Are you searching for the best online course platform to create and sell courses quickly? If that’s the case, you’re in the right place because I compiled a list of the best online course platforms.
In the year 2021, according to Statista, people made over $46 billion by selling their online courses, and this number is expected to grow exponentially by the end of 2024. Online courses provide knowledge to students from all over the world at their convenience. They can learn different skills whenever they want because online courses are not bounded by time.
However, choosing the right platform to create your courses and sell them is a challenging task. That’s why I have prepared a list of the seven best online course platforms to help you make your decision. I have compared these course platforms on the basis of their pricing, features, etc.
So without wasting any more time, let’s get into the list.
Top 11 Online Course Platforms: In A Nutshell (2024)
| Sr. No. | Online Course Platform | Pricing |
| 1. | Thinkific | $49/month |
| 2. | LearnWorlds | $29/month |
| 3. | Teachable | $39/month |
| 4. | Kajabi | $149/month |
| 5. | Podia | $39/month |
| 6. | LearnDash | $199/year |
| 7. | Ruzuku | $99/month |
| 8. | Mighty Networks | $39/month |
| 9. | Kartra | $99/month |
| 10. | Teachery | $47/month |
| 11. | Xperiencify | $49/month |
Here is the list of the 11 best online course platforms that you should give a try.
1. Thinkific
I personally prefer Thinkific to create my courses and manage my students. It is on the top of my list because of its robust features and affordable pricing. I started on Thinkific with its free plan, but as soon as my student list started growing, I upgraded to one of its premium plans. The free plan has its own limitations, but it is the best way to get started with Thinkific.
Thinkific is an all-in-one solution because it offers everything you will need to create your course on a single dashboard. In your courses, you get the option to include surveys, audio & video files, quizzes, texts, and more. You can manage your students, course materials, integrations, payments, and more from the dashboard. The best part about Thinkific is that they won’t charge any fee on transactions, even on the free plan.
Key Highlights:
- Drag & drop editor to help you organize your courses and their content
- Course expiry feature allows you to set up an expiry date on courses
- Run Facebook and Google ads to advertise your courses
- Create unlimited free or paid courses
- Add your brand logo in courses with the help of a white label feature
- Customize your students’ dashboards and provide them with better accessibility
- Use the drip content feature or send the entire course
- Customize your course websites to give them a professional look
Pricing: If you want a test drive of Thinkific, then the free plan is the best choice. You get three options in the premium plans. The basic plan starts at $49/mo or $39/mo yearly; the pro plan starts at $99/mo or $79/mo yearly, and the premier plan starts at $499/mo or $399/mo yearly.
Grab discounts with Thinkific Black Friday deals and get started with selling online courses within budget-friendly pricing!
2. LearnWorlds
LearnWorlds is also one of the best online course platforms because of its interactivity. It offers you robust features such as an E-book reader and video player that help you provide a one-of-a-kind experience to your students. They also offer customizable templates, analytics & reports, marketing tools, and sales pages.
LearnWorlds help course creators with a unique and interactive way to interact with their students. You can quickly increase your sales and conversions with its course sales pages. You can include games like quizzes, interactive videos, texts, and more in your courses. Even if you don’t have any experience in course creation still, you can create high-quality courses using its templates.
Key Highlights:
- Highly customizable templates to help you create unique courses
- You get the option to create free courses
- Provide course completion certificates to your students
- Use the multilingual feature to create a course in your native language
- Use CSS or Javascript to edit your courses
- Create discounts & coupons
- Learn to create courses from the knowledge base
- Extract transcripts from your courses
Pricing: If you don’t want to commit to the tool right away, then try LearnWorlds’ 30-day free trial of any plan. There are three pricing options available on LearnWorlds. The starter plan starts at $29/mo or $24/mo annually, the pro trainer plan starts at $99/mo or $79/mo annually, and the learning center plan starts at $299/mo or $249/mo annually.
