AccessAlly vs. Podia: a comparison

Our fans tell us AccessAlly allows them to earn more from their online courses and membership sites. We think you’ll love AccessAlly’s power features, along with its sophisticated interface.

If you’re curious to see how AccessAlly really stacks up to Podia, read on!

Podia and AccessAlly both allow you to create multimedia courses, with a combination of text, video, and downloads. The differences lie in the infrastructure and flexibility of each platform.

With Podia you can upload videos directly to the platform, as well as PDF downloads and other files. Every file is tied to a Product, and you can assign products to a membership level.

Membership content is created as “posts,” so you don’t have any flexibility to organize or set up your site navigation the way you’d like.

With AccessAlly, you can also sell any type of content or structure, and access to that content is controlled by tags that get applied in your email CRM. That means you’ve got a ton of flexibility, and you can sell memberships and courses the way you want.

With AccessAlly, your videos can be hosted on Amazon S3, YouTube, Vimeo, or Wistia. You can also track video views, see when members login and which pages they access, and so much more. None of these tracking options are available in Podia.

Podia’s downfall for brand-conscious entrepreneurs is their limited theme customization.

It’s great for beginners who aren’t very specific about the look and feel of their sites, but not ideal for those who want full design flexibility.

Podia has a very basic design editor that lets you choose between a few fonts and colors, and that’s it. You can’t change the structure, location of sidebars, or add content or blocks anywhere that isn’t built-in already.

Want to change what shows up on a member dashboard? Add a progress bar within a course or profile page? With Podia, you’re out of luck.

On the other hand, AccessAlly is a WordPress plugin, so it offers full design flexibility by integrating seamlessly with any WordPress theme.

AccessAlly also comes with a beautiful mobile-friendly interface that you can customize, which is great for:

• • Displaying progress tracking, pie charts, and checklists
  • On-brand cross-selling dashboards
  • Affiliate centers, complete with tracking and downloads

We’ve even heard of folks hiring designers and developers to knock off AccessAlly’s look and feel, because it provides such a great user experience.

Although Podia has PayPal integration, it doesn’t provide you with the ability to offer recurring PayPal payments or payment plans. 

With AccessAlly you can take recurring payments through PayPal, and you’ll be notified through a “failed payment” tag if someone cancels their recurring payment in their PayPal account. This gives you the ability to follow up or revoke access.

Another interesting difference is that Podia doesn’t allow you to change plan prices once you publish a membership. AccessAlly does let you change plan pricing, and make updates to existing products as your business grows and evolves.

While AccessAlly started off as an “access management” tool for online courses, it quickly developed into a full-fledged membership plugin for WordPress.

That means you can create beautiful searchable member directories, sorted by your marketing automation platform tags. This allows members to opt in or out of your member directory, and even to purchase a premium listing.

You decide what you want to include in your member directory – like a biography, or even points earned, and course progress. Podia offers no member directory.

All with one click, and everything gets synced between your membership site and your CRM.

Podia offers a simple multiple-choice quiz functionality, and you can add quizzes to your courses easily.

However, if you want to use quizzes beyond the usual “pass/fail” approach you’ll want to take advantage of AccessAlly’s 3 quiz types. You can create Personality Tests as well as Scored Quizzes, that sort students based on how they answer questions.

You can then use this information to guide them to the right next steps, courses, or modules. Plus AccessAlly gives you the ability to design customized Certificates of Completion that students can download with their name and date of graduation or completion. Podia offers no such certificates.

Finally, with AccessAlly you can track video and audio listens and kick off automations based on people’s actions. Students can also come back to bookmarked areas easily with progress-tracking checklists. Podia doesn’t offer any audio or video view tracking or video bookmarks.

• • You need a bare-bones course website, with no plans for added functionality down the line
  • You want to have your site up and running quickly, so you can test your ideas without worrying about design
  • You don’t use a CRM like Infusionsoft, Ontraport, ConvertKit, ActiveCampaign, or Drip to do your email marketing automation
  • You don’t mind giving up full control to have a course storefront platform that handles email and course delivery all in one place

• • You have a discerning eye for design and love the flexibility of a WordPress theme or design plugin combined with AccessAlly
  • You want everything to work seamlessly from one end to the other (payments, courses, and memberships) with as few plugins as possible
  • You’re looking to create an amazing customer experience, that’s functional, profitable, and helps you stand out in the marketplace
  • You like to get geeky or you have advanced marketing needs and want lots of flexibility in your course platform