Circle vs Podia: My In-Depth Comparison (Early 2025)

Over the past three months, I’ve been using both Circle and Podia to see how they measure up.

I’ve been digging into each platform’s features, workflows, and pricing structure to evaluate where each thrives and lacks.

So, in this Circle vs Podia comparison, I’ll break down how each platform stacks up when it comes to:

• Ease of use
• Online course creation
• Community building
• Event management
• Sales and marketing capabilities
• Pricing

Let’s get right in.

Circle vs Podia: A Quick Summary

Both Circle and Podia offer robust features for selling memberships and courses online, but they cater to slightly different audiences and use cases—which is reflected in their feature sets and pricing structure. 

Circle  — Best for community building 👥 🏗️

Circle best suits creators, educators, and knowledge entrepreneurs who want to build vibrant online communities around their digital products.

It also offers well-rounded community engagement features such as discussions, chats, leaderboards, polls, and live events.

With Circle, you can create private spaces for online courses, coaching, resources, and live events, and then put them behind a paywall so that only paid members can access them.

Podia — Best for selling digital products 🧑‍🏫 🛒

Podia is more of a digital business platform. It lets you create and sell online courses, digital downloads, coaching, and membership subscriptions.

Its community feature is more limited and feels disconnected, as it’s offered separately from its core digital products. Podia is better suited for creators and educators looking to sell their knowledge without the complexity of full-fledged LMS platforms.

Despite this, there are many overlapping features on both platforms — which we’ve covered in detail in this post.

But you can use the table below for a quick Circle vs Podia comparison.

Circle vs Podia: Digital Products

Digital products include online courses, live workshops, coaching, and digital downloads such as PDFs, e-books, audio files, templates, and more. 

Both Circle and Podia allow you to create digital products and monetize your audience. But how do they measure up? Let’s find out starting with…online courses.

Circle’s course builder is more intuitive, but Podia’s is more comprehensive.

Circle’s course creation workflow is slightly different from Podia’s. 

As Circle is primarily a community first platform, courses are offered within “Spaces” — allowing you to create dedicated sections to host your learning materials.

As such, courses in Circle feel like they’re part of your community providing a more interactive learning experience for your students where they can engage, share ideas, and learn together.

In contrast, Podia offers courses and communities as separate products. While this gives you the flexibility to offer courses and communities individually, it can result in a fragmented experience for students since the two are not inherently linked.

Inside Circle’s course builder, you can organize your curriculum using Sections and Lessons. You can upload learning materials directly or embed content from platforms like Wistia, Vimeo, and YouTube.

Using the Structured course structure,  you can drip your course materials relative to a student’s enrollment date.

Additionally, Circle supports file attachments, letting you include PDFs, cheat sheets, and templates that enhance the learning experience by providing students with additional resources to practice and apply what they’ve learned.

However, Circle has limitations when it comes to assessments. You can create quizzes to assess your students, but it lack the functionality to issue a certificate of completion.

Meanwhile, Podia takes a more traditional approach to course creation. Courses are offered as standalone products, and it supports course dripping by default—along with the ability to customize notifications when new content becomes available.

Podia also supports quizzes and video embeds like Circle, but it goes a step further by allowing you to offer a certificate of completion when students finish your course.

Circle is better for hosting paid events, workshops, and webinars.

Circle allows you to schedule and host live events natively, eliminating the need for third-party platforms like Zoom, Demio, or Livestorm.

You can create a dedicated space for hosting events, making it easy to gate them behind a paywall and invite select attendees. You can also enable RSVP options, send notifications, and allow attendees to add the event to their calendars.

With its Go-live functionality, you have the flexibility to host two types of live events.

You can host a “Liveroom” where participants can engage via video and audio— which is ideal for 1-on-1 coaching sessions, group calls, or virtual classrooms.

Alternatively, you can opt for the standard “Live stream” where only you and your invited co-hosts can participate through video and audio, while attendees can watch and participate via a chat. 

Depending on your Circle plan, you can host livestreams for anywhere between 100 to 2,000 participants.

Additionally, Circle lets you record live sessions, which you can later repurpose as video content for courses or coaching programs, adding value to your overall offerings.

On the other hand, Podia does not support native live streaming and requires integration with Zoom which can add extra costs.

Podia is better for selling digital downloads.

If you’re looking to sell digital products like templates, PDFs, eBooks, and cheat sheets, Podia offers the most streamlined approach.

The platform allows you to sell digital downloads as standalone products within your membership or as one-time purchases. 

You can easily create a dedicated landing page for each digital product, making it simple for visitors to browse, purchase, and download your offerings. 

Podia also offers flexibility in bundling digital downloads with other products like online courses or memberships. You can offer one-time purchases, and subscription models, or even provide discounts for bundled products.

