Podia vs Kartra are two widely used platforms for selling products, courses, and services. Both platforms share a few common features, but they also differ in some crucial aspects that may make you want to choose one over the other.
So, without further ado, let us dive in and see how these platforms stack up against one another.
Podia vs Kartra: How Are They Similar?
Both these platforms let you construct attractive membership sites and provide different degrees of access to members based on the plan they choose.
Both Podia and Kartra also come with a feature for content dripping for memberships. It allows you to upsell, bundle, and cross-sell products. Through this feature, you may also offer discounts or coupons.
Podia and Kartra both have a 14-day trial period, but the former offers it free while the latter charges you $1. The good thing about both trials is that they allow access to all the features of their respective platforms.
Kartra vs Podia: Why Does Podia Win?
When it comes to creating online courses, Podia has amazing marketing and course customization tools that help you get the job done superbly.
Webinars are a fantastic approach to market your products and build rapport with your target audience. You may use Podia to stream live and host webinars.
It records webinars automatically, and customers who pay to subscribe can receive replays. It is one of the most effective strategies for generating recurring revenue.
In particular, Podia excels over Kartra when it comes to themes. Podia has a vast library of themes that you can modify in different ways to match your website. There are light themes, dark themes, and other custom themes to meet your preference.
Kartra vs Podia: Why Does Kartra Win?
The funnel feature in Kartra is more adaptable and advanced than Podia’s. It’s a better fit for your campaigns in general, and it also comes with funnels sharing feature.
Kartra offers many clean and professional page and block templates. On the other hand, Podia does not have block templates, and its page templates appear rather dated.
With Kartra, pages can be split and tested up to four versions, including the emails. You can’t make this happen with Podia.
Kartra integrates seamlessly with various payment gateways, membership systems, and SMS gateways, among others. When it comes to integrations, the winner is clearly Kartra vs Podia. It doesn’t make you stress about external integrations because the tool itself holds all the necessary functionalities for marketing products.
Kartra has a customer support functionality that allows you to create a live chat, automated responses, and ticket systems, so you won’t have to rely on FreshDesk, ZenDesk, Intercom, or Drift.
Agency owners can leverage Kartra’s agency function when dealing with several clients. It lets you monitor each customer account from a single dashboard, boosting your efficiency.
Thanks to the feature, you can even provide client login information with individualized permissions.
Kartra also offers a visual sequence builder with Yes-No and If-Then booleans and is equipped with powerful automation.
Options for lead scoring and lead tagging to segment lists are also available in Kartra vs Podia.
Kartra combines powerful promotional features like conducting versatile showcasing, dynamic OTOs, knock deals, and downsells to take online marketing to the next level. Will you find these in Podia? The answer is “no”.
A Comparison Table
| Platform | Who Is It For? | Pros | Cons | Pricing |
| Kartra | Authors Solo entrepreneurs Course creators Digital product owners | All-in-one solution14-day trial for $1Full membership, funnel, and website system | Lacks email marketing integrations Overwhelming for beginners Steep learning curve | Starter plan: $99 per month Silver, Gold, and Platinum Plans: $199 to $499 per month |
| Podia | Digital content creators who want to sell their products | 14-day free trial Fully responsive customer support around the clock (live chat) Easy to set up and use | Lacks landing page templates Limited options for experts Lacks sales funnels feature | Mover plan: $39 per month Shaker plan: $79 per month |
Podia vs Kartra: Key Comparison Points
So, the future of your entire online business has come down to Podia vs Kartra. In such a high-stakes battle, you won’t want to miss going over the following features when deciding the victor.
Funnel Building
Kartra outperforms Podia when it comes to funnel creation. You can think of Kartra as a ClickFunnels alternative because it is very similar to Clickfunnels.
In Kartra, funnels are labeled “campaigns.”
You may develop a new campaign by either using DFY campaigns that are plug-and-play or building one from scratch.
DFY campaigns are developed by top business specialists and can be used to customize depending on your needs and requirements. You can share funnels with the rest of your team, collaborators, and other Kartra users.
Kartra’s marketplace should help rake in the revenue through amazing funnel promotion within the industry. You can set the specific prices you like, and Kartra will take care of things from there.
Podia is hopeless when it comes to building funnels. To develop a funnel sequence with this tool, you will need to employ its email marketing program. That would require triggering events and setting up the automated sequences for follow-up.
