November 13, 2020

Kajabi vs Podia: Which Online Course Platform is Best in 2024?

Kajabi vs. Podia: Compare their learning curve, course creation, pricing, and integrations to find out which all-in-one platform best fits your business needs.

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Kajabi and Podia 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 examine 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's marketing capabilities. 

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:

  1. Learning curve
  2. Customization
  3. Online course creation 
  4. Video hosting
  5. Customer/student progress
  6. Assessments, surveys, quizzes
  7. Digital product templates
  8. Website builder
  9. Landing pages
  10. Email marketing
  11. Automated marketing campaigns
  12. Live events, virtual summits, webinars, live streams
  13. Integrations
  14. Customer support
  15. Reports and data
  16. Pricing

Let’s see how Kajabi stacks up to Podia.

Kajabi Overview

Kajabi is an all-in-one platform to help entrepreneurs, course creators, and online businesses build, market, and sell digital products.

It offers a comprehensive suite of tools for course creation, website building, email marketing, sales funnels, and automation, eliminating the need for third-party integrations. 

Additionally, the platform offers a robust community builder, supporting live events, challenges, and group chats to foster member engagement. You can create exclusive spaces for different membership tiers​.

Here’s an overview of its key features, functionalities, and benefits:

  • Course Creation: Kajabi's course builder allows you to design multimedia-rich courses with a drag-and-drop interface, supporting video, audio, quizzes, and assignments. You can also drip content over time to enhance student engagement​.
  • Website Building: The platform includes a built-in website builder, which allows you to create professional-looking, mobile-friendly websites. You can customize your site using pre-made templates and the drag-and-drop editor​.
  • Email Marketing & Automation: Kajabi offers robust email marketing features, allowing users to build landing pages, create automated email sequences, segment their audience, and track analytics. This eliminates the need for separate email marketing software​.
  • Sales Funnels and Payments: Kajabi includes tools for building sales funnels, upsells, and order bumps. It supports integrated payment processing via Kajabi Payments, Stripe, or PayPal. The platform does not charge transaction fees, making it a streamlined option for digital sales​.
  • Community Building: Kajabi offers advanced community-building tools where users can create interactive spaces for their members. This includes features like live events, challenges, and group chats, which help foster engagement and loyalty among customers​.
  • Coaching and Webinars: Kajabi supports one-on-one or group coaching and integrates webinar hosting, allowing creators to monetize live events and offer tailored coaching services without relying on external tools​.

Overall, Kajabi is best suited for business owners who want a comprehensive, professional platform to manage all aspects of their digital business in one place.

Podia Overview

Podia is an easy-to-use, all-in-one platform that helps creators sell digital products, memberships, and online courses. 

It focuses on simplicity, offering users a streamlined experience without the complexity of multiple integrations.

Podia’s user-friendly interface makes it accessible for beginners, and its core features cater to small businesses and creators looking to launch their first digital products.

Podia’s key features include:

  • Course Creation: Podia provides an intuitive interface for building online courses. You can upload multimedia content (videos, audio, text, quizzes) and organize lessons into sections. While it lacks advanced quiz features and complex student tracking options, it’s easy to use and ideal for beginners​.
  • Digital Product Sales: Podia allows creators to sell digital products, from ebooks to software, using one-time payments, subscriptions, or payment plans. You can bundle products, or offer upsells, making it a versatile option for digital sales​.
  • Memberships and Communities: Podia includes basic community-building tools that let creators set up membership tiers with recurring payments. Members can interact with each other through posts, comments, and discussions, though it lacks advanced community features like gamification​.
  • Webinars and Coaching: Podia integrates with YouTube Live and Zoom to offer webinars directly through the platform. It also supports one-on-one coaching, although options for group coaching are limited​.
  • Email Marketing: While Podia offers basic email marketing tools, including the ability to segment subscribers and send automated email sequences, it doesn't have advanced features like dynamic content or deep analytics​.
  • Ease of Use: One of Podia’s major selling points is its user-friendly interface, making it accessible to creators with little technical expertise. It’s designed to streamline the setup process, allowing creators to focus on content rather than technical details​.

Podia is ideal for those who want a clean, beginner-friendly platform to launch and sell their digital products without needing extensive customization or advanced marketing features.

