Podia vs Memberful vs Kajabi: Which Is Best for Creators?

Building a business around your passion and expertise as a creator can be incredibly rewarding. However, choosing the right platform to sell your online courses, memberships, and digital products is crucial to making that dream a reality.

In this article, we’ll compare three popular platforms: Podia, Memberful, and Kajabi. We’ll compare each platform based on its ease of use, key features, integrations, and pricing to determine which is best for your needs.

Podia vs Memberful vs Kajabi – A Basic Overview

Before we get into the nitty-gritty, let’s start with a basic overview of each platform.

What is Podia?

Podia is an all-in-one digital storefront that allows creators to sell online courses, memberships, and digital products. It has a user-friendly interface and a suite of marketing tools, making it a one-stop shop for creators looking to build a sustainable income stream.

What is Memberful?

Memberful operates differently by focusing primarily on membership sites. It enables creators to integrate with existing websites, offering a paywall solution to gate content. The platform provides a seamless experience for managing subscribers and handling recurring payments.

What is Kajabi?

Kajabi, on the other hand, is for creators looking for a platform with advanced features. It offers extensive tools for creating and marketing online courses, membership sites, and coaching programs.

Now that we’ve learned about each platform, let’s look at some of their key features.

Key Features: Podia vs Memberful vs Kajabi

Regarding features, each platform has its own set of strengths. Let’s break down what each has to offer.

Podia Key Features

Lets you create and sell digital downloads, online courses, memberships, coaching, and webinars, all from one place.
Built-in features like email broadcasts and campaigns so you can communicate with your audience.
Sale-boosting features such as upsells, coupons, and product bundles.
On-page chat widget to close deals with site visitors and engage with logged-in customers.
No-code website builder to create a modern, mobile-friendly website for your brand.
High-converting checkout experience.
Built-in affiliate program with custom commission rates.

Memberful Key Features

Optimized checkout to increase conversions and customer happiness.
Dedicated WordPress plugin to gate your content.
Easy member management with subscription handling, refund processing, targeted staff permissions, and private notes.
Different membership pricing options such as one-time payments, recurring subscriptions, free trials, or pay-what-you-want.
Built-in referral program to offer discounts to members when they successfully refer new users using their referral link.

Kajabi Key Features

Good marketing features like automation funnels, upsells, downsells, order bumps, coupons, and more.
Drag and drop website builder with various modules for creating landing pages, opt-ins, websites, and blog posts.
Plenty of beautiful and ready-made templates that you can customize to make it your own.
Send cart abandonment emails with single-use coupons.
Built-in hosting for events will help you host webinars and product launches inside the platform.
Built-in affiliate program.
Has a mobile app for both iOS and Android.

Ease of Use: Podia vs Memberful vs Kajabi

Ease of use is a critical factor for most, as you’d want to spend more time creating content than on technical setup. Let’s look at how they stack up against each other.

Podia Setup and Ease of Use

Regarding ease of use, Podia is often praised for its simplicity and clean interface. New creators can get started quickly without being overwhelmed by too many options.

It offers a drag-and-drop editor for building and customizing various website pages, such as the landing page, product page, and checkout page.

As Podia prioritizes ease of use, you’ll find that it lacks extensive customization features. However, this trade-off results in an intuitive system that makes it straightforward to sell and market your offerings without a steep learning curve.

Memberful Setup and Ease of Use

Memberful is most commonly integrated with WordPress through its dedicated plugin. This gives creators the flexibility of WordPress for building their website while easily managing membership through Memberful’s dashboard.

The Memberful-hosted website option offers only basic features and customization. But with WordPress, you can build a full-featured website tailored to your brand. The Memberful plugin allows you to protect content from non-members while granting access to members.

The Memberful dashboard provides a central hub to create and configure subscription plans, view member details, and monitor site activity. This enables easy membership program management without affecting your core WordPress website.

