Podia vs Kajabi in 2026

TL;DR. Same category, different weight class. Podia bundles a website, email marketing and every product type for $49 / $99 / $179 a month, or $42 / $84 / $150 on annual billing ($504 / $1,008 / $1,800 a year, roughly 14–16% off), with 5% taken on Mover, nothing on the two plans above it, and Stripe or PayPal’s 2.9% + 30¢ on all of them. Email subscribers are capped at 100 / 500 / 1,000. Kajabi costs $179 / $249 / $499 ($143 / $199 / $399 annual), takes 2.7–2.9% + 30¢ through Kajabi Payments or 0.5–2% over an outside provider, and counts contacts at 2,500 / 25,000 / 100,000 with unlimited funnels and marketing emails on every tier. Both are 30-day trials with no free plan. Podia is the cheaper roof — though its top plan and Kajabi’s entry plan meet exactly at $179 a month; Kajabi is the bigger engine. A third shape, below, removes the roof altogether.

Podia is usually described as the friendly Kajabi, which is accurate about the tone and misleading about the trade. The two products bundle roughly the same list of modules. What separates them is how much audience each is built to move — and you can read that off the pricing pages before comparing a single feature.

Who each is built for

Podia is for a creator who wants one calm tool. Every plan — including the $49 Mover — carries the website builder, email marketing, online courses, digital downloads, coaching, events and community, and a custom domain is listed for everyone. The tiers mostly ration volume: 50, 150 and unlimited products; 100, 500 and 1,000 email subscribers; affiliate marketing and upsells reserved for Shaker and Earthquaker. Nothing central is held back behind a paywall, which is a rare and honest way to price.

Kajabi is for a business that runs launches. Its entry plan already includes unlimited landing pages, funnels and marketing emails, a website builder, community features, a universal inbox and comment-to-DM, and it counts contacts in thousands rather than hundreds. The tiers ration reach and team: 5, 50 and unlimited products; 1, 1 and 3 websites; 2, 11 and 26 admin users; AI credits at 0, 500 and 1,000.

The clean way to state it: Podia gives you everything at a small scale, Kajabi gives you scale at a large price. A creator emailing 400 people is overpaying on Kajabi. A creator emailing 4,000 has already outgrown Podia’s top plan.

The numbers side by side

	Podia	Kajabi
Monthly price	$49 / $99 / $179	$179 / $249 / $499
Annual price	$42 / $84 / $150 a month ($504 / $1,008 / $1,800 a year)	$143 / $199 / $399 a month
Platform fee on a sale	5% on Mover; none on Shaker and Earthquaker	2.9% / 2.8% / 2.7% + 30¢ via Kajabi Payments
Bringing your own processor	Stripe or PayPal at 2.9% + 30¢, charged by them, on every plan	+2% / 1% / 0.5% by tier on top of the provider
Audience ceiling	100 / 500 / 1,000 email subscribers	2,500 / 25,000 / 100,000 contacts
Products	50 / 150 / unlimited	5 / 50 / unlimited
Website and domain	Builder on all plans, custom domain for everyone	Builder on all plans; 1 / 1 / 3 websites
Team	1 assistant on Shaker, unlimited on Earthquaker	2 / 11 / 26 admin users
Course assessment	Quiz lessons, completion certificates, drip content, owner-facing progress dashboard with per-student quiz scores	Assessments, drip schedules, progress tracking, automatic certificate on completion
Marketing depth and AI	Email marketing on every plan; affiliates and upsells from Shaker	Unlimited funnels and marketing emails; AI credits 0 / 500 / 1,000 by tier

The split is cleaner than most comparisons: Podia takes price and the low end, Kajabi takes everything measured in thousands. The course rows are close to a tie — both have quizzes, drip and certificates, and Podia is the one that publishes a per-student view with quiz scores.

Where Podia wins

• Price at the entry point, by a wide margin. $49 against $179 paid monthly, $42 against $143 paid annually — Mover is between a quarter and a third of Kajabi Basic. The margin does not hold all the way up: Podia’s top plan is $179 a month, exactly Kajabi’s entry price, and on annual billing Earthquaker’s $150 is $7 more than Kajabi Basic’s $143. Podia is cheap where most creators actually buy.
• Nothing important behind a tier. Courses, downloads, coaching, events, community, email and a custom domain are on Mover. On Kajabi the equivalent starting point is 5 products and 1 website.
• A fee that vanishes. Move from Mover to Shaker and Podia’s own cut goes to zero; Kajabi’s percentage shrinks with the tier but never disappears.
• Course features that are genuinely present, not implied. Quiz lessons, certificates, preview lessons, video captions, lesson comments, and a per-student progress view with quiz scores.
• Less to assemble. Every module Podia sells is on every plan, so setup is deciding what to sell rather than working out which tier unlocks it.

