BigCommerce vs. Podia

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
BigCommerce
Score 7.7 out of 10
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)
BigCommerce is a SaaS platform that allows SMBs to develop eCommerce sites. Features include the capabilities to design the storefront, configure products, manage payments, generate traffic, and optimize conversion.
$29.95
per month
Podia
Score 7.0 out of 10
N/A
Podia in New York offers their ecommerce platform for managing memberships and selling courses online.
$39
per month
Pricing
BigCommercePodia
Editions & Modules
Standard
$29.95
per month
Plus
$79.95
per month*
Pro
$299.95
per month*
Enterprise
Custom
per month
Mover
$39.00
per month
Shaker
$79.00
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
BigCommercePodia
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details*if paid annually
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
BigCommercePodia
Features
BigCommercePodia
Online Storefront
Comparison of Online Storefront features of Product A and Product B
BigCommerce
7.4
432 Ratings
6% below category average
Podia
8.1
2 Ratings
3% above category average
Product catalog & listings8.0428 Ratings8.02 Ratings
Product management7.6425 Ratings9.02 Ratings
Bulk product upload7.6324 Ratings8.01 Ratings
Branding6.9375 Ratings8.02 Ratings
Mobile storefront7.7415 Ratings8.02 Ratings
Product variations7.5402 Ratings8.02 Ratings
Website integration7.6356 Ratings8.02 Ratings
Visual customization6.9418 Ratings8.02 Ratings
CMS7.1308 Ratings8.02 Ratings
Online Shopping Cart
Comparison of Online Shopping Cart features of Product A and Product B
BigCommerce
7.6
418 Ratings
2% below category average
Podia
8.0
2 Ratings
4% above category average
Abandoned cart recovery7.6376 Ratings8.01 Ratings
Checkout user experience7.6413 Ratings8.02 Ratings
Online Payment System
Comparison of Online Payment System features of Product A and Product B
BigCommerce
8.0
414 Ratings
4% below category average
Podia
8.0
2 Ratings
4% below category average
eCommerce security8.0414 Ratings8.02 Ratings
eCommerce Marketing
Comparison of eCommerce Marketing features of Product A and Product B
BigCommerce
7.4
419 Ratings
4% below category average
Podia
7.0
2 Ratings
10% below category average
Promotions & discounts7.5395 Ratings9.02 Ratings
Personalized recommendations7.2328 Ratings00 Ratings
SEO7.6389 Ratings5.02 Ratings
eCommerce Business Management
Comparison of eCommerce Business Management features of Product A and Product B
BigCommerce
7.6
424 Ratings
6% below category average
Podia
8.0
1 Ratings
1% below category average
Multi-site management7.8198 Ratings00 Ratings
Order processing8.0403 Ratings8.01 Ratings
Inventory management7.9358 Ratings00 Ratings
Shipping7.1364 Ratings00 Ratings
Custom functionality7.0359 Ratings8.01 Ratings
Best Alternatives
BigCommercePodia
Small Businesses
Ecwid by Lightspeed
Ecwid by Lightspeed
Score 10.0 out of 10
Ecwid by Lightspeed
Ecwid by Lightspeed
Score 10.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Shopify Plus
Shopify Plus
Score 9.1 out of 10
Shopify Plus
Shopify Plus
Score 9.1 out of 10
Enterprises
IBM Digital Commerce
IBM Digital Commerce
Score 9.0 out of 10
IBM Digital Commerce
IBM Digital Commerce
Score 9.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
BigCommercePodia
Likelihood to Recommend
7.8
(451 ratings)
7.0
(2 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
10.0
(54 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
10.0
(28 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Availability
9.1
(5 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
9.1
(5 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
10.0
(27 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Online Training
9.1
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
9.7
(14 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Configurability
9.1
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
9.1
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
7.9
(356 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
9.1
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
9.1
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
BigCommercePodia
Likelihood to Recommend
BigCommerce
Big Commerce is great for managing our items for sale all while serving as a home base for our customers. - Whether they want to buy PPE, learn about PPE or have any questions or concerns, they know they can come to our site and get the service/product they need!
Read full review
Podia
In my experience, Podia has been well suited in every way! I am a small company with a couple of independent contractors, and I don't know how to build my own website. I am not very techy. I get lots of compliments on how my website looks! I have had some people support me with setting up my group emails for my email list and setting up automations, and these techy people complained that they needed to do more customization in the email formatting and programming, so I switched to Mailchimp for those needs. Otherwise, I have been very happy with Podia and I am grateful to have a platform that offers so many services/features. It's affordable and user friendly. My clients and students are happy using it, too
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Pros
BigCommerce
  • They are "SUPPOSEDLY" better for SEO but we have not gotten data on that yet
  • Sales guy was good at what he does (no value to our website though)
  • No fear they will go out of business anytime soon
  • Customer support is generally available, in my opinion, just not very helpful
Read full review
Podia
  • Emails
  • Course hosting
  • Website creation
  • Website chat
Read full review
Cons
BigCommerce
  • Better and easier localisation for stores outside the US
  • Speed - it is not the fastest
  • Make sure that third-party theme developers update regularly and use best practice
  • Consider EU and country-specific rules and legal obligations and make customers aware of whether BC is actually fully compliant
Read full review
Podia
  • I sometimes wish there was more that I could customize on my website and digital programs
  • I wish their email service (for broadcasts/group emails) had more features and customization
  • I would like to use my brand font
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
BigCommerce
I personally would not even consider another e-commerce website platform.
