Online course platforms let you create a website to easily sell your courses. Most online course platforms manage everything for you, from website hosting to a smooth course registration process. It even lets you automate certain activities, so the courses reach the right students at the right time.
With this ready-made infrastructure, you can boost your overall ROI as the entire process is streamlined & hassle-free. Thus you can focus more on content creation and student engagement to craft your authoritative space.
In this article, I’ll show you some of the best platforms to sell online courses with enriched learning experiences. Before that, let me highlight the essential features you should look for in an online course platform.
Important Features of Online Course Platforms
There are tons of online course platforms available, but not every platform fits your business. Thus, choosing the right online course platform is crucial.
So, here the some of the crucial features that you may want in your online course platform to succeed –
- Website Builder – Customizable, beginner-friendly, and allows you to build optimized sales pages.
- Course management – Ability to easily create/upload courses, conduct interactive quizzes, assignments, and exams, apply gamification elements, and manage & communicate with students effectively.
- Video Hosting – Provides unlimited video storage bandwidth and compatibility with external video hosting platforms such as Vimeo, YouTube, etc.
- Payment methods – Supports multiple currencies and payment gateways to ensure customers are not restricted by limited payment methods and high transaction fees.
- SEO optimization – Optimize course title, meta description, keywords, and other vital parameters necessary to increase your course visibility
- Email Marketing – Send different types of emails – one-on-one, automated, or drip-feed based on your requirements to boost engagement & sales.
- Affiliate system – Onboard new affiliates, manage commissions, and run customizable affiliate campaigns to broaden your reach.
- Analytics reporting – Get a clear idea of how your online courses deliver value to students by accessing in-depth metrics & reports.
- Integrations – The online course platform should support flexible third-party integrations to expand the power of your e-school
- Security – Must have in-built potential security features to make online course selling secure & hassle-free.
- Customer Support – Even if you’re stuck with a problem, the support team must be accessible with just a few clicks.
Now, before going ahead, you may want to pick the important features that you must want in your online course platform. This way, you will be able to make a quick decision.
13 Top Platforms to Sell Online Courses
In this section, I reviewed and ranked the best online course platforms based on the above-mentioned features. I have also highlighted the key features and pricing details to help you know the platforms better.
So, without further ado, let’s get started.
1. Teachable
Teachable is the best online course platform that has helped over 100k creators make more than $1 billion in sales. It is an all-in-one platform to build, host, and sell your online courses and coaching.
You can create engaging multimedia lectures, videos, coaching sessions, and optimized sales pages with its power editor. The drag-and-drop builder is user-friendly & intuitive such that it works well for even first-time users.
Teachable also focus on improvising student interactions by letting you run one-on-one sessions, host calls, conduct quizzes, and collect feedback. It allows you to incentivize existing students to refer your course to their peers, seamlessly expanding your reach and popularity.
Overall, Teachable is a fully functional cloud-based platform that takes care of every aspect of creating and selling online courses. Its easy-to-use interface makes it simple for anyone to build a site and sell courses without technical knowledge.
Key Features –
- Track students and sales insights via the dashboard
- Unlimited video bandwidth
- Offer subscriptions, one-time payments, bundles, etc
- Access to built-in affiliate marketing tools
- Accept international payments with over 130+ currencies
- Takes care of EU VAT procedures
- 24×7 monitoring and instant upgrades
Pricing Plans – Teachable has a free plan that allows unlimited students, courses, coaching services, basic quizzes, course design templates, instant payouts, product support, and a $1 + 10% per transaction. The breakdown of Paid plans is as follows –
- Basic Plan – $39/month
- Pro Plan – $119/month
- Business Plan – $299/month
The Basic plan incurs a fee of 5% per transaction. However, you can enjoy zero charges on the Pro and Business plans.
2. LearnWorlds
LearnWorlds is a robust and powerful online course platform that has empowered educators, online trainers, and entrepreneurs to develop unique and outstanding learning experiences. It gives you full control over what you design – which means it is a fully customizable platform tailored to fit your needs.
It is packed with hundreds of ready-made templates, widgets, & layouts that let you build any page – landing pages, 1-click sales, about us, affiliate pages, payments & policy pages, etc., within minutes.
The best part of using LearnWorlds is its no-code mobile app developer. It enables you to turn your online course website into an app for Android and iOS devices.
