Podia Review 2024: Should You Use It for Your Courses?

Podia is among the top online course platforms and is well-known for its simplicity and ease of use.

But is it the right choice for you? Does it have the features you need? How does it perform compared to its competitors?

To help you make an informed decision, we have created this in-depth Podia review. We thoroughly tested the platform and evaluated it using a detailed set of criteria.

Below, you’ll find a breakdown of Podia’s features, usability, and pricing, along with its pros and cons. We’ll also compare it to other popular course platforms, so you can see how it stacks up against the competition.

What Is Podia?

Podia is an online platform that lets you create and sell online courses, memberships, and other types of digital products.

With Podia, you can host your content, deliver it professionally, build a storefront to sell your products, and accept payments on your website.

We have been following Podia since 2016, when it was called Coach, and had very little to offer in terms of features. Its team has upgraded the platform in a big way since then, making it one of the top options.

However, the thing that stands out about Podia the most is its simplicity and ease of use. It lets you quickly set up your courses and storefront even if you’ve little technical knowledge, and everything works great out of the box.

But Podia’s ease of use comes at the cost of flexibility. With all its tools, whether it’s the course builder or the page builder, you’ll find that it always prioritizes simplicity over customization options.

With this in mind, let’s deep dive into the platform and see what it offers.

Ease of Use

Podia is the simplest platform to use for creating and selling online courses.

The user interface is clean and well organized. All the features are easily accessible from the top navigation menu, and they’re all self-explanatory.

Podia takes a layered navigation approach, where you start with the top-level options and then drill down to more specific features. This makes it easy to find what you need, and the learning curve is almost non-existent.

For example, when you click on the Products menu, you’ll only see options to access existing products or create a new one. When you create a product, you can then choose the product type.

This intuitive approach is consistent throughout the platform, and we love it.

A quick walkthrough of Podia’s user interface

The process of creating a course in Podia is straightforward as well. You can easily upload your content and structure your course using the drag-and-drop course builder.

Moreover, it automatically generates linked pages (sales and checkout pages) for the main product, saving you from the manual effort of creating linkages.

All in all, Podia’s ease of use is its standout aspect. We have tested dozens of course platforms, and Podia ranks among the best in terms of user-friendliness.

Course Creation and Engagement

Course creation and learner engagement are the most important job of any online course platform and in this section, we’ll see how Podia performs. Let’s start with the course builder.

Course Builder

When it comes to creating your course structure, you have two levels in Podia—sections and lessons. Lessons are where the actual content lives, and sections are nothing but used to organize your course lessons.

You can easily add sections and lessons and move them around using drag-and-drop.

Podia also takes care of content hosting. You get unlimited storage for all your content, including videos.

Now, you can either add content one by one or bulk upload multiple files at once. If you choose the bulk upload option, the platform will turn the uploaded files into course lessons automatically.

Podia supports a few lesson types, including videos, audio, downloads, text, quizzes, and embeds.

Apart from the main content type, the lesson editor includes a text editor for adding supplementary content. You can also use it to add downloadable resources and embeds.

However, there are a couple of limitations of the course builder as well:

• It doesn’t support importing content from cloud drives.
• There’s no video library, so you can’t reuse already uploaded videos.
• You can’t bulk edit lessons

Despite these, Podia’s course builder still offers a seamless and user-friendly experience for creating and managing your online courses.

Learning and Engagement

There are a variety of tools course creators use to engage their students and enhance the learning experience. Let’s explore what Podia has to offer in this regard.

Quizzes and Certificates

Podia has a built-in quizzing feature, but it’s pretty basic. You can create quizzes with multiple-choice and multiple-answer questions. But that’s about it.

Quiz questions can be text-based only, with no option to add images or videos to questions or answers. You can’t create open-ended or file upload questions, so it’s not possible to create assignments.

However, the biggest limitation is that you can’t set a passing grade for your quizzes, which means you can’t automatically evaluate your students.

