Podia vs. Teachable [2022]: Which Is Best?

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So you’ve narrowed down your selection of online course platforms to either Podia or Teachable. But which one is the best choice?

Podia or Teachable, which platform is better? Podia and Teachable are both great online course platforms with similar site-building and sales features. Podia is a bit better suited for those looking to create a membership site. While Teachable has more powerful course features like graded quizzes.

In this article, I’ll compare Podia and Teachable in depth. By the end, you should have a good idea of what both platforms offer, and be better informed about which would be a better choice for your online course business.

Table of Contents

Podia vs. Teachable

Teachable has been one of the leading online course platforms for a number of years now.

They have over 23 million students, more than 250,000 active courses, and instructors have earned over $550 million through the platform.

In comparison, Podia is more of a newcomer to the online course world, and has only really started to gain a lot of traction in the past couple of years.

Both platforms are similar in a lot of ways. So it can be hard for course creators to really determine which is a better choice for their business. That’s why I’ve decided to write this article.

I’ll take an in-depth look at both platforms and let you know all the details you may want to consider when making your final choice.

Pricing

Podia and Teachable use substantially different pricing models.

For one thing, Teachable has three plan options, while Podia has two. Podia’s lower-tier plan restricts fewer features from users.

While Teachable holds back a lot of their best features and doesn’t make them available in their basic plan.

Podia Pricing

Podia offers a Mover plan for $39 per month, and a Shaker plan for $79 per month.

Many of the features offered are the same on both plans. Although you’ll need to upgrade to the more costly plan to take advantage of a few key features.

Namely memberships, blogs, embedded checkout, affiliate marketing, and third-party code.

Read the in-depth review of Podia and compare Podia pricing plans before considering Podia as your online course platform.

Teachable Pricing

You can sign up for the basic plan for $29 per month. At $99 per month, you get access to the professional plan. And the business plan costs $249 per month.

Teachable also offers a free plan when you first sign up. But this almost isn’t worth taking into consideration. It only allows you to have 10 students at a time, and charges you a transaction fee of $1 + 10% on each course sold.

It also lacks most features aside from the very basics. So I’m not going to discuss it any further for this comparison.

Some pretty major features aren’t available on Teachable unless you sign up for at least the $99 plan. This includes graded quizzes, advanced reporting, an unbranded website, course completion certificates, and more.

For more info on the differences between the different plans, check out my article on Teachable’s Pricing Plans.

Check out the full review of Teachable to decide if it’s the right online course platform for you.

Transaction Fees

Podia never charges transaction fees, no matter which of their plans you choose. So you can be confident that you’ll only pay the one low plan amount each month.

Teachable charges 5% transaction fees on its basic $29 plan, which can start to really add up if you’re starting to sell thousands of dollars worth of courses.

Course Builders

Both Podia and Teachable offer course builders that let you upload and create your online courses with relative ease.

Either one will let you upload all of your content at once, and easily rearrange your lessons by dragging and dropping.

However, I do feel that Teachable is a bit more user-friendly overall. It offers some nice quality-of-life improvements over Podia, like being able to select multiple lessons and change settings or delete them all at once.

So overall it’s more flexible and easier to use. With Podia, you have to go through and update everything one by one.

Teachable lets you add multiple different file types like PDF, quizzes, text, and videos to a single lesson.

Podia is more restrictive and you can only have one type of content per lesson. This can be a pretty big restriction if you’re trying to create really rich, engaging lessons.

Teachable also offers cloud importing with their course builder. So you can bring files over straight from Dropbox or Google Drive. Podia only lets you upload straight from your computer.

In terms of actually putting your course together, I have to hand it to Teachable. Its page builder is significantly more flexible and easy to use than Podia, and offers more features overall.

Limitations on Resources

Both Podia and Teachable provide you with unlimited numbers of courses and students on all of their paid plans.

So you don’t have to worry about the size of your customer base or future growth when deciding on which plan to use.

Podia goes a bit further and has a real “unlimited everything” approach. They explicitly also state that they don’t put any limits on things like number of files hosted, emails sent, and other items.

It’s unclear whether Teachable has any additional restrictions on any of these items.