Kajabi Vs. Podia: Learning Curve 

When it comes to the learning curve, Kajabi stands out as the best option for entrepreneurs and course creators who want to hit the ground running.

Despite its wide array of powerful tools, Kajabi maintains an intuitive and user-friendly interface that simplifies the setup process.

Here’s why Kajabi takes the lead in this comparison:

  • Comprehensive Onboarding: Kajabi offers extensive onboarding support, including tutorials, guides, and a community forum that helps users navigate the platform with ease, regardless of their tech skills.
  • In-app Guidance: Kajabi features step-by-step guidance within the platform to walk users through creating their website, setting up email marketing, and launching their courses. This minimizes the learning curve for beginners.
  • All-in-one Solution: Since Kajabi integrates all the tools you need—from course creation to marketing—under one roof, you don’t need to learn how to work with multiple tools and third-party integrations, which saves time and reduces frustration.
  • 24/7 Customer Support: If you ever get stuck, Kajabi offers round-the-clock customer support to ensure that you never lose momentum in your business. This adds to the ease of learning and ensures a smoother experience overall.

On the other hand, Podia is also user-friendly but lacks the same depth of in-app support and step-by-step guidance. While Podia’s interface is simple, users may have to rely more on external resources to unlock the platform’s potential fully.

This makes the learning curve slightly steeper for those looking to scale quickly.

Bottom Line: When it comes to the learning curve, Kajabi outshines Podia with its comprehensive onboarding, in-app guidance, and all-in-one functionality. For those who want to start quickly and efficiently without being bogged down by technical hurdles, Kajabi’s ease of use and robust support system make it the superior choice.

Kajabi Vs. Podia: Customization

When it comes to customization, Kajabi once again wins, offering a more robust and flexible suite of design and personalization options that cater to both beginners and advanced users.

Here’s why Kajabi takes the lead in customization:

  • Fully Customizable Website Themes: Kajabi provides a wide range of modern, mobile-responsive website themes that can be easily customized to match your brand. You can modify everything from fonts and colors to layout and images, ensuring your site looks unique and professional.
  • Drag-and-Drop Builder: Kajabi’s drag-and-drop builder allows you to create custom pages without coding experience. You can easily move elements around, add sections, and create a fully tailored website or sales funnel that aligns with your business goals.
  • Advanced Customization with Code Access: For users with coding experience, Kajabi allows you to access your site's HTML and CSS, offering complete control over the design and functionality. This is perfect for those who want more advanced customization beyond the built-in tools.
  • Customizable Course and Membership Layouts: Kajabi allows you to fully customize the layout of your courses and membership sites, ensuring your content is presented in a way that reflects your brand. You can modify the look of your course player, lesson layout, and even automate specific user experiences based on their actions.
  • Integrated Marketing Customization: Kajabi also shines in its marketing tools, allowing you to customize your email campaigns, sales pages, and funnels with ease. From the design of your email templates to personalized automations, everything can be tailored to suit your branding and customer journey.

On the other hand, Podia does offer customization features, but they are somewhat limited compared to Kajabi. While you can modify basic elements like colors, fonts, and images, Podia lacks the same depth of customization and flexibility. It doesn’t provide access to HTML or CSS, which limits how much you can tailor the look and feel of your site.

Podia allows for basic customization of course and product pages. You can add multimedia, links, and files, but the customization ends there, lacking options for advanced layout changes or complex design.

Bottom Line: In customization, Kajabi outpaces Podia with its expansive design flexibility, advanced coding options, and powerful tools for personalizing every aspect of your website, courses, and marketing efforts. If you want complete control over your branding and customer experience, Kajabi is the clear winner, offering far more versatility and creative freedom than Podia.

Kajabi Vs. Podia: Online Course Creation

Kajabi and Podia let you turn any 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 is known for its simplicity. It offers an intuitive course creation process where you can quickly upload various types of content (videos, text, quizzes) and organize them into sections.

The interface is straightforward and beginner-friendly, allowing creators to drip content over time or release it all at once. However, customization options are limited.

Podia's course player has a default template that users cannot modify extensively. While you can customize some basic elements, such as colors, the overall structure and specific design elements remain unchanged.

Podia course creation

Kajabi offers product templates that are premade and fully customizable. The templates help take the guesswork out of creating digital products.

