Podia Review, Pricing & Features

What is Podia?

Podia is a course creation software solution with approximately one thousand instructors. Podia helps customers create and market their online courses. Features like a course and site builder, lead capture, live chat, and integrations with software like Mailchimp, Shopify, Stripe & Zoom help course creators build their online businesses more efficiently.

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Table of Contents

• What is Podia?
• Podia Review Summary
• Podia Pricing & Cost
• Podia Features
  • Course Builder
  • Course Delivery
  • Marketing
  • Payments
  • Legal & Security
• Podia Integrations & Website Compatibilities
• Podia Customer Support
• Podia vs. Competitors
• Is Podia Right for You?

Podia Review Summary

Podia was founded in 2014 by Spencer Fry. Podia has four principles — putting the creators first, treating everyone with the same level of respect and attention, making the software fun and for the people, building a platform that supports creators for their future endeavors. Today, Podia has approximately 20 employees and is based in New York, New York.

Podia is a course creation solution that provides what you need to sell online courses, webinars, file downloads, and memberships without worrying about the technology involved. Podia’s platform comes with the same tools & integrations found in other course creation solutions. However, its tools are not as advanced as those found in alternative solutions.

Starting at $39 per month, Podia is one of the most affordable course creation solutions in the market. In general, Podia customers pay about 50% less than customers of Teachable and Thinkific.

We recommend Podia to beginners who need a basic platform to begin their course creation journeys.

Podia Pricing & Cost

Podia’s pricing ranges from $39 to $79 a month. The company also offers a free trial for 14 days that provides access to all of Podia’s features.

Podia Features

Below, we will discuss the key features of Podia. We will also include screenshots of the product to give you an idea of its design and architecture.

Course Builder

The course builder is the central feature included in course creation software. In Podia, courses are made of separate content blocks that are grouped into chapters. Overall, building courses in Podia is simple once you learn to navigate the application’s user interface.

Within your sections, you can upload different forms of multimedia – images, video, audio, and PDFs. You can also add links, text, and quizzes.

As seen above through the preview, elements in Podia are automatically centered and layered top to bottom. Unlike other solutions, Podia does not let you align your text in the center or to the right of the screen.

One disadvantage of Podia is that once you’ve uploaded your files, you cannot edit them inside Podia. Therefore, we recommend making any edits to your files before they’re uploaded.

Quizzes

Podia lets you create multiple choice quizzes to include in your courses. As a course creator, quizzes let you understand how well your students are performing. Quizzes also provide useful feedback to students on areas of improvement.

Overall, quizzes in Podia are simple and allow very little customization. As seen above, your only customization options are to name your quiz, write your questions, and add text-based answers.

Podia shows students the questions they answered correctly, but you cannot assign grades, or set a passing grade. Other solutions offer these grading capabilities, which can be used to unlock subsequent lessons for students.

Additional Course Editing Features

Podia lets you add custom branding, and translate your website & courses into 10 different languages besides English. However, you cannot remove Podia branding from your website.

The custom branding Podia offers includes adding custom colors, changing the typography, and uploading a logo and favicon. Some of the languages Podia lets you translate your website into include:

Course Delivery

After your course is created, you need to deliver it to your students. Podia offers features that help schedule the delivery of your course content, teach live classes, and support student interactions.

Drip Schedule

As a course creator, you can use a drip schedule to publish certain sections of your courses at certain times. In Podia, when you create a section, you can also activate a drip schedule for it.

However, Podia only lets you drip your course content based on a selected number days after it is purchased. Unlike other platforms, you cannot choose a specific date or another event to trigger a drip schedule. Like most other solutions, Podia does let you send emails to notify customers that a new course section is available.

Live Classes

Live classes are an effective way to create a more engaging learning environment. Live classes in Podia can be delivered using YouTube Live or Zoom. Overall, we found this function in Podia to be user friendly, as it requires no coding. Podia lets you customize a few features for your live classes:

Student Discussions

In Podia, Students can have discussions within courses using comments. This feature lets students and instructors comment and reply to one another, and creates a sense of community.

As an instructor, you can choose if comments are visible, hidden, or locked. Locking comments doesn't affect existing comments, it prohibits new ones. Students can also like comments and edit them after they have been posted.