And obviously, it doesn’t support advanced features like explanations, retake limits, or question banks.

So, Podia’s quiz feature is suitable only for a quick knowledge check, and it’s not a full-fledged quiz feature.

Talking about certificates, Podia lets you create and send certificates to your students upon completing a course.

There’s just one default template that applies to all courses, and you can only modify the default text that appears on the certificate.

There’s no way to customize the certificate design or display any custom fields on the certificate, making it good for basic uses.

Content Dripping and Locking

Podia gives you the ability to release your course sections at predetermined intervals. It also lets you send an email to your students automatically when the content is available to them.

Additionally, Podia lets you set a start date for your course, and you can also start the drip schedule based on the start date.

Regarding content locking, Podia doesn’t have a feature to prevent students from skipping ahead in the course. There’s no way to set prerequisites for course sections or lessons.

Online Community

Podia has a native feature for creating an online community on your website.

Within your community, you and your students can make text posts and include videos and images in them. Members can also react to posts with likes and comments.

You can create topics inside your community and assign them to discussion posts to keep things organized. You can also restrict access to topics based on members’ plans, making it useful for creating a Podia membership site.

However, the community feature lacks on many fronts:

• You can’t customize the design or layout of the community at all.
• It doesn’t support one-on-one or group chats.
• You can’t create events or do livestreaming.
• There’s no mobile app, which limits member engagement.

As a result, Podia’s community feature works for creating a basic support community around your course. But it’s not robust enough to replace dedicated online community builders.

Content Delivery

Podia’s course player is very well-designed from a user experience point of view. It also looks aesthetically quite attractive.

Your students can watch your videos on the right. If comments are enabled for your course, they will appear at the bottom, allowing users to ask questions without leaving the course player.

The table of contents is in the left sidebar, and you also have the next and the previous lesson buttons below your content area, so your students can easily navigate through the course.

Another thing we like about the course player is that your students can click on the little icon at the top to hide the sidebar and let the content area take the full width of the player.

A quick walkthrough of Podia’s course player

The only thing that should probably improve is the ability to customize the player design. There’s one default template, and you have no control over the elements. You can only customize the colors.

Talking about the mobile experience, Podia’s course player looks great on all screen sizes, and the design is fully responsive, even though there are no mobile apps for the end users.

Site Design and Customization

In this section, we’ll see how Podia performs when it comes to creating a website for your digital products.

Remember, Podia is a hosted platform, so you get hosting and SSL certificates included when you purchase any plan. Your website uses a free subdomain (mysite.podia.com) by default, but you can also use your own domain (mysite.com).

Podia also supports essential options like white-labeling your course platform and changing the site language.

With basics out of the way, let’s dive into Podia’s site-building tools.

Website Themes

Podia doesn’t have any site themes. There is just one template that all the websites built on the platform use by default.

However, you can control a few things at the site level. You can customize your header style and add a logo and a favicon. You can also modify the color schemes of your site and change the default fonts for your body text and headings.

Regarding layout, you can only make minor changes, like adjusting padding and margins.

Moreover, if you’re an advanced user, there is no place where you can access your website’s backend or even add some CSS code to modify the styling.

However, the default template has a clean, modern design, and your storefront and sales pages will look good out of the box. Plus, you can customize your pages using the page builder, which we’ll talk about next.

Page Builder

Podia’s page builder has a simple interface and is user-friendly. When you land on it, you’ll see the existing page and an option to add a new section.

The page builder has several pre-built sections that you can add to your page. There are sections for product banners, course description, author bio, FAQs, testimonials, email forms, pricing plans, and more. It also supports basic elements like text, images, and videos.

You can then customize the layout and design of these sections. Specifically, you can adjust element size, padding, margins, height, alignment, and colors.

Podia also provides some options for changing the position of the elements within a section. For example, in the product banner section, you can move the media element to the left, right, above, or below the text.

Meanwhile, your layout options are limited to the settings provided by Podia. You can’t just freely add, remove, and rearrange elements in your page section.

