Podia vs. MemberPress: a comparison

You could easily spend hours searching for the right online course and membership platform. So we did the heavy lifting for you and put together this comparison.

As a WordPress plugin, MemberPress works only with your WordPress website. Using MemberPress, you can achieve a basic membership site or online course with protected content and digital downloads. All of your content, pages, and permissions will be managed through your WordPress dashboard.

MemberPress offers integrations to fully support an LMS experience for your users. We’ll discuss LMS integrations a bit later in this comparison, but be aware that many of these integrations have additional monthly costs or tier requirements to add them to your membership site. If you just need a simple course builder, MemberPress does that natively.

With Podia, you’ll use their platform to host your website, take payments, and house your protected content. Podia strives to provide everything you need to operate your online business, so although they do offer integrations, you shouldn’t need them unless you have a more advanced or specific set up.

An important distinction between MemberPress and Podia is who owns the space. When you select MemberPress, you own your information because it’s built on your WordPress website. If you decided to migrate, you could export all your data and fairly easily move it. This approach to building out your membership or online courses is comparable to building and owning a house.

That’s not the case with Podia. Podia owns the platform, and therefore exporting all your data for migration isn’t possible. If you decide Podia is no longer a good fit for your business after setting up, migrating off the platform will be time-consuming, manual, and tedious. With Podia, and any platform-as-a-service offering, you’re renting a house, and simply coming into it to decorate it as your own.

With MemberPress, you have more creative freedom and flexibility to make your member’s site truly look and feel like your brand.

This is because MemberPress works with the theme you have installed on your WordPress site.

You can also select add-ons for specific themes that allow you to design your site even easier. For example, there’s an add-on integration available with Beaver Builder that would allow up to use the easy drag-and-drop editor and make changes with ease.

With Podia, they offer pre-built template designs that you can adapt to your brand look and feel. When you use these templates, you’ll be adding your brand elements by customizing fonts, colors, and images. You won’t be designing the page layout and course flow from the ground up.

There is a benefit in using these templates from Podia. Although you give up design flexibility and creative freedom, it makes building your courses quicker because the design is done for you.

You can customize your Podia templates with third-party code as long as you’re a skilled developer, or hire one. If you’d like this level of customization, make sure you’ve selected the appropriate plan to support third-party code.

So if you’re looking to get your member’s site up and running quickly, and don’t mind making compromises on your design, then Podia may be a better fit for you.

If the design of your member’s site is very important to you, then MemberPress may be a better option because of the design flexibility that you have working with your WordPress theme.

Having access to knowledgeable, responsive customer support can make a difference in your initial setup and ongoing experience with a platform or plugin.

Podia has more readily available support via their live chat hours and quicker response times when you email in or submit a ticket.

They support live chat seven days a week and have their hours on their support page. If you leave a message on their chat feature outside of normal business hours or send an email, they’ll respond within 24 hours, 7 days a week.

Note that although chat support has a quicker response than email support, sometimes a chat session isn’t the best method to offer detailed technical support. It can be difficult to communicate the issue and challenging to give clear instructions for resolution.

In many cases, email support is far more effective, even if you have to wait a bit of time for your answer.

Because Podia is a platform-as-a-service, this type of customer service makes a lot of sense. You’ve set up on rented land, so when something goes wrong, you certainly expect a responsive “landlord”.

Podia also offers a Help Center with how-to and support articles on its features and implementation.

MemberPress offers support as well, but it looks a bit different than Podia. The best way to get support is through their Knowledge Base which covers every setup aspect for each feature.

You can use your username and password to submit a support ticket from the Premium Support Request page. When you submit a support ticket you can expect a response within 1-2 business days. Their office hours are 9 am to 5 pm Monday through Friday, US Mountain Timezone.

Podia and MemberPress have different integration philosophies.

Podia strives to be an all-in-one platform. They do allow for integrations, but if you’re using the platform to its fullest, you wouldn’t necessarily need to use them.

However, Podia does not offer the same advanced functionality in pipelines, segmentation, and email automation that you’ll find in a true CRM or email automation platform.

You may find yourself in a situation where you’ll have to either modify your setup within Podia because of their platform limitations or use an integration to support your preferred setup.