But generally both platforms seem to offer a lot of freedom and flexibility, regardless of your business size.

Check out these Teachable Course Examples as inspiration for your courses.

Affiliate Marketing

Both Podia and Teachable offer ways to use affiliate marketing to sell your course.

But neither platform has integrated affiliate marketing on their lowest plans.

On Teachable you’ll need to sign up for at least the $99 Professional plan to use affiliate marketing, while Podia requires signing up for the $79 Shaker plan.

Third-Party Integration

Podia only allows third-party integration on their $79 plan, whereas you can use it on Teachable with just the basic $29 plan.

There are a bunch of applications of third-party scripts when promoting and tracking your course.

Including the use of Facebook Pixel and Google Analytics. So this is one area where I feel that Podia is more restrictive than Teachable.

But if you do have Podia’s more expensive plan, they offer more in terms of integration.

Podia will directly integrate with ConvertKit, Aweber, ActiveCampaign, MailerLite, MailChimp, GetResponse, and Drip.

Meanwhile, Teachable only integrates natively with ConvertKit and MailChimp.

Both will also integrate with Zapier however, which opens up the ability to use a lot more third-party apps through that instead.

But to make things more confusing, Teachable is the winner when it comes to using Zapier.

You can use triggers with Teachable like quiz results, lecture completion, or course completion that aren’t available with Podia.

So in terms of integration, there isn’t necessarily a clear winner. It depends what third-party apps you’re planning on using with your course alongside your main platform.

Marketing and Automation

Both Podia and Teachable offer integrated email marketing on even their lowest plans. But aside from that, neither platform really offers advanced marketing tools.

Don’t expect to use either platform to create sales funnels, complex series of landing pages, or other more advanced ways of marketing your online course.

Since both Podia and Teachable are all-in-one systems, they don’t tend to focus on these things.

So you may need an additional tool like Clickfunnels for more advanced marketing strategies.

Customer Support

Both Podia and Teachable offer sufficient levels of customer support, and you’ll get the help that you need if you run into trouble when setting up your online course.

Both platforms have large knowledge bases where you can search through frequently asked questions and how-to sections for answers to common questions.

Teachable offers basic product support through email on their $29 plan, while you get priority product support on their higher plans which also includes access to live chat.

Podia offers support through chat on either of their plans. During business hours, you can expect a response time of about 5 to 10 minutes for most questions. Outside of working hours, you can leave a message.

From looking at reviews of users from both platforms, it seems that Podia’s customer support is a bit more friendly and responsive.

Podia also supports free migration if you’re coming over from another platform. This makes it easy to bring over both your content and existing users.

Teachable does have a community Facebook group though where you can interact with other users of the platform, and you may be able to get some answers to your questions there.

Checkout Process For Customers

Podia and Teachable both have streamlined checkout processes for your customers, which are optimized for conversion. They allow your users to pay for your course quickly and easily with minimal hassle.

On either platform, users only need to make an account after they’ve checked out and paid.

And you can also add one-click upsells to the thank you page after users have bought your base course on either Podia or Teachable.

Either platform can also automatically calculate EU VAT and charge it appropriately, so it’s easy no matter where in the world your customers are buying from.

Teachable is perhaps slightly more streamlined. The checkout takes place in one step where your customer enters both their payment information and email on one screen.

In comparison, your customers on Podia do need to go through a multi-step process where they first enter their email, and then payment details on the next page.

Podia also seems to offer less customization on the checkout page in terms of testimonials, money-back guarantees, and other elements.

But like I mentioned, both checkout processes are quite streamlined. So I wouldn’t worry about it being the deciding factor for choosing between either Podia or Teachable.

Payment Processing

You can use Stripe and PayPal with either Podia or Teachable, which will cover most of what your customers will want to pay with.

Podia’s integration is a lot more straightforward. You just connect your Stripe and PayPal and the money goes straight to your account.

Teachable’s payment processing has more options. You can either use a custom gateway, which is similar to what Podia offers. This option also allows you to get paid instantly.

But there is also a Teachable Gateway option. The downside to this option is that you’ll need to wait 30 days to get paid if you use it.

