Let’s review Podia more closely  considering different use cases in mind.

As I told you, Podia is an affordable all-in-one platform that allows you to sell online courses, coaching, webinars, community, and other digital products.

It offers many features and is a great alternative to other platforms like Thinkific or Teachable for a much lower price.

Upfront bottomline

Podia is an all-in-one platform for selling memberships, webinars, and digital products.

However, it may not be suitable for those who need course compliance or full-fledged community features. Instead, you can look at Teachable or Circle.so.

Its marketing features may feel limited for advanced marketers coming from ClickFunnels or Kajabi.

Nonetheless, Podia is a versatile platform that recently added support for webinars, coaching sessions, and communities, showing that they are constantly improving to meet the needs of their users.

To summarize, Podia offers good value for money. With the ability to create unlimited products, it offers unlimited storage and bandwidth to host your videos. However, it lacks advanced marketing features, course-compliance features, and customization options like Kajabi and Teachable.

For more information and my complete Podia review, refer below.

Podia pros and cons

What do I like about Podia ?

• Podia has a user-friendly UI/UX with great attention to detail. You can sell various digital products, including courses, memberships, webinars, bundles, communities, and downloads. All their features work in an integrated fashion, sustaining your state of “flow” as a creator.
• Podia offers unlimited courses and products, unlike Teachable or Kajabi, which have a product limit.
• You get unlimited storage and bandwidth to host your videos (say goodbye to Vimeo or Wistia).
• It has a built-in email marketing tool that supports broadcasts and campaigns that supports automation conditions. This is a big advantage compared to platforms like Teachable, which doesn’t come with email support.
• It integrates with a good number of email service providers, payment gateways (majorly Stripe and PayPal), and analytics tools. Also, it has integration with platforms like Zapier.
• Podia comes with built-in course completion certificates, community (which can be used as memberships), and quizzes. However, their communities’ feature is not so feature-rich.
• Podia supports embeddable checkouts and even upsells. But, it lacks advanced marketing features like order bumps, downsells, and cart abandonment.
• Podia has a built-in affiliate program for your audience. However, it’s available only on their Shaker plan, which costs $75/mo.
• Recently, it has introduced a website live chat feature to connect with prospect customers in real-time. With this, you can resolve users’ queries, understand their needs, and engage with them.

What we don’t like about Podia?

• With Podia, you get lower course completion rates compared to say, Teachable since it does not have course-compliance features or other advanced LMS-specific features.
• Podia’s customization features are poor, with just a basic builder and a few modules. Don’t expect any CSS/HTML customization options to hack some features in.
• Its email marketing tool lacks pre-made templates, personalization fields (big one), a drag-and-drop editor, and split testing.
• Podia supports a few lesson types and lacks Adobe Captivate, Articulate Storyline, and HTML5 content assessments if you’re in for a more academic-style setup.
• Its affiliate program lacks affiliate-specific commissions (really!) and multiple commission tiers.
• Podia doesn’t have a mobile app, and there are no plans to release one soon. This is a very big con compared to other platforms like Teachable and Kajabi! It lacks video analytics and heatmaps, unlike dedicated LMS tools like Kajabi and Thinkific. These are much essential to analyze –
  • Which part of the video are students engaging.
  • Where are they dropping off?
  • What is the engagement rate.
• Podia lacks course-compliance features. Unlike Teachable or Thinkific, it lacks enforcing:
  • Quiz completion
  • Graded assessments
  • Video watch duration

Podia review – latest updates

Recently Podia introduced feature updates like –

• Product access duration – Now, you can limit product access duration so that until the set date and time customers have access to the product. For example – For courses, you can set access duration as 15 days starting from their enrollment.
• Sign up limits on product purchases. You can use this for scarcity marketing and motivate users to purchase your products quickly.
• Ability to offer lead magnets and opt-in freebies to grow your email list faster.
• Improved site editor with new formatting options for images and videos.

Podia’s supported product types

Online courses

Podia has a pretty good course feature. The curriculum is divided into sections and lessons. For adding course content, it supports text, files, quizzes, embeds, and coachings.

