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Podia vs. Teachable — Which is the Best Course Creation Tool?

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With an industry forecasted to reach $108 Billion by 2026, finding the best course creation platform is pivotal to the success of your online course business.

You’ve done your research and came across 2 excellent online platforms: Podia and Teachable — but which one takes the crown?

In this post, we compare their features and pricing to help you determine the best solution for your business needs.

Ready to find the answer?

Let’s begin!

1. What is Podia?

Podia’s homepage

Founded in 2014, Podia is an all-in-one creator course platform that allows creators to sell online courses, webinars, digital downloads, and memberships.

To run whole course businesses online, Podia provides their creators with hosting, custom websites, free migration, and a set of tools for both launching and marketing.

With 50,000+creators on board, Podia delivers an effortless experience that is rarely matched by competitors — that’s not to say there aren’t any though.

On top of that, they have an amazing live chat support team that is available 24/7, there’s always an experienced agent who’s there to help you.

2. What is Teachable?

Teachable’s homepage

Launched in 2013 as Fedora, Teachable grew so fast that in just 7 years it was acquired by the Hotmart group for $250 million.

This platform focuses on building instructing courses businesses for creators with ease of access through multiple platforms – smartphones, PCs, tablets, etc.

Their mission has proved to be remarkably efficient as it rendered great student management features, easy integration with other platforms, and overall ease of running online schools.

This is exactly why Teachable has 100,000+ instructors that have generated more than $500 million combined.

3. Podia vs. Teachable: Pros and cons

Needless to say, both platforms are powerhouses when it comes to uploading and selling courses.

But at the end of the day, no platform is perfect, and the goal of this post is to give you an honest opinion on both.

So if you don’t have much time to go through the post, this section will give a high overview of both platforms’ qualities.

3.1. Podia’s pros and cons

Pros

Unlimited bandwidth, hosting, and storage

Zero transaction fees — just regular payment processor fees

Multiple-choice quizzes for students are available

Easy third-party integrations with a straightforward design

Integrated email marketing features

Cons

Limited technical personalization for pages

No learning paths available for students

No free plan is available

No built-in sales funnel builder

No marketplace for courses

3.2. Teachable’s pros and cons

Pros

Offers course compliance features

Offers a Free plan

Ability to add admins and authors to courses

Unlimited courses and students

Graded quizzes for students are available

Cons

Starting plans have transaction fees

Narrow multi-lingual support

Designing sales pages can be tiresome

No marketplace for courses

Gets expensive for adding upgraded features

4. Podia vs. Teachable: Comparing the core features

Welcome to the showdown — this section will pick apart the most mutually marketed features of Podia and Teachable.

This will help you make an informed decision before choosing either of these platforms.

And since making your online course is why you’re probably here, let’s start with that.

4.1. Online courses

These are set at the heart of Podia and Teachable’s core features, but how does each platform handle them exactly?

4.1.1. Podia’s online course builder

Podia’s course dashboard

Podia gives you the power to:

Sell standalone, drip, cohort-based, bundles, or pre-launch courses

Sell digital downloads like audio files, ebooks, music, templates — If it’s downloadable, you can sell it on Podia

Track students’ progress with a messaging feature

You can customize your courses with:

A custom domain and custom website using the site builder

Multiple-choice quizzes

Any type of media

Course completion certificates

Podia lets you express your course material in 11 languages and supports up to 20 global currencies when it’s time to collect payments.

Speaking of payments, Podia integrates with both Stripe and PayPalas payment processors for your online course business — with no transaction fees as well.

4.1.2. Teachable’s online course builder

Teachable’s course builder

Teachable offers quite a different approach and lets you create an online school with your own curriculum to attract more traditional students.

This lets you:

Divide your curriculum into sections

Publish lectures and content for sections in your curriculum

Host scheduled events and webinars — This requires integration with platforms like Zoom or YouTube live

Schedule feedback sessions — This requires integration with a scheduling platform like Calendly

Track students’ progress with a messaging feature similar to Podia

For customization features, Teachable allows you to:

Use drip content to schedule your curriculum for students

Brand courses and your online school to match your own theme using their in-house builder — You can also add your custom domain if you have one

Bulk upload lectures if you already have content ready for your courses

Offer graded quizzes to check student’s performance

Offer course completion certificates

Set course compliance conditions

And just like Podia, Teachable integrates PayPal and Stripeas payment processors to accept all kinds of payments for your online course.