Compared to other course platforms, Learnworlds offers an extensive course management system. It has many built-in features, from creating titles to issuing digital certificates. Besides, it lets you conduct exams to evaluate your student’s knowledge and issue a certificate of knowledge.
LearnWorlds is more than a simple online course platform. You can check out our detailed LearnWorlds review to learn more about its features and functionalities.
Key Features –
- SEO-friendly
- Customizable course player
- Branded Digital Certificates
- Add interactions without post-production
- Robust mobile app builder
- Built-in affiliate marketing system
- Detailed Analytics reports and insights
- Excellent Customer support
Pricing plans – LearnWorlds has four pricing plans which are as follows –
- Starter Plan – $24/month
- Pro Trainer Plan – $79/month
- Learning Center Plan – $249/month
- High volume & corporate Plan – Custom
If you opt for the Starter Plan, you’ll have to pay a $5 fee per course sale. By upgrading to higher plans, you can enjoy zero fees.
Learnworlds also offers a 30-day free trial on all the plans and a money-back guarantee. So sign up and explore the platform to try out its distinct functionalities.
3. LearnDash
LearnDash is an award-winning WordPress LMS plugin exclusively built by e-learning experts for course creators. The best part is that it is designed using leading online learning principles to maximize your content delivery and boost completion rates.
It is packed with the industry’s best drag-and-drop builders to create your own branded learning portal. You can also take full control over managing students – offering badges, course points, discussion forums, grade books, group management, and in-depth reporting capabilities.
One of the unique aspects of LearnDash is its advanced quizzing – you can create around 8 question types, limit attempts, provide hints, etc. Once the quiz is over, you can display answers instantly, reward them with certificates, display leaderboards to motivate them and allow students to review the Q&A.
Thus LearnDash strives to deliver an out-of-box learning experience while keeping your brand goals in mind. It is a flexible and lightweight solution designed to sell online courses on WordPress websites.
Key Features –
- Unlimited courses and users
- Course content protection
- Dynamic content delivery
- Automated notifications based on the user’s actions
- Multiple pricing methods – one-time purchases, subscriptions, memberships, course bundles, and bulk access
- Free Integrations
- Excellent customer support
Pricing Plans – LearnDash costs only $199/year for a single site. You can also opt for LearnDash Cloud to get a fully hosted website on WordPress, starting at $25/month.
4. LifterLMS
LifterLMS is a comprehensive WordPress LMS Plugin to create and sell online courses. It gives you complete control over what you design and deliver – from making simple online courses to an advanced multi-instructor training-based membership site; it provides everything.
You can create multimedia lessons, dynamic quizzes, and assignments, and even offer downloadable worksheets. Your students will have their own dashboard to track their activity and stay organized.
An outstanding aspect is that LifterLMS is packed with several payments and membership options. It lets you accept credit cards, PayPal, one-time charges, subscriptions, site-wide memberships, automatic enrollments, etc. With such a plethora of options in hand, boosting your ROI is simple and seamless.
On the whole, LifterLMS is a one-stop solution to build a robust e-learning platform that lets you engage with students across every touchpoint.
Key Features –
- Compatible with any WordPress-coded theme
- Unlimited on everything – courses, lessons, students, memberships
- Drip and scheduled course content
- Boost credibility by collecting reviews
- Personalized behavior-based emails
- Restrict access to certain courses
- Private group discussions
- Affiliate WP compatible
- Vast set of integrations
- Excellent customer support
Pricing Plans – LifterLMS plugin has a free plan that allows selling unlimited courses with a limited features. They offer a range premium add-ons that you can purchase individually or as bundles. The packages are as follows –
- Earth Bundle – $149.50/year, 1 active site with access to payment add-ons
- Universe Bundle – $249.50/year, 5 active sites with access to a theme, email marketing & CRM add-ons.
- Infinity Bundle – $749.50/year, unlimited active sites with access to advanced addons
It also offers a 30-day 100% Money Back Guarantee, so you can try and test out all the core add-ons.
5. Podia
Podia is a popular creator-friendly platform for selling online courses. You can host your content, build a professional website, sell your courses, and build a community from one dashboard.
With Podia, you can sell three types of courses –
- Standalone courses – Students can purchase the course and complete it at their own pace.
- Drip Courses – Deliver courses section-by-section by scheduling them at your preferred time
- Cohort-based courses – Set a future date so all your students can access courses simultaneously.