You can still start 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 and a list of common tips on preparing for your coaching session.

Podia digital products

Additionally, Kajabi supports advanced assessments, such as graded quizzes with automations that unlock subsequent lessons based on student performance.

Bottom Line: Podia is ideal for creators who prioritize simplicity and want a fast, straightforward way to launch courses. It's suited for beginners or those running smaller courses who don't need complex features.

However, Kajabi, with its customizable templates and advanced assessment options, is a better fit. It offers more powerful marketing and student engagement tools, making it the choice for those with more advanced or large-scale course needs​.

Kajabi Vs. Podia: Video Hosting

When comparing Kajabi and Podia for video hosting, both platforms offer support for uploading and hosting video content, but they differ in the depth and quality of their offerings.

Podia

  • Basic Video Hosting: Podia offers built-in video hosting as part of its core service, allowing you to upload and manage video files directly within the platform. However, the platform does not provide unlimited video hosting, and restrictions may be based on the plan you're subscribed to​.
  • No Advanced Video Analytics: While Podia allows you to upload videos and present them in your courses, it lacks advanced features like video heatmaps or engagement tracking. This makes it more suitable for creators with basic video needs​.

Kajabi

  • Unlimited Video Hosting with Wistia Integration: Kajabi stands out with its unlimited video hosting, which is provided through Wistia, a premium video hosting service. Wistia ensures high-quality video playback across devices, along with faster streaming speeds. Kajabi’s integration with Wistia is seamless, giving creators more control over video presentation and performance​.
  • Advanced Video Analytics: Kajabi offers powerful video analytics, such as video heatmaps, which allow you to see how students engage with your content. These insights can help creators understand where students drop off or rewatch sections, enabling course optimization.

In Kajabi, the maximum file size for video uploads is 4 GB. If your video file size exceeds 4GB, we recommend using a free video file compression tool such as Handbrake.

Bottom Line: Kajabi vs. Podia video hosting is 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. Kajabi works with Wistia to host all of the video content, has higher quality playback through Wistia, and detailed engagement analytics, making it a better choice for creators who rely heavily on video content and want detailed insights into student behavior.

Kajabi Vs. Podia: 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:

Kajabi product progress

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.

Kajabi progress by post


Podia tracks whether students have watched specific videos on an individual basis. By accessing a customer’s profile, creators can see which lessons have been viewed or not.

However, it lacks the comprehensive overview reports that Kajabi offers. There are no aggregated metrics showing overall engagement trends across the entire course.

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. 

Kajabi Vs. Podia: Assessing Your Students: Testing, Surveys, Assignments

Effective assessment is crucial for online course creators, as it helps gauge student understanding and engagement. Kajabi and Podia provide tools for testing and assessing students but differ significantly in functionality and depth.

Podia Quizzes

Podia allows you to create quizzes and assessments to test your students' knowledge. You can add multiple-choice, true/false, and short-answer questions to your quizzes.

These quizzes can be integrated into your online courses, helping to reinforce the material and provide immediate feedback to students.

Podia also includes survey tools that you can use to gather feedback from your students. You can customize the questions and analyze the results to gain insights into your students' experiences and preferences.

This can be useful for improving your course content and delivery.

Additionally, with Podia, you can create assignments and track student progress. You can set deadlines, provide feedback, and manage submissions within the platform.

This makes it easy to evaluate student work and ensure they meet the course objectives.

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.

Kajabi Vs. Podia: Digital Product Templates

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 invested, 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 does offer multiple themes for products.

While it may not have as many themes as Kajabi, Podia provides a variety of professionally designed templates that you can customize to fit your brand.

You can change designs, colors, and layouts to create unique product landing pages.

The strength of Podia’s product template lies in its simplicity. For creators who want to get their products online quickly without getting bogged down in design, Podia offers an easy-to-use, straightforward interface that allows you to focus more on content creation than on extensive design customization.

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.

Kajabi themes

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 that you can deliver free, valuable content to potential customers. 

But there are huge differences between Podia and Kajabi’s website builders, so let’s dive in.

Podia Website Builder

With Podia, you don’t have to compromise between a stunning design and ease of use. The platform allows you to create a high-performing, visually appealing website in just a few minutes without technical expertise.

