Gumroad and Podia are two of the most popular choices for creators looking to build and sell digital products. However, while both claim to offer all the tools necessary to achieve that goal, their capabilities vary greatly.
Both platforms have pros and cons, so deciding which one is the better option for your products can be difficult.
That’s why we’ve created this comprehensive Podia vs Gumroad guide to make it easy for you to choose the right platform.
We helped answer the Gumroad vs Podia question based on our extensive experience in helping creators sell digital products. We considered factors like product objectives, feature requirements, tech skills, and budget.
So, without further ado, let’s get into the review.
Podia vs Gumroad Summary
Pros of Podia vs Gumroad
- Better course creation tools
- Support for more product types
- Better end-user experience
- Powerful website builder
- Get paid immediately
- No transaction fee on paid plans
Pros of Gumroad vs Podia
- No monthly fee
- Offers iOS/Android app for end-users
- More product pricing options
- Sales tax collection & remission
- Automated affiliate payouts
What Are Gumroad and Podia?
Gumroad and Podia are software platforms that allow creators to sell their digital products online. They offer tools to create, host, market, and sell digital products.
Both are cloud-based platforms and very simple to use. So, irrespective of your tech skills, you can easily set up your digital products and start selling them.
However, the two platforms approach the whole process very differently.
Gumroad is primarily an eCommerce platform. It provides creators with a storefront where they can sell their products and accept payments.
While Gumroad also lets you host your digital products, it doesn’t let you create elaborate delivery experiences. So, simply speaking, it doesn’t offer much for product building or customer engagement.
Moreover, Gumroad acts as a middleman between you and your potential customers. It handles payments on your behalf and then pays you based on a schedule.
Upon successful payment, your customers will need to create a Gumroad account to access their products.
Now, Podia is also an eCommerce platform to sell your digital products, but unlike Gumroad, it goes beyond creating simple digital products. It allows you to create full-fledged online courses, coaching products, and community and deliver a fantastic member experience.
Moreover, Podia doesn’t act as a middleman between you and your customers. Instead, it lets you create a white-label platform for your products, where users create an account on your website rather than Podia’s.
Additionally, you’ll accept customer payments directly into your Stripe/PayPal account.
With this information in mind, let’s discuss the details.
Product Creation
With Gumroad, you can create eight types of products:
- Digital product
- Course or tutorial
- E-book
- Newsletter
- Membership
- Podcast
- Audiobook
- Physical good
The Newsletter, Membership, and Podcast categories operate on a membership basis. Therefore, your customers will pay a recurring fee to retain access to your product. Meanwhile, the other categories have a one-time pricing model.
Apart from this, there’s not much difference between the different product types. They’re similar in terms of the product creation process, content types supported, and delivery experience.
In terms of supported content, Gumroad allows you to upload any file type and use it in your product. Otherwise, it doesn’t support other content types, such as text content, quizzes, etc.
Now, the process of adding content to your products is very straightforward. You just have to upload files to your product and, if you want, organize them into folders. You can upload them directly from your computer, import them from Dropbox, or reuse a previously uploaded file.
Now, let’s talk about Podia. Here you have five types of products:
- Online course
- Digital download
- Webinar
- Bundle
- Coaching session
Online courses are Podia’s most popular product type. When creating a course, you get an easy-to-use course builder where you can add sections and lessons directly and organize them with the drag-and-drop feature.
Most importantly, you can create lessons that go beyond just downloadable files. Apart from videos and other file types, you can add text lessons, quizzes, a coaching session, or embed an external file.
Moreover, Podia supports important course creation features like content dripping, certificates, etc., which Gumroad doesn’t offer.
Apart from online courses, Podia also lets you build an online community where customers can interact with you and each other. With the Community feature, you can create engaging posts, create topics to organize your community, and send direct messages to your members.
The good thing about Podia’s Community is that you can either offer it as a standalone product or combine it with other products to offer memberships.
Podia supports a few more product types:
- Coaching lets you create and sell one-on-one coaching sessions.
- Digital Download allows you to upload downloadable files and sell them.
- Webinar enables you to embed a YouTube Live video or link to a Zoom meeting to deliver a live webinar.
- Bundles allow you to sell a collection of multiple products for a new price.
Overall, Podia has much more to offer for product creation. The platform is suitable for all types of digital products, from digital downloads to online courses and memberships.
