Podia and MailerLite both work well for managing and automating your email marketing, but while MailerLite primarily focuses on email, Podia gives you a wide range of tools for selling products and running your entire business.

Every creator business has different needs, so to help you make the best choice for you, let’s see how Podia and MailerLite stack up.

Pricing and plan limits for Podia and MailerLite

Both Podia and MailerLite have competitively priced email marketing tools, but the features you get with each platform are different.

With Podia, you can choose the Mover or Shaker plan and add on email subscribers as needed.

• Mover: $39/month or $33/month when paid annually (5% transaction fee), includes your website, blog, landing pages, and customer chat messaging, plus unlimited digital products, unlimited courses, and our simple online course builder

• Shaker: $89/month or $75/month when paid annually, includes everything on the Mover plan plus affiliates and zero transaction fees

All plans include 100 email subscribers for free, and if you need more, you can pay as you go. Everyone gets unlimited email sends, newsletters, automated campaigns, segmentation, tagging, email opt-in forms, lead magnets, waitlists, email templates, and built-in blog post emailing, regardless of your subscriber count.

• Up to 500 subscribers: $9/month

• Up to 1,500 subscribers: $17/month

• Up to 2,500 subscribers: $25/month

• Up to 5,000 subscribers: $42/month

• Up to 10,000 subscribers: $63/month

See the full pricing scale here

With MailerLite, there’s a free plan with 1,000 subscribers, but you have a limit of 12,000 email sends per month. You can build a website, but you’re limited to 10 landing pages, and you cannot sell digital products. Additionally, you only get access to support for the first 30 days of your subscription.

For more features, you’ll need their Growing Business or Advanced plan, which increases in price as your list size grows.

• Free: Free for up to 1,000 subscribers with a limit of 12,000 email sends per month

• Growing Business: $10/month for up to 500 subscribers, $25/month for 2,500 subscribers

• Advanced: $20/month for up to 500 subscribers, $40/month for 2,500 subscribers

Let’s say you have an email list with about 10,000 subscribers. With Podia, you could use the Mover plan with the email add-on, bringing your total cost to $102/month billed monthly or $83/month billed annually.

That price includes all the perks of Podia’s all-in-one platform, including your full website builder, blog functionality, landing pages, customer messaging, online course builder, and the ability to sell unlimited coaching sessions, downloads, webinars, and digital products.

With MailerLite, you would not be eligible for the free plan, so you’d have to use the Growing Business or Advanced plan.

The Growing Business plan costs $73/month for 10,000 subscribers and the Advanced plan costs $110/month for 10,000 subscribers, but neither of these plans include courses, customer messaging, affiliates, or the ability to sell coaching. If you wanted these features, you’d need to use another platform or integration which could come with additional costs.

Can I use segments and automations?

Segments and tags make it easy to communicate with a particular subset of your audience. Automations allow you to automatically send emails when subscribers take certain actions, like opt-in to your email list, buy a product, or join your membership.

Podia and MailerLite allow you to create as many audience segments as you like. Both platforms also allow you to schedule and automate your email campaigns and newsletters.

One perk of using an all-in-one tool like Podia is that we can automatically handle some of your tagging for you. Because your customer data is already linked to your email list, you can filter, tag, and segment your audience based on things like products purchased, total amount spent with your business, waitlist status, and how long someone has been a subscriber.

You can also add custom tags yourself, but out of the gate, you’ll have tons of information you can use to customize your messages without having to set anything up yourself.

For example, you can build an automated workflow that begins when someone downloads your lead magnet (built in Podia). The campaign showcases your signature paid product (built in Podia) and includes 10 emails over the course of 10 weeks (also built in Podia).

If the person buys your signature paid product at any point during that time, they’ll be automatically removed from the campaign, so they’ll stop seeing the promo emails. You could even have them automatically entered into a new campaign for signature product customers (you guessed it, built in Podia) if you want.

Everything happens in Podia so you don’t need any extra apps or Zapier which could come with additional costs.

How much creative control do I have over my email design?

To make your emails look great, Podia and MailerLite both include an easy-to-use email builder with pre-styled blocks so you can design to your heart’s content. You can also use a template as your starting point.

Newsletter and email templates are included on all Podia plans, so you can feel confident that your message looks professional and on-brand. You can also set up your own custom templates and use any templates you like in your automated campaigns.

With MailerLite, you can only use newsletter templates on the Growing Business plan and Advanced plan, but not on the free plan. If you want access to the template library, upgrading is required.

Are websites and landing pages included?

Podia and MailerLite both have a full website with blogging and landing pages where you can promote your email list. Both come with a free subdomain and web hosting, so you don’t have to worry about setting that up on your own.

Podia’s website page builder is easier than drag and drop and you can customize your fonts, colors, layouts, header, footer, and every section on the pages of your website. You can choose from dozens of pre-designed sections and layouts so that your site looks good from day one, and many of our users report that they were able to set up their website in an afternoon.

Another perk of Podia is automatic blog post emailing. When you publish a new blog post on your site, you have the option to send that blog post as an email newsletter to your subscribers. You can share the full text of your article or just a snippet, and you can even set up a custom blog post emailing template so sharing your work only takes a few seconds.

With MailerLite, you can create a website and ten landing pages on the free plan, but you’ll need to upgrade to the Growing Business plan if you’d like unlimited landing pages. MailerLite also includes blogging on the Growing Business and Advanced plan.

Sell your products and manage your email list from one platform

You can sell digital products on Podia and MailerLite, but the key difference is the types of products you can sell.

Podia has features for selling:

• Digital downloads

• Online courses

• Webinars

• Bundles

• Coaching

You can also offer product bundles, connect products with Discord for community access, set access duration limits, create drip email courses, run cohort programs, and increase revenue through upsells at checkout.

On the Shaker plan, Podia includes affiliate management functionality so you can let happy customers promote your work for you in exchange for a commission.

You can use Stripe or PayPal as your payment processor with Podia.

On MailerLite, you can sell products with the Growing Business or Advanced plan. There’s no built-in online course platform, online community feature, or webinar feature, so you’re more limited in the type of products you can offer your audience. You can use Stripe as your payment processor with MailerLite.

How can I get customer support if I get stuck?

Even the most tech-savvy entrepreneurs will have questions as they grow, and it’s important to have quick and reliable access to support when you need it.

With MailerLite, email support and live chat support are only available for the first 30 days on the free plan. After that, you have no support on the free plan aside from knowledge base documents. If you need hands-on help, you can upgrade to the Growing Business plan for email support or the Advanced plan for email and 24/7 live chat support.

Podia users get expert support, help docs, free training courses, guides, video tutorials, and access to our welcoming Podia Community on all plans. Email support and quick chat support is available on all plans.

If you’re ready to launch your dream online business, create courses, sell products, promote with affiliates, simplify your email service, and grow alongside a friendly team who gets it, give Podia a try today.