5 Best Online Course Platforms (of the 12 we tested) for Course Creators in 2024

Online learning and training have become an essential part of every online business. Creating and selling online courses can be very profitable and rewarding as well.

Many professionals achieve 6 and 7 figure incomes through selling their online courses!

The whole e-learning market is expected to exceed $300 Billion by 2025, and that includes both individuals and corporations spending more and more on online learning. 

Moreover, with the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, there was a surge in demand for online courses and the trend is here to stay. 

Online course platforms have opened up hundreds of opportunities for e-learning, either for students, young learners, professionals or simply people who felt the need to improve and enrich their skills.

So, how do you build and sell a great online course?

How do you provide the course material, assess the learners and provide feedback? How do you manage payments and access to the course?

This is where a great online course platform comes in!

These platforms are designed to help you build and manage your courses, engage with learners and, of course, collect your payments. 

So, what makes a worthwhile online course platform? And how do you choose one for your project?

To find out, we tested and reviewed the best 12 online course platforms. We evaluated each tool’s deliverables for customization, beginner-friendly online course creation, marketing features and payment gateways.

Here are the 12 top online course platforms we tested to find the best of the best:

1. Thinkific
2. Udemy
3. Mighty Networks
4. Teachable
5. LearnWorlds
6. Podia
7. Ruzuku
8. LearnDash
9. Kajabi
10. WizIQ
11. Skillshare
12. Xperiencify

Excited to find the perfect online course platform to sell your courses?

Let’s get into the test results and reviews!

Quick Comparison – 5 Best Online Course Platforms to Build and Sell Your Online Courses

From all the best online course platforms we tested, these are the top picks:

Keep reading for the full reviews, test results and examples!

How We Tested and Evaluated the Best Online Course Platforms

To determine the best online course platforms, we need to define what makes audience-centric online courses that will accelerate your bottom line.

There are so many online courses free and paid. But not all this learning material gets the attention their creators expected.

So, what makes excellent online courses, and how should your online course platform support this?

These are the top elements you need for sales-driven online courses:

• Social proof and authority. Users are more prone to take an online course if the provider seems credible or an expert in their field. Online course platforms like Coursera allow creators to add background information about themselves. You can persuade traffic to your online courses by highlighting your experience in the topic and how you want to impact users that learn from your material. 
• Course creation. You need course content that will engage your users and provide maximum value. Ensure the online course platform has the features you need for your content, including: video content, live integration, digital downloads, student discussion etc.
• Proactive, clear communication. Successful online courses must offer students clear, consistent communication. If users have questions about your content, they must seamlessly reach you. Fortunately, the online course platforms we tested offer creators communication channels to stay ahead of their students and course progress.
• Website Building. The next category in which every online course platform needs to be assessed is the website building capabilities, the branding and design. You might need to check on the landing page design, custom domain, lead captures, HTML & CSS custom code etc. Make sure it can do what you will need it to do.
• Human-like interaction. Online students want a personalized experience. They don’t like faceless interactions to help improve or gain their skills. Using video content to have a distinct face and voice convey your course material will help keep users engaged. Online course platforms allow creators to upload video series’ to keep users hooked. You can also use an intro video to explore your courses and professional experience.
• Feedback. Gather consistent customer feedback to adapt your course to user trends and demands. Many online course platforms and websites make it simple for creators to gain and respond to user feedback.
• School Administration. Whether you are a course creator looking to better understand your students and sales, an HR manager or trainer interested in seeing the progress of your students or customize the experience of your users, the administration side is immensely important. Check out the features like dashboards, sales data reporting, data exports, manual enrollment of students, customizable sign-up fields etc.
• A clear plan for student wayfinding. Your online courses must have a clear direction. What must students gain after your online course? This acts as your value proposition and helps users understand whether your material is ideal for them. Online course platforms like Coursera enable creators to create a plan for their courses through course descriptions, target audience, and skills covered. 

When you combine all these components you get impactful online courses with high retention and engagement rates and low bounce rates. 

The best online course platforms have the features and functions to perfect all these elements. This saves you a lot of time, as you can rely on software that has built, marketed, and managed thousands of online courses before.

So, do the best online courses get the job done? Do they take on marketing too? And how much human intervention is required?

