Two different jobs
Podia is a hosted service. Its own site describes courses with drip lessons, quizzes and certificates, digital downloads, coaching, community spaces, events, email marketing, a website builder with a custom domain, and an affiliate programme. You sign up and everything lives in one account.
Learnomy is a plugin for a WordPress site you run. It does courses, quizzes, certificates, memberships and checkout very well, and leaves the rest of your business to other tools. We have no built-in email marketing, no webinar tool and no website builder. WordPress itself is your website.
So the real question is not which has more features. It is whether you want one service that does many things, or a course platform that sits inside a site you control.
Building and selling one course
In Podia, you create a product, upload lessons, set a price and publish on a page it hosts for you. It is quick, and the vendor’s pitch is that you can be live in an afternoon. The email and the page are already connected.
In Learnomy, you need a WordPress site first. Then you install the plugin, add sections and lessons (video, audio, PDF, embed, download, live session link or rich text), attach a quiz, set up the certificate and add Stripe or PayPal keys. The course is on your own domain, in your theme.
That extra step is the real cost. If you have never run WordPress, expect a few hours to pick hosting and learn the admin, and plan for updates and backups afterwards. Good managed hosting takes most of that off your hands.
Email and your list
Podia includes newsletters, welcome sequences and automations, with sales tied to email results. That is a real advantage for a solo creator who wants one login.
Learnomy sends transactional email, such as receipts, enrolment and certificate messages, and lets you send announcements to enrolled students. For marketing email, you connect a WordPress email or CRM plugin or an outside service. Student email addresses live in your own database, so you can feed them into whichever tool you choose.
What a student sees in the first week
On Podia, a student gets a clean, simple course page. On Learnomy, they get an account on your site, a course outline that shows what is open and what is locked, progress tracking, a quiz that saves their answers as they go, and a certificate with a public page for checking it.
Students on Learnomy log in to your domain, not a third party’s. That helps if you want the course next to your blog or shop. It also means you handle password resets and support.
Student data, exports and erasure
With a hosted platform, the records sit with the vendor, and the vendor’s export options decide what you can take. The vendor’s pages did not mention data export when we looked, so ask before you commit.
With Learnomy, enrolments, attempts, orders and progress are in your own database. You can export a student’s data on request, erase learner records on request, and read everything through the REST API. Payment and audit records are kept but unlinked from the person, so your accounts stay intact.
Moving over from Podia
There is no importer for Podia. Our importer reads LearnDash, Tutor LMS and LifterLMS only. The route is to rebuild by hand, or script it against the REST API or WP-CLI.
Course content is the easy part: copy text, re-upload or embed videos and recreate quizzes. Students are different, since they have no WordPress accounts. Paste their emails or upload a CSV to enrol them in bulk. People without an account are given one and sent an invite to set a password. Their old progress does not travel, so decide how to treat anyone partway through.
- Export or save every lesson, file and quiz from Podia.
- Set up WordPress, hosting and the plugin on a staging site.
- Rebuild one course and test the whole student path.
- Rebuild the rest, then set prices and a checkout.
- Enrol current students by email or CSV.
- Move your email list to your chosen tool, then cut over the domain.
Who should not switch
Stay with Podia if you do not want to run a website, or if you want email, downloads and coaching under one bill. Stay if you are new and your first goal is to sell something this week.
Switch when you already run WordPress, need deeper assessment or public certificate checks, or want your student records in your own database.