Next, you can simply add sections for each lesson and content in videos, texts, documents, quizzes, etc., in an effortless manner. You can also create multiple sections within a course, which can be re-arranged via the drag-and-drop builder.
Podia also comes with an in-built email marketing platform. You can send broadcast, conditional, and automated emails by integrating with Drip. It lets you host unlimited subscribers and offer free lead magnets and segment campaigns to deliver a personalized learning experience.
Overall, with Podia, you can deliver a distraction-free learning experience to your students. Check out our Podia review to get a complete picture of how it can help you sell online courses and build an online community.
Key Features –
- Easy-to-use editor
- Clutter-free dashboard and interface
- Zero transaction fees
- Unlimited video bandwidth
- Presell courses to build a buzz
- Membership portal to monetize your following
- Centralized management for students
- On-page live chat support
- Increase sales via coupons and bundles
- Built-in affiliate marketing
Pricing plans – Podia has three pricing plans namely –
- Mover Plan – $39/month
- Shaker Plan – $89/month
- Earthquaker Plan – $199/month
It offers a 14-day free trial with unlimited access to every feature on all the plans. However, you will have to pay an additional $20/month to add new teammates.
6. Payhip
If you are looking for an effortless platform to create and sell online courses, you can consider Payhip. It is a beginner-friendly and affordable platform for selling online courses.
With its customizable course player, you can easily organize lessons into sections and manage them. Your students will have access to their accounts to view the entire course. You can include lessons in videos, text, quizzes, downloads, surveys, assignments, and many more.
Overall, with Payhip, you don’t have to struggle with a time-consuming process. You just have to customize the look, upload course files, and set up pricing, and you’re done. The rest is taken care of by Payhip.
Key Features –
- Build sales pages via store builder
- Optimized for any device type
- Unlimited storage and bandwidth
- Take full control over payments and subscriptions
- Free previews of course lessons
- Enable comments to boost interaction
- Accept payments before launching via Preorders
Pricing Plans – Payhip has a forever-free plan that gives you access to all the features. The Plus plan costs $29/month, and the Pro plan is priced at $99/month.
However, the free plan incurs a transaction fee of 5% and 2% with the Plus plan. The Pro plan does not incur any transaction fees.
7. SendOwl
SendOwl is an amazing platform that simplifies online course selling. You can sell directly from your existing website, blog, social media, or API. It strives to deliver a better learning experience by enabling students to access their content faster instead of wasting time on the manual process.
With Sendowl, each file you upload gets converted into a unique SendOwl product. You can sell these files as a part of the course or also individually to boost sales and overall ROI.
Once this is done, you can schedule content within a specified timeframe to release it. You can also create custom codes and license keys to maintain an overview of purchases and automatically send product updates.
SendOwl also ensures that your course content is securely stored and distributed. It enables you to set download limits, 2-factor authentication, add watermarks, and stream videos/audio to protect you from unauthorized downloads.
Key Features –
- Faster content delivery
- Modern & responsive checkout
- Support for multi-language & multi-currency
- Custom email templates
- Automate your marketing flows
- Built-in affiliate marketing
- Offer 1-click upsells, discounts, promo codes
- “Pay what you want” pricing is available
- Comprehensive analytics and reporting
Pricing Plans – SendOwl has 4 paid pricing plans based on the number of products, storage limit, and other features. They are –
- Basic Plan – $9/month – 10 products, 1GB storage
- Standard Plan – $15/month – 30 products, 3GB storage
- Premium Plan – $24/month – 100 products, 5GB storage
- Business Plan – $39/month – 250 products, 15GB storage
However, if you wish to self-host or sell subscriptions, it has separate pricing plans catered to both.
SendOwl offers a 30-day free trial on all pricing plans with no credit card required. If you think it is the best fit, you can sign up and try out all the core functionalities.
8. Thinkific
Thinkific is another popular online course platform that gives you all the tools and resources needed to build an online education website and grow it exponentially.
It enables you to build a personalized e-school via its intuitive drag-and-drop builder. Access to beautiful website themes and advanced customizations lets you craft an on-branded e-learning website. It also enables you to add your professional domain and get rid of Thinkfic branding.
With Thinkific, you can deliver a robust learning experience by conducting on-demand/blended classes, comprehensive quizzes, assignments, and exams and increasing revenue via memberships. It also offers built-in content creation tools, so you don’t waste money on unnecessary apps.
