Podia vs. Skool: Which one is right for my business?
Both Podia and Skool are solid tools for running paid communities, but they’re ultimately designed for different kinds of businesses. The biggest difference is how each platform handles products along with community, and what marketing features are available. Let’s take a closer look so you can make the best choice for your work.
Podia vs. Skool plans and pricing
Both Podia and Skool offer free trials, so you can test each platform before committing. Podia has a 30-day free trial, and Skool has a 14-day free trial. When you’re ready to upgrade, here’s how pricing works on each platform.
Podia Pricing:
Podia has three plans: Mover, Shaker, and Earthquaker. All Podia plans come with your website, digital products, community, and unlimited members and sales.
- Mover: $49/month and 5% transaction fee ($42/month when paid annually): Includes your community, website builder, blog, landing pages, digital products and courses, customer messaging, and third-party code, with 50 products and 25 community spaces.
- Shaker: $99/month and 0% transaction fee ($84/month when paid annually): Includes everything in Mover, plus affiliate marketing, upsells, and integrations with PayPal, Zoom, and Zapier, with 150 products and 100 community spaces.
- Earthquaker: $179/month and 0% transaction fee ($150/month when paid annually): Includes everything in Shaker, with unlimited products, video storage, and community spaces.
All Podia plans include email marketing features like automations, newsletters, email templates, segmentation, tagging, and campaigns. Mover includes up to 100 subscribers, Shaker includes up to 500 subscribers, and Earthquaker includes up to 1,000 subscribers. You can also pay for more subscribers on any plan as your list grows.
Podia also includes a free migration service on paid plans. The team will move your products and customers over from another platform so you can get set up faster without extra work. Learn more about how migrations work here.
Skool Pricing:
Skool has two pricing plans.
- Hobby: $9/month and 10% transaction fee. Includes unlimited community members, video hosting, and live streaming.
- Pro: $99/month and 2.9% transaction fee. Includes everything in Hobby, plus custom URLs, advanced analytics, and the option to hide suggested communities
One important difference to note is that all Skool plans include transaction fees, including the higher-priced Pro plan. As your revenue grows, those fees scale with it, and there’s no option to remove them.
For example, if you had a community bringing in $1000/month, here’s how the price would work out with each plan:
Podia:
- Podia’s Mover plan (5% fee): $49 + $50 transaction fees = $99/month
- Podia’s Shaker plan (0% fee): $99 + $0 transaction fees = $99/month
- Podia’s Earthquaker plan (0% fee): $179 + $0 transaction fees = $179/month
Skool:
- Skool’s Hobby plan (10% fee): $9 + $100 transaction fees = $109/month
- Skool’s Pro plan (2.9% fee): $99 + $29 transaction fees = $128/month
In this scenario, both Mover and Shaker are less expensive than Skool’s lowest tier plan, and they come with way more features.
With Podia, you can eliminate transaction fees by upgrading. With Skool, you’ll pay transaction fees no matter what plan you’re on, which can take a bigger bite out of your earnings as your business grows.
It’s also worth considering what’s included in the price. Podia comes with a website and marketing tools built in. With Skool, you’ll likely need to pay for separate tools to handle those parts of your business, which can increase your overall costs over time.
Community features with Podia and Skool
You probably landed on this article because you want to make a community, so let’s get into it.
Both Podia and Skool make it possible to build a community, and they share many of the core features you’d expect.
On both platforms, you can create dedicated community areas (called categories in Skool and Spaces in Podia), where members can create posts and leave comments. Both tools include search functionality so members can find conversations and content, along with member profiles that make it easier to connect with people who share similar interests.
Both platforms also have a chat feature built in so members can build connections, and a leaderboard so you can see who is posting and commenting most.
Podia and Skool also let you make free and paid plans for your audience, and members can upgrade or downgrade their plans as needed.
But the platforms differ in how your community interacts with your digital products and the rest of your business.
With Skool, everyone shares the same community feed and topics. You can gate courses and live events by plan or level, but all community categories are shared across all members.
With Podia, you can take a more segmented approach. You can create products and spaces that are only visible on certain plans, and create separate community spaces for different memberships, products, or tiers. This works well for things like VIP areas, cohort programs, course-specific discussions, or smaller groups inside a larger community.
For instance, you could sell a course that comes with a private mastermind area for discussions, or create two different plans for different types of customers that each have their own discussion forum.
Classical piano instructor Joseph D’Amico uses this feature in his business Flex Lessons. Students can choose between a beginner membership with access to introductory resources or an intermediate membership with access to more advanced pieces.
Within the community, students can see the correct resources for their level, and have space to get feedback and ask questions from other users in their group.
