Podia vs Teachable

Godaptive Team
Sep 22, 2021
Product

Are you searching for a platform to deliver your online courses? Choosing the right one can be difficult and time consuming. To help decide if it's suitable for your business needs, you’ll need to know what the platform offers and the costs involved.

This quick and easy guide will provide you with all the information you require to compare two popular online course platforms, Podia and Teachable.

What do Podia and Teachable offer?

Both Podia and Teachable provide the tools needed to build and host your online courses on their platform. As part of this, they offer the following:

  • Tools to sell your online courses, including integrated payment processing and affiliate marketing.
  • Tools to structure your courses into individual lessons and modules / sections.
  • Tools to assess your students.
  • Functions to support website building and hosting – leaving you free to focus on creating and selling your online courses.

Key features of Podia and Teachable

Podia and Teachable offer the following key features:

Features Podia Teachable
Website setup Links to existing website under custom domain.
Integrated payment processing
Marketing emails Not available with the ‘free’ package.
Analytics and reports Included in the ‘pro’ and ‘business’ plans.
Mobile app Yes but it’s not supported by Teachable.
Templates
Assessments
Webinars
Membership Available with ‘shaker’ and ‘earthquaker’ packages. Not available with the ‘free’ package.
Course completion certificates Available with ‘shaker’ and ‘earthquaker’ packages. Available with the ‘pro’ and ‘business’ packages.
Pipelines (for marketing)
Affiliate marketing Available with ‘shaker’ and ‘earthquaker’ packages. Available with the ‘pro’ and ‘business’ packages.
Artificial intelligence (AI) powered, adaptive courses

In terms of key features, there is little variation in what Podia and Teachable offer. The following sections will explore these in more detail and any differences between them across the two platforms.

What Podia and Teachable do well

The following are positive aspects of the Podia and Teachable platforms:

  • Both offer unlimited courses and student numbers on all of their packages.
  • Both allow you to add different content formats, including text, videos, pdfs, quizzes, etc., to your lessons.
  • They include video hosting with the use of Wistia.
  • Both Podia and Teachable allow you to build membership areas / communities.
  • Both allow you to integrate third party tools; although Podia does include a wider range of integrations.
  • They include marketing tools such as ‘upselling’ and email marketing. This is similar to other course platforms such as Thinkific and Kajabi.
  • Both include course completion certificates on their more expensive payment plans (see table above).

It’s important that whichever platform you choose has the tools you require to meet your business needs. The following explores the features Podia and Teachable offer for some key areas which you may need to consider:

Assessment

Both platforms allow you to create quizzes in order to assess your students.

With Teachable, these either take the form of ‘basic quizzes’ included in their ‘free’ and ‘basic’ plans, or graded quizzes included in their ‘pro’ and ‘business’ plans. For graded quizzes you also have the option of setting a minimum pass mark and number of attempts to pass. Additionally, quizzes can be used to support course compliance (for ‘pro’ and ‘business’ plans), with students needing to pass a quiz before gaining access to the next section.

There is no option to set a pass score for your quizzes with Podia, but students can view their score before moving on to the next section. Podia’s assessment functionality is basic and only allows you to include multiple choice questions, which limits your assessment opportunities. Likewise, Teachable only allows the use of multiple choice or multiple option questions, which prevents the use of open-ended questions for assessment.

Customer support

Podia and Teachable offer similar customer support options with email support and live chat. The only difference is the limitations each place on the live chat, which are as follows:

Podia:

  • Live chat times: Weekdays 9am – 6pm ET; weekends 9am – 5pm ET.
  • Available to: All customers regardless of their payment plan.

Teachable:

  • Live chat times: Monday – Friday 10am – 5pm EST.
  • Available to: Customers on the ‘pro’ or ‘business’ payment plans only.

Website setup

Podia allows you to develop a variety of webpages and ‘hosts’ your website, while Teachable links to your existing website. What you already have, and what you require to compliment this, will determine which is more suitable for your business.

Content dripping

Podia and Teachable allow you to ‘drip’ content, if you’d prefer, rather than making it all available at once. This gives you more control over when your students access content; although bear in mind that there are limits to how this can be used with each platform.

