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Podia vs Kajabi: Which Is the Better Platform for Creating Online Courses?

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More and more individuals are moving towards online educational platforms to access learning opportunities. After all, e-platforms are cheaper and allow learners access to educational material from anywhere, making learning more convenient.

In a similar light, you’ll find many platforms developing tools to offer effective and prompt educational courses for users to benefit from. Given this wide pool of e-educational sites available, how can you make your site the best online course platform?

Podia vs Kajabi are two of the best platforms designed to help you achieve this goal. They have built-in website builders and email marketing tools to guide you in creating and promoting your website. That said, which of the two is the better pick?

Podia vs Kajabi: What Are They Anyway?

A quick Google search will show you several online platforms offering tools for course creation and marketing features to promote them. Often, these sites also have built-in features to help you create custom segments, such as multiple-choice quizzes.

Amidst the plethora of platforms available, Podia vs Kajabi are two of the leading creation platforms offering the best deals. Both of these sites market themselves as an all-in-one platform for online businesses dealing with online educational content. They have useful tools to create and market quality content, like email marketing, page builders, and website builders.

It is also important to note that these sites work as “hosted platforms.” This means that they have established tools and infrastructure that allow you to create, market, and sell your digital courses through your website.

The key benefit of using hosted platforms is that you don’t need to integrate maintenance tools like software and security updates or plugins to optimize your site. Even if you aren’t tech-savvy, you’ll find that using these platforms for your online course creation is cheaper, easier, and quicker.

What Are the Key Differences Between Podia vs Kajabi?

We have established the significance and convenience of Kajabi vs Podia services regarding course creation. Now, it’s time to dive into how and in which aspects they differ.

Some prime differences between Podia vs Kajabi are:

  • Podia has a more user-friendly interface than Kajabi, allowing for easy navigation and integration of content on the site.
  • Podia is comparatively cheaper but offers limited tools. On the other hand, Kajabi is more expensive but offers course creators a wide range of tools and services.
  • Podia is more suitable for small businesses and start-ups aiming for growth in the e-education sector. In contrast, Kajabi is a viable solution for established businesses expanding their services.

Even with this knowledge, picking which platform will suit you better is not easy. As such, it would help to look at each feature, tool, and service offered by Podia vs Kajabi. Which platform can help you create, promote, and sell your online courses more effectively?

What Is Podia? An All-in-One Platform

Podia was initially named Coach when Spencer Fry founded the company in 2014. The platform was then re-branded as Podia in 2017 when it became one of the leading online course sites.

What Can You Use Podia For?

As an all-in-one platform, Podia provides you with “everything you need to sell courses, webinars, downloads, and community.” The website also has “powerful email marketing tools to boost your sales, from pre-launch to post-purchase.”

If you’re wondering what exactly can Podia do to help your business, here’s what:

1. Sell Your Work

The platform allows you to sell your work under five different domains:

With its large storage, Podia lets you sell online courses containing videos, doc files, PDFs, sheets, and more. Using this online course platform, you can create drip courses, devise payment plans, and pre-sell your courses. You can also create bundles and coupons, create quizzes including multiple-choice assessment types, and more.

It is possible to sell one-off downloads like eBooks, digital workbooks, PDFs, cheat sheets, and more in Podia. The best part is that you can enjoy instant payouts and zero transaction fees simultaneously.

One way to generate recurring income through Podia is by bringing your subscribers to the platform. You can do this by boosting customer engagement through the use of quality content and effective marketing.

You can also host one-on-one sessions, webinars, and paid live sessions using Zoom and YouTube Live. On top of these webinars, it is also possible to earn passive income from replays.

Using Podia, you can sell live coaching sessions without any limits or transaction costs. It has a user-friendly interface, so you can easily add or modify your coaching sessions and content.

2. Market Your Work

Podia offers effective marketing tools to promote your content under five needed domains:

Email marketing enables you to reach your target audience via broadcast emails, automated marketing campaigns, and segmentation. You can do this using segmentation metrics to track your email analytics.

Using Podia, you can add an on-page messaging widget to interact with easily and guide site visitors and logged-in customers.

Podia offers easy customization of your site through the help of customizable themes and its mobile-friendly user interface.

With the affiliate marketing feature, you can easily set up affiliate programs, custom invites, and commission terms with easy payouts.

You can sell your digital products with offsite buy buttons using this feature. The embed button is easy to set up with a customizable outlook.

What Is Kajabi? The Best Online Course Platform

Kajabi was established in 2010 by Kenny Rueter and Travis Rosser. It is an “all-in-one platform that makes it easy to create online courses, launch a marketing campaign, build landing pages, and design the perfect website.”

The homepage proudly features the milestones achieved by the platform. According to Kajabi’s overview reports, it has earned $3.5 billion and has over 100,000 businesses built and 300,000 products created.

To further promote the site’s credibility, the homepage also features success stories of its customers and their experiences with Kajabi’s services.

What Can You Use Kajabi For?

Like Podia, Kajabi helps customers create and market their digital products. In addition, it also allows its customers to manage their products, payments, people, and their business analytics.

