Kartra vs Podia 2023: Which is Better? (Comparison Guide)

Searching for a helpful and detailed comparison between Kartra and Podia?

Then let me welcome you to where you’ll get to see the BEST, then choose the right one for your online business.

In this Kartra vs Podia comparison – I’m going to compare both platforms in terms of:

• Membership site/course hosting
• Email marketing and automation
• Sales funnel building
• Page editor and design
• Pre-built customizable templates
• Affiliate management center
• Integrations

And many more…

Both Kartra and Podia serves entirely two different use-cases. Kartra can help you build your entire online business to sell both your digital and physical products, while Podia focuses mostly on creating digital products and memberships.

Kartra wins in all ramifications obviously but we are going to dig deeper to review and see for ourselves how.

• Difference and Similarities
• Kartra vs Podia Overview
• Benefits of Kartra vs Podia
• Core Features Comparisons
• Kartra vs Podia Price
• Pros and Cons
• Final Thoughts

Differences and Similarities Between Kartra vs Podia

Before we dive in fully, there are things that bring both Kartra and Podia together and also features that tears them apart.

Starting with their differences:

• Kartra comes with an inbuilt helpdesk that allows you to easily provide immediate customer support via live chat. Podia currently doesn’t have a built-in helpdesk
• Podia comes with a better customization features for memberships and courses than Kartra
• Kartra’s built-in Calendar functionality allows your clients to self-book and reschedule based on your availability, and even sends automated reminders. Nothing like this on Podia
• Kartra comes with advanced automation features like Behavioral Adaptive Marketing (BAM) and Dynamic 1click upsells, downsells and order bumps for increased conversion rates
• Podia provides an inbuilt webinar hosting and live streams. While on Kartra you’d have to integrate with WebinarJam or EverWebinar
• Kartra is much better when it comes to funnels, plus, also comes loaded with pre-made funnels and campaigns. This isn’t on Podia
• Podia offer its users free (and hassle-free) migrations on any annual plan. On Kartra you can’t do all that yourself
• Unlike Podia, Kartra lets you to A/B split testing of the pages up to 4 variations to find out the winners

Here are the similarities between Podia vs Kartra:

• You can create your membership site and create your online courses on both platforms
• Both Podia and Kartra comes with an inbuilt affiliate management tool for managing your army of affiliates
• Both provides users with a page builder and editor to create a sales pages and landing pages. Although Kartra provides more templates than Podia
• Podia and Kartra offers you email marketing system sending emails, segmenting contacts, broadcast, automated follow-up etc
• Kartra and Podia never takes a cut of your sales – meaning no transaction fees. All you’ll pay is the standard processing fee charged by Stripe or PayPal.

Kartra vs Podia: Overview of Both Platforms

Let’s started with Kartra:

What Is Kartra?

Kartra is one of the best sales funnel builders, a marketing automation platform, and a customer relationship management tool for course creators, marketers, and online business owners.

Kartra is a complete marketing tool-suite or an all-in-one software hosting lots of marketing solutions from one end.

Kartra’s goal is to ultimately eliminate duct-taping for online entrepreneurs so they can build, launch and sell both physical and digital products in one place.

Without the need for complicated integrations and techy headaches.

Going further…

From the horses’ mouth, Kartra says that they:

Your online business requires a bunch of different solutions that must be duct-taped together, often leading to frustrating results.

You know the pain: your checkout page won’t add your customers into your mailing list, or your helpdesk portal won’t connect with your contacts database, or your membership site won’t revoke access when a user refunds payment, etc.

Kartra also says that:

This is utterly frustrating, and a huge waste of time… until now!

All the individual sections of Kartra are woven together so they seamlessly “talk” to each other, without having to configure any integration whatsoever. As a result, the tracking is global!

Founded in 2018 by Andy Jenkins and Mike Filsaime.

One core difference between Kartra and other marketing platforms like Podia is that things on Kartra are done in a goal-oriented manner.

What Is Podia?

