Podia vs Teachable: Two Course Builders, But Who Has Better Features?

You’re ready to get your courses out there and let your eager students feast their eyes on your learning materials and videos, and learn a thing or two.

Now it’s time to choose the best platform to host everything.

With either of these services, you can build courses, market them, sell online courses, and more.

It’s time for the showdown of Podia vs Teachable so we can determine which one is going to better suit your needs for creating online courses, hosting, and bringing a new learning experience to individuals in your field.

We’ll explore which service has the best tools, features, and components to help you build a unique online course.

It’s new and innovative versus tried-and-true. Let’s see what they can do for you.

Podia vs Teachable Compared

Podia helps you sell your own online courses and turn them into an income, while Teachable doesn’t just focus on it being a side hustle—they believe you can turn their platform into your career.

With similar packages, I’ll tell you right now that it comes down to the fine details when you look at Podia and Teachable.

As they go head to head, which one will align with your personal goals?

Let’s find out.

What is Podia?

Podia is an all-in-one service that lets you create, sell, and market your courses from one simple dashboard.

With Podia, you host your own website through them (your own domain, no subdomains that make you look like you’re part of another site), you build each course module, and you make a fully packaged, ready-to-go online course by the end of it.

If you’ve taken online courses and don’t know what to begin, but want to emulate the feeling and success of those classes, Podia can help.

For all you know, the courses you took were built on Podia—that’s the beauty of it, nobody is going to know that you built everything on Podia.

Everything is your own, and your brand appears independent.

What is Teachable?

Teachable is similar to Podia: it’s an all-in-one service that ensures you don’t need anything else.

You can create unlimited courses, sell them, host them on your own site, and accept payments.

One of Teachable’s strengths is its in-depth marketing solutions for selling courses, which sets it apart from Podia and other similar all-in-one platforms.

Take what you know, and separate it into modules, or linear learning segments within your Teachable course.

With Teachable, you can design everything yourself, and appear as your own brand without being hosted on another site—it’s a white-label solution that lets you make everything look, feel, and act like you designed the code from scratch with no help.

What Course Building Do They Offer?

Podia is designed to be an all-in-one experience, so that’s exactly what they offer: building your courses, marketing them, delivering them, and everything in between.

You build video modules through Podia and apply alternative content around it, whether that’s in a different window or through downloadable content.

Podia is unique in the fact that they let you screencap videos, so you can basically record videos through them, edit as you see fit, and this gives you a better way to explain the UI of software or programs if that’s what you’re going to be teaching.

Teachable has a more simplified course-building structure.

You go in, open a new course (just like opening up a blank email), and fill in the fields.

You’ll design a course author, title, subtitle, and description, and utilize some excellent SEO tools as well.

It’s simple but straightforward.

Add video content and DLC as you see fit, and go module by module as you build your course.

Teachable is very intuitive for first-time course creators.

Both platforms offer the possibility of creating course completion certificates to go along with your courses.

What About Course Delivery?

With Teachable, your students simply have access to all that you have to offer.

You can set it so that they have to go through one module to get to the next and basically unlock the next part of the lesson by doing this, and that’s generally a good way to go about it.

However, Podia offers content dripping, which means that after their membership hits a certain status, they’re able to access more and more content. Think of loyalty rewards: after being a member for so long, you get exclusive rewards.

This is possible with Podia, and depending on what kind of course site you’re running, this could be a great way to ensure average minimum customer retention of a few months, at the very least.

This way, a student can’t just sign up and download all of your content at once before quitting their membership.

How Hard is it to Make a Course?

Now it comes time to actually make the course.

Both platforms have their strengths, and both have their weaknesses, so let’s discuss what you can expect when you sign up for either of them.

Podia

Course-building on Podia is not only simple just by the interface, but they have an entire guide with eight separate chapters on their website to guide you through each step individually.

Even if this is your first time using a course builder, Podia’s intuitive online course platform doesn’t disappoint. In terms of ease, they’re one of the best platforms to get started on.

Their features may appear limited in some areas throughout this guide, but in a way, that actually helps course building by making it easier to understand and perform.

Teachable

Teachable also features a pretty linear setup. All you have to do is go into your Teachable dashboard and begin making a course by clicking on the “New” button.

Make the course title and subtitle, input some SEO attributes, and work your way down the pipeline to brand your own videos, add buttons, and make an intuitive learning platform.

Teachable and Podia were put head to head in this battle because they’re both very easy to use, especially for first-time course makers.

Pricing (Including Payment Methods)

You can’t really know what to go with until you know how they’re going to make you money, and how much they’re going to cost on an ongoing basis.

Both Podia and Teachable are SaaS products, so there are no lifetime options available—you’re going to pay monthly or annually depending on which service you want.

Podia

While there’s no free plan, Podia has a 14-day free trial, and with this option, you’ll be able to explore everything in the first package.

Keep in mind that Podia isn’t just a course-building website, so their cheaper package may shock you at first.

• Mover Package: For $39 per month, you’ll get access to your own website, you can develop webinars, and design email marketing campaigns, and messaging features. Digital downloads and building your own courses are also options. Unfortunately, you cannot make memberships on this package. Pay annually to save $78 per year.

• Shaker Package: For $79 per month, you’ll have all the previously mentioned benefits, plus membership packages, Zoom integration, your very own blog, affiliate marketing solutions, and advanced coding. This is a perfect choice for a successful online course business. If you pay annually, you’ll save $158 per year.

Teachable