Note: Podia, as of now, doesn’t support any other assessments except multiple-choice quizzes. If you are looking for graded assessments, random question banks, or surveys, I suggest you go with alternatives like Kajabi or LearnWorlds.

Compared to dedicated course platforms like Teachable or Thinkifc, Podia lacks behind.

• It doesn’t support cloud uploading and bulk uploading of course content.
• You can’t add multiple content types inside the same lesson.
• Doesn’t support custom codes inside the lessons.
• Lacks course compliance features like – enforcing video watch duration, lesson completion order/quiz completion.
• There are video analytics reports and heatmaps.

To increase student engagement, Podia supports comments. You can make them visible/locked/hidden.

What’s more?

• With Podia, you can prelaunch (waitlist) the courses to validate your idea. You can provide early bird access to the customers and create marketing buzz around your product.
• It provides course completion certificates which you can customize as needed. These are available only in its Shaker plan which costs $89/mo.
• You can drip feed the content and send emails when content becomes available.

Coachings

Podia simplifies your coaching sessions by consolidating all the essentials in one place. Whether you’re organizing group coaching calls or providing one-on-one coaching, Podia has got you covered.

To help users book the sessions easily, it gives integrations with SavvyCal, Acuity, or YouCanBookMe. You just need to embed these on your service page or add a custom calendar link.

1. If you are just beginning your coaching business, you can pre-sell them to validate the idea before a big launch.
2. You can set signup limits, access durations, and program start dates to encourage users to book sessions early.
3. As a marketing strategy, you can sell coaching as an upsell to your products and vice versa. If you want to provide more value to your audience, you can bundle them with other digital products like courses, webinars, digital downloads, or communities.

Through Podia’s website, you can sell unlimited coaching sessions unlike Teachable or Kajabi

Digital downloads

You can sell any type of digital product with Podia. It can be –

• Templates
• Cheatsheets
• Digital prints
• Workbooks
• eBooks
• Spreadsheets
• Etc

You can add as much content as you like. There is no limit to the amount of content that you add.

Also, you can build your email list by offering free digital downloads as lead magnets. Setting up an email funnel will allow you to nurture leads and sell paid products using its built-in email marketing tool.

It is also possible to sell digital downloads as upsells for other products. In this way, you can increase the average order value for your customers.

For accepting payments, you can create a beautiful sales page and integrate it with Stripe or PayPal.

Webinars

Webinars are a great way to connect with the audience in real time. Podia lacks native streaming, but it provides integration with Zoom and YouTube Live.

You can directly sell access to the live events/masterclasses/webinars that you host on Zoom or YouTube Live.

Simply share the Zoom signup or live link inside the courses/membership posts or in emails.

One of the best things about Podia is that “Webinar Replays” are automatically made available. Those who missed the live sessions can purchase these for a fee.

Unlike tools like Kajabi, Podia lacks the ability to send automatic event reminders. The email campaigns must be manually set up to send follow-up emails before 24 hours, 1 hour, and when the event starts.

Note: As of now, Podia doesn’t support recurring events. Please note that any recurring events created on Zoom will not appear in the dashboard.

Buying a Zoom webinar from the site:

Users can purchase access to the webinar directly from your sales page when it goes live. For this, first, any of the payment gateways should be connected.

Product bundles

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Bundles are a great way to sell multiple products at once. You can generate more revenue by –

• Selling multiple products for a single price (at a cost lower than the individual products). This helps in increasing your average order value (AOV).
• Motivate customers to purchase new products.
• Create customized bundles based on the user’s personas. For example – blogger bundle, LMS bundle, course creator bundle, etc.

Additionally, you can create membership plans based on the type of bundles. This encourages members to upgrade their membership tiers to access premium content.

Bottom line: Podia is the best digital platform for selling courses and all kinds of products under one roof. To increase conversions, you can sell them as upsells or bundle them with other products.

Communities and memberships in Podia

Podia just have basic community features. Currently, it supports members, posts, topics, comments, and likes. That’s it.