Thinkific is a powerful sales-optimized platform. It has everything covered, from tuning your site to becoming SEO-friendly to selling courses to cohorts. It also integrates leading email marketing tools like ActiveCampaign, Convertkit, Constant Contact, Mailchimp, and Infusionsoft.
Whether you’re an entrepreneur, coach, author, consultant, or an industry-leading expert, Thinkfic lets you deliver state-of-the-art learning experiences.
Key Features –
- No design or tech experience needed
- Customizable course landing pages
- Full video and content hosting
- No transaction fees
- Rich student environment
- Prevent students from skipping lessons
- Offer free trials for your courses
- Create free, paid, time-limited courses
- Multiple payment methods and currencies
- Built-in affiliate system
- Marketing analytics integrations – Mixpanel, FB Pixel, Google Analytics
- Thinkfic App Store – install software packages
- Top-notch customer support
Pricing Plans – Thinkific has a free plan with a drag-and-drop builder, access to eCommerce functionalities, website templates, app store, email & phone support. The breakdown of paid plans is as follows –
- Basic Plan – $49/month
- Pro Plan – $99/month
- Pro + Growth Plan – $149/month
- Premier Plan – $499/month
- Plus Plan – Custom plan
9. Kajabi
Kajabi is an advanced online course platform designed for experienced educators and professionals who want to monetize their knowledge and skills through online courses.
With Kajabi, you can sell courses, podcasts, memberships, newsletters, and more via its easy-to-use interface. Whether you want to create a mini-course or a full-fledged online course, its intuitive product blueprints make the process a no-brainer.
It also offers advanced automation capabilities to expand your online course selling. You can use its ready-to-use playbooks or pre-built frameworks for customizing lead generation campaigns, product launches, or even webinar funnels.
An outstanding aspect is that your products will be automatically integrated with your website, marketing campaigns, emails, CRM, etc., to create an effective multi-channel conversion funnel.
In a nutshell, Kajabi is a powerful online course platform that enables you to create, sell, optimize, and grow your business from a single dashboard.
Key Features –
- Fully integrated website builder
- Zero transaction fees
- Build dynamic landing pages
- Send unlimited marketing emails
- Access to advanced automation
- In-depth segmentation capabilities
- Engage with students anywhere via the mobile app
- Deep dive into student’s progress & performance
- Excellent 24×7 customer support
Pricing Plans – Kajabi has 3 pricing plans based on the number of products, pipelines, contacts, active members, website & admin users. They are –
- Basic Plan – $149/month – 3 products, 3 pipelines, 1000 active members, 10,000 contacts, 1 website & admin user
- Growth Plan – $199/month – 15 products, 15 pipelines, 10,000 active members, 25000 contacts, 1 website & 10 admin users
- Pro Plan – $399/month – 100 products, 100 pipelines, 20,000 active members, 1,00,000 contacts, 3 websites & 25 admin users
All Kajabi plans include secure & unlimited hosting. It uses the best servers and networks to optimize your site for faster loading speed.
Kajabi also offers a 14-day free trial along with a money-back guarantee. You can signup and test out the functionalities to gauge the best fit.
10. Academy of Mine (AOM)
Academy of Mine is an enterprise-grade online course platform built for expert-level trainers and instructors. You can create self-paced courses, train online in real-time via webinars, and sell online courses either as subscription models or one-time purchases.
You can organize different course types or create individual pages for them. Even if you want additional customization, AOM’s team of experts will effortlessly customize it for you based on your most refined requirements.
One outstanding aspect is you can bulk share your courses with external organizations. This means other companies can purchase courses in bulk and manage the user’s progress with their white-labeled training portal.
This is best suited if you have created partnerships with any organization, so you can use it as an excellent opportunity to monetize it.
Furthermore, you can build dynamic sales pages to offer free trials & bundles to ignite your online course selling. In this way, you can identify and nurture qualified leads to maximize your sales.
So if you’re looking for a robust course platform to sell your online courses with a high focus on brand imagery and learning experience, AOM is the ultimate fit.
Key Features –
- Flexible webpage builder
- Live webinar integrations
- Upto 1TB of storage plus 100 GB of SCORM
- Dedicated server & hosting
- Quizzes, Surveys, Assignments, and Evaluation
- SCORM 2004 & SCORM 1.2 compliant
- Detailed course analytics
- 24×7 customer support
Pricing plans – Academy of Mine has 3 pricing plans, namely –
- Essentials Plan – $599/month
- Professional Plan – $899/month
- Enterprise Plan – Custom pricing
You can also request a free trial by filing a form or directly reaching out to the team.
