LifterLMS vs. Podia: a comparison

Are you starting an online course? A brand new membership? Or maybe you’re already up and running, but looking to uplevel your member’s area. 

You may be considering LifterLMS or Podia. We’ll take a close look at LifterLMS vs. Podia and how each of these will support your online courses and memberships.

As we mentioned, Podia is a platform, meaning that you sign up for your account, then build your business from the Podia platform. It’s an all-in-one platform that strives to be everything you need to run your business, from website building, accepting payments, managing your lists, and of course, an online learning area.

LifterLMS is a WordPress plugin that works on your WordPress website. So rather than logging into a platform, you’ll be working from your WordPress dashboard. LifterLMS focuses solely on your courses and memberships. It has integrations that allow you to accept payments and integrate with your CRM to manage your lists. Its primary focus is online learning environments.

The core plugin for LifterLMS is free, and provides very basic online course functionality. From there, you’ll be purchasing add-ons and integrations for the plugin to build the full system. If you’re just starting out, you may only need a few integrations, but as you grow, you’ll want more and more functionality added.

Protecting content is the core functionality of an online course, membership, program, or digital download.

With Podia, you can protect your content behind specific products. You can drip content on a specific interval, for example, 7 days after purchase release this lesson. You cannot release content within the same product on a specific date unless you upload the content manually on that date. You can set release dates for an entire course.

The memberships you build on Podia are created from existing products. The Membership Plan options on Podia are limited though.

They offer a very bare-bones, out-of-the-box structure to sell online courses and memberships that can be great for businesses just starting out, or never planning to run an online course website and membership with a unique experience and LMS features.

LifterLMS has more content protection features than Podia. You can drip content, or release it on a certain date. You can also require prerequisites, meaning they have to successfully complete a specific lesson before another one unlocks.

The membership building on LifterLMS is similar to the course builder and offers more flexibility than Podia.

So although they both allow you to protect content, LifterLMS offers more options, flexibility, and an overall better user experience. Podia offers the bare minimum required to protect your content.

Podia has a small learning curve. It’s very plug-and-play when it comes to getting your website, products, and courses set up. 

With the ease of setup and plug-and-play nature of Podia, you lose features like custom design, laying out your dashboard, and making your courses and memberships site really feel like your brand. 

The learning experience your students have is dictated by Podia. If they’ve signed up for another course through another business that uses Podia, it’s going to look and feel very similar to yours. 

On the contrary, LifterLMS may take a little bit longer to get setup, because you’re deciding more design and layout elements than with Podia. The courses and membership that you create will feel like your own brand. 

And if your students are part of other courses built on LifterLMS, that won’t necessarily be obvious to them. Although LifterLMS has a bigger learning curve than Podia, it’s going to be more of a valuable learning experience for your users, and a better long-term fit because of it’s available add-ons, custom design, and the fact that it’s a plugin on your WordPress site. 

Learning reinforcements are any feature that enhances the learning experience for your students. Although some people think of them as an afterthought that’s not exactly true. 

When you can use these learning reinforcement features to enhance retention, test knowledge, and make it truly feel like a course, you’re succeeding in spreading your work in the world.

With Podia, you can add multiple choice quizzes to your online courses or memberships. The quizzes are pretty basic, and you don’t have options when it comes to what kinds of questions, such as long-answer or fill-in-the-blank. 

You don’t have the option to make them pass or fail, give grades or feedback, or lock / unlock content based on quiz performance. 

Podia doesn’t offer other valuable learning reinforcements that you’ll find in other LMS platforms and plugins, such as progress tracking, gamification, video, and audio bookmarking and tracking, objective lists, assignments submissions, private notes, or auto-generate certificates.

With LifterLMS you’ll be able to create graded quizzes with a variety of question types from multiple-choice, true or false, picture choices, fill-in-the-blank, long and short answers, and more.

Any type of quiz you can imagine can be built on LifterLMS. They offer reports on quiz results as well, be it individual per user, or a group of students. You can use these reports to see how your students are absorbing the materials.

They offer assignments, which can be a task or task list, upload requirement, or a long-answer requirement. These features are available with the Advanced Assignments add-on. LifterLMS has an add-on for certificates as well, where you can add details and merge fields to personalize them. It comes with a provided background, or you can upload your own.

They don’t have advanced progress tracking built into their plugin, but you can find add-ons that provide basic progress tracking.

LifterLMS offers more e-commerce features than Podia. With LifterLMS, you’ll be working with add-ons and integrations to accept payments through Stripe, PayPal, Authorize.net, or WooCommerce. Podia works with Stripe and PayPal.

With both Podia and LifterLMS you’ll be able to accept one-time payments and multiple payments (either a payment plan or subscription). If you choose Podia though, you can only accept subscriptions through Stripe, not through PayPal.

Both allow you to change your default currency, create coupons, and offer trial periods.

Neither has the ability for advanced promotions that would allow you to swap out order forms automatically after a specified limit has been reached. Or add count-down timers to your order forms to show when a special offer will be expiring.

Podia offers a limited affiliate management program. You can set a standard commission with a percentage or dollar amount. You’ll also have the option to set product-specific commissions.

The affiliate program can have open enrollment, where anyone can sign up as an affiliate, or you can set it to invite-only.

As the admin, you’ll have a summary screen of your affiliates on your Podia dashboard that shows affiliate sales, revenue, commission paid, commission owed, clicks, and conversion rates.

The biggest element that’s missing here is that your affiliates won’t have a dashboard where they can login and see, not only their own stats, but also marketing materials, important dates, and/or personal messages from you about promotion.

LifterLMS doesn’t offer affiliate management features but will integrate with AffiliateWP or iDevAffiliate.

If you’re already on the Infinity Bundle at $999 per year, and now you’re looking for another system to manage your affiliates, you’re adding cost, complexity, and ultimately duct-taping systems together to create a solution.

While this does indeed work, you’re paying for multiple solutions to do what one plugin could do on its own, and at a lower price point. AccessAlly has all this affiliate functionality and more built-in.

• • You’re looking for a membership and LMS plugin all-in-one
  • You’re already using a WordPress website and looking for a WordPress plugin
  • You don’t mind using a third-party tool to connect your course with your CRM
  • You have a need for more advanced quiz functionality 

• • You’re a creator looking for a simple course website
  • You have offerings like free and paid webinar, digital downloads, or simple courses with no plans to expand to a fully functional and integrated membership site
  • You don’t have a CRM and plan to keep automation and interaction with your customers simple
  • You’re willing to migrate off the system when your business grows