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Podia and Kajabi are two of the leading online platforms designed to help creators build and sell online courses, membership sites and other digital products.
While both platforms compete directly with each other, they differ significantly in terms of the features offered, their customization capabilities and even pricing. Basically, Podia vs Kajabi are two very different platforms.
Now, it can be very difficult for an average, non-techie creator to figure out the right option especially when one considers the range of features that these online course software offer.
There are some Kajabi vs Podia comparisons out there but they aren’t of much help as they fail to cover all the important details you should know in order to make the right choice.
This is why I have created the most comprehensive comparison guide where we’ll look at how both platforms stack up as the go-to platform to build and grow your knowledge commerce business.
And I will also share my personal experience of working with creators on both platforms, what I like and what I don’t like about them.
Let’s get started.
What I like about Kajabi vs Podia?
What I like about Podia vs Kajabi?
Both Kajabi and Podia position themselves as all-in-one solutions. However, they differ significantly in terms of the platform capabilities.
With Kajabi, you don’t just get features for creating and selling an online course but you also get best-in-class tools for handling entire sales & marketing on the platform.
So Kajabi is a truly all-in-one platform that allows you to run your entire online business from a single place.
Podia, on the other hand, offers you essential features for course creation, delivery and sales side of things. You do get some basic marketing tools as well but they are very basic and so it’s far from a stage where you could use it as your main marketing platform.
With this in mind, let’s discuss the key differences between the two platforms.
At a high-level, both course builders are easy to use and offer flexibility in terms of how you’d like to structure your course. Both allow you to bulk upload your content as well as reorder your lessons and modules by simply dragging and dropping.
Plus the course builders support different content formats like videos, audio, PDFs, text, etc. and you get unlimited hosting for your videos and other content.
Overall, both Kajabi vs Podia have an easy to use course builder that allows you to quickly get your online course up and running.
However, when you get into the details, you’d notice some stark differences between the two.
Firstly, Kajabi gives you more flexibility when it comes to structuring your course. While Podia lets you add two levels to your course – sections and lessons, Kajabi lets you add a third-level as well.
Secondly, Kajabi’s course builder is more user-friendly.It uses “Product Blueprints” which are basically pre-designed templates that make it easier for you to get started.
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On the other hand, Podia doesn’t have any pre-built course templates, so you have to upload content and structure it by yourself.
Another difference is that the course builder in Kajabi supports cloud importing which lets you import your content into your course directly from Dropbox, Google Drive or OneDrive which is currently not available in Podia.
Cloud importing is an important feature for setting up your online course, as it is much faster than uploading files from your desktop manually.
Now, one area where both course builders do an average job is supporting multiple types of content within a single lesson.
So you can add, say a video and some text in your lessons but if you want to add a video and a quiz in the same lesson, you can’t do that. In Podia, you can’t add even downloadable PDFs to your video lessons.
Otherwise the process of setting up a course on both platforms is pretty straightforward, with Kajabi having an edge over Podia in terms of flexibility and user-friendliness.
Course player is one of the most important features for content delivery and user engagement as its design influences your students’ experience significantly.
Basically, it is the area accessible to your students where they can watch your content, navigate through various lessons, leave comments and do much more.
So the better the course player design is and the more intuitive it is, the more your students are likely to engage with your course.
Let’s start our discussion with Podia’s course player. It has a simple design, with the main content area on the right, the navigation area on the left and the comments section embedded at the bottom of the content area.
Overall, the course player is well-designed from an end-user experience point of view and is aesthetically appealing as well.
One specific thing that I like about Podia’s course player is that it allows you to hide the navigation sidebar and make the content area full-screen so as to enable students to have distraction-free learning.
Apart from online courses, another product type that Podia supports is Memberships. Within a Membership, you can bundle not just courses but you can also create Posts.
These Posts are like blog posts and are great for delivering one-off content to your members.
When it comes to Kajabi, things work very differently. It has a library of 10+ Product Themes and you can choose one depending on what type of design you want for your course player.
