Podia Review 2023: Detailed Features, Pricing, PROs & CONs

There are tons of popular online course platforms out there, including some big names like Teachable, Kajabi, and Thinkflick. But one online course platform that has gained a massive reputation in the last couple of years is Podia.

If you’re a course creator looking to build and host your courses online, now is an excellent time to get started.

With a robust tool like Podia, you can seamlessly create, promote, manage subscriptions and sell your courses online.

Today’s online course creator review will take you through everything you need to know about Podia and why it is a reliable tool for anyone looking to host their courses online.

Let’s jump right in, shall we?

What is Podia?

Podia is one of the leading online platforms that lets course creators host and sell courses online. The platform also supports membership subscriptions and digital download services.

Launched in 2014, Podia has continued to gain traction in the online course creation community.

Using Podia, course creators can seamlessly host their courses online, deliver them to their audience professionally and have a storefront for selling their courses directly from their website.

Cool right? We thought so too.

Unlike Udemy, Podia works pretty differently, and here is why. With Podia, online course creators own and have access to student data such as email addresses and sometimes phone numbers. Plus, creators have complete control over course pricing and refund policy.

What creators get with Podia is the infrastructure and tools required to host their courses online. One remarkable thing about Podia is that you don’t need to be tech-savvy to find your way around the software. All you need to do is log in, and you’ll have seamless access to all the tools required to manage your online courses.

Here is an overview of what you get with Podia:

• With Podia, you can create and host your courses online
• Podia lets users offer membership style subscriptions
• Enjoy unlimited video hosting
• Model and deliver your courses professionally via a sophisticated and built-in course player.
• Podia provides tools for creating appealing sales pages
• Podia lets users set up payment plans, including offering a one-time fee or charging recurring fees.
• Podia supports multiple payment options, including PayPal and Stripe
• This software offers users tools for setting up and managing affiliate programs
• The tool helps users manage EU VAT taxes
• Reliable for email campaigns.

Podia Review: Is It Worth Giving A Try?

If you’re looking to convert your knowledge and skills into passive income by creating online courses? Then Podia is worth checking out, and here is why.

With Podia, you get unlimited access to powerful tools for creating and selling courses online.

Podia is designed in such a way that you can host and sell your courses, offer membership subscriptions and digital download services for all your courses. The icing on the cake is that you can do all of this without being tech-savvy.

All the tools you need to host, sell and manage your online courses are available in an all-in-one dashboard. This means you won’t have to log into different apps to ensure your services are working fine.

Being an all-inclusive platform, Podia saves you time and the extra money you’d have spent subscribing to different tools you’ll need to run your business. With Podia, you only have to pay for the product’s premium plans, and you’re ready to go.

The unique thing about Podia is that you also get a 14-day trial option. This is a brilliant option for people who want to test the tool to gauge its performance and see if it delivers on its promises.

Podia Review: Platform Overview

Before we give you a detailed review of each feature available on Podia, we would like to provide you with a quick overview of what you can do with Podia.

To start with, Podia offers web hosting, a drag and drop website builder, custom checkout pages, and content delivery style tools.

Podia provides you with valuable resources to start creating and selling your courses online, including templates for landing pages, marketing tools, and built-in shopping cart tools.

And you know the best part? You don’t need to have any coding knowledge to start using these features. Since everything is drag and drop, we are sure you won’t get stuck along the way when building your business.

And in case you want your online course site to have more advanced features like membership subscription and recurring billing, you’d be happy to learn that Podia offers these features.

Here are some of the valuable features the platform offers:

• Course dashboard: This unique feature lets creators upload courses, including video lessons, ebooks, and podcasts, while supporting download services. And the best part is that you do all of this with just a few clicks.

• Digital storefronts: With this remarkable feature, users can quickly set up an online store without being tech-savvy or having any design or programming skills.

• Drip content: The drip content feature is a fantastic tool that lets creators set up their courses to release on a predetermined date. With this helpful feature, you get an opportunity to release your content one at a time. This way, your students won’t have access to everything at once.

• Multiple payment integrations: Podia supports numerous payment options. This means you can receive credit card and PayPal payments from customers worldwide. More interestingly, payments are processed in your preferred currency.

• Email campaign and marketing: This online course platform allows creators to set up email campaigns and marketing seamlessly. With this feature, you can send multiple emails to your customers, set up automated emails, and send one-time announcements any time you like. Also, Podia offers email marketing services. With this option, you can effortlessly send newsletters to your students. And yes, the platform also has a beautiful email editor which lets users create custom emails.

