They empower creators to generate a wide variety of digital products (such as online courses, coaching sessions, webinars, workshops, and digital downloads) and manage their online communities. The two platforms are largely similar in function and capabilities, neither having any obvious advantage over the other.
So choosing one over the other comes down to use cases, preferences, and budget. To help with your decision, I’ll compare their primary features like community management, website building, and online courses. Then, I’ll cover coaching features and pricing, too.
So, let’s dive into Podia vs. Kajabi.
Comparison Summary: Podia vs. Kajabi
Podia is a user-friendly platform designed for beginner entrepreneurs that need an all-in-one tool to test whether their infobusiness idea has merit. Kajabi is best for professional infopreneurs, coaches, and consultants who are serious about building their online business for the long term, with a powerful all-in-one infobusiness solution.
| Podia | Kajabi |
|---|---|
 |
 |
| Price | |
|
🏆⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Offers a free plan. Basic plan is $33/mo, while Growth plan is $75/mo. |
⭐⭐⭐⭐ No free plan, 14-day free trial. Basic plan is $119/mo, while Growth plan is $159/mo. |
| Community | |
|
⭐⭐⭐⭐ Community feature is fully unlocked in the free plan. Very easy to set up and customize. |
🏆⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Membership is hard to implement. However, it has better community interaction features. |
| Website Builder | |
|
⭐⭐⭐⭐ No website templates. But websites can be created in as little as 10 minutes. |
🏆⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Offers several easy-to-use website templates. Highly customizable web pages. |
| Online Courses | |
|
⭐⭐⭐⭐ Simple and intuitive course creation tools. Offers several integrations but lacks templates. |
🏆⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Fully-featured course creator. Offers templates and built-in automations. |
| Coaching | |
|
⭐⭐⭐⭐ Barebones session creator. Provides integrations with booking services. |
⭐⭐⭐⭐ User-friendly session creator. Provides coaching packages containing multiple sessions. |
| Best for | |
| Beginners looking for affordable software to test their infobusiness ideas. | Professionals that need an industry-standard tool for long-term content creation. |
| Try free forever (no card required) |
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What is Podia?
“Shockingly simple” 🤯
Founded in 2014, Podia grew out of a desire to help entrepreneurs earn a living from their passion. It is a feature-rich content creation platform designed to help you market your work.
Podia excels at creating online courses, offering unlimited file hostings, upsells, and student comments. Furthermore, it offers the best third-party integrations for courses, coaching sessions, and webinars. Podia will never take a cut of your earnings. Instead, it offers unlimited bandwidth for video hosting and allows you to sell to as many customers as possible. You can acquire more clients using its advanced email marketing tools, including workflow automation, segmentation, and campaign analytics.
Due to its ease of use and no-code features, Podia is great for beginners that need a low-cost solution to prototype their content-creation ideas.
What is Kajabi?
“One stop shop” 🚏
Kajabi began in 2010 to help business owners in the digital knowledge industry achieve success.
The first thing you notice when using Kajabi is just how in-depth its community tools are. Kajabi is much more than a chat app. It provides features to keep your members engaged, such as community challenges, Q&A sessions, and virtual meetings. While it doesn’t have many unique features, Kajabi provides more sophisticated versions of the same tools in competing products. For example, the website builder, online course creator, sales funnel builder, and coaching tools have way more quality-of-life options than Podia.
Kajabi is an excellent option for both individuals and teams. It has continued to empower entrepreneurs, experts, and influencers who are serious about their success online.
Podia vs. Kajabi: Community
Podia’s communities have excellent chat features and are easier to manage, Kajabi offers better community activities.
| Podia | Kajabi |
|---|---|
| ⭐⭐⭐⭐ | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
Podia and Kajabi allow you to edit and delete groups but Podia gives you more customization options.
Podia’s edit options include topic, description, image, notifications, and access.
Kajabi only allows you to edit the group title.
All in all, I found creating and customizing groups in Podia easier.
Writing posts in Podia communities is similar to dedicated chat apps like Discord and Slack, while Kajabi’s text editor is much simpler.
Podia includes a fully-featured text editor with tools like bold, italics, link embed, numbered lists, and bullet points. You can even attach any file type, including photos and videos.
On the other hand, Kajabi only supports simple, unformatted text and multimedia files.
Kajabi offers more unique community features like polls and challenges.
Because polls are just as easy to create as regular posts, community members can vote on pressing issues with ease, making Kajabi’s communities more engaging. In addition, you can create community challenges and display top members on a leaderboard.