These themes give you a great amount of variety in terms of design and they will work for all types of products – online courses, memberships, coaching, etc.
For example, if you’re creating a signature course, you may want to use the Premier Theme. It is the most elegant course player theme of all the platforms I have used and it gives a premium look and feel to your product.
Similarly, if you want a more traditional style online course delivery (similar to Podia’s course player), you should use the Momentum Theme.
Finally, each of these themes can be further customized, so you can add that personal touch to your courses and stand out from the crowd.
When it comes to mobile learning, both course players are mobile-responsive by default and your students can watch your content in any mobile browser.
In addition, Kajabi also gives your students the option to access their members area through a mobile app. It has a free iOS/Android app which your students can use to watch the content on mobile, resulting in a much better learning experience.
Ultimately, Kajabi is a clear winner over Podia when it comes to course delivery. You have much more comprehensive design and customization options available for the course player and on top of that, your courses are available on a mobile app.
As a creator, you would want to engage your students throughout your course and for that to happen, your course platform must support important learning and engagement tools.
This is one area where the difference between Podia vs Kajabi is pretty significant and it might become the deciding factor in choosing between the two platforms.
With Podia, you have just two engagement tools – content drip and quizzes. Podia doesn’t have any other learning tools to offer.
With the first feature, you can drip feed your course content and release them at fixed intervals. So instead of giving complete access to your students to all of your content at once, you can deliver it according to a schedule.
The next feature is the ability to create multiple-choice quizzes inside your course. However, the quizzing tool is very basic.
It doesn’t allow you to add different question types nor does it let you add images or anything except text to your quiz questions.
In fact, it’s so basic that you can’t even set a passing grade for your quizzes which means you can’t automatically evaluate your students.
Now, Kajabi has much more to offer here. In addition to content dripping, you also have the content locking feature which allows you to restrict the progress of students unless they complete a specific lesson or pass a quiz.
Kajabi’s quizzing feature (Assessments) is much more powerful as well.
With Assessments, you can include multiple-choice questions, multiple-selection questions, “paragraph” style questions, etc. You can also include images and do other formatting in your questions.
Moreover, you can set a passing grade for your quizzes and even show a results breakdown to your students on the completion page.
Another cool feature that Kajabi Assessments supports is the ability to have your students upload assignments (or homework) in the form of word documents, PDFs, videos, audio files, and images.
In fact, you can use Kajabi Assessments on the landing pages in the frontend and use them to segment your audience or collect email addresses.
Finally, Kajabi offers another powerful engagement tool – Community that lets you build a standalone community area where your members can participate in discussions and interact with each other.
So whether you want to build a community for your online course or membership site, you’ll find this feature handy and something that isn’t available on Podia.
Overall, Kajabi does an excellent job when it comes to enhancing the learning experience and engagement of students and has a clear lead over Podia in this regard.
Both Podia and Kajabi offer you the ability to build a website for your brand. In fact, both platforms share a lot of similar features that you should know about.
Firstly, both Podia and Kajabi are hosted platforms, so you don’t need to worry about technical stuff like hosting, SSL certificate, security, updates, maintenance, etc. as it is all taken care of by their teams.
Secondly, you get a free subdomain by default on both the platforms. You can also use a custom domain for your website if you want.
Now, when it comes to site themes, Podia takes the same approach as its course builder. It doesn’t have any site themes, and there’s only one template that you can edit, that too to a very minimal extent (only colors, text, and font).
You don’t have any control over the style or high-level design of your website, which can be quite frustrating. Moreover, if you’re an advanced creator and want to access the backend of your website to modify the styling, you can’t do that with Podia.
In the case of Kajabi, you get a bunch of pre-designed themes that you can install on your website with a single click.
Currently there are 6 themes available in the library and each one has a different look and feel which makes it easier to build all types of websites on Kajabi.
Finally, Kajabi also lets you edit the website theme you choose or lets you upload your own custom theme which is a good to have option.
