Kartra vs Podia Comparison, Review & Buying Guide (2022)

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Kartra vs Podia Comparison

Kartra is a marketing solution that includes a suite of tools such as a course builder, funnel builder, CRM, affiliate center, booking app, video hosting, helpdesk, checkout tool and many more.

Podia is a great platform for creating, hosting, managing and selling your online courses.

Therefore, both Kartra & Podia come with several things in common. But, there are some crucial differences that you need to consider in order to make the right decision when purchasing your tool.

So in this Kartra vs Podia in-depth comparison review has covered everything you need to know before your purchase.

Which One Is The Best Solution For Your Business - Kartra vs Podia Comparison Table


kartra logo

Kartra

podia-logo

Podia

Price Range

$99/m - $499/m

$39/m - $79/m

Key Features

  • Checkouts
  • Pages
  • Leads
  • Forms
  • Funnels & Campaigns
  • Mail
  • Memberships
  • Affiliate Management
  • Marketplace
  • Videos
  • Helpdesks
  • Calendars
  • Agency
  • Online courses
  • Webinars  
  • Affiliate Program 
  • Email marketing 
  • Digital downloads 
  • Bundle up  
  • Website builder
  • Payment portal 

Money-Back Guarantee

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Kartra vs Podia In-Depth Review

Kartra is an all-in-one marketing tool-suite for launching and selling both physical and digital products in one place.

It comes with powerful features including;

what is kartra
  • Checkouts: This helps you to sell you products/services online.
  • Drag-and-drop Page Builder with hundreds of professionally designed templates that are super flexible & 100% mobile optimized.
  • Leads: This helps you to create and build your customers database.
  • Funnels & Campaigns: This helps you to convert your visitors to customers.
  • Mail: This helps you to send automated emails & SMS to your clients.
  • Membership: This feature helps you to deliver your content, course, or training material.
  • Video Hosting: This enables you to host your videos without depending on YouTube or Visita.
  • Helpdesks: This helps you to provide ticketing and live chat support to your clients.
  • Calendars: This helps you to organize a one-to-one appointment and meetings with your client.

Similarly, Podia is an all-in-one software for selling your membership products, digital or downloadable products. 

It also comes with unique features to help you run a successful online business. These tools include;

Podia online course platform
  • Online courses & digital downloads for creating and selling digital products.
  • Email marketing campaign: Podia lets you create nicely-formatted emails and drip campaigns so that you keep engaging with your customers.
  • Instant payout with no transaction fees.
  • Free migration from anywhere you had previously hosted your content.
  • Webinars: This helps you to host webinar marketing events.
  • Bundle up:This tool helps you to bind your products and sell them as a single item.
  • Website: Podia comes with powerful website builder tools to allow you to create a stunning, professional-looking website without the need to hire a tech guru for your team.
  • Embed your buy button: This helps you to convert any page of your site into a course sales page so that your audiences can purchase your content without leaving the page.
  • Payment portal: This enables you to integrate Stripe or PayPal accounts with your Podia platform for instant payment.
  • Membership: This tool helps you create various membership levels and include different products & prices.

So, let’s see what each tool offers;

Kartra vs Thinkific Similarities

Ease of Use

Podia offers the perfect user-experience for both beginners and experienced users. The dashboard is fitted with easy to understand features for creating your website & hosting your course. 

Similarly, Kartra has an intuitive user interface, making it a perfect tool for you, regardless of your online marketing experience. Kartra’s Done For You Campaign features make the entire tool fun and easy to use. 

Although Kartra may have lots of features and tools, which may be overwhelming, especially if you are a new user, it comes with lots of video tutorials and materials with a responsive customer support team to help you operate the platform hassle-free.

Winner: Both tools win in this category.

Templates and Design

Both Kartra and Podia include easily customized, 100% mobile responsive templates. Both platforms include a drag-and-drop tool that makes your design process enjoyable. 

Podia’s templates are pre-set for making your checkout, sales page, membership pages, and course pages as attractive as you can make. However, Podia comes with limited templates.

Similarly, with Kartra, you get access to hundreds of templates, including the sales page, squeeze page, coming soon, checkout and many more. The templates are tailored to fit any sort of business and you can quickly customize them without coding.

Kartra also includes block templates that look clean and highly professional. Podia doesn’t offer block templates. In addition to this, its page templates look quite outdated.

Winner: Kartra.

The Tool With The Best Membership Site Features

When it comes to membership sites, this is where we have stiff competition. Lets see how each tool is playing in the market;

Drip content

With podia, you can give your students immediate access to your online course or deliver it section-by-section over time.

Equally, Kartra allows you to make your content available all at once or drip it over time in a truly set-and-forget fashion.

Winner: Both tools tie

Quizzes

Podia allows you to test your students’ knowledge with interactive quizzes at the end of every module.

Kartra doesn’t offer this feature, but you can integrate with third-party tools for you to use such features.

Winner: Podia

Digital Products

Podia allows you to host and sell any digital downloads in various formats, including eBooks, PDFs, cheat sheets, checklists, video files, audio files, text, or any content you want without headache.