On the other hand, Circle lacks dedicated features for selling digital downloads. While you can use the Circle’s “Post” space type to share digital files behind a paywall, this feels more like a workaround than a built-in feature.

Verdict: Podia wins as it offers more comprehensive course functionality and native support for digital downloads. However, Circle excels in paid live events and fostering a community-driven learning experience. Given that, choose Podia for well-rounded courses and digital download support, and Circle for interactive learning with live workshops built-in.

Circle vs Podia: Online Community Building

Both Circle and Podia allow you to create private community spaces where members can hold discussions, share ideas, and collaborate. However, after digging into each platform’s community-building functionality, it’s pretty much clear Circle outshines Podia in almost every aspect. Let me show you:

Circle has a more effective way to organize your community than Podia.

Circle allows you to organize your community using Spaces and Space Groups. Essentially, Spaces acts as the foundation of your community where you can create dedicated sections for discussions, live events, group chats, and even courses. Space Groups on the other hand enable you to bundle related spaces into common themes, creating a logical structure for your community.

Podia, on the other hand, is much more limited. It organizes your community around Topics, but these only support one type of content: posts. While posts can include text, images, videos, embeds, and even code snippets, that’s the extent of its flexibility. You can’t create dedicated sections for live events, courses, or exclusive group chats.

Circle has robust community management tools like moderation, profanity filters, and workflows, while Podia offers a barebones experience.

To help you provide a safe and respectful environment for your members, Circle offers strong moderation features including profanity filters, reporting tools, and the ability to flag members. With its profanity filter, you can automatically flag posts or comments containing specific words and phrases. 

Additionally, you can automatically flag members after a set number of reports from others. In that case, all their future posts are upheld until you deem their content useful and safe for others.

To streamline community management, Circle has a unique feature called Workflows. Essentially, it allows you to automate repetitive tasks such as welcoming new members, moderating content, and sending reminders. You get access to various automation templates that cover various use cases to help you get started quickly. 

On the other hand, Podia’s community tool lacks any form of moderation. While you can delete posts and comments manually, with a large community, this can be time-consuming.

Circle offers advanced community engagement tools like group chats, leaderboards, polls, and native live streaming—features Podia lacks.

Circle empowers you with robust tools to create engaging experiences for your members. You can set up private spaces for discussions, chats, and events.

Using the “Post” space type, you and your members can share various content formats, including text, videos, images, PDFs, GIFs, code snippets, and embeds. Members can interact by leaving comments or likes.

While Podia allows similar interactions, Circle goes further by incorporating polls and gamification. You can create polls to gather members’ opinions and enable leaderboards to boost engagement. You can reward members with points for every like they get from other members. The more points they accumulate the higher they’ll rank on the leaderboard. 

Circle also lets you reward members with badges as a form of recognition. For example, you can add a badge to acknowledge active contributors and top participants. This together with, points earned and their level are displayed on their profile cards and leaderboard. 

Additionally, Circle allows you to create chatrooms where members can engage with each other and share content. They can also send private messages. In contrast, Podia only allows private messaging, lacking the option to create group chats for discussion.

Lastly, Circle enables you to host live events natively, removing the need for third-party platforms. You can hold group calls for up to 20 members, who can join via Circle’s mobile app or a web browser.

For larger events, you can host virtual gatherings of up to 2,000 attendees. In contrast, Podia doesn’t provide built-in live streaming tools, requiring you to invest in additional webinar software like Zoom or Livestorm.

Verdict: When it comes to community building, Circle easily outperforms Podia. Circle provides superior engagement tools like live events, leaderboards, and polls, which Podia lacks. Additionally, Circle offers more effective community organization and moderation features than Podia.

Podia vs Circle: Sales & Marketing Features

After building your digital product—whether it’s an online course, coaching service, or membership—you’ll need effective tools to market and sell it. Both Podia and Circle offer features to help with this, such as building landing pages, accepting payments, and boosting sales through discounts and coupons.

However, when you dive deeper into their marketing tools, Podia consistently stands out with more comprehensive, integrated capabilities. Let’s break down how Podia vs Circle measures up when it comes to selling and marketing your digital products.

Podia has a more advanced page builder than Circle.

Both Podia and Circle offer landing page builders, but neither is up to par with more specialized tools. Podia’s page builder feels outdated, less polished, and lacks any templates, while Circle’s is highly restrictive.

In short, it’s hard to create landing pages that feel modern and uniquely yours on either platform.

However, leaving that behind and comparing them side-by-side, Podia’s page builder is more functional than Circle’s.

With Podia, you can create product-specific pages and add elements like sign-up forms, CTA buttons, testimonials, and product sections.

You also get some level of customization, such as adding logos, background colors, and images. 