Bigcommerce may have the same (or close to the same) functionality and integrations as other SaaS platforms but they excel at customer service and tech support. At the end of the day you need a company that will answer the phone in less than a minute especially if you're having a 5 alarm issue. That said, we hardly ever have any issues. The site was down for a few minutes one time 5 years ago. Sometimes we have issues with coding or apps and they help me with that too. They even walked me through installing our new theme when the contracted developers told me that wasn't included in the development of our new website.
Bigcommerce comes out with new innovations every year, not including apps that other people write for the platform, and there are a lot of those and new ones all the time. And there are a LOT of awesome themes to choose from (Halothemes are the best).
And the price is reasonable!
I'd give Bigcommerce my business any time and recommend them to anyone looking to run an e-commerce website. You could even use them for a non-shopping site, we have one of those too!
Read full review
Podia
No answers on this topic
Usability
BigCommerce
I think that overall it has a great front end for the customer. On the back end, it takes a little spin-up time, but in just a couple of hours you can really have your head wrapped around everything you're going to need 99% of the time. It takes me about 5 minutes to train a new user on how to interact with customer orders.
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Podia
It has a great user interface, it's fast to edit and create courses, to edit and create emails, to find chats, to develop the website. Support has been friendly and I haven't found anything that hasn't worked. It also has basically all the tools you need outside if a complete blog platform
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Reliability and Availability
BigCommerce
So far in my time with BigCommerce I have not had any down time when it comes to my webstore or accessing it at any time I need to. Knowing that they have such a good uptime, it makes me feel comfortable that my customers can access things anytime, but also keep sales going 24/7
Read full review
Podia
No answers on this topic
Performance
BigCommerce
I have not had any issues with pages loading slow or any real other issues, not that I have encountered so far. Speed of the site and images loading are fantastic and everything just seems to work nicely, which may seem like a simple thing to say about things, but when something just WORKS! Its rather nice vs fighting with things to work right.
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Podia
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
BigCommerce
Because they are always there no matter how simple or complex the question is, if they don't know the answer they don't fake it and just make you go away feeling frustrated.. they get you to someone that does know the answer. I always appreciate their help and their honesty!
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Podia
No answers on this topic
Online Training
BigCommerce
They have a comprehensive online help file system that makes it easy to do almost anything. They cover just about everything you'd want to do with your online store with images, clear descriptions and in some cases video. I will, however, say the videos should be a little more professorially done and not sound like the employees are doing it in their cubical.
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Podia
No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
BigCommerce
A certified BigCommerce design and solution partner will usually comprise a team of highly experienced designers, developers and marketers. It is our view that in the vast majority of cases, this will pay dividends in the long-term - especially for those teams that could use the extra support.
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Podia
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
BigCommerce
We switched from Shopify due to the restrictions they implemented on our industry. While we spent tens of thousands of dollars investing in our Shopify store, we can't have them cutting us off anytime they want. We reviewed WooCommerce, but didn't like the storefront or backend. Plus it seems like Wordpress/WooCommerce runs into tons of hacking issues and bugs.
Read full review
Podia
Kajabi had lots of features all in one place. I liked their digital course creator program. I liked the ease of their their membership site program/host, too. It had an app for my clients to use. There were some problems with not being able to customize the look of pages, but they allowed coding/programming if you had training, so I sometimes hired someone to do that for me. I couldn't figure out how to use their website builder, so I didn't do much there. When it came down to it, I could use Podia and it was cheaper and easier to use. GoDaddy was my website host for a few years. I did a lot on there. It was my website builder and host and I liked it. It was easy to use. My website looked great. It had more features than Podia with blogging and connecting to social media. I had a storefront but it wasn't great for selling digital products. Back then, it wanted to show my inventory and shipping options, which don't apply for services and digital products. I did a little with my digital courses on there, but in the end, I liked other sites better for this. It didn't work out. Weebly was just a starting point for me when I create my first digital course. I liked how it looked and it was easy to build, but there are better options for this sort of thing now.
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Scalability
BigCommerce
I believe after seeing all of the parts of this platform, one is able to develop the business and keep adding on select features for the business. There are multiple options for purchase with the various platforms once the business grows more. The different features being offered by the platform can lead us to scalability.
Read full review
Podia
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
BigCommerce
  • Provides a robust platform to sell a high-risk product.
  • Page Builder saves you time and money by negating the need to buy a template.
  • Includes robust promotion settings that allow for codes and automatic discounts, bulk discounts, and customer groups (i.e. military discount), all native options.
Read full review
Podia
  • It was the 1st system I used to launch my buisness and we did 100k within 2 yrs
Read full review
ScreenShots

BigCommerce Screenshots

Screenshot of Enterprise ecommerce for high-volume brands like Skullcandy.Screenshot of Our industry-leading integration will let you list your products on Amazon directly from the BigCommerce control panel, with centralized inventory and order processing and fulfillment.Screenshot of Easily customize the look and feel of your storefront.