Analytics and reporting

While the option to track students’ progress is available with both platforms, Teachable offers more extensive analytics and reporting in comparison to Podia.

Teachable offers course-level analysis, with reports for every course, which includes lecture and course completion rates, video statistics and engagement, quiz scores and student leaderboards. In contrast, Podia does not provide reports on lecture or course completion rates, or student engagement with videos. Therefore, without the use of an integrated third party tool, it would be difficult to analyse content engagement using Podia.

Similarly, both Podia and Teachable provide tools to analyse your sales performance, but Podia’s sales reporting is basic.

If tracking student engagement with your content is a priority, the limited tracking abilities of Podia may be an important consideration.

Blogs

Although basic and lacking tools to make it customisable, Teachable does allow you to create a blog using the platform, a functionality which is not available with Podia. However, if you use a specialised blogging platform, such as WordPress, or don’t use blogging, then this may not be a consideration for you. Additionally, you may find the features offered by Teachable lacking if you require a fully functioning blog, and therefore may still require an alternate platform for this.

Pros and cons of Podia vs Teachable

The following are additional elements which Podia or Teachable offer, or ways in which they outperform one another:

Podia

  • There are no transaction fees on any of its plans. With Teachable, transaction fees do not apply to their higher priced packages, but $1 + 10% is charged on the ‘free’ plan and 5% on the ‘basic’ plan.
  • Podia offers a messaging feature which is not available with Teachable. This allows you to message students directly to increase your customer engagement and make communication easier.
  • Podia gives the option of embedding a ‘checkout’ button on any of your websites, to make the buying process quicker and easier for your customers.

Teachable

  • Offers a free package which includes unlimited courses, videos and student numbers. However, many features, such as being able to ‘drip’ course content, integrate third party tools and email marketing, are restricted. There is no free plan available with Podia.
  • Teachable provides tools to ensure course compliance. These include the option to make the completion of lectures, videos and graded quizzes compulsory. Note: this is only available with ‘pro’ or ‘business’ payment plans.
  • Teachable gives the option of a comments section on lectures to allow students to ask questions and discuss the content.

Pricing

Pricing will no doubt be an important factor when deciding whether to invest in either Podia or Teachable. The following is an overview of the packages, fees and any limitations on courses, student or admin users for the two platforms:

Podia Teachable
Package options Mover / Shaker / Earthquaker Free / Basic / Pro / Business
Monthly fee $39 / $79 / $179 $0 / $39 / $119 / $299
Annual fee $390 / $790 / $1790 $0 / $348 / $1188 / $2988
Transaction fees 0% Cost per transaction for each package:
Free: $1 + 10%
Basic package: 5%
Pro or Business: 0%
Limits on courses Unlimited Unlimited courses and videos
Limits on student users Unlimited Unlimited
Limits on admin users 5 additional ‘teammates’ included with the ‘earthquaker’ plan. $20/mo for each additional ‘teammate’ on the other two plans. Limited to 1, 2, 5 or 20 depending on package

Podia and Teachable’s pricing are not wildly different, making the details of what’s included in each of their packages more important. To compare the possible difference in price for your business, you should identify which package from each platform would meet your needs, and the fees associated with this.

You can find more information on the packages offered by Podia by visiting our Podia Pricing blog.

Do Podia or Teachable offer AI powered, adaptive courses that personalise content for users?

A key feature missing from both Podia and Teachable 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

Podia and Teachable are similar in what they offer as an online course platform, as well as being similarly priced. Podia has the added benefit of no transaction fees on any of its plans, a messaging feature and an embedded ‘checkout’ button. While Teachable offers a free plan (with limitations), more extensive analytics and reporting features, course compliance tools and lecture comment sections.

Whereas Podia and Teachable are similar in what they can offer your business, a platform such as Godaptive, which allows you to automatically personalise learning for your students, gives you a unique feature to make you stand out from your competitors. To find out more about AI powered learning, and how it can personalise your content for your students, visit the Godaptive website.

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