3. Teachable
If you want to build your courses on a solid foundation, then Teachable is also a viable option. The user interface of Teachable is built in a way that even a beginner can use it with ease. Teachable gives you the power to create responsive educational courses, landing pages, graded quizzes, and sales pages.
Teachable has already helped over 100K course creators in generating over $1 billion in revenue. With its custom completion certificates, you can create a customized course certificate to give to your student when they complete your course. You can also set up a minimum number of quiz scores to unlock the next lesson so that you will be able to track your students’ progress.
Key Highlights:
- Option to import content directly from Dropbox, One Drive, and Google Drive — Google Docs.
- Run live zoom courses from the pro plan
- Optimized sales pages and storefront
- Create custom course completion certificates
- Include various media formats into your courses
- Get feedback from your students through Google Forms
- It supports 130 currencies, so it takes payments from all over the world
- Customize your course website with Website Theme customization
Pricing: Teachable offers a free plan to all its users, and there is no validity on the free plan. Other than that, it offers three pricing plans. The basic plan will cost you $39/mo or $29/mo annually, the pro plan will cost you $119/mo or $99/mo annually, and the business plan will cost you $299/mo or $249/mo annually. You can use our exclusive Teachable offer to save up to 33% on annual plans.
Tip: To claim the best discounts on the annual plans of Teachable, check out the Black Friday offers available on Teachable.
4. Kajabi
Kajabi is one of the best choices for professional course creators because, with its robust features, you can create a training program in the way you want. It is also an all-in-one solution that provides you with all the features you will need to run your course website successfully. It allows you to build your website, run email marketing campaigns, process payments, view course analytics, and more from a single dashboard.
Kajabi is the best option to choose because of its marketing automation and pipeline features. With the pipeline feature, you can create automated marketing funnels and campaigns. You also get the option to run your blog, sell digital products, customize your checkout pages, and create course websites using its customizable themes.
Key Highlights:
- Wistia video hosting included
- You get marketing and sales-focused tools on Kajabi
- Create attractive looking pages with the drag & drop editor
- Create live events to provide live training to your students
- PayPal and Stripe payment methods are integrated
- Use the email marketing solution to automate your emails
- Create multiple pages using the Kajabi page builder
- Use pre-built themes and templates
Pricing: You can try any one of the premium plans of Kajabi with its 14-day free trial. There are three premium plans available on Kajabi. The basic plan will cost you $149/mo or $119/mo annually, the growth plan will cost you $199/mo or $159/mo, and the pro plan will cost you $399/mo or $319/mo annually.
5. Podia
Podia is a popular online course creation platform that can help you create your entire course website. It allows you to create multiple courses simultaneously, set up separate membership sites, create digital downloads, and host everything from a single dashboard. It offers a template library; from there, you can choose any customizable template to start the course creation.
In the landing page templates, you can include your course’s overview, creator bio, table of content of your course, information on what your students will get when they enroll in your courses, and more. You get the option to set up a pre-launch of your courses so you can get some pre-orders on your course before its launch.
Key Highlights:
- Set automated emails using the email marketing tool of Podia
- Include videos, images, PDFs, audio files, quizzes, and more in your courses
- Deliver your content using the drip content feature
- Exceptional membership options to help you create amazing membership sites
- Sell your digital downloads such as assessments, e-books, audio files, and more
- Lock your content for any specific student
- Combine your similar courses
- Create your website in just three simple steps
Pricing: Podia offers a 14-day free trial of all their premium plans, and you won’t need to provide them with your credit card information. There are three pricing options available on Podia. The mover plan starts at $39/mo or $33/mo annually, the shaker plan starts at $89/mo or $75/mo annually, and the earthquake plan starts at $199/mo or $166/mo annually,
6. LearnDash
LearnDash is not a course creation platform, but it is a learning management system. It is a WordPress plugin that you can integrate with a WordPress website. It gives you all the features that you will need to sell your courses from WordPress. It is a self-hosted tool that gives you complete control over your course creation and customization process.