Marketing

Once your courses are complete, you need to find the best method to market them. Podia offers a site builder, and additional marketing tools like coupons, course bundles, email marketing, affiliate marketing, and a sales tracker.

Site Builder

Podia offers a site builder that lets you create your website from scratch, and host it on a custom domain. Overall, we found its site builder to be basic, but effective. While its platform is not design-focused, for its price, its customization capabilities are above average.

Web pages in Podia are edited in separate content blocks – this includes the appearance, header, and content sections. Podia offers a range of content section types for your biography, FAQs, testimonials, text, and images. You can link your social media profiles from within the biography section. Podia also lets you customize your site’s color scheme and align images in a section to the left, center, or right.

Coupons

Podia lets you create coupons that offer discounted pricing for your courses. These help promote your courses and increase your sales. Podia lets you create coupons that can be applied store-wide, to certain products, or to certain plans. When creating a coupon, Podia lets you:

Course Bundles

Podia also lets you sell your courses as bundles at a discounted price. There are two primary benefits to selling your courses as bundles – they encourage your customers to purchase, and they increase your average order price.

In Podia, you can name each bundle, generate its URL, add a social media image, and choose when it is available. Students who have purchased the bundle will have access to any classes added to it in the future, and will be removed from any classes that you remove from the bundle.

Email Marketing

One of the most effective ways to market your course is via email marketing. Podia comes with its own email marketing tool that includes the common features found in email marketing software – lead capture forms, segmentation, a text email editor, newsletters, drip campaigns, and email analytics.

This is an advantage over other solutions like Teachable and Thinkific that do not offer email solutions. If you prefer, however, you can also integrate Podia with Aweber, Mailchimp or other email systems to manage your email marketing externally.

Affiliate Management

Podia lets you add affiliate partners who can earn money by selling your courses. These affiliates enable you to promote your courses to a wider network of potential students.

In Podia, you can choose to pay your affiliates a fixed-dollar commission or a percentage commission. However, you cannot customize these commission terms for different affiliate partners.

Sales Tracker

Podia lets you keep track of the revenue that your courses generate. Its sales tracker is very basic – but it does allow you to monitor how your courses are performing, and how marketing tactics such as coupons and affiliates have affected your sales.

Podia’s sales tracker includes total sales, your monthly recurring revenue, overall revenue, and pending revenue. Podia also lets you click on students to view their individual monthly revenue, total revenue, and pending revenue.

Student Messaging

Podia offers an in-platform student messaging feature. This is where you and your students can directly message each other. With this feature, you can instantly recommend the best course of action, answer questions, and recommend products without having your students leave your site.

Payments

Podia does not process payments through its own platform. However, it does integrate with Stripe and Paypal, where a ~3% transaction fee will be applied. Podia also lets you offer your courses for free.

Legal & Security

Course creation software requires sensitive information like login and payment credentials. Therefore, it is important that your software complies with certain legal and security standards to protect your sensitive information.

Podia Customer Support

Overall, we found Podia’s customer support to be above average. In particular, their live service is quick to respond and responsive after hours. We recommend using their live chat service for any inquiries.

Podia’s help articles are generally sufficient for simple questions. However, there are inconsistencies in the writing styles. Some articles bold certain terms, while others do not. Podia's articles also do not include GIFs or videos, and their images can be difficult to decipher in terms of the feature that is being referenced.

Podia Integrations & Website Builder Compatibilities

Podia offers key integrations and website builder compatibilities that are critical to its customers’ success. These include integrations that support the creation, marketing, selling and delivering of online courses. Integrations include:

Podia is also compatible with various website builders. These include:

Podia vs. Competitors

The top Podia competitors are listed below. It's the most basic solution of the group – Teachable and Thinkific are most similar to Podia. The best option for you will depend on the features you need and your budget.

You can also check out our articles that directly compare Podia against its competitors:

For a full breakdown, read our analysis of Podia Competitors & Alternatives.

Is Podia Right for You?

Podia is an online course creation software solution with approximately one thousand instructors. It helps customers create and market their online courses. Podia’s platform comes with the same tools & integrations found in other course creation solutions. However, its tools are not as advanced as those found in alternative solutions.

We recommend Podia to beginners who need a basic platform to begin their course creation journeys.

To learn more about Podia, try it for free today.