Teachable is a more popular and established player in the course platforms industry.

It’s a specialist when it comes to one thing – online courses! And they do it well.

In contrast, Podia is a newer entrant, but it’s making some serious noise because it is an all-in-one platform and is also more creator-centric and transparent.

In this blog post, it’ll be all about comparing Teachable and Podia.

This blog post is very comprehensive and indepth (based on my 3+ years of course design experience with both these platforms).

Feel free to use the table of content (on the right ) to navigate well!

Here’s a quick table for comparison:

 Quick Decision

What I like about Teachable compared to Podia?

• Better course features: It’s a specialist course platform with features like better course compliance, assessments, and course analytics. It has better course compliance functionalities.
• Better analytics: Teachable comes with improved course-level analytics, and you will also be able to see per-student engagement metrics. You also get heat maps and retention graphs for all the videos in your training course, which can help with your instructional design.
• Customizable design: Teachable has better design and customization options than Podia – their power editor gives you a great deal of developmental freedom. But it’s only available on their highest plan.
• Powerful certification mechanisms: It has very powerful certification mechanisms with liquid templating abilities.
• Mobile app for students: It has an iOS app for the students to consume your online course content. On the other hand, Podia doesn’t come with any.
• EU VAT handling: The inbuilt ability to handle EU VAT that very few online platforms come with. You don’t need to integrate it with services like Quaderno.

What I like about Podia compared to Teachable?

• Unlimited Products: Podia allows you to create unlimited products in all of their paid plans without any transaction fees. On the other hand, Teachable has restrictions of only up to 5 published products, even on their $59 per month plan.
• Digital downloads feature: You can sell digital products with the ability to embed checkouts on external sites.
• Superior email marketing platform: Podia has a powerful email marketing platform with drip, broadcast, and automation features.
• Community feature: Podia has a basic community feature whereas Teachable asks you to integrate with Circle.so ($99/month), adding up costs.
• Ease of integration: Podia integrates with Zoom and YouTube Live for webinars. It also has good customer support and migration service.
• Zero transaction fee: There’s a 0% transaction fee for any product purchased. In contrast, Teachable charges you 5% fee even on their paid plan at $39/month.

Upfront bottomline

If you want an all-in-one platform that not only allows you to sell courses but also create communities, sell digital products, and has a powerful Email Marketing software, Podia is the perfect choice.

Unlike Teachable, Podia does not charge transaction fees at weird limitations or limit the number of products you can create.

Teachable is perceived as shady in this regard because they recently increased their subscription costs and replaced their unlimited courses feature with only supporting up to five courses on their beginner plan.

This change led to a lot of backlash from existing customers, who felt like they were being held for ransom.

Podia is more creator-centric and transparent with their business.

However, if you need advanced course-related functionalities like course compliance and student-level course analytics for better accountability, Teachable is the specialist.

Interface

Both these platforms are highly refined and have great UI/UX.

When you log in to Teachable, you can see the below screen.

You can access all the features that Teachable offers you for your school under the sidebar and sub-menus under them.

And, now let’s look at Podia.

When you first log in to Podia it’ll ask you whether to create:

1. Membership
2. Online Course
3. 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).

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.

But when it comes to uploading videos, both of these platforms support bulk uploads, allowing you to upload multiple videos that will automatically be turned into lessons.

Now, another crucial feature of course structuring is the ability for you to set drip lessons.

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.

However, Podia does not come with course compliance features that allow you to enforce lecture completion, video order, and quiz completion for nudging the students to consume the course in a specific pattern/sequence.

Student experience

Teachable is known for its familiar course interface and feature-rich player.

Students can easily browse the curriculum in the left sidebar, and the player comes with various settings like speed control and a mini player in picture-in-picture mode.

Students can even take lesson-specific notes (like Udemy) and participate in threaded discussions with other students by scrolling down to the discussion area.

Podia also comes with a similar interface.

But unlike Teachable, it doesn’t come with a lesson notes feature for students to take notes, which would help them review their lessons and courses in the future.

Both Podia and Teachable have well-designed course interface and players for students, but they don’t support templates or designs for the frontend interface.

Winner: Teachable. It’s a specialist in course creation.

Membership/community

Podia and Teachable have community/membership functionality, but Podia offers it as a separate community feature.

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.

Teachable doesn’t have a dedicated community feature and requires integration with Circle.so (app from the same founders!

