If you run a studio with three or four instructors teaching under one membership, the question that matters is whether each instructor can log in with their own account, see their own students, and get paid their own cut, or whether everything has to run through your login and your bank account.
Here's what the pricing pages for Podia and Thinkific actually say, and where they leave that question open.
Podia's entry tier: Mover at $42/mo
Podia's cheapest paid plan, Mover, runs $42/mo billed annually ($504/year). It includes unlimited customers, 50 products, 500 videos, and 25 community spaces. There's a 5% transaction fee on this tier.
Nowhere in the Mover plan's feature list is there any mention of a second login, a team member, or an instructor seat. The first mention of anything like that shows up two tiers up.
Where "assistant" seats actually start
Podia's Shaker plan, at $84/mo ($1,008/year), includes "1 assistant." The Earthquaker plan at $150/mo ($1,800/year) includes "unlimited assistants." Those are the only team-access features listed on Podia's pricing page at any tier.
The page doesn't say whether an assistant gets their own login credentials, whether they can see only their own students versus the whole account, or whether Podia has any built-in way to split revenue and pay an assistant automatically. "Assistant" reads more like a permissions role for helping run the business than a co-instructor with their own payout. We can't confirm that either way from what's published, so if a split-payout workflow is a dealbreaker for your studio, that's a question to put directly to Podia's support before you sign up, not something to assume from the pricing page.
Also worth flagging for a multi-teacher studio: even Shaker's 1 assistant sits two tiers above the $42 entry price. If you've got three instructors, you're not fitting them into "1 assistant" no matter which plan you pick.
Thinkific's entry tier: Basic at $40/mo
Thinkific's Basic plan runs $40/mo billed annually, saving $173 a year over monthly billing. It covers unlimited courses, video lessons, quizzes, one community, up to 5 digital products, and standard ecommerce checkout tools.
Scanning through Basic, Start ($82/mo), and Grow ($164/mo), there is no feature listed called "team seat," "instructor account," or "collaborator" anywhere in what's published on the pricing page. Grow adds "Group orders and B2B sales" for selling bulk seats to companies, and 3 communities for splitting audiences by topic or level. Both of those are about selling to teams, not staffing your own studio with multiple logins.
That's a real gap in what we can tell you. Thinkific may handle instructor collaboration somewhere in its product (course collaborators, admin roles, that kind of thing are common in this category), but it isn't part of the pricing page's feature list at any of the three tiers shown here, so we're not going to guess at capabilities or limits that aren't there in black and white.
What this means if you're comparing the two
At the entry paid tier, both platforms cost about the same: Podia Mover at $42/mo versus Thinkific Basic at $40/mo. Neither one lists separate instructor logins, per-instructor student views, or automatic payout splits as a feature at that price point. Podia's cheapest mention of any second-user access ("1 assistant") sits at $84/mo, double the entry price, and even then the page doesn't describe what that role can actually do or see. Thinkific's page doesn't mention team access at any published tier.
If separate instructor logins and individual payouts are a hard requirement, don't take either pricing page at face value. Message support for both platforms directly, ask specifically: "Can instructor B log in and see only their own students, and can I split revenue to pay them automatically?" Get the answer in writing before you commit a studio's worth of students and payment history to either platform. Course hosting, community spaces, and checkout are solid on both pricing pages at the entry tier. The multi-instructor mechanics are what neither page actually answers.