Podia Review Summary
I started using Podia in late August. Previously, I used Convertkit and made my own optins. I would get 2-4 email signups per day. When I switched to Podia and started offering free courses and a free membership, my email signups went up to 6-10 signups per day with the same traffic #s!
If you’re looking to grow your email list and income online, I recommend creating courses (free and paid), and finding ways to engage your audience–Podia can help with all of that hands down.
Overall Rating
Best Used For: Create and sell online courses, Create and sell membership plans, Create and sell Digital Products, Grow an engaged community and brand, and Email Marketing
What Podia Does Well
- Provides a great user experience for students and creators
- Has very high conversions because it requires little up front information for the sell (in comparison to other platforms)
- They’re constantly making updates and improvements
- They let you try for free before you buy
Recommend Improvements
None of my recommended improvements are game-changers AT ALL.
- I’d like to see more automations where you can automate adding subscribers onto more than one email list. In other words, I’d like to see more back-end segmentation options.
- I’d like to see integrations with the memberships and webinars
- I’d like to see open rate and analytics on messages sent out thru the membership email options.
Reliability
The software hasn’t had any noticeable down-times or glitches. All updates are performed seamlessly.
Ease of Use
There is a live chat, helpful articles, and lots of instructions so the software is very easy to use.
Price
Competitors have less features or much higher price for what Podia offers. It’s truly the highest value for the price.
Support
Support typically responds within seconds except outside of business hours. I’ve always gotten very quick responses and other customers say the same.
Price: From $39/per month for Unlimited Digital Product Sales (and no processing fees!)
If you’re trying to make a decision about which learning management solution to use, and you’re looking for a thorough Podia review, you’re in the right place.
It’s likely if you’re here, you’ve been thinking about taking a skill or something you’re good at, and turning it into an online course. Besides, many people are making great money doing that. In fact, there is a growing number of creators who are earning full-time incomes or more selling courses online, and it’s a pretty cool way to earn an income.
The problem is once you’ve decided you want to sell courses online, then you’re bombarded with all of the choices like:
- Which learning management solution should I choose?
- How will I engage with my students?
- How will I generate ideas for the course?
- How will I market the course?
- and the list goes on and on
You have to choose pricing and course names, and more. This can all be very overwhelming, and I’m aware of that. In this review, I want to make your decision on which learning management solution to use as easy as possible.
As a result, in this Podia review, I will tell you:
- What it is
- How it works
- Pros and Cons
- What it does well and what it does not
- What others are saying (good and bad)
- My Recommendation
- And, Alternatives (in case you want to do some comparison shopping
Contents
- 1 What is Podia? An Overview
- 2 How Does Podia Work?
- 3 How Do I Get Started with Podia?
- 4 Who is Podia For?
- 5 Podia Tools & Training
- 6 Podia Support
- 7 What Does Podia Do Well
- 8 What Doesn’t Podia Do Well
- 9 Podia Review Roundup
- 10 Podia Price
- 11 My Final Opinion of Podia
- 12 Top Podia Alternatives
- 13 VERDICT: Recommended
- 14 Podia | Digital Product and Course Sales Software
- 15 Pros
- 16 Cons
What is Podia? An Overview
Podia is one of the most feature rich learning management systems on the market. They offer lots of great features including:
- Email marketing
- Cross-sell or upsell products
- Unlimited everything
- Analytics
- And more
Using Podia, you can create various digital products including:
- Online courses
- Digital product downloads
- Memberships
- and, an Affiliate Program
The versatility of the platform makes it a fierce competitor with other learning management options like Teachable, Thinkific, LifterLMS, or Kajabi.
How Does Podia Work?
One of the key things that customers of Podia enjoy is the ease of use. Podia has a very streamlined process for making courses which makes it easy to create digital products and get them out to the market.
You’d generate your product ideas and do your market research, then when you’re ready to make the product, Podia is fairly drag and drop. There’s lots of instructional tutorials and directions to tell you where to go to get your products set up. If you need to see how it works, check out my video demo.
How Do I Get Started with Podia?
It’s best to get started with creating digital products after you have an audience in most instances, which is why I recommend most people to start as affiliates, build their audience, and reinvest their earnings into product development. However, once you’re ready for product development and you’ve decided to use Podia, it’s very simple from there. You’d simply set up your free trial account and you’re off to begin creating!
Who is Podia For?
