Are you trying to decide whether Kajabi or Podia are the right platform to host your online courses? This quick guide will help you to easily compare them and decide which, if any, is the best choice for you.
By focusing on what both platforms offer and the cost of each, you can consider whether Kajabi or Podia meet the needs and priorities of your business, and are therefore suitable.
What do Kajabi and Podia offer?
Both Kajabi and Podia provide tools enabling you to build and host your online courses on their platform. These includes:
- All the tools needed to host and sell your online courses.
- Tools to structure your courses, breaking them down into individual lessons, sections or categories.
- Tools to deliver assessments.
- Functions to support website building and hosting.
Both platforms aim to take care of the ‘technical work’ of the website, allowing you to focus on creating and selling your online courses.
Key features of Kajabi and Podia
Kajabi and Podia offer the following key features:
While Kajabi and Podia are similar in terms of key features that they offer, how these are delivered varies across the two platforms, resulting in some substantial differences.
The main difference is the marketing capabilities of Kajabi and Podia (see section below). Both platforms provide essential tools for online course creation, delivery and sales; but while they both claim to be an ‘all-in-one’ platform, their marketing features differ considerably. Kajabi allows you to keep everything in one place, whereas you may require additional tools to support marketing, if these are essential for your business, with the Podia platform.
The key features and differences between them are explored in more detail in the following sections.
What Kajabi and Podia do well
The following are positive elements of the Kajabi and Podia platforms:
- They have easy to use course builders.
- Both allow you to structure your courses; although Kajabi offers more flexibility in this area.
- They include video hosting with the use of Wistia.
- Both allow you to add different content formats, including: text, videos, pdfs, quizzes, etc. However, both limit the use of multiple content types within a lesson, i.e. adding a video and a quiz to a lesson.
- They offer a full website setup and support the technical aspects of running it.
- Both use a drag-and-drop editor for website building, making their website page easy to use.
- Both allow you to build online membership sections.
- Both allow you to integrate third party tools. This may be more useful if using Podia as you may require additional marketing tools.
There are some areas in which Kajabi and Podia do not necessarily outperform one another but simply differ in what they offer. The importance of these differences will depend on your business needs and how the features provided meet these. They are as follows:
Marketing
Kajabi and Podia both incorporate marketing tools, such as ‘upselling’ and email marketing. This is similar to other course platforms such as Teachable and Thinkfic. Kajabi’s automated email marketing features, and additional pipeline builder and sales funneling, are extensive and aim to meet all your marketing needs. Podia, in comparison, lacks sales funneling capabilities and its email marketing features are more limited.
Assessment
Both platforms provide tools which allow you to assess your students. Below is an overview of what Kajabi and Podia offer:
Kajabi:
✔ Create quizzes, assignments and surveys.
✔ Include multiple choice, multiple option and paragraph style questions.
✔ Allow students to upload assignments.
✔ Include images with your questions.
✔ Set a pass score for your quizzes and use automatic marking.
Podia
✔ Create quizzes.
✔ Include multiple choice questions.
❌ Allows different question types.
❌ Include images with your questions.
❌ Set a pass score for your quizzes.
✔ Show students their score before moving on to the next section.
Podia’s functionality is more basic and the lack of different question types, for example paragraph style questions which allow for open-ended questioning, does limit the assessment opportunities.
Customer support
Kajabi and Podia offer the following customer support services:
Kajabi offers:
- Live chat 24/7 for customers on its ‘growth’ or ‘pro’ plan. This is limited for those on the ‘basic’ plan and isn’t offered 24/7.
- Email support for all.
Podia offers:
- Live chat weekdays 9am – 6pm ET and weekends 9am – 5pm ET.
- Email support with a one day response time.
How important urgent, out of hours customer support is to your business will determine whether this is an important consideration or not. It’s also worth bearing in mind that if you’re in a different timezone to the customer support service then this will have an impact if you’re using Podia or the Kajabi ‘basic’ package.
Website setup
Both Kajabi and Podia will ‘host’ your website and provide tools for developing a variety of webpages which are compatible with mobile, tablet and desktop devices. Kajabi offers a range of themes, editing options and allows you to upload your own custom theme. In comparison, Podia only offers one template and the options to edit the theme are more limited. However, which is preferable will depend on your business requirements and even potentially what you already have, as you may not require these features.
Content dripping
Kajabi and Podia both provide features which allow you to ‘drip’ content. This gives you control over when your students access it, rather than all content being available at once. With Kajabi you have the additional benefit of being able to send automated emails to your students informing them that new content is available.
Analytics and reporting
With the Kajabi or Podia platform you’re able to track students’ progress. However, the ability to analyse content engagement is lacking with Podia, as there is no reporting on lecture or course completion, or student engagement with videos. Kajabi, in contrast, provides information on the average engagement, total plays, play rate and drop off for video content.
