Podia vs LearnWorlds, which is better for you? That’s exactly what we’re going to take a deep look at throughout this article.
We will dive into all the details you need to know of both online course platforms to help you make the best decision for your education business.
If you’re looking to sell online courses, having the right software to run your business is crucial.
You need the best possible tools you can get for all aspects of creating and selling a course, whether that’s building the membership site, email marketing, or engagement tools.
Only then will you be able to grow and scale your education business. So, let’s take a look at which of these tools does the job better.
LearnWorlds vs Podia’s main difference is that LearnWorlds comes with more advanced tools to grow and scale your business.
This includes SEO-friendly pages, a complete branded website, and a powerful sales engine designed to help you sell your course more effectively.
On the other hand, Podia has some nice themes, but it lacks customization and branding capabilities.
However, it does make up a little with its relatively affordable pricing plans.
What Is LearnWorlds
LearnWorlds is known to be one of the best online course platforms on the market. The platform allows users to take their knowledge and build an entire business around it.
It focuses on ease-of-use and has some advanced tools to help users build and scale an online education business.
What LearnWorlds does incredibly well is offering an unbelievable amount of support and education to course creators.
For example, the LearnWorlds Academy and is a selection of both free and paid courses. Or, there are also daily webinars inside of the learning center to help users build their business.
LearnWorlds is a complete course creator platform that helps its users sell online courses.
What Is Podia
Podia is an online creator platform that was founded in 2014. Since then, it has become quite popular, with over 25,000 users of the platform.
Its main selling point is its ease of use and pricing compared to many other options in the course creation market.
Most Podia users utilize the platform to sell their digital products using its easy-to-use website, email marketing, and membership site tools.
Something that makes the Podia platform unique is that it allows you to sell your courses in 11 languages and 22 currencies. This makes it a good option for course creators outside of the US.
Podia is known as a great solution for beginners who want to sell their digital products and online courses.
Main Differences Between Podia and LearnWorlds
To make your choice easier, I wanted to jump straight into these course creation platforms’ differences.
Difference 1: LearnWorlds has SEO-friendly pages
One of the big differences between LearnWorlds and Podia is that LearnWorlds comes with SEO-friendly pages.
This means you’ll be able to rank in search engines organically if you optimize your pages well. And in return, you’ll generate more organic traffic to your pages and ultimately make more sales.
When using Podia, you’ll always be a little limited by the fact that you will never be able to rank in search engines. And, if you do want to, you’ll have to switch to another platform like LearnWorlds.
So, this is a big point for LearnWorlds.
Difference 2: LearnWorlds Has Better Website & Course Building Tools
LearnWorlds has a lot more to offer when it comes to website building tools. Some of the features that it has, which Podia doesn’t, include Student Segmentation, Editable HTML, and a WordPress plugin.
Additionally, LearnWorlds offers more templates as it has 400+ compared to Podia’s 9 template zones.
Something that I also noticed when comparing LearnWorlds vs Podia is that Podia lacks in the customization aspect.
LearnWorlds gives you a lot more options when it comes to branding your website or online school. You can also build more comprehensive websites than with Podia.
LearnWorlds also has much better course building tools. For example, their interactive course player, which Podia doesn’t have.
So, Learnworlds lets you build better membership areas and front-end websites for your courses.
Difference 3: LearnWorlds Is Better For Scalability
Podia is a decent tool for beginners. However, if you’re looking to scale your education business, you will need to go for a more robust course platform like LearnWorlds.
This is mainly because Podia does not have dedicated servers for high volume accounts, whereas LearnWorlds does.
This means when using Podia with high amounts of traffic; your website won’t handle it.
Course creators that have a popular online course will not be able to use Podia. We’ll cover this in more detail later on, though.
Difference 4: Podia has better Email Marketing tools (for beginners)
One aspect in which Podia has is its superior email marketing.
Podia has a built-in email marketing tool that you can use to send emails to your customers. When you’re starting, this is pretty useful as you might not need to use integration.
However, as you start to grow your education business, you will probably need something more advanced with better features, such as ActiveCampaign.
The reason for this is that Podia only has basic email responder tools, so you won’t be able to make the most out of what the email marketing platform has to offer.
