The Ultimate Guide to Choosing the Right Online Course Platform
Published on 31 May 2023
To say that the world of online learning has experienced tremendous growth in recent years is a massive understatement.
According to recent research published by ReportLinker, the industry is predicted to be worth more than $686.9 billion by 2030, offering learners the flexibility to expand their knowledge and acquire new skills in many areas of their lives, all from the comfort of their homes or offices.
Creating online courses can be a game-changer for your business too, allowing you to reach a wider audience at a lower cost and freeing up more of your time.
However, with numerous online course platforms available to host and sell your courses, it can be daunting to choose the right one for your business, which can leave you feeling overwhelmed and stressed.
In this ultimate guide, I will outline the essential factors you should consider when selecting an online course platform, review four market-leading platforms and share my notes and recommendations to help you figure out where to create your online course, which will save you a ton of research time.
But before we get into all that, I would like to start with a quick clarification.
Clarification: Who This Guide is For
In this article I am going to assume you either have your own business and you are looking to introduce another revenue stream by selling online courses, or your employer has asked you to investigate how to create online courses for your organisation.
However, if on the other hand you are currently employed and you are thinking about creating online courses in order to supplement your income, I recommend selling your courses through an online course marketplace like Udemy or SkillShare (sponsored link) in the first instance, rather than what I am going to suggest below.
The reason for this is because the course platforms below do not directly sell your online courses.
Selling Online Courses through Marketplaces vs. Third-Party Platforms
Third-party platforms give you the functionality to be able to sell your courses, but you still need to promote them to people who are interested in what you are selling, which typically involves building an audience; something you may not have the time or inclination for if you have a job.
Of course anyone can utilise online course marketplaces to sell and make money from their online courses, so it doesn’t need to be a one-size-fits-all decision.
You could potentially sell some of your courses through an online marketplace and others through a third-party platform, but if you are going down that route I would recommend selling lower priced mini-courses on these aggregator platforms.
The downside to using a course marketplace is that they charge a relatively high commission for every sale you make, meaning that if you have an audience you can reach, using a course platform that you have control of will allow you to keep more of the profits for yourself.
Okay, so now we’ve got that cleared up, let’s take a look at online course platforms!
Understanding the Landscape of Online Course Platforms
Before getting started on your online course creation journey, it’s crucial to understand the concept of online learning platforms.
These platforms, also known as Learning Management Systems (LMS), E-Learning platforms or online course builders, let you securely host your course content; manage your student’s experience going through your course; market your course AND, of course, manage the all-important payment processing function to allow you to get paid, even when you are doing something else.
Think of it like a one-stop-shop for creating and selling your online courses or membership programmes, that allow you to automate and scale your business!
Now that you understand what an online course platform is and why you need one, the first thing you need to decide is whether you should integrate it into your existing website using a plugin (assuming you have a website) or use a third-party service.
Already have a website?
Adding an LMS to your own website is easy if you are using WordPress and there are some really good online course plug-ins, such as LearnDash.
But they do require a fair bit of customisation, so if you are not particularly techie you may end up using the services of a web designer to help you get this set up.
This means there will be a higher upfront cost and it will likely take longer to get your course up and running.
Plus, if this is the first time you have created a course, you may not be sure about the features you really need, or how your course should be laid out to ensure the best results for your students.
The advantage though is that this option will be cheaper in the long-run, because you are not paying monthly fees to use the software.
If you are new to course creation I highly recommend using a third-party LMS!
You can always switch to a plugin option on your website later if desired, but in my experience the key is to get your course up and running and start selling as quickly as possible, and the best way to do that is with a third-party course platform.
If you are a more experienced course creator with several courses under your belt, can afford a higher upfront cost and are prepared to invest the time in developing your own website, then the plugin option would be a good long-term solution for you.
Don’t have your own website yet?
If you don’t have your own website this option is obviously not available to you and in that case you need to use a third-party self-hosted course platform.
The advantages of using a self-hosted course platform are that they are quicker and easier to set up, even if you are not particularly techie. They have a pre-built course design template and all you need to do is add your content.
