Kajabi vs. Podia: All-in-one course platforms, compared
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Kajabi and Podia both position themselves as an all-in-one platform for online businesses, eliminating the need to integrate your course platform with other tools like email marketing, website builders, and page builders. In this in-depth comparison, we’ll look at how Kajabi and Podia stack up as the go-to platform to build and grow a profitable online business.
In addition to course-related functionality, we’ll compare Kajabi vs. Podia marketing capabilities. After all, people want to know who you are, what you’re about, and what you can do for them before they’ll consider buying from you.
Every successful online marketing strategy follows a similar framework. As you compare Kajabi and Podia, think about how each feature will support the following framework for your business:
- Understanding your audience.
- Drive visitors to your site.
- Create digital products.
- Nurture customer relationships.
- Get repeat sales.
We’ll compare Kajabi and Podia's capabilities in these areas:
- Online course creation, structure, and delivery
- Video hosting
- Customer/student progress
- Assessments, surveys, quizzes
- Digital product templates
- Website builder
- Landing pages
- Email marketing
- Sales funnels (AKA automated marketing campaigns and funnels)
- Live events, virtual summits, webinars, live streams
- Integrations
- Customer support
- Pricing
Let’s see how Kajabi stacks up to Podia.
Online course creation, structure, and delivery
Both Kajabi and Podia let you turn any type of content you’ve created (video, audio, digital workbooks, etc.) into a digital product. Both offer flexibility in terms of how you’d like to structure your course.
These are just a few of the online course structures that Kajabi and Podia allow you to create:
- A mini-course with three lessons or simply one downloadable video with a workbook
- An evergreen training where the content gets dripped over time to your customers
- A membership built for evolving content, where subscribers access content on-demand
The main difference is the course creation interface.
Podia has a simple, easy-to-use course creation tool. Their platform allows you to upload any type of file, deliver your content all at once or drip it, and even prelaunch e-courses.
With Podia, you start by selecting your digital product (i.e., online course, digital download, webinar, bundle) and from there, you have a blank slate to build upon. You’ll create a section and add pieces of content under each section.
Kajabi offers product templates that are premade and fully customizable. The templates help take the guesswork out of creating digital products.
You also still have the option of starting from scratch with Kajabi, which is great if you have an existing e-course or know exactly how you want to structure your content upfront.
Seeing an existing skeleton can give you new ideas or simply save the time and energy of logistical planning. For example, one of Kajabi’s templates is a 12-week coaching program, where the content comes with a built-in weekly coaching section. The outline includes a placeholder for the link to schedule the session, plus a list of common tips on how to prepare for your coaching session.
Bottom Line: With Podia you’re always starting from a blank slate. Kajabi gives you customizable templates to build upon. While Podia gives you a very simple interface, Kajabi gives you a stronger foundation to build your product on.
Video hosting
Both Kajabi and Podia have unlimited video hosting for online courses.
For back-end video hosting, Kajabi uses Wistia, which:
- Delivers high streaming quality via adaptive streaming
- Automatically adjusts the quality based on your viewer’s Internet speed.
- Ensures uninterrupted playback, even if your student is watching your video from a smartphone, going through a tunnel, on 3G (as Wistia explains it)!
Podia does not specify what video host it uses on its website. But it positions itself as “a Vimeo alternative” that lets you upload videos with no limits on file size. For faster uploading/processing, Podia recommends keeping individual videos under 1 GB.
In Kajabi, the maximum file size for video uploads is 4 GB. If your video file size is larger than 4GB, we recommend using a free video file compression tool such as Handbrake.
Bottom Line: Kajabi vs. Podia video hosting seems to be pretty equal at first glance. But take a closer look and you’ll find Kajabi may be able to provide a better viewing experience for those watching your videos.
Customer/student progress
Up-to-date progress reports about your students or customers help you answer questions about your customers, such as:
- Are they going through the course and digesting the material?
- Are they getting stuck anywhere?
- Are my videos too long?
- Where do they tend to drop off?
