Great question! We obviously think we’re pretty great, but here’s an honest comparison:

Stan Store is a link in bio tool that lets you sell digital products like courses, downloads, and webinars directly through your social media bio link. You can accept payments, collect email addresses, and see some basic analytics about your shop.

Podia is an all-in-one creator platform that also gives you a bio link page and the ability to sell digital products. You can accept payments, run advanced email marketing campaigns, build your own community, and even create a full website with unlimited landing pages.

Let’s take a look at how the two platforms stack up.

Podia and Stan Store Pricing

Stan Store offers new users a 14-day free trial, and there are two paid plans to choose from. The Creator plan costs $29/month and includes a link in bio page, digital products, and email address collection. The Creator Pro plan costs $99/month and includes email automations, funnels, upsells, and affiliates. Stan Store doesn’t charge transaction fees.

Podia has four plans to choose from, including a free forever plan.

• Free plan (10% transaction fee)
  • Includes a full website with unlimited pages, link in bio pages, blogging, an online community, one digital download, one coaching product, and full email marketing features for up to 100 subscribers.
• Starter: $9/month or $4/month paid annually (8% transaction fee)
  • Includes everything in free plus the ability to connect a custom domain and chat support
• Mover: $39/month or $33/month paid annually (5% transaction fee)
  • Includes everything in starter plus unlimited digital downloads, online courses, webinars, community tiers, product bundles, and coaching. There are also more selling features like coupons, upsells, and access limits.
• Shaker: $89/month or $75/month paid annually (no transaction fees)
  • Includes everything in Mover plus affiliates

Stan Store focuses exclusively on selling with social media. Podia is a one-stop shop for your whole business.

Stan Store could make sense for you if you only connect with your audience on social media.

Because Stan Store pages are designed to be viewed on mobile, the only way you can arrange your content is in a list of buttons and call-outs. You don’t have control over how your Stan Store looks on desktop, so if someone comes across your page while on their computer it might not look the way you want it to look.

Stan Store gives you a single link in bio page and basic checkout pages for each of your products. There are character limits on product titles and subtitles, and the product checkout pages allow you to add text with bullet points, videos, images, and links.

There’s no option to build an “about me” page, a services page, in-depth sales pages, or a blog unless you connect (and potentially pay for) extra tools.

Podia, on the other hand, makes it easy to design pages that look great on mobile and desktop. You get as many pages as you like, and your sales or landing pages can be fully customized with Podia’s easy website builder (more on that later).

With Podia, you’ll have more options since you can make an amazing link in bio page that does all the same things as Stan Store, but you aren’t limited to just that. With a full website, blog, and pages about anything you want, you’ll have more flexibility as your business grows.

Strict link in bio templates vs. unlimited website customizations

A big difference between Stan Store and Podia is how much you can customize. With Stan Store, you start the building process by choosing from a library of 11 templates. From there, you can customize your template with two colors and one font (there are about 10 fonts to choose from).

But other than your colors and fonts, you can’t change much about the way the template looks, and you must use a template as a starting point. There’s no “build from scratch” option.

Because Stan Store’s templates are pretty set-in-stone, you aren’t able to change image sizes and shapes, text layouts, and other details that make your pages look and feel like you. Also, there’s no way to add extra videos or images to your shop page unless they’re already part of the template.

With Podia, you can customize every detail of your website and link in bio page, and every element looks great out of the box – no need to worry if web design isn’t your strong suit.

Choose from 14 (and counting) different layout blocks like testimonials, FAQ sections, product grids, featured sections, and email forms, and customize the details however you want. You can edit how your page looks on desktop, tablet, or mobile view, and you have hundreds of different color and font combinations you can choose from.

You can even adjust the width and padding of your site, add background images, toggle your website header on and off, add your logo, and embed content from +1900 sources around the web. All on the free plan.

Here are some of the different link in bio designs you can make in Podia:

An here’s how your full website could look:

Instead of listing 3-5 products, organize and sell as many products as you like

On the same note as customization, Stan Store doesn’t have many features to help you organize your products. They recommend only listing 3-5 products on your Stan Store page since it’s on mobile and would get very long at a certain point, and there aren’t categories or other ways to break up your content.

With Podia, you can categorize products and create category-specific landing pages for each topic you cover. For example, if you sell printables for music teachers and music students, you could make a separate page for each type of product with as many items listed as you like.

