Best Podia Alternatives for Selling Digital Products in 2024

Starting a successful eLearning business typically requires comprehensive software that will help you centralize all your data, content, and workflows, elevate user experience, and boost sales efficiency. Podia is a popular choice that enables entrepreneurs to create and manage websites, sell various digital product types, and streamline email marketing within a single platform.

But as technology evolves, staying competitive means exploring the latest tools and trends. While Podia provides an excellent all-in-one solution, other platforms might better fit your business needs or offer unique features this software lacks. In this post, we’ll introduce you to the top Podia alternatives to help you find a platform that aligns perfectly with your goals and budget.

Key Podia features

Podia is a robust online platform that can help you create and sell digital products, including courses, webinars, downloadables, and live workshops. This solution also offers email automation tools to make your sales process faster and easier.

Some of the key Podia features include:

• Website builder. With Podia’s intuitive website builder, you can build high-quality, customized websites and landing pages without coding skills and add a variety of lessons, knowledge assessment tests, and media files.
• Support for multiple eLearning product types. The platform allows you to create and sell standalone, cohort, and drip courses, as well as webinars, coaching sessions, digital downloads, and more.
• Video hosting. Podia lets you upload and store your courses, workshops, videos, downloadables, and other materials without paying extra for web hosting services.
• Email marketing automation. With Podia, you can design emails from scratch or use customizable templates, gather and segment your mailing lists, and send automated broadcast emails and drip campaigns to nurture your leads.
• Upsells and bundles. Podia allows you to add upsells and create bundles of multiple courses and digital products. The platform also lets you create waitlists and pre-sell your online courses before the launch.
• Community-building features. Your customers can join your free or paid communities and share their experiences with fellow students directly on your website.
• Third-party integrations. Podia seamlessly integrates with many popular tools, including PayPal, Stripe, Google Analytics, Hotjar, YouTube Live, Zoom, Calendly, Facebook, Pinterest, and others.

Podia provides powerful functionality, making it one of the top platforms for selling online courses and other digital products. However, several disadvantages might make you consider Podia’s competitors.

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Podia downsides

Every software has benefits and drawbacks, and Podia is no exception. The following disadvantages may be worth your consideration:

• Limited functionality. If you choose any of Podia’s basic plans, your customers will be restricted to using only one download and one coaching product on your website. Additionally, the webinars and courses can only be drafted but not published.
• Additional transaction fees. Depending on your plan, Podia charges transaction fees ranging from 5% to 10%. Moreover, Stripe and similar payment systems impose their own payment processor fees. The only Podia plan that doesn’t charge an extra transaction fee is the most expensive one.
• Lack of collaborative features. Podia lets you develop a simple community with basic features. However, your website visitors and clients will not have the option to leave peer reviews, send screenshots or images in comments, or fully interact with one another.
• Limited website builder. Personalizing your sales pages often requires more advanced editing tools, which Podia doesn’t provide.

Some negative Podia reviews also mentioned the lack of options to embed custom codes and categorize products.

As for the Podia pricing, it depends on the number of features included in the plan. Generally, Podia’s cost varies from $4 to $75 per month. Additionally, there is a 5-10% transaction fee for each sale.

Features to look for in Podia alternatives

There are many alternatives to Podia, each offering various unique tools and features. When looking for the most suitable platform, consider the following factors:

• Variety of digital products. Ensure your chosen platform supports all digital product types you want to sell, whether courses, downloads, videos, or coaching services.
• Built-in marketing tools. Look for a platform that not only helps you create courses but also assists with marketing. Having powerful marketing tools built into the platform can make attracting new customers much easier.
• Scalability options. Some platforms limit the number of customers or downloads you can have based on your pricing plan. Make sure the platform can grow with your business and won’t impose restrictions as you expand.
• Multiple monetization options. Choose a platform that supports different ways to monetize your content. Such flexibility can help you improve customer experience and increase your revenue.
• Advanced customization tools. If you want to strengthen your brand awareness, opt for a platform with robust customization options that will allow you to create a unique and professional-looking website that stands out.

Top Podia alternatives to try out

While Podia offers extensive features, numerous competitors in the market also provide impressive functionality. To expand your options, let’s explore some of the most notable alternatives to Podia.

SendPulse

SendPulse is an advanced marketing and sales automation platform that provides a robust toolset for creating, promoting, and selling eLearning products. Using this Podia alternative, you can effortlessly develop a high-quality website, create and manage online courses, attract and engage students, and accept payments — all within a single platform.