To find out, we tested 12 online course platforms to find the perfect one for your project! And here’s how we did it:

How We Tested Them & What We Were Looking For

To choose the best online course platforms we tested, we looked at user reviews and available features.

We found the best online course platforms for free and paid. But to get down to the bottom of it and determine if each online course tool was worth it, we signed up for each platform and tested it.

To give every digital course tool a fair chance, we used our affiliate marketing course content to create course materials. We also used a standard criteria you can read about below. 

The main objective of testing the best online course platforms was to determine which platform made it super easy to create, sell and market high-quality online courses.

This is the 6-point criteria we used to evaluate and score  the best online platforms:

1. Branding and customization options and how well creators can tailor their online courses to their businesses and audience. 
2. Marketing functions to promote your online courses to a wider audience. 
3. Functions that support lead nurturing and payment gateways to sell your online courses. 
4. The ability to interact with the learners through live webinars, interactive teaching features, and community building. 
5. Interactive assessment and quiz features
6. How easy it is to update old course material. 

Now let’s jump into the best 12 online course platforms we tested. 

The 12 Top Online Course Platforms We Tested

These are the 12 online course platforms we tested:

1. Thinkific
2. Udemy
3. Mighty Networks
4. Teachable
5. LearnWorlds
6. Podia
7. Ruzuku
8. LearnDash
9. Kajabi
10. WizIQ
11. Skillshare
12. Xperiencify

Overall, the online course platforms we tried and tested did make creating online courses much easier and quicker. The platforms all shared basic features to create online courses using various forms of content, like videos, images, and text. Some platforms, like Thinkific and LearnWorlds, leaned a lot more towards video content for engaging courses than others.

However, there were some notable inconsistencies between these platforms, which made comparing them to one another tricky at times.

Some specialized in course content creation only, while others provided a range of marketing and sales features, others provided limited options to assess and engage with learners, while others great engagement features but lacked in other areas.

However, of the 12 platforms we tested, the five that emerged as the best were: Thinkific, Udemy, Might Networks, Teachable, and LearnWorlds.

We chose these platforms because they scored best against our six criteria, and made creating and marketing courses beginner-friendly. These platforms will all enable you to do everything you need, from A to Z, to create and implement a profitable online course. 

The six that didn’t make the cut fell short in various key areas, most notably ease-of-use, customization options, and a lack of features needed for the full end-to-end process of creating, selling, and updating an online course.

Now that you know the best online course platforms, and how we chose them, let’s explore what each platform offers:

The 5 Best Online Course Platforms for Course Creators

1.Thinkific

Thinkific aims to enable professional course creators and mid-sized businesses. This online course platform offers much more than building and marketing digital content. You can create websites, landing pages, and more for lead generation and sales.

The features Thinkific offers are:

• Course templates
• Drag-and-drop course builder
• Bulk content import
• Live lessons and webinars
• Automated completion certificates
• Assignments, quizzes, surveys, and exams
• Built-in social sharing 

It’s easy to create a Thinkific account. You’ll need to add your email address, name, and surname, and choose a password. Then, Thinkific will take you through a four-step onboarding process to create your digital learning hub.

You’ll add your business name, niche, bio, photo, team size, and estimated revenue. There are also loads of questions to personalize your experience. Thinkific considers your online course-building experience and goals. 

You can also opt to start with an online course or create a community. We chose to start with an online course. This is how it went!

We clicked on “Create a Course” from the dashboard and were quite surprised! Thinkific is more technical than most online course platforms. The software takes you through stages of building your online course, starting with planning your content, outlining your course, and choosing your price.

Afterward, you can add a few final touches to your course and publish and market it. All these stages are robust, and Thinkific provides worksheets to help you progress through each step. 

Here’s an example of the worksheet for content planning:

You can double-click any of the options to get into Thinkific’s course builder tool. Starting with the curriculum, you can add chapters and lessons. You can enable free lesson previews and open lessons for student discussion. There’s a bulk content importer to get your online course ready in record time!

There’s a lot to customize including, your course image and description, your site colors and course player, and how students can access your videos. You can also add social sharing, automate completion certificates, add admins, partners and affiliates and optimize your SEO.

