Podia vs Kajabi (2024) – Finding The Best Online Course Platform

When you think of Podia vs Kajabi, there are lots of similarities. Both are intuitive products with tons of course creation and marketing features designed to maximize your online course sales.

But despite the similarities, these products aren’t a perfect fit for everyone. Choosing the platform that is best for your needs can be a daunting task.

This is why I’ll break down all their features, pricing plans, strengths, and weaknesses in this in-depth comparison of Podia vs Kajabi.

Let’s dive in.

Quick Verdict – The Best Online Course Platform Is…

If you don’t have time to read till the end and want a quick verdict, here’s my recommendation.

Podia is a superb online course platform for beginners that offers all the necessary course creation, marketing, and selling features at an affordable price.

If you’re just starting, need limited automation features, or have a tight budget, Podia is an excellent option.

But if budget is not your primary consideration, and you’re looking for a more robust website builder and course creator with better customization options and advanced automation.

Kajabi is the perfect fit for your needs.

Podia vs Kajabi – The Main Differences

There are many similarities between Kajabi and Podia, and we’ll talk about them in detail later. But let’s understand their main differences first.

Podia	Kajabi
Podia is a beginner-friendly online course platform for selling online courses and digital products	Kajabi is a marketing and automation platform for advanced marketers to sell all kinds of digital and physical products
Offers a free 30-day trial (no credit card required)	Offers a free 14-day trial (credit card needed)
Offers unlimited products, customers, messages, files, and sales in all plans	Offers 3 products, 10K active customers, and unlimited landing pages
Offers unlimited email subscribers	Offers 10K subscribers in its entry plan and 25K subscribers in its most popular plan
Offers minimal customization in page builder	Offers extensive customization and 20+ website themes
Very basic email marketing, automation, sales funnels	Advanced email marketing, segmentation, automation, and funnels for different marketing objectives
Charges $39/month in its starter plan and $89/month in its most popular plan	Costs $119/month in its entry plan and $159/month in its most popular plan

Podia vs Kajabi – An Overview

Before diving deeper into Podia vs Kajabi, let’s get a quick introduction to both these products and what they offer.

What Is Kajabi?

Kajabi is a digital marketing and lead generation platform designed to help knowledge entrepreneurs sell online courses, membership sites, and coaching programs.

It gives you all the tools to create world-class websites, landing pages, email campaigns, and multimedia content without the need to have any coding, programming, or technical skills.

Founded in 2010, Kajabi has helped over 40,000 knowledge entrepreneurs in more than 160 countries make over $2 billion in sales by serving over 60 million students.

What makes Kajabi different from other online course platforms is its advanced marketing and automation capabilities.

It gives you the necessary tools to create online courses and other digital products.  You also get ready-to-use marketing and automation templates for different scenarios and objectives.

Here are some of the main features you get with Kajabi.

• Online courses, membership sites, and coaching programs
• Drag & drop website builder
• Landing page builder with 20+ themes
• Supports video, audio, PDF, and text content and downloads
• Student assessments, quizzes, and downloadable files in every lesson
• Unlimited videos and webinar support
• Complete student management system
• Pipelines (sales funnels) with templates
• Email marketing, newsletters, and automation
• In-depth analytics
• Invoicing and payments

With Kajabi, you have everything you need to build, grow, and scale a sustainable e-learning business.

What Is Podia?

Podia is another hugely popular online course platform that has helped over 50K creators sell courses, webinars, digital downloads, and memberships since 2014.

Podia is packed with features to help you build, market, and sell online courses. Its email marketing, funnels, automation, and lead generation capabilities are also impressive (although not as robust as Kajabi.)

Here are the core features you get with Podia.

• Online courses, membership sites, digital downloads.
• Recurring, installments, and one-time payments
• Product bundles and upsells
• Drag & drop website and landing page builder.
• Support for video, audio, PDF, and text content
• Video and webinar hosting
• Quizzes and additional downloadable files in lessons
• Embeddable course widget with a Buy Now button
• Email marketing and automation
• 24/7 customer support

Overall, Podia is perfect for beginner course sellers looking to set up a successful e-learning business without worrying about coding or other technicalities.

