Both Podia and Skool are solid tools for running paid communities, but they’re 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 two plans, Mover and Shaker. Both plans include your products and community, as well as unlimited sales and unlimited community members.

• Mover: $39/month and 5% transaction fee ($33/month when paid annually): Includes your community, website builder, blog, landing pages, digital products and courses, custom domains, customer messaging, and third-party code.

• Shaker: $89/month and 0% transaction fee ($75/month when paid annually): Includes everything in Mover, plus affiliate marketing.

All Podia plans include email marketing features for up to 100 subscribers, like automations, newsletters, email templates, segmentation, tagging, and campaigns. If you like, you can upgrade your Podia Email plan at any time to add more subscribers 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 also 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’s Mover plan (5% fee): $39 + $50 transaction fees = $89/month

• Skool’s Hobby plan (10% fee): $9 + $100 transaction fees = $109/month

• Podia’s Shaker plan (0% fee): $89 + $0 transaction fees = $89/month

• Skool’s Pro plan (2.9% fee): $99 + $29 transaction fees = $128/month

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 paid 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 topics 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.

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. In addition to gating content by plan, you can 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 also comes with a private mastermind area of the community 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.

One unique aspect of Skool is that it uses gamification to encourage participation, giving members points for posting, commenting, and interacting. For some communities, this can be motivating and create momentum early on. You can let people see where they are on the leaderboards, and allow members to unlock courses when they reach certain levels.

That said, many Skool users report that this system can also lead to low-effort posts. When points and perks are tied to activity volume, people sometimes post just to unlock content rather than to add value. This might mean more moderation and more noise in the feed.

Skool also has a member map view that shows where community members are located, to make it easier for members to meet up in real life.

Overall, both tools cover the fundamentals of running a community. The main difference comes down to structure and style: Skool emphasizes a gamified group experience, while Podia offers more flexibility in how communities are organized and connected to the rest of your business.

Products and courses in Podia and Skool

Skool 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, and products can’t be sold on their own outside of a community.

With Podia, you can sell standalone courses, digital downloads, webinars, coaching, or bundles, with or without community access. Community can be the main product, an add-on, or a bonus, depending on how you want to structure your offers.

Podia also supports more advanced course features like quizzes and completion certificates. For every product you make, you can add seat limits, access duration limits, coupons, and future start dates.

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.

This is a big perk if you’re starting with a small audience or don’t have one just yet, since you don’t need to pay for extra tools.

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.

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.

Podia also has built-in tools that segment your audience based on what they’ve bought or how they’ve engaged. 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 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

1. Find your blog post and click over to your website

2. Sign up for a free lead magnet to get on your list

3. Receive an email welcome series over 5 days with details about your community

4. Join your community and start participating

5. 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.

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 people who are less familiar with your work.

Who is Podia best for?

Podia is a good fit if you want to build your community, digital products, 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, products, email, and community fully connected in one platform

• Are interested in marketing their business and growing their audience

• Want more flexibility in how they build products and make offers

• 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.