• Membership and subscription services: This feature lets creators charge monthly or yearly fees for access to exclusive content like courses and webinars. Also, this feature allows users to give free Membership to users. For instance, creators can offer unlimited access to courses and webinars to customers who subscribe to their recurring $5/month plan.

• Kiss goodbye to transaction fees: One of the most significant benefits of using Podia to sell online courses is that creators don’t have to worry about paying transaction fees from sales generated through their platforms.

• Affiliate programs: Podia has a unique infrastructure that lets creators set up affiliate programs for their courses. This is a brilliant feature for scaling up and increasing sales.

• Simplicity and user-friendly: Podia is remarkable in many ways, including being user-friendly and easy to use. With Podia, you don’t need any technical abilities to navigate the tool.

Who is Podia Built For?

Podia is built for a variety of creators. And just to add, the platform has put together a list of brilliant tools you’ll need to start marketing and selling your digital products, including:

• Online courses: This is perhaps the most critical feature of Podia. This feature allows creators to create and host unlimited videos, embed links, quizzes, and offer download services for digital products. With Podia online courses, you can provide subscription plans to your students. And yes, you can also explore drip content features and use your students’ comments on your platform.
• Community: Podia is perfect if you’re looking to earn recurring passive income through building a community that loves your content. Thanks to Podia, you can bring your students, members, and products together in one place.
• Digital download: Podia makes it easy for creators to host and sell digital products, including offering download services for ebooks, whitepapers, cheat sheets, reports, PDFs, and more.
• Webinars: Thanks to the Zoom and YouTube Live integrations supported by Podia, creators can charge users for one-on-one or one to many coaching sessions. With Podia, you don’t have to worry about using multiple tools for your webinars, and that’s because the platform has many built-in tools designed to make your job easy.

In a nutshell, you’ll need Podia if:

• You are interested in a sleek, user-friendly, easy-to-use platform to host and sell online courses.

• You want to host webinars and offer subscription-based services for digital products.

• You want to organize a live chat function on your sales pages and storefront.

• You want to offer highly responsive customer support services around the clock.

• You don’t want to pay transaction fees.

Course Creation With Podia

Creating courses and building engagement is unarguably one of the most challenging aspects of building an online learning platform.

Good enough, Podia has made it easy for course creators to host their content, create rich courses and deliver it professionally.

The exciting thing with the platform is that it also allows creators to engage students and track their progress.

As we delve deeper, we will highlight specific areas of course creation where Podia shines. Let’s start with content uploading and course structuring.

Uploading Content And Structuring

Podia makes it seamless for creators to host content such as videos, audios, files, etc.

Uploading videos on Podia is possible through its partnership with Wistia, a platform lauded for offering unlimited video storage services. And yes, you don’t have to pay extra as this is all included in your subscription fee.

When uploading your content on Podia, you have an option to do it one-by-one or upload in bulk. Once uploaded, Podia will create lessons from your content automatically.

Although uploading content on Podia is easy and pretty straightforward, one downside to this tool is that you can’t directly import files from OneDrive or Dropbox.

Thankfully, importing files via the cloud is quicker than uploading files directly from your laptop. This is a brilliant feature, especially considering that the platform doesn’t have a video library.

When creating your course structure, you can leverage the Sections and Lessons levels. The Lessons level is where your content lives, while the Sections level is perfect for organizing your course lessons.

To refresh your memories, always remember that every file uploaded to Podia becomes a lesson. But using Podia’s superb course builder, you can easily rearrange your lessons, making t easy to move from one section to another.

Podia Review: The Course Builder

Even though Podia’s course builder is pretty easy to use, it isn’t so flexible, especially when adding multiple contents to the same lesson. Here is what we mean.

For instance, the platform doesn’t let creators add a video and ebook download in the same lesson. Also, users can’t seem to add videos and quizzes in the same lesson.

This simply means that if you have a downloadable resource you’d like to include in your video lesson, you’ll have to set up a different lesson for it. Doesn’t sound flexible, right?

Other things you can’t seem to do with Podia’s course builder include:

• There is no option to make course download videos downloadable
• There is no option that allows creators to show PDF files as an embed
• It’s not possible to turn off the download option for audio files
• Podia’s text editor is pretty basic and missing a lot of formatting options.

Podia’s Course Player And Content Delivery

Podia’s course player is one of a kind. For starters, the course player makes it possible for students to watch content. This is a fantastic feature you should get the hang of as its design plays a significant role in students’ experience.

We love Podia because their course player is sleek, intuitive, and adequately designed to improve students’ experience. Without mincing words, the course player is intuitive and straightforward.