With SendPulse, you can seamlessly integrate multiple marketing channels into effective automated sales pipelines to engage your customers at every stage of their buyer journey. You can connect with students via email campaigns, SMS, chatbots, live chats, and web push notifications and manage all student data in a built-in CRM system. SendPulse’s intuitive no-code course builder and customizable templates will allow you to create different types of educational products effortlessly and tailor them to your brand personality and audience preferences.

Some of SendPulse’s notable features include:

• All-in-one marketing platform. SendPulse seamlessly combines multiple marketing channels, including email marketing, SMS, chatbots, and web push notifications, in one place. This solution lets you easily create websites, registration forms, and courses, develop automated sales pipelines to promote digital products, store and manage user data in a built-in CRM, accept payments, and more.
• Powerful drag-and-drop builder. The platform provides robust editing tools to create and customize your online course website and marketing campaigns. You can develop a course of any format from scratch or using a template, create engaging video, audio, and text lessons, upload files, and add knowledge assessments and course completion certificates.
• Automatic students’ enrollment. With SendPulse, you can automatically enroll students in paid courses using chatbots and pop-ups.
• Instructors and mentors. You can add users who track your students’ progress, customize lessons, create tests, edit design certificates, and answer questions.
• Detailed course analytics. SendPulse gives you access to robust course data, statistics, and analytics. All the information is available on the dashboard right at hand.
• “Education by SendPulse” mobile app. Students can use a convenient mobile application to complete their assignments, download materials, and communicate with their peers and instructors.

Pricing. SendPulse is one of the most affordable platforms among Podia alternatives. It offers a free plan with up to 200 students and 1 GB of storage, making it ideal for new businesses. The platform’s paid subscriptions start at $21 monthly and include numerous advanced features, unlimited courses, and more students, instructors, and storage space.

Thinkific

Thinkific is one of the most well-known Podia competitors, offering extensive features for creating self-paced, cohort, and scheduled courses, live lessons, and webinars. The platform provides everything creators need to build engaging learning experiences, from an intuitive editor, customizable course templates, and multimedia content support to advanced quizzing, analytics, a mobile app, and community-building tools. Additionally, Thinkific supports multiple languages, making your website accessible to a global audience.

As a Podia alternative, Thinkific offers the following valuable features:

• Community building tools. This Podia competitor provides various tools for building and managing online communities, including discussion forums, memberships, and student groups.
• Drip scheduling. Thinkific lets you schedule the release of your course content over time to increase student engagement.
• Integration with third-party tools. This platform seamlessly integrates with different third-party apps, including email marketing software, CRM systems, and payment gateways.
• Course previews and free trials for your students. This Podia alternative lets you add course previews and free trials to attract and convert potential learners more effectively.
• AI-based features. Thinkific allows you to leverage artificial intelligence to create personalized student learning paths based on their progress, preferences, and performance.

Pricing. You can test Thinkfic’s features for free during a 14-day trial period. Its most inexpensive subscription plan is priced at $36/month when billed annually and includes unlimited courses, 1 community, 5 digital downloads, 5 live events, and email marketing features. Notably, this Podia competitor doesn’t charge any extra transaction fees.

EducateMe

EducateMe is another excellent Podia competitor, known for its robust tools for creating and selling courses, webinars, online training programs, and other types of eLearning content. The platform offers numerous powerful community-building and engagement tools, including peer and instructor reviews, group channels, integrated live sessions, and more. With EducateMe’s intuitive drag-and-drop builder, you can create any type of educational program without coding skills and easily customize it to align with your brand’s identity.

EducateMe offers the following helpful features:

• Advanced customization and branding. With EducateMe, you can customize numerous types of design elements, including colors, fonts, logos, and shapes. The platform also allows you to add personalized log-in and subscription forms and create custom menus.
• Detailed student analytics. EducateMe lets you easily track students’ behavior, learning progress, satisfaction levels, attendance statistics, and more. Its automated reporting feature significantly simplifies data-driven decision-making.
• Seamless integrations. This tool’s functionality can be enhanced with numerous third-party integrations. You can use apps like Zoom, Notion, Slack, Loom, and others directly from this platform’s dashboard.
• Built-in messaging platform. Your teachers, mentors, and instructors can easily communicate with your students directly on the platform. EducateMe’s group channel and notification features can be extremely helpful for making your online course platform more user-friendly and engaging.

