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Podia vs Kartra: Side By Side Comparison (2023)
Have you been working hard to learn the differences between Kartra vs Podia, so you can choose the one that’s best suited for your business?
Well, we have you covered in this article!
Read on as we compare the similarities and differences between the two platforms across a whole range of features such as usability, flexibility, email marketing, user engagement, ease of checkout, affiliate marketing, pricing, and more.
But before we jump in, note that Podia offers a 14-day free trial while Kartra offers a 30-day money-back guarantee and a 14-day trial for $1.
With that, let’s head into the Podia vs Kartra comparison.
Table of Contents
Podia vs Kartra Summary
At the outset, Karta is an all-in-one digital marketing platform that comes with a wide range of tools for selling both digital and physical products while Podia is a platform designed for creating and selling online courses, memberships, webinars, downloads, and other digital content.
What I Like About Podia vs Kartra?
- Podia offers a ton of customization features for your online courses.
- It allows you to host webinars and other live streams. You can even record these webinars and share the recordings with your customers for a fee.
- Comes with a native live-chat feature to interact with your visitors in real-time.
- Supports custom themes and backgrounds.
- No transaction fee.
- Offers free and hassle-free migration from any platform.
What I Like About Kartra vs Podia?
- Kartra comes with advanced funnels that can be used for selling any product.
- Offers appealing and professional-looking block and page templates for your website.
- Comes with a built-in help desk to address any problems from your end customer.
- Supports advanced automation features like Behavioral Adaptive Marketing to help you understand your customers’ behavior and use them in marketing.
- Provides a built-in calendar functionality, so your customers can book and reschedule appointments, and even get automated reminders.
- Offers four variations of A/B testing.
Membership Platform Comparison
Memberships are a key feature of both platforms, so how do they fare against each other?
Kartra
With Kartra’s membership portal builder, you can drag and drop elements to create professional courses and landing pages. You can also choose from the existing templates to build your custom-branded membership sites.
Further, you can deliver content in text, video, or audio formats, and can even mix up these formats for your courses.
You can track the progress made by users through your content and can learn from this behavior to make your courses more appealing and engaging for your audiences.
Podia
Podia is a specialized membership platform and hence comes with many features that help you to build and sell digital content.
First off, it offers multiple membership tiers, starting from a free plan, so you have the flexibility to set your membership plans and the associated content. This way, you can gate content and charge a higher rate for premium content.
You can even pin the latest or the most important content and share it with specific people or communities for a wide reach. Podia makes it easy to engage your audience by asking them to like and comment on your content.
From a content creation standpoint too, Podia is simple and easy to use. It takes only a few minutes to set up these sites and you can connect to Slack, Facebook, and Palapa, so more paying members can join.
Verdict
Which one of the two is better?
Podia is hands-down better because it is specialized for content creation and distribution. With Podia, your courses tend to be media-rich with a flexible layout, supports customizable branding, and even enables you to see these changes in real-time.
What’s An Easier All-In-One Platform To Use Overall?
Podia’s page builder is easy to use and comes with rows and columns to make it easy to arrange your visual content. Setting up the membership site is easy as well.
Kartra also comes with a ton of digital marketing tools that make it easy to build and scale your business easily.
Overall, both tools are easy to use. When you compare the two, Podia has limited features and a shorter learning curve when compared to Kartra, so if you’re a beginner, Podia is the easier one to use.
Course Flexibility and Price Options Comparison
Let’s see how the two platforms fare when it comes to creating courses and marketing them.
Podia
Podia is a platform designed for creating and selling courses and other digital content. It comes with many features to add content sections, update settings when needed, and even set a price and payment options for your customers.
You can set standalone or drip courses at any time, and can even bundle them when needed. Also, you can pre-sell courses for crowdfunding campaigns, generate interest by setting a future date for releasing your course, and can even pre-launch them to test the interest levels.
Since marketing is integrated with Podia, you can also create email marketing campaigns to sell them.
Kartra
Moving on to Kartra, its drag-and-drop editor makes it easy to create courses using the existing block and page templates.
Kartra also makes it easy to structure your lessons by dividing them into different categories and sub-categories. You can even add individual articles for an intuitive navigation experience.
Probably the biggest advantage of Kartra is you can leverage its extensive digital marketing tools to sell your courses. For example, its sales funnel is a great way to generate leads for your online courses and boost their chances of a sale.
Its Customer Relationship Management and email marketing tools help with selling and distributing your content to a wide audience.
Verdict
Which of these two should you choose for creating a course?
Here too, Podia is the choice as it is designed for course creation and comes with a lot of flexibility with respect to its creation and pricing.
Learning and Engagement Tools Comparison
Enabling your audiences to learn and staying engaged with them is critical for every content creator. Which of the two is better on this front?
Podia
Podia enables you to use a ton of engagement and learning tools like quizzes and polls to keep your students interested in the course. Also, you can issue certificates at the end of the course to incentivize their efforts.
You can also track student progress and nudge them to complete the courses by sending emails and on-page messages. You can also interact with students through the on-chat widget.
