Last Updated on May, 2025
We live in the digital age that enables the management of a significant part of our lifestyle online. From product purchasing to learning, you can do it all ONLINE. We can learn and offer so much through the Internet right in the comfort of our homes.
Lately, online businesses are becoming more and more popular and common. And if you are thinking of using Podia to establish your online business or brand, read this Podia review to gain a clear view of what it can do for you.
Podia is a creator-centric platform with the tools you need to create and grow your online venture. In this deep dive podia review, you will learn what you can use it for, how it works, and if it can actually live up to your expectations.
Effectiveness
Brand Reputation
Price
Contents
- What is Podia?
- Capabilities of Podia: What and How Can Podia Help You Create?
- How Does Podia Support What it Offers?
- Podia Pricing: How Much Does Podia Cost?
- The Upsides and Downsides of Podia
- Alternatives to Podia
- Is Podia Worth it?
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Final Words
What is Podia?
Podia initially started as an online course platform when it was launched back in 2014. It has become an all-in-one online platform allowing users to build their own website, host communities, and create and sell online courses and digital products, including coaching sessions, webinars, memberships/subscriptions, and digital downloads.
This all-in-one platform is creator-centered, offering many features and services at a great price.
Keep reading this Podia review to find out if it is the right online course platform for your online course business, website builder, and/ or digital commerce platform for your products.
Capabilities of Podia: What and How Can Podia Help You Create?
Podia is jam-packed with features to offer you multiple features. Each one of these features is explored below to give you an in-detail view.
1. Custom Website Building
Podia offers a basic website builder to create your site for your online business or brand.
To begin with, you can either choose a blank site or go for pre-built templates like an email lander, link page, or full website.
Choosing a full website template gives you access to multiple other essential page templates like:
The drag-and-drop website editor allows you to customize the website to your liking by adding the following:
You can customize colors, themes, and fonts and optimize the design for mobile, desktop, or tablet viewings.
You can choose the information you want displayed on product pages, like the price, availability, description, etc.
You can see here how Podia users have created their websites for their brand/ storefront and Podia’s demo site here to see how Podia has built a site using their templates.
2. Create Online Courses
Online course builder is one of Podia’s flagship features.
To create online courses, Podia has an elaborate and organized curriculum setup with many customization options.
You can set prices, add/ edit sections and lessons, and add multiple contents, including texts, quizzes, embeds, coachings, and files.
At the moment, the quizzes can only be set as multiple-choice questions.
So it limits the sophistication required for advanced courses like essays and random assessments. Although it lacks advanced features, you can easily build the course with its simple and easy-to-use features.
To support and encourage student engagement on the course pages, Podia has a comments section where students can start conversations, post questions and receive feedback.
Podia also offers a customizable course completion certificate to motivate students and boost course completion numbers.
3. Sales and Marketing
Podia supports several basic marketing features to encourage and boost sales of products.
Upsell
Upsell option is available for all products on the sales page. Through upsell, you can encourage single product buyers to purchase additional products immediately upon the purchase of the previous product.
You can offer multiple products and a one-time offer (OTO) discount for upsells to encourage an immediate sale.
Coupons
Coupons are another great marketing strategy that can encourage the sales of your products. You can create coupons on products and community plans.
You can customize coupons by including an expiry date and limiting the use to a certain number of customers.
Embeds
Podia allows you to embed products on your website by copying the embed code from a specific product and pasting it as custom HTML that will display it on the site.
Affiliate Program
Podia lets you create your own affiliate marketing platform to allow satisfied users and fans to promote your product and improve sales.
You can make the program closed/open/ invite only and set custom commissions for your products.
This program will help you create your own sales army to build a successful online business by driving sales.
After setting up the program through the platform, you can invite potential affiliates to sign up and promote your products.
Customer Messaging
The Podia platform offers a built-in live chat feature for your business site.
You can communicate with customers and other users browsing the site in real-time to collect information on their requirements, respond to their queries, and convert them into customers.
This feature is not something that you find in any other platforms. Unlike a plug-in, this feature is fully integrated into your business site, allowing seamless operation from one place.
The best part is it is unlimited. Any number of visitors, chats, and customers are supported.
To ensure priority to all the chats, you can enable chat notifications and simply turn them off when you are not around. Also, this chat widget supports 11 languages to connect with users from all over the world.