For example, let’s say you want to add an email form to your banner section or a video to your email sign-up section; you can’t do that.

There are other limitations as well. For instance, you can’t add animation effects or edit the mobile layout separately.

Having said that, Podia gives enough customization options for most users, and you’ll be able to create a good-looking storefront and sales pages quickly.

If you want to see the possibilities, check out this list of Podia examples.

Blogging Tools

Podia lets you create a blog on your website and add blog posts to it.

Creating a new blog post is a simple process. You get a text editor where you can write text content, add images, embed videos, and format your content.

However, the text editor is quite basic and doesn’t have essential formatting options like custom fonts and colors.

Apart from the post content, you can also add a featured image, provide SEO details, and publish or schedule your blog post, but you can’t add tags or categories.

Finally, you can customize the design and layout of your blog page as well as blog posts using the page builder, just like other pages on your site.

Overall, Podia’s blogging tools are basic; they can’t match specialized blogging platforms like Squarespace and WordPress in design, content editing, or functionality. But if you just want to host and publish a simple blog on your site, they’ll do the job.

Sales and Marketing

When it comes to sales and marketing, Podia offers the essential tools to process payments and sell your courses. It also comes with built-in email marketing features. Let’s take a closer look.

Product Pricing Options

Podia supports three pricing options—one-time payment, installment payments, and subscription.

By default, all the product types support only one-time and installment payments. You can create a subscription pricing only for community plans.

The limitation, obviously, is that you can’t have a recurring product without attaching it to your community. So, if you want to bundle only your courses and sell them as a subscription, you can’t do that.

Regarding subscription pricing, you can charge monthly and yearly and offer free trials as well. You can’t charge a setup fee, though.

Podia also lets you create multiple pricing tiers. In the case of a community, you can have as many plans as you want and select the products and topics students can access on each of them.

For other products, you’ll need to create a separate bundle for each pricing tier.

One useful tool that Podia offers for product pricing is coupons, which let you discount your products either by an amount or by a percentage. You can choose to create coupons that apply to all your products or specific products only.

Payments and Checkouts

Payment processing in Podia is straightforward. It supports PayPal and Stripe gateways and lets you connect your accounts and start receiving payments right away.

However, Stripe is the only supported gateway for payment plans and subscriptions.

Regarding the checkout process, it is optimized for conversions with a simple and clean design.

While existing users need to log in before making a payment, you can move the account creation step for new users after the payment process.

However, you don’t get any customization options for the checkout page. You can’t customize the design or add product details and testimonials to boost conversions.

One useful feature you get here is the ability to add this checkout experience to external websites as well. Podia offers an embed code for a button that opens the checkout in a popup.

Another thing we like is that you can charge sales taxes for your digital products. You can enable the jurisdictions where you want to collect taxes, and Podia will automatically calculate and add the tax amount to your product prices.

Finally, you can add a 1-click upsell to your checkout and apply a discount as well. The best part is the ability to add multiple upsells for the same product.

Affiliate Marketing

If you want to leverage affiliate marketing to promote your courses, Podia has got you covered. With Podia, you can add affiliates to your store and create unique affiliate links for all your products.

Additionally, your affiliates get a private dashboard to access their affiliate links and track the sales and commissions.

When it comes to affiliate commissions, you can give your affiliates either a % of the sale amount or a flat commission. Plus, you can customize the commission at a product level, which is really handy.

Now, there are a few things about the affiliate tools that can be improved:

• You can’t set a custom commission rate for certain affiliate partners.
• There is no way to upload any swipe files or assets for your affiliates.
• You can’t change the cookie tracking period for your affiliate links.

Otherwise, Podia’s affiliate system is simple and has all the essential features, so it should work well for most creators.

Other Marketing Tools

Podia offers features for email marketing. It lets you send both one-off emails as well as automated emails.

Using their campaign builder, you can create a series of emails and set the delay between each email. You can only set delay in multiples of days and not in hours or minutes.