But unlike Podia, Teachable has transaction fees on both the Free and Basic plans (up to $1 + 10% on Free, and 5% on Basic).

Verdict: Both platforms are amazing for course creation.

It would be a tie if you’re willing to sign up for an advanced plan on Teachable and avoid the transaction fees, but if not, Podia takes the lead on this one.

Podia vs. Teachable: 1 - 0

4.2. Coaching

It’s true that courses and coaching go hand-in-hand, but each platform markets their coaching features alone with enough reasons to back it up.

4.2.1. Podia’s coaching

Coaching sessions in Podia

Podia’s approach for coaching is as easy as it gets.

This platform will let you:

Add a coaching module straight to your courses so course students can book coaching sessions

Sell unlimited coaching sessions

Use Podia’s checkout seamlessly

Have no transaction fees on the coaching sessions you sell

Though Podia does require you to use either Calendly, Acuity, YouCanBookMe, SavvyCal, or your custom link to manage your booking sessions and availability.

There’s, unfortunately, no dedicated sales funnel builder available.

4.2.2. Teachable’s coaching

Teachable’s coaching dashboard

Teachable treats coaching as a standalone product and has a basic sales funnel builder to intake the flow of students coming to your online school.

Once you create a coaching product, you’ll be prompted to choose one of these funnels:

Direct — New clients can go directly to checkout and sign up

Intake form — New clients fill out an intake form and go to checkout

Intake form and approval — New clients fill out an intake form and wait for approval before checkout

After choosing what sales funnel your coaching product is going to implement, you can start customizing everything to match your wants and needs — templates are available to help you build sales pages.

You’re free to sell as many coaching products as you want, but the platform expects you to integrate with platforms like Calendly, Zapier, and others to completely manage your coaching business.

Keep in mind, the standard transaction fees of Teachableapply to your coaching products.

Verdict: The fact that both platforms require integrations for you to run your teaching business fully isn’t optimal — but Teachable having a built-in sales funnel builder gives it an edge here.

Podia vs. Teachable: 1 - 1

4.3. Landing pages

A landing page is the first web page your students and clients see that introduces them to your teaching business.

So it goes without saying that it’s incredibly important for your landing pages to be as optimized as possible.

Because they’ll convert traffic, warm leads, and interested eyes to paying students.

4.3.1. Podia’s landing pages

Podia’s sales pages builder

Podia’s website drag-and-drop builder will allow you to add any type of media you want, control the layout of sections, and personalize content to match your brand.

You have the option to link to your own domain, and they promise free migration of your existing business if you sign up for a yearly plan.

The builder is extremely easy to use, but we did find that the design for most of the Podia websites can get repetitive.

And that’s because of the lack of templates, no dedicated sales funnel builder to direct traffic into buyer journeys, and overall limited functionality when it comes to implementing features that you may want.

So, if you want a distinct design for your landing pages and overall website, you’ll have to resort to using integrations with other platforms like ClickFunnels or Leadpages.

4.3.2. Teachable’s landing pages

Using blocks in Teachable’s builder

Teachable has a different sales page builder compared to Podia, yet it’s still as easy to use.

After choosing a template, you’re presented with a builder where you can add/edit blocks to control the layout and content of your landing pages.

The builder also allows you to add fully customizable Liquid/HTML blocks.

This means, if you have the technical knowledge or are willing to hire someone who does, you’ll be able to reach any desired design you want.

If you already have a website with your own domain, you can have it hosted by Teachable.

This would help you integrate your courses and coaching sessions right into your existing brand.

Verdict: While both platforms offer an exceptionally easy experience for setting up your sales pages — Teachable offers more customizability options.

Podia vs. Teachable: 1 - 2

4.4. Email marketing

Let’s get this out of the way, email marketing is a huge weapon to have in your digital marketing for any online course business.

Why?

Because it has a remarkable track record of increasing the customer lifetime value (CLV), it’s the perfect tool for acquiring and retaining students for your online course business.

To put it in perspective, email marketing has an ROI of $42 - $1.

So if you’re not using it, you’re losing money and you don’t even know it!

Luckily, both Podia and Teachable have recognized that.