Thinkific offers lead generation tools too, like landing page builders, popup form builders, website builders, and online formers builders. Plus, there are built-in marketing and sales tools, and advanced reporting to track your student’s progress.

This online course platform doesn’t go wrong with community marketing either. You can strike up student discussions, create groups and develop feedback channels.

Thinkific has a fantastic content creator and editor that makes it super quick and easy to create course content that isn’t too clunky. While there aren’t a heck load of customization options, beginners can develop engaging courses and tailor their settings and payment gateways to what this online course platform allows.

Here’s a preview of the course content we created with Thinkific. Notice how the content is easy to look at and scan. It’s easy for students to navigate your online course and progress through the chapters. Because of how intuitive this platform is we were also able to split content up into more lessons.

Yet, the biggest drawbacks we came across while testing Thinkific are:

• The dashboard doesn’t look aesthetically pleasing.
• There are an overwhelming number of features, which isn’t ideal for beginners.
• The stock media library isn’t high-quality.

Thinkific Pricing:

• Free Forever
• Basic: $49 p/m for unlimited courses, 1 community, affiliate selling, custom domains, automated content, and email students 
• Start: $99 p/m for everything in Basic plan + assignments, live lessons, website code editing, and student certificates 
• Grow: $199 p/m for everything in the Start plan + 3 communities, bulk enrollment, Zapier actions, advanced quizzes, and send bulk emails
• Expand: $499 p/m for everything in Grow plan + 10 communities, custom SSL certificates, phone, and email support, and email white labeling

Our Review Scores:

1. Branding and Customization: 9/10
2. Marketing Functions: 8/10
3. Lead Nurturing and Payment Functions: 8/10
4. Interactive Teaching and Engagement Features: 6/10
5. Interactive Assessment and Quiz Features: 5/10
6. Updating Course Material: 8/10

Final Score: 44/60 (73%)

Website: https://www.thinkific.com/

2.Udemy

Udemy is one of the most credible and popular online course marketplaces. There are thousands of online courses varying in different niches, making this ideal for businesses of all sizes.

Like online course marketplaces, Udemy has built-in ranking features to get your course in front of the right people.

Here are some of Udemy’s features:

• Online course tracking and analytics
• Custom manager portals with various permissions 
• Content management and storage
• Content planning 
• Payment management 
• Built-in social network

Signing up for Udemy takes only a few minutes. You’ll complete a simple registration form requiring your name, email address, and password. Then, Udemy will take you through a three-step onboarding process to personalize your online teaching experience. 

After this, you’ll arrive on your dashboard, where you have quick action buttons to create an online course, record your video lectures, and grow your audience. On the left-hand menu, you’ll also notice navigation buttons to Udemy’s marketplace insights, teaching community, your courses, resources, and tools.

What we like about Udemy are the support and resources they provide for beginner online teachers. We chose to start with creating an engaging course and this is how it went!

You can opt between creating a course or a practice test. Udemy will first require you to name your course. They will also ask 4 questions to help you develop your course.

Once you get to the course creator, there are three stages: 1)Plan your course, 2)Create your content, and 3)Setup and audio test. These steps make it super easy to create an online course with Udemy. 

Source: Udemy

When you create your content, you can add interactive content like quizzes and assignments in a few clicks. You can also add videos and resources but not any links!

Another excellent aspect of Udemy is how well you can target your online courses. You can set specific languages, reading levels, captions, and the topic and sub-topic of your content. 

Unfortunately, we can’t publish the course on Udemy as it takes time to get approved. Because this is an example, it probably wouldn’t! But here’s a preview of the course content:

And here’s a preview of the Udemy landing page we created:

The most significant cons I found for Udemy include:

• There’s a lack of features for customization and branding. You can’t add your signature color palette, only your brand voice and content like images and video.
• This platform relies on video tutorials and images to make the text content engaging.
• Udemy doesn’t auto-save your updates.
• There are a lot of requirements you only learn about when trying to publish your course, forcing you to go back.