Podia is for:
- Those who have an audience to sell digital products to
- Those who know how to drive traffic and sales online
- Someone with a trade or skill they’re looking to package into digital products
- Those who want an all-in-one solution and don’t want to piece together landing pages with plugins with e-commerce stores, and so on
- Those who want to integrate digital products and an affiliate program
- Those who want a budget-friendly and feature-rich learning management solution
If you don’t know how to drive traffic and sales online, but you want to build an online business that sells courses, I’d recommend you build an audience first. There are stories all over that share how entrepreneurs dumped lots of money into product development, patents, and other things only to find they launched the product and heard crickets. Start as an affiliate and build an audience first.
Starting as an affiliate of a company that’s already established will help you to get revenue coming in faster. It will help you build the skills to drive traffic and sales online, you’ll be able to test and validate your ideas, and it will help you learn the market more. I give a full explanation of why that will help you start making money faster than starting a business with product development here. If you’d like to get started with free affiliate marketing training, two free websites, and 7 days of 1-on-1 coaching ====>>>JOIN ME HERE.
Recommended Reading:
- Affiliate Marketing vs. Starting a Membership Site
- 7 Reasons Why Entrepreneurs Should Start as Affiliates (Before Creating Products)
Podia Tools & Training
Podia offers guides and articles to help you become a successful course creator using their platform. You can check those out here.
Podia Support
Another thing you’ll see Podia customers rave about is the support. Even for potential customers, they have a live chat that responds in minutes. I’ve personally used the support and I received very thorough responses within minutes.
What Does Podia Do Well
- Podia offers a learning management platform with lots of features
- The pricing for the features is much less than other similar product suites. Most others are well over $100/mo for similar features
- They have very high customer satisfaction
- Their customer support is highly responsive
- They include the ability to create courses, memberships, downloads, and an affiliate program
- And, their development team is working on updates to keep the platform advancing and innovative
What Doesn’t Podia Do Well
- You’d need additional software for webinars, to build a community (forum, private coaching, etc.)
- There’s no CRM integration created for the platform, so you’d have to create a workaround
- They don’t have a phone number for customer support
Podia Review Roundup
Podia has a clear monopoly of positive reviews: from customers and third party reviewers, which is a great sign. You can see the Google results here:
Common Positive Feedback
- I run my entire business on Podia
- I switched from other learning management systems because Podia has more features
- I switched from other learning management systems because Podia has better support
- We get more features and pay less
Negative Feedback (Which is Uncommon)
- No mention of security features
Most Helpful Positive Podia Review
Neil Patel said this about Podia:
Podia is a fantastic platform that offers some amazing benefits:
You can create a digital storefront to sell your courses, e-books, PDFs, and more.
Plus, they’ll migrate your existing content from other sites or platforms for free!
And they have one of the easiest checkout processes I’ve ever seen. All you need is an email and a credit card, Stripe, or PayPal.
That means frictionless conversions and quick sales.
They structure their pricing annually and monthly with a free trial and a 30-day money-back guarantee if you aren’t satisfied.
Most Helpful Negative Podia Review
This review from Emma, a G2Crowd reviewer, isn’t really negative, but it does offer input about the limitations of Podia, so here it is:
“Best course building tool”
What do you like best?
I switched to Podia after using/researching a number of the other platforms like Kajabi, Teachable, Thinkific, WordPress plugins, etc. (even clickfunnels). Podia is SUPER streamlined, very easy to use, way more affordable, and beautiful for the user (not just for the content creator).
What do you dislike?
The only thing I wish they had was the original landing page feature that they removed. It allowed someone to download a digital product by entering their email, but without creating a whole account for all your courses.
What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?
Online courses, digital downloads/workbooks, monthly memberships, etc.
Podia Price
Podia offers two pricing plans: the Mover ($39/mo) and the Shaker ($79/mo). The mover is their most basic plan and the shaker adds on their affiliate marketing, embedded checkout, third party code, and free migration which is really cool!
My Final Opinion of Podia
I wouldn’t recommend course development to someone who doesn’t have an audience and doesn’t have experience selling online. Instead, I recommend entrepreneurs in that situation to start with affiliate marketing, build an audience, and develop the skills to sell online first. You can get started with my #1 recommended Affiliate Marketing Training here ===>>> Join me here.
If you’ve already built an audience, there is really some tough competition in the learning management space which makes it a tough decision when you’re trying to pick which one to build your business around. If you are looking to build your online course business on WordPress, have all the branding control, and build a community inside there, LifterLMS would be my recommendation for you.
