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, 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 them, 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 online course creation, 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 and Teachable Compared

Podia helps you sell your own online courses and turn it 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 courses, sell them, host on your own site, and accept payments.

One of Teachable’s strengths is its in-depth marketing solutions, 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 video 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, 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.

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 an 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 platform doesn’t disappoint. In terms of ease, they’re one of the best platforms to get started on.

Their features may appear limiting 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, 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’s no lifetime options available—you’re going to pay monthly or annually depending on which service you want.

Podia

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, 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. If you pay annually, you’ll save $158 per year.

Teachable

Teachable comes with three moderately-priced options that are comparable in terms of quality to Thinkific and Kajabi, but no matter which way you look, you’re saving money. These packages are:

• Basic: With the basic package, it’s $39 per month or $29 per month through the annual package. You get unlimited students, unlimited course products, coaching products, membership community features, and community building features as well. The integrated email marketing is beneficial here as well.

• Pro: Fir $119 per month or $99 per month through the annual package, you’ll get access to unlimited student profiles, absolutely no transaction fees whatsoever, coaching products, membership-exclusive community features, and support for your custom domain. This package is an excellent middle-of-the-road choice in terms of cost and power.

• Business: For $299 per month or $249 per month through the annual package, you’ll get access to unlimited students, no transaction fees at all, instant payouts (which is huge when you’re scaling), up to 20 admins, bulk student enrollment packages for enterprises, and priority product support. This is the true all-in-one package with access to quality customer support.

Templates

Templates help your customers and students feel out the site and navigate content accordingly.

A bad template is bad design, and bad design isn’t eye-catching or aesthetically appealing to anyone. Templates are important.

Podia

Podia has some templates, but the best thing is that they have a third-party marketplace where you can buy templates that give you a more custom feel.

These cost money, but fewer people use them than the integrated Podia templates, so you’ll certainly stand out and break away from that cookie cutter mould.

Teachable

Teachable gives you a page builder with pre-built templates, but they also have a third-party marketplace where other people will try to make templates to tantalize you. Spoiler alert: they do a good job at it.

You can spend money on a one-time purchase to get a different template than the integrated page builder that Teachable offers, although they do have a lot of features that you should toy around with before you make that financial decision.

Features

Features are the different parts of how students interact with your site, different ways you manage it, interact with it, and build your courses. A feature is any interaction that helps you or the student out.

Podia

• Landing Pages: Podia helps you build landing pages with their page building tools. Thanks to the number of options that are available, you can make stellar landing pages that rival their own Podia.com page.

• Marketing Tools: Not sure how to market your own course? That’s not a problem. You can use Podia’s integrated tools to make coupons, initiate internal upsells, and even commission affiliates to sell your courses for you in exchange for a cut of the profit from their referrals. Marketing is key with course building, and they help you out more than you could imagine.

• Intuitive Design: Need to focus on the UI experience for yourself and your students? Podia not only has ways to manipulate the UI, but plenty of texcellent templates to make your course feel like your own, and make it easy to navigate at any point in time.

Teachable

• No Transaction Fees: Teachable handles the payments through their own processing system, so they cut out the transaction fees for you and make sure you get 100% of the money that your customer is sending your way for any plan above the basic tier. Processing fees still apply, which is unavoidable, but it’s the bare minimum.

• Quizzes: Quizzes help your students stop and ask themselves if they really mastered that last module, or if they’re just going to need more time to get it down pat. This is good for helping them self-regulate while using your platform.

• Lecture Comments: Make a list of comments or bullet points from the lecture, so that your student can use them later on to review the course material in a quick, digestible way.

Podia Pros and Cons

Pros

• Podia Hosts: Podia will host your site. You don’t have to go through the process of getting a host, then a WordPress site, then plugins, then integrating membership features, and all that noise. No separate hosts, no extra red tape to cut through at all.

• Unlimited Bandwidth, No Restrictions: Another issue with hosts is that they upsell you over and over again. They’ll limit the total number of monthly visitors you’re able to have, but Podia has absolutely no restrictions on what you’re able to do with your site. Are you lucky enough to get 10,000,000 unique monthly visitors? Rock on, Podia isn’t going to bottleneck you.

• Instant Payouts: Need money to scale now? Podia is here to help. They’ll offer to give you an instant payout as soon as the money is in their possession through the transaction process from your student’s financial institution, so you can pay admins, upgrade your package, or purchase more courses to host on your Podia platform.

• Complete Course Builder: From the ground up, or if you’re importing SCORM files, you can build the course from a blank slate up to a towering educational masterpiece in little to no time at all.

Cons

• Email System Isn’t That Great: The integrated email handling isn’t where it should be. You should probably contact your students via separate email addresses like Gmail at this rate.

• Payment Gateways: While they may cut out transaction fees when you break past the basic tier, they still have minimum payment gateways available, so you may end up losing one or two sales along the way as a result.

Teachable Pros and Cons

Pros

• Great for First-Time Users: Never used a course builder before? That’s the point. Teachable is here to help anyone, new or seasoned in the online education game, make a course that really speaks to their customers and students without requiring experience to get started.

• Cheaper Than Other Competitors: Teachable isn’t dirt cheap, but you’ll often find that you can save over $2,000 per year if you choose teachable over a service like Thinkific. Not to put competitor services down (we use them and review them here on EdWize), but the cost-savings are great for startups.

• Sell More Than Courses: Teachable is a place to sell educational material as well. If you’re getting traffic from your YouTube videos or forums posts online, you can lead them to a quick video on the product you’re talking about, and sell lesson plans, planners, or whatever the case may be. It’s more than just courses.

• Automatic Affiliate Pay: One of the best selling tools that exist on the internet today is affiliate marketing. You can get affiliates to sell your sites, and then Teachable will automatically give them their commissions so there’s no extra bookkeeping or liability on your end.

Cons

• No Live Services: You can’t host any live videos, so there’s no way to use Zoom to teach a live class or anything of the sort. You’re stuck with pre-recorded videos only.

• Limited Third-Party Integration: This may not seem like a huge issue at first, but since you can only really use what’s included on Teachable, you end up being limited in certain areas. It’s still an all-in-one solution, just a little less intuitive than it could be.

Which One Should You Go With?

Podia is a newer platform, and while it has taken many excellent points from other online course selling platforms, it still has a way to go in terms of operations and intuitive design.

➡️ Teachable Vs Thinkific

Teachable continues to be one of the best online learning platforms for both students and course creators who want to make a serious income off of their courses. Teachable has a few more tools to help you get there, as well as information to help you achieve your goals.

At the end of the day, we think Teachable wins this round, but Podia is still an ever-changing solid option as well. These online platforms change all the time, so be sure to check in on Podia if they don’t currently have the options or tools available that you need in an online course builder.