Course or Membership Websites
Podia is the better solution vs the Kartra platform when it comes to course creation and membership site features.
In Podia, you can create a course instantly by going to “products” and creating a new online course. You can change the premium fee to any amount you desire since the course will be free by default.
Podia allows you to add more features to each course, such as course lectures, text, links, and quizzes. However, when you compare Podia with Thinkific, the latter enables you to include some unique aspects, such as surveys, PDFs, downloads, presentations, audio, exams, and assignments.
These are extremely useful for expert course developers looking to expand their business.
Like Teachable, Podia enables you to drip content over time to ensure students don’t binge-watch the lectures.
Dripping content actually aids in the development of your particular brand and customer rapport. When you offer your audience upsells, there is a better chance for them to convert, boosting your overall conversion rate.
You may send your students welcome emails or notice emails each time a new module gets unlocked. That’s all thanks to Podia’s built-in email marketing tools. You won’t have to pay for third-party integrations as a result.
There are no limits to the number of programs you can develop, emails you can send, students you can enroll, or profits you can earn with Podia. It provides full access to everything.
You can also use Podia to construct great membership sites and earn recurring revenue by limiting content to premium plan holders. However, note that the membership function is only offered under the premium plan, costing $79 per month.
To begin making your membership site, go over to “My memberships,” and choose “create new.”
Kartra is one of the top membership site systems, with more extensive features than Podia’s.
Below are membership website features offered by Podia and Kartra:
- Multiple membership tiers
- Various membership levels
- All-in access vs dripping overtime
- Posts are scheduled automatically.
- For increased engagement, there is a comment section (Questions and Feedback)
You can enable Kartra’s password protection to provide password-based access to the course or website for added security.
Both Podia and Kartra offer a sign-on feature to make membership access convenient for customers. They will only be given one password for different memberships bought, which should push them to purchase more.
Design and Page Builder
Podia editor has a visually pleasing interface and is incredibly easy to use.
Using Podia’s built-in professional themes, you can create sales, shop, and landing pages. Also, you can select either a light theme, dark theme, custom theme, or no theme for your website and have complete freedom to modify any of the parts.
This kind of feature stands out more in Podia vs Kartra.
Podia also has a feature for designing rows and columns on your page, letting you add visual elements and organize information on the page according to your preference. It also features multiple widgets that can be personalized and applied to the page.
Now, let’s have a look at Kartra.
Kartra comes with a very smart, feature-rich, and easy-to-use drag-and-drop developer that lets you design pages that stand out. Styles, sites, settings, components, sections, helpdesk, and alert bar are among the tool’s many available features.
The cool thing is that there are plenty of templates for each block, including 500-page templates.
This feature allows you to easily optimize your pages for desktop, mobile, and tablet devices using both platforms. But unlike Podia, Kartra allows for up to four variations of A/B split testing of the pages.
Its own built-in page tracking system will monitor the pages being split tested to see which one is converting better.
Automation and Email Marketing
You can use Podia for your courses and products and deliver one-time newsletters and drip mailings.
Newsletters are an excellent approach to communicate product announcements and course launches. You can build sales funnels using automated emails through drip campaigns. It has professional-looking email templates, but there are no customization fields.
You may categorize the lists based on whether or not the subscribers have bought the products or the types of products purchased. Sending targeted emails to a specific group of customers is quite helpful.
For instance, you can send upsell offers to individuals who purchased your product in the past, or you can send nurture emails to cold consumers to warm them up before pitching them your items.
You can use external integrations if you aren’t pleased with Podia’s email marketing features. However, Podia does not offer lead scoring and lead tagging options, unlike Kartra. Don’t expect it to have a specialized automation developer, either.
When creating and sending automatic sequences, Kartra uses its specialized visual sequence builder. You can choose whether to send emails using KartraMail or an SMTP server.
Compared with Kajabi or ClickFunnels, Kartra has this type of visual builder missing.
That said, here are some of KartraMail’s unique features:
- Behavior-based automation for tracking consumer activity and delivering emails accordingly
- Split testing permits you to conduct split tests of the subject lines and content, and its monitoring system will automatically pick the one with more conversions. So, all you have to do now is set it and let it be.
- Personalization fields allow you to offer highly tailored messages to boost the likelihood of a screenshot conversion.
- Automation builder that is somewhat similar to Drip or ActiveCampaign
To design your marketing tactics, you can use if-then automation or YES or NO booleans.