Podia vs Kajabi – Comparing the Online Course Platforms

Both Kajabi and Podia allow you to host, manage, market, and sell online courses with multiple content types (videos, screencasts, presentations, text, etc.)

Let’s explore their main features one by one in more detail.

• Pricing And Features
• Course Creation
• Student Experience
• Course Website Builder
• Course Marketing
• Student Analytics
• Teacher Features
• Payment Management

1. Podia vs. Kajabi: Pricing, Free Trial, and Features

Your course platform’s subscription fee and payment charges have a significant impact on your course’s profitability.

Let’s see how much Kajabi and Podia charge you for selling courses.

Podia Pricing and Free Trial

Podia offers two different paid plans that come with a 30-day free trial (no credit card needed.) It also doesn’t charge transaction fees on its higher-tier plan. But you’ll have to pay PayPal or Stripe payment processing charges.

Here’s what Podia’s premium plans offer.

Mover, Podia’s cheapest plan, costs $33/month if you choose annual billing. It offers unlimited courses, customers, and email subscribers. You also get webinars and custom website integration.

However, the Mover plan doesn’t offer embeddable buy-now widgets for your courses or membership sites. There’s also a limit of 5K emails per month.

Shaker, Podia’s most popular plan, costs $75/month if you opt for annual billing. It is ideal for growing a serious online course business and offers everything in the Mover plan plus 15K emails, membership sites, and buy now widgets you can embed into your site. You can add more team members at $20/month.

Overall, both Podia subscription plans are pretty affordable and offer more value for money than most other online course platforms.

Kajabi Pricing and Free Trial

Kajabi also offers three different subscription plans with a 14-day free trial (credit card required.)

Here’s what Kajabi’s premium plans would cost you.

As you can see, even Kajabi’s cheapest plan is more expensive than Podia’s most popular plan.

But that’s because Kajabi offers significantly more advanced automation and marketing features which we will review later in the post.

You get a fully customizable drag & drop website and landing page builder with every plan, along with dozens of different templates.

Kajabi also doesn’t charge any transaction fees and supports both Stripe and PayPal (payment processing fees apply.)

At $119/month (billed annually), Kajabi’s Basic plan gives you 3 courses, up to 1000 customers, 3 sales funnels, 10K email subscribers, and unlimited monthly emails.

Its most popular Growth plan costs you $159/month and allows up to 15 products and funnels, 25K email subscribers, 10K customers, and 10 admin users.

For experienced sellers and e-learning companies with a large customer base, Kajabi’s Pro plan offers up to 100 products and funnels at $319/month.

Kajabi offers a lot of great features in its premium plans. But for a beginner and mid-level seller with limited automation needs, Podia’s pricing still makes more sense.

Winner: Podia

2. Podia vs. Kajabi: Course Creation

Course content features are the backbone of any online course platform.

Let’s see how these two platforms perform head to head.

Podia

Podia allows you to create different types of digital products. To create an online course, choose Create Product from your dashboard and choose Online Course.

Podia’s online course creator is simple but gives you all the necessary options to upload your content and manage the visibility and accessibility of your course.

Each course consists of sections (modules) and lessons.

In every lesson, you have the option to upload video, audio, PDF, or text content.

You can also add quizzes and additional links for students to explore.

You can configure drip courses in the availability section, presell your content, add upsells, or sell it as a bundle. You can also get instant previews of your course page as a customer or visitor.

Kajabi

Kajabi comes with a power-packed course creator that allows you to structure engaging online courses.

You can start building a course from scratch or use one of its product templates to get started.

Every course consists of modules and lessons. A lesson can be an audio file, a video tutorial, or an assessment (quiz) along with additional text content.

You can add downloadable files to a lesson and adjust its appearance to your liking. You also have the option to grant full course access at once or enable drip lessons that are served at the time of your choice or after a student completes the previous lesson.

You also get a host of automation features with every lesson, which allow you to initiate various actions based on your student’s engagement with your content.

You can also bundle more products with your course and choose if you want to offer it only to new students or existing customers.

Plus, you have the option to presell your course if you follow a build-as-you-go model.

In short, Kajabi’s course creation features offer you complete control over your course content and its accessibility. Moreover, its templates make it much easier to get started as compared to Podia.

