Podia or Prolaud: which one pays membership money straight into your own account, and which gives you more control over your site?

If you sell memberships, two questions decide most of the platform choice before features come into it. Where does the money go when a member pays, and how much of it does the platform keep? And when a visitor lands on your site, does it look like your business or like a template with your logo pasted in? Podia and Prolaud both have good answers to the first question and different answers to the second, so this comparison takes them one at a time, with the numbers from each company's own pages.

A note on who is writing: Prolaud publishes this article, so read it with that in mind. Every Podia fact below comes from podia.com or the Podia Help Center as they read on 22 October 2026, and there is a section on where Podia is the better choice. If anything here is out of date, the pricing pages are the source of truth for both of us. There is also a shorter side-by-side at Podia alternative.

Yes, on both. Podia's help center says it plainly: "All the balance from purchases made through Podia will go straight into your Stripe or PayPal accounts." Once the funds are available in Stripe or PayPal, you withdraw them to your bank on that processor's schedule. Podia does not hold your money in an account of its own first.

Prolaud works the same way. You connect your own Stripe account, or a Razorpay account, and when a member pays, the money lands in that account less the processor's fee. The processor then pays it out to your bank on its own schedule. It never sits in a Prolaud account, so there is nothing for us to hold or release. The full mechanics are in bringing your own payment gateway.

So "straight into your own Stripe" is not where these two differ. The differences are which processors each one supports for what, and what each platform takes before the money gets there.

Which processors each one supports

• Podia: Stripe on every plan; PayPal on the Shaker and Earthquaker plans only. Stripe handles products, payment plans and recurring subscriptions, which on Podia are sold through community plans. Podia's help article does not say PayPal takes recurring subscriptions, so don't assume it does.
• Prolaud: your own Stripe account, connected by pasting its API key, charges in US dollars. A Razorpay account connects in one click for one-off sales; to bill recurring memberships through Razorpay, connect it with its API keys instead. Either processor is enough to start selling, and you can connect both. A membership priced in dollars is charged through Stripe; a price in another currency goes through Razorpay.

This is where the two separate. On Podia, the Mover plan carries a 5% transaction fee on sales. Shaker and Earthquaker carry none. The help center also notes that Stripe and PayPal charge their own processing fees on top, which is true everywhere: Podia's pricing page puts it at 2.9% + 30¢ for cards.

Prolaud takes 0% of your sales on every plan. It is the first article of our Founder Bill of Rights, not a promotion. Your processor still charges its standard fee, which goes to the processor, not to us, and you can check every payment in your own Stripe or Razorpay dashboard.

A worked example at $3,000 a month

Say your memberships bring in $3,000 a month and every plan is billed yearly. On Podia Mover, the 5% fee is $150 a month on top of the $42 plan, so $192 a month goes to Podia. Podia Shaker costs $84 a month with no fee. Prolaud Pro costs $15 a month and Studio $34, with no fee on either. The processor's fee is the same on all four, so it doesn't change the comparison.

On Podia, Mover's 5% overtakes the $42 price gap to Shaker once sales pass about $840 a month, so a growing Podia business usually ends up on Shaker. The fair comparison for a teacher with steady sales is therefore Shaker against Prolaud, and there the gap is the plan price and what each plan includes, not a percentage. Run your own numbers in the payout calculator, and see course platform fees explained for the fees that are easy to miss.

On Podia, recurring billing runs through community plans: a member subscribes to a plan of your community, and you decide what that plan unlocks. Podia also lists online courses, digital downloads, coaching and events on every plan, so a membership business there is usually a community with courses and downloads around it.

On Prolaud, a membership is a product that bundles other products. When you create one, you pick what it includes from your own storefront:

• Courses, each unlocked for as long as the membership is active.
• A community, so members join its wall, challenges and leaderboard when they subscribe, and leave it when the membership ends.
• Webinars, downloads and license keys.
• A 1:1 session, delivered as your booking link or a room code. It is a link to book, not a monthly allowance of sessions.

You choose the billing interval per membership: monthly, every three months, every six months, or yearly. If you want the same membership on two intervals, you create one product for each. When a renewal fails, the member keeps access for a short grace period while the processor retries; if it never succeeds, access closes at the end of what they paid for. A canceled member keeps access to the end of the paid period. Renewals extend everything the membership includes in one step.

Podia's Site Builder, in its own words, "gives you complete control over the look and feel of your site." In practice, you add pages, set a homepage, edit the header and footer, connect your products, email list and blog, and set global design options. Its color system starts from six base colors and generates matching themes for each section, so pages stay consistent without you choosing colors section by section. That is a good default for people who don't want to design.

Prolaud's site editor goes further on layout and type, and less far on two specific things. Here is the honest split.