Most have an easy-to-follow on-boarding process that guides you through the basics of getting set up on their platform.
A few of them offer free packages, so there will be no upfront cost, meaning that you can be making money straight off the bat. Then if you require more advanced features, you will need to switch to one of their paid plans.
All-In-One-Platforms
Some course platforms, such as Zenler and Kajbi (see below) are an all-in-one solution, which means that they can become your business website and replace the need to pay for other third party tools, such as email marketing software.
This means that an all-in-one tool would be a great solution for someone who doesn’t already have a website or any of these other online marketing tools.
Other course platforms, such as Thinkific and Teachable (see below) are third-party stand-alone solutions, designed to help you create, market and sell your online courses, as well as optimising the learning experience of your students, which they do very well, but they are not really great at doing much beyond that.
Whilst you can create a website and do some limited email marketing activities using these tools, these elements tend to be quite basic and are geared around selling your courses, meaning that you will likely need to use other 3rd party tools to create a professionally functioning online business.
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If this is the first time you are reading about the different options for course creation, it can be challenging to get your head around the nuances to figure out which is best type of platform for your particular situation; so to clarify the decision making process, the following flowchart illustrates the key factors to consider for selecting the most appropriate type of LMS, along with platform examples of each type.
Learning management system selection process
Key factors to Consider When Choosing a Learning Management System
Reputation and Credibility:
Assessing a particular platform’s reputation and credibility is important, but to get a true sense of this you are going to need to do a bit of research.
There are many Facebook Groups that talk about online business related topics, where you can search for the platforms you are considering and read what people are saying, or you can ask a question in the group and receive responses from other members.
It would also be worth going onto Google and simply typing the name of the platform followed by the word ‘reviews’, and you should find many blogs discussing that specific system.
User Experience and Interface:
Student – Understanding how a particular platform’s navigation feels for your students is important. Short of buying a course from someone you know that uses a platform you are interested in, one of the best ways to assess this is by signing up for a free trial, if available.
If not, search YouTube for tutorials that provide an inside look into the software.
Creator – As a course creator, you’ll want an intuitive and easy-to-set-up platform. Of course, just like any software there will be a bit of a learning curve when you first start, but most platforms strive to simplify this process and may offer quick-start tutorials or checklists to facilitate a speedy setup.
Having a free trial is invaluable when evaluating different options. If there is no free trial, then YouTube is a good way to find on-boarding tutorials.
Marketing and Sales Features:
Promoting and selling your courses effectively is crucial for the success of your online education business.
Look for platforms that provide marketing and sales features, such as email marketing, affiliate programme management, sales funnels, discount coupons, order bumps and up-sells.
Some of these features may only be available on higher tier packages, so it’s important to know what features you’ll have access to at each tier and their relative importance to your business.
In addition to robust marketing features, it’s also worth investigating what analytics are available, which will allow you to improve the performance of your marketing over time. Not all platforms provide useful marketing data such as conversion metrics.
Costs and Fees:
Platforms usually offer the option to pay monthly or prepay for a year at a discounted rate, so check the pricing pages on the platforms’ websites you are evaluating and make a note of the different rates.
Most online course platforms offer different tiers that unlock additional features, so it’s important that you compare the list of features that are available on the different plans.
As stated above, some platforms offer a free trial. Some are always free for as long as you have your account, whereas others are just free for a limited time (such as a 14 day free trial) after which you will start paying unless you cancel your account.
In addition to the monthly fee, some platforms also charge a transaction processing fee. This may or may not be in addition to the merchant processing fee charged by your payment processor e.g. Stripe or PayPal, and is calculated based on a percentage of sales that you make.
When comparing platforms, it’s important to take all these fees into consideration when calculating affordability vs profitability to ensure they are in alignment with your business goals.
You may also need to consider how you are going to add tax to the purchase price of your courses; if you need to collect taxes that is!
If you are VAT registered in the UK for example, you’ll need to charge VAT on your course sales. That’s obvious, but some course platforms don’t let you distinguish between the product cost and the sales tax element, giving you a bit more of a headache, when it comes to record keeping etc.