4.4.1. Podia’s email marketing

Podia’s email dashboard

Podia claims that they can completely replace your email marketing platform by giving you the ability to:

Launch broadcast emails

Launch automated email campaigns

Prepare entrance and existing conditions for email campaigns

View a sufficient amount of analytics

Preview emails with test emails

They also give you the option to grow your email list through:

Embeddable forms that you can spread through different pages

Segmentation of contacts who bought different products

While these features are awesome and can be enough for a lot of creators to kick start their email marketing journey, it’s not enough compared to real email management software.

For example, creating entrance and existing conditions would get very difficult for any complicated marketing plan.

Say you want to upsell students a higher valued course after they finish their current one, and you set up an exiting condition for their current course if they join the higher valued one.

What happens if a student decides to join the higher valued course on their own overnight?

They’ll exit their current course and lose progress.

Plus, Podia’s email composer is limited — you can’t add integrated videos, boxes, timers, or put attachments in certain places.

4.4.2. Teachable’s email marketing

Teachable’s email composer

While Podia flexes in-house features for email marketing, Teachable has taken the integration approach, with platforms like:

ConvertKit

Zapier

Mailchimp

Webhooks

This means you’ll manage and create all of your campaigns externally, so you need to have the technical know-how or hire someone that does.

Once you got yourself set up with one of those platforms, Teachable would help grow your email list by:

Providing subscribing blocks to use in your sales pages

Providing email lead forms that you can use

Providing a sufficient amount of data metrics for your products

Teachable also gives you an email area in your dashboard that lets you control sending notifications for students and view your email history sent by your Teachable school.

They also include an email composer and template editor so that you can fully customize emails sent to your students.

Verdict: Although Podia’s email composer is somewhat basic, the convenience and hassle-free experience for running your email marketing efforts from one place is just too good compared to that of Teachable.

Podia vs. Teachable: 2 - 2

4.5. Monetization

When it comes to monetizing your online courses, you can expect the best from both Podia and Teachable.

After all, they have every incentive to make you earn more.

So here’s what you can anticipate from each one:

4.5.1. Podia’s monetization

Other than taking full revenue for everything you sell on Podia, you can:

Start a blog hosted on your Podia site

Sell membership access — Although we couldn’t pin-point what plans this is available on

Sell all kinds of digital products natively — This includes webinars, ebooks, audio files, and more

Start an affiliate program — Available on the two upper-priced plans

Offer multiple payment options like one-time or recurring payments

Price all of your courses and coaching sessions as you please

Offer course bundles, coupons, and upsells

Talk to students live through the native messaging feature

Quite the list, now let’s check what Teachable has in response.

4.5.2. Teachable’s monetization

You can monetize your online school with Teachable using:

Upselling courses and coaching sessions — Teachable makes this one a breeze with pre-made blocks in the sales page builder

Course and coaching bundles and coupons

Affiliate marketing — Available on the two upper-priced plans

Talk to students live through the native messaging feature

Add authors and team members — Available on all paid plans with varying degrees

Multiple payment options

Verdict: Both platforms excel at providing you with tools to monetize your online courses and coaching sessions, so let’s call this one a tie.

Podia vs. Teachable: 3 - 3

4.6. Extra Features in Podia and Teachable

For features, we have covered all of the main ones that will help you in choosing the right platform for your online course creation journey.

But, we don’t stop there, here are a few more that you can expect from each platform.

4.6.1. Podia’s extra features

Native support for certificates

Live chat support

Email support — Respond in up to 24hrs

Instant payouts

Control whether your affiliate program is public or invite-only

Sell unlimited online courses

Collect VAT/UK taxes (at the time of writing this post)

Offers payment plans for students

4.6.2. Teachable’s extra features

Has an iOS app

Native support for course completion certifications

Sell unlimited products to unlimited students

Instant payouts

Collect VAT/US taxes (at the time of writing this post)

Students can leave lecture comments

Email support

Product support for students

Pretty close, let’s check out pricing next.

5. Pricing

So we have taken a thorough overview of what each platform has to offer for you and your students, time to pull out the credit card — or is it?

5.1. Podia’s pricing

Podia’s pricing plans

Podia offers 3 paid plans:

Mover plan — $39/month or $33/month billed annually

Enough to get you moving, set up your custom website, sell unlimited courses, digital products, and webinars while having the essential marketing kit that Podia offers.

Shaker plan — $89/month or $75/month billed annually

Everything in Mover plus getting you access to advanced features like affiliate marketing, and unlimited coaching products.