Just download the LearnDash plugin on your WordPress website and log in with your premium account and start selling your courses from the WordPress dashboard. You can give certificates to your students, deliver quizzes, manage student enrollment, view analytics & reports, and more from a single dashboard.
Key Highlights:
- Give rewards when your students pass a quiz
- Keep tabs on your students’ progress from the sleek profile area
- Enable focus mode to help your students avoid distractions
- Create complex quizzes and assessments
- Add your brand to your content with the white-label feature
- There is no limit on the number of courses you can create and host
- Add images, audio, or video hints for students in the quizzes
- Create custom messages for each student
Pricing: There is no free plan or free trial available on LearnDash, but they do offer a 15-day money-back guarantee on their plans. LearnDash offers three pricing options. The basic plan starts at $199/year, the plus package plan starts at $229/year, and the pro package plan starts at $369/year.
7. Ruzuku
Ruzuku is an excellent online course creation platform that helps you in creating your course step-by-step. You can create your course content, reorder or edit the steps, set up a launch date for your course, and start selling them to generate revenue. It also offers integration with tools like Infusionsoft, Mailchimp, and PayPal & Stripe for payments.
Once you start creating a course on Ruzuku, you get access to the Ruzuku community, where you can get the help of other team members in course creation. Ruzuku claims that their course creation process is ridiculously easy, and even a beginner can do it without any coding knowledge.
Key Highlights:
- Create unlimited free or paid courses
- Host all your files such as videos, PDFs, audio files
- Copy your previous course and use the structure to create a new course
- Remove or invite any participant from your courses
- Create multiple pricing for your course
- Get an email notification whenever a student posts a question in the forum
- Send email announcements to all your students
- Add unlimited students to unlimited courses
Pricing: Ruzuku offers a 14-day free trial of all their premium plans so you can understand how Ruzuku works before purchasing a subscription. Ruzuku offers three pricing options. The bootstrapper plan starts at $99/mo or $74.75/mo annually, the up and comer plan starts at $149/mo or $83.08/mo annually, and the university plan starts at $199/mo or $125/mo annually.
8. Mighty Networks
Mighty Networks is a little bit different from the above listed online learning platforms because it is basically known for being an online community builder platform. Along with building an online community, it also allows you to build courses, run events, and do live streams. You can create a private online community for your students where they can discuss all the things related to your courses.
Creating an online community on Mighty Networks is a cakewalk. After creating the community you can also take it public, make it a secret, paid, or private depending on your choice. They also give you the option to connect your community directly to a custom domain for free. With the course builder of Mighty Networks, you can create courses within a few clicks. Its course builder is much better than Podia’s but it still lacks a few features that Thinkific and Teachable offer.
Key Features:
- Offers a 14-day free trial on all the plans
- One of a kind online community builder tool
- Create unlimited free & paid courses
- Drip content delivery feature
- Host live classes for your students
- Activity feed for discussions
- In-built messaging feature
- Intuitive website builder
- Sell courses in bundles
- Ambassadors program for promotions
Pricing: There are three pricing plans available on Mighty Networks. The Community plan starts at $39/mo or $33/mo annually. The Business plan starts at $119/mo or $99/mo annually. The Mighty Pro plan is a custom plan for which you need to contact their sales team.
9. Kartra
Kartra is another online course platform that not only gives you all the tools to create & sell your courses but also gives you a lot of features such as membership sites, creating checkout pages, and even starting your own affiliate program. Some would say it is an all-in-one platform with marketing & sales features. So if you’re on the lookout for a platform that allows you to create your own course and also gives you tools to take your business to the next level, then Kartra is the one for you.
The only issue with Kartra I have is that it does not offer an advanced course builder like other tools from my list. Although it allows you to add quizzes, upload your video content, drip your content, structure your course, and enforce a linear progression. Apart from these features, it gives you tools to create landing pages, send automated emails, and market your courses.
