Podia vs. Whop: What’s right for me?
Great question. We obviously think we're pretty great, but here's an honest comparison.
Both Podia and Whop let you sell courses, digital downloads, coaching, and events, and both give you a way to build a paid community.
But even though the feature list might have some similarities, Podia and Whop provide a different experience for you as the creator and the customers you serve.
Podia is all-in-one, so you get a website builder, a blog, landing pages, and email marketing to promote the products you’ve worked so hard to build. You can build a complete home base for your business, with a vibrant community and lots of tools for reaching new members, like email, blogging, and affiliates. Your community areas and digital products are seamlessly connected, so students can access content and connect all from one spot.
Whop lets creators set up businesses by connecting apps to their account. You can choose from hundreds of different apps (some made by Whop, some made by third-party vendors). When you make products, you have the option to be listed in their discovery marketplace. They also have lots of different payment options, so you can let customers pay in Crypto or offer financing.
To help you decide what’s best for your business, let's dive into the details.
Podia vs. Whop pricing
First, let's talk numbers.
Podia pricing
Podia has three plans: Mover, Shaker, and Earthquaker. All Podia plans come with your website, digital products, community, and unlimited customers and sales. There's a 30-day free trial so you can test everything before you buy.
- Mover: $49/month and 5% transaction fee ($42/month paid annually). Includes your community, website builder, blog, landing pages, digital products, and courses, with 50 products, storage for 500 videos, and 25 community spaces.
- Shaker: $99/month and 0% transaction fee ($84/month paid annually). Everything in Mover, plus affiliate marketing, upsells, 1 assistant seat, and integrations with PayPal, Zoom, and Zapier, with 150 products, storage for 1000 videos, and 100 community spaces.
- Earthquaker: $179/month and 0% transaction fee ($150/month paid annually). Everything in Shaker, with unlimited products, unlimited assistant seats, unlimited video storage, and unlimited 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 up to 500, and Earthquaker up to 1,000. You can add 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 the extra work.
Whop pricing
Whop has no monthly fee. You pay per sale, starting at 2.7% + $0.30 on every successful card transaction. The thing to watch is that other fees can stack on top depending on how you run your business:
- Tax handling and remittance, if you use it, adds 2%
- Affiliate processing adds 1.25%
- Financing, which lets buyers pay in installments, costs 15% per transaction
- Payouts carry their own fees: $2.50 for next-day ACH, 4% + $1.00 for instant bank deposit (RTP), 5% + $1.00 for crypto or Venmo, and $23.00 for a bank wire
These extra fees can add up, and the real cost of running on Whop depends a lot on which of them you end up using.
Plus, you’ll likely need to pay extra for tools like your website or email marketing platform with Whop, since those aren’t included out of the box.
Podia's pricing works the other way around: one predictable monthly price that already includes your community, products, website, blog, landing pages, and email marketing, with a 0% transaction fee on the Shaker and Earthquaker plans.
Here’s an example of how this might look:
Say you're a creator earning $6,000 in sales this month across a hundred and twenty $50 orders.
Here's what you'd pay to run that on Podia:
- Podia Mover: $349/month ($49 base plan + 5% transaction fee)
- Podia Shaker: $99/month (0% transaction fee)
- Podia Earthquaker: $179/month (0% transaction fee)
And here's the base cost on Whop:
- Whop: about $198/month (2.7% of $6,000, plus $0.30 per order)
The Whop total is just the base fee. Your real total could be higher if you use features like tax handling, affiliate processing, or financing, and you also have to consider the payout fees to actually get your money.
In this situation, you’ll pay much less using Podia’s Shaker or Earthquaker plan, and your total won’t go up as you earn more in the future.
You can build a website and blog with Podia
Podia comes with a website builder and blog so you can showcase your business and products. You can connect a custom domain, choose your fonts and colors, track traffic with Google Analytics, and adjust your design to match your branding.
Podia has an easy page builder so you can design your site even if you don't know how to code. With a few clicks, you can display testimonials, promote your email opt-in, highlight best-selling products, and tell customers about your brand. Your blog and landing pages use the same builder, so everything looks cohesive, and there's no new tech to learn.