Pricing. This Podia alternative doesn’t offer a free plan. The most affordable EducateMe plan costs $100 monthly and includes unlimited courses, basic customization, up to 40 students, 5 team members, live session hosting, and Zapier integration. For advanced customization, up to 500 students, unlimited team members, and advanced security controls, you will need to pay $1,250 per month.

LearnDash

LearnDash is a powerful Podia alternative that provides numerous features for creating and selling educational products. Its main product, LearnDash, is a WordPress LMS plugin that allows you to create and manage online courses and accept payments without additional fees. Additionally, the company offers the MemberDash plugin for monetization and community building and LearnDash Cloud for hosting.

LearnDash is a strong competitor in the market with its various handy features:

• Content protection. LearnDash seamlessly integrates with membership plugins, offering extensive options for content protection and access control. As a result, only enrolled students can access your course materials.
• Monetization options. The company supports various monetization options, including one-time purchases, subscriptions, memberships, and course bundles. It also integrates with popular eСommerce solutions like Stripe, PayPal, and WooCommerce, allowing businesses to accept and manage payments easily and improve user experience.
• Gamification. The platform includes a gamification system where learners earn points for completing activities. Points can unlock new courses or levels, adding a layer of engagement and motivation to the learning process.

Pricing. The most affordable LearnDash plan costs $199 yearly and includes a course builder, 1 website, onboarding wizard, course dashboard, PayPal and Stripe integrations, and other features.

Mighty Networks

Mighty Networks is a community-building platform with robust features for managing and selling online courses, making it a great Podia alternative. This solution offers various course monetization options, customizable lesson scheduling, AI-powered features for content generation, an extensive selection of pre-made templates, live-streaming features, mobile apps, and more.

Here is what makes Mighty Networks one of the best alternatives to Podia:

• Community features. Mighty Networks has dozens of customizable activity feeds, event tabs, interactive posts, and other tools for attracting new students and building online communities.
• AI-based content support. With Mighty Networks, you can use artificial intelligence tools to generate ideas, posts, and messages for your website.
• Hidden plans and discounts. The platform can help you categorize your subscribers, manage and merge different groups of students, and create hidden plans for different users.
• Mobile app. The Mighty Networks mobile app allows businesses to create communities, edit students’ profiles, view statistics, and more.

Pricing. You can try Mighty Networks features during a 14-day free trial. The platform’s most affordable paid plan, priced at $99/month, includes resource libraries, unlimited course videos, additional sales landing pages, third-party integrations, messaging tools, and more.

Circle

Circle is a strong Podia competitor that offers a wide variety of community-building features. This solution provides an intuitive drag-and-drop builder that allows you to create custom educational programs without any technical background. Using Circle, you can add downloadable multimedia files to your course, host live streams, add gamification elements, and create student clubs and groups to provide engaging learning experiences. The platform also offers multiple monetization options, paid communities, and mobile apps, among other features.

Some of Circle’s notable features include:

• Interactive content. You can use simulations and virtual labs to provide your customers a realistic, hands-on experience. Circle also lets you create interactive videos where learners make choices, answer questions, and explore different outcomes.
• Live sessions and webinars. The platform allows you to host live teaching sessions where students can interact with instructors, mentors, and peers in real time.
• Predictive analytics. Besides evaluating students’ progress, monitoring user activity, and tracking transactions, the platform can use data to predict and address potential learning challenges before they occur.
• Offline access to learning materials. Your customers can download learning materials and continue their studies offline.
• Resource libraries. Using Circle, your students can not only get access to articles and posts, but also explore numerous supplementary materials, including eBooks, articles, and videos.

Pricing. This Podia alternative doesn’t offer a free plan. Circle’s Basic plan is priced at $89 per month and includes unlimited members, events, discussion forums, live streams, custom branding, and paid memberships.

Teachery

Teachery is a robust platform for creating branded digital products without transaction fees. This Podia alternative features an intuitive drag-and-drop builder, making it accessible to users without technical backgrounds, and offers numerous templates and customization features. Using this platform, you can create sales pages, build a community around your product, offer upsells, bundles, and promo codes, and use a wide variety of third-party integrations.

Teachery is a great option for both beginners and seasoned creators. Here are some of the notable features this Podia alternative offers:

• No limitations. The platform offers unlimited courses, customers, admin accounts and no extra transaction fees.
• Custom CSS. Teachery allows users to add custom CSS to ensure their course is completely unique and matches their brand’s visual identity.
• Free SSL certificate. This Podia competitor will generate a free SSL certificate for any custom domain to ensure a safe browsing experience for students.
• Promo codes and course gifting. The platform allows businesses to boost student enrollment through promo codes, and offers students the option to gift courses to other people.
• Hubs and memberships. You can develop a central access point to all your courses or create a membership product using course hubs.