Udemy’s Pricing:

• Free Forever

Our Review Scores:

1. Branding and Customization: 6/10
2. Marketing Functions: 7/10
3. Lead Nurturing and Payment Functions: 6/10
4. Interactive Teaching and Engagement Features: 8/10
5. Interactive Assessment and Quiz Features: 9/10
6. Updating Course Material: 7/10

Final Score: 43/60 (72%)

Website: https://www.udemy.com/instructor/

3.Mighty Networks

Looking for an intuitive all-in-one online course platform that makes building, managing and growing online courses and communities a breeze? Mighty Networks is a fantastic place to start!

Mighty Networks offers features like: 

• Community development and marketing 
• Custom web pages
• Student chat with emojis and GIFs
• Real-time feed 
• Resources libraries 
• Virtual events 
• Live streams 
• Student welcome checklist and ice breaker questions 

Get started with Mighty Networks by creating an account with your name, email address and password. Mighty Networks doesn’t take you through an onboarding process, but only requires your network’s name.

At first glance, this software is really smooth and easy to navigate. You can tell it acts as an entire student hub rather than just an online course creator and marketer.

The idea is to attract digital schools, and high-level eLearning endeavors. This would be perfect for those organizations, but too complicated for individuals and small brands. 

Mighty Networks offers you the best opportunity to build and grow a community. The features are focused on community marketing, and this can be a little distracting for simple online course building.

From the dashboard, you can post to your feed, create events, manage members and use polls and questions. Amid all these functions, in the bottom left-corner there are two options: 1)Create a Space and 2)Create a Collection.

We clicked on the second option, and from there, “Cohort Course”. They give you a default template to start with, and you gotta add your course name, collection (if it belongs to one), tagline and privacy.

You can add people to your space or view it. There’s a tab for “Course Community”, “Course Materials”, “Discovery” and “Members”. In the “Course Materials” tab is where you can add your lessons. 

Might Network allows you to edit each lesson to add a title, description and toggle with the lesson settings. It’s really quick and easy to add course materials on Mighty Networks. You can format text to your desired headings, create bullet and numbered lists and add quotes. While there isn’t a lot of customization flexibility, this online course platform makes it ridiculously easy to develop online courses and grow a thriving digital community.

 When you’re done creating your course materials, here’s how it would look on your dashboard:

If you click into your course lessons, it should look like this:

After using Might Network here are the cons I came across:

• It’s only ideal for businesses and organizations that want a simple, well balanced combination of community marketing and e-learning.
• There aren’t high-level customization options and your course material must be basic.
• The user interface is super boring. 
• There lacks lead generation features for basic online course creation projects. The lead generation features are live webinars and actual networking which can be cumbersome if you don’t have an established audience. 

Might Networks Pricing:

• Free Trial: 14 Days 
• Community: $39 p/m for live streaming and video, chat and messaging, paid memberships and events. 
• Business: $119 p/m for everything in Community plan + premium integrations, live cohort course creation, analytics and member data and online courses. 
• Mighty Pro: Custom Price

Our Review Scores:

1. Branding and Customization: 5/10
2. Marketing Functions: 6/10
3. Lead Nurturing and Payment Functions: 6/10
4. Interactive Teaching and Engagement Features: 9/10
5. Interactive Assessment and Quiz Features: 9/10
6. Updating Course Material: 9/10

Final Score: 44/60 (73%)

Website: https://www.mightynetworks.com/

4.Teachable

Teachable is well known for the all-in-one platform of online course creators and coaching business.

With more than 10,000 users, it’s an easy to use platform with basically everything you need to start your boutique online course business.

Here are Teachable’s key features:

• Unlimited video
• Unlimited courses
• Unlimited hosting
• Integrated payment processing
• Student management

Creating an account with Teachable takes a few minutes, and they have a one-page form to find out more about your business and online course creation.

Arriving on your dashboard, you’ll notice that Teachable has all the bells and whistles of an all-in-one online course platform. Nonetheless, it’s still super intuitive to navigate on Teachable. On the left-hand menu, you’ll find options to navigate to your community, analytics, website, sales, emails, courses, coaching, and resources.

Because of its wide range of features, businesses can use Teachable to develop and grow online communities, websites, and digital courses.

What we love about Teachable is how much customization this platform offers. You can set your branded theme to reflect in your online courses and landing pages. You can also customize your URL domain in a few clicks, and set up payment gateways for your course material.

