Podia and The Leap are two of the most popular platforms for selling digital products. But when it comes to a showdown between The Leap vs. Podia, which platform rises to the top?
While Podia boasts itself as “the all-in-one for teams of one,” the recent removal of its free plan has got a lot of creators and entrepreneurs wondering if they can even afford the platform.
Meanwhile, The Leap is a 100% free alternative to Podia with the bonus of an AI-powered digital product builder that saves you time and money.
In this article, we deep dive into what sets The Leap apart from Podia, so you can decide which platform will work best for you.
Start monetizing your audience with The Leap, your free link-in-bio store.The Leap vs. Podia: Key differences
The Leap and Podia are both user-friendly online store platforms with similar feature offerings, like the ability to build and sell online courses and other digital products. However, some key differences set them apart.
For example, The Leap is free to use, while Podia recently removed its free plan and only offers two paid plans for $39 to $89/month. Read on to learn more.
| Platform | Pricing and key features |
| The Leap | Price: Free! Digital product builder: ✅ lets you build mini-courses, guides, tutorials, and challenges Online store: ✅ Generative AI: ✅ Email marketing tools: ✅ Native calendar booking: ✅ Flexible payment options: ✅ Referral program: ✅ up to 40% commission per month |
| Podia | Price: $39 – $89/month + transaction fees Digital product builder: ✅ online course builder Online store: ✅ Generative AI: ❌ Email marketing tools: ✅ Native calendar booking: ✅ Flexible payment options: ✅ Referral program: ✅ up to 20% commission/per month |
What is The Leap?
The Leap is the only completely free link-in-bio store that helps creator entrepreneurs monetize their knowledge by creating, selling, and marketing digital products.
Not only does The Leap allow you to create bite-sized mini-courses, but you can also use its AI-powered digital product builder to create other digital products — like challenges, guides, tutorials, and more — to sell or offer for free as lead magnets to build your email list.
Beside the ability to sell digital products, with The Leap’s native calendar booking feature Book My Time, you can schedule appointments like 1:1 calls, consultations, and coaching sessions with clients. It also boasts email marketing automation features, including a library of expert-recommended email templates to help you optimize your email marketing campaigns and boost your sales.
The Leap doesn’t just use AI to create digital products, it can also generate landing pages with high-converting product descriptions for you — all within minutes. Ultimately, The Leap’s AI tools save you time and money, so you can focus on other important parts of your business.
The Leap key features
- AI-powered digital product builder: The Leap’s digital product builder is the only of its kind powered by generative AI. It can produce a draft for a mini-course, guide, tutorial, or more in just minutes, with an accompanying landing page, saving you a ton of time and effort.
- 100% free to use: While many digital product stores charge a monthly subscription or transaction fees, The Leap is free to use. Once you start making sales from your Leap store, all you have to pay is the standard 2.9% Stripe fee.
- Native calendar booking: The Leap’s Book My Time feature allows you to offer and schedule one-on-one calls with your clients, like coaching or consultation sessions, and get paid easily.
- Flexible payment options: The Leap creators have access to flexible selling and payment options, like Buy Now, Pay Later payment plans via Klarna, Afterpay, and Affirm. Plus, discount/coupon codes and one-click payments via digital wallets like Apple Pay.
- Lead generation: The Leap’s product builder can help you create effective lead magnets (aka freebies), which help you grow your email list and boost your sales.
- Email marketing automation: Use The Leap’s pre-made email templates for setting up automated email flows and sending one-off broadcasts easily.
- Referral program: The Leap’s unique referral program operates on a tiered commission system, offering creators the ability to make up to 40% recurring commission.
What is Podia?
Podia is an online platform that allows users to easily set up websites and blogs, sell digital products, and create and sell online courses. It’s designed for creators, coaches, consultants, and many other business roles, and offers several features catered to each, such as the ability to sell memberships or ticketed webinars.
While Podia is celebrated for its simplicity, it was most popular for its affordability. However, the platform recently removed its free plan, causing many creators to search elsewhere for an affordable alternative.
Podia allows users to create online courses only, meaning you can’t build other digital products on the platform. Its course builder is fairly simple to use and offers all the basic functionality you’d hope for from a course builder (e.g. the ability to upload videos and create quizzes).
The Leap vs. Podia: Comparison
Now that you’ve got a handle on the basics of The Leap and Podia, let’s dive in a little deeper. Keep reading for a thorough comparison of the two platforms. We’ll cover everything from pricing to the presence of AI features, payment options, and more.
- Pricing
- Native calendar booking
- Digital product builder
- Referral program
- Email marketing automation tools
1. Pricing
One of the key differences between The Leap and Podia is their pricing structure.
Podia previously offered a free plan, which made the platform accessible to users just getting started. However, the platform has recently removed its free plan, which means you’ll have to pay either $39/month with a 5% transaction fee on all sales, or $89/month with 0% transaction fees.
On the other hand, The Leap remains one of the only free online stores for selling digital products, with zero transaction fees. The only extra fee you’ll see with The Leap is a standard 2.9% Stripe payment processing fee. That’s it — all the profits are yours to keep.
Click here to start creating and selling digital products with The Leap. It’s free!2. Native calendar booking
Both The Leap and Podia offer calendar booking features that allow creator entrepreneurs to monetize their expertise via coaching sessions or consulting calls.
The Leap’s Book My Time feature allows creators to schedule appointments like one-on-one calls, consultations, and coaching sessions. It also comes with automated appointment reminders and other valuable email marketing features for nurturing your leads and customers.
Podia also offers appointment scheduling. However, the biggest difference between Podia and The Leap is that The Leap’s calendar booking feature is built into the platform, meaning you don’t have to worry about integrating with a different appointment scheduling app.
On the other hand, Podia requires you to integrate with another appointment scheduling platform before you can offer appointment services. Not only does that mean unnecessary tab-hopping, but it also means you end up paying for two separate platforms.
If you want an online store where you can sell digital products and services like coaching and consulting calls all from one place, The Leap is your best bet.
Use The Leap to offer micro-consulting and sell coaching sessions. It’s free!3. Digital product builder
Another key difference between Podia and The Leap is their digital product builder capabilities. Both The Leap and Podia offer creators the ability to build and sell courses. Both platforms offer easy-to-navigate course builders and are simple to get started.
However, there are some important differences to consider. Firstly, The Leap has an AI-powered digital product builder that creates bite-sized mini-courses (as opposed to longer-form online courses), as well as other digital products like challenges, tutorials, guides, and more.
While Podia has been known for its simplicity, The Leap’s AI-powered digital product builder takes it one huge step further, making it ridiculously easy for users to produce mini-courses and more in just minutes. How, exactly? The Leap’s AI can generate customizable drafts for your digital products, and even high-converting landing pages and product descriptions, saving you tons of time and effort. Watch the video below to see how it works:
Since The Leap is designed to feel as intuitive to use as your social platforms, this platform is a good option for creator entrepreneurs who want to market their product offering to their social media audiences.
Click here to start creating and selling digital products with The Leap. It’s free!4. Referral program
Both Podia and The Leap offer a referral program for their users. Podia’s Refer-a-Friend program lets you earn account credits every time someone uses your referral link to sign up with the platform. Once the referred user becomes a paying Podia customer, you can earn up to $30 account credits per referral.
The platform also offers useful analytics for tracking your referral, like the number of visitors who clicked your link, accounts still in trial, pending, and earned commissions.
Meanwhile, The Leap Referral Program operates on a tiered commission structure. And rather than being rewarded with account credits, you receive cold hard cash for your referrals! Since The Leap is a free-first platform, its commission structure reflects this. Essentially, it gives you the ability to also leverage free sign-ups into cash.
With The Leap, the more free sign-ups you refer during a given referral period, the higher your commission rate tier for that period will be. The Leap’s commission tiers start at the Bronze level (earning a 10% commission) and go up to the Diamond level (earning up to a 40% commission).
Want to find out more about how to turn referrals into cold hard cash? Learn more about The Leap Referral Program here.
Invite friends to The Leap and earn $$$ from your referrals!
5. Email marketing automation tools
The Leap and Podia both offer built-in email marketing tools, meaning there’s no need to integrate with a separate email marketing platform.
Podia makes it easy for users to automate email campaigns to reach the right audience at the right time, with segmentation options like products purchased, memberships, and revenue. The platform also offers several pre-made email templates, and allows you to embed your email sign-up form onto a third-party website.
Now let’s take a look at The Leap: the platform offers most of Podia’s features, including automated email flows and the ability to send one-off broadcasts with ease. The Leap also provides users with a library of expert-approved, pre-written email templates from Warm Welcome, to Friendly Check-in, to Nurture Funnel. With The Leap, you can capture unlimited leads and send emails to up to 500 contacts for free.
On the contrary, none of Podia’s email marketing features are free — you must first subscribe to a paid plan to access them. And even with Podia’s paid plans, there is a limit on the number of email subscribers you can have, depending on what paid tier you go with.
Nurture and convert leads with The Leap’s built-in email marketing features. Start free!The Leap vs. Podia: Which one should you choose?
Ultimately, when it comes down to deciding on the best digital product store for you, it’s important to consider your needs, goals, and most importantly, your budget.
If you’re on a budget, The Leap is your best option, since it provides you with most of Podia’s features plus an AI-powered digital product builder without the hefty monthly subscription or transaction fees. Not to mention, with The Leap’s digital product builder, you can create a range of engaging digital learning products in just minutes, like mini-courses, guides, challenges, tutorials, and more.
However, if Podia is still on your mind, it may be a good option for you if you’re a creator looking to pursue income streams like ticketed live streams or an SEO-driven blog. Keep in mind that when it comes to Podia, these features come at a cost — a $39 (plus a 5% transaction fee) to $89 monthly subscription fee, to be exact.
TL;DR
The Leap is best if… |
Podia is best if… |
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Create and sell digital products for free with The Leap
While Podia is a solid digital product store option, Podia’s recent removal of its free plan and the absence of advanced tools, like AI-driven course builder features, may make it less appealing to creator entrepreneurs seeking more robust or budget-friendly options.
The Leap is a 100% digital product store solution. With The Leap, not only do you get access to its AI-powered digital product builder — which can generate ideas and drafts for mini-courses and other digital products in just minutes — you also get a built-in appointment scheduling tool for selling one-on-one calls, email marketing automation features, an email list builder, an analytics dashboard, and more.
If you’re looking for a budget-friendly, scalable platform for your business as a creator entrepreneur, The Leap is for you!
Want to turn your knowledge into serious cash? Try The Leap free today to build your online storefront and sell your digital products.
Start monetizing your audience with The Leap, your free link-in-bio store.
The Leap vs. Podia FAQ
How is The Leap better than Podia?
The Leap and Podia are both digital product stores with robust feature toolkits for monetizing your expertise. Each platform appeals to creator entrepreneurs. However, some key differences make The Leap more desirable.
Firstly, The Leap is 100% free to use — there are no hidden subscription or transaction fees. With The Leap, you get access to its built-in appointment scheduling tool, email marketing automation features, email list builder, analytics, and more.
Secondly, while Podia allows users to build online courses, The Leap’s AI-powered digital product builder allows you to create mini-courses, as well as other digital products like challenges, tutorials, and guides.
Finally, what truly sets The Leap apart from Podia is its generative AI, which can produce ideas and customizable drafts for digital products, high-converting landing pages and product description copy, and more, in just minutes. Ultimately, The Leap saves you time and effort building and selling digital products.
Create and sell digital products in minutes using The Leap!
What is Podia?
Podia is an all-in-one platform designed for creators, entrepreneurs, and educators who want to sell digital products, create online courses, and offer memberships. Known for its user-friendly interface, Podia allows users to build customizable websites, upload digital content like videos and ebooks, and engage their audience with tools like email marketing and webinars.
How does Podia work?
Setting up on Podia is straightforward: all you have to do is sign up, choose a plan, and use the Podia dashboard to design your website, add products, and set pricing.
Podia’s course builder enables users to create structured lessons with video uploads, text, and quizzes. Membership features let creators monetize exclusive content, while built-in marketing tools help grow their audience.
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Further reading
- 11 Best Platforms To Sell Digital Products Online
- 10 Best Online Appointment Scheduling Tools
- 7 Best Microlearning Platforms for Building Mini-Courses
- 8 Best AI Tools for Ecommerce Businesses
- 12 Best Lead Generation Tools and Software for Creators
- Podia Pricing 2025 Review: Is the Digital Product Store Worth It?