4. Email Marketing and Automation
To promote your products, Podia’s email marketing features support broadcasts and sequences of emails.
You can use this tool to:
To create a single broadcast, click on New Broadcast and write the email like it is usually done. You can also personalize it with each recipient’s name. To see what the email will look like before it goes to the recipients, you click Preview or Send Test.
Similarly, under the New Campaign option, you can set automation rules like entrance and exit conditions to automatically send sequence emails to subscribers.
5. Digital Products
Podia’s e-commerce feature allows you to sell digital products. You can:
You can create bundles based on the various users’ personas. For example, if you are selling online courses, you can create LMS bundles, course creator bundles, and blogger bundles.
You can also create membership tiers for different types of bundles to encourage customers to upgrade their membership to gain access to premium content.
6. Hosting Communities
Using the community feature, you can build a thriving community (like an online form) around your digital products that will help support a recurring revenue stream.
At the moment, this feature only supports members, posts, topics, likes, and comments.
Currently, Podia lets you create only one community, but you can categorize it into as many topics as you want to separate them into different discussion boards.
You can choose if your community plan is free or requires paid access.
For paid members, you can create multiple membership tiers at different rates, including bundle products.
To strengthen these membership tiers, you can create private groups and masterminds to allow access to premium content only by higher membership holders. It encourages community members to purchase higher plans to access exclusive content.
Although Podia lacks proper gamification features to engage users, you can use Podia tags to achieve it to some extent.
You can set up tags like active members, inactive members, new customers, etc., and based on their engagement, you can offer them coupon codes or free access to webinars and much more.
7. Podia Integrations
Podia supports integrations with third-party software providers to easily connect to tools and complete extended tasks.
Email Service Providers
To enable email marketing, Podia allows integration of email marketing tools, including MailChimp, ConvertKit, Aweber, Drip, Active Campaign, MailerLite, Get Response, etc.
These email marketing integrations allow you to track the sales of your digital products directly through the email platform and segment the purchases based on the type of digital product purchased.
Payment Processing
Podia has Stripe and PayPal Integrations at no additional transaction fees to receive instant payments from your digital product purchases.
Analytics
Podia also allows analytic softwares like Google Analytics and HotJar to allow you to keep track of how your visitors interact and engage with the sales pages and the overall website. You can also run tests to analyze opportunities to improve conversion numbers.
Webinars and Live Streams
You can use integrations such as YouTube Live and Zoom platforms to sell webinars, live streams, and meetings.
Embeds
Podia integrates with Google Forms, Spotify, Vimeo, Twitter, GitHub Gists, and Dribble, so you can embed content from over 1900 websites into Podia’s website-building tool through the platform’s native iFramely embed feature.
Scheduling
You can use scheduling integrations such as Calendly, Acuity Scheduling, YouCanBook.me, and Savvy Cal to schedule coaching sessions and meetings.
Advertising
You can use integrations like Google Ads, Facebook, and Pinterest to put up paid ads to help you drive traffic and sales of your digital downloads and products.
You can also use Zapier to connect Podia to over 1000s of apps and tools without using any third-party code. Some apps you can connect to include Trello, Google Sheets, DubSado, ThriveCart, LeadPages, and many more.
How Does Podia Support What it Offers?
Apart from ensuring the platform is simple, easy, and requires no technical skills, Podia also offers a strong support system to help users have a smooth workflow using the Podia platform.
24/7 User Support
Podia offers world-class customer support to its users in various forms to help them start and scale into it. They offer guides, articles, videos, tools, webinars, 7 days a week of live chat support, weekly demos, and more.
The resource center is immense and dedicated to helping users tackle issues or challenges:
Analytics and Reports
Podia has all the basic features to allow you to track metrics, including:
Within the learner experience and activity feeds, you and the customer/ student can access the details reflecting the progress status.
You can also access reports, including all information specific to a particular customer/ student. The metrics displayed include last sign-in, keys, survey results, video performance results, etc.,
Apart from allowing integrations of analytic tools, the Podia platform itself is capable of gathering certain advanced analytics for websites, sales, email marketing, etc.,
Podia Pricing: How Much Does Podia Cost?
Currently, as I write this Podia review 2023, it offers three membership plans: Free, Mover, and Shaker, as shown in the below image.
Previously Podia offered 3 membership tiers Mover, Shaker, and Earthquake. But recently, Podia has introduced a free plan with limited features to allow users to experience the platform’s many features.