On the other hand – Podia is widely known as an all-in-one software used for selling your membership products, digital or downloadable products.

Simple to use and understandable tool.

With a platform like Podia, it’s very easy to quickly build and sell things like e-books, online courses, online masterminds, music, videos, and lots more.

Podia describes itself as:

A solution that hosts everything, you need to sell online courses, downloads, and memberships without worrying about the tech.

Replace 5+ tools and keep all of your products, content, customers, email subscribers, payments, and data in one place.

Podia gives digital course creators a whole lot of features which makes it a tight competition with popular course hosting mediums like Kajabi, Teachable, and Thinkific.

Even though the above tools might seem a bit more complex than Podia – but overall, Podia is slightly affordable on the surface.

But that’s by the way…

Podia boasts to take care of your marketing tasks such as:

• Affiliate management
• Email marketing
• Landing pages

And a few others.

But the question now is – how does Podia match up to Kartra and vice-versa?

Kartra vs Podia – Features of Both

This is the part where we take a comprehensive look at Podia and Kartra features. As you follow along, you’ll notice the clear differences in both.

For Kartra…

Kartra Complete Features

Kartra says:

You won’t need to purchase other software or set up confusing connections to get started. That their programmers have done all the work for you, so everything is already integrated for you straight out of the box.

That choosing Kartra is the right choice because their platform comes packed with every tool you’ll need to effortlessly run your online business.

It’s time for us to go through all these tools ourselves:

#1: Kartra Helpdesk

Kartra helpdesk allows your customers or clients to contact you via LiveChat, support tickets, phone, and Skype calls. You can set up multiple helpdesks and also canned responses at the ready.

Not just those.

In addition, you can add a product wiki to your helpdesk for your customers to browse through to search for answers on their own.

To see more of Kartra helpdesk in action you can watch the demo over at https://home.kartra.com/feature-helpdesk

#2: Kartra Membership portal

This is where you can configure, build, host, and sell your online courses on the Kartra Platform. Remember this is a feature Podia shines on the best. More on that later. 😊

It’s pretty easy to deliver your content, course, or training material with Kartra’s professionally designed, drag-and-drop membership portal builder.

One cool thing about the Kartra course hosting platform is that you can create a branded site with different membership levels, and differing content, products, and files for each.

With this, you can create a unique helpdesk, automate your members based on behavior, and communicate through comments.

To see more of Kartra members area in action you can watch the demo over at https://home.kartra.com/feature-memberships

#3: Funnels and Campaigns

To get a taste and hold of all the great features and tools within Kartra, you should check out the Kartra Funnels and campaigns. This is the beauty of Kartra.

A place where everything comes into play.

Campaigns like:

• Agency campaign
• Simple list builder
• Book funnel campaign
• Quick launch campaign
• Four-day cash machine
• Tripwire campaign
• Squeeze page campaign
• Video Sales Letter (VSL) campaign
• Digital Daily Deal
• 3-Step Application campaign

Plus a few others. All for free!

These are done-for-you automated campaigns you can install, customize, and launch with a click of just a few buttons. And your business is live.

They’re built by experts and proven to convert and will help you get more leads, and more sales, and build a more profitable business, with less time invested from you.

#4: Affiliate Management Center

With this you can easily recruit, assign links, manage and pay your army of affiliate marketers. You can also set commissions, payment milestones, currency, due dates, etc.

You can also become an affiliate for the products of other Kartra users from the marketplace section.

You can watch the demo at https://home.kartra.com/feature-affiliates

#5: Kartra Landing Pages, Forms, and Checkouts

When it comes to the number of page templates – Kartra has them in hundreds. You will find literally any type of page template on Kartra.

Templates like:

• Squeeze page templates
• Blog home & post templates
• Webinar page templates
• Legal pages
• Upsell pages
• 404 pages
• Product launch pages
• Thankyou page templates
• Plus, many more…

You can go to https://home.kartra.com/feature-pages for more on Kartra pages

With Kartra forms you can create stunning-looking lead capture forms. Create your own custom fields with powerful tagging and automation rules inside of Kartra.