As far as the page builder is concerned, Podia has a simple drag-n-drop editor. In addition to letting you add text and images, it comes with a few pre-built sections like product banner, course description, author bio, testimonials, etc.
While the page builder is quite easy to use and lets you create a simple sales page pretty quickly, you won’t be able to create custom designs as the editor is quite restrictive.
The variety of page blocks supported is small and even for those blocks, you don’t have control over things like font size, spacing, order of the elements, etc.
On the other hand, Kajabi’s Page Builder offers a lot more flexibility to customize pages according to your requirements.
To start with, the page builder has over 40+ pre-built sections available which include different elements like hero section, multi-column layout, pricing tables, course listing, blog posts, opt-in forms, countdown timer, etc.
Moreover, you have various options for modifying these elements including the ability to change the text, change colors, add animation, adjust margins and paddings, edit the mobile layout separately, etc.
Talking about blogging, Kajabi has a dedicated tool for the same. You can easily create new blog posts and add content to them, modify their layout as well as customize the appearance of your blog homepage.
On top of that, you can do SEO settings, use categories to organize your blog posts, display CTAs and opt-in forms, etc., so you can create a fully-functional blog.
Now, Podia doesn’t have a real blogging functionality. But you can use the Membership Posts feature as a workaround to create a blog. Basically you can make your Posts public and use them as blog posts.
However, you have no control over the blog page layout, blog posts design or even SEO settings, and so it’s not possible to build a functional blog on Podia.
Overall, I’d say that Kajabi performs much better than Podia when it comes to both website building as well as blogging as it gives more features and flexibility.
Both Podia and Kajabi give you multiple options to price your products, so you can charge your student in different ways. You can set a one-time payment, recurring fees, or even a payment plan for your products.
Along with this, they also offer the ability to create coupons. So you can provide a discount on your products either by a percentage or a fixed amount to your users.
Moreover, both platforms let you integrate with your own Stripe/PayPal account in order to process payments. The good thing is that the platform doesn’t charge you any transaction fees.
What’s good about product pricing in Kajabi is that it gives you a lot more flexibility for recurring payments.
For instance, Kajabi lets you charge your members on a weekly, monthly, yearly, or a specific time period basis. But with Podia, you can only offer monthly or annual subscriptions to your members.
Similarly, Kajabi lets you charge a one-time setup fee for your subscription, something which you won’t be able to do in Podia.
Another important difference is that Kajabi supports both Stripe and PayPal for recurring subscriptions while Podia supports only Stripe.
As far as the checkout process is concerned, both platforms have a well-optimized checkout process where the users are required to create an account only after they complete the payment.
With Podia, you have a multi-step checkout process with no real checkout page and the entire process takes place in a simple popup.
The good thing about this style of checkout is that you can add the checkout popup to other external pages outside your Podia website.
However, you can’t really customize the popup design or add any conversion elements (e.g. testimonials) to your checkout page.
Now, this is totally opposite of how the checkout process works in Kajabi. With Kajabi, you get a proper checkout page where users can enter their personal information as well as payment details on a single page.
Plus you have a lot of options to customize your checkout page. From adding an intro video and offer details to elements like money-back guarantee, testimonials, etc., you can do a lot with checkout pages in Kajabi.
Beyond the checkout process, there are a couple of other differences between the two platforms.
First, Kajabi lets you add an order bump to your checkout page as well as a 1-click upsell on the thank you page. However, Podia lets you add only upsells but not bumps.
Second, Kajabi lets you track abandoned carts and send follow up emails to people who don’t complete their purchase. This is an excellent feature for improving conversions, something which isn’t available with Podia.
Third and one where Podia does a better job is EU VAT handling. With Podia, you can simply turn on the “Collect EU VAT” option and it’ll automatically add the calculated VAT amount to the payment.
Kajabi doesn’t have this feature and you’ll have to rely on a third-party solution like Quaderno to handle EU VAT.
Overall, I like the additional flexibility and options that Kajabi vs Podia offers for both product pricing as well as payment processing.