Where Kajabi wins

• Audience scale. 100,000 contacts on Pro against Podia’s 1,000 email subscribers on Earthquaker. This is not a close row; it is two different businesses.
• Funnels, unlimited, from the entry tier. Landing pages, sales pages, unlimited marketing emails and a row the pricing page calls Advanced Automations. Podia sends email; Kajabi runs campaigns.
• Seats before the top plan. Kajabi Basic starts at 2 admin users and Growth carries 11; Podia’s assistant row starts at one on Shaker. It flips at $179, where Earthquaker’s assistants are unlimited against Kajabi Basic’s two.
• The deeper annual discount. $143 instead of $179 is about 20% off, against roughly 14–16% on Podia. It does not close the entry gap — $143 is still more than three times Mover’s $42 — but at the top of each range it puts Kajabi Basic under Podia Earthquaker.
• Room above. Unlimited products, three websites, three communities and metered AI credits mean the platform is still there when the business is five times the size.

The third option: doing it inside Telegram

Both plans here rent you a web home base and assume students will visit it, sign up and return. If your readers already sit in a Telegram channel, a Telegram LMS skips the base entirely. The course is delivered as messages inside the bot’s chat — text, images, video, audio, files — unlocking in order as the student marks each lesson done, with live sessions and their recordings held in the same course. There is no account to create, an AI tutor answers from your own lessons, and Telegram’s protocol-level content protection stops lessons being forwarded out.

We take 0% of the sale and there is no monthly floor to clear before the first one. What the rail takes is the honest cost: a buyer spends $19.99 per 1,000 Stars as a store pack or $14.10 at Telegram’s sell rate while Telegram’s developer terms put your payout at $0.013, a spread of 35% on a store pack (7.8% at Telegram’s own rate) — wider than Podia’s 5% or Kajabi’s 2.9%. What withdrawing Stars actually pays covers the 1,000-Star minimum and the 21-day hold.

Do not choose it if you need quizzes or certificates, or a roster telling you who finished — none of the three exist here. Do not choose it if buyers find you through search or ads, since there is no page to land on. And not if your buyers pay by card: Telegram policy routes digital delivery through Stars only.

If… then…

If	Then
Your list is a few hundred people and money is tight	Podia Mover. Everything is included; the 5% is the price of not paying $179
You email thousands and run launches	Kajabi. Podia’s top plan caps at 1,000 subscribers and that is the whole answer
You sell enough that 5% hurts	Podia Shaker. $99 removes the fee entirely, which pays for itself past roughly $1,000 of monthly sales
A team of five works inside the platform	Podia Earthquaker — unlimited assistants for $179, where Kajabi Basic gives two and eleven seats need Growth at $249
You want quiz scores per student without an upgrade	Podia publishes exactly that view
Your audience already reads you in a Telegram chat	The Telegram option — but only if certificates and a progress roster are things you can do without

Where to start

The honest test is not which pricing page you prefer, it is your subscriber count. Under a thousand people on a list, Kajabi’s contact tiers are capacity you rent and do not use, and Podia does the same job for a quarter of the money. Past a few thousand, Podia’s ceiling turns into a migration you will pay for in a worse month than this one.

And if you cannot name a subscriber count because the audience is not a list at all — it is a channel, a group, a chat — that is the signal worth taking seriously. Both of these products would have you build an email list first and sell second. Test one short course for a month where those people already are, and compare the money kept per sale against the number who reached the final lesson. Only the second figure tells you whether the web detour was doing any work.

The single-product versions of this argument: Podia alternatives and Kajabi alternatives. For the website-first course builder that sits between them on price, Thinkific alternatives and, head to head, Kajabi vs Thinkific. What chat-native delivery looks like from the student’s side: selling courses on Telegram. Sending a reader from a post straight into a lesson takes a bot deep link, and the Telegram link generator builds one.

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Podia plan prices — the monthly rate and the discounted annual rate — the 5% Mover fee, processor fees, email subscriber and product limits, custom domain, assistants, affiliate marketing and trial length: podia.com/pricing; quiz lessons, completion certificates, drip content and the owner-facing per-student progress view: podia.com/features; both checked September 2026. Kajabi plan prices, annual rates, transaction fees, contact, product, website, community, admin and AI credit limits and trial length: kajabi.com/pricing; course assessments, drip scheduling, progress tracking and automatic certificates: kajabi.com/features/online-courses; both checked September 2026. Star payout rate: Telegram’s terms for bot developers, section 6.2.4.