The upside is that it supports some other payment options like Google Pay and Apple Pay, which gives a bit more payment flexibility to your customers.

Course Pricing

Both Teachable and Podia give you lots of different options for pricing your products. You can set up a payment plan, a one-time purchase, or a subscription model.

Teachable offers a little more flexibility. You can offer your courses in multiple different currencies. Whereas with Podia, you just set one currency setting at the platform level.

Neither Podia or Teachable is very flexible in subscription duration. You’re pretty much stuck with monthly or annual.

There’s no way to make different options like a quarterly or weekly subscription.

Podia’s membership plans make it a bit more flexible in terms of which products are included with which membership. You can offer basically an unlimited amount of different plans and levels.

Teachable doesn’t really have a way of offering multiple different tiers of membership.

Student Experience

A big part of how your students will experience your course is through the course video player. So I think it’s worth focusing part of a comparison between two platforms on that.

The good news is that both Teachable and Podia have well-designed and attractive course players. Not only do they do the job, but they look great too.

On either platform, students have a navigation menu on the left side and content appears on the right.

Both also have an area below the lesson for embedded comments where students can discuss and give feedback.

One feature Podia’s player has that Teachable lacks is the ability to go full-screen.

I think this is a great feature to help remove distraction, as it hides the sidebar navigation so students can focus on just the lesson material.

I also think the Podia player looks slightly better, although that may just be personal preference.

Both platforms have mobile-friendly players. Teachable is a bit more advanced and offers an iOS app and the ability to view course material offline.

If you have an Apple device this might be more convenient for you. But for Android users, the experience is about the same on either platform.

Overall, either course player will give a great experience. Students aren’t going to likely run into technical difficulties or frustrations with using either.

On either Podia or Teachable, you can drip your content to students on a schedule and send them an email automatically when new content is available for them.

Teachable wins out in terms of quizzing, since it actually has the ability to assign graded quizzes.

Podia is more limited and only has pre-made interactive quizzes, and doesn’t allow you to lock users to a certain number of attempts.

Teachable offers more in terms of course compliance, with the ability to force students to complete lessons in a specific order, or pass quizzes before they can progress.

You can check more Teachable alternatives to decide which online course platform is the best for you.

What I Like Best About Each Platform

If it’s not already apparent, both Podia and Teachable have a lot of their own little pros and cons.

While overall both are great platforms that have many of the same features, there are some little differences that might make a difference in which you’ll prefer.

What I like best about Podia:

No transaction fees on any plans
More friendly and responsive customer service
Free migration from other platforms
Flexible options for pricing your memberships
Built-in live chat to connect with your customers

What I like best about Teachable:

Course builder is easier to use, more flexible, and offers more options such as cloud importing
More course features like certificates and graded quizzes
Can support more payment types and keeps better track of VAT
Third-party integration is available on all plans
Course compliance tools and controls

Conclusion

Podia and Teachable are both great options if you’re looking for an online course platform. They’re both full of great features that you’ll need to create and sell your courses and other digital products.

Podia is a no-brainer if you’re mainly focused on memberships.

If you are looking for a membership course platform, check these 5 Best Membership Site Platforms.

Teachable offers more features like graded quizzes and certificates that can allow for more engaging online courses.

I do think that Podia’s $39 Mover plan is the better choice if you’re on a budget.

In comparison, Teachable‘s basic $29 plan is quite limited and doesn’t give you access to many of the features that I’d recommend using the platform for in the first place.

Having a 5% transaction fee on Teachable‘s basic plan is also likely to be a dealbreaker for some people.

If your main focus is selling online courses and you are okay with the $99 per month price tag, I think Teachable‘s professional tier plan is your best bet.

But if your online business is more diversified than just courses and you’re looking to also sell digital products like ebooks and other items, plus memberships and webinars, then Podia is the better choice.

For the lower price, I can put up with the slightly less convenient course builder. You can compare these online course platforms as well:

About the Author Jacob M.

Jacob has a background in finance and engineering. Outside of his day job, he is a lifelong learner, who enjoys reading, taking online courses, and writing about what he's learned.

15 May, 2020

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