If you have selected to use Podia, but then you come up with a list of integrations you’ll need to implement and maintain, Podia may not be the right choice for you.

MemberPress on the other hand is the foundation you’ll need for a website with protected content. You’ll most likely need to use integrations in your initial build to complete your membership site setup, and likely need or want to add more integrations as it grows.

If you know you won’t want to implement, maintain, and work with other plugins, add-ons, and integrations, MemberPress isn’t for you.

All that being said, both Podia and MemberPress do allow for integrations. Podia offers CRM integrations and integration with other systems through a third-party tool like Zapier.

This integration is a one-way integration, which means that Podia will push information to your secondary system through the integration, but it’s not a deep, two-way integration where both Podia and the secondary system can communicate seamlessly.

An example of an integration you might use on Podia would be if you already have your CRM automations set up, and you’re not interested in migrating them to Podia, you’ll use a third-party tool like Zapier to help the two systems communicate.

It’s important to note that any time there’s an additional integration, there’s always the opportunity for an error, be it technical in the setup, or just a glitch between the two systems.

MemberPress has various add-ons and integrations available. This is in line with its plugin philosophy. You’ll use MemberPress as a foundation, and add on anything and everything you need to meet your business vision.

These plugins and add-ons aren’t usually supported directly by MemberPress. Instead, you may find a help article with a link to the plugin owner for support. For some, this process and flow work great, but others may find themselves frustrated searching for answers from different sources.

If having as few integrations as possible is important to you, then Podia may be a better choice. Be prepared to change your setup and flow to fit within the platform.

If you’re okay with all kinds of integrations, going to different sources for technical support, and maintaining all these add ons, then MemberPress may be a better option for you.

Both Podia and MemberPress integrate with Stripe and PayPal to accept one-time payments.

Podia doesn’t support recurring subscriptions through their PayPal integration but does through their Stripe integration. With Podia, out-of-the-box, you’ll get a simple checkout, ability to bundle your products, offer cross-sells, 1-click upsells, and the ability to offer coupon codes. Note that this functionality is only available on the upper tier of Podia.

Since Podia is an all-in-one platform, you’ll be able to see your transactions on Podia’s platform. You won’t have to log in to your Stripe and/or PayPal to see details on sales.

MemberPress supports recurring payments through both PayPal and Stripe integrations. You can also integrate with Authorize.net on the upper tier.

In line with MemberPress’s philosophy, they’ll meet your foundational needs for the checkout process. They also support coupon code generation and management with the ability to customize how those operate. For example, you can select your specific code, number of uses, and expiration dates. They even provide a few layouts for your checkout pages to make that process and setup easier.

If you want to add more advanced order form features like 1-click upsells, cross-sells, and bundling, you’ll need to use add-ons, plugins, or integrations.

All in all, if you want to see everything in one place, and have the ability to customize without integrations and add-ons, Podia may be a better fit for you.

If accepting recurring subscription payments through PayPal is important to you, and you don’t mind integrations and add-ons, MemberPress may be the best choice.

Bulk course enrollment allows you to sell your courses and programs to an organization or group. This fully automated feature will allow the team leader to purchase, and assign sub-accounts easily and seamlessly. Each team member will have their own login to access your materials.

Bulk course enrollment can be a powerful selling tool, and a poorly managed system or lack of automation can be a poor reflection on your business.

Podia does not offer this feature.

MemberPress doesn’t offer this feature out-of-the-box. They do have an add-on called Corporate Accounts that will allow for this functionality, and it’s no additional cost when you’re on the Plus or Pro plans

• • You want a social media like platform to connect your members
  • The look and feel of your online course isn’t important to you and you’re willing to conform to the layout and design options
  • You’re willing to lead your students through what can be a very distracting learning environment
  • You’re willing to use a third party like Zapier to integrate with your current systems
  • You’re not looking to create a true LMS experience for your students

• • You simply want restrict content and not a fully functioning learning management system
  • You won’t need a two-way integration with your CRM to allow for customized experiences
  • You’re comfortable with purchasing, setting up, and maintaining multiple add-ons, integrations, and plugins