans.
• Improved checkout – It has redesigned its single-page checkout for a more improved user experience.
• You can now set product access duration to create a sense of urgency.

Upfront bottomline:

Mighty Networks is for you if you are mainly looking for feature-rich online communities and you need custom-branded apps to make it easy for customers to connect.

On the other hand, Podia is an affordable digital platform best for digital creators and marketers. Unlike Mighty Networks, it doesn’t offer any mobile apps.

If you also want to sell online courses, both platforms are good enough as they provide basic LMS features (works great for beginners). If you are a course creator/teacher/instructor you don’t have to buy third-party course platforms.

Community features compared

When it comes to communities, Mighty Networks excels over Podia. It has spaces (similar to channels) to manage your conversions. You can create unlimited spaces on all its plans. Whereas its competitors like Circle.so has restrictions on the number of spaces depending on the pricing plans you choose (on its lowest plan you can create only up to 10 spaces).

There are also various space templates available. You have templates for –

• Chat community
• Feed community
• Event or event series
• Cohort-based course
• Content-only course
• Discovery
• Web pages

In the case of Podia, you can create only one community under each account. But you can have multiple subscriptions (to create various pricing tiers). As you know, Podia lacks dedicated memberships. They have designed communities so you can use its multiple subscriptions to create different community/membership tiers. (e.g. Gold, Silver, Bronze). You can consider these levels (subscriptions) as spaces.

If you want to host course-specific communities, you can create dedicated spaces in Mighty Networks. Whereas with Podia, you may need to create subscription plans naming them as courses.

Mighty Networks gives you the flexibility to rename spaces as channels, servers, classes, classrooms, events, etc. Depending on your niche or industry these text modifications would come in handy. For example – For the eLearning industry, you can name spaces as classrooms.

Mighty Networks’ communities support customized feeds, member tags, rich profiles, badges, etc. Badges help identify the members and their position. For example – VIP member, admin, moderator, top affiliate, or member of the week. You can create as many custom badges as you need. If a member has “Member of the week” badge, it inspires the rest of the people to actively participate to earn that badge. This helps in increasing member engagement rate.

On the other hand, Podia’s community supports members, topics, posts, comments, and likes. That’s it. (As told earlier, it lacks a dedicated community. You have to use its memberships as communities).

As I said previously, Mighty Networks has a built-in live-streaming feature. With this, you can host events to connect with your members in real-time. Whereas with Podia, you need to use Zoom or YouTube live integration for live streaming as it lacks native live streaming.

To ease members’ onboarding process, Mighty has a welcome checklist. You can customize this to help guide and onboard them. You can use Zapier “member action” trigger to automate sending a welcome email, adding them to spaces, giving access to products, etc. In the case of Podia, you can use external email marketing tools with Zapier to achieve this.

One more feature of Mighty Networks that is worth mentioning is its online now. This helps members see who is online and chat with them in real time. Podia lacks this.

What’s more?

To establish real-life relationships, Mighty Networks has match-making features. This helps members connect with each other based on their interests, locality, categories, hobbies, etc. Based on members’ geographical areas they can even arrange offline meetups to share more value.

Winner: Mighty Networks. If you need a feature-rich community-building tool for building a thriving online community, Mighty Networks would be the best bet. Its online now, spaces, badges, categories, hashtags, customizable checklists, etc. make communities powerful.

Online courses

Both Mighty Networks and Podia have courses. Unlike dedicated LMS tools like Teachable or Thinkific, these just have basic LMS features.

Both of these don’t offer any course templates. You need to create them from scratch.

Mighty Networks and Podia’s course curriculum consists of sections and lessons. Mighty Networks supports various content types like –

text, video, images, and files. While Podia supports text, embeds, quizzes, coaching, and files.

Unlike tools like LearnWorlds, they lack Adobe Captivate, Articulate Storyline, HTML5 content types, and custom codes.

To avoid students binge watch your lessons, they have a drip scheduling feature. This is the only course compliance feature available. These lack compliance features like –

• Enforcing lecture order
• Video watch duration
• Graded quiz completions.

If you need all these features, you can go with tools like Teachable.

If you are hosting academic courses, Podia has course completion certificates built-in. Mighty Networks lacks this. If you need, you can integrate with third-party tools like Accredible to issue certificates outside the tool.

Note: If you are an academic course creator/a school owner and want to build university-level courses, I highly suggest you go with LearnWorlds. This is purely an academic-level LMS tool. It supports advanced assessments, exams, quizzes, course progress reports, live classrooms, webinars, Webex integration, and much more. To know all its features, you can refer to my LearnWorlds review post.