If you’re looking for something you can start selling your courses on for free and build from there, Teachable or Thinkfic would be the best option (depending on which interface and user experience you like better). If you’re looking for an all-in-one solution where you can create unlimited courses, unlimited digital products, host unlimited videos, and avoid transaction fees, then Podia is going to be the best option.
You can set up your 14-day free trial account here and test it out for yourself without entering a credit card. Try Podia for 14 days and see how it works for you.
Top Podia Alternatives
If you’re still in the market for a learning management solution, or an option to sell your digital products, you can see what the market says in Google Trends here:
According to Google Trends, Clickfunnels is most popular. I don’t think they’re most popular as a membership and digital course solution, but more as a landing page and sales funnel solution, however, the market has spoken in terms of popularity. You can also see my top recommended Podia alternatives and how they compare:
Teachable vs Podia
In comparison with Teachable, Podia has two plans with unlimited everything. They don’t charge transaction fees (like you’d get with the Teachable basic plan) and there are more community building options. Podia has threads that are created within the training, when someone adds a comment, it sends notifications, and keeps people engaging in the community. Teachable doesn’t offer options like that. Podia also has email marketing.
The major advantages of Teachable over Podia is the widespread reputation and there are many more courses and tutorials on Teachable in comparison with the growing number on Podia. Teachable also has a free plan, so if you’re starting with no budget, you can start out with a free Teachable plan, and upgrade as you’re revenue grows–that’s a major perk. You can check out my full Teachable review here.
LifterLMS vs Podia
LifterLMS is a WordPress plugin. According to Google Trends, this was the least popular, although it’s a good learning management solution. It integrates with any WordPress theme and has quizzes, surveys, and lots of private coaching and gamification/community building options. You have the most branding control with LifterLMS in comparison to all of the other LMS options I’ve seen, however, you’d also have more to puzzle together.
There are many addon options and you’d have to update your plugins and do normal WordPress maintenance. Podia eliminates more of the responsibility. You can learn more about the pros and cons of LifterLMS in my review here.
Thinkific vs Podia
Similar to my comparison between Teachable and Podia, Thinkific has a much more well known brand. They also have a free plan, so you can start out with no budget and still sell courses, then once you have a budget, you can upgrade–this lowers the risk and barrier to entry.
You can find courses and tutorials on Thinkfic many places (like Udemy) very easily. In contrast, Podia is still growing the reputation, so you may have to look a little deeper, but since the software is so easy to use, it makes up for that in many cases. You can learn more about Thinkific by going here.
Kajabi vs Podia
Kajabi is a very popular all-in-one solution that’s used by celebrities like Brandon Burchard and Grant Cardone. It’s known to process tens of millions of dollars in course sales annually, so the software is durable. Added to that, they have nice features embedded like webinars, customization for branding, landing pages, and other neat conversion options.
Unfortunately, Kajabi comes at a very hefty price for many people: starting at $119/mo to sell 3 products. Podia enables you to sell unlimited products and they leave room in the pricing where you can subscribe for webinar software, quiz software, and other things to fill in the gaps until Podia makes more advancements.
ClickFunnels vs. Podia
Clickfunnels is a behemoth in the conversion funnel space. Their software is raved about because it makes it easy to upsell, downsell, and to make aesthetically pleasing landing pages and sales funnels. They’ve also built on features for selling memberships and digital products that many people like.
Podia outpaces Clickfunnels in these areas:
- Free migration
- Live chat support (without the $297/mo plan)
- No transaction fees
- and, lower pricing
You can check out my full Clickfunnels review here and see my list of the pros and cons.
VERDICT: Recommended
——————————————————-
Podia | Digital Product and Course Sales Software
Pros
- No transaction fees
- Lots of features including threads and notifications of comments on courses. Plus ongoing innovation.
- You can sell digital courses, memberships, digital downloads, webinars, and coaching
- High customer satisfaction ratings
- Customers rave about the user experience and support, so it's easy to use and easy to get help
Cons
- They're fairly new to the market
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22 thoughts on “Podia Review: Pros, Cons, Competitor Comparisons, and Alternatives”
Seems to me like podia does have many positive reviews online and people really use this. They really have a good training platform for practically anything you might want to do online. I don’t know about other platforms but it’s a very good one like teachable. It has its cons but apparently, the pros greatly outweighs the cons. I’ll give it a trial. Thanks for reviewing.
You’re welcome! I’m glad this was helpful for you. The pros outweigh the cons for me, but I do also have reviews of other software that might be a good fit for others.