If you want to build a strong community with your audience, hosting your communities on Facebook Groups is not advisable as there will be a lot of distractions that hurt users’ engagement.

Though Podia’s community cannot replace dedicated community tools like Circle.so or Tribe.so, it gets the job done.

• As of now, you can create only one community. Unlike its competitors like Kajabi or Thinkific, it doesn’t support multiple channels or spaces.
• But you can create as many topics as possible to keep the conversations organized.
• You can use communities to create memberships. To create multiple membership tiers, you can make use of subscriptions.
  • Also, you can create private groups and masterminds and keep premium content access to higher membership labels. This encourages members to go with higher subscriptions. If you need a dedicated membership platform, you can refer to these platforms.

Gamification:

Podia completely lacks gamification features such as points, rewards, leaderboards, badges, rankings, etc.

If you want, you can incorporate gamification by manually implementing the tasks. It is time consuming. But there is no other way as of now.

For example – You can play with Podia tags to achieve this.

• You can create tags like active members, inactive members, customers, etc.
• Based on their activity, you can offer them coupons, free access to masterclasses/webinars, and much more.

Note: If you are more concerned about user engagement and genuinely need more robust gamification features, I recommend you go with Podia alternatives.

Recently, Podia has introduced several updates to the community. These include –

• Now, you can tag community members to mention them in chat, posts, welcome new members, ask for feedback from specific members, etc.
• Several filter options are available to help you find, organize, and manage your audience list easily.

Bottomline: If you want to build a thriving online community or want to scale your existing community with excellent gamification, you can consider tools like Skool or Circle.so.

Design and customization features

Podia comes with a basic website builder that you can use to design your entire website, landing pages, product pages, checkout, and thank you pages.

You can also create your own custom pages.

To begin designing a page, Podia offers pre-built email landers, link pages, and full website templates. If you use a full website template, Podia will automatically create some essential pages for you, such as:

• Home page
• About page
• Service page
• ToS page

Below are the blocks available to design the pages

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

You can add favicon images, cookie popup scripts, and sticky product banners to product pages.

The best thing is to duplicate the sections to design the pages quickly. You can create one base section (headers/footers/author box) and use it across multiple pages. This is a quick time saver.

Note: Their site builder is geeky and not flexibility as dedicated site builders like Squarespace or CMS like WordPress. Unlike Teachable, there is no custom coding feature.

You can check this link to see how the Podia creators have built stunning websites and online stores to sell their products. Also, Podia has built this demo site using the templates available in the Podia account.

Bottomline: Despite its shortcomings when it comes to page templates, Podia offers a decent number of customization options. There are a few blocks available for designing pages. Besides that, it is not possible to customize it with HTML or custom CSS. Nevertheless, the features may be sufficient for most non-techies.

Sales and marketing features

For effective marketing, Podia has several features like –

• Upsells
• Coupons
• Embeds
• Prelaunch
• Affiliates
• Customer messaging

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

Podia products can be embedded on your website. Simply copy the embed code from your product and paste it as custom HTML to display on the page.

To integrate Podia with your site quickly, embed a link that triggers a modal popup. This allows your audience to checkout if you already have a sales landing page on WordPress, ClickFunnels, or other platforms.

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 affiliate-specific commission rates and multiple commission tiers.

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

Customer messaging

Unlike other digital platforms, Podia has website live chat feature. This helps you to connect with prospect users in real-time, know their requirements, provide them with personalized answers, and convert them into your customers.

• There are no limits on visitors, customers, and chats. It supports unlimited everything.

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.

Email marketing and automation

Podia’s built-in email marketing tool supports both broadcasts and sequences. You can use this tool –

• To capture emails. Build your email list by embedding the sign-up forms anywhere on the web pages. Podia collects all the emails that you can use further.
• Automated campaigns – Create automated drip email campaigns by specifying the email entry and exit conditions.
  • Available entry conditions –
    • Signs up for product
    • Subscribed for waitlist emails
    • Joined community plan
    • Tagged with
  • Available exit conditions –
    • Text
    • Signs up for a product
    • Joins community plan
    • Tagged with:
• Create sales funnels – Trigger your drip campaigns when the entry-level conditions satisfy.