On the other hand, Gumroad is only suitable for simpler file-based digital products. It supports multiple product categories, but the differences are superficial and there’s not much in terms of features.
Suggested Reading: Podia Review – Is It the Best Course Platform for You?
End-User Experience
The most significant difference between Podia and Gumroad is the end-user experience.
When you create an online course on Podia, the content is delivered through the native course player.
Your students will watch the video and other content on the right side, while they’ll see their overall progress and navigate between lessons from the left sidebar.
Podia also allows you to enable comments for your lessons, so your students can ask questions and interact with you from the course player.
Gumroad, on the other hand, doesn’t have a course player where your students can watch your content and navigate through the product. When you click on a video, it opens a new tab where you can watch the video in the browser’s video player.
It also has a playlist icon from which you can access other product videos. However, finding other videos and navigating through them is difficult.
Moreover, there’s no way for your students to know their progress or leave a comment on a video lesson.
This is an outdated way of delivering video-based online courses. Therefore, we don’t recommend you create online courses or memberships through Gumroad.
Gumroad’s approach will work only for delivering simpler downloadable digital products, such as eBooks and templates.
Moving to the mobile experience, both platforms allow users to watch content on any device. However, Gumroad also offers iOS/Android apps, which makes it better for consuming content on the go.
Finally, the two platforms also differ significantly regarding the user’s purchase and access experience.
When users purchase your products on Gumroad, they need to create a Gumroad account and access the products through it. So, if users buy products from multiple Gumroad creators, they will still have one account.
However, in Podia’s case, users create an account directly on your website. Overall, Podia’s purchase experience puts your brand in the front and center and creates a more seamless user experience.
Overall, Podia is far superior to Gumroad in terms of end-user experience. Not only does it let you deliver your products in a more engaging way, but it also enables you to do it through your own branded platform.
Site Design and Customization
Gumroad allows you to create a storefront for your customers which includes a homepage with your product listings and a landing page for each product.
The landing page lets your customers read more about your product and initiate a purchase.
However, Gumroad’s home and landing pages are elementary and you can hardly customize anything. For example, you can’t change the page layout, add new sections, or modify the design of existing elements.
In fact, Gumroad doesn’t have a page builder at all, and you can’t use it to create full-length product sales pages.
In contrast, Podia allows you to create an actual website for your business.
First, you can create additional website pages (e.g., About Us) apart from the homepage and product sales pages. Second, you get a drag-and-drop page builder to build and customize them as you like.
For example, the page builder has prebuilt sections for the hero area, testimonials, FAQs, pricing plans, author bio, and more. On top of that, you can customize the style and layout of these sections to your liking.
To sum up, Podia’s website builder is much more powerful than Gumroad’s, and you can use it to create a full-fledged website with sales pages.
Sales and Marketing
Both Podia and Gumroad offer numerous tools to help you market and sell your products. We’ll discuss them in detail in this section.
Product Pricing Options
When it comes to product pricing, Gumroad offers the option of free, one-time, and subscription-based payments.
Alternatively, you can leave it up to your customers to decide how much they are willing to pay for your product.
There’s also the option of offering your product as a rental product, meaning that the customer can stream it within 30 days from purchase.
Now, Podia offers multiple pricing options, too. You can offer your products for free, for a one-time payment, for a subscription fee, or you can allow your customers to pay over a set number of monthly installments.
However, Podia doesn’t support the rental and “pay what you want” payment models.
One pricing feature that both platforms offer is the ability to create coupons and offer discounts on your products.
Payments and Checkouts
Payment processing is one of the core aspects of the two platforms. While they both let you offer card and PayPal payment options to your potential customers, their approaches to payment processing are quite different.
In Gumroad’s case, the platform collects payments on your behalf and makes payouts every week as long as you have a minimum balance in your account.
On the other hand, Podia allows you to receive payments directly from customers through Stripe and PayPal, so the money goes directly to your account.
Both approaches have advantages and disadvantages.
With Gumroad, the entire payment process is managed, so you don’t have to worry about things like taxes.
For example, Gumroad is generally the merchant of record for all transactions, so it charges and remits sales taxes, making tax compliance easier for you.
On the other hand, with Podia you can only collect EU VAT, so you’ll need to remit taxes to the authorities yourself. Plus, you can’t collect sales taxes for other countries, such as the US or India.
