Great question! We obviously think we’re pretty great, but here’s an honest comparison:

Stan Store is a link in bio tool that lets you sell digital products like courses, downloads, and webinars directly through your social media bio. You can accept payments, collect email addresses, and see some basic analytics about your shop.

Podia is an all-in-one creator platform that also gives you a bio link page and the ability to sell digital products. You can build an online store, accept payments, run advanced email marketing campaigns, set up online courses, manage your affiliate marketing, and even create a full website with unlimited landing pages.

Let’s take a look at how the two platforms stack up.

Podia and Stan Store Pricing

Stan Store offers new users a 14-day free trial, and there are two paid plans to choose from. The Creator plan costs $29/month and includes a link in bio page, digital products, and email address collection.

The Creator Pro plan costs $99/month and includes email automations, funnels, upsells, payment plans, and affiliates. Stan Store doesn’t charge transaction fees.

Podia has a 30-day free trial and two paid plans depending on what you need in your business. All plans have payment options like payment plans, preselling, monthly subscriptions.

Mover: $39/month or $33/month paid annually (5% transaction fee): Includes your website, blog, landing pages, and link in bio, plus unlimited digital downloads, online courses, webinars, product bundles, and coaching. There are also more selling features like coupons, upsells, and access limits.

Shaker: $89/month or $75/month paid annually (no transaction fees): Includes everything in Mover plus affiliates.

One thing to note is that Podia and Stan Store both use Stripe and PayPal as payment processors, which come with their own fees.

Stan Store focuses exclusively on selling with social media. Podia is a one-stop shop for your whole business.

Stan Store was built for creators who only connect with their audience on social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok.

Because Stan Store pages are designed to be viewed on mobile, the only way you can arrange your content is in a list of buttons and call-outs. You don’t have control over how your Stan Store looks on desktop, so if someone comes across your storefront while on their computer it might not look the way you want it to look.

Stan Store gives you a single link in bio page and basic checkout pages for each of your products. There are character limits on product titles and subtitles, and the product checkout pages allow you to add text with bullet points, videos, images, and links.

There’s no option to build an “about me” page, a services page, in-depth sales pages, or a blog unless you connect (and potentially pay for) extra tools.

Podia, on the other hand, makes it easy to design pages that look great on mobile and desktop. You get as many pages as you like, and your sales or landing pages can be fully customized with Podia’s user-friendly website builder (more on that later).

With Podia, you’ll have more options since you can make an amazing link in bio page that does all the same things as Stan Store, but you aren’t limited to just that. With a full website, blog, landing pages, and more customization options, you’ll have more flexibility as your business grows.

Strict link in bio templates vs. unlimited website customizations

A big difference between Stan Store and Podia is how much you can customize. With Stan Store, you start the building process by choosing from a library of about a dozen templates. From there, you can customize your template with two colors and one font (there are about 10 fonts to choose from).

But other than your colors and fonts, you can’t change much about the way the template looks, and you must use a template as a starting point. There’s no “build from scratch” option.

Because Stan Store’s templates are pretty set-in-stone, you aren’t able to change image sizes and shapes, text layouts, and other details that make your pages look and feel like you. Also, there’s no way to add extra videos or images to your shop page unless they’re already part of the template.

With Podia, you can customize every detail of your website, product pages, and link in bio page, and every element looks great out of the box – no need to worry if web design isn’t your strong suit.

Choose from dozens (and counting) of different layout blocks like testimonials, FAQ sections, product grids, CTAs, featured sections, and email forms, and customize the details however you want. You can edit how your page looks on desktop, tablet, or mobile view, and you have hundreds of different color and font combinations you can choose from.

You can even adjust the width and padding of your site, add background images, toggle your website header on and off, add your logo, and embed content from +1900 sources around the web.

Instead of listing 3-5 products, organize and sell as many products as you like

On the same note as customization, Stan Store doesn’t have many features to help you organize your products. They recommend only listing 3-5 products on your Stan Store page since it’s on mobile and would get very long at a certain point, and there aren’t categories or other ways to break up your content.

With Podia, you can categorize products and create category-specific landing pages for each topic you cover.

For example, if you sell printables for music teachers and music students, you could make a separate page for each type of product with as many items listed as you like.

While both Podia and Stan Store let you sell a wide variety of product types (coaching, digital downloads, memberships, courses, etc.), some entrepreneurs and content creators might find that listing all their offers on one page, in a list, is too limiting as their product lineup grows.