However, if you are looking at basic memberships, you can achieve this functionality in Teachable by making use of product bundling along with subscriptions.

Winner: Podia. It comes with dedicated community feature

Digital products

Teachable is not meant for selling digital products. It does not come with digital product delivery and all the other supportive features.

However, Podia is an all-in-one platform that comes with course creation, membership and also digital product selling. You can have dedicated sales pages for each of the products you create in them.

So if you are thinking of selling your own digital products somewhere in the future 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)

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.

Below is the screenshot of the thank you page customizer where I’m adding an upsell for my course.

The higher plans of Teachable also come with the Power Editor feature. It allows you to directly edit the files of your site, resulting in much more customization possibilities for developers and designers.

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!

When using the page builder, there are several blocks and sections available to help users create their page effectively.

However, compared to other platforms like WordPress or Kajabi, the number of blocks available in Podia is relatively limited.

Additionally, unlike other builders, Podia does not have a separate feature called sections or containers to allow users to include multiple blocks in a single section.

Overall, the options are kept minimal to embrace minimalism. Some complexity like padding and margins are hidden, which can be both good and bad for power users.

However, for most people, they may find Podia’s page builder quite limited, and they may need to use dedicated page building software like Elementor in the case of WordPress or LeadPages to build their landing pages.

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.

Checkout experience

Both Podia and Teachable offer one-page checkout functionality that is useful for selling high-ticket offers also supports upsells feature.

The Teachable checkout page is optimized for conversions, allowing you to write bullet points, add guarantee badges, and overall provides a more streamlined experience.

It also allows you to add order bumps for add-on products, maximizing profits. This order bump functionality is not available in Podia.

On the other hand, Podia traditionally had a two-step checkout process, but more recently, they added a single-page checkout where customers can enter their basic and payment details on one page.

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 is useful if you are using an external website builder say like WordPress.

Winner: Teachable. Their checkout page builder is more conversion-optimized with support for guarantee badges and order bumps.

Email marketing

Teachable comes with quite a basic email marketing features. It allows you to email your course students to keep the communication going regularly.

You can also consider sending emails to a specific segment of your students under the Users > Students section of your Teachable account.

However, there are no drip or auto-trigger email functionalities as it’s not an all-in-one platform.

On the other hand, Podia has two types of email marketing:

1. Drip campaigns
2. One-off newsletters

The Drip campaign enables you to send your students or pre-launch offer signups a series of emails over time.

The above example will send the sequence to people who have signed up for my pre-launch offer. This approach can also be helpful for sending indoctrination emails or marketing sequences to those who have enrolled in your free online courses or trials.

Winner: Podia. Teachable doesn’t come with any email features.

Integrations

When it comes to integrations, Teachable has a good number of native integrations with popular email marketing tools, analytics, CRMs, and much more. On the other hand, Podia has a limited number of native integrations.

However, to circumvent this, both platforms offer integrations with tools like Zapier or Make.com.

Adding to this, Teachable also comes with webhook management functionality that allows you to send Teachable relevant events to a specific webhook URL automatically.

However, since Podia is an all-in-one platform that comes with built-in email marketing and automation abilities, you may save your Zapier subscription by using Podia.

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.

But do note that Podia doesn’t charge you any transaction fees, unlike Teachable.

Winner: Tie. Teachable does more compliance things for you. But Podia doesn’t have any transaction fees. Which one would you pick?

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 Professional plan, which costs $119/month, and Podia’s Shaker plan, which also costs $79/month.

It is available in the second-tier plans for both Podia and Teachable.

Pricing and support

Both Teachable and Podia offer a free plan. But Podia’s free plan is more generous.

Unless they want additional features such as affiliate marketing and webinar functionality, most people would be better off with the Mover plan at $39 per month.

Unlike Teachable, none of these paid plans come with a transaction fee.

On the other hand, even the Basic plan of Teachable comes with a 5% transaction fee.

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.

Winner: Podia. Because it doesn’t come with any transaction fee, limitations, and offers live chat support with all their paid plans.

Bottomline

If you are an online trainer focused solely on course creation and want the most potent course creation features, such as superior course compliance, certification, and student analytics, you should choose Teachable.

However, if you want an all-in-one platform to sell communities digital products, and also want superior email marketing automation, you may need to go with Podia.

Remember, though, that Podia has some limitations, such as a lack of advanced course reporting and course compliance.