Overall, both tools cover the fundamentals of running a community. The main difference comes down to structure and style: Skool emphasizes a uniform group experience with more gamification features, while Podia gives you more options for how to organize your space with private areas for certain members.
Products and courses in Podia and Skool
With Podia, you can sell standalone courses, digital downloads, in-person and virtual events, coaching, and bundles, with or without community access. Products can be free, or you can charge a one-time payment, create payment plans, or make subscriptions with monthly and annual pricing.
With your courses, Podia supports more advanced course features like quizzes and completion certificates. To give you even more options, each product you make can have seat limits, upsells, access duration limits, coupons, and future start dates.
Skool, on the other hand, treats products as part of the community. You can add courses to a classroom area, and your members can unlock them by paying for them or reaching a certain level in the community. Courses can be dripped and paired with live events, but they’re fairly basic. There are no quizzes or completion certificates.
Most importantly, Skool products and courses can’t be sold on their own outside of your community.
Marketing features with Podia and Skool
It’s one thing to make a great community, but you also need to find people to join it. This is an area where Podia and Skool take very different approaches.
Skool’s main tool for discovery is that your community can be listed in Skool’s marketplace. Being present in this database can help new people find you, but beyond that, there are no landing pages, blogs, or lead magnets included.
Most creators will need a separate website or landing page tool to explain their offer and bring people into the community. That said, this might not be an issue if you already have a large following on another channel.
Podia is designed to help you attract new people to your products and email list. You get a full website with landing pages and blogging, so people can learn about your work, find you through search, and join your email list before becoming community members.
You’ve also got email list growth features like lead magnets and welcome sequences that can take people from strangers to active followers, even when you’re just starting out.
Email and ongoing communication
Skool allows you to send broadcast-style emails to your members, which works well for announcements, updates, and reminders tied directly to the community. But beyond that, there aren’t any tools for building an email list or running automations.
Podia includes full email marketing tools. You can send newsletters to your customers and community members as well as anyone else on your email list, even if they haven’t bought from you yet. You can also run automated campaigns and sales funnels so you aren’t having to manually send every message.
Podia has built-in tools that segment your audience based on what they’ve bought or how active they’ve been with your business. For example, you can let people know about a product if they haven’t bought it yet, or send a follow up to people who haven't signed in to your business in the last 30 days.
There are also email newsletter templates that are fully customizable so you can match your brand, and it’s easy to create automated emails like welcome sequences or sales campaigns. This gives you more control over how and when you communicate with different parts of your audience.
Funnels, upsells, and promotions
Skool doesn’t include built-in sales funnels or checkout tools beyond community payments. If you want to run promotions, attract newcomers with lead magnets, or guide people through a longer buying journey, you’ll need additional tools.
Podia includes features like checkout upsells and email automations, which make it easier to guide people from a free resource to a paid product or community.
For instance, someone could:
- Find your blog post and click over to your website
- Sign up for a free lead magnet to get on your list
- Receive an email welcome series over 5 days with details about your community
- Join your community and start participating
- Receive a weekly newsletter with info about more of your products and courses
All in one tool with Podia.
Affiliate marketing
Both Podia and Skool have built-in affiliate marketing features so you can allow others to promote your work and receive a commission.
With Skool, affiliate commissions are preset percentages (10–50%), or you can turn affiliates off entirely. Podia lets you set custom commission percentages or flat dollar amounts, adjust the cookie window, and choose which products or plans are eligible for commissions.
Who is Skool best for?
Skool can be a good fit if you’re mainly building a paid community and aren’t focused on selling products.
It works well for people who:
- Already have a website and email marketing tool they’re happy with
- Already have a large audience that they can point to their community
- Are comfortable linking multiple tools together manually
- Like gamification features such as points, levels, and leaderboards
Skool can also be appealing if you want built-in visibility through the community marketplace, where people can browse and request access to groups. This can help new members discover your community, but it can also mean more moderation, since requests can come from strangers who are less familiar with your work.
Who is Podia best for?
Podia is a great fit if you want to build your community, digital products, courses, and the rest of your business in one place, without relying on a collection of separate tools.
It works well for creators who:
- Want their website, blog, products, email, and community fully connected in one platform
- Use email marketing to grow their audience list and automate things like sales funnels, welcome emails, and campaigns
- Want to sell digital products, courses, and events in the same place they run their community
- Prefer the option to remove transaction fees as the business grows
Podia is especially helpful if digital products are a core part of your business. You can organize courses, digital downloads, webinars, coaching offers, and bundles in a way that fits your goals, and still keep community as a central part of the work you do.
Overall, Podia was designed for entrepreneurs who want room to grow and adapt, with community as part of a larger, connected business. If you’d like to give Podia a try and see what you can make, you can start your 30-day free trial today.