Teachable vs Podia 

Among the different platforms you could compare as a course creator, Teachable and Podia are two serious contestants used by 1000’s around the world.

Now, these popular tools get updated often with new cool features and perks, so it can be hard to keep up to date or know what to look at.

This is why today we’ll compare them on the most fundamental criteria for course creators and help you decide which one is best for your situation!

One thing to start talking about when comparing Teachable and Podia is the category of course platforms they belong to.

Although Podia is selling itself as an all-in-one platform, it’s lacking some crucial features to really deserve that title and allow you to not need any external tools.

Teachable is a course-only platform and also requires you to integrate things like an email marketing system or a proper site builder.

All-in-all the two platforms sort of fall into the same category and therefore are worth comparing to directly!

Let’s take a quick look at the overall pros and cons here:

The two platforms have a lot in common and so we’re going to have to dig into the details to find the subtleties!

Let’s now break down the nitty gritty of what makes them different from a feature point of view:

As we’ve established, Teachable and Podia have a fairly similar feature set and we can therefore compare the most important ones together:

• Page building: none of these 2 platforms are really suited to build a full website but they can certainly help to set up some kind of landing pages to promote and support your course.
• Checkout: both platforms allow to take payment and handle the product delivery, which also include an affiliate system
• Course Delivery: this is an important part for course creators to know exactly to what extent they’ll be able to design the member’s area
• Other: we’ll review smaller feature that could tip the balance either way

Page Building

Teachable and Podia are overall both fairly limited on that side of things.

You’ll have access to a page builder with different block options that you can easily edit.

Although the process of setting up a page on either platform is relatively simple, it’s very limiting in terms of design.

Of course, you can still put together a good-enough looking page if you’re just getting started! But don’t expect anything very well designed.

If you’re already using another platform for your website, then you may want to keep your pages there and only use Teachable or Podia for the course side of things.

Checkout

There is a bit more of a significant difference when it comes to payment between Teachable and Podia.

Both platforms are suited to sell anything digital: courses, membership, downloads,etc.

One the one hand, Teachable’s checkout and payment abilities are more powerful.

You’ll have more flexibility in terms of the type of payment (free, paid trial etc.), but a better ability customize the checkout page

The affiliate system is also much more robust in Teachable with a greater ability to customize links for your partners.

That being said, Teachable does have 2 major downside Podia doesn’t:

The first is the 5% transaction fee that comes in until you upgrade to the $99/mo plan…

This can be a big deal for some course creators and force them into the higher tiers without needing anything else.

The second is the fact that Teachable holds your money for some time before releasing it to your bank account, which can create some disturbances with cash flow.

Now, if these two things aren’t that important to you, then Teachable comes out on top here!

Course Delivery

This is another fairly similar feature between the two platforms.

You’ll be able to put together your online course or membership from the back-end by organizing your content in different sections and categories.

Teachable is a little more flexible in terms of what you can build here, with a few more block types and the ability to add multiple videos or blocks to the same module.

It also has a cool Upsell feature that would enable you to create some context around a product upgrade or cross-selling inside of your course.

From the front-end perspective, Podia and Teachable courses layout look very similar, with the content you’re watching at the center and a sidebar with a menu to help your student navigate:

Unfortunately, you won’t have much choice of customizing that part beyond the basics such as colors, branding, etc.

Teaching tools are plenty for both platforms: quizzes, PDFs, video, audio, text,etc

So if you’re ok with the out of the box layout you’re getting, this shouldn’t make a big difference when deciding between the 2 platforms.

Other

To finish this feature comparison section, let’s highlight 1 feature for each platform the other isn’t offering:

Coaching: Teachable offers a native feature to help you take care of your coaching clients. This includes the ability to set milestones and set up a real coaching curriculum with individual assignments. Podia does offer coaching-type products but not as advanced as Teachable for now.

Community: Podia allows you to create a native community group in the platform, you’ll be able to create different threads and allows for the posting of text, videos and images for your users. This can be great if you’d rather not have to take this out of the platform (Facebook group,etc.)

Comparing Teachable and Podia’s pricing is interesting.

Since Podia is technically closer to being an all-in-one platform than Teachable, you would expect it to be more expensive.

But it’s a little more complicated than that:

Although both platforms have a free plan, Teachable sales fee is 5% while Podia's 8%.

Which could easily make up the difference with Podia’s first available plan at $39/mo.

Teachable is really wanting most users to use the $99/mo plan, where you actually unlock most necessary features as a course creator.

Podia’s pricing packages aren’t as difficult to navigate: upgrading to a higher plan would mostly be if you needed to push up the cap on email marketing, integrate other apps with Zapier or sell coaching.

Joining a vibrant community as part of being a user of such a platform can be of great support, especially for new course creators!

And of course, being able to have a quick and useful reply from the technical department could save your day.

Teachable is probably the online course platform with the most active users (100,000+) and has therefore been a great environment to meet fellow course creators.

Podia on the other hand has a smaller user base and no public forum or private group for users to meet and discuss…

Teachable is also notoriously bad with tech support. It can take several days to get an answer, and this can be a problem if you’re on a deadline to launch something!

Podia has a chat support you can ping anytime you need and get a reply within a few hours.

Teachable Vs Podia: The Bottom Line