
With all its impressive capabilities, Podia isn’t the best fit for some entrepreneurs. If you’re in this camp, chances are you’re already searching for Podia alternatives.
In a nutshell, here’s a list of the seven best alternatives for your online courses, digital products, and memberships.
Best Podia Alternatives
Let’s dig a little deeper into each of these course platforms.
Table of Contents
- 1. Teachable (Best Podia Alternative)
- 2. Thinkific (Best Free Plan Podia Alternative)
- 3. Kajabi (Best High-End Podia Alternative)
- 4. LearnWorlds (Best Customizable and Interactive Alternative)
- 5. LearnDash (Best WordPress-Based Alternative)
- 6. Ruzuku (Best Simple Podia Alternative)
- 7. Udemy (Best Active Podia Alternative)
- Podia Alternatives Final Recommendation
1. Teachable (Best Podia Alternative)
Teachable has long established itself as a powerhouse in the online course marketplace, with over 23 million students, 250,000 courses, and 100,000 course creators!
Indeed, Teachable has been the most suggested alternative in Podia reviews, and for good reasons. It gives you complete control of everything, from building your course to managing your customers.
Teachable’s course building system is value-packed, with tools such as content locking, graded quizzes, certificates of completion, course compliance, etc., all of which are effective at supercharging student engagement.
What Features Make Teachable a Good Alternative?
- Teachable provides a superb online course creation experience. It allows you to import content directly from Google Drive, One Drive, and Dropbox. With this platform, you can create highly engaging online courses with PDFs, images, videos, and text.
- Automatically generates customizable certificates of completion for students. It also comes with course compliance features that compel students to finish their courses. Other tools include content locking, graded quizzes, etc.
- It allows you to accept payment from customers in over 130 currencies via Stripe, PayPal, and credit card.
- Teachable comes with an in-built reporting system that shows your students’ progress, the number of enrollees, revenue from each course, etc.
- It has more flexibility than Podia when it comes to creating your storefront, sales page, thank you page, etc.
Learn more pros and cons in our Teachable review.
Pricing
Teachable has a three-tier pricing system, all of which allow you to create an unlimited number of courses, own an unlimited number of students, and more.
Here’s a list of Teachable’s pricing plans:
- Basic: $39 per month (Billed $29 with annual payment)
- Pro: $119 per month (Billed $99 with annual payment)
- Business: $299 per month (Billed $249 with annual payment)
2. Thinkific (Best Free Plan Podia Alternative)
One of the most impressive things about Thinkific is its ultra-wide range of integrations. It allows you to connect a wide array of app integrations for different purposes, including e-commerce, automation, email marketing, analytics, etc.
Thinkific is tailored specifically to help you build an education empire and provides a rich multimedia course content system to support that.
Since 2012, Thinkific now has over 40,000 course creators in the world of online courses and has recorded over $200 million in course sales.
The best thing about Thinkific is that you do not need to pay to get started. It has a free plan which you can use to host courses, have unlimited students, receive payments, and more!
What Features Make Thinkific a Good Alternative?
- Has an extremely easy-to-use drag and drop builder for creating and customizing courses and quizzes to match your brand.
- Supports all kinds of content—PDFs, Typeform, surveys, digital downloads, texts, videos, etc.
- Offers full customization power for website building and impressive tools that help inexperienced people build fantastic websites quickly.
- Offers flexible pricing mechanisms and advanced marketing tools to help you reach more people and sell online courses more efficiently.
- Supports all credit cards and over 100 currencies while paying its creators immediately.
Related: Podia vs Thinkific
Pricing
Thinkific comes with four pricing plans, including a free plan. Its paid plans attract no transaction fees, while the free plan charges 10% on all transactions.
The free plan is also a great opportunity to put the platform’s core features to test as you do not have anything to lose!
Here’s a list of Thinkific’s pricing plans:
- Free: No monthly fees. Only a 10% fee on each transaction.
- Basic: $49 per month (Billed $39 month on annual subscription)
- Pro: $99 per month (Billed $79 per month on annual subscription)
- Premier: $499 per month (Billed $399 per month on annual subscription)
3. Kajabi (Best High-End Podia Alternative)
Kajabi is more like Podia but on steroids. It is an all-in-one platform that has all you need to sell online courses, build websites, host memberships online, create funnels, etc.
Since its launch in 2010, the platform has recorded over 50,000 users and 60 million students, generating over $1.5 billion.
With Kajabi, you wouldn’t need to pay for platforms such as WordPress, Teachable, Kartra, etc., because it provides all the services you can find on any of these platforms.
What Features Make Kajabi a Good Alternative?
- Kajabi has everything you need to create and monetize your online course, membership site, digital product, etc.
- Its web development tool is fully integrated with all the things you need, and you can set up your entire business on the platform without needing a plugin.
- It has a mobile app for both IOS and Android.
- The platform comes with a built-in sales funnel builder and marketing automation tools.
- Kajabi offers unlimited video hosting on all its plans.
See everything Kajabi has to offer in our Kajabi review. For a comparison of both platforms, click here.
Pricing
For all the extra features that Kajabi gives, it comes with higher fees than Podia. But if you weren’t impressed by Podia’s limitations as an all-in-one platform, then perhaps you can whip out a little more cash to get one of Kajabi’s packages.
Kajabi offers a 14-day free trial. That way, new customers can put them to the test for two weeks.
Here’s a list of Kajabi’s pricing plans:
- Basic: $149 per month (Billed $119 per month on annual payment)
- Growth: $199 per month (Billed $159 per month on annual payment)
- Pro: $399 per month (Billed $319 per month on annual payment)
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4. LearnWorlds (Best Customizable and Interactive Alternative)
LearnWorlds stands out as an alternative to Podia because of its unique online course creation system. It pays a lot of attention to user experience, providing over 400 ready-made page builder templates to help you easily find a structure that best fits your brand.
It takes student engagement to another level as an online course platform, allowing you to engage your students more effectively with video interaction, real-time note taking, interactive e-books, automatic transcripts, etc.
What Features Make Kajabi a Good Alternative?
- LearnWorlds has a robust affiliate marketing tool.
- The platform allows you to create interactive videos by adding interactive elements such as questions, titles, buttons, image overlays, etc. to make your videos more engaging.
- It comes with an intuitive drag-and-drop block-based page builder with hundreds of templates to help you build a fully operational website in record time.
- With LearnWorlds, you can write content once and then cycle through designs until you find the one that fits your brand’s voice and style.
- This online course platform supports several payment gateways, including PayPal, Stripe, 2Checkout, PagSeguro, and Shopify.
Pricing
LearnWorlds comes with three main pricing plans and a negotiable custom package for high volume and corporate customers.
Its Starter plan charges a flat fee of $5 per course sale, while other plans charge no transaction fees.
Here’s a list of LearnWorld’s pricing plans:
- Starter: $29 per month (Billed $24 per month on annual payment)
- Pro Trainer: $99 per month (Billed $79 per month on annual payment)
- Learning Center: $299 per month (Billed $249 per month on annual payment)
- High Volume and Corporate: Negotiable. You’d have to call them for quotes.
5. LearnDash (Best WordPress-Based Alternative)
Used by Fortune 500 companies such as InfusionSoft and major universities such as the University of Florida, LearnDash has set itself apart as the most reliable Learning Management System for WordPress.
It exists as a plugin that works with most WordPress themes. However, its impressive capabilities as an online course system rightfully earned it a place among this list of top Podia alternatives.
What Features Make LearnDash a Good Alternative?
- LearnDash comes with sophisticated course tools such as focus mode, advanced quizzing, dynamic forums, and more!
- The platform also allows you to run a membership site. It also gives you a flexible pricing option. Thus you can charge one-time fees or set recurring payments on your content.
- LearnDash allows you to set expiration dates for user access to your content.
- Its course builder is highly efficient, allowing you to create multi-layer courses in a snap.
- Integrates with different payment gateways such as Stripe, PayPal, and 2Checkout.
- It is compatible with several 3rd-party applications such as email marketing tools, content cloners, events tools, etc.
Pricing
LearnDash’s pricing system is a little different because it offers only annual pricing plans. They do not offer free trials. However, there’s a 30-day money-back guarantee available.
Here’s a list of LearnDash’s pricing plans:
- Basic: $159 per year
- Plus Package: $189 per year
- Pro Package: $329 per year
6. Ruzuku (Best Simple Podia Alternative)
Ruzuku prides itself on its simplicity. So, if you fancy a straightforward system that gets your courses up and running in no time, then this platform can be seen as one of the best alternatives to podia.
Beyond courses, Ruzuku lets you sell digital products and even launch a membership site!
What Features Make Ruzuku a Good Alternative?
- Ruzuku has a simple yet powerful course management system and offers unlimited storage to its users.
- It handles all sorts of files, from PDFs to audios and texts. Also, students can submit images, PDFs, Videos, etc. in their responses.
- It comes with a ‘course health’ feature, which shows students’ comment and activity completion rates and data on course progress.
- It integrates with MailChimp, allowing you to run email marketing campaigns for your courses and digital products.
Pricing
Ruzuku has a straightforward pricing plan along with a 14-day free trial. Its three plans come with zero transaction fees, and you’re able to receive payments through Paypal, Stripe, and credit card.
Here’s a list of Ruzuku’s pricing plans:
- Bootstrapper: $99 per month (Billed $74.75 per month on annual payment)
- Up-and-Comer: $149 per month (Billed $83.08 per month on annual payment)
- University: $199 per month (Billed 125 per month on annual payment)
7. Udemy (Best Active Podia Alternative)
With over 290 million enrollments across 190+ countries and over 150 thousand courses, Udemy is one of the most popular and active online course marketplaces today.
However, Udemy does take a different approach to the online course business. The platform handles the infrastructure and marketing, allowing course creators to simply focus on creating courses.
What Features Make Udemy a Good Alternative?
- Easy to use course builder for creating engaging courses and quizzes with videos, PDFs, etc.
- Udemy promotes its instructors’ courses, allowing them to get noticed by students all over the world.
- Udemy manages your payment processing for you. You literally only have to worry about creating your course and putting in your own marketing to supercharge your revenue.
Pricing
Udemy has a different pricing system from all the podia alternatives we’ve discussed. To become an instructor on Udemy, you do not have to pay anything—at least not upfront.
However, Udemy does operate on a revenue-sharing system where they split your revenue into percentages depending on factors such as traffic source, promotions, coupons, referrals, etc. Read the details here.
Udemy also charges transaction fees of 3% (for instructors outside Japan )and 4% for instructors in Japan.
Podia Alternatives Final Recommendation
To conclude, Podia is good for selling online courses and has strengths when it comes to selling membership sites and if you want to sell digital downloads.
But it’s not the best fit for everyone. And if you made it to this part, I hope you find my recommended Podia alternatives insightful.
As you may have noticed, the best podia alternative is the one that charges zero transaction fees, allows you to sell digital products, and also has advanced features to set up membership sites.
Before choosing a replacement for Podia, it is important to consider these features and if they’re crucial for your online business, and if there are some features you’re willing to do without.
To round this up, below is my best Podia alternative recommendations:
- Teachable — Best Overall
- Thinkific — Best Free Account
- Kajabi — Best Premium All-in-One
- LearnDash — Best WordPress Platform
If you have any questions about these Podia alternatives, feel free to reach out.
Cheers!
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