While both Podia and Stan Store let you sell a wide variety of product types (coaching, digital downloads, memberships, courses, etc.), you might find that listing all your offers on one page, in a list, is too limiting as your product lineup grows.

Add quizzes, course completion certificates, coupons, and +1900 embeds to your online courses

Both Podia and Stan Store allow you to sell online courses. With Stan Store, you can start selling online courses on the $29/month Creator plan, and on Podia you can start selling online courses with the $39/month Mover plan.

Stan Store’s course builder is pretty basic. You can add modules and lessons, and within each lesson, there’s space to add one video, text, and supporting files. There’s no community or commenting, so if you want students to interact with each other you’ll need to use a separate tool. Stan Store also doesn’t have quizzes, course completion certificates, waitlists, preselling, or features like access duration, seat limits, or coupons.

Stan Store does offer some advanced selling features like affiliates and upsells, but these are only available on the Creator Pro plan for $99/month.

With Podia, you can start drafting your courses on the free plan and upgrade to Mover when you’re ready to sell.

Courses can have unlimited modules and lessons with any combination of text, videos, downloads, embeds, text decorations, audio files, or other media you like. You can also add coaching sessions within your courses, and combine courses with community access so students can connect.

Courses can be sold with a limited number of seats, presold, waitlisted, or bundled with other products. You can also add quizzes and embed surveys, polls, and other features, as well as issue course completion certificates and run sales with coupons.

Upsells are available on the $39/month Mover plan and affiliates are available on Podia’s $89/month Shaker plan.

You don’t need to use extra integrations for your email marketing

Email is a great way to stay in touch with your audience without the inconsistency of social media. With Stan Store, you can set up an email sign-up box to collect email addresses and give away free lead magnets to attract subscribers.

However, once you have this contact information, you’ll need to integrate it with another email tool for full email marketing features. Stan Store automatically integrates with Mailchimp, but to use another email provider like ConvertKit or Flodesk, you’ll need to connect through Zapier which could have an extra monthly expense.

On Stan Store’s Creator Pro plan, you can set up email automations called flows, but on the Creator plan you can only send emails to people to deliver their product links. To send any kind of welcome email or follow-up message, you’ll need the more expensive plan with email flows.

Podia, on the other hand, comes with advanced email marketing built in. Podia Email has automations, segmentation, tagging, exit and entrance conditions, link click triggers, and beautiful templates, and it’s free for your first 100 subscribers. After that, the price only goes up as your list grows and the rates are below the industry average.

If you have another email tool you’d rather use, Podia has native integrations with ConvertKit, Drip, Aweber, ActiveCampaign, GetResponse, Mailerlite, and Flodesk so you can send data between your accounts seamlessly.

Let’s say you’ve created a digital download that you’d like to sell to your email list. With Stan Store, you can create your download and grow your list on the $29/month plan, but you’ll need to upgrade to the $99/month plan to send a series of emails to those followers.

With Podia, you can create your download and grow your list on the free plan. You can message your followers on the free plan too as long as your list is under 100 subscribers, and after that, you can upgrade your Podia Email subscriber count in small increments as your list grows.

So if you had 1,500 people on your list, you’d pay a total of $17/month for full email features plus everything else you need to sell your digital download – saving you $82 each month!

SEO features to help new people find your work

SEO, or search engine optimization, is another thing to consider when choosing between Stan Store and Podia. While Stan Store is geared toward social media, Podia has built-in SEO features which make it easy for potential customers to find your work on search engines.

For each page, Podia lets you add a custom SEO title, meta description, and URL, all of which help tell search engines what your page is about. Plus, you can create distinct pages for each part of your business and a full blog, which gives you even more visibility on the web.

At this time, Stan Store doesn’t have SEO features and the platform strongly leans toward getting discovered on social media, not in search.

Bottom line, Stan Store works well if you’re selling 3-5 products and you need a way to sell primarily via social media. You don’t mind integrating with other tools to get landing pages, advanced email marketing, and more website options, and you only need basic course features.

Podia is a better fit if you want to run your entire business, including your website, email, community, and all products, under one roof. It’s an affordable option since there’s a free forever plan that includes your link in bio and website, and you get more features on each of the paid plans, more customizations, and friendly support.

Give Podia a try for free today.