Both Kajabi vs Podia have tools for email marketing and at a high level, they share a few similar features like the ability to send email broadcasts, create automated email sequences, track campaign analytics, etc.
Apart from this, they differ significantly and the most important difference between them is in terms of their automation capabilities.
Firstly, Kajabi has better list management features that allows you to tag your users and create segments. This makes it easier to manage your subscribers and also helps in creating more targeted email campaigns.
With Podia, on the other hand, you don’t get any list segmentation features. So you can’t tag or segment your users, which is a huge drawback.
Secondly, Kajabi has more powerful and flexible automation rules than Podia.
With Podia, what you get is just the ability to add someone to an email campaign when they join your list or purchase one of your products. And you can also remove someone from a campaign when they make a purchase. But that’s pretty much it.
Kajabi, on the other hand, has a lot more triggers and actions available in their automation rules.
For example, you can send someone an email sequence not just when they join your list or purchase a product but even based on things like when they open an email, click a specific link, complete a lesson/assessment or even when they’re inactive for a certain amount of time
Similarly, Automations don’t just support actions like sending an email sequence or unsubscribing from one but you can also do things like adding/removing tags, granting/revoking an offer, registering to an event, sending a coupon, etc.
Overall, Kajabi has solid email marketing and automation tools and as a result, many creators use the platform as their email marketing software.
On the other hand, Podia has very limited capabilities, and it’s only good for sending notifications to your students or performing basic email functions and it can’t really replace a specialized email service provider like ConvertKit.
When you’re selling online courses, you’ll need to have a proper sales funnel that can help you automate the process of generating leads and turn them into customers.
With Kajabi, you get a dedicated tool called Sales Pipeline Builder. It’s an easy to use tool that lets you build entire sales funnels even if you have little knowledge or experience with funnels.
The good part is that it offers several pre-built sales pipeline blueprints that you can simply select and start building funnels.
For instance, if you want to build your email list with a lead magnet, you can use their “Freebie” blueprint. Or if you want to market your online course through webinars, you can use their “Zoom Webinar OVO” blueprint.
When you select a blueprint, it automatically creates all the elements of your funnel, such as landing pages, email sequences, product offers, etc, so you don’t have to put every piece together from scratch.
Moreover, the pipeline builder lets you customize all the elements within your pipeline and you can always add additional pages or email sequences as you want.
Apart from the ability to build end-to-end funnels, Kajabi also lets you build standalone landing pages for lead generation, selling your courses, etc.
There are 20+ pre-designed landing page templates which you can select from and you can further edit them using the page builder.
If you look at Podia, it doesn’t offer a sales funnel builder or even a landing page builder. While you can add a basic opt-in form to your pages, it’s not ideal for lead generation.
So in all likelihood, you’ll need to use a separate marketing platform (like Kartra) for building landing pages and funnels.
Apart from the sales and marketing features that we have discussed in this Podia vs Kajabi comparison, there are a couple of other important ones that you should know about.
Firstly, both platforms allow you to create and run your affiliate program. They offer all the essential features like the ability to set a commission, track affiliate sales, private dashboard for the affiliates, etc.
Their affiliate suite has very similar features except that Kajabi gives you more control over the affiliate registration process and also has better affiliate reporting tools.
Secondly, Podia has an inbuilt messaging widget that allows your website visitors and your students to easily send messages to you and have a conversation.
You can use the messaging feature to answer questions from your potential buyers as well as provide support to your students.
On top of the inbuilt tools, you can connect both platforms with third-party apps that you need to run and grow your business.
To start with, you can directly integrate with the popular email marketing platforms like MailChimp, ConvertKit, ActiveCampaign, Drip, and Aweber and pass your student information.
Along with these platforms, both Podia and Kajabi have Zapier integration. So if there’s any marketing tool you can’t directly integrate with from the respective platforms, you can simply use Zapier for that.
For example, none of these platforms integrate with Infusionsoft but you can use Zapier to create an indirect integration.