Further, you can connect to more than 1,900 third-party platforms such as GitHub and SoundCloud to embed those content into your courses, so you can provide an elevated learning experience. This platform also supports live classes, webinars, and digital downloads that can make your courses stand out.
As a content creator, you have the option to deliver the entire course content at once or provide it section-by-section over time.
Kartra
Like Podia, Kartra also supports quizzes, surveys, and forms to engage your audience. Also, you can add videos, text, audio playlists, and more to keep your audience engaged.
Moreover, you can add multiple access levels to your course and charge students for the content they want to access. This flexibility is a win-win for both you and your students as they pay for just what they want while you get to earn extra income from your additional materials.
You can track the progress of your student and send emails or messages accordingly and even implement a help desk to answer any queries.
All this can be integrated with other Kartra tools to streamline the digital marketing process.
Verdict
Out of the two, Podia is the winner here as it comes with advanced features for providing varied content and integrating them from many third-party sites. While Kartra is a good choice to create and sell from the same platform, Podia is better in terms of engagement.
e-Checkout Comparison
Ease of checkout is known to play a big role in boosting the conversation ratio, as visitors tend to prefer a simplified checkout process. Let’s compare the checkout experience of the two platforms.
Podia
Podia makes it easy to upsell (add additional products at the time of checkout) and bundle products and services. Further, you can create and distribute coupons with a specific expiration date, usage cap, or product limitation, based on your business needs.
It also accepts credit cards and payments through Stripe or PayPal as well.
Overall, Podia’s checkout process takes less than 10 seconds, and this is sure to bring down the drop-out rates.
Kartra
Kartra enables you to set multiple price points for each product and many ways to pay them such as one-time or as recurring installments. It also supports one-click transactions, upsells, downsells, and order bumps to reduce the drop-out rates.
Moreover, you can create great-looking checkout pages to boost conversions.
Lastly, you can tag buyers automatically, assign lead scores against their profile, create an automated email sequence, and more.
Verdict
Both the platforms are excellent, so it depends on the specific checkout features you want to leverage.
Email Marketing and Automation Comparison
Podia comes with many built-in email marketing and automation features that make it easy to broadcast emails, automate campaigns, set up an email funnel for new audiences, and provide free content to collect leads.
Kartra, on the other hand, is built for email marketing and automation, and this is one area where it wins hands-down!
As noted in our Kartra review, it comes with a sequence builder for building advanced funnels and an if-then rulebook for custom automation. You can have advanced sequences in your email marketing, segment your leads into different groups, profile your prospects at every stage of the funnel, leverage its many plug-and-play campaigns, and more.
Affiliate Marketing Feature: What Platform Works Better?
Both platforms support affiliate marketing.
Podia gives the option to keep your affiliate as public or as an invite-only group. It also supports automated email campaigns for your affiliates, custom commissions, and instant payouts.
Kartra’s affiliate marketing features, on the other hand, are elaborate and come with custom affiliate portals and landing pages, flexible commissions, granular control over how and when your affiliates are paid, an approval process for affiliates, transaction-based and subscription-based affiliation, joint venture options, and more.
Needless to say, Kartra is the winner here.
Platform Support Comparison
Podia offers 24/7 live chat support, extensive documentation and resources, and onboarding assistance for the Shaker plan.
Kartra also has live support, an extensive document and training portal, and a ticketing application.
Since both platforms offer good support, both are winners in this category.
What Tools Are Available On Podia and Not On Kartra?
- Extensive course customization options
- Webinars and live streams
- Digital downloads
- Free migration from other platforms
- Option to embed your buy button in any web page
- Bundling of products at checkout.
What Tools Are Available On Kartra and Not On Podia?
- Advanced funnels for different marketing campaigns
- Four variations of split testing
- Behavioral Automation Marketing (BAM) to customize marketing based on users’ behavior.
- Built-in helpdesk and calendar
- Extensive marketing automation
- Drag-and-drop page builder.
Podia vs Kartra Pricing
Podia pricing includes three plans, namely,
- Mover – $39/month
- Shaker – $79/month
- Earthquaker – $179/month
Kartra pricing, on the other hand, includes four plans, namely,
- Starter – $99/month
- Silver – $199/month
- Gold – $299/month
- Platinum – $499/month
Conclusion
Now comes the big question – which tool is right for your business?
Choose Podia if you want,
- A comprehensive and flexible course creation platform.
- To provide a wide variety of course content from other platforms like SoundCloud and GitHub.
- To bundle your courses and upsell them during checkout.
- A platform to sell webinars, live streams, and digital downloads.
On the other hand, choose Kartra if you want,
- A complete digital marketing platform.
- To sell digital and physical products
- Landing pages and portals for affiliates.
- Funnels and advanced automation
- A drag and drop builder for creating your landing pages.
- Split testing and custom webhooks
- Calendar scheduling tool
Overall, Podia is a stellar course creation platform while Kartra is a comprehensive digital marketing platform.
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