You can also set entry and exit conditions for your campaign. For example, you can sign someone up for the campaign when they submit an email form on your website and unsubscribe them when they buy one of the products.

For creating emails, you can choose from various templates and customize them using the email editor. The editor is easy to use and provides enough flexibility to create well-designed emails.

Having said that, there are a few major limitations with Podia’s email marketing:

• Podia has limited lead generation features, and if you use an external tool, you can only bring your audience through Zapier.
• Podia doesn’t have any real automation feature, which means you can’t tag users automatically and run campaigns based on their behavior or actions.
• There’s no way to create saved segments for use in broadcast emails.

Podia’s email marketing tools are good for beginners seeking a simple email solution, but they fall short compared to services like ConvertKit. Considering it’s available as an add-on at a significant price point, it’s not a worthwhile investment.

Apart from email marketing, Podia offers some other useful sales and marketing tools.

The first one is the native live chat feature, which allows your site visitors and students to start a conversation with you via the widget.

The second feature is creating webinars via Zoom integration or embedding YouTube Live. Podia handles reminder emails, and you can even make your webinars paid.

Reporting and Administration

For any online course platform, managing your courses and students and tracking revenue and engagement are crucial aspects. In this section, we’ll evaluate what Podia offers for the same.

Reporting and Analytics

Podia’s course reporting capabilities are limited, and some critical components are missing. The only thing that you can do is to track the student’s progress for an individual course.

You can see the completion rate for individual students, and you can also track what lessons they have completed.

But that’s pretty much it. There are no reports to see how your courses are performing or track student engagement. You can’t even measure average course completion rates.

Additionally, no analytics are available for your course videos, so you can’t track things like average watch time or drop-off rates.

Regarding sales analytics, Podia has a separate dashboard where you can see an overview of your store sales. Plus, you can filter the sales report by specific products or plans.

Below that, you can see individual sales transactions, which you can also export in CSV format.

However, the sales report in Podia is again basic. It doesn’t have filters for either date or other items like coupon codes and affiliates.

Similarly, there are no visual tools available for comparing the performance of various products or seeing monthly sales over a period.

Overall, Podia’s reporting tools are basic and lack essential features. You can’t drive detailed insights into your course and sales performance.

People Management

With Podia, you can easily see the list of your users in the Audience section of the app and filter it based on whether they’re email subscribers, paid customers, or community members.

You can add additional filters based on the courses they’ve enrolled in, their purchase total, their email activity, and more.

You can select multiple users and add or remove tags, unsubscribe them, or delete them altogether, even though you can’t do essential actions like enrolling or unenrolling users in bulk.

When you click on a user, you’ll see their profile, which shows the products and plans they’ve purchased, their tags, and their product progress.

Here, you can edit their information, add or remove tags, reset passwords, remove product access, or delete the user’s account.

User Roles

Apart from students and affiliates, Podia allows you to add your team members as well.

Adding team members to your Podia account is pretty straightforward. You just need to enter the team member’s name and email address and select which sections in your Podia app they should access.

For example, if you want your VA to access everything but the sales reports, you can do that while sending them an invitation or even after they accept it.

However, keep in mind that there’s no course author role in Podia. So, if you want to sell other authors’ courses on your website and share revenue with them, you won’t be able to do that in Podia.

Third-Party Integrations

Podia integrates with many of the popular email marketing platforms, including ConvertKit, MailChimp, Drip, ActiveCampaign, GetResponse, and MailerLite.

When users enroll in your courses, you can pass the user information to your email service provider and add them to a specific list or tag.

Additionally, Podia has a Zapier integration as well. If you use an email solution that Podia doesn’t integrate directly with, you will still be able to integrate it via Zapier.

Plus, you can use Zapier to integrate with thousands of third-party apps, such as Accredible (certificates), ThriveCart (checkouts), and FreshBooks (accounting).