Similarly, if you’re using an external checkout solution like ThriveCart to process payments, you can use Zapier to automatically grant product access to your buyers.
Finally, you can integrate both platforms with popular analytics and tracking solutions like Google Analytics, FB Pixel, Deadline Funnel, etc.
Overall, both platforms allow you to integrate with a wide variety of third-party tools, so irrespective of whether you use Podia or Kajabi, you can be confident that it will play well with the other tools in your stack.
In this chapter, we’ll discuss the reporting and administration tools that the two platforms have to offer and highlight the important differences between There are many differences between Podia vs Kajabi when it comes to the reporting and administration side of things.
Let’s start with Kajabi. It has a dedicated Analytics section where you can track things like opt-ins, page views, affiliate sales, revenue, course progress, etc.
What I like about Kajabi Analytics is the fact that the individual reports are very well designed and allow you to drive insights pretty easily.
For example, you have the Net Revenue report which you can use to track your overall sales, identify your top Products, see your sales performance over time, etc. You also can filter this report by date or by offers and you can see the sales daily, weekly, monthly or annually.
Another thing I like is that you have a report for tracking subscription metrics like Average Revenue Per User (ARPU), Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR), and Churn Rate.
As far as course reporting tools are concerned, you have a Product Progress report where you can see the course progress for individual students.
You can also create student segments and track and report their progress together which is useful if you’re selling courses to organizations, you’ll find this feature pretty useful.
In addition, it has some handy video analytics tools where you can track metrics like play rate, engagement rate, etc. and you also have some visual tools to understand how your learners engage with the videos and where they stop watching.
When it comes to Podia, it is very limited in terms of analytics and tracking capabilities.
To start with, you have a very basic Sales report where you can track your overall sales and see the individual transactions.
However, you don’t have any visual tools to analyze your sales performance over time or for various products nor can you filter this data based on date.
In terms of course reporting tools, you can track the progress of your students for an individual course. But that’s pretty much it.
There is no central place where you can track the progress of different courses. You can neither create student segments nor can you export the student progress data.
In addition, Podia doesn’t give you any analytics for course videos, so you can’t measure the engagement or performance of your videos.
When it comes to student administration, both platforms allow you to find specific users and do specific actions like editing their details, granting them access to a product or revoking their access, sending them an email, etc.
Having said that, Kajabi vs Podia does a better job when it comes to letting you manage your students.
Firstly, it lets you bulk import new users into Kajabi, add tags to them and also grant access to an Offer if you want. WIth Podia, you’ll have to reach out to their support to get a bulk import done.
Secondly, it has a ton of filters available in the People section, so you can filter the users based on their activity, product access, coupons used, email activity, tags, custom fields, etc. With Podia, on the other hand, you can filter your users just based on their product access.
Finally, Kajabi lets you track the entire lifecycle of a user in one place. So when you click on a specific user, you can see what Offers they’ve purchased and when, what Products they’ve access to, their course progress, what emails they’ve received, etc. which is really handy.
When it comes to admin roles and privileges, both platforms allow you to add team members to your account and grant them access to specific areas inside your admin account.
When you’re putting all your time and effort in building an online business, the last thing you want is getting stuck with the software with no one to really help you out and this is why it’s important that your online platform has good customer support.
I have personally interacted with both Podia’s and Kajabi’s support teams multiple times on behalf of my clients and based on my experience, I have found their customer support excellent in terms of both responsiveness and the quality of responses.
The only difference between the two is that Kajabi has 24X7 live chat support where you can talk to a customer service agent in real time and get your query resolved immediately.
With Podia, it works a bit differently. They do have a chat widget where you can leave your query and someone from their support team will get back to you.
While the response time is 5-10 minutes on weekdays, it’s not real time and so you should expect some back and forth to get a resolution. Plus during the weekends or outside work hours, you’ll have to wait a little longer to get a response.
When it comes to self-help guides and training, both Kajabi and Podia have extensive knowledge libraries that have a lot of resources and training material to help you with different things on the platform.