In Kajabi, you get full access to all these details with our robust analytics. With both lesson progress and video progress, you can track exactly how people are digesting your content on an individual and high-level basis.
If you’re looking for a high-level snapshot of how students are progressing in your course, Kajabi’s overview reports are your answer. They show you the number of customers who completed a lesson, the number of customers that started, as well as the average progress by lesson.
Kajabi also lets you segment out your students however you’d like to categorize them. If you wanted to specifically see how community members were progressing, you could create a filter for them:
Let’s say you wanted to slice the data differently, by lesson. Here’s an example that shows the overall progress all of your students have made, broken down by each lesson of your e-course.
Podia tracks when students have watched a video on an individual basis. By clicking on a customer’s profile and the progress bar, you can see every lesson your customer has viewed or hasn't viewed. Podia does not offer the overview progress reports that Kajabi offers.
Bottom Line: Podia offers you some basic information about your student progress. However, Kajabi’s more in-depth reports can give you great insight into how effective your courses are for your customers as a whole and on an individual basis.
Assessing your students: Testing, surveys, assignments
Every course creator wants their students to soak up as much knowledge as possible. Building an interactive experience for your customers makes a big difference. It also sets your course apart from others on the market. When done right, testing helps your students digest and remember your material on a deeper level.
Giving your customers opportunities to take quizzes or surveys helps you, as the course creator, understand them better. You can track how well they’re learning and how they’re feeling throughout the course. Both Kajabi and Podia platforms offer their own versions of an assessment.
Podia quizzes
Podia allows you to add multiple choice quizzes to any lesson. When students are done with a quiz, they can see their score before moving onto the next lesson.
To view your customers' quiz completion individually, you can do so by checking their course progress.
If you think multiple-choice questions are sufficient for your course, then Podia’s quiz functionality is all you need. However, some course topics need more flexibility to assess students.
Let’s say you wanted to ask an open-ended question, where the answer requires the student to write a paragraph. What if you wanted to assess your student’s work by asking them to upload a photo, audio file, or PDF to answer? In those scenarios, Podia would fall short.
Kajabi assessments
With Kajabi’s assessments, you have plenty of flexibility in how you test your students’ knowledge, with options for:
- Multiple-choice questions
- Open-ended questions
- Fill-in-the-blank statements
- Images as the question itself
You could even have students upload homework as PDFs, word documents, videos, images, or audio files directly into the lesson. Grading comes free with every plan.
You can require your students to complete an assessment with a minimum score before moving on to the next lesson. Or if it’s more important that they answer the questions rather than the grade itself, set the passing grade to 0%. They’ll be able to move on once they answer your question(s), regardless of how they score.
Every course is unique and likely requires more than a multiple-choice question to fully test your students’ understanding of the material. Unfortunately, that’s the only option you have with Podia.
The more flexibility you have in facilitating deep, meaningful interaction with your students, the better equipped you’ll be to create top-notch courses.
With Kajabi, there’s much more you can do with assessments far beyond courses.
Do you want to automatically subscribe students to an email sequence after they’ve completed the assessment? Do you want to email them with a link to test results? Do you want to email your team every time a student completes an assessment? You can do all of that in Kajabi.
You can also use surveys on your landing pages to collect and segment out your leads.
Bottom Line: Podia does offer multiple-choice quizzes but Kajabi gives you so much more to test and assess your students’ learnings. If you want robust functionality for testing your students, sending surveys, or simply designing a more interactive learning experience, Kajabi is the Podia alternative you need.
Digital product templates: the look and feel of your course
If you’ve ever purchased an Apple product, you most likely remember the visual experience, the packaging, and the overall high-quality presentation. Powerful branding is one of the reasons consumers are willing to pay premium prices for Apple products. The look and feel gives their products a higher perceived value.
Customers want to be blown away by their purchases. Once they’ve made an investment, they want to feel like they’ve made the right decision. That feeling you had unwrapping a beautiful, sleek MacBook or iPhone is the same feeling your customers should have the first time they log into your course.