Thanks to Podia’s brilliant course player, your students can watch your courses directly from the content area on the right. Also, a “Table of Content” section sits on the sidebar. This brilliant feature gives students a glimpse of what to expect from a course.

The next and previous button located below your content makes navigation easy for your students.

If you activate the “Comment” option for your course, you should see students’ comments about your courses at the bottom. This option is excellent as it lets users ask questions and share feedback without exiting the course player.

Another thing we love about Podia’s course player is that it provides a little icon just at the top of the page. Using this icon, students can hide the navigation sidebar. And since the content area occupies your entire screen, students are guaranteed a distraction-free learning experience.

Podia’s Learning And Engagement Tool

When it comes to online courses, course builders leverage various learning tools to keep their students engaged and help them achieve their goals.

Some of the top learning and engagement tools include course compliance, quizzes, certificates, and more. Let’s give you a glimpse of some of the brilliant learning tools available on Podia.

To start with, Podia lets creators drip their course content. With this option, course creators can define a schedule for their course sections. Not just that, they can also create emails that will be sent to students automatically when courses go live.

One of the brilliant dripping features you get with Podia is the ability to unlock dripped course modules for students. With this option, it is seamless to grant immediate access to specific modules or even the entire course to specific students.

Another fantastic tool that Podia offers creators is Quizzes. This option allows creators to put together multiple choice quizzes for each course. If you plan to test your students learning experience after every course, this is one learning tool you should take advantage of

Besides the ability to add quizzes to your courses, Podia is missing other superb features like the ability to add images to your questions, set question types, upload questions from external files, and more.

Website Design And Customization

Podia performs superbly when it comes to designing and customizing your website. The most significant advantage of using a platform like Podia is that you enjoy free hosting. This means that you won’t need to pay for website hosting or an SSL certificate.

Also, you won’t need to bother about technical issues like site maintenance, updates, and security.

And the icing on the cake is that every school built and hosted on the Podia platform gets a free subdomain like mysite.podia.com.

Nonetheless, you also have the option of a custom domain if that’s what you want.

Marketing And Sales On Podia

Podia offers creators access to some of the most sophisticated tools for processing payments and selling courses.

Unfortunately, Podia doesn’t offer any type of sales funnel builder or comprehensive email marketing solution. But we doubt if this will be a big deal, especially considering that Podia isn’t an all-in-one solution.

That said, let’s take you through what Podia offers in terms of marketing and sales.

Podia Review: Product Pricing And Payment Processing

Podia supports Stripe and Paypal. With this option, students can pay for courses using Paypal or a debit/credit card. And yes, the payment goes to you directly for instant cashout.

As per product pricing, things work pretty differently with Memberships and Products.

With products, you can charge a one-time price or offer a payment plan. The only caveat with this option is that you can’t have multiple price points. Let’s assume you’d like to charge $100 for a simple course and $200 for a premium course; there is no simple way to achieve this with Podia.

In respect to Membership, you can set up multiple plans and select which products or courses are available under which plan.

Similarly, Podia makes it possible for creators to price Membership either on a monthly or annual basis. Also, there is the option to create a free trial.

Email marketing with Podia

Podia has some of the best lead generation tools we have come across. With Podia, you can incorporate a pre-launch sign-up form to your sales page.

You can also add an option for newsletter signup to your storefront. With this, you can collect email addresses from your students.

As per email marketing, Podia has a unique email marketing infrastructure that lets creators send one-off emails as automated emails. This option is great for setting up automated email campaigns.

By leveraging the campaign builder provided by Podia, you can send multiple emails, set up a schedule for your email campaign to drip out, and also define parameters for sending emails.

The cool aspect of all these is that you can set entry and exit conditions for your campaign. For instance, you can sign students up for your campaign when they join the pre-launch form. You can also unsubscribe them once they buy one of your courses.

Podia’s affiliate marketing setup

Affiliate marketing is a remarkable tool for boosting sales, and Podia offers a robust affiliate marketing solution to help creators promote their courses.

Using Podia’s affiliate setup, you can add affiliates to your platform and create special affiliate links for all your courses.

More so, affiliates have their unique dashboard where they can seamlessly access their links, track sales and commissions.

Podia and third-party integrations

With the in-built email tool that comes with Podia, there are only a few things you can do. That’s why many creators opt for more sophisticated third-party email services.

But guess what? Podia has gone a step further to integrate many leading email marketing platforms, including ConvertKit, MailChimp, Drip, MailerLite, and more.

With these email marketing options, you can seamlessly collect users’ information. Also, Podia supports Zapier.

So if you decide to deploy an email marketing solution that isn’t available on Podia, you can still pass user data through Zapier.