From the dashboard, we clicked “Create a Course” and Teachable starts by requiring your course name. Unlike most online course platforms, Teachable allows you to add upsells to your course lessons. You can add quizzes and assignments too!

Creating an online course with Teachable was really quick, and it’s not difficult to add your content. The courses are also aesthetically pleasing. Have a look below:

Pricing 

• Free Forever!
• Basic: $39 p/m for 5% transaction fee, 5 published courses, email marketing, coupons and custom domains 
• Professional: $119 p/m for 0% transaction fee, unlimited published courses, email marketing, coupons, custom domains, affiliate marketing and group coaching calls 

• Business: $299 p/m for everything in the Professional plan + custom user roles and bulk student enrollment

Our Review Scores:

1. Branding and Customization: 9/10
2. Marketing Functions: 9/10
3. Lead Nurturing and Payment Functions: 8/10
4. Interactive Teaching and Engagement Features: 7/10
5. Interactive Assessment and Quiz Features: 8/10
6. Updating Course Material: 8/10

Final Score: 49/60 (82%)

Website: teachable.com

5.LearnWorlds

LearnWorlds is the top learning platform for creating, managing and selling online courses. It is a scalable platform that grows with your needs and provides an excellent e-learning experience at all levels.

LearnWorlds comes with all the basic features, such as:

• Full website builder with a blog
• Interactive Videos with subtitles and transcripts
• Interactive Ebooks
• SCORM & HTML5 support
• White-labelling and the ability to create your fully-branded website 
• Built-in social network
• Advanced student management and analytics
• Custom iOS/Android App (for an extra fee) 

When you start with LearnWorlds, you must create an account and add your email address. A second field requires your school name, which you can come up with yourself!

LearnWorlds will take you through an onboarding process where you can add your school name, localization settings, school appearance, and school context.

Off the bat, it’s easy to use LearnWorlds and customize it to your branding. There are loads of pre-built templates to tailor your online courses. Businesses can also configure custom settings based on their teaching goals and company structure.

From your dashboard, you can create your first online course alongside landing pages and your first mobile app. When you build your first online course, you’ll start with a course name, custom URL, and the type of access for your content (free, paid, etc.). 

If required, you’ll have to choose your price next and whether to offer a discount. Next, you’ll add a course description and image. You can also enable the Drip Feed feature and automatically schedule your posts.

It’s fun to edit your online course, and the customization options are endless. The available lead generation features include popups and landing pages, and you can integrate a payment gateway. Another fantastic feature is that you can customize access for different sections. So one of your sections may free while learners have to pay to dive deeper into the topic. 

You can also view analytics for each separate section which helps if do offer gated content. 

There are also many built-in marketing features, like affiliate management, data, and analytics, user management, forms, NPS scores, and promotions. You can create and customize a mobile app for your online courses.

Adding to how handy this online course platform is, it’s simple to edit past content. You can do this through your dashboard and edit each page and section. 

Here’s a snippet of the course we created with LearnWorlds. Notice how we’ve customized it a bit with different colors and a random logo.

 

As students scroll down your homepage, they’ll come across your course sections. If your sections are mostly text, I wouldn’t recommend the layout we chose. Instead choose a more compressed layout for your home page. But if you’re using a lot of video, it shouldn’t be an issue.

However, there are some negative aspects of LearnWorlds, and these include:

• There’s a lack of features for interactive teaching like live events.
• There’s a lack of community building and growth features.
• It’s difficult to customize sections.
• The software can lag sometimes.

LearnWorlds Pricing:

• Free Trial: 30 Days 
• Starter: $29 p/m for 3 pages, 2 popups, 4 payment getaways, basic integrations, and coupons 
• Pro Trainer: $99 p/m for everything in the Starter plan + unlimited courses, unlimited landing pages, affiliate management, and premium integrations 
• Learning Center: $299 p/m for everything in the Pro Trainer plan + scheduled automated reports, user segments, and full white-label options 
• High Volume & Corporate: Custom Price

Our Review Scores:

1. Branding and Customization: 9/10
2. Marketing Functions: 8/10
3. Lead Nurturing and Payment Functions: 8/10
4. Interactive Teaching and Engagement Features: 6/10
5. Interactive Assessment and Quiz Features: 6/10
6. Updating Course Material: 8/10

Final Score: 45/60 (75%)

Website: https://www.learnworlds.com/

Creating & Selling Online Courses in 2024

There are many online course platforms to create and sell courses in your niche. And guess what? This market is forecasted to boom!