11. Gumroad
Gumroad is a creative online course platform that breaks down the chaos of selling online courses. It is best suited for writers, authors, game developers, musicians, artists, and filmmakers who want to transform their incredible knowledge into a regular income stream.
You can either set up your store using its flexible page editor or directly embed it on your existing site. All you have to do is just open an account, add your product, set pricing, start selling, get paid, and continue this profit.
With Gumroad, you can create simple memberships, launch subscriptions, and even allow customers to pay what they want. It also helps expand your audience base via email broadcasts and powerful automated workflows to identify and nurture customer relationships.
In simple terms, Gumroad is a simplified end-to-end course platform that paves efforts for ravishing courses. It handles everything – payments, affiliates, discounts, etc., to focus on monetizing your creativity.
Key Features –
- Forever free to start & scale
- Accept payments from global audiences
- Collects and processes VAT to the EU
- Easily import existing email list
- Provide discount offer codes
- In-depth analytics and reporting
Pricing Plans – Gumroad does not charge any monthly or annual pricing. Instead, you’ll have to pay a transaction fee for every sale. It is ideally based on your lifetime earning milestones.
For instance, if you generate $1000, you must pay a transaction fee of 7%, and it varies accordingly. However, you get access to all the features.
12. Ruzuku
If you’re looking to create a step-by-step online course in the easiest and fastest way possible, Ruzuku will be the best. It is a user-friendly online course platform best suited for people with limited technical knowledge.
Ruzuku supports all types of class materials for both instructors and students – from PDF files and videos to recordings. Thanks to Ruzuku’s fast compression engine and hosting!
The best part is that you can host teleconferences, broadcasts with slides & group chats to amplify student engagement. Besides, it records everything and posts automatically to the event page on your behalf. This makes it easy for students to review again or catch up on sessions that they’ve missed.
Ruzuku breaks the daunting aspect of an online course platform and simplifies the course creation process. It is a highly flexible, and intuitive platform that can help you grow your loyal audience base in the best way possible.
Key Features –
- Unlimited courses and students
- Zero transaction fees
- Dedicated lightning-fast servers
- Daily backups of your course data
- Increase sales via coupons
- Unlimited video, audio, and data hosting
- Deliver on-demand courses with drip content
- Comprehensive support on all plans
Pricing Plans – Ruzuku has 3 pricing plans, which are as follows –
- Bootstrapper Plan – $99/month
- Up-and-Comer Plan – $149/month
- University Plan – $199/month
All the plans allow for unlimited on everything and offer a 30-day money-back guarantee.
13. LearnPress
LearnPress is one of the flexible WordPress LMS plugins with over 1,00,000+ users worldwide. With its simple drag-and-drop builder, you can build unlimited courses, lessons, quizzes, & questions within minutes. It also makes it easy to make a full curriculum layout and edit and maintain it.
Once you’ve created the course, you can allow students & instructors to register automatically or manually. Besides, you can also set requirements for students to learn a lesson and control instructor permissions by using the LearnPress Add-ons.
So whether you want to create a stunning website for your online courses, university, or e-learning projects, LearnPress is curated for you. It is ideally designed to solve multiple needs during your teaching journey.
Key Features –
- Always free to use
- Communicate with your students
- Supports WordPress multisite
- Access to multiple courses & lesson settings
- Integration with PayPal, WooCommerce, Stripe, 2Checkout, etc
- Accept payments even offline
- Extend the functionality with LearnPress Add-Ons
Pricing Plans – LearnPress is free to use. However, you’ll have to pay only for the additional add-ons.
Wrapping Up
The best online course platform entirely depends on the type of courses you want to sell, the features you want to offer on your site, and the BUDGET.
So, while picking the best platform to sell your courses, ensure that you have created your business plan and listed all the features you want in your platform. For now, here are our top online course platforms that you should consider –
- Teachable – Best user-friendly online course platform
- LearnWorlds – Best online course platform with a mobile app builder
- LearnDash – Advanced WordPress Plugin to sell Online Courses
- LifterLMS – Best online course plugin for WordPress sites
- Podia – Best platform to sell courses and build communities
I hope this article helped you pick the best platform to sell your courses. If you are looking for a platform to sell other digital products like ebooks, graphics, videos, and more, you should check out our list of the best platforms to sell digital products.
