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Podia vs Mighty Networks 2023: Side By Side Comparison
If you have been looking for a side-by-side comparison of Podia vs Mighty Networks to choose an appropriate platform for you to create and sell online courses and membership sites, we have you covered.
This article talks in-depth about who these platforms are for, what are the unique features of each, and how they fare against each other across a wide range of aspects such as sales and promotion features, course creation, membership building, community support, and more.
By the end of this guide, you should be able to make an informed decision between Podia vs Mighty Networks for your particular needs.
Before we jump in, note that both platforms offer a 14-day free trial, so you can always test both of them out for yourself if you’re still on the fence after reading this article.
Table of Contents
Podia vs Mighty Networks Summary
At the heart of it all, Podia is an all-in-one digital marketing platform where you can host your website, manage email marketing, create and sell online courses, design landing pages, create membership content, take payments, monitor analytics with dynamic reporting, and more.
Mighty Networks, on the other hand, is not so extensive. It started as a social networking site and has evolved to become a website-building service with a strong focus on community.
So, this platform is a good choice when you want to build online courses and membership content, build a community, and engage in meaningful conversations with your customers.
Where Podia Is Better Than Mighty Networks?
- Offers more customization to create online courses and high quality digital learning programs that look and feel just the way you want. You can even make code-level changes in the Shaker plan to get fine granularity in design.
- Accepts payments through PayPal and Stripe while Mighty Networks accepts only Stripe and no other payment method.
- More flexibility in business models as you can upsell and offer free trials to everyone and not just members as in Mighty Networks.
- No transaction fees.
- You have flexibility in choosing a price for your online content.
- Supports quizzes, video bookmarks, and course progress tools.
Where Mighty Networks Is Better Than Podia?
- There is a big focus on community, which means, you don’t need separate platforms like Facebook to interact and engage with your customers. You can create your own community platform with it.
- Similar to a social media community platform as students can see a personalized feed to know more about other members.
- Offers an Ambassador program to allow members to bring in more members.
- Enables you to automatically unlock content based on a member’s progress.
- Easy to search through directories to find specific members.
Now that you have a fair idea of what Podia and Mighty Networks can do, let’s get down to a detailed comparison of the two.
Online Community Builder Comparison
Mighty Networks is designed for building communities and engaging with them to build a vibrant and active customer base.
Since it started as a social media platform and expanded into a website builder for online communities and content, it has all the features to get your site up and running with minimal time and effort.
It also supports live chat during an event, the ability to invite select members to an exclusive event or content presentation, chat with members at any time, follow specific people, and more, which is great for community engagement.
All these features can help build not just an audience for your content, but also a community that can generate recurring revenue for you, not to mention the referrals that come with it.
Podia, on the other hand, has a feature called Community that allows interactions among members, and they can at any time, purchase your product, consume your content, join discussions, and more through a single platform. As a group owner, you can define the access level for each member as well.
Overall, Podia’s platform helps to build a community around your content, opens up opportunities for interactions, and creates a unified experience for your customers.
So, which of the two is better?
Mighty Networks is the winner here as it is better designed for building online communities quickly. In particular, the personalized feed and the possible levels of interactions are a big draw.
Online Course Creator and Engagement Comparison
Course Creation
Mighty Networks enables you to quickly create courses and interact with your members through it. The setup process is intuitive and requires no technical knowledge or additional resources.
However, you don’t have a lot of flexibility in the design process, as you will have to go with the default designs and dictated workflow of Mighty Networks. There is no option to customize the look and feel and at best, you can only make minor changes within the design and workflow.
In comparison, Podia offers enormous flexibility in design as it comes with different templates, layouts, and design elements that you can combine to create courses just the way you want. Further, the higher plan allows you to use code for extensive customization. Simply put, it’s all the tools you need to create courses, market courses, and sell courses online.
Engagement
Moving on to engagement, Mighty Networks makes it easy to engage and interact with your customers, so they can get answers to their questions or problems right away. Also, you can build a thriving community where members can help each other and in the process elevate their knowledge.
In some ways, this platform enables automatic social media marketing that can bring in considerable revenue and visibility for your content.
Moving on, Podia’s community-level engagement is not as extensive as Mighty Networks, but it enables you to create quizzes, bookmark videos, and track the progress of students to better understand their requirements and cater to their needs.
These reinforcement learning strategies can help serious learners.
Further, you can have drip content, commenting options for students, webinars, and more to engage your students.
When you compare the two, Podia is the better choice for course creation as you can have different types of content. It is also good for engaging with your audiences through your content. The design flexibility is another plus of Podia.
What’s The Easier Platform To Use?
Both platforms are easy to build and use.
A key difference for users is that Mighty Networks is designed more like a social media platform while Podia looks and feels like a pure course platform.
From a creator’s standpoint too, both platforms are easy to design, and hence both are winners in this category.