By 2027, online learning is expected to boast an annual growth rate of 2.15%, equally a market value of over $63 billion.

There’s no surprise in the popularity of digital learning. It’s more convenient and personalized than traditional learning. Not to mention, users aren’t restricted to their locations.

Online courses are essentially digital downloads, far more premium than e-books, and can be priced accordingly. Also, no stock is required, and no shipping processes or costs. They can consist of text, video, audio, or file downloads and any combination of these types of content.

They’re easily accessible, instantly or on demand, from anywhere, and on any device. Look at this handy video by Sunny Lenarduzzi to see how to sell online courses with very little knowledge.

Businesses and individuals notice these E-learning perks as 80% of companies and 50% of university or college studies have used online courses. Almost 30% of companies use E-learning for compliance training. Online courses could boost employee engagement rates by 18%.

But online courses aren’t limited to corporations. Individual learners love this learning route too! Learner retention rates for E-learning are an impressive 25 to 60%, while one-on-one tutoring has a retention rate of 8 to 10%.

Online course platforms like Udemy, Coursera, and Skillshare accurately prove the excitement around online courses. Udemy has over 40 million students, with Coursera at 87 million and Skillshare having over 5 million users. 

There are many online course platforms and websites to create and sell your digital courses. With so much hype and engagement around online courses, there’s never been a better time to get in on this action! 

Types of Online Course Platforms

The main types of online course creation software include all-in-one platforms, standalone platforms, online course marketplaces, WordPress LMS Plugins, and Academy and Enterprise LMSs.

All-in-One Platforms

All-in-one platforms for online courses provide creators with a full range of tools and functions to research, develop, publish and manage their online courses. You can also use practices like email marketing and community marketing to grow your user base. 

All-in-one platforms are ideal for beginners who want one, robust tool to manage all their E-learning marketing and sales efforts. 

Online Courses Marketplace

Online course marketplaces work in favor of the course creator and student. You get to list your online course for free, and the online course marketplace will offer it to targeted users. It’s possible to get extra exposure from these marketplaces by paying them a predetermined commission from each course sale.

Standalone Platforms

Standalone platforms specialize in nothing more than helping you build your online course from scratch. These online course platforms and websites suit course creators with established audiences and need an intricate course builder. You can integrate third-party apps for marketing, analytics, and payment management.

Academic and Enterprises LMSs

Academic and Enterprises Learning Management Systems LMSs are online course platforms for enterprises and academic institutions. These platforms are super high-level and offer organizations ample customization capabilities to adapt the platform to their organization’s branding and user base.

WordPress LMS Plugins

This is a course creation plugin available on WordPress. If you’re a WordPress user who wants to host your courses on your WordPress site, this option would be ideal. However, you’ll need to rely on more plugins for online course payment management and marketing. 

For this review the types of online course platform’s we’ll explore include all-in-one and standalone platforms and online course marketplaces. We won’t be evaluating academic and enterprises LMSs and WordPress LMS Plugins. 

Final Thoughts on the Best Online Platforms to Sell Your Courses

We have reviewed 12 different platforms for creating, hosting and selling online courses and included options to suit different needs, with different price points. 

Overall, and according to the criteria that we set,  the best online course platforms include LearnWorlds, Thinkific, Udemy. Might Networks and Teachable. 

These are easy platforms to use, and they provide customization for businesses of all sizes. There are also built-in features for marketing, sales and community development. 

And remember, a business is a living entity. It needs nurturing so it can grow over time. Having your first launch and sales is only the beginning.

Learn from your first project, go back and improve your processes, bring more people on and work to optimize your sales funnel!

Then, you can go on to publish your second course, and then the next and the next.

At the end of the day, it all comes down to this: No one knows your business better than you do. Also, no one knows what it needs for it to keep going, and to become a big success in the online world

Having said that, you still need to update your knowledge in the online strategies and business models and incorporate useful techniques and marketing tactics that will help your business thrive in the new normal. 

Creating and selling your online courses is the way to go forward. The growing e-learning trends are here to stay.