Podia vs Teachable Online Course Platform 100% Unbias Comparison By Real User (Tried & Tested)

1. Course Creation

As course creators, choosing the best online course platform to create and sell courses means to find online course platform that offers a complete online learning experience for both the course creator and the student.

Let’s take a look at a few key areas of Teachable vs Podia and find the platform suitable for you.

Podia

First look on the Podia’s course creation give you a sense of simplicity. Even as a new course creator, you feel pretty comfortable at the dashboard at it is clean and intuitively designed. Consisting of four different tabs:

• Lessons: Place where you create your “sections” and “lessons” for each of the sections. You can edit your sales page here as well.
• Details: Entering your course name, descriptions, cover image, completion certificates, comments options.
• Pricing: Change your offering, “free”, “waitlist”, “on-time payment”, “subscription membership” with option to include upsell, and discounts.
• Availability: Update the availability to be time-based, visibility options and access rights.

Navigation through the different tabs, you get to create your course, the process is straightforward, and the tabs are nicely designed, the UI/UX of the Podia platform is simply amazing.

And since Podia don’t only offer creators the option to create online course, each of its other “products” are designed just as good. Products you can sell using Podia includes:

• Online Courses
• Digital Downloads
• Webinar
• Coaching Session
• Bundles

Teachable

Entering into the Teachable’s dashboard you will be greeted with all the various features it offers. However, unlike podia, Teachable’s platform looks more complicated and with so many elements on the screen, it can feel slightly overwhelming for new course creators.

Having said that Teachable features for course creation are top in class, and it offers many advance options where course creators can create their online course. To create your online course you’ll need to fill in all the information listed on the various tabs.

• Course Setup: More of an overview of the online course with all the different things for the online course included in this page.
• Course Creation Section: Within this section it have “Curriculum”, “Design Templates”, “DRIP”, “Certificate” and “Information”
• Pricing Section: Includes items such as “Pricing”, “Sales page”, “Coupons” and “Order bumps (Upsell)”
• Engagement Section: Includes things like “Comments”, “Students” and “Reports”

Honestly, the UI/UX is pretty bad, and the design of the different tabs are really confusing. I only come up with the “section name” otherwise it will be hard to categories each of the tabs. Even as an experience creator, it took me some time to get use to navigating the Teachable dashboard.

They did a revamp on the look and feel of the Teachable dashboard, while it did improve from the previous time I visit, there is still a lot of work needs to be done.

With that said, Teachable do offer some great features for course creators, such as Drip and completion certificate similar to Podia.

My Choice: Podia

Both Teachable and Podia offer many features to create your own online course, from creating your curriculum, your landing page, your website, drip contents, completion certificate, and options to set different payment options. Furthermore both Podia and Teachable let you create and sell unlimited courses.

• Teachable offers design templates and advance reporting such as heatmaps which can be useful for some creators, however, the number of design template is really limited.
• Podia do not offer design templates, however it offers high level of flexibility on how your online course can look, in additional, their reporting is good enough for most online business. Most importantly, the course creation process is easy-to-use and offering options to easily create a large variety of digital products, giving you more flexibility in your online business.

This comparison is a close one, but I will think Podia gives a better user experience for course creators.

2. Student eLearning Engagement Experience

Student’s online learning experience is the key to building profitable online course business. When deciding which is better platform for this assessment, simply ask yourself this question, “Does the platform provide you with the tools to engage your students?”

Here, we are going to answer this question, and look into the features that make an impact in engaging your students.

Podia

Podia is an all-in-one platform with all the key features that help keep your audience engaged. As one of the most popular platform for creating online course and membership site, it offers all basic and advance features that help you engage your students.

Student Engagement For Online Courses:

• Create quizzes, test and assignments
• Unlimited downloadable resources, such as videos, guides, eBooks and digital downloads.
• Unlimited live events, webinars and seminars to engage your students at real-time
• Unlimited 1-on-1 coaching or consulting sessions.
• Branded certificates for completion or attaining achievements through your online course.
• Drip scheduling to personalize the learning experience for your students according to their learning progression.
• Bundles and coupons for marketing and conversion.

Student Engagement For Community Building:

• Direct chat and messaging support where you can connect with your students.
• Gamifying your membership by offering digital badges or “stickers”, creating a leaderboard or point system.
• Unlimited members and member levels that create a vibrant community for your students.

Podia is filled with various powerful features that engage your student in more than just within the course but outside of the online course, building a community of learners on your own platform.

Teachable

Teachable provides both basic and advance features to engage it’s students during their online education. Teachable course features are designed to help the students to reach their learning goals faster and easier. Here are some features offered by Teachable:

• Engage through quizzes, assignments or providing downloadable resources.
• Option to add fully customizable codes for creating new types of user experience.
• Create drip scheduling to personalize the delivery of the learning content to each of your students.
• Create live events, such as webinar or seminars to live audience.
• Create 1-on-1 sessions for coaching and consultation services.
• Offers unlimited video and digital downloads for building a library of online courses and resources.
• Teachable App that let you engage your student on their mobile devices.
• Offers bundles and coupons for marketing and conversion.
• Offers comments to allow your students to engage with your course and other students.

My Choice: Draw (Podia vs Teachable)

Teachable and Podia are both great platform to create engaging course content that lead to higher rate of course completion. Helping your student reach their learning goals, there some slight difference between Teachable and Podia:

• Teachable offers more online course specific features catered to course engagement, and Teachable App is a great plus to that.
• Podia don’t only engage your student during their online course, but also outside of the course where it offers many features to build your own online community on your platform.

When it comes down to purely student engagement, I think Podia is better, but knowing that Teachable offers Teachable App, I think this is a draw between these platforms.

3. Pricing And Free Trials

Pricing is something that is often discussed, while it is important, it is not a definitive criteria. A good platform that is more expensive is  a better choice than another that is cheaper but offer average performance.

With that said, let’s take a look at Podia vs Teachable in both their free and paid pricing plan.

Podia

Podia offers both free and paid pricing plans, targeting different creators to create their own online business.

Starting with the Podia free plan, where it let you try out Podia for $0 per month forever::

• Free Account for $0 per month (No Credit Card required): Recommended for anyone who want to try out Podia before committing to their paid plans. Including features like a working website, unlimited member community, direct messaging (Live Chat), 1 digital downloads, 1 coaching product, payment processing (with 8% fees) and basic email marketing tools.

For their paid plans, they have two different options:

• Mover Plan for $33 per month: Recommended for creators and business who are looking to build an online business. Including all features in the free plan plus; 0% payment processing fees, unlimited digital downloads, unlimited coaching services, unlimited courses offerings, custom domains, coupons and upsells, 5K emails broadcast and unlimited email campaigns, popular social media integrations and free migration services.
• Shaker Plan for $75 per month: Recommended for experienced course creators with a large audience. Including all features in the Mover Plan plus; webinars, bundles, course certificates, embedded checkouts, affiliated marketing, access durations, 15k email broadcast, third-party API integration, full white labeling of your platform.

Teachable