1. Create

Under Create, Kajabi offers similar services to Podia. Here, customers can sell courses, build coaching content and podcasts, and earn revenue by generating online communities and memberships via the platform.

2. Grow

With Grow, Kajabi offers practical marketing tools, including email campaigns, funnel pipelines, and affiliate marketing. It also has a page builder to create landing pages, customizable websites with fully integrated features and customizable themes, and a user-friendly interface.

3. Manage

What makes Kajabi unique from Podia is its effective management tools. These useful tools can help you track sales, make sense of site analytics, and manage and build strong customer relationships.

With Kajabi, you can build easy payment gateways. It integrates with Stripe and PayPal, making the transaction process seamless and quick.

Kajabi offers a quick and efficient CRM that allows you to build customer relationships with fewer efforts. The automation keys and tools allow easy interaction with customers and generate email coupons and product access to customers with easily customizable rules.

Kajabi also offers the right metrics and insight into Google Analytics. This way, you can generate smart reports to guide you in making smarter business decisions.

Podia vs Kajabi: A Detailed Comparison

Establishing a successful platform selling online course content and creating a strong online marketing strategy is as essential as the quality of what you are selling. Therefore, when choosing an all-in-one solution for your business, look for a service that best matches your business needs.

We will be building a side-by-side comparison of Kajabi vs Podia across various domains to establish which platform meets your needs better.

Kajabi vs Podia: Video Hosting

Both Kajabi and Podia include unlimited video hosting for their online courses. Kajabi uses Wistia as its video hosting platform, which supports:

  • High quality streaming
  • Automatic adjustment of quality based on the user’s internet speed

Podia has not specified the hosting platform for its video streaming services. However, the platform does claim it is a proud Vimeo alternative.

Worried about the processing or uploading of your videos on these two platforms? Podia supports a file size of up to 1GB for optimal processing and streaming. Whereas, Kajabi can handle file sizes up to 4GBs. The larger files can also be compressed and uploaded on the platform to save space.

The Verdict

In short, both Kajabi and Podia offer unlimited video hosting. However, the quality and efficiency of Kajabi’s hosting server dominate the streaming experience offered by Podia.

Kajabi vs Podia: Course Content Creation

Both Kajabi and Podia offer flexibility and convenience in terms of course creation. These platforms support all file types, including word documents, PDF files, workbooks, audio files, and videos.

The course builder built into these platforms allows flexibility to structure and customize the content layout as needed. However, Podia is more convenient and easier to use regarding the creation interface.

With Podia, you can structure your content with a few clicks. All you have to do is select the product type and the name of your product and begin structuring the layout of your content. At the same time, you can also upload your desired file types within the content.

Kajabi offers product blueprints you can customize according to your needs and structure your content accordingly. Instead of following the blueprints, some choose to start from scratch.

The Verdict

With Podia, you have to start building your course layout from scratch. It’s a good thing then that the creator interface is easy to navigate.

Compared to Podia, Kajabi’s creator interface requires some practice. Still, it contains course blueprints you can use to structure your content. There is no need to begin from scratch with Kajabi.

Kajabi vs Podia: Testing and Assignment Tools for Course Completion Certificates

The course creator must devise competitive testing and assessment tools when it comes to online platforms dealing with educational content. This way, you can be sure the learners absorb the maximum knowledge.

Multiple choice quizzes, open questions, surveys, discussion platforms, and the like offers an interactive experience for the learners to test, evaluate, and learn at a deeper level. Both Kajabi and Podia offer testing and assessment tools within the content for the credible generation of course completion certificates.

The Verdict

With Podia, you can add multiple choice questions, but the room to add the types of assessment tools is much wider with Kajabi. As such, you can design a more interactive assessment style and offer multiple-choice questions.

Kajabi vs Podia: Website Builder 

For an online learning platform, a responsive, user-friendly, and secure website is necessary. Kajabi vs Podia are both all-in-one platforms. Hence, they both entail an integrated website builder to help you structure your website and create, manage, and market content.

Podia’s website builder is similar to its content creation interface, where you start with a blank slate to structure your site. It has some default segments you can fill out to develop the layout of your website.

Some of the predesigned default segments include Bio, Products Page, Email Newsletter Signup, FAQs, and Testimonials.

On the other hand, Kajabi’s website builder is more elaborate. It has multiple themes and custom tools to help you sketch a catchy, secure, and optimized website without the need to hire a professional developer.

The Verdict

With Kajabi, all you need to do is pick a preset layout, add your own branding to the theme and start selling. In addition to standard available features, you can also add custom headers and CTA (Call-Action) buttons to further enhance the user experience.

Kajabi vs Podia: Integrations

The availability of reliable integration tools on a website is important for any business. That’s because this feature allows them to collaborate or connect with third-party apps.

The Verdict

As you’ll see on the table, both platforms entail numerous integration options to connect with a third-party program. Podia vs Kajabi both offer almost a similar set of integration options to help course creators.

Kajabi vs Podia: Customer Support

Quick and effective customer service is integral to any website, helping establish its credibility. As such, a lousy customer support system is the last thing you would want for your platform.