Moreover, Kajabi has a solid user community on Facebook where you can ask questions, engage with fellow creators, exchange ideas, and network with them.
As of now, Podia doesn’t have a dedicated user community like Kajabi and this is definitely something that they should introduce.
Another thing I like about Kajabi customer support is that it has a dedicated rewards program called Kajabi Hero which rewards creators who achieve certain revenue goals with exclusive perks. This definitely helps to keep you motivated along your journey.
Now that you have seen the major differences between the two platforms in terms of features, let’s take a look at Podia vs Kajabi pricing.
When it comes to Podia pricing, it is pretty straightforward.
The first tier is the Mover Plan which costs $39/month with almost all features except the Membership Builder, Affiliate Marketing, Free Migration, Third-Party Scripts, etc., which are available on the Shaker Plan (costs $79/month).
The good thing about Podia pricing is that there is no limit on the number of students or the number of products you can have on either of these plans.
Plus you can start a 14-day free trial on either of its pricing plans and you don’t need a credit card in order to start your trial.
As far as Kajabi is concerned, the pricing plan works a bit differently.
The lowest tier is their Basic Plan which costs $149/month and it gives you all the main features except affiliate marketing. However, you can only have up to 3 products, 3 pipelines, and 1,000 active members.
As you switch to the higher pricing tier i.e Growth Plan which costs $199/month, you can have up to 15 products, 15 pipelines and 10,000 active members. On this plan, you also get access to the affiliate marketing tools as well as the ability to remove Kajabi branding from your site.
The third tier is the Pro Plan (costs $399/month) and apart from the increased limits on products and active members, it lets you create up to 3 unique websites.
While Kajabi is definitely more expensive than Podia, you need to consider the fact that it is the most feature-rich platform out there for creating, marketing and selling online courses. And so if you’re looking for an all-in-one platform, Kajabi pricing should work well for you.
However, if you just need essential course creation and selling tools, Kajabi will be overkill for you and in this case, Podia pricing will work better for you.
I have covered all the important features that Kajabi vs Podia have to offer, and by now you will have a clear idea of what each platform has to offer, how they can be used and what are their strengths and weaknesses.
When it comes to Kajabi, it is literally the most comprehensive and feature-rich online course platform available in the market. In terms of course creation tools, Kajabi does a much better job than Podia with features like Assessments, Community, mobile app, etc.
Apart from course creation, Kajabi offers best-in-class tools for sales and marketing as well. It lets you create a fully-fledged website with a blog, build entire sales funnels as well as do email marketing.
So if you are looking for an all-in-one platform that lets you run your entire business from a single place, Kajabi will be an excellent choice. You can start a free trial by clicking the button below.
Podia, on the other hand, is more straightforward and offers just the basic features for creating and selling online courses. While you can create basic courses with videos, PDFs, etc., it’s very light on learning and engagement tools like quizzes, community, etc.
Moreover, it doesn’t have a sales funnel builder and the email marketing tools are very basic as well, so you can’t really use it as an all-in-one platform.
Having said that, if you want to create simple online courses or membership sites and want an easy to use, reasonably priced platform for the same, you should consider using Podia.
I hope this Podia vs Kajabi guide helped you choose the right online course platform for your business. If you have any questions, please let me know in the comments below.
Hey there! I'm Baidhurya, the brains behind SellCoursesOnline. I used to run a digital agency, where I helped course businesses launch their eLearning platforms. I also led the tech and marketing teams at StationX, helping it grow to 500K+ students. In addition, I created the popular supply chain network design course. With 8+ years of experience, I'm here to share my expertise and insights on course creation and platforms with you.
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Hey there! I’m Baidhurya, the brains behind SellCoursesOnline. I used to run a digital agency, where I helped course businesses launch their eLearning platforms. I also led the tech and marketing teams at StationX, helping it grow to 500K+ students. In addition, I created the popular supply chain network design course. With 8+ years of experience, I’m here to share my expertise and insights on course creation and platforms with you.
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