Still, it’s something that Podia has, which LearnWorlds doesn’t. Although LearnWorlds has a long list of integrations, it doesn’t need to have an autoresponder.
Difference 5: Podia Is More Affordable On Higher Plans
Lastly, Podia is also more affordable on higher plans.
However, this is also because it has fewer features and support than LearnWorlds.
Using Them To Create Online Courses: Podia vs LearnWorlds
Now let’s look at the course creation processes with both of these platforms to get a better idea of how they work.
I have broken down the process to create online courses into 6 areas where we will compare LearnWorlds vs Podia of these options:
- Course creation
- Learning Communities & Social features
- Building your front-end website
- School administration
- Sales & marketing tools
- Scalability
Course Creation
Course creation is one of the areas in which LearnWorlds is superior.
Both platforms have basic features like file hosting, drip content, etc., it’s the more advanced features where LearnWorlds really takes the points.
Here’s a list of some of the most important course creation features that LearnWorlds has, but Podia doesn’t:
- Certificates
- Live classes with Zoom
- Graded quizzes
- Exams
- Interactive Videos
- Automatic Video transcription
- Private courses
- Custom HTML & SCORM
- & Many more
The full list would be way too long to count, but you get the point… LearnWorlds has much better course creation tools.
So, the course creator inside of LearnWorlds is a lot more comprehensive than Podia’s.
Learning Community & Social Features
Having a learning community around your online courses can often improve student-retention and help you make the online learning experience more enjoyable for your students.
While both platforms have basic tools like messaging and course discussion, LearnWorlds has the more advanced community & social features for your online courses.
Podia does not have a comprehensive community feature, nor can students message each other, and there is also no study group creation. LearnWorlds has all of these features.
Building Your Front-End Website
- Hosting
- Having an SSL Certificate
- Allowing you to connect custom domains
- Font customization
School Administration
We haven’t yet talked about School administration.
And again, the pattern that we have seen so far repeats itself. Podia has the basics, for example, dashboards, sales reporting, data exports, etc.
However, it lacks in those more advanced features.
There aren’t many areas that you can control like you can with LearnWorlds. For example, you can’t choose who can message whom.
Or you can also not set customizable options for the logins of your students.
Also, I’m not too fond of the fact that Podia because is not GDPR compliant, which is becoming increasingly important.
Sales & Marketing Tools
One more balanced area is sales and marketing tools.
Both platforms allow you to manage affiliates, send basic email campaigns, create coupons and integrate with various online tools.
Podia has better email marketing capabilities as it lets you build campaigns, whereas LearnWorlds only allows you to send out your notifications via email.
However, even Podia’s campaigns are still very basic if you compare them to an actual email marketing tool you will need once your business grows.
One feature that LearnWorlds has, though, and Podia doesn’t, is the 1 click sales funnel. This is a type of sales funnel designed to make everything as easy as possible for the customer.
It is a funnel where the sales page and sign-up are all on one page, making it very easy for the customer to buy your product.
The final difference in this area is in the payment processing. Both platforms have Stripe and PayPal. However, only LearnWorlds has Shopify and PagSeguro.
Additionally, only LearnWorlds has local gateways for the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, and a few other EU countries through Sofort.
Scalability
As we spoke about earlier, LearnWorlds has dedicated servers that can handle more traffic. This means, if you’re looking to grow into an enterprise business, Podia won’t be able to handle your high volume of traffic.
Additionally, LearnWorlds also comes with a dedicated account manager on the higher plans, which Podia doesn’t.
And if that wasn’t enough, here are more reasons why LearnWorlds is more scalable than Podia:
- You can create an app for your students
- SLAs are available upon request
- Flexible Invoicing
- Automatically creates Backups, while Podia doesn’t
- DPA
The Podia platform doesn’t have any of these, so it’s simply not scalable.
That’s another point for LearnWorlds, as most people will want to grow their business in the future.
Benefits & Drawbacks of Both Online Course Platforms
To recap what we have covered in this article, I created a quick overview of both platforms’ benefits and drawbacks.
Benefits of Podia
- There are no transaction fees
- Offers a 14-day free trial
- Very easy to use
- There is no limit on email contacts
- You can easily create your courses and websites in other languages
- It has a decent list of integrations
- The data and reports are good too
- Connect custom domain to your website/membership sites
- More affordable on higher pricing plans
Drawbacks of Podia
- It is not GDPR compliant, so you can’t legally have students from the EU.