The inbuilt shopping cart and checkout system let you sell your products, services, or courses through the secure checkout form for credit cards and PayPal payments.

#6: Kartra Emails & Automations

This is another robust feature I found in Kartra. I can go ahead to write a separate article on the complete Kartra email and automation system.

Quite a WIDE one.

In a nutshell – Kartra comes with a feature called (BAM) which allows you to personalize your marketing messages based on visitors’ journeys.

Then you can create live or automated email/SMS marketing campaigns to communicate and engage with your user base.

You can set automation based on triggers such as:

• Tags
• List subscribes/unsubscribes
• Cart Abandonment
• Email opens/clicks
• Page visits
• Purchases
• Form submits
• Video views/clicks
• Membership status

Pretty crazy!?

You can see a live demo of Kartra emails at https://home.kartra.com/feature-mail

#7: Kartra Videos

With Kartra videos – no need for a third-party hosting solution like Wistia, Vimeo, and YouTube.

As you can host your marketing videos with a customizable player, complete with an advanced in-video action that brings about more conversions in your business.

There are lots of functionalities here that you can see for yourself on the Kartra video demo page.

Like tagging viewers based on watch behaviors, and adding CTAs and opt-in forms at any point while playing a video.

#8: Calendar/Scheduling/Booking App

Kartra’s built-in Calendar functionality lets your clients self-book and schedules an appointment with you based on your availability and sends automated reminders when necessary.

This also integrates with other parts of your business and marketing sales funnels.

Kartra also integrates with other third-party software – should in case you decide to connect your favorite.

Podia Complete Features

Podia is a platform that also poses to be an all-in-one (just like Kartra) – due to the fact that it has an inbuilt email tool, sales page builder, payment processor, etc.

But seriously, not much of an “all-in-one” compared to Kartra.

Although Podia could be possibly greater than Kartra in terms of online course hosting and membership portals, we can’t be 100 percent sure about this until we go through the complete features below.

Starting with:

#1: Podia Membership portal

Let’s get it straight here. Podia membership site is way out of this world compared to that of Kartra.

I mean there are tons of stuff you can accomplish as a course creator who builds and hosts courses for students.

Let me show you:

• Multiple membership levels

Podia allows you to offer as many membership levels or tiers as you like. Let’s say you want to offer free or paid access to your digital product – it’s very easy to do.

Or maybe you want the annual or monthly membership configuration. Whichever is perfect!

• Ability to share posts publicly

You can share your free content with anyone who has the link.

This is in the form is of public posts. These types of posts are indexed on search engines, so you can even use them as a replacement for your traditional blog.

• Make your posts private

On your Podia membership site, you’ll also have the ability to gate content by membership levels, allowing specific members to see the more premium content.

This is will kind of entice free members to upgrade by keeping premium offerings behind a paywall.

• Pin posts

You can have a pinned or sticky post at the top of your membership feed for showing the latest development about your course, referencing community guidelines, welcoming new members, announcements, and all that.

#2: Podia email marketing and automation

Basically, you can carry out several email marketing tasks within Podia. According to podia, they say that you get everything unlimited when it comes to emails.

Like:

Unlimited emails, subscribers, digital goods, sales, support, and anything else you can think of!

Just like some features you find in Kartra’s own email tool –below are that of Podia’s:

• Drip campaigns for sending automatically targeted emails
• Automated emails triggered by specific events like new signups, purchases, and unsubscribes
• Segmentation and tagging of customers
• Inbuilt email tracking and monitoring

#3: Podia Courses (plus Quizzes)

Kartra has no such thing as quizzes, obviously. This is a great tool for engaging students and also fosters feedback for your online course and digital products.

Not just quizzes.

Podia has a few other student management, engagement sales-boosting features – comments, coupons, upsells, etc. And yes, Kartra has the upsells, and downsells features with the order bump as an added bonus.