This is where Kajabi vs. Podia product theming comes into play. There are some big differences here.
Podia product "template"
Podia offers a default template with a few options for customization. Aside from the default template, you can choose from the following options:
- Heading and body font
- Background colors
- Text colors
- Color customization for your brand, background, and heading
Kajabi product templates: Suitable for any type of digital product
Here’s what Kajabi does that no other online course creator does: it presents you with a library of beautiful, highly customizable template that you can apply to your different products.
Want to create an online course with several modules and lessons?
What about a membership site?
Want to add coaching and a weekly webinar?
What about creating a paid community?
If you have any kind of digital product, Kajabi has the right template for it.
The best part is you’re not obligated to use the same template across all of your products. You have the option to pick a different template for each product.
Even within each carefully crafted template, you have the flexibility to customize each one with Kajabi’s easy-to-use template editor and powerful code editor.
Bottom Line: Unlike Podia’s over-simplified template, Kajabi’s product template can help you easily create customized and cohesive look for your products. If you want to make a strong impression and have the flexibility to serve your audience in different ways, there’s no question that Kajabi is the better choice.
Kajabi vs. Podia: Website builder
Having your course live in the same ecosystem as your website eliminates tech integration headaches and gives your website visitors a more seamless experience. You eliminate that extra layer of friction that would otherwise force your visitors to bounce around different platforms.
Both Kajabi and Podia position themselves as all-in-one platforms with a website builder. Blog posts are hosted on Kajabi and Podia’s higher tier plan, so you can deliver free, valuable content to potential customers.
But there are huge differences in Podia vs. Kajabi’s website builders, so let’s dive in.
Podia website builder
The Podia website builder takes the same approach as Podia’s course creation software: you start with a blank slate and click on predesigned blocks to build your website. Podia’s predesigned blocks include:
- FAQs
- Testimonials
- Columns
- Bio
- Products
- Email newsletter signup
Podia’s definition of “prebuilt templates” is very different from Kajabi’s definition of templates. Where Kajabi’s layout presets (see below) offer different designs, Podia defines its templates as:
- None: A simple, white background, with dark text
- Light: A light background color with dark text
- Dark: A dark background with white text
Not a lot of room for customization.
Kajabi website builder
With Kajabi, you can feel confident about building a beautiful website that’s safe, secure, and stable without hiring expensive designers or web developers. Kajabi’s template offers multiple layout presets that you can customize.
Just pick a layout you like and add your own branding and copy. From there, you’ll have your own stunning website, complete with your library of products, about page, blog, and more.
With Kajabi, you get access to all the elements successful websites use, including options to add:
- Site header
- Video background
- Opt-in forms
- Calls-to-action (CTAs)
- Feature highlights
- Testimonials
- Sales pages
- Blog posts
You can also add a pop-up form on your site so when visitors land on your homepage, you can start capturing their emails.
The best part is that it’s all easily customizable with any Kajabi plan. The user-friendly editor makes it easy to implement changes on the fly and move elements around.
No other online course creation software comes close to letting you create beautiful, professional-quality websites from scratch.
Bottom Line: Podia’s website builder is severely limited: no website template for you to create a unique look and feel. If you’re looking for a fully customizable and integrated website builder, Kajabi is the all-in-one platform for you.
Kajabi vs Podia: Landing pages
Landing pages are pages aimed solely at getting visitors to take a specific action, known as the call to action (CTA).
Landing pages should be simple and separate from your website where visitors come to learn about you and your brand. The goal is to remove potential barriers to conversion, whether your CTA is to download a free PDF, sign up for a newsletter, or buy a product.
You’ve seen landing pages in many different forms:
- Email opt-in pages
- Sales pages
- “Thank you” pages
- Download pages
- Video pages
- . . . and more.
Let’s compare how Kajabi vs. Podia landing pages can help you build and grow your online business.
Podia landing pages
Podia lets you sell prelaunch products by collecting email addresses to gauge interest before launching a new product. It also provides email capture and conversion-optimized checkout.