If you are only selling in the one country, that might not be too much of an issue.
You can bundle the tax element into the overall price and make it very clear on your sales page that the price includes VAT, but don’t even get me started on the complexities of collecting EU VAT; and of course one of the attractions to having an online course is that you can sell to a global audience.
If you think you are going to have customers in multiple countries, you should take that into consideration when narrowing down your list of potential platforms.
Number of Courses Permitted:
Certain platforms impose limits on the number of courses you can create, especially on free and lower-tier packages, so it’s important that you think ahead and plan for the future.
You might only have one course idea at the moment, but once you get started on this journey, you will likely come up with other ideas for future courses.
If the entry level paid plan only allows for a small number of courses that may mean that before long you will need to upgrade to the next tier, and therefore increase your monthly costs.
Technical Support and Reliability:
Reliability and responsive support are crucial for the smooth operation of an online course. Look for platforms that provide excellent technical support, including assistance with setup, maintenance, and troubleshooting.
This can be hard to assess by looking at the company website, so again be prepared to do your own research to see what people are saying about this aspect of the platform.
However, regardless of a platform’s reputation, there will likely be times when the tech response is slower than you would like it to be, so you should bear that in mind in relation to all the main platforms; particularly as most of these platforms are based in US time zones, meaning that if you are in the UK, tech support may be less available, especially in the mornings.
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Overview of Popular Learning Management Systems
So now you have a method for comparing different learning management systems, which platforms are worth comparing?
There are literally dozens of different platform options for creating and hosting online courses that you could evaluate, but to save you time, I will focus on 4 market leaders.
These platforms are all good options, but depending on your budget, technical expertise and other business needs, hopefully you’ll be able to narrow the selection down further with the following info.
Please note that the following section contains sponsored links. That means that if you were to buy into any of their paid plans we would receive a small commission from the company at no additional cost to you.
This helps to support the work that we do and the content we create here on the blog. It’s important to know that we would recommend these particular tools, even if they didn’t operate an affiliate programme, so this does not in any way affect the tools we feature.
As you will see they each have their pros and cons, but the information below will give you a good indication as to which option or options would be a good fit for your online education business.
Platform 1: Teachable
Website: www.teachable.com
– Reputation and Credibility: Well-known platform trusted by many course creators.
– Marketing and Sales Features: Offers robust marketing and sales features, including email marketing, order bumps, up-sells, coupon codes and affiliate management.
– User Experience and Interface: User-friendly interface, easy to navigate for both students and course creators.
– Costs and Fees: Simple to understand tiered plans starting at $59/month, plus transaction fees on lower-tier plans. Free plan available but limited to only 10 students. 14 day free trial available on the Pro Plan.
– Number of Courses Permitted: 1 (Free Plan), 5 (Basic Plan), unlimited (Pro Plan).
– Technical Support and Reliability: Responsive customer support and reliable platform performance.
– My Notes: Teachable is a tried-and-tested platform with a clear and easy to navigate student interface. The free and basic plans are a bit limited, meaning that you may need to upgrade to their Pro Plan within 12 – 18 months (depending on how many ideas for courses you have), which is $159/month.
Where I think Teachable has a clear edge over it’s nearest competitor (Thinkific) is in the handling of taxes. If you need to collect tax, Teachable offers built-in tax collection capabilities, which is especially useful for collecting taxes from customers in different countries.
This is important if you anticipate having significant international sales.
Platform 2: Thinkific
Website: www.thinkific.com
– Reputation and Credibility: Another well-known platform that gets positive reviews among course creators.
– Marketing and Sales Features: Offers essential marketing and sales features, including email marketing, coupons, up-sells, order bumps (even on the free plan) and affiliate marketing. A marketing funnels tool is currently under development, which will help creators further improve conversions.
– User Experience and Interface: Clean and user-friendly interface for both student and creator, with an easy-to-follow on-boarding process for new creators. The sales-page builder interface is a bit clunky, which can take a bit of getting used to.