Podia offers beautiful templates designed for aesthetics and for performance, ensuring your site is optimized for speed, SEO, and user experience. Whether you’re building a blog, an online store, or a membership site, Podia’s drag-and-drop interface makes it easy to customize your site to reflect your brand and business goals​.

Additionally, Podia’s straightforward customization options allow you to easily change fonts, colors, and styles to match your brand.

Podia also includes essential SEO tools out of the box, helping your site rank on search engines. You can customize metadata to target specific keywords and boost your site's visibility.

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 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: While both platforms cater to similar audiences, Kajabi provides a more robust website-building experience with greater customization options and integrated marketing tools, making it a better choice for those seeking a comprehensive solution for their online business.. 

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 offers basic landing page creation tools that are easy to use, perfect for beginners or creators who need to get their products online quickly. The landing page builder is intuitive but lacks more advanced customization options. 

You can adjust essential elements like fonts, colors, and imagery, but Podia does not offer as many pre-built templates or design flexibility as Kajabi.

Podia’s simplicity is ideal for creators who must focus on content delivery and sales without being bogged down by complex design choices. Its landing pages are effective for straightforward product promotion, though they may not have the same visual impact or conversion-optimization features as Kajabi.

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.

Kajabi landing pages

Here’s an example of a landing page funnel you could create in Kajabi in less than 20 minutes: 

  1. Your visitor lands on an opt-in page that promises exclusive video content in exchange for an email address.
  2. Once your visitor opts in, they reach a landing page with your video content.
  3. At the bottom of that page, you include a compelling CTA with an offer related to the video they just watched.
  4. Your visitor clicks on the CTA, and automatically gets directed to a sales page featuring one of your introductory offers.
  5. 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.

Kajabi Vs. Podia: 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.

Podia Email Design Templates

Podia's email marketing integrates seamlessly with your website and online store, enabling you to manage everything from one platform. With no need for third-party email integrations, you can effortlessly manage your subscribers' data in one place.

Over 12 pre-made templates are available for different purposes, including newsletters, affiliate announcements, special deals, welcome emails, and thank-you messages. This variety helps users quickly find a suitable starting point for their email communications.

As a robust alternative to Podia, Kajabi provides a selection of over 19 pre-designed email templates tailored for different types of communications, such as newsletters, product announcements, and promotional emails.

These templates are designed for readability and engagement, allowing users to focus on their content without worrying about formatting issues.

In addition to using pre-designed templates, Kajabi allows users to create and save an unlimited number of their custom email templates. This feature is beneficial for maintaining brand consistency and streamlining the email creation process for recurring campaigns.

Email Segmentation

Podia simplifies the segmentation process by automatically tracking user interactions such as purchases, sales, memberships, and email activity. 

This means that users can segment their audience without extensive manual setup, although adding custom tags as needed is also possible.

Users can segment their email lists based on subscriber behavior and interests. For instance, you can send tailored emails to subscribers who have purchased specific products or engaged with particular content. This targeted approach helps improve engagement rates and reduces the likelihood of emails being marked as spam.

On the other hand, Kajabi provides robust email segmentation features that enable users to effectively target their audience and enhance their marketing efforts.

Here’s an overview of how Kajabi handles email segmentation:

  • Tag-Based Segmentation: Kajabi uses a tag-based system rather than a list-based approach, allowing users to categorize subscribers based on specific behaviors, interests, and interactions. This flexibility helps in creating highly targeted email campaigns tailored to different segments of the audience.
  • Custom Filters: Users can create custom filters to segment their audience based on various criteria, such as purchase history, engagement levels, or specific tags. For example, you can filter contacts who have purchased a particular product but not another or those who have downloaded a specific freebie. This layered segmentation allows for more precise targeting.
  • Automated Tagging: Kajabi automates the tagging process through forms and interactions. When subscribers engage with your content (like signing up for a lead magnet), they can be automatically tagged, making it easier to segment them in future campaigns.
  • CRM Integration: The built-in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool in Kajabi helps manage contacts effectively. Users can clean up their email lists by removing duplicates and inactive subscribers, ensuring segmentation is based on an accurate dataset.
  • Segmentation Examples: Users can segment their audience based on various factors such as location, purchasing habits, interests, or even responses from assessments. For instance, a cooking course provider might segment by dietary preferences or cooking skill levels.

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:

  1. You create a Kajabi landing page with a video about your upcoming digital product.
  2. Anyone who opts into that landing page, automatically gets entered on your Kajabi email sequence.
  3. 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.
  4. At the end of the week, you notify subscribers that you’ve opened up registration to your online course with discounted early bird pricing.
  5. A few days pass. If the prospect hasn’t purchased yet, your autoresponder notifies them that the discounted pricing offer will soon expire.
  6. 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.

New to email marketing? Track, refine, and boost your strategy with our free "Email Performance Tracking Sheet."

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Kajabi Vs. Podia: 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 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 automated email marketing campaigns are designed to help businesses engage their audience effortlessly, using smart, personalized email sequences that run 24/7. You can set up customized email automations within minutes, creating welcome emails, sales-focused sequences, and engagement boosters without needing any technical knowledge.

Key features include: 

  • Automated Sequences: Create personalized customer journeys that engage new subscribers, nurture leads, and trigger emails based on actions such as course logins, link clicks, or product purchases.
  • Custom Subscriber Journeys: Automate your marketing to send emails tailored to each subscriber’s journey, ensuring the personal touch is maintained while reducing manual effort.
  • No-Code Setup: Podia handles the technical details for you, including deliverability management, ensuring your emails land in inboxes.

Kajabi’s sales funnel builder is much more robust with six 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, by the way, 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.

Kajabi’s product launch Funnel

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.

Kajabi Vs. Podia: 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.

Podia itself doesn't host webinars directly on its platform. Instead, it integrates with popular webinar platforms like Zoom and YouTube Live.

This allows you to host your webinars on these platforms and then use Podia to sell access to your webinars, manage registrations, and handle payments.

After the live event, you can automatically convert webinar replays into digital products. These replays can be sold as standalone items, bundled with other products, or offered as free content to drive engagement.

Kajabi also provides robust tools for hosting live events, virtual summits, webinars, and livestreams, allowing creators to engage their audience and generate revenue seamlessly.

Here are examples of events you can set up in Kajabi:

  • Native Webinar Hosting: Kajabi now offers built-in webinar functionality, enabling creators to host live or pre-recorded webinars directly on their platform. The setup is easy, as you can create an entire webinar funnel with registration pages, email sequences, and thank-you pages all generated automatically, which helps streamline the process​.
  • Virtual Summits: Kajabi supports virtual summits through its Virtual Summit Blueprint, which allows you to create and host multi-day events, panels, or conferences. You can organize sessions by date and topic, and even invite guest speakers. Virtual summits can be monetized via ticket sales, upsells, or affiliate programs​.
  • Live Event and Pipeline Integration: Kajabi’s Live Event Blueprint lets you organize and sell access to live and virtual events. You can fully automate marketing through Pipelines, which include pre-built templates for events like webinars or virtual summits, saving time while ensuring professional execution. Attendees can receive reminders, and post-event emails can be turned into a sales funnel​.
  • Monetization Options: Kajabi allows you to monetize your events through ticket sales or by bundling your events with other digital products, such as courses or memberships. You can also sell event replays to continue generating income long after the live event.

The best part? You don’t have to think much about 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, sales pages, and 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 get similar functionality with Podia, but only with add-ons and upsells.

Kajabi Vs. Podia: 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.

Podia offers native integrations and supports various third-party apps, making it a flexible, all-in-one platform for entrepreneurs. Podia's built-in tools cover most business needs for many, but the platform also supports hundreds of integrations to ensure it fits into your existing tech stack.

Podia also allows for adding code snippets for apps that aren’t natively supported, enabling integration with tools like Deadline Funnels, Hotjar, and TrustPulse.

It also connects with over 1,000 apps through Zapier, allowing for automation between tools like Asana, Google Sheets, Shopify, Typeform, and more without needing to code.

Kajabi Vs. Podia: Integrations

Kajabi offers various integrations that enhance its functionality and allow users to connect with various tools essential for their online business.