Thank you for this review of Podia. I’m not much of a seller or teacher, so I can see why you’d recommend starting out by doing affiliate marketing. I’d heard of Teachable buy not any of the other programs. The price for Podia seems reasonable for the services they offer. When I am ready to branch out from affiliate marketing I will give Podia a try. Thanks again for all the valuable information!
I’m glad that you know yourself and you’re focused on completing one phase of the journey at a time. Best wishes for you and your business Cathy! Thanks for stopping by.
Hi there Domena, I am trying to grow my own online affiliate marketing business right now and I need all the help, tips and advice that I can get, I am doing fairly well and my online business is slowly growing, but after reading your review here I realise that there are things I’m not doing which I should be doing, for instance I don’t use email marketing, which is probably something i should be doing, so thank you for sharing this post, I think I will follow your recommendation and sign up to Podia,
Podia is more for people who want to create their own products. If you’re happy with the affiliate marketing model, then Podia may not be the best option if you’re only looking for email marketing. In that case, I’d recommend GetResponse, ConstantContact or Convertkit.
Thanks for this amazing and helpful review. There are a lot if platforms online that are not standard enough or meet up with the expectations of individuals online and this is why many at times I need to engage in productive research like this in order to be sure of the right decision. A friend who wants to invest his time and money in this platforms need help on how helpful it could be and I think I have found the right answers to his questions. thumbs up for this great job
I’m glad this was helpful for you Willy!
I’m very much enjoying the fact that I’m learning so much from your website! Thank you for writing such well-researched articles and reviews! I can appreciate an author who tirelessly works to be transparent and truthful. I’ve never heard of many of the companies you’re reviewing, but I am learning a ton!
Regarding Podia, I’m still in the traffic-building phase in my business, so it’s not right for me at this time. You do advise to have a solid following first, and I see the importance in that. Besides that, it seems a little expensive, but reasonable, compared to other companies of the like. I might check it out when I get my traffic rolling in! Thank you so much for this review!
I’ve done quite a few learning management reviews here and many of the competitors offer a way to sell your courses, but some offer a restriction on how many products you can sell, some don’t offer memberships, some don’t offer email marketing, and some require lots of addons. Considering the features included, Podia is actually a high value in comparison to the others. They have a bundle that I haven’t seen others put together.
Hello there, I must admit I’m really impressed with what I have seen here in this post. Following the current flow in my line of business (affiliate marketing), we all look forward to having a huge flow of traffic in our site and this can’t be done just by any means, and one effective way is email marketing which is something this program offer and by that I wouldn’t mind giving it a trial. Best regards.
I wouldn’t recommend Podia if you’re only looking for email marketing software. Instead, you should probably look into GetResponse, Convertkit, or Constant Contact. Podia is for people who want to sell digital products.
Honestly, this is a very good one. I think that podia has done a very good job to be able to give good training on their site. One thing I’d like to learn is how to make landing pages and I’m happy that podia offers training on that as well, do you think that podia is beginner friendly? If not then which platform would you suggest?
Ideally, you’d want an audience before you start creating online courses, so I’d say Podia isn’t for beginners to online business. It’s a digital product creation software. The training is intended to teach you how to be successful with your online course business, but it’s not meant to be a platform that you join solely for training. If you’re looking for a beginning friendly training platform, you should take a look at Wealthy Affiliate.
This post is just a confirmation of all the research I did and the conclusion I made about Podia. While Podia’s simplicity is a very big asset, it’s also a downside — the platform doesn’t have lots of customization options or advanced features, and that might be a real issue for an advance user.
Awesome write-up.
Best Regards.
There are definitely pros and cons. Since writing this review, I have chatted with the Podia team and they’re adding more customization in their updates, but you’re right, this could be an issue for advanced users. I still decided to go forward and use the platform.
I’m happy to be here. I actually have the intention of checking out this site before now. Although you don’t know me, but you’re like a mentor to me. You inspire me to want to do more. Since I am a beginner, I will like to take to your advice to start with affiliate marketing first before using a learning management system like Podia. Thanks always.
Thanks so much for your compliments! That means alot. Best wishes in your business!
This is useful information as I had stumbled upon clickfunnels and i really didn’t understand the concept behind it. I’m still very new in affiliate marketing trying to build authority so hopefully, when I’m established I’ll venture into podia. Building an audience is not as easy as it sounds which makes affiliate marketing a bit strenuous at first cant imagine how it would be when you’re trying to sell e-books and stuff without any exposure.
I agree Hope! You definitely want to build the audience first then venture into creating online courses. Otherwise, it’ll take longer to start earning.
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Thanks so much! I’m glad to hear the content is helpful for you.