On the other hand, Kartra comes with the best video hosting functionalities. You will also be able to host any file formats such as text, video, audio podcast, or a mix of all three‬.

Winner: Both Kartra & Podia ties

Helpdesks

Should your students or clients face any challenges regarding your courses or product, Kartra offers you a help desk functionality with a ticketing system and live chat that allows you to take care of their issues on time.

Podia does not have such functionalities, so you will dig deeper into your pockets to integrate such tools with your Podia platform. 

Winner: Kartra

The Best Online Course Features

Both Podia and Kartra include a modern look and a clean & drag-and-drop interface. You get support for an unlimited number of courses, customers, and sales. Both tools’ drip content is also perfect for sending out courses and lessons over a certain time frame. 

So, with regards to Podia vs Kartra Online Course comparison, both tools come out with powerful functionalities.

Podia allows you to upload just about any type of file to your online course. It includes a built-in sales page for collecting money and giving out coupons. It also comes with a pre-sales page so that you can pitch your courses and collect email addresses from potential students.

This is the same with Kartra. Its great benefits are that it helps you to do more than selling your courses. It comes with powerful marketing features that help you create a stunning website and a high-converting funnel for your course.

So, there is nothing that is offered by Podia which can’t be done by Kartra. 

Therefore in this section, you might prefer Podia since it is more affordable than Kartra. 

Winner: Tie with both tools

The Best Email Marketing Features

Both tools offer integrated email marketing in every feature, including digital downloads, online courses and membership sites to help you retrieve emails from prospects and clients.

With Podia, you can automatically send drip content through emails. Podia also offers email newsletters that you can customize the content and keep your audience engaged. 

On the other hand, Kartra comes with powerful email marketing tools such as Email Automation, Broadcasts, Tagging, & visual Sequence builder with If-Then and Yes-No option. 

Kartra also enables you to create Behavior-Based Automation so that you can send emails based on your audience’s behavior.

Both Podia and Kartra can also track your audience click rates, open rates and unsubscribe rates but when you need advanced automation then Kartra win the game while Podia can do regular email marketing only 

Winner: Kartra

Pricing

Podia provides a 14-day FREE Trial without the need to type in your credit card information. What's more is that if you pay for Podia on a yearly basis you are going to get a better monthly rate. 

With only two Podia pricing packages, you are not confused when trying to figure out which features you need to pay for.

With Kartra, you will have an opportunity to test its features for 14 Days at $1. 

What makes Kartra’s pricing affordable is that you will get a huge discount of up to 25% with annual payment options.

So, although Podia is the cheapest platform in this Podia vs Kartra pricing comparison, it doesn't offer the cheapest way to make a general online store since it doesn’t include all the features you need, rather it's only focus on selling online courses hence come with little features. So, you will have to integrate other third-party features which include extra costs.

Therefore, Kartra makes up for the price with the awesome powerful all-in-one features.

Winner: if you want the best platform for only hosting and selling courses in an affordable way, then Podia takes the win. Otherwise, Kartra will be much more affordable if you are looking for the best all-in-one platform for your online courses.

Podia vs Kartra Differences

  • Kartra includes advanced Sales Funnels & Campaign features to help you convert your visitors into recurring customers, a feature that Podia does not offer.
  • Kartra comes with a Help Desk feature to create a live chat, canned responses and ticket systems.
  • Kartra includes essential agency features, especially if you are an agency handling multiple clients. This feature enables you to manage all of your client’s accounts within a centralized dashboard, thus increasing your productivity.
  • Kartra includes a Calendar app for managing appointments with your clients.
  • Kartra comes with lead scoring & lead tagging options to enable you to segment your contact lists. Podia does not offer this feature.
  • Unlike Kartra, Podia offers built-in Quizzes & Survey features to enable you to interact with your students actively.
  • Podia comes with in-build webinar tools to help you host live events that enhance your online marketing, hene improving sales. With Kartra, you will have to integrate with their sister company - WebinarJam & EverWebinar - for you to host webinar events. 

Where does Kartra Work Best?

  • Kartra comes with a Done For You Campaigns & Funnels Sharing feature, which is more flexible and advanced.
  • Kartra offers Landing page building, CRM, online Checkout and many more must have features for any online business.
  • Kartra enables you to split test your pages, funnels and emails so that you choose the one that will perform best. This is not possible with Podia.
  • As Kartra includes all the essential features to market your products and you don’t need to go with external integrations which will come with extra cost. 

Where does Podia Work Best?

  • Podia provides excellent course hosting and customization features than Kartra.
  • Even though Kartra has most membership features that Podia offers but if you only need a course platform then Podia is a little bit cheaper with this aspect. 

Kartra vs Podia Pricing

Kartra Pricing

kartra pricing plans
  • Kartra Starter Plan at $99/m which gives you all features except Kartra Agency, but limits traffic, leads and domains.
  • Kartra Silver, Gold & Platinum Plans costs $199/m, $299 & $499/m respectively. As you upgrade to a higher tier, each plan gives you more leads and domains.