- It doesn’t have the advanced features that LearnWorlds has in the course building, landing pages, and website building aspect.
- It is not scalable because they don’t have dedicated servers
- It does not have as good customer support, and an onboarding process like LearnWorlds does
- The website customization isn’t very good
- Your pages are not SEO-friendly
Benefits of LearnWorlds
- 30-day free trial available
- It gives you all the tools you need to create a fantastic online learning experience for your students
- SEO-friendly pages so you can gain organic traffic
- Much better customization than Podia, so you can build a branded website
- 24/7 customer support and 1 on 1 onboarding
- Dedicated Server and account manager available, so you can scale
- GDPR compliant so you can legally have students from the EU
- Great school administration and security tools
- A long list of integrations so you can connect with all your favorite tools
- More payment processing options available
- Beautiful templates for landing pages and websites
- Connect custom domain to your websites
- Full E-commerce sales system to help you sell your courses
Drawbacks of LearnWorlds
- Limited built-in email marketing
- Higher plans can be costly for a beginner
- It can be a little overwhelming at first because you get so many tools
Podia Vs LearnWorlds Integrations
Podia and LearnWorlds have some great tools to help you create and sell online courses but still need integrations to help you make the most out of them.
They both have some pretty comprehensive marketing features and have a good landing page & website builder so that you won’t need any integrations there.
The main area where you’ll need integrations with both of these platforms is for the email autoresponder. As already mentioned, Podia has a basic one built-in, but it probably won’t be enough for most users.
Both options make it easy to integrate your landing page or website with your autoresponder and also integrate with some of the most known autoresponders on the market.
Podia email autoresponder integrations:
- ActiveCampaign
- Aweber
- ConvertKit
- GetResponse
- MailerLite
- Drip
LearnWorlds email autoresponder integrations:
- ActiveCampaign
- Aweber
- ConvertKit
- MailChimp
Other software pieces that also natively integrate with Podia:
- Google analytics
- Zapier
- Facebook and Google Ads
- Sumo
Other software pieces that also natively integrate with LearnWorlds:
- Zoom
- Zapier
- Webex
- Google Analytics/Search console/Tag Manger
- Facebook and Google ads
- Paypal
- Stripe
- And more.
LearnWorlds Vs Podia: Pricing Comparison
I also wanted to talk you through the costs that both of these platforms come at to help you find the best platform.
LearnWorlds Pricing
LearnWorlds has very flexible pricing plans ranging from $29 to $99 per month, as shown in the image above.
This means you should be able to find a pricing plan that is right for your business.
If you are a beginner, I highly recommend starting out with the pro trainer plan.
With LearnWorlds, there is also a 30-day free trial available for you to try the platform before committing to it.
Podia Pricing
Podia’s pricing plans are pretty decent, as they start at just $39 per month with the mere plan.
However, if you really want to get the most important features like a blog, affiliate management, or the third-party code, you will have to be on the $79 per month shaker plan.
You can take a look at the full pricing plans below. Podia offers a 14-day trial that you can use to test the platforms.
Final Verdict: Podia or LearnWorlds?
As you have seen throughout this LearnWorlds vs Podia comparison, there is only one clear winner.
LearnWorlds has the most advanced features to not only help you sell a couple of digital products but instead to help you sell your online courses.
With LearnWorlds, you will have so many more tools to grow and scale your business than you will with Podia.
I have also searched the internet to find you the 30-day trial, which you can get started with by clicking the button below.
Calvin Lim is a professional blogger and founder of TheCalvinLim.
He enjoys helping others learn about various internet marketing tools and dedicated to helping people achieve success online.
One of the best side by side reviews of these two really good platform products.
The only other comment I’d add is about customer service. as a trial user, I need to contact Podia customer service and they were highly reactive and positive.
I’ve also been in touch with Learnworlds customer service and yes they are ok but they also appear to be a bit more sales driven than Podia. I had a one to one call with a Learnworlds advisor last week and a longer one to tomorrow. Going to be interesting.
Hey David, Glad that you like it. Thanks for your comment.