Additionally, Kajabi and Podia both provide tools to analyse your sales performance; although Podia’s sales reporting is basic.
Overall, Podia is limited in its tracking abilities, and therefore, this may be a crucial consideration, particularly if you wish to track student engagement with your content, as this may be more difficult to judge. Again, the importance of these will depend on the requirements and priorities of your business.
Pricing options
Although they differ slightly, both Kajabi and Podia offer a fair amount of flexibility in terms of the pricing options for your courses. These include options such as one-off payments, payment plans and membership subscriptions.
Pros and cons of Kajabi vs Podia
There are some additional elements which Kajabi or Podia offer, or ways in which they outperform one another. However, the value of these features will depend on how useful they are to your business.
Some examples are as follows:
Kajabi
- Kajabi includes a sales pipeline builder, which allows you to easily build sales funnels – a functionality which Podia does not offer – and more advanced automated email marketing. Note: there are limitations for each of these depending on the package you choose.
- A content locking feature supports course compliance, by allowing you to restrict access to content until specific lessons have been completed.
- Kajabi’s ‘product blueprints’ provide a template, making it easier to build and structure your courses.
- As part of its ‘all-in-one’ platform, Kajabi allows you to build a fully functioning blog; this functionality isn’t available with Podia.
- Kajabi offers a mobile app which isn’t available with Podia.
Podia
- Offers unlimited courses and student numbers, as well as allowing you unlimited marketing emails and file hosting, on all plans. In contrast, Kajabi limits the number of ‘products’ – courses, subscriptions and other digital products – and the number of enrolled students, even with their most expensive plan.
- It is a considerably cheaper option than Kajabi. You can easily compare fees using our pricing section below.
- Podia’s messaging feature allows you to message students directly, making communication easier and increasing your customer engagement; a tool which isn’t available with Kajabi.
- Podia provides course completion certificates with its ‘shaker’ and ‘earthquaker’ packages. Kajabi doesn’t have this as a built-in feature, so you would have to use an integrated third party platform if you wanted to provide your students with certificates.
- Podia allows you to embed a ‘checkout’ button on any of your websites, for a quicker and easier buying process for your customers.
Pricing
When deciding which, if any, of these platforms to invest in, pricing will undoubtedly be an important consideration. Below is an overview of the packages, fees and any limitations on courses, student or admin users:
As discussed above, Kajabi offers a number of additional features in comparison to Podia, particularly in terms of marketing, assessment and analytics and reporting. However, its packages are more expensive than Podia, and there are limitations on the number of products, pipelines and enrolled students you can have with each of these.
Podia, meanwhile, offers unlimited courses, file hosting and student users on all of its payment plans. It is also the cheaper option of the two platforms.
Whether the additional cost of Kajabi is beneficial or not will depend on your business needs and which features you require or need to prioritise in order to meet these.
You can find more information about both platform’s payment plans in our Kajabi Pricing and Podia Pricing blogs.
Do Kajabi or Podia offer AI powered, adaptive courses that personalise content for users?
A key feature missing from both Kajabi and Podia is the ability to offer AI powered, adaptive courses that personalise course content for individual users. A platform which supports this would allow you to offer a personalised learning experience to your students.
A high quality adaptive learning platform, such as Godaptive, captures data as your learners interact with your course content and automatically reacts to their learning needs. Using artificial intelligence (AI), it can adapt and personalise the content, providing additional resources and further assessment tools where necessary, to support your users’ individual learning needs.
An adaptive learning platform gives you the same ownership over your courses and delivery of your desired content. The key difference you get with AI powered courses compared to traditional courses is a significant improvement in the user experience. Each student gets their learning environment optimised, resulting in improved learning outcomes and much higher student satisfaction.
An online course platform such as Godaptive, which enables the delivery of adaptive personalised courses, can make your online courses stand out from the competition. Supporting better user retention, exam results and course completion rates, you can increase engagement with your products and ensure that your users keep coming back for more.
To learn more about an AI powered, adaptive learning platform visit our ‘Benefits of an Adaptive Learning Platform’ blog. Here you’ll find more information about how adaptive learning works, why to choose it and the benefits for your business and learners.
Conclusion
In simple terms, if you want a fully fledged, customisable website, to run all aspects of your online course business, then Kajabi has features to do this. Its ‘all-in-one’ platform combines your course hosting, sales, marketing and blog all in one place; however, this does come at a premium price.
Podia is a more budget friendly alternative, if you’re looking for a simple online course and membership site, and can meet your business needs with some basic marketing tools. It also provides good integration with third party tools for any additional features you may need.
If you want a platform that allows you to offer AI powered, personalised learning for your students, giving you the edge over your competitors, visit the Godaptive website to find out more.