Finally, Podia allows you to add third-party scripts to your website, so you can integrate with tools like Google Analytics, ConvertBox, and Deadline Funnel.

Beyond this, Podia doesn’t give you advanced integration options like API access or single sign-on (SSO).

Customer Support

Podia excels in customer support. We have always received great feedback from our readers about Podia’s customer support. During our interactions as well, we found them to be friendly and responsive.

Their customer support team is available via live chat between 9 AM – 6 PM ET on weekdays and 9 AM – 5 PM ET on weekends. Outside of business hours, you can reach out via email.

While email support is available on all plans, live chat support is only available on the paid plans.

On top of that, Podia has an extensive knowledge base with a lot of resources on using the platform so that you can easily find answers by searching it rather than contacting customer support.

For course creator training, Podia has a lot of free guides on their website. It also has a user community, but it’s not very active.

Finally, our favorite customer support feature is free migrations. If you buy an annual plan, Podia’s team will move your content and audience from another platform free of cost. This is unique, and we’re unaware of any other course platform offering a similar service.

Pricing Plans

This Podia review won’t be complete without a discussion on pricing. Podia offers four plans:

• The Free plan has a 10% transaction fee. You can launch a website and a community and create products in draft mode.
• The Starter plan costs $9/month + an 8% transaction fee. It lets you use a custom domain for your website, but you can still not publish your products with this plan.
• The Mover plan costs $39/month + a 5% transaction fee and offers unlimited products and students. You also get access to most of the features with this plan.
• The Shaker plan costs $89/month and removes the transaction fee. It also supports affiliate marketing and embedded checkout features.

Apart from these, Podia offers an email marketing add-on priced by the number of subscribers. It’s free for under 100 subscribers, $9/month for up to 500, and $63/month for up to 10,000.

There’s another add-on for adding team members priced at $20/month for one member and $100/month for 20 members.

While Podia’s core plans are affordable, we don’t like the fact that there are add-ons that can actually end up costing more than the core plan itself. And we’re not big fans of the transaction fees either.

Podia doesn’t offer a free trial, but you can test most of the features on the free plan. You need to upgrade only when you’re ready to publish your products.

Podia vs the Competition

Let’s make a quick comparison of Podia with its main competitors—Thinkific, Kajabi, and Teachable.

Thinkific is the best overall course platform and has a clear edge over Podia in almost all the departments. It has better course creation tools, including advanced quizzes, certificates, live classes, prerequisite lessons, and mobile apps.

Podia, on the other hand, is easier to use and supports features like blogging and email marketing. Otherwise, Thinkific’s pricing is more affordable as well.

Kajabi is an all-in-one course platform that offers advanced features for website creation, sales funnels, and email marketing. It also has superior course creation tools, a powerful community builder, and free and branded mobile apps.

However, Kajabi’s pricing starts at $69/month. So, if you’re just starting out or don’t need all the advanced features, Podia will be a better option for you. Read our Podia vs Kajabi comparison to learn more.

Teachable is quite comparable to Podia in terms of features, with a few differences. For example, Teachable has better course creation and reporting tools, while Podia has a more flexible page builder and built-in blogging tools.

However, Teachable is more expensive than Podia across the board. Its entry-level plan costs $59/month + a 5% fee, and the most popular plan costs $159/month. Read our Podia vs Teachable comparison to learn more.

Podia Review: Final Thoughts

In this Podia review, we’ve discussed everything that the platform has to offer, along with its pros and cons.

The most standout thing about the platform is its ease of use. From course creation to website building, everything is straightforward and intuitive. Podia has some decent features for course creation and selling as well.

However, Podia falls short in some areas, such as learning and engagement tools, website themes, and reporting tools. It has also introduced native email marketing features, but they lack automation and segmentation options.

So, if you’re looking for an affordable solution to create simple online courses or membership sites, Podia will be a good choice.

There’s no free trial, but you can create a free account to test the platform.

We hope you found this Podia review useful. If you have any questions about it, let us know in the comments below.

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