Another exciting feature is the circle meetup for physical and virtual events. These meetups are repeatable and send notifications to all invited members. Furthermore, Kajabi offers a live room with video and audio capabilities.
Winner: Kajabi, narrowly. It’s easier and faster to create communities in Podia and its messaging system is much more sophisticated. However, Kajabi feels more like a community than a simple chat app. Features like challenges and circle meetups can help members develop deeper relationships.
Podia vs. Kajabi: Website Builder
Web pages are easy to create and customize in Kajabi, Podia is just as easy to use but lacks templates.
| Podia | Kajabi |
|---|---|
| ⭐⭐⭐⭐ | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
Kajabi doesn’t have a lot of templates, but they cover a lot of use cases.
Kajabi offers website and landing page templates for different types of businesses, including fitness, cooking, and finance. Each template is fully customizable: you can change background colors and images, font types, and hyperlinks. The web page elements can also be animated to give your website a dynamic look.
Podia helps you design websites for mobile devices but may be limiting.
Unlike Kajabi, Podia’s page builder lets you preview the appearance of web pages on various screen sizes, allowing you to optimize your website for mobile devices.
On the flip side, Podia comes with one default website template. Sections are easy to create but have limited customization options. For example, there are no animations for web page elements. Moreover, you can’t add custom buttons to web pages. You’ll be able to create a sales page in no time, but it’ll turn out simple looking, accordingly.
Winner: Kajabi. Both apps offer similar interfaces for building websites. However, Kajabi’s templates allow you to create websites much faster than with Podia.
Podia vs. Kajabi: Online Courses
Kajabi’s online course creator is simple but powerful, while Podia is basic but offers third-party integrations.
| Podia | Kajabi |
|---|---|
| ⭐⭐⭐⭐ | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
Kajabi’s course creator is more sophisticated than Podia’s.
Kajabi offers several quality-of-life features designed to make online course creation extremely easy.
For example, it provides dedicated sections for audio and video files that aid your teaching. It also has a download section for additional course content and an import function that allows you to move content from other modules and courses. Meanwhile, Podia only allows you to embed files within text.
Both Podia and Kajabi support quizzes and assessments, but Kajabi’s feature gives more options for the type of questions and formatting.
You can lock the modules until students complete the lessons or set drip days until the course content is released to customers.
Kajabi provides comprehensive product & course templates.
In the Kajabi course builder, you’ll find eight product templates to help customize the appearance of your courses to students.
You can also import custom templates from Google Drive, Dropbox, or your local device. And as you would expect, Kajabi allows you to edit these templates to match your tastes. What’s more, some of these templates are made by other Kajabi users.
It also provides course templates that create a course structure with some mock content, which you can then edit. It also allows you to preset certain functions. For example, you can create a drip-style course where lessons are gradually unlocked over several days or weeks. Or, you can use the Membership template to create a pre-configured membership site.
Podia offers third-party integrations to enhance courses, while Kajabi is more self-reliant.
Podia allows you to connect your account with video streaming apps like Zoom for live webinars. You can also connect with email services like MailChimp, MailerLite, ActiveCampaign, and ConvertKit to send out email campaigns and other notifications to your subscribers.
On the other hand, Kajabi is designed to be self-dependent, with only a few integrations for payments and calendar bookings. However, if you want to use other tools – like Zoom for video conferencing – you may be overpaying for the feature in Kajabi.
And about payment processing—both Podia and Kajabi use Stripe and PayPal.
Kajabi provides built-in automation, while Podia relies on Zapier.
Kajabi’s course automation allows you to execute various actions when customers fulfill specific conditions, such as offer purchases, lesson completions, and passed quizzes. These actions include tag removals, event registrations, and module unlocks.
Podia relies on Zapier integration to perform the same automation functions as Kajabi. Unfortunately, users must purchase a Zapier subscription and upgrade to Podia’s $89 Shaker Plan, or higher, to use these automations.
Winner: Kajabi. Kajabi’s course creator contains more tools and customization options than Podia. Kajabi also offers course templates and automation for no additional cost.
Podia vs. Kajabi: Coaching
Kajabi offers coaching packages containing multiple sessions, while Podia is more barebones.
| Podia | Kajabi |
|---|---|
| ⭐⭐⭐⭐ | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
Coaching sessions are largely similar in Kajabi and Podia. They both offer integrations with booking and calendar services. However, Kajabi takes the edge in this category.