However, a major advantage of Podia’s approach is that you’re not tied to their system. If you were to switch platforms tomorrow, you don’t need to worry about the continuity of customer payments, as they’re already in your Stripe or PayPal accounts.
Additionally, the payments go into your account immediately, without waiting for your platform to make the payouts.
In terms of checkouts, both platforms have a well-designed checkout process, which you can also use on an external website. Plus, both give you similar capabilities with minor differences.
In Gumroad’s case, the checkout happens on a standalone page and in a single step where users enter their contact details and payment information.
On the other hand, Podia’s entire process happens in a popup. Plus, it’s a two-step process where the user enters their contact information in the first step and the payment information in the second step.
Moreover, you can add 1-click upsells to the Podia checkout, so your users will be able to purchase additional products on the thank you page.
Having said that, both platforms’ checkout processes are straightforward and work equally well.
Marketing Tools
Apart from the selling tools, Podia and Gumroad offer a few handy marketing tools.
The first one is email marketing. Both platforms allow you to create broadcast emails and automated email campaigns which you can send to your subscribers and customers.
However, in both cases, the email marketing capabilities are basic. For example, you can’t segment your subscribers based on their interests or activity, but you can only separate them based on their purchases, limiting the tools’ effectiveness.
The only difference is that Podia allows you to add email sign-ups to your website so that you can collect email addresses, while Gumroad doesn’t offer anything similar.
Meanwhile, the analytics will help you analyze and learn from your previous interactions with members to improve your products and, consequently, your marketing game.
While Gumroad’s Discovery feature allows users to search for the product they want, its effectiveness is still limited.
Additionally, Podia allows users to add email sign-ups to any page, even outside Podia. You will also receive full revenue metrics for every email you send, so you will have all the data you need to improve your content based on the results.
The next important feature is affiliate marketing, and the good thing is that both Podia and Gumroad allow you to create and run an affiliate program.
In both cases, you can make any of your users into an affiliate, and allow them to promote your products for a commission.
The only significant difference is that Gumroad automatically pays out the affiliates, while in Podia’s case, you’re responsible for paying them.
However, keep in mind that if you choose Gumroad, they’ll be Gumroad affiliates and they can promote other Gumroad products as well. With Podia, instead, they’re your affiliates and you own the relationship with them.
Finally, both platforms have direct integrations with popular email marketing services like ActiveCampaign and ConvertKit, as well as a Zapier integration, so you can literally integrate with any third-party app.
Pricing Plans
When it comes to costs, these platforms differ a lot.
Gumroad doesn’t have a flat rate and operates on transaction fees. The platform takes 9% + 30 cents for every transaction until you reach $1,000 in earnings. The transaction fee is then reduced to 7% + 30 cents.
As your earnings through the platform increase, the fee decreases. The lowest fee is 2.9% + 30 cents per transaction once you cross the $1 million mark.
On the other hand, Podia has a completely different pricing structure. Its free plan doesn’t charge anything but an 8% transaction fee.
However, the free plan is clearly limited, as you can only create one Digital Download, one Coaching product, and draft courses.
Still, Podia offers three paid plans where you can create unlimited courses and digital products:
- Mover plan – $39/month
- Shaker plan – $89/month
- Earthquaker plan – $199/month
These plans don’t charge a transaction fee but differ from each other in terms of the included features. One important thing to note is that, on top of the monthly fee, you’ll also pay a 2.9% + 30 cents fee to your payment provider (e.g., Stripe).
If you’d like to explore Podia pricing in more detail, you should check out this pricing guide.
Overall, Gumroad’s pricing will work better for beginners. As your business grows, instead, choosing Podia will be more cost-effective.
Podia vs Gumroad – Final Verdict
In this article, we covered the pros and cons of Podia vs Gumroad in detail, and we hope that you were able to decide on the right platform for you.
If not, here’s our recommendation:
If you want to sell simpler, files-based digital products, and you don’t have money to spend on a monthly subscription, go for Gumroad.
However, if you want to sell more elaborate digital products like online courses or memberships, Podia will be an obvious choice. Plus, if you’re fine with the monthly fee, we recommend you use Podia for digital downloads as well.
Overall, Podia is a superior platform compared to Gumroad, offering more features for product creation, delivery experience, and sales and marketing.
We hope this article helped you pick between Gumroad vs Podia. If you have any questions, leave a comment and let us know.
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