Winner: Kajabi

3. Podia vs. Kajabi: Course Website Builder

Your website plays a vital role in selling your online course. Let’s check out the site-building features in Podia and Kajabi.

Podia

Podia gives you a helpful drag-and-drop page builder to create a fully responsive website for your online course.

It allows you to create new website pages and landing pages for marketing campaigns. You can control the visibility of every page and optimize it for SEO as well.

Here’s an example of a site created with Podia.

And here’s how the individual product pages appear.

However, Podia site builder offer limited customization options.

You can use different page blocks to create new sections, add images, testimonials, or text sections. But you can’t edit every element of the page the way you want.

Still, for a basic course website, Podia’s site builder does a pretty good job.

Kajabi

Kajabi comes with an advanced site builder that allows you to create fully responsive websites. Unlike Podia, Kajabi doesn’t leave you with a blank site builder.

It gives you 20+ fully customizable website themes that you can mold according to your needs.

There are tons of different site blocks like testimonials, sections, reviews, images, text fields, and ready-to-use website pages such as 404 pages, check-out pages, login pages, etc.

You can click on the different elements of your site like buttons, images, or text to change its color and customize its settings.

In short, Kajabi’s site builder offers significantly more control and customization capabilities than Podia.

Winner: Kajabi

5. Podia vs. Kajabi: Course Marketing

To build and grow a sustainable e-learning business, you need to intelligently market your courses and develop a system to convert visitors into customers.

Here are the marketing and sales features you get with Podia and Kajabi

Podia

Podia provides you with several powerful marketing and sales tools to promote your course and convert your leads into customers.

First, it allows you to create lead magnets from the product section to build your email list.

Next, Podia gives you a complete email marketing solution to create email broadcasts and automated campaigns.

You can trigger automated email campaigns on different entry and exit conditions.

Podia’s email interface is immaculate and intuitive, using which you can easily add new emails to your campaigns.

After developing email campaigns, you can use Podia’s landing pages to set up opt-in forms.

Another useful selling feature in Podia is the embeddable widget.

Instead of keeping products on one page, you can create widgets with a buy-now button or text links to your products and place them on any website you own.

You can also create product coupons and add upsells to your offers to encourage more sales.

One of my favorite features in Podia is messaging. It allows you to interact with your audience through live chat, understand their needs, answer their queries, resolve their concerns and convert them into customers on the spot.

Finally, Podia offers a complete webinar system to hold live events, grow your list, and sell directly to your audience.

Kajabi

Kajabi is a sales, marketing, and conversion powerhouse. It offers a ton of advanced marketing and automation features along with ready-to-use templates to make your job easier.

Let’s start with Pipelines, one of its most impressive features.

Pipelines are sales funnels you can connect with your courses. They contain lead magnets, landing pages, email campaigns, products, and check-out pages.

Kajabi gives you several ready-to-use Pipelines for different marketing objectives. For example, you can activate a freebie pipeline to build your email list. Or choose the Zoom webinar Pipeline for your latest event.

You can also design your own Pipeline sequences using Kajabi’s visual builder, making it easy to set up conditional campaigns.

Kajabi’s email marketing and automation systems are also much more advanced than Podia’s.

It allows you to create broadcasts and autoresponder campaigns based on different subscriber actions. You can start with a blank canvas or use various email templates in Kajabi’s visual builder.

You also get a complete subscriber and lead management system that allows you to tag users, and trigger individual campaigns and automation.

Automation features are generally embedded in all of Kajabi’s tools like its website builder, landing pages, email system, pipelines, etc.

Additionally, you get a robust webinar management system with Kajabi to host live events, run recorded webinars, or even sell your previous events.

Note: Kajabi has recently introduced three new features to simplify your marketing and sales efforts even further: Newsletters, Downloads, and Invoicing.

• Newsletters: Build your own media platform by blending free and paid content to generate revenue.

• Downloads: Protect your digital products with a secure system that ensures PDFs, templates, and files stay safe and accessible.

• Invoicing: Streamline billing and manage finances effortlessly with an all-in-one solution.

All of this, plus many other features, makes Kajabi a clear winner for online course marketing.

Winner: Kajabi

6. Podia vs. Kajabi: Student Experience

Student experience plays a decisive role in your course’s success.