The free plan that will cost zero dollars only allows one coaching product and one digital download, but you’ll be charged an 8% fee per sale you make. Also, this plan lets you create a full website and draft courses and webinars.
Best part…for a free plan, your Podia account signup does not even require your credit card details.
Podia’s actual cost starts at the Mover Plan, $39 per month. It has all the features of the free plan and allows the unlimited sale of digital downloads, coaching, and courses at a zero transaction fee. Plus, it also holds chat support.
In addition to what the mover plan offers, the Shaker plan, priced at $89 per month, offers additional benefits like an affiliate program, third-party code, embedded checkouts, and priority support.
Apart from what I have covered here, there are many other benefits per plan. I have only highlighted the core benefits to give you an idea. Check out Podia’s in-detail pricing page for a complete breakdown of what each plan offers.
They also have a video tour to help you choose the best plan suitable for you. Most users will benefit from signing up for a shaker plan as it is value for money.
You can upgrade, downgrade or switch between monthly and yearly plans at any time. And if you are not satisfied with your purchase, Podia offers you a 30-day money-back guarantee, so no issues there.
Besides, if a free plan lets you test some of the platform’s best features, then the paid plans will offer the best.
Podia Discount
The prices mentioned for each plan above are monthly. But if you choose a yearly plan, you will save 17% per paid plan. That is $72 on Mover and $168 on Shaker plans. That’s some major savings.
The Upsides and Downsides of Podia
Upsides of Podia
Downsides of Podia
Alternatives to Podia
Below are a few Podia alternatives to help you understand how Podia compares to its competitors and what works best for you.
Podia Vs. Kajabi
Kajabi is a marketing tool that supports courses, memberships, coaching, communities, and podcasts. Since Kajabi is a premier tool, the monthly pricing starts at $149.
Key areas Kajabi excels over Podia are:
Podia Vs. Thrivecart
ThriveCart is one of the leading platforms allowing the sale of digital and physical products but doesn’t support coaching and webinars. However, you can host them using a third-party platform and sell them through ThriveCart’s built-in checkout.
Key Areas ThriveCart excels over Podia are:
Podia Vs. Payhip
Payhip is a simple ecommerce platform allowing digital and physical products to be sold. It is comparatively cheaper than Podia, with monthly plans starting at $29.
Key areas Payhip excels over Podia are:
Podia Vs. Thinkific
Thinkific is more of a dedicated course platform, unlike other alternatives discussed above. Thinkific’s pricing, just like Podia, starts at zero dollars. It focuses more on courses and communities and does not support digital downloads.
Key Areas Thinkific excels over Podia are:
Is Podia Worth it?
Well, there is no Yes or No answer to this question because it solely depends on what you expect out of it to achieve your end goal. But here’s what I CAN say.
It is undoubtedly a versatile digital ecommerce platform that started as a course platform with the course builder tool and has come a long way since. And still today, Podia constantly keeps upgrading its interface with more new improvements.
It is jam-packed with features and tools to help you kickstart your small business or entrepreneurship. And you can start as a complete beginner without any prior skills because the platform is intuitive and easy to use.
At the same time, it has its limitations. The lack of customization options, advanced features, and being a digital products-only platform can be deal breakers for some users. But not everyone needs these to achieve their end goal.
As I already discussed, the upsides come with the downsides, as with any platform. So based on this Podia review and your additional research, you have to decide if it meets your requirements and is worth the investment.
Considering all these facts, I recommend Podia for online coaches, small startup business owners, course creators, influencers, and anyone else needing a hassle-free and easy way to market and sell their digital products online.
If you are still indecisive, remember there’s a free plan that allows you to test the platform’s capabilities to a great extent.
Other e-learning platforms reviewed:
Frequently Asked Questions
Final Words
Podia is a great all-in-one platform with all the basic and necessary features to create, sell, manage, and market your storefront online.
It offers so many features to effectively market and grow your business/brand while ensuring the UI is simple and easy to use by just about anyone without prior knowledge. So even complete beginners can establish an online business in no time.
Currently, Podia has over 50,000 users enjoying the platform’s many benefits.
I hope this Podia review gave you the insight to choose and shed light on your various queries. Also, remember, with the free Podia plan, you can always try risk-free to understand how your business can benefit from it.
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