However, you don’t get templates to help you set up a good design fast.

I mean, you can get creative with some design elements but if you don’t have much experience in design, it’s easy to end up with a horrible-looking landing page.

But it’s not about aesthetics, but having a professional-looking landing page can help up your conversion which is what some advanced page builders like Leadpages do best.

But hey, at least Podia’s page builder gets the basics done.

On the other hand, Circle’s page builder is extremely limited. It focuses more on locking content behind paywalls than on creating customizable landing pages. The available elements—banners, CTAs, and paywall displays—are basic at best. 

If you need professional-looking landing pages, you’ll certainly have to integrate a more robust builder like Leadpages or Unbounce.

Podia can build email campaigns but Circle depends on third-party apps.

With Podia, you can launch end-to-end email marketing campaigns to help you promote and sell your digital products. You get to choose from creating broadcast emails—which is ideal for sending announcements, product launches, or special offers. 

Or you can set up automated sequences, where you can trigger a series of emails based on customer behavior. For instance, you can create a welcome email sequence that begins when someone signs up for your course.

Podia also comes with an email designer featuring six customizable templates, making it easy to create emails that match your brand’s style. You can embed videos, add downloadable files, showcase products into your emails.

Once done creating and designing, Podia lets you send a test email to ensure everything looks perfect from the recipient’s perspective.

Circle, on the other hand, doesn’t have built-in email marketing. The closest it gets is the Weekly Digest feature, which lets you send members a weekly summary of popular posts, comments, and activity from your community.

Beyond that, you’ll need to integrate an advanced email marketing tool like ConvertKit to create full-fledged email campaigns and workflows. 

Podia provides more robust checkout options compared to Circle.

With Podia, you can create a better checkout experience and potentially increase your sales. It supports both PayPal and Stripe, giving you more flexibility in payment options, while Circle only works with Stripe.

Both platforms let you offer discounts and coupons, but Podia offers additional tools like upselling and bundle pricing. You can combine multiple products into a package deal, which can help increase your average order value. Circle offers discounts and coupons as well, but it doesn’t include upselling or bundling features.

Verdict: Podia easily wins due to its built-in email marketing and landing page features, which Circle lacks.

Circle vs Podia: Pricing Review

Podia is more affordable than Circle. It also includes a free plan while Circle doesn’t. Podia also includes built-in marketing tools like landing pages and email marketing, features that Circle lacks. However, Circle offers more advanced community-building tools that Podia struggles to offer.

Instead of comparing their prices head-on, let’s break down what each platform offers in their paid plans to give you a better idea of their value.

Let’s start with Circle.

Circle Pricing

Circle’s pricing starts at $49 per month for the “Basic” plan, which includes paid memberships, events, gamification, and a searchable member directory. However, it does not include courses or live streaming.

To access those, you’ll need to upgrade to the “Professional” plan at $99 per month, which also offers community white-labeling, custom code snippets, and Zapier integration.

For larger creators, the $219 per month “Business” plan adds features like workflows, email white-labeling, and automated video transcription. At the top end, the “Enterprise” plan costs $399 per month and provides unlimited workflow automations, full white labeling, and dedicated support.

Podia Pricing

Podia offers a “Free” plan that allows you to create a website, blog, digital downloads, and coaching products, though it comes with a 10% transaction fee. 

Its paid plans start at $39 per month for the “Mover” plan, which includes unlimited courses, downloads, and webinars, but still has a 5% transaction fee. The $89 per month “Shaker” plan adds top-tier features including affiliate marketing, Zapier integration, and PayPal support.

Circle vs Podia: Pros and Cons

Circle vs Podia: Which One Should You Choose?

Circle and Podia are both popular platforms for selling memberships and digital courses, but after comparing them side-by-side, it’s clear that they cater to different needs.

Circle excels as a community-building platform. It offers a strong set of features to help you create private spaces where you can engage your audience through discussions, chats, live events, courses, and leaderboards. 

That said, choose Circle if:

• You want to build a thriving community around your digital courses and coaching programs.
• You need an online coaching platform with integrated live streaming and paywalls.
• You’re looking for a simple and effective membership solution.

Podia, on the other hand, is a versatile digital business platform. It equips you with the tools to create a membership site and sell courses, digital downloads, and coaching sessions. While its marketing tools—like email campaigns and landing page builders—aren’t on par with specialized platforms, they are effective for creators with simple marketing needs.

Given that, choose Podia if:

• You need a membership platform with built-in marketing capabilities.
• You want to offer certificates of completion for your courses.
• You plan to sell various digital products, including courses, eBooks, downloads, and coaching.

Interesting readings:

• Circle vs. Kajabi
• Circle vs. Skool
• Circle vs. Mighty Networks
• Best community platforms
• Circle.so detailed review