Whop doesn't have a built-in website builder, landing pages, or a blog. It gives you product pages inside its marketplace, but for a full website and a place to publish content, you'd build that elsewhere and point people to your Whop checkout.
Set up beautiful online courses
With Podia, you can create multimedia courses with videos, images, embeds, text, audio, and pretty much any other type of content you can dream up. When your students purchase a course from you, they’ll get to experience it inside our native course viewer with progress tracking and course comments.
You get built-in video storage, and you can add multiple-choice quizzes, completion certificates, and drip scheduling. You can also customize how students access your course with seat limits, access durations, future start dates, and waitlists.
One of the biggest perks of using an all-in-one tool like Podia is that you can bundle your courses with community access, events, or other products. You can also make your course available to everyone who buys a community plan or to everyone who signs up for a particular event.
Plus, students and creators love the course experience. As Khe Hy puts it, “We design all of our courses around two fundamental principles: A delightful learning experience and massive student outcomes. Podia's rich set of teaching tools, relentless focus on design and deep integrations across the creator ecosystem enable us to deliver for our students AND grow our sales.”
Whop’s course experience is built through its Courses app, and you can add video lessons, PDFs, and quizzes. You can add as many modules and lessons as you like, but there's no built-in video storage, so you'd link out to YouTube or another host for your videos. Whop has quizzes and drip scheduling to organize your content.
Run your email marketing in the same place as everything else
With Podia's email tools, you can design email sequences and run campaigns all in one place, so you don't have to pay for a separate service. Podia Email includes automations, campaigns with entrance and exit conditions, tagging, segmentation, audience filters, and metrics like how much income you earned from each email.
There are over a dozen email templates to choose from, or you can build your own. And because your email is already connected to your website, blog, and products, it's easy to add opt-in forms, set up lead magnets, and pull blog posts into your emails.
All Podia Email features are included on every plan, with a set number of subscribers out of the box:
- Mover includes 100 subscribers
- Shaker includes 500 subscribers
- Earthquaker includes 1,000 subscribers
If you need more, you can add extra subscribers at any time for an additional fee.
Whop doesn't include native email marketing, so creators who want newsletters, automated campaigns, and audience segmentation typically need to connect another email platform.
Sell with affiliate marketing
Both Podia and Whop include built-in affiliate marketing, so you can let other people promote your products in exchange for a commission.
With Podia, you create your own affiliate program, choose which products are eligible, set your commission rates, and decide whether the program is open, private, or closed.
Whop works similarly, with custom rates and eligible-product settings. It also lets you open your store to global affiliates, so anyone can earn a commission promoting your products to their audience, which can be a useful way to find more affiliate partners.
Why choose Whop?
Whop works well if you:
- You prefer having no monthly fee and are okay with always paying transaction fees
- Like the idea of a marketplace for product discoverability
- Prefer assembling your setup from individual apps and want that flexibility
- Need flexible payout and payment options, including financing and crypto
- Are looking to promote your product heavily with affiliate marketing
Why choose Podia?
Podia is built for people who want to run their whole business in one place. It works well if you:
- Are building a community experience for your customers, combined with digital products and events
- Want a real website, blog, and landing pages you own, not just a marketplace listing
- Prefer everything built in and working together instead of adding apps
- Want to grow and own an audience with built-in email marketing
- Like predictable monthly pricing, with 0% transaction fees on Shaker and Earthquaker
- Want a full course experience with a native player, video storage, and certificates
If you're looking for an all-in-one platform that's simple to run, has world-class customer service, and is affordable whether you're just starting out or growing fast, we built Podia just for you.
We’ll help you move to Podia for free
To make the decision even easier, we offer free migrations on all paid plans, so you don't have to move your products and email list over by yourself. Just sign up for a Mover, Shaker, or Earthquaker plan, let the team know you're interested in a free migration, and we'll get started. Before you know it, your whole business will be up and running on Podia.