Podia, as of now, just has a basic text editor.

Unlike dedicated email marketing tools like MailChimp, there is no drag-and-drop email builder.

There are some downsides like –

• It lacks email templates.
• No support for custom-coded emails.
• Lacks custom form fields (it only has {first_name}).

When it comes to analytics, you will get various metrics like: Sent, Open, Click, Sale, Revenue, Bounce, Unsubscribe.

All its paid plans support unlimited email sequences. But based on the plan, there are restrictions on the number of broadcast emails and imported emails.

Bottomline: If you just need a basic email marketing tool, this is more than enough. For features like lists, split testing, drag n drop editor, mail templates, and email automation, you can consider third-party platforms like Convertkit, MooSend, or MailerLite.

Payment processing

Before selling any digital products from Podia, you need to 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 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.

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.

Note: Podia supports EU/VAT tax calculation. You don’t have to remit the taxes if your students are from Europe.

Analytics and reports

To analyze the performance of each product, Podia gives various metrics like –

• Comments
• Waitlists
• Customers
• Sales generated
• Revenue
• Pending revenue

In the dashboard, you will get quick access to –

• Community analytics
• Sales analytics
• Audience analytics

When it comes to course reports, you don’t have individual student reports. Also, Podia lacks video analytics and heatmaps. These data will help you figure out how students are engaging with your videos, where they are dropping off, their engagement rate, etc.

Bottomline: Though Podia has recently introduced various new metrics updated its analytics, it is not powerful as its competitor tools like Kajabi or Teachable.

Podia integrations

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

As of writing this review, Podia had integrations with:

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 release the integration with other tools as well.

Pricing and discount

Podia recently released its free plan. With the Podia free plan, you can sell only one coaching product or digital download, and you’ll pay an 8% fee for each sale.

Surprisingly, this plan doesn’t let you create full courses, but you can make drafts of courses.

Its premium pricing starts at $39/mo, but it lacks features like affiliates, third-party code, embedded checkouts, 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. If you consider going for Mover or Shaker plan, you can save $72 or $168, respectively, on your purchase.

Support:

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

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

Bottomline: Podia’s pricing is affordable. Its free plan is not feature-rich, but the paid plans worth the money you spend. Also, if you are an advanced marketer, its Shaker plan would be ideal for you. Choose the annual plan to save a huge discount .

How Podia compares to competitors ?

Podia vs. Payhip

Payhip is one of the cheapest alternatives to Podia. It also supports digital downloads, coachings, courses, and memberships.

Where Payhip excels over Podia?

• Even you can sell physical products on Payhip.
• It has a built-in blogging platform (with SEO settings) for content marketing.
• It has marketing features like referrals, cross sales, and customer reviews. They have an approval system that can detect which reviewers have purchased the product with a verified badge next to their reviews.

Its lowest pricing starts at $29/mo. Click here to see all the pricing details.

Podia vs. ThriveCart

ThriveCart is one of the best online platforms for selling all your physical and digital products. Unlike Podia, it doesn’t support coaching and webinars. But you can host them on any third-party platforms and sell them using ThriveCart’s built-in checkout.

Notable features:

• Recently, it has introduced its LMS tool called “ThriveLearn”. It comes with different course layouts, bundles, content dripping, automations, and much more.
• It excels when it comes to marketing. It has sales funnels, order bumps, cart abandonment, automation rules, A/B split testing, etc.
• It comes with a one-time payment of $495/lifetime. There is also a Pro account available for an additional $195.

Podia vs. Kajabi

Kajabi is a tool created for marketers. Along with courses, coaching, memberships, and communities, it also supports podcasts.

Where does Kajabi excel over Podia?

• It is a marketing centric platform. It has features like sales funnels, automations, advanced email marketing, mobile apps, blogging, all built with in the platform.
• It has mobile apps for both iOS and Android (both user and creator apps available).
• Unlike Podia, users can completely custom code in Kajabi. On its highest plan costing $399/mo, you will get access to its code editor.
• Recently, it has acqu