Key Features:
- Sell unlimited products with Kartra’s checkout feature
- Manage your leads from one dashboard
- Create high-converting sales landing pages
- Create surveys and quizzes in a few minutes
- Use the drag & drop interface to create a membership site
- Personalize your video content with its video player
- Integrates with major payment methods
- Create forms to capture your leads & grow your business
Pricing: It comes with four pricing options. The starter plan will cost you $99/mo or $79/mo yearly. The silver plan will cost you $199/mo or $149/mo yearly. The gold plan will cost you $299/mo or $229/mo yearly. The platinum plan will cost you $499/mo or $379/mo yearly. You can also try Kartra for 14 days for just $1.
10. Teachery
If you want to use a simple online course platform with an easy-to-use interface, then Teachery is the best option for you. It is kind of a new platform compared to all the platforms I have listed here, but its features are a lot similar to Teachable and Thinkific. It is the best platform for beginners to start creating because they have removed the complex design and interface that most of the course creation platforms have, and they also don’t charge any transaction fee.
The biggest difference between Teachery and other online course creation platforms is that you can just create your course and start selling it in no time. They claim that they have made course creation as simple as writing an email on Gmail. With its features, you can create unlimited courses, unlimited landing pages, enroll as many students as you want, and so much more. They have two fully customizable course templates for you to start creating your course as quickly as possible.
Key Features:
- Pay no transaction fee whenever you make a sale on your courses
- Feed your content to your student in drip-style
- Two fully customizable templates to get you started
- Use different styling options to give a colorful look to your lessons
- Create as many payment pages as you want for each course
- In-built affiliate program to help you promote your courses through others
- Create customizable landing pages
- Manage & track your customers’ activities
Pricing: There are only two pricing options on Teachery. You can either pay $47/month or $470/year to get access to all the features of Teachery.
11. Xperiencify
If you are looking for a platform to create online courses and teach your students in a gamification way, then Xperiencify is the right platform for you. Along with gamification features, it has the standard course creation features that the industry requires, such as website creation, marketing & selling features, third-party integrations, and more. This course creation platform is built by course creators and for course creators.
Who doesn’t love playing games! Following that philosophy, Xperiencify gives you plenty of gamification features that you can use to create your course and make it fun for your students. The biggest issue course creators are facing is keeping the students hooked on their courses, and now you can keep your students interested in your courses with Xperiencify. It also helps you in ensuring that students are actually finishing your courses.
Key Features:
- Give points or rewards when a student finishes a lesson
- Choose sound effects when a student earns a reward or point on your course
- Create urgency & FOMO among students with timers
- Buil community of your students and keep them engaged
- Give badges as social proof to students giving them a sense of achievement
- Achievement celebrations and player milestones similar to a game
- Create personalized messages for your students
- Complete eCommerce solution & custom domain connection
Pricing: You can get started with Xperiencify for free. Other than that, it has four pricing options. The starter plan costs $49/mo or $499/year, the growth plan costs $99/mo or $999/year, the pro plan costs $149/mo or $1499/year, and the platinum plan costs $299/mo or $2999/year.
What Are The Best Online Learning Platforms?
Many online learning platforms are available on the internet, and I have listed the three best online learning platforms here.
1. Skillshare
Skillshare is one of the best online learning platforms; that’s why it is one the top of my list. All the courses available on Skillshare are engaging and help students in learning. They have courses in almost every category, such as ecommerce, music, data science, graphic design, cooking, and more.
The courses I like the most are “Build Your Own Website In 5 Hours” and “Productivity For Creatives.” Whenever you create a course on Skillshare, it becomes a part of its categories, and whenever a student enrolls in your course, you earn a revenue share from their membership fees.
You can create a course on Skillshare for free. Skillshare pays you monthly royalties on your courses when someone watches your content on their platform. You can also get $10 per membership referral on Skillshare.