It doesn’t differentiate between its website builder and landing page builder. Unlike Kajabi, Podia doesn’t have page templates with high-level designs to choose from. Podia provides a default template that allows you to customize colors and fonts.
Kajabi landing pages
With its built-in landing page functionality, Kajabi lets you choose from 20+ different templates to create any kind of landing page you need.
You get an entirely separate set of layouts from the website builder presets. These landing pages are designed to help grow your audience, deliver value, and sell your products. And they're easily tied together to build an automated marketing campaign or funnel.
Here’s an example of a landing page funnel you could create in Kajabi in less than 20 minutes:
- Your visitor lands on an opt-in page that promises exclusive video content in exchange for an email address.
- Once your visitor opts in, they reach a landing page with your video content.
- At the bottom of that page, you include a compelling CTA with an offer related to the video they just watched.
- Your visitor clicks on the CTA, and automatically gets directed to a sales page featuring one of your introductory offers.
- Your visitor converts! They purchase the introductory offer and are now a student of yours.
This simple example, which barely scrapes the surface of Kajabi’s landing page capabilities, can easily help you generate sales from Day 1.
Bottom Line: A good landing page will lead to conversions and ultimately, your success. Kajabi has dedicated templates and funnels to help you build landing pages that convert. These features are simply lacking on the Podia platform.
Email marketing
Email is the lifeblood of any online business. It converts more effectively than any other marketing medium out there. Consider these impressive stats on email marketing from HubSpot:
- For every dollar brands invest in email marketing, they receive $42 in return.
- Marketers who use segmented campaigns note as much as a 760% increase in revenue.
Both Kajabi and Podia offer email marketing, so let’s compare the two and see how they stack up.
Email design templates
Podia claims to offer a “clean, professional-looking email template.” Aside from basic text formatting options (i.e., bold, italics, hyperlink, quotes, bullet lists, and numbered lists), there are no visual design elements.
As a robust alternative to Podia, Kajabi’s visual builder makes it easy to add rich design to your emails.
You get:
- 15+ templates
- 12 preset sections that quickly allow you to add:
- New content
- Countdown timers
- Images
- Video previews
Kajabi email also comes with Email Subject Line Validation, which improves deliverability as you’re typing your subject line. The tool automatically checks for potential spam triggers and suggests exactly what to fix, helping you increase open rates and stay out of spam.
Email segmentation
Podia offers segmentation options based on how your contacts subscribed to your email list, which could be through:
- Your prelaunch signup
- What item they purchased
- What membership they subscribed to
- A lead-capture form from your website
Kajabi email comes with several default segments including:
- Subscribers
- Inactive subscribers who haven’t opened your emails in the last 90 days
- Those whose emails have hard bounced (or in other words, were undeliverable)
Beyond those default segments, Kajabi also lets you create custom segments, so you can decide what categories work best for your business. For example, you can segment contacts based on how they respond to a survey, if they used a coupon code, or if they visited a page on your site in the last two days.
Email campaigns, broadcasts, automated sequences, and email campaign analytics
Both Kajabi and Podia offer email campaigns, broadcasts, automated sequences, and email campaign analytics. By far, Kajabi’s advanced customization options and built-in capabilities overpower Podia’s email marketing features.
Here’s how the third-party review site Sell Courses Online puts it:
“Podia’s email capabilities are really basic and it’s far from a stage where it can act as your email marketing platform. In fact, it’s not meant to replace your email service provider.”
With Kajabi, it’s different. Everything is connected for a seamless experience. By having your emails natively integrate with the rest of your website, product offerings, and marketing campaigns, you no longer have to worry about frustrating integrations and broken APIs.
If you’re wondering how you benefit from having an email marketing tool integrated with the rest of your business, here’s an example of a sequence you can build in Kajabi:
- You create a Kajabi landing page with a video about your upcoming digital product.
- Anyone who opts into that landing page, automatically gets entered on your Kajabi email sequence.