Podia pricing

Podia offers three unique plans you can opt for.

Each plan has its special features, so it’s best to check this out when deciding what works best.

Here are the three pricing plans available on Podia.

• Mover: The mover plan starts at $39/ month or $390 annually.
• The shaker plan: This plan costs $79/month or $790 annually.
• Earthquaker: This plan starts at $179/month and $1790 annually.

Podia: Pros and cons

Podia offers a range of perks and drawbacks. Here, check out some pros and cons of Podia you should know.

Pros

• Easy to use: Podia is user-friendly and has an intuitive interface that makes it easy for just about anyone to build their platform. So whether you’re tech-savvy or not, you should be able to set up your online course platform without sweating it.

• Comprehensive solution: All products and services are easily accessible as they are all located in one place.

• Fantastic storefront and course player: These remarkable features make setting up your online course platform easy.

• No transaction fees: With Podia, you don’t have to worry about paying transaction fees. Once you subscribe to the platform, you get unlimited access to everything.

• Free trial: Each plan offered by Podia comes with an accompanying 14-day free trial. This option lets you test the platform so you can decide if it is a great fit or not.

Cons

• Limited customization: You only have a handful of options available in terms of customization. That said, the platform is constantly rolling out new features to improve users’ experience.

• Podia doesn’t offer phone support, which you’ll agree can be quite inconvenient sometimes. For some users, this can be a deal-breaker.

Podia alternatives

Though Podia provides creators with all the tools and resources required to sell online courses, including offering digital download services, hosting webinars, and more, their tools for email marketing aren’t as robust as what you find on other similar platforms.

That said, here are some Podia alternatives you should know.

Thinkific

Thinkific is among the leading platforms for creating and selling online courses. This platform offers creators access to some of the best resources, including drip schedules, quizzes, course templates, communities, memberships, certificates, and live sessions.

With Thinkific, online course creators can create learning materials using ready-to-use professional templates. And unlike the Podia platform, Thinkific is sophisticated and geared towards improving students’ learning experience. Using Thinkific, course creators can interact better with their students.

Even though Podia has an intuitive and user-friendly interface, Thinkfic offers creators better functionality, especially with marketing, selling, and managing courses. 

Kajabi

Another excellent platform for creating and selling online courses is Kajabi. Like Podia, Kajabi provides everything you need to run a successful online course selling platform. From helping to grow your business knowledge, Kajabi provides online course creators with fantastic resources, including website hosting, marketing automation, landing pages, communities, membership, and analytics.

With Kajabi, you can create premium digital products and sell them directly on your website. Also, members of this platform can host podcasts, create coaching programs, engage communities, and design newsletters.

One of the selling points of Kajabi is that it offers users a variety of marketing materials for creating learning products that are unique to their brand. On the flip side, Podia only provides users access to a handful of customizable templates and design options.

Teachable

Teachable is among one of the most sophisticated tools for online course creation. What we love most about this tool is the flexibility that it offers. To start with, this brilliant resource offers access to a wide range of learning products such as tests, videos, quizzes, PDFs, live classes, articles, and more.

Just like Podia, the Teachable platform is sleek, intuitive, and user-friendly. And yes, they also offer the drag and drop editing tools you’ll find on Podia. Another cool thing about Teachable is that you can access web development toolkits that unlock advanced customization options.

Teachable provides all-in-one resources for monitoring students’ progress and other important metrics for tracking performance.

Podia Review: FAQs

Is Podia easy to use?

Podia features a sleek UI/UX, and it is easy to use. You don’t have to be tech-savvy to navigate this software, and setting it up is a breeze. With Podia, you can offer tons of products, including webinars, memberships, courses, and even digital downloads.

Is Podia an excellent tool for blogging?

When people think of a website, they also think of owning a blog that lets them post regularly. Good enough Podia allows creators to replicate this aspect using their membership feature.

Do podia have a funnel?

With Podia, you don’t need to subscribe for extra services to be able to run a sales funnel. This is because the platform is designed to help you go from just a lead magnet to email sales.

Podia In A Nutshell

As an all-in-one online course platform, Podia has everything you’ll need to set up and succeed.

From creating and selling online courses to hosting webinars and building community, there is a whole lot you can do with Podia.

Whether you’re tech-savvy or just a beginner looking to set up your online course platform, rest assured that Podia has the right tools you’ll need to kick off your business.

Also, the platform lets you set up custom websites, send email campaigns, run paid ads, and more. Compared to other platforms, Podia stands tall.

Let us quickly add that Podia has a collection of great resources, including a blog, video tutorials, a help center, a live demo, and much more to help you every step of the way.