Sales and Promotion Features Comparison
Let’s see how the two platforms fare on this all-important aspect.
Podia
With Podia, you can sell different types of digital downloads such as eBooks, audio files, learning video tutorials, PDF downloads, cheat sheets, and more, besides courses and membership content. You can even bundle this content and upsell them easily. It’s easy to include free offers and coupons as well.
There is no limit on how much content you can create or sell on this platform.
Along with upselling, Podia offers a ton of digital marketing features to market your products to a wide customer base and increase the rate of profit. You can also schedule an event ahead of launch and do some pre-launch marketing for it.
With Podia, you can design a good-looking custom website to bring in visitors. It also offers many design templates and layouts to choose from, and you can even use programming code to make fine changes to the look and feel of your site.
Email marketing is another highlight of Podia as you can send broadcast emails, build automated funnels, and send event-based triggers when needed. It also helps you to build email lists with opt-in forms and segment them based on factors such as geography, frequency of purchase, and more.
Podia also supports affiliate marketing that is easy to set up and can be public or invite-only. Flexible commissions, instant payouts, and an integrated email marketing platform for affiliates are other salient aspects of Podia’s affiliate marketing.
All these features make Podia an effective digital marketing platform.
Mighty Networks
The biggest advantage of Mighty Networks is its social media. When members sign up for your course, it reflects in their followers’ feed, and this can enthuse more people to sign up for your content.
This has been proven to be an effective strategy and can provide wider visibility for your offering.
Besides this, Mighty Networks offers something called an Ambassador program where members can invite others or refer other members to your content. No commission is involved here, so it is not an affiliate program.
However, Mighty Networks does not support email marketing natively, though you can integrate a third-party tool for it.
Verdict
The winner is obvious – Podia, as it offers more advanced digital marketing features such as custom websites, email marketing, and affiliate marketing.
Analytics Tools Comparison
Mighty Networks offers advanced analytics displayed through an attractive dashboard.
You can stay on top of active membership rates and numbers, people who interact with your content, the messages exchanged about your content, and more.
Further, you can integrate with third-party tools through Zapier to get more advanced insights.
Moving on to Podia, you can integrate natively with Google Analytics and Facebook Pixels to get the insights you need. Besides this, Podia offers very little analytics on its own platform.
Which of the two is better?
Though Podia integrates natively with Google Analytics and Facebook Pixels, Mighty Networks has an edge here because you can find detailed statistics on your engagement and active user numbers through an attractive dashboard.
Support Team Comparison
Podia offers chat and email support, though chat is limited to business hours while email support is available 24/7.
A good feature of Podia is you get introduced to the support team as a part of your onboarding process, so there are names and faces to answer your questions.
Further, Podia has a Help Center for common questions and problems.
Moving on, Mighty Networks has an extensive Help Center for hosts and members that contains video deep dives and answers to FAQs.
You can also submit your concerns through a contact form and the company claims that it will get back in one or two business days. Otherwise, no chat or email support is offered at the time of writing this piece.
Undoubtedly, Podia is the winner in this category.
What Tools Are Available On Podia and Not On Mighty Networks?
- Email marketing
- Affiliate marketing
- Design templates and layouts for building custom websites from scratch.
- 24/7 chat and email support.
- Quizzes, drip content, video progress tracker, and other tools to boost interaction.
What Tools Are Available On Mighty Networks and Not On Podia?
- A social media-style platform where members can follow each other.
- Focuses on community building
- A native dashboard for analytics.
- Ambassador program to bring in new members through referrals.
Thus, these are the key differences between the two platforms.
Pricing
Mighty Networks pricing includes a few different plans, namely,
- The Community Plan – $23/month. This supports live streaming and is ideal for new communities.
- The Business Plan – $81/month. This is a good choice for a growing business selling online courses and memberships.
- Mighty Pro – Custom quote. Ideal for scaling a growing business.
Podia pricing includes three plans, namely,
- Mover – $39/month
- Shaker – $79/month
- Earthquaker – $179/month
Note that Podia offers free content and customer migration with an annual subscription. And of course, there’s a free 14-day trial
Conclusion
Now comes the big question – which of the two platforms should you choose?
Choose Podia when you want to,
- Leverage email and affiliate marketing to increase your revenue
- Have 24/7 support to answer your questions
- Use advanced engagement tools such as quizzes, video progress trackers, and more.
- Natively integrates with Google Analytics and Facebook Pixels to provide advanced analytics.
- Build custom websites just the way you want.
On the other hand, choose Mighty Networks when you want to,
- Create and sustain vibrant communities
- Have wide visibility for your offerings through a social media-style platform
- Get a site up and running in minutes, without worrying too much about customization.
- Get a native dashboard for analytics.
Overall, Mighty Networks is a good choice if you’re looking for a social media-style platform that’s geared for online courses and membership content. For all other preferences, including making the most of email and affiliate marketing, Podia is your choice.