With the upper Kartra plans, you get Kartra agency, unlimited pages, products, membership sites & funnels.

You will also get a discount of 25% on any Kartra plan you purchase with a 14-day trial at only $1. Find out the in-depth Kartra Pricing guideline here.

Podia Pricing

podia pricing plans
  • Podia Mover Plan at $39/m: Suitable if you need a tool to launch your first digital product. It includes all the basic Podia features plus drip course content.
  • Podia Shaker Plan at $79/m: Suitable if you need powerful marketing features to grow your digital business. This plan includes all Mover plan features plus advanced traffic, onboarding, migration assistance, drip course content, affiliates, and memberships.

Podia also offers a 14-day Free Trial and an annual discount to all of its plans.

Kartra vs Podia Pros & Cons

Kartra Pros:

  • Kartra comes with a free to use DFY marketing funnels and campaigns.
  • It includes hundreds of professional page templates.
  • Kartra offers you checkout and shopping cart solutions for your digital products.
  • Kartra also offers awesome Facebook community and customer support.
  • Kartra is an all-in-one platform..

Kartra Cons:

  • Kartra is expensive compared to Podia.
  • Kartra doesn’t offer you complex student management and engagement features like Podia.

Podia Pros

  • Podia comes with lots of powerful student engagement & management features.
  • Podia is much cheaper and affordable than Kartra
  • Podia is easy to learn and use
  • It offers a free trial.

Podia Cons

  • Podia does not include many features such as calendar app and helpdesk.
  • It comes with limited page templates.
  • Lacks lots of customization like Kartra.
  • Podia is not a full marketing tool like Kartra.

Kartra vs Podia: Which Tool Is Right For Your Business?

If you are an online course creator and your primary objective is to focus more on marketing courses, Podia is a perfect choice.

It includes good course customization options, bundling courses, zero transaction fees, student engagement features and many more amazing membership tools. 

But if you are an agency owner, digital marketer, blogger, or eCommerce owner, Kartra is the best tool.

Kartra comes with all the features you will ever need for your online business, not only to launch your digital products but also to market and make more sales. 

So, Podia is more focused on the course creation aspect whereas Kartra is more into all-in-one marketing platforms.

What is My Recommendation?

Kartra is the #1 platform you need to consider integrating into your business and here are the reasons;

  • Kartra’s drag-and-drop editor makes it super simple to create stunning courses.
  • Kartra includes all the necessary  features for selling your courses, including Sales funnels & Powerful Email Marketing tools.
  • Kartra comes with DIY marketing campaigns that you don’t need to be a tech expert to create.
  • Kartra helps you to create high-converting landing pages & sales funnels
  • Kartra comes with lots of beautiful templates to choose from.
  • Kartra’s Helpdesk & Calendars help you manage your business at a single place.

Top Features You Need to Consider When Selecting The Best Tool for Your Business

  • In-Built Video Hosting for hosting your videos and enhancing your marketing.
  • Scheduling apps that help you to schedule appointments with your clients.
  • Flexible eCommerce tools to help you sell any type of digital products
  • Seamless Integration to enable you to work with other popular tools and third-party service providers.
  • Email Automation Service to help you send automatic emails to your subscribers.

Pro Tips: First find your requirement, Second plan your budget and based on these you have to compare the tools to decide which one is right for you.

Kartra vs Podia FAQs

Q. Which platform should I choose for my course creation?

Since Podia gives more focus on course creation features and functionalities, it is the best tool to consider. However, if you are looking to run your entire business besides just selling courses, then Kartra is the perfect choice.

Q. Does Kartra offer a free plan?

No, Kartra does not come with a free plan but they offer a 14-days free trial at $1.

Q. Podia is very cheap, is it worth it?

Yes, Podia offers amazing features if your main focus is to create and sell online courses only.

Kartra vs Podia Final Verdict

At this point, Kartra stands out and wins almost everything except for pricing.

However, choosing Kartra or Podia will largely depend on your overall objectives.

Both tools are excellent platforms and can help you sell your digital products and deliver an amazing experience to your audience, as well as growing your online business.

Kartra gives all the essential tools, with the best funnel campaign features to run your online business.

Similarly, Podia offers amazing features and tools that are focused on helping you create better digital products.

So, should you go with Podia or Kartra?

If you are exclusively searching for a course platform then check this Best Online Course Platforms guideline.

Therefore, if creating and selling online courses, memberships, and digital products are your main focus, then go with Podia to get a 14-Day Free Trial now.

But if you want to do more than just creating and selling digital products, get started with Kartra’s 14-Day Trial at $1 only and get access to all amazing features for your online business.

Bhargav Bavarva is a digital marketing consultant & affiliate marketing expert. He helps local, small & SaaS businesses to get consistent and predictable leads. He also guides people like you to find the right software tools by extensive review, comparison and personal recommendation to make informed decisions and earn more money!

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