The Verdict

In terms of tools that allow the optimization of customer support, Podia vs Kajabi both offer equally competent tools. Therefore, you won’t have a hard time building a strong customer base.

Kajabi vs Podia: Pricing

An affordable pricing point with optimal features is the most desirable combination for any business or digital platform.

When it comes to offering affordable packages, Podia takes the limelight. The site offers a 14-day free trial with no credit card details required. The standard packages offered by Podia, along with the accompanying features, include:

In comparison, the price points of Kajabi are relatively higher. A 14-day free trial is also offered, but you will have to input your card details. The standard packages offered by Kajabi, along with accompanying features, include:

The Verdict

Comparing the prices of Podia vs Kajabi, the former seems like a viable option. However, what’s important is to note the availability of various features. Kajabi’s subscription comes with several integrated services you will have to buy with Podia’s subscription additionally.

Kajabi vs Podia: Sales Funnels

A functional and well-designed sales funnel helps a website automate processes to facilitate user experience. The sales funnel also contributes to the automation of marketing campaigns to maximize sales. Therefore, it is important to build and integrate sales funnels within a website to maximize a site’s performance.

Both Kajabi and Podia offer the development of complete sales funnels. However, the funnel builder in both these platforms is different and, thus, offers different performance.

The Verdict

For Podia, the sales funnel includes designing a drip campaign with links added that refer to landing sales or product pages. In comparison, Kajabi’s sales funnel builder is known as “pipelines,” which is fully automated. As such, you do not have to create drip campaigns or keep adding links. Once a funnel is created, it works in the background by self-building links.

Kajabi vs Podia: Landing Pages

Having a functional page builder to develop landing pages is important to generate web traffic. Building separate, clear, and structured landing pages help grow your brand reputation and your customer base. Thus, choosing the right service that offers a competent page builder is essential.

The Verdict

Podia does not have a distinguished landing page builder. Instead, its landing page builder is somewhat integrated with its web builder. Also, there are not many options available to customize landing and sales pages. You can only choose various fonts and colors from the provided default theme.

In comparison, Kajabi has a fully functional and built-in landing page builder with a unique set of themes and layouts. It allows you to build landing and sales pages with separate layouts to expand your user base as well as maximize sales.

Kajabi vs Podia: Email Marketing

A strong email marketing campaign is considered a lifeline for any online business. Effective email marketing allows you to grasp the attention of your audience as well as maximize sales.

Both Podia vs Kajabi offer email marketing and digital campaigns as their primary services. You will find numerous templates you can use to design, segment, and structure your marketing campaigns accordingly.

In addition, you can also automate email campaigns and broadcasts, as well as track the campaign analytics using these two platforms.

The Verdict

Notice the range of marketing services offered on the two sites. While Podia only offers basic email marketing services, Kajabi holds a more competitive email marketing platform and boasts a more advanced marketing experience. It does all these without borrowing and integrating additional features from third-party applications.

Kajabi vs Podia FAQs

1. What is the main difference between Kajabi vs Podia?

The main difference between the two is that Podia is cheaper but limited in terms of its available tools and services. Kajabi is expensive but offers a wide range of marketing and SEO optimization tools.

2. Which one is better: Podia vs Kajabi?

Podia and Kajabi both have their unique suitability, depending on the type, size, and needs of the businesses. However, Kajabi takes the lead in marketing and promoting content. The platform has the right tools, sales funnel, and automation capabilities to help a business grow its customer base.

3. What makes Kajabi better than Podia?

Kajabi has more advanced tools that give its customers an all-in-one solution for their business needs. Through this platform, you will gain access to SEO optimization tools, sales funnels, and competitive marketing mediums.

In comparison, Podia’s email capabilities fall in the average domain, which you can only access using third-party apps.

4. Does Podia also offer a CRM to its clients like Kajabi?

Podia offers a comparatively more accessible and simpler communication tool to interact with the customers. However, a CRM can be integrated into the site if you wish to set up a more complex setup.

5. What are some of the best Podia and Kajabi alternatives?

If you are looking for alternatives that offer similar features for less, you can check out TalentLMS, Thinkfic, LearnWorlds, and Teachable. These platforms provide targeted marketing solutions and features that are competitive with the ones offered by Kajabi and Podia.

Which Is the Better Platform?

Two years into the pandemic, the digitalization of educational platforms has seen a rapid surge, with increasing online course sites left and right. According to recent statistics, the e-learning sector significantly expanded to an astonishing value of $243 billion in the past few years.

Because of this, it’s not surprising to find platforms that promise to help you bridge the gap between traditional, in-person learning and online courses. Among these trusted sites is Kajabi vs Podia.

Comparing and evaluating the services and features offered by these platforms, it’s almost clear as day that Kajabi wins in terms of market effectiveness, quality services, and range of marketing features available.

Uday Tank

Uday Tank is a serial entrepreneur and content marketing leader. He has a wide variety of interests and enjoys writing, including marketing, productivity, business, health, diversity, and management.