Kajabi Setup and Ease of Use

Kajabi offers a straightforward, easy-to-use interface that neatly houses all the tools needed to build an online business. Its clean and minimalist dashboard provides a one-stop shop for building membership sites, online courses, sales funnels, landing pages, and more.

Like Poadia, it also offers a drag-and-drop builder for courses and websites that anyone can use without technical know-how. It also has a broad library of pre-designed website templates that help anyone get started quickly.

It also includes an AI Creator Hub where you can use the free AI tools to create your online courses in just minutes. While having an all-in-one model provides comprehensive tools, it can also be overwhelming for users who only need specific functions like membership management.

Integrations: Podia vs Memberful vs Kajabi

Each platform supports various integrations that expand your site’s capabilities. This makes it easier to run your business by connecting with tools you already use.

Podia Integrations

Podia offers integrations with hundreds of platforms, including email, analytics, advertising, scheduling, and more.

You can either use native integrations to link other software with a few clicks or connect with Zapier to send data between tools.

For email marketing, it seamlessly integrates with top ESPs, including Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, ConvertKit, GetResponse, AWeber, and Drip. For payment, you can use Stripe and PayPal.

Podia also lets you connect tools with code snippets, such as pop-ups, countdown timers, and other software.

Memberful Integrations

Memberful integrates smoothly with many tools, especially WordPress, through its dedicated plugin. This allows for easy syncing between your site and Memberful’s dashboard.

For email marketing, it connects with leading providers like Campaign Monitor, MailerLite, Sailthru, Mailchimp, Drip, and ConvertKit.

Memberful also integrates with top learning management platforms like Learndash and Sensei to help you sell online courses and learning materials.

Other integrations include Google Analytics to track site analytics, Zapier for connecting different apps, Discord for building community, and bbPress for member forums.

Kajabi Integrations

Kajabi has a relatively limited set of native integrations compared to other platforms. It connects with only 13 tools and services natively.

For payments, you can connect with Stripe and PayPal. For email marketing, Kajabi works with ActiveCampaign, Mailchimp, Aweber, Converkit, and Drip. It also connects with Creator.io for adding an AI chatbot to your website.

Additional native integrations include Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Segment, and Meta Pixels for analytics and tracking.

Pricing: Podia vs Memberful vs Kajabi

Pricing is an important consideration when choosing a platform. Let’s look at the different pricing plans these platforms offer to see which provides the best value for money.

How Much Does Podia Cost?

Podia offers four subscription plans:

Free: Completely free, allowing users to create a website with a single download or coaching product. However, it charges a 10% transaction fee on each sale.

Starter: Costs $9/month, plus an 8% transaction fee on all sales. It includes all free plan features, plus the ability to use a custom domain.

Mover: Costs $39/month, plus a 5% transaction fee on all sales. It allows users to sell unlimited products, courses, and memberships and add third-party code.

Shaker: Costs $89/month and does not charge any transaction fee. It includes advanced features like embedded checkout, affiliate marketing, third-party code, and free migration.

How Much Does Memberful Cost?

Memberful offers three pricing plans:

Starter: Free but has a flat 10% transaction fee/sale. It lets you create two membership plans and one download.

Pro: Costs $25/month, plus a 4.9% transaction fee/sale. It lets you create unlimited plans and offer paid newsletters, coupons, referral programs, and more features.

Premium: Costs $100/month, plus a 4.9% transaction fee/sale. It includes advanced features like group membership, white-labeling, and volume discounts.

How Much Does Kajabi Cost?

Kajabi is an expensive solution with three pricing plans:

Basic: Costs $149/month and includes three products and funnels, unlimited landing pages and marketing emails, and 10,000 contacts.

Growth: Costs $199/month and includes everything in basic, plus 15 products and funnels, 25,000 contacts, an affiliate program, and advanced automation.

Pro: Costs $399/month and includes everything in Growth, plus 100 products and funnels, 25,000 contacts, and a custom editor.

All three plans include no transaction fee.