Are you looking for the best online teaching platforms to strengthen your business, sell online courses, take the training business to a wider market or support your learners?
It’s no secret that e-learning and online course platforms are growing exponentially. Selling online courses is a great way to monetize as well as help people benefit from your knowledge. Market researcher has forecast online teaching platforms to total $350 billion by the next decades.
You want the best online course platforms.
But which online teaching platform is suitable for both course creators and learners?
Generally, there are now many online course creation platforms that attempt to provide for this growing demand. However, the best online course platforms meet a variety of needs of an aspiring online educator. Includes video, audio, PDF, and slide presentations that make your course unique. In addition, e-learning is becoming more competitive and start-up costs for platforms will be an important point. Finally, comprehensive customer support can make a big success in the early stages of your online course creation journey.
Are you ready to control this market and sell online courses for your learners?
If you want to create your course platform, this browser-based platform helps you:
- Create a website for online courses (or integrate your course with an existing website).
- Build payment landing pages.
- Price your course and collect payments (either one-time or in installments).
- Upload your audios, and videos, add assignments and quizzes, create interesting course content, and engage with your learners.
- Create membership communities.
- Host live webinars.
In this post, we’re reviewing the 7+ best online teaching platforms based on the learner experience, features, pricing, ease of use, course integrