Teachable vs. Podia: a comparison

In this Teachable vs. Podia comparison, we review two course platform options so you can see the key differences between functionality, design flexibility, integration options, ease of use, pricing models, and ongoing customer support.

Reviewing course platforms can quickly become overwhelming, which makes it difficult to choose the best software for you and your business. This article will help you cut through the noise and focus on what really matters.

Podia is an all-in-one, platform-as-a-service provider that tries to do everything from hosting your website and handling email marketing to designing landing pages, taking payments, delivering online courses, and managing memberships.

Podia offers a “plug-and-play” setup so you can set up your storefront, add website pages and products, and start taking payments without being a tech expert.

It is a plus to be able to get your website up and running quickly, however, since this is a platform-as-a-service provider, you’re building on “rented” land. Meaning you don’t actually own your website and when it comes time to move to a different system, you’ll have a manual migration on your hands. You might also discover you have limits in place on what you can and can’t do with your website.

Teachable is focused on online course creation and education. They too have an easy setup process so you can get your site up and running quickly.

Within their framework, you can build an online course and deliver a powerful learning experience without extensive setup and technical knowledge.

You can start with your own free subdomain through Teachable (yourschool.teachable.com), you can host under your own domain name (yourschool.com), or you can link to a subdomain (member.yourschool.com).

Pricing is an important factor in the decision-making process when it comes to choosing the platform or software that will power your membership or online courses.

Understanding the full picture is going to be key for your business.

Not only should the cost of the platform itself be considered, but any add-ons, integrations, upgrades, or other required (or desired) systems, should also be factored in to ensure any investment surprises won’t pop up along the way.

Teachable is unique in that they offer a free monthly plan. There is a 10 student limit on this plan, so this would be a good option to get up and running or use as a foundation to build out your course without having to pay a start up cost until you’re ready to start selling, but know that you’ll have to upgrade to a paid plan very soon.

Teachable has three paid tiers:

• • Basic ($39)
  • Professional ($119)
  • Business ($299)

All paid plans have unlimited courses and students. There are transaction fee differences depending on your tier. For example, the Basic plan has a 5% transaction fee, but the Professional and Business plans are 0%.

The different tiers offered by Teachable do however, have limitations on features. To truly achieve a high-end learning experience, using a lot of the features we compare in this article, the Professional plan ($119/ month) is required.

The Basic plan ($39 / month), leaves out essential features like graded quizzes, an integrated affiliate program, certificates of completion, course compliance, reporting, and design flexibility. It’s also important to note that there’s no live chat support on the Basic plan.

In comparison, Podia offers two tier options to meet your needs:

• • The Mover ($39)
  • Shaker ($79)

These plans are distinguished mostly by feature limits.

The Mover plan leaves out memberships, blog functionality, offsite buy buttons, affiliate marketing, and the ability to incorporate third party code. If these elements are part of your business now, or will be in the future, budget for the Shaker plan.

In summary, unless you’re just getting started or run a bare-bones course or membership, you’re mostly likely going to need the Professional ($119) plan with Teachable and the Shaker ($79) plan with Podia.

Implementing your newly purchased software or platform takes a lot of bandwidth, implementation, learning a new system, and almost always customer support. This is just part of the process.

Having access to great customer support, or not so great support, during your new setup can make or break your launch. Setting up the user experience and learning environment that your students expect and deserve will result in better retention rates with the material and long-term relationships with your students.

Teachable offers an extensive knowledge base with well-organized, detailed articles complete with step-by-step instructions and tutorials. Their support hours 8am-8pm ET, 7 days per week via email. On the upper tiers you can access chat support Monday-Friday 10am-5pm ET.

Podia does have chat support at any tier, and they clearly state their email business hours and response time. Podia has a team page so you can become familiar with the folks on the support team.

They too have help articles in their Help Center so that you can research and find answers on your own.

Offering learning reinforcements throughout your courses and membership provides your students with more accountability, checkpoints throughout their course or membership, and creates a learning environment that makes a significant impact.

On the Professional tier, Teachable offers great options for these learning reinforcements like quizzes, course completion certificates, course compliance markers, and required passing scores. Teachable outshines Podia in this department.

Podia offers quizzes to enhance learning, but they do not offer course compliance features such as Teachable, customized certificates of completion, or required passing scores.

Bulk course enrollment allows you to create a set of online courses that can be sold to multiple people at one time.

This feature serves business models who sell their courses or memberships to companies, families, or schools. The team leader can assign the allotted number of courses purchased to each student on their team.

This becomes a powerful selling tool that can change the way you sell your training and expand your business in a whole new way.

Neither Podia or Teachable offers a fully automated solution for bulk course enrollment. However, with Podia it is possible to sell online courses by creating an offer for the specific number of people to enroll, and using coupon codes to enroll them.

This setup on Teachable would work for on-off situations or on an as needed basis, but it would be challenging to expand and grow that feature of your business.

Both Podia and Teachable integrate with Stripe and PayPal. On Podia, membership payments can only be paid via Stripe, not through PayPal because their system does not support recurring PayPal payments or recurring subscriptions.

Teachable Payments are available for customers operating in the United States, Canada, or the UK. Teachable Payments uses Stripe Express to accept credit cards as well as PayPal.

Teachable pays out your earnings on a monthly basis set a payout schedule that you can set on your Teachable Payments dashboard. Stripe payouts can occur daily, weekly, or monthly. There is a 30-day delay on PayPal payouts. Note again, that depending on your tier, there are transaction fees associated with each sale.

Podia accepts international payments based on Stripe’s policies. Payouts happen instantly with no delays, and there are no additional transaction fees. This is a +1 in the win column for Podia users.

Consider that no matter which software or platform you choose, you may find yourself needing a way to calculate tax worldwide. AccessAlly offers a Quaderno integration that does just that and integrates seamlessly with your AccessAlly order forms.

Podia and Teachable both provide affiliate marketing capabilities on specific tiers.

Podia offers a program where customers can sign up to become affiliates, view their dashboard, find their unique links, and view commissions. There is no easy way within the affiliate dashboard to seamlessly share affiliate assets such as swipe copy, approved images, or other affiliate materials.

If you run a large, or multi-tiered affiliate program and want to easily share all resources with your affiliates in one central location, you’ll need to purchase another program or hire someone to share these assets, grow your affiliate program, and manage it fully.

Teachable and Podia are very similar in this regard. Teachable’s affiliate infrastructure makes it possible for affiliates to retrieve their links, view commissions, and payout details from their unique login.

There’s not a seamless way to share affiliate assets such as copy and images, so be sure to formulate a plan that will support sharing these with your affiliates.

If you run a robust affiliate program, or you’re planning to expand your affiliate program, you’ll very quickly outgrow these platforms. Choose a fully-functional, completely integrated affiliate system like AccessAlly. Register affiliates, share links, sales, commissions, and assets all from one beautifully designed, easy to use dashboard.

• • 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’re willing to modify your setup when you’re met with Podia’s platform limitations
  • You don’t have a CRM and plan to keep automation and interaction with your customers simple
  • You won’t mind migrating off Podia and into a new software-as-a-service offering as your business grows

• • You want to build a storefront or simple website quickly and get your courses for sale right away 
  • You’re willing to adapt your branding to fit within the ‘out-of-the-box’ design offerings 
  • You’re willing to increase your tier level to meet the needs of your business as you expand 
  • You won’t mind setting up your business on ‘rented land’ and manually migrating when your business grows