Pricing. Teachery is one of the most budget-friendly options among the other Podia competitors. For $49 per month, you can create an unlimited number of courses and landing pages, accommodate any number of students, use custom domains, and set up drip scheduling for your lessons.

LearnWords

LearnWords is another excellent learning management system for course creators. This Podia alternative supports a wide range of digital products, and offers an eBook builder, AI-powered features, drip scheduling, easy control over sales and earnings, and no extra fees. With its customizable templates, you can quickly create a stylish website tailored to your brand and industry, including fitness, coaching, health, finance, employee training, and more.

By using LearnWords, you get access to the following features:

• Assessment builder. The platform lets you build different types of highly personalized exams and self-assessments.
• Survey builder. LearnWords allows you to design beautiful and engaging forms and surveys for your website pages and courses.
• NGO solutions. Non-profit organizations can easily align members, donors, and volunteers with their mission and provide the training they need to be valuable to the organization.
• Custom user roles. The platform lets you easily assign specific responsibilities to users by creating instructors, mentors, seat managers, reporters, affiliates, and other custom user roles.

Pricing. LearnWords offers a starting plan at $24 per month. This plan provides all the essential tools for creating courses, eBooks, and a customized 3-page website. It also offers 3 payment gateways and marketing integrations. For more advanced options, you will have to upgrade to a higher-tier plan.

Teachable

Teachable is an online education platform that offers robust built-in marketing tools, AI-powered features, a wide variety of monetization options, and more. This Podia competitor allows you to create, manage, and sell different types of online courses, downloads, coaching services, and memberships. Also, Teachable provides a variety of payment methods, seamless third-party integrations, community and engagement features, and fraud protection.

Being one of the popular alternatives to Podia, Teachable offers a bunch of great features:

• Content hosting and delivery. Teachable hosts all your course content, including videos, PDFs, quizzes, and assignments. It ensures high-quality video streaming and provides unlimited bandwidth for your content.
• Marketing and sales tools. The platform has many built-in marketing tools, such as affiliate marketing tools, email marketing integrations, and sales page customization. You can also use Teachable sales funnels to optimize conversions.
• Integration. Teachable integrates with many third-party tools, including email marketing platforms like Mailchimp and ConvertKit, CRM systems, and Zapier, among many others.
• Blog. Teachable allows you to create and manage a blog directly on your course website to provide additional value to your students.
• Drip content. Using this platform, you can schedule lessons to be released at specific intervals.

Pricing. Teachable offers a free plan with no time limits that includes 1 published digital product of each type, a course builder, and an integrated payment system. However, there is a transaction fee of $1 plus 10%. This solution’s most affordable paid plan starts at $39/month if billed annually and includes 5 published products, integrated email marketing, a custom domain, live coaching, and a 5% transaction fee.

Kartra

Kartra is a popular platform designed to help creators sell their content to online audiences. This Podia alternative is an excellent tool for industry leaders, coaches, and consultants looking to build their reputations and generate revenue. Kartra offers an intuitive drag-and-drop builder, an extensive selection of customizable templates, automated drip scheduling, and robust email marketing automation features.

Kartra provides numerous features for online educators:

• All-in-one marketing platform. Kartra combines various marketing tools like email marketing, landing pages, sales funnels, and memberships into a single platform.
• Calendar. You can use this solution to schedule appointments and manage events. Your customers can easily book appointments directly through your website. Kartra also integrates with third-party calendar apps for seamless synchronization.
• Split testing. You can A/B test pages and emails to improve conversion rates and boost overall effectiveness.
• Sales pipeline automation. You can easily move leads through different stages of your sales cycle. As a result, it is easier to identify bottlenecks and improve your sales strategies.

Pricing. You can try the platform’s features for free during a 30-day trial period. The most affordable Kantra plan costs $99 per month when billed annually and includes unlimited pages, forms, and emails, the ability to set up memberships and calendars, access to over 100 pre-designed funnels, and support for up to 2,500 contacts.

Final words on the best Podia alternatives

Choosing the right platform for creating and selling digital products can be challenging. To help you evaluate different options, we’ve summarized the basic functionality and unique features of the best alternatives to Podia.

Each company on this list is a game-changer in the digital products space. However, if you’re looking for a perfect balance between robust functionality and affordable price, SendPulse is a fantastic choice.

Sign up for a free account now and see for yourself!