Winner: Tie. If you are hosting academic courses and you need course completion certificates, go with Podia. If your audience are marketers and you just need a simple LMS tool, Mighty Networks courses would be enough for you.

Mobile apps experience

Mighty Networks calls its mobile apps as Mighty Pro. These are completely custom-branded mobile apps that help users connect with your brand which in turn increases conversions. Podia doesn’t have any mobile apps.

Users can access courses, communities, memberships, and live streams all within the apps. They also support in-app notifications and purchases.

These apps are completely owned by you, and you have complete ownership of them including the data. You can create an immersive experience with its flexible customization options.

They are also offering Done for you service. If you don’t have app-building experience or don’t have time to create the apps, the team will develop the apps for you.

If you are in niches like health & fitness, arts, fashion, lifestyle, and business, these apps are game changers.

You can read a case study by Cristy, founder of Code Red, a multi-million dollar weight loss coaching company. She has moved her community from Facebook Groups to Mighty Pro. Her branded apps helped her keep her members away from all the distractions they faced with Facebook’s algorithm.

Winner: Mighty Networks, obviously.

Sales and marketing features

Podia has a good number of marketing features compared to Mighty Networks. Podia supports coupons, discounts, and unlimited upsells. Mighty Networks has only upsells and discount features. With both, you can offer free trials by setting the plans with zero pricing.

To monetize the community, with both, you can sell paid memberships, gate access to content, create paywalls, and premium event tickets, and charge access for spaces.

Podia even supports course embeds. With this, you can embed the products on your website.

You can add embed links or codes to promote your products. In the above screenshot, I have added an embed link that triggers the popups.

Checkout:

Both Podia and Mighty Networks have built-in checkouts. In case of Mighty Networks, users can purchase on the web and iOS apps. While with Podia, they can purchase only on web.

Podia supports Apple Pay, Google Pay, and iDEAL for checkouts. Mighty Networks supports credit cards, debit cards, or prepaid cards for checkout.

Winner: Podia. It has a good number of marketing features than Mighty Networks. You can offer coupons, discounts, trials, and upsells. While Mighty just supports upsells and discounts.

Reports and analytics

Mighty Networks gives more powerful analytics. You will get reports on members’ data (data on active members, returning members, contributing members, etc.), insights on the content ( gives data on the total number of posts, member posts, etc.), and product purchases.

Podia gives reports on course sales, email broadcast analytics, and affiliates (sales, revenue generated, clicks, conversions, etc).

Winner: Mighty Networks. It has more detailed analytics and gives colorful graphs compared to Podia.

Pricing

Podia is a freemium platform while Mighty Networks is a premium tool. Both have their lowest pricing plans starting at $39/mo.

Mighty Networks’ lowest plan lacks several features like courses, analytics, member data, zapier APIs & workflows. To avail of these features you need to go with its Business plan at $119/mo.

If you need custom-branded mobile apps, you have to go with Mighty Pro. For the pricing details, you should contact the support team.

Podia’s lowest pricing plan costs $39/mo. It supports unlimited downloads, and unlimited coachings & courses. If you need a built-in affiliate program, go with its Shaker plan at $89/mo.

Its highest plan is the Earthquaker plan; it costs $199/mo. It has special features like priority support and onboarding calls.

Winner: Podia. It has a generous free plan and its premium plans are more affordable compared to Mighty Networks. Also, there are no limitations on the number of products that you can create.

Integrations

Compared to Podia, Mighty Networks has fewer native integrations. It provides integrations with –

• MailChimp
• WordPress
• ThriveCart
• ActiveCampaign
• HubSpot
• ConvertKit
• Flodesk
• Etc.

Podia integrates with –

• Payment processors – GPay, Apple Pay, Stripe, and PayPal.
• Email marketing tools – MailChimp, Aweber, ConvertKit, ActiveCampaign, MailerLite, etc.
• Analytics tools – Google Analytics and HotJar.
• Webinar tools – YouTube Live and Zoom.

Both have Zapier integration to connect with 1000’s of other services.

Winner: Podia. It has more number of native integrations.

Wrap up

Choose Mighty Networks if you need –

• A powerful thriving online community.
• A basic LMS tool.
• Custom branded mobile apps.
• Native live streaming.
• Referral system to increase conversions (ambassador program).

Choose Podia if you need –

• An affordable all-in-one digital platform for your business.
• The ability to sell memberships and communities (basic features are enough for you)