Here’s an overview of Kajabi's integration capabilities:

  • Automation: Kajabi integrates seamlessly with Zapier, enabling users to connect with over 7,000 applications. This allows for automation of repetitive tasks without coding, such as syncing new purchases or form submissions to other platforms like Mailchimp, Google Sheets, and Slack.
  • Triggers and Actions: Users can set up triggers for events like new purchases or form submissions, automating workflows based on these actions.
  • Customer Relationship Management (CRM): Kajabi includes built-in CRM features that help manage contacts effectively. Users can clean their email lists by removing duplicates and inactive subscribers.
  • Payment Processors: Kajabi integrates with various payment gateways, making it easy to handle transactions for courses and digital products. This includes tools like Stripe and PayPal.

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.

Kajabi Vs. Podia: 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.

Kajabi Vs. Podia: Customer Support

Bottom Line: Kajabi and Podia offer a strong customer support base. 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.

Kajabi Vs. Podia: Reports And Data

When comparing Kajabi and Podia in terms of reports and data analytics, Kajabi once again takes the lead as the more comprehensive and insightful platform.

For entrepreneurs and course creators who value detailed data to drive business decisions, Kajabi provides advanced reporting tools that help you track the performance of every aspect of your online business.

Here’s why Kajabi excels:

  • In-depth Analytics Dashboard: Kajabi offers an all-encompassing analytics dashboard that provides insights into user behavior, revenue, subscription performance, and engagement metrics. You can easily track how your courses, memberships, and digital products perform in real time.
  • Sales and Revenue Tracking: Kajabi gives you detailed reports on your sales performance, including breakdowns by product, offer, or time period. This helps you understand which products are generating the most income and where improvements can be made.
  • Customer Engagement Data: Kajabi allows you to monitor student engagement at a granular level. You can track who has completed your courses, their progress, and even which lessons are most engaging. This data is vital for improving content and increasing completion rates.
  • Email Marketing Reports: Kajabi’s integrated email marketing platform also provides detailed reports on your campaigns' open rates, click-through rates, and overall performance. Based on these data-driven insights, you can segment your audience and optimize your email marketing strategy.
  • Funnels and Conversion Tracking: Kajabi makes it easy to track the success of your sales funnels, from lead generation to customer conversion. You can analyze conversion rates and optimize your funnels to improve sales outcomes.

While Podia offers basic reporting tools, they are more limited than Kajabi. Podia provides insights into sales performance and course engagement, but it lacks the same level of detail, particularly when tracking customer behavior and email marketing performance. 

Podia’s reporting features are sufficient for smaller operations but may fall short for users seeking deeper analytics to scale their business.

Bottom Line: When it comes to reports and data analytics, Kajabi proves to be the superior choice with its comprehensive tracking, detailed insights, and robust reporting tools. For business owners who rely on data to make informed decisions and optimize performance, Kajabi’s advanced analytics capabilities far surpass what Podia offers, making it the better option for scaling and optimizing an online business.

Kajabi Vs. Podia: Pricing

Now that you have seen the major differences between Kajabi vs. Podia, let’s talk about pricing to see where you can get the most bang for your buck.

Podia pricing

Podia offers two main plans designed to cater to different levels of business needs, with no upfront costs for starting your journey:

  • Mover Plan$39/month (or $33/month with annual billing). Transaction Fees: 5% on all sales.
  • Shaker Plan – $89/month (or $75/month with annual billing). Transaction Fees: 0%.

Both Podia plans come with Podia Email built-in, offering automated emails, email designs, and subscriber analytics. The 30-day free trial allows you to explore every feature of the platform before committing.

Kajabi offers four pricing tiers aimed at creators scaling their businesses with more advanced features:

  • Kickstarter Plan$55/month (billed annually) or $69/month without annual billing. Transaction Fees: 0%
  • Basic Plan – $119/month (billed annually) or $149/month without annual billing. Transaction Fees: 0%
  • Growth Plan – $159/month (billed annually) or $199/month without annual billing. Transaction Fees: 0%
  • Pro Plan – $319/month (billed annually) or $399/month without annual billing. Transaction Fees: 0%

Podia is the more affordable option, especially for creators who are just starting out. However, the 5% transaction fee in the Mover plan may impact profitability.

Kajabi is a more premium option with no transaction fees and a wide range of advanced features, including affiliate programs and automations. It is ideal for creators who need extensive customization and are focused on growth.

Bottom Line: Podia is cheaper 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. 

Table comparing Kajabi and Podia

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 to 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.

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