#4: Podia digital download

Podia has everything you need to host, market, and sell not just online course membership BUT digital downloads as well.

Podia supports forms of digital downloads you can think of.

Ranging from:

• eBooks
• PDFs
• Audio files
• Text files
• Image files
• Video files
• Quizzes etc.

#5: Podia’s Page builder

Wondering if you can build complete sales funnels on Podia? The brief answer is no.

But you can definitely build a simple page on Podia.

Pages like “Storefront” for marketing your online courses or homepage, opt-in, about, contact, FAQ, services, landing pages, products, and review pages.

Podia offers design themes to make it easier to create your course pages.

Although the customization of Podia themes is pretty limited, if you’re after a ‘not too’ complicated funnel – Podia pages will serve you.

#6: Podia Affiliate Management

Just like Kartra, you can also manage your affiliate using Podia’s affiliate management platform.

It enables course creators to launch their own affiliate programs, set custom commission terms, invite affiliates, pay them, and more.

Kartra vs Podia Core Features Comparison

Funnel Building

In comparison, Podia lacks where sales funnel features are concerned.

Yes, Podia boasts powerful capabilities for building a modern, mobile-friendly website for your brand with its unique tools, but it doesn’t feature a visual sales funnel builder like Kartra.

Kartra funnels are called “campaigns”. And they did their best to provide campaigns proven to convert.

Winner in this category is Kartra.

Course Hosting and Membership Sites

When it comes to building your online courses and members area, Kartra is amazing in these aspects BUT not as Podia.

You see, Podia lets you choose from a variety of online courses that fit your business and customers’ needs.

As I mentioned earlier, Podia even support every file type, hosts all of the content, and never place limits on how much content you can upload and sell to your students.

And the Podia digital download feature is something worth dying for tbh.

Both did well to provide users with their own inbuilt video hosting.

But Podia takes it a step further by having you covered with unlimited video bandwidth on all plans. Unlike Kartra with limited bandwidth on the Starter plan.

The winner in this category is Podia

Page Builder

Again, both Kartra and Podia provide a drag-and-drop style page builder which eliminates the need to know the code or hire a developer.

With Podia you can put sales pages and storefront pages using its built-in professional themes.

And it ends there!

On the other end – Kartra. In my experience with using Kartra, it comes with one of the most powerful page builders I’ve ever seen.

It comes with a super-intuitive drag-and-drop builder, and feature-riched page building elements.

And to cap it all, Kartra also provides online businesses, marketers, and course creators with over 500 templates of pages. Which is kinda generous of Kartra.

The winner here is Kartra

Affiliate Management

As you may already know, having an army of affiliates working tirelessly to promote your product and services for commissions is a free way to generate leads and sales.

Kartra and Podia both have an array of tools to help you bring in new affiliates and manage your current ones.

Cleary Kartra wins here. By providing a ton of affiliate management features.

And to also add to the fact that Kartra uses its own affiliate manager to manage its affiliates. We can say they drink their own Kool-Aid right?

While Podia on the other hand manages its own affiliate program using a different affiliate system called Rewardful.

Now you decide the winner haha

The winner in this category is Kartra.

Email Marketing

Yet again, Kartra and Podia lets you manage your entire email marketing and automation game.

Kartra comes powerful with a ton of more email marketing and automation capabilities.

• BAM with a behavioral-based automation
• Intelligent email marketing split-testing
• Unlimited email templates
• Multiple trigger rules
• Sophisticated email analytics and reporting

The true genius of Kartra Mail is how it tracks and acts on your readers’ actions. And the ability to follow up with your customers for you, based on specific actions.

Then for Podia email marketing:

They have everything you need to sell digital products, plus the tools you need to grow your email list and market to your audience.

Some of its features include:

• Automated campaigns
• Segmentation
• Complete email reporting and analytics

A few things to note about Podia email marketing is that it lacks quite a lot of things:

For example, no personalization features, no serious automation capabilities, no visual email builder, no lead scoring, and many more.