2. Udemy
Udemy is one of the biggest eLearning platforms that help you create unique courses in various categories such as entrepreneurship, marketing, web design, business, web development, and more. Over 90 million students have already joined in 183,000+ video courses on Udemy, and the number of students, instructors, and courses is increasing regularly.
There is no rush in the course topics on Udemy; you can learn at your own convenience. Creating a course on Udemy is really straightforward, and it is free of cost as well. When you start selling your courses, you have to give some revenue share of sales to Udemy.
3. Coursera
Coursera is an excellent online learning platform because instructors of Coursera teach content that is usually taught in reputated institutions and universities. It is an excellent marketplace for students because they can enroll in various types of courses or even get a degree in Coursera. All the courses on Coursera are of high quality.
Sadly not everyone can teach as an instructor on Coursera because it is an invite-only platform for instructors. You can also enroll in online degree programs to get higher education as a student. Most of the courses available on Coursera are free of cost. When someone purchases the Coursera plus subscription, instructors get some percentage of the sale if students watch their content.
What Are The Types of Online Course Platforms?
When it comes to online course platforms, there are five different types, and they are:
1. All-in-one Online Course Platforms: These are not your usual run-of-the-mill type of course creation tools. Along with course creation tools, they also offer features to create live webinars, developer email sequences, email marketing & marketing automation tools. Some of the best examples of these types of online course platforms are Kartra, Kajabi, Systeme.io, and Podia.
2. Dedicated Online Course Platforms: Most people want dedicated online course platforms to create their online courses. You can efficiently run your own school or online courses with these platforms. Some of the best examples of these types of online course platforms are Thinkific, Teachable, LearnWorlds, and Ruzuku.
3. Enterprise LMS Platforms: These are the type of learning management systems that big enterprises and businesses use to train their employees and staff. These platforms focus less on small & individual course creators. Some of the best examples of these types of online course platforms are Wiz IQ and Academy Of Mine.
4. Online Learning Platforms: These are online course marketplaces where students can find a course of their choice at an affordable rate. You can learn various skills while staying on budget. You can find thousands of instructors on these platforms for thousands of courses. Some of the best examples of these types of online course platforms are Udemy, Udacity, Skillshare, and Coursera.
5. WordPress Online Course Plugins: If you want to keep all of your course content on WordPress, then these WordPress plugins are a good option for you. If you already have a course website, then choose one of these WordPress plugins, such as LifterLMS and LearnDash.
Related Reads: eLearning Statistics
How to Choose The Right Online Course Platforms?
All the course creation platforms mentioned in this post are good options to start creating your online courses. But how does someone choose the right online course platform? To answer this question, I have prepared a list of things that everyone should look at in an online course creation platform, and they are:
- If an online course creation platform has an outstanding reputation and positive online reviews, then it is the right choice.
- Choose an online course creation platform based on your skillset and convenience.
- If you want to give your courses a professional look, then choose a platform that offers you tons of professional templates.
- Not all online course creation platforms can offer you all the tools to successfully run a business of selling online courses. You will need to integrate your website with third-party apps, so choose a platform that offers the best third-party integrations.
- If you want marketing & email marketing automation tools to market your courses, then choose an all-in-one tool like Kartra, Kajabi, or Systeme.io.
- Choose an online course creation platform that fits your budget. Do not go overboard and purchase something which you can not afford in the long run.
- If you don’t want to build your websites from the ground but want to sell your courses on already popular platforms, then choose online learning platforms.
- Choose a platform that is always ready to help you out every step of the way. Because customer support is essential for everyone.
Conclusion: Which are the best course creation platform?
So this is my list of best online course platforms; now you might be thinking about which one you should choose?
I personally recommend Thinkific and Teachable because these are two dedicated course creation platforms that can offer you all the tools to create unlimited online courses and membership sites. The best part about them is that they both offer free plans to all their users. So what are you waiting for!! Get started with one of them right away.
With this list of best online course platforms, I hope you can choose one of them to get started right away. Let me know your thoughts on online course platforms in the comment section below.