Here’s what your students see in Kajabi and Podia.

Podia

Podia’s student interface is quite impressive.

First up, your students get to see your course website, where they can access your curriculum as well.

You have the option to add preview lessons so that prospects can get a sense of what your course offers.

The individual lesson pages are also cleanly designed and give the center stage to your content (video, audio, or text).

As you can see, the video tutorial is right in the middle of the page, and the other lessons are listed in the sidebar.

Overall, pretty impressive.

Kajabi

Kajabi’s student interface isn’t bad either.

I’ve already shown you Kajabi’s course websites in the website builder section. The actual lesson pages are also quite good.

Like Podia, the video lesson is in the middle, and the rest of the classes are in the sidebar.

You can also fully customize the look of these pages according to your brand colors.

Winner: Draw

7. Podia vs. Kajabi: Teacher Features

What features do you have to evaluate and assess your students in Kajabi and Podia? Let’s find out.

Podia

Podia offers limited student evaluation and assessment features.

You can create multiple-choice questions, but that’s about it.

There’s no option to create open-ended questions, upload assignments for evaluation, or run surveys.

You also can’t issue course completion certificates.

You can, however, use different third-party app integrations to perform those actions in Podia.

Kajabi

Kajabi’s evaluation features aren’t as advanced as its marketing capabilities, but it’s still better than Podia.

You can run multiple-choice and open-ended questions, allow students to upload assignments for evaluation, and create fill-in-the-blank quizzes as well.

But there are no certificates and surveys in Kajabi either.

Winner: Kajabi

8. Podia vs. Kajabi: Payment Management

How many payment options do you have with Podia and Kajabi? Let’s find out.

Podia

Podia supports Stripe and PayPal payments, which means you’ll be charged by the payment processor you choose for every transaction.

You can use these payment services to offer one-time payments to your students. But for installments and recurring membership payments, Podia only supports Stripe.

Kajabi

Kajabi also offers both Stripe and PayPal integration. You can use them to accept one-time, recurring, and installment payments via credit card and PayPal. The recently added feature allows you to invoice your customers easily from your dashboard without the need to integrate a third-party tool.

Winner: Kajabi

Podia vs Kajabi: Pros and Cons

Before I share my detailed verdict, let’s take a quick look at the main pros and cons of both Kajabi and Podia.

Podia Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Allows you to sell courses, memberships, and digital downloads with zero coding skills	Minimal automation features
Offers 24/7 customer support	Limited quizzes and assessments
Much more affordable than Kajabi	No certificates
Offers native email marketing features	The marketing and automation features are generally insufficient for advanced users
An intuitive website builder	No templates for websites, landing pages, and automation
Live chat feature your website
Unlimited video and webinars
Impressive student experience

Kajabi Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
World-class course creation and marketing features	More expensive than Podia
Marketing and sales funnels with templates	Requires a credit card for the free trial
Native email marketing features	No course completion certificates
Advanced automation and condition-based audience tagging	Only one content type per lesson
Clean and distraction-free student experience
Live, pre-recorded, and scheduled webinars.
Powerful website builder with more than a dozen fully customizable templates
Quizzes and surveys
Newsletters, Downloads, and Invoices
Detailed student analytics

Podia vs Kajabi Verdict – Which Online Course Platform Is Right for You?

After this detailed Podia vs Kajabi analysis, here’s my verdict.

Both products are excellent, which means you won’t be making a mistake by choosing either one of them.

Podia is more suited to beginner course creators with limited automation and marketing needs. Plus, it’s more pocket-friendly.

Kajabi is the real online course marketing powerhouse if you want to grow your business fast. It gives you excellent course creation features and even better marketing and automation tools.

So if you’ve got the budget for it, Kajabi should be your go-to option for scaling your online course business.

See also:

• Full Kajabi Review
• Full Podia Review

Podia vs Kajabi – Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

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Jeff Cobb, Founder of Learning Revolution

Jeff Cobb is an expert in online education and the business of adult lifelong learning. Over the past 20+ years he has built a thriving career based on that expertise – as an entrepreneur, a consultant, an author, and a speaker. Learning Revolution is a place where Jeff curates tips, insights, and resources to help you build a thriving expertise-based business. Learn more about Jeff Cobb here.