- Throughout the week, Kajabi automatically sends out an email with a new video each day. Each video is delivering value and building up excitement about your upcoming product.
- At the end of the week, you notify subscribers that you’ve opened up registration to your online course with discounted early bird pricing.
- A few days pass. If the prospect hasn’t purchased yet, your autoresponder notifies them that the discounted pricing offer will soon expire.
- You close the cart and you’re done. Now you have an evergreen launch funnel that runs on its own so you can spend time running your business.
You can do all of this inside Kajabi. For more info about Kajabi’s email builder, check out email FAQs and the Kajabi Email Deep Dive Training video.
Bottom Line: When comparing Podia vs. Kajabi’s email marketing programs, Kajabi is the clear winner. It has all the email creation and automation capabilities you need to grow and develop your customer base. If you go with Podia, you’ll have to enlist the services of a third-party email marketing platform.
Sales funnels (AKA automated marketing campaigns)
Before people will buy from you, they need to know, like, and trust you. That’s why it’s important to cultivate relationships with your audience and steer them in the right direction, whether that means purchasing a product, joining a webinar, or signing up for a freebie.
A well-designed sales funnel can help you automate that process, so that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time you have a new prospect.
Sales funnels are automated marketing campaigns that help you sell your digital products and online courses. They tie together your opt-in forms, landing pages, and automated emails.
Both Kajabi and Podia claim to build complete sales funnels, but the resources and capabilities of each platform are starkly different.
Podia’s version of a sales funnel is this:
- You design an email drip campaign that’s triggered by someone downloading a lead magnet or purchasing a product.
- Somewhere in the email sequence, you include links to your sales page or product page.
The Podia knowledge base offers a few ideas on crafting a long email sequence versus a short email sequence, but that’s basically how Podia defines “a complete sales funnel.”
Kajabi’s sales funnel builder is much more robust with six f templates for:
These are carefully crafted, proven formulas that are already set up for you in the platform. Funnels eliminate the guesswork and lets you build powerful funnels with just a few clicks.
For a closer look, here’s an example of Kajabi’s product launch Funnel (which, btw, was designed by Brendon Burchard):
- Opt-in page with an incentive for visitors to provide their email address
- Three “Value pages” delivered via an email drip campaign. These landing pages show your lead the unique benefits of your product with a video and headline.
- Checkout page with the offer you promoted in your Value pages. Each Value page has a link to the checkout.
You also have the option to start a funnel from scratch or customize the existing funnel templates to your liking.
The Funnels feature in Kajabi is entirely automated, which means once you’ve created your funnel, you can set it and forget it. The Funnels work in the background so you can work on your business.
Bottom Line: If you want to grow a profitable online business you can scale quickly with marketing automation, Kajabi is the right platform for you. Podia’s sales funnel suggestions might get you started, but Kajabi’s templates will take you all the way.
Live events, virtual summits, webinars, livestreams
Everyone knows how critical it is to build an audience in a way that’s both consistent and sustainable. You need new people discovering you, telling their networks about you, and subscribing to your emails. Free live webinars can help you attract new audiences.
Both Kajabi and Podia offer webinar support and integrate with Zoom and YouTube Live. Both platforms help you get set up with advanced scheduling, automated sales pages, reminder emails, and replays.
While Podia does offer some flexibility like bundling with other product types, upsells, and affiliates, Kajabi offers many more capabilities.
Here are three examples of events you can set up in Kajabi:
- Live event. Host a live training and engage with your audience.
- Virtual summit. Host a virtual summit that runs over the course of a few days.
- Evergreen webinars. Run fully automated webinars. Just set an event to repeat however you’d like — every 10 minutes, every hour, every day. You can set your webinar to run on autopilot.
Once you’ve nailed the type of event, date and time, Kajabi makes it easy to:
- Add countdowns to your landing pages and email broadcasts
- Register contacts (for both digital and in-person events)
- Send email notifications reminding contacts about the event
The best part? You don’t have to put much thought into what elements you need to create a marketing campaign around your event. Kajabi comes with a webinar Funnel that includes customizable templates for your registration, confirmation, and sales pages, as well as all emails associated with the webinar.