– Costs and Fees: Slightly confusing range of tiered plans starting at $49/month, no transaction fees are charged, but your payment processor (Stripe or Paypal) will still charge a merchant processing fee. There is a Free Plan available that allows unlimited students to enrol.
– Number of Courses Permitted: 1 (Free Plan), Unlimited (Basic Plan and above).
– Technical Support and Reliability: Responsive customer support and reliable platform performance. There is a really good Facebook Group for Thinkific users, so if you are in a hurry to get an answer to a burning question, this is a great resource to get support from a sizeable community of international course creators.
There are also some great on-boarding tutorials and How-To help articles available.
My Notes: Thinkific is the course platform that I use for all my online courses, live masterclasses and even with my 1-2-1 coaching clients.
In my opinion the on-boarding for new creators is better than Teachable and the free plan is a great way to get started with your online course business and maximise your course revenue generation with zero up-front investment.
If you’d like to see a Thinkific example course, check out my Quick Start Mini-Training!
There are no restrictions as to how many students you can enrol into your course, so you can start building your course business and making money very quickly.
The cons are that the marketing analytics are not great, the sales-page builder is clunky and not as flexible or attractive as some of the other course platforms; and at time of writing (unless you are based in the US or Canada), Thinkific does not assist with sales tax collection.
They are however currently developing a solution for other countries, so it will be available at some point in the future, but we don’t know exactly when that will be available, or on what plans.
And in terms of the clunky sale page builder, if you don’t like it you can always build your own sales pages on your website and simply link to the Thinkific checkout; or bypass it altogether by using ClickFunnels or other sales page builders.
In the meantime there is a partner integration with Quaderno available, that will allow you to collect international taxes, so there is a work-around, but there is an additional cost for using Quaderno. If you don’t need to collect sales taxes, this is not going to be an issue for you at all.
If you want to learn more about Thinkific, check out my full Thinkfic review!
Platform 3: Kajabi
Website: www.kajabi.com
– Reputation and Credibility: Established platform with a strong reputation and credibility.
– Marketing and Sales Features: Offers robust marketing and sales features including website builder, built-in email marketing, sales funnels, affiliate management and up-sells.
– User Experience and Interface: Intuitive and user-friendly interface for both students and course creators.
– Costs and Fees: Higher pricing plans, starting at $149/month with no transaction fees. 14 day free trial available on all plans (as a Kajabi affiliate partner I am delighted to offer my readers a 30 day free trial – click here to sign up).
– Number of Courses Permitted: 3 (Basic Plan), 15 (Growth Plan), 100 (Pro Plan).
– Technical Support and Reliability: Strong technical support and reliable platform uptime.
My Notes: Kajabi is very much the Rolls Royce of E-learning and course delivery platforms.
As such you would expect the cost to be significantly higher than the other platforms we’ve looked at in this article and it is, but the system is more customisable than other platforms, and it’s a one-stop-shop for absolutely everything you need to start creating and selling online courses and membership programmes.
Kajabi has a very nice website builder that you can link to your own URL.
Where other online course platforms offer features like email integrations, Kajabi has everything fully integrated within their platform, so you don’t need to use other third party software solutions (saving you money on other software tools).
Kajabi also has it’s own built in webinar feature so you don’t need a Zoom subscription; and if you have a podcast, or you fancy starting one, Kajabi has you covered there as well.
Kajabi gives you the ability to create a web page for your podcast show, host your podcast within their platform, and even distributes your episodes to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts.
However with this high degree of customisation comes a steeper learning curve, meaning that the set up process is likely to be more time consuming than other platforms and it can be a bit fiddly to sync all the elements together, so everything works seamlessly behind-the-scenes.
Kajabi University provides lots of helpful tutorials and courses to get you going and support the growth of your online course business.
At time of writing, Kajabi does not assist you with taking sales tax like Teachable and Zenler do.
In summary, Kajabi is a really good solution, but it is one of the more expensive platforms, and the lack of a free plan means that you will likely need to invest money up-front, before generating revenue from your courses.
Kajabi could be a great option for you if you do not already have a website for your business and you have sufficient funds to finance the development time of your courses, whist paying the monthly fees.