Add quizzes, course completion certificates, coupons, and +1900 embeds to your online courses

Both Podia and Stan Store allow you to sell online courses. With Stan Store, you can start selling online courses on the $29/month Creator plan, and on Podia you can start selling online courses with the $39/month Mover plan.

Stan Store’s course builder is pretty basic. You can add modules and lessons, and within each lesson, there’s space to add one video, text, and supporting files. There are no community integrations or commenting functionality, so if you want students to interact with each other you’ll need to use a separate tool.

Stan Store also doesn’t have quizzes, course completion certificates, waitlists, preselling, or features like access duration, seat limits, or coupons.

Stan Store does offer some advanced selling features like affiliates and upsells, but these are only available on the Creator Pro plan for $99/month.

With Podia, courses can have unlimited modules and lessons with any combination of text, videos, downloads, embeds, audio files, or other media you like. You can also add coaching sessions within your courses, enable commenting, and combine courses with community access through our Discord integration so students can connect.

Courses can be sold with a limited number of seats, presold, waitlisted, or bundled with other products. You can also add quizzes and embed surveys, polls, and other features, as well as issue course completion certificates and run sales with coupons.

Upsells are available on the $39/month Mover plan and affiliates are available on Podia’s $89/month Shaker plan.

You don’t need to use extra integrations for your email marketing

Email is a great way to stay in touch with your audience and improve conversions without the inconsistency of social media.

With Stan Store, you can set up an email sign-up box to collect email addresses. You can also give away free lead magnets to attract subscribers. However, once you have this contact information, you’ll need to integrate it with another email tool for full email marketing features.

Stan Store automatically integrates with Mailchimp, but to use another email provider like ConvertKit (now known as Kit) or Flodesk, you’ll need to connect through Zapier which could have an extra monthly expense.

On Stan Store’s Creator Pro plan, you can set up email automations called flows, but on the Creator plan you can only send emails to people to deliver their product links. To send any kind of welcome email, sales funnel, or follow-up message, you’ll need the more expensive plan.

Podia, on the other hand, comes with advanced email marketing built in. Podia Email has automations, segmentation, tagging, exit and entrance conditions, link click triggers, and beautiful templates, and it’s free for your first 100 subscribers. After that, the price only goes up as your list grows and the rates are below the industry average.

Podia also lets you add email opt-in forms anywhere you like on your website, and you can give away free lead magnets or other free products to grow your list. You can also set up landing pages to promote your newsletter, and add custom tags to each opt-in form so you know exactly where your subscribers came from.

If you have another email tool you’d rather use, Podia has native integrations with ConvertKit (not known as Kit), Drip, Aweber, ActiveCampaign, GetResponse, Mailerlite, and Flodesk so you can send data between your accounts seamlessly.

Let’s say you’ve created a digital download that you’d like to sell to your email list. With Stan Store, you can create your download and grow your list on the $29/month plan, but you’ll need to upgrade to the $99/month plan to send an automated series of emails to those followers.

With Podia, you can create your download, grow your list, and run your automated sales funnel on the $39 per month Mover plan. When your list grows beyond 100 subscribers, you can upgrade your Podia Email subscriber count in small increments as your list grows.

That's $60 back in your pocket every month to run the exact same business.

Podia has SEO features to help new people find your work

SEO, or search engine optimization, is another thing to consider when choosing between Stan Store and Podia. While Stan Store is geared toward social media, Podia has built-in SEO features which make it easy for potential customers to find your work on search engines.

For each website page and blog post, Podia lets you add a custom SEO title, meta description, and URL, all of which help tell search engines what your page is about. Plus, you can create distinct pages for each part of your business and unlimited blog posts, which gives you even more visibility on the web.

At this time, Stan Store doesn’t have SEO features and the platform strongly leans toward discoverability on social media, not in search.

Bottom line, Stan Store works well if you’re selling 3-5 products and you need a way to sell primarily via social media. You don’t mind integrating with other tools to get landing pages, advanced email marketing, and more website options, and you only need basic course features.

Podia is the best platform if you’re a digital creator or small business owner who wants an all-in-one platform for your business – including your website, email marketing tools, link in bio, blog, affiliates, and all products, under one roof.

Try Podia for free for 30 days. We can't wait to see what you make.