Kajabi can group sessions into packages, while Podia’s coaching sessions are offered individually.
Kajabi allows you to create coaching packages with multiple sessions.
These sessions have separate agendas and coaching resources but are offered under one pricing bundle. Even so, Kajabi provides the option to offer a single coaching session.
Kajabi’s coaching session interface is more user-friendly than Podia’s.
Unlike Podia, Kajabi provides dedicated controls for outlining each session’s agenda. It also includes a similar UI for adding session resources like files and links.
Meanwhile, Podia only provides a booking calendar and session instructions.
Winner: Kajabi. Kajabi’s course packages and ergonomic UI give it an advantage over Podia.
Podia vs. Kajabi: Pricing
Podia is cheaper than Kajabi, but only for individuals and small teams. Kajabi offers great value for money for larger teams.
| Podia | Kajabi |
|---|---|
| ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
Podia offers a free plan, Kajabi has a 14-day free trial.
Both entry-level pricing plans offer a complete website, webinars and events, and live chat support. However, unlike Kajabi, Podia provides unlimited topics and members in the free plan.
In contrast, Kajabi offers automation, a 0% transaction fee, unlimited campaign emails, and the Kajabi University in its Basic plan. Kajabi’s pricing model is such that higher tiers reduce limits rather than unlock more features.
Podia’s plans work best for small teams, while Kajabi offers more value for larger teams.
| Free Plan | Basic | Growth | Pro | Annual Discount | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Podia | $0/month
250 broadcast emails 1 user |
$39/month
5000 broadcast emails 1 user $20/additional user |
$89/month
1 user $20/additional user |
$166/month
1 user $20/additional user |
17% |
| Kajabi | – | $149/month
Unlimited broadcast emails 1 user |
$199/month
10 users |
$399/month
25 users |
20% |
If your team contains more than one member, Podia’s pricing plans can quickly get just as expensive as Kajabi’s — or more. At $20 per additional team member, Podia’s second-tier, Shaker plan, with 6 team members, is already $10 more expensive than the equivalent Kajabi Growth plan.
The difference is even larger at the highest pricing tiers. For example, Kajabi offers 25 admin users in the Pro plan at $399, while Podia with 25 users would cost $599.
All things considered, the additional features on each plan for both software offset the cost of additional users. Kajabi tends to be cheaper at higher tiers, but Podia does not require plan upgrades to add more users.
Winner: Podia wins by a small margin. Podia’s free plan rivals Kajabi’s paid Basic plan. Podia unlocks the most vital features in this plan, and upgrading to higher subscription tiers doesn’t break the bank.
Podia vs. Kajabi: Pros & Cons
At the end of the day, Kajabi’s tools are more refined than Podia’s.
 |
|
|---|---|
| Podia Pros | Podia Cons |
| ✅ Great website builder | ❌ Doesn’t have templates |
| ✅ Beginner friendly | ❌ Lacks vital community features |
| ✅ Lots of integrations | ❌ Pricing doesn’t scale well |
| ✅ Super easy to use | |
| ✅ Most features unlocked in the free plan | |
 |
|
|---|---|
| Kajabi Pros | Kajabi Cons |
| ✅ Fully-featured tools | ❌ Expensive for individuals and small teams |
| ✅ In-built automations | ❌ Limited integration options |
| ✅ Lots of templates | ❌ Communities are harder to create and manage |
| ✅ Excellent community features | |
| ✅ Clean and intuitive user interface | |
| ✅ Advanced marketing features and analytics | |
| ✅ All-in-one platform | |
| ✅ 24/7 live customer support | |
Final Verdict: Podia vs. Kajabi
Podia is an affordable solution for beginner infopreneurs with busy schedules, while Kajabi excels as an all-in-one tool to help creators build a professional knowledge-based business.
| Podia | Kajabi |
|---|---|
| Best for:
Beginners looking for a cheap, easy-to-use online course platform. |
Best for:
Professional content creators that need a self-contained, all-in-one tool. |
Podia and Kajabi share many similarities. Yet, each has certain advantages that make them better suited for certain use cases. So, I recommend testing both and thinking about how they help with your specific needs before making a decision. But if you’re looking for a quick answer…
Use Podia if:
- You like simple, easy-to-use tools.
- You need extensive third-party integrations.
- You want a sophisticated community chat service.
Click here to get started with Podia!
Use Kajabi if:
- You love using templates to organize and speed up your activities.
- You want better community engagement features.
- You need advanced automation features.