Earthquaker plan — $199/month or $166/month billed annually

Has access to all the features Podia has to offer.

5.2. Teachable’s pricing

Teachable’s pricing plans

Teachable offers a free plan alongside 3 paid plans:

Free plan

Well, not exactly free with a $1 + 10% transaction fee on each sale, but the truth is everything has a cost, and paying a fee is way better than paying with your personal data.

The Free plan will let you set up unlimited courses, unlimited coaching services, basic quizzes, product bundles, product support, and a few integrations.

You have no access to affiliate marketing, coupon codes, drip course content, course completion certificates, or a student community.

Basic plan — $39/month or $29/month billed annually

The Basic plan includes everything in Free with access to the email admin section in your dashboard, a single student community, drip course content, and more integrations.

Oh, and a 5% transaction fee on each sale.

Pro plan — $119/month or $99/month billed annually

Teachable's professional plan, it includes everything in the Basic plan with a 0% transaction fee.

It has access to more features like affiliate marketing, advanced theme customization, course completion certificates, priority product support, advanced reports, and group coaching calls.

Business plan — $299/month or $249/month billed annually

Has access to all the features Teachable has to offer.

6. Podia or Teachable: Which one should you use?

So now the score is tied and it comes down to this final verdict, which platform should you choose for creating online courses?

From our honest point-of-view, we think that both platforms could be right for you, and both platforms could not be right for you.

So here’s our final recommendation:

Podia will win you over if:

If you’re a beginner in selling online courses and want a breeze-experience to get your online business up.

And also if you don’t care much about customizing everything to the last detail.

Teachable is the better choice for you if:

You’re someone who’s looking to invest more time and money into making the perfect brand for selling online courses.

Or if you’re someone who’s looking to offer a traditional learning experience for students.

Do you know what else is perfect?

7. Systeme.io — The best all-in-one online course platform alternative

systeme.io logo

You like Podia because it’s more affordable and straightforward to use, you also like Teachable for the amount of customizations available.

But you probably dislike that you have to integrate other platforms for your online course business to reach its full potential.

With systeme.io, you can get the best of both worlds without the need for any integrations.

How?

Systeme.io is a fully integrated platform that gives you 6 essential features to launch and grow your online course business.

7.1. Systeme.io’s features — Build, launch, automate, and grow

systeme.io’s features

Here’s how systeme.io can skyrocket the growth of your business with no technical knowledge being required:

Website builder — Use proven templates with a drag-and-drop interface to create a beautiful custom website for your eLearning offering in minutes

Online courses — Create, market, and sell courses from one place while having all the functionalities you want

Sales funnels builder — Control your students' journey with awesome funnels using proven templates and a drag-and-drop builder

Email marketing — Set up all kinds of email campaigns and send unlimited emails to perfectly segmented students easily

Affiliate program management — Turn your biggest fans into paying affiliates with fully integrated affiliate marketing from the get-go

Marketing automation — Automate all of your digital marketing efforts with minimal effort

We would forgive you if you think that all this comes at a hefty price tag, but you couldn’t be more wrong.

7.2. Systeme.io’s pricing

systeme.io’s pricing plans

All of our plans - including the free one - give you an unlimited course site with no limits on how many users can use it or any transaction fees.

Here are our plans:

Free plan — $0/month

Startup plan — $27/month

Webinar plan — $47/month

Unlimited plan — $97/month

The Free plan offers you all of the 6 essential features to get your online course business fully up and running — and it’s free forever.

You can save 30% on an annual subscription, you also get a free migration if you sign up for the Unlimited plan or any annual billing plan.

8. Conclusion

And there you have it! It’s been a pleasure to give you an honest review of Podia vs. Teachable.

In summary of what we learned today with:

Both Podia and Teachable are awesome course creation platforms that excel in their own ways

Podia is a great option for people starting out with its in-house marketing features, website builder, and straightforward experience

Teachable is awesome for people looking to offer a traditional online learning experience to students or looking to have the ability to customize everything

Both platforms offer integrated payment processing

Podia is more affordable compared to Teachable — while systeme.io is even more affordable

Both platforms require integrations with other platforms for your business to reach its full potential — Systeme.io doesn’t

With an awesome customer support team that has an average response time of under 2 hours, it’s easy to see why users love systeme.io.

And since you can try it out for absolutely free, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t give us a chance, sign up today!

Cheers!