This makes Kartar a better platform for emails and marketing automation.

The winner for emails and automation is obviously Kartra

Customer Support & Community

Quality of customer support and helpful community is something to also consider when choosing between Podia vs Kartra.

At the moment Kartra provides the following support options:

• Kartra ticketing support portal
• Kartra live support (available from 8:AM to 12:PM workdays)
• Kartra documentation
• Kartraverse training portal
• Kartra Facebook group (quite engaging)

On the other hand – the Podia support team is friendly and they have decent response times according to the majority of users.

Podia also has an impressive support system.

You have access to:

• Connect with their live chat support 24/7 (unlimited)
• Onboarding and migration assistance on the Shaker plan
• Documentation and a Resource section

Both platforms really take both their users and potential customers very seriously.

Kartra and Podia have a TIE here

Kartra vs Podia Price – How Much Do They Cost?

Starting with Kartra pricing:

Kartra has 4 pricing options and offers a $1 14 days trial period for you to test drive the software before starting your monthly or annual subscription which you get a discount of 25%.

The four plans are:

• Starter plan

This costs $99/mo with all the features of Kartra. You’ll get 15,000 emails per month, 2,500 contacts, 2 membership portals, 100 pages, and up to 20 products on this plan.

• Silver plan

The Silver plan costs $199/mo with all the complete features still. Getting access to 12,500 leads, 125,000 emails monthly, unlimited membership portals, and a bunch of other features.

• Gold plan

Costs $299 per month with larger access to a number of emails, contacts, and a bunch of other Kartra features.

• Platinum plan

This is the most expensive (rare) of all Kartra packages. Costs $499/mo.

==> Click Here To Start Your Kartra Trial!

Podia Pricing

Unlike Kartra, Podia has only two recurring paid plans after your free 14day trial period.

The plans are:

• Mover at $39/month billed upfront for $390 for a whole year
• Shaker at $79/month billed upfront for $790 for a whole year

The two plans have different included features, most notably the membership module which is not available in the Mover package.

==> Click Here To Start Podia Trial!

Kartra and Podia – Pros and Cons

Kartra Pros

• A free-to-use DFY marketing funnels and campaigns
• Affiliate management with advanced tracking
• Helpdesk for modern customer support
• Calendar app for managing appointments
• Behavioral Adaptive Marketing (BAM) for advanced personalization
• Video hosting
• Supports webinar
• Hundreds of page templates
• Checkout and shopping cart solution
• Awesome Facebook community and support

Kartra Cons

• Can be expensive for $99/mo
• Lacks complex student management and engagement feature
• Steep learning curve
• Extra video bandwidth requires a third-party hosting
• No free trials

Podia Pros

• Has a bunch of student engagement & management feature
• Pretty cheaper and affordable
• Easy to learn and use
• Intuitive user interface
• Unlimited storage for online courses digital downloads
• Great customer support

Podia Cons

• No video hosting solution
• No calendar/scheduling app
• Lacks helpdesk feature
• Limited page templates
• Lacks customization
• Not a full marketing tool-suite

Which Should You Use?

When it comes to building and hosting a simple membership site for offering your online course, membership stuff, and digital downloads, Podia will do it exceedingly well.

This is where Podia shines and wins the most.

As for Kartra – this is more than just creating an online course.

You will agree with me that running a successful business is a lot more than just selling digital products. This is an aspect where things begin to go downhill with Podia.

Podia is a flexible solution for what it does – there is stuff you can’t finish with it.

Despite Podia claims to be all-in-one, I beg to differ.

As they don’t offer booking/scheduling, behavioral automation, and helpdesk tools – all of which are critical to your course and product success…

Kartra takes care of all these.

Get started at https://home.kartra.com/free

If you’re looking to get software that NOT only builds and hosts your membership sites but does everything else you need to run your business…

…then I think Kartra is the ideal platform you deserve.

Let me know in the comments between Kartra vs Podia which of the platforms above you’d love to start with.