Set up your webinar funnel once, and Kajabi takes care of the rest.
Bottom Line: Kajabi’s built-in features give you everything you need to leverage events and webinars for marketing needs. You might be able to get similar functionality with Podia, but only with add-ons and upsells.
Integrations
Integrations make it easy to connect third-party apps with your online platform and have them work together in powerful ways. Both Kajabi and Podia come with built-in integrations.
Bottom Line: When comparing Podia vs. Kajabi integrations, it’s pretty much a tie. They are two of the biggest online course platforms around and it’s no surprise they both support a wide and very similar selection of integrations with third-party apps.
Customer support
One thing about any software platform that you have undoubtedly learned in all walks of life: don’t overlook excellent support.
The last thing you ever want to happen when creating and selling your online course is getting stuck with no help.
Sure, you can pour over countless help articles to find an answer, but what if you were about to launch and something goes wrong the night before? Do you have a way to get help immediately?
Here’s a side-by-side comparison of Kajabi’s and Podia’s customer support.
Bottom Line: Kajabi and Podia both offer a strong base of customer support. Still, with longer hours of available live chat and an extremely generous amount of live training, Kajabi is the Podia alternative for better customer support.
Pricing
Now that you have seen the major differences between Kajabi vs. Podia, let’s talk about pricing so you can see where you can get the most bang for your buck.
You can see all the details directly from Kajabi’s pricing page and Podia’s pricing page.
At first glance, it looks like you might save money with Podia.
And that brings us to the question: Is Podia really an all-in-one platform?
To sell your online courses and match all the powerful capabilities of Kajabi, you can’t rely solely on the basic functionalities of Podia. You’d have to add a whole host of third-party tools, including landing page software, a CRM, and an email marketing platform.
All of those tools combined can easily cost hundreds of additional dollars per month, which you should factored into the cost of going with Podia. There’s nothing more frustrating than signing up for a platform, only to discover you’ll have to pay for additional tools.
That’s why you can often save money by investing in one robust platform. We’ve broken down what you’d have to spend if you picked Kajabi’s most popular plan versus Podia’s Shaker plan.
It’s also important to note that both Kajabi and Podia do not take a portion of your profits.
Bottom line: Podia is the cheaper option if you only need their basic offerings. The problem is you probably need much more. In this case, all the added costs will far exceed the monthly price of the Kajabi platform, which already has everything you need.
Who is Kajabi and Podia for?
If you are just starting out and building your first online course and product, Podia’s features and simple interface could be sufficient enough to build a foundation for your business.
The Kajabi platform is also a strong option for those just starting out, but it is especially fine-tuned for those with established businesses. Kajabi’s advanced marketing and sales features are meant to give your business the boost you are looking for.
Not to mention all the templates and automation built into the Kajabi platform that will help streamline the entire course building and marketing process, saving you very valuable time you can spend on other aspects of your business.
The final word on Kajabi vs. Podia
There are many more nuanced differences between Kajabi and Podia, but as you can see, the functionality, templates, and design templates you get with Kajabi make a huge difference to your business.
If you’re tired of duct-taping different tools together and want something that does more than just deliver your products, then it’s pretty clear which platform you need to use. Kajabi has all the tools you need in place so you can build and run your entire online business selling digital products.
We hope this article has helped illuminate the differences of Kajabi vs. Podia.
And if you’re interested in experiencing a streamlined, all-in-one solution for your online business, try Kajabi for free today.
Still researching? Check out our other competitor comparisons:
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Kajabi vs. Thinkific
Kajabi vs. Patreon
Kajabi vs. Wordpress
Kajabi vs. Clickfunnels
Kajabi vs. Ontraport
Kajabi vs. ConvertKit
Kajabi vs. Systeme
Kajabi vs. LearnWorlds
Kajabi vs. Samcart