What you control on Prolaud today

• Every section: hero, features, course and store grids, testimonials, team, stats, FAQ, video, galleries, logos, trust badges, contact and lead-capture forms, a blog teaser and more. Sections can be reordered, hidden or duplicated.
• Layout per section: many sections come in several layouts. A call-to-action can be a banner, a split block with a form, a sticky bottom bar or a floating mobile button. Stats can be cards, big numbers, animated counters or a reach map. Team sections can be a grid, a compact list or cards with social links.
• Your own fonts: pick from Google Fonts or upload your own brand font file, and it is used across your public pages.
• Themes that change everything at once: full-recipe themes reset colors, fonts, layout and home-page sections in one click, and lighter palettes adjust only colors and a font pairing. Browse them at website templates.
• Header and footer: logo, navigation, primary and secondary buttons, footer columns and copyright.
• No Prolaud badge on paid plans, and a language picker for visitors on every paid plan.

What you can't do on Prolaud yet

• Use your own domain. Connecting your own domain is coming soon. Today every academy runs on its own prolaud.com address, such as yourname.prolaud.com. Podia includes a custom domain on every plan, and if your own domain matters on day one, that is a real point for Podia. See custom domains for a course website.
• Write custom CSS. That is coming on Pro and above. Today you shape the site through sections, layouts, fonts and themes, not code.

So the answer depends on what "full control" means to you. If it means your own domain and a clean, consistent site with little effort, Podia is ahead today. If it means choosing how each section is laid out and using your own typeface, Prolaud gives you more. Neither is a code-level page builder.

Podia lists events, "Live & In-person", on every plan. For a webinar or an occasional workshop, that may be all you need.

Prolaud runs its own classroom. Students who bought the course or membership see the class in their account and join in the browser, with no Zoom account or meeting link. The room has a whiteboard, slides, polls, raised hands, chat, screen share and recording, and attendance lands on the record of the student who paid. A class runs up to 90 minutes with 49 people on Pro, and 180 minutes with 99 on Studio. There is no cap on the number of classes, and there is a monthly fair-use allowance on total participant time; passing it never cuts off a class that's running. How it works in practice: live classes without Zoom.

This is the biggest difference between the two products. If your membership is built around a weekly live call, Prolaud removes the separate meeting tool and the link-sharing that comes with it. If you don't teach live, it shouldn't weigh much in your decision.

Both include a community. Podia's plans set a number of community spaces: 25 on Mover, 100 on Shaker, unlimited on Earthquaker. Prolaud gives every course a community with a wall, daily challenges and habits, XP, levels and leaderboards on every plan; see how to run a community challenge.

Email is where Podia is stronger. Podia Email is built in, with subscribers included up to each plan's limit (100 on Mover, 500 on Shaker, 1,000 on Earthquaker). Prolaud's marketing tools cover coupons, drip campaigns, abandoned-cart recovery and a Refer & Earn program on Pro and above, but for newsletter-style broadcasts to a large list, a dedicated email tool is still the better choice next to Prolaud. Podia also lists affiliate marketing, upsells and Zapier on Shaker and above.

• You need your own domain today. Podia includes it on every plan; on Prolaud it is coming soon.
• You sell in many currencies, or want PayPal. Podia lists 20+ currencies and sales-tax handling, and PayPal on Shaker and above. Prolaud's Stripe connection charges in US dollars.
• Email is your main sales engine. Podia Email is built in and more complete than Prolaud's broadcast tools.
• You want the simplest possible setup for downloads and a course or two, and you don't teach live.
• You value a long track record. Podia has been around for years; Prolaud is new, which is why our commitments are written down publicly.

• You teach live. The classroom, whiteboard, recordings and attendance are part of the product, not a link to another tool.
• You want to keep every percent from the first sale, without moving to a higher plan to drop a transaction fee.
• Your membership is courses plus a community, and you want streaks, XP and leaderboards to keep members coming back.
• You care about layout and type, and want several layouts per section and your own brand font.
• You want a lower plan price. Prolaud Studio, with unlimited students and courses, costs less per month than Podia Shaker when both are billed yearly.

1. Put your members' names and emails from Podia into a spreadsheet. Podia's help center has the current steps for getting them out.
2. Recreate your courses and products in Prolaud, starting with the ones members use most.
3. Import your members into a community; each one gets an invite by email, and importing twice is safe because people are matched by email.
4. Ask paying members to subscribe again on your Prolaud membership. A saved card belongs to the payment account that created it, so subscriptions don't move by themselves.
5. Keep Podia running until the last renewal you're moving has been replaced.

The switching guide goes through each step, and the free switching service will do the moving for you if you'd rather not.