Marketing and Checkout Features
Both Kartra and Podia have a variety of marketing elements, such as:
- Product bundling
- Upsells
- Products, sales pages, and pre-launch courses
- Pre-sell courses
- Coupons
- Content dripping
- Cross-sell products
However, Podia does not have the downsells and order bumps found in Kartra.
Kartra has certain unique marketing elements, such as:
- Behavioral Adaptive Marketing
You may use this to send consumers behavior-based emails, which can enhance conversions. You can also tailor the colors, messaging, and buttons based on previous user activity.
With all the essential features of Kartra, such as KartraMail, KartraPages, and KartraLeads, which are tightly integrated, you can use BAM to send tag-based, list-based, and history-based information to help boost your sales.
- Dynamic OTOs
With the customizable OTOs of Kartra, you can provide a variety of one-time offers like order bumps, upsells, and downsells based on your customers’ past purchases.
Affiliate Marketing
You can build affiliate programs for subscriptions, courses, and digital products with Podia.
To do so, you must first enable the affiliates function and then set the commission rates for each product. You can ask your affiliates to advertise your items and be paid for their efforts by entering their email address.
There are two sorts of affiliate settings offered in Kartra:
- Product-wise affiliate setups
- Global affiliate setups
Kartra allows you to set fixed pricing per product and a global or percentage-based commission.
The tool’s affiliate features are as follows:
- Personalized affiliate portals
- Brokers of joint ventures
- Affiliates can have their own landing pages.
- Tag and Subscribe your affiliates
- Subscription-based or transaction-based
Integrations
Podia integrates with a variety of payment gateways, email marketing software, and other services. Zapier integration is also one of its integration features.
Podia integrations include:
- AWeber
- MailChimp
- Drip
- MailerLite
- PayPal
- Google Analytics
- ConvertKit
- Google Ads
- Stripe
- GetResponse
- HotJar
- ActiveCampaign
You may also link with a variety of apps via Zapier integration, such as:
- ThriveCart
- Trello
- Google Sheets
- Dubsado
- LeadPages
Kartra’s integrations are more powerful than Podia’s. Among the integrations are:
- Payment gateways: Authorize.net, Stripe, Braintree, and PayPal
- Email gateways: Elastic Mail, SendGrid, Postmark and MailGun
- Hub connectors: Zapier
- SMS gateways: Plivo, Nexmo, and Twilio.
- Calendar Apps: Google Calendar
- Membership platforms: aMember, Kajabi(review), Digital Access Pass, S2Member, Optimize Press, and Wishlist.
Working in tandem with these are custom Kartra integrations such as IPN and API integration.
Customer Support and Community
When deciding between Podia and Kartra, consider the quality of customer service and the helpfulness of the community.
The following support functions are now available on Kartra:
- Kartra live support (available Mondays through Fridays, from 8 a.m. to noon)
- Kartra documentation
- Kartra ticketing support portal
- Kartraverse training portal
- Kartra Facebook group (incredibly engaging)
According to most users, the Podia support crew is friendly and has reasonable response times. Podia also provides a reliable support network.
The tool provides access to the following:
- 24/7 live chat assistance (unlimited)
- Onboarding and migration help via the Shaker Plan
- A section with documentation and resources
Pricing
Podia has two different pricing plans you can choose from: shaker and mover. The mover plan is available at $439 per month, while the shaker plan is priced at $79.
If you require features like a blogging section, memberships, embedded checkout, third-party code, and affiliate marketing, the shaker plan has got you covered. The mover plan doesn’t allow you to add any of these elements.
With Podia, you get a discount on annual billing. Signing up for annual payment gives you free access to all the features for 60 days. If you don’t, you still get free access for 14 days with the free trial.
You are not required to have a credit card to start the program. Moreover, Podia does not charge transaction fees.
Kartra is available in four different pricing levels, the first of which starts at $99 per month. Higher plans, including unlimited products, subscriptions, helpdesks, and other features, are recommended if you wish to sell more.
If you run an agency, Kartra’s agency tool comes in handy for keeping track of your clients’ accounts. The client reports can be customized to match your brand and meet your specific demands.
Like Podia, a 25 percent discount for all of its annual billing plans is offered by Kartra. If you’re unhappy with the tool’s performance, you can request a refund within 30 days after purchase.
Kartra Vs Podia: What Stands Out When Reviewing Them?
When comparing the closely similar platforms Kartra vs Podia, here’s what stood out to us:
Kartra is an all-in-one platform that allows you to manage your entire business from a single location. It includes everything you need for creating sales funnels, sending email campaigns, holding webinars, selling digital products, and a lot more. You can use it to sell nearly anything online.
At its core, Podia is more of a simplified method for selling digital products. You get an online shop where you can host and sell online courses, digital downloads, and subscriptions to unlimited consumers.
The Top Three Areas to Consider When Making Your Choice
As crucial as it is to go over all key comparison points, these three are what you most want to look into in general. So, who wins in the following areas? Let’s find out.
Membership Sites and Landing Page Creation
Both systems provide capabilities for creating appealing membership sites, selling digital services (ebooks, online courses, and other digital downloads), running email campaigns, and hosting webinars. But it’s certainly not a tie where these matters are concerned.
Kartra trumps Podia in this area, as it includes ready-to-use landing pages and templates for sales funnels. With Podia, you can either start from scratch or select one of two easy page themes: the dark theme and the light theme.
Both Podia and Kartra solutions allow you to create attractive sales pages, but Kartra does most of the work for you.
Marketing Automation
Kartra is leagues ahead of Podia when it comes to email automation. You can use the all-in-one solution to construct automation maps using a visual sequence builder and segment your subscribers using lead scoring and tagging.
Kartra’s powerful campaign and sales funnel function is another point in its favor over Podia. You can choose from ready-to-launch funnels and campaigns or create your own using the funnel builder and stunning page templates offered.
Other reasons to choose Kartra include its extensive range of outstanding third-party app integrations, a help desk function for providing live help (like chat support) to your clients, an agency function for managing many client accounts from a single dashboard, and more.
In all fairness to Podia, it is very simple to work with, user-friendly design with superb online course personalization and marketing features (affiliates, coupons, and more). You will also have the opportunity to host webinars to showcase your expertise and market your items online using the tool.
Price: Which Offers the Best Value for Money?
Podia is an economical option for digital product producers on a budget, with a monthly payment of $39 with the basic plan. Kartra, on the other hand, is available for $99 per month with its basic plan.
The latter might be considered the more worthwhile investment, given the number of tools bundled together in one spot.
You can save $500 to $600 per month if you use the whole suite of tools provided in Kartra instead of duct-taping multiple tools to manage your business.
To earn extra income on the side, you can advertise both tools and earn affiliate commissions when you bring in new consumers effectively.
Yet again, we will consider Kartra the better option in this department. Despite being more expensive, it provides significantly more value for your money and allows you to forgo other costly solutions, such as a landing page creator.
Podia vs Kartra: The Overall Winner
Barring pricing, Kartra stands out and takes this competition on practically every front.
Both Podia and Kartra are fantastic marketing platforms for selling your products, providing a fantastic experience for your audience, and growing your online business.
Kartra provides a comprehensive set of tools to help manage your business online while saving you time and money. On the other hand, Podia focuses on assisting with digital product creation to boost income.
If you are a course designer who mainly wants to promote courses, Podia is the way to go because it offers great course customization tools and unlimited bandwidth. It can also bundle the courses with no transaction charges required.
Kartra is one of the finest platforms for digital marketing, solopreneurship, and business blogging. In addition, Kartra’s agency function is the best option for agency owners.
The winner for the number of features is Kartra vs Podia. It has a more comprehensive set of tools for funnel creation and course development.
That said, choose Podia vs Kartra if your needs focus solely on course development, as it is a more practical choice.
Kartra vs Podia FAQs
Here are the most frequently asked questions online about Kartra vs Podia.
1. Which is the better platform for course creators?
Podia is great for trainers and course makers because it is primarily focused on course creation.
2. Which platform is ideal for integration?
Podia has fewer integrations than Kartra, making Kartra the better choice in this regard.
3. What platform helps you sell products better?
Both have distinct advantages. It all depends on what you’re selling. You should find the answer above.
4. How does Kartra stack up against Clickfunnels?
ClickFunnels and Kartra are closely similar; in fact, many consider it a good substitute for ClickFunnels. To get a good idea of which is better for your needs, consider reading an in-depth comparison of the two tools.
5. Do templates come with these platforms?
The Kartra vs Podia battle is more even in this department, as both offer attractive templates that are clean and professional-looking.