Although more expensive than other platforms, you won’t need to pay someone to build a website for you, or pay for any other 3rd party software solutions, that you would perhaps need with other platforms; so you need to take this into account when making your decision.
Platform 4: Zenler
Website: www.newzenler.com
– Reputation and Credibility: Zenler is a relatively new player in the market and are gaining a loyal following of raving fans.
– Marketing and Sales Features: Offers marketing and sales features including landing page builder, coupons, up-sells, order bumps, sales funnels and email marketing.
– User Experience and Interface: Fairly easy to use interface, designed to cater to both students and course creators. Can be a bit overwhelming for new users.
– Costs and Fees: Competitive pricing plans, starting at $67/month (substantial discount for purchasing an annual plan), with no transaction fees. There is also a free plan with limited features that can be accessed via their home page, but at time of writing it’s by invite only.
– Number of Courses Permitted: Unlimited courses and Communities on all plans.
– Technical Support and Reliability: Responsive customer support and reliable platform performance.
My Notes: Zenler, also known as New Zenler, are a fairly new UK based company. Being based in the UK they facilitate the collection of EU VAT (collect, report and pay), so if you expect to get a lot of sales from within the EU, and you want this to be as hassle-free as possible, Zenler could be a good option for you!
Current users rave about how beautiful the software is, and the web page builder certainly creates some very impressive sites. The course design customisation is a bit basic though and some of the elements can be buggy at times, but the software is still fairly new, so this will likely improve over time.
On the whole I am actually really impressed with this platform! What impresses me the most is the sales funnel aspect, with its clear conversion data for each stage of the funnel, and one-click build. The analytics are way better than the analytics available within Thinkific, and their Page Builder is better too. Sorry Thinkific, I still love you!! 😉
They also have a really robust ‘Live’ feature, that allows you to host webinars and other meetings from within the platform, as well as livestream on Facebook and YouTube. And, if you already have courses set up on another platform, they are the only platform that I’ve come across that offers concierge migration, meaning that it’s much easier to import courses from other platforms.
This makes Zenler very attractive to course creators who may already have a few courses set up elsewhere and have been resisting switching to another platform because of the perceived hassle of getting everything moved over.
And lastly, Zenler makes it easy to use their platform for 1-2-1 clients as well as for selling courses, memberships etc.
I’ve adapted Thinkific courses for working with 1-2-1 clients, so it is possible to do that on other platforms, but it feels very much like Jerry Rigging the platform to do something that it’s not really set up to do; however that’s not the case with Zenler, which comes with this option straight out the box, meaning that you can effortless use Zenler for all aspects of your online business.
Zenler is marketed as an all-in-one-platform, so you don’t need to invest in third-party tools like ConvertKit, Zoom, SquareSpace or Clickfunnels, saving you money on these other platforms.
So in conclusion, Zenler is well worth considering if you are looking for a one-stop-shop, but want a cheaper option than Kajabi; however you should be prepared for the odd tech glitch that might arise, due to the site still evolving.
Online Learning Platforms Comparison
Choosing the right online course platform is a crucial decision that will shape the success of your online course business.
By considering the sales and marketing systems you already have in place, as well as the factors outlines above, you can make an informed choice that aligns with your business goals.
For example, if you already have a website, email marketing system etc Thinkific or Teachable would be great options for you to consider.
If on the other hand you don’t already have a website, and you want your site to be more than just a place to sell your courses, Kajabi or Zenler would be a better choice for your particular situation.
Conclusion
When it comes to choosing the best LMS for your business you basically have four options. Utilise a course marketplace, host the courses on your own website via a plugin, utilise a third-party learning management system, or choose an all-in-one system.
You will need to decide which option best suits your business needs, and then evaluate the alternatives within these parameters.
Once you have chosen where to create your courses, combined with your expertise and dedication, you can create an impactful and profitable online course business, making a difference in the lives of your students while fulfilling your entrepreneurial goals.
Take the first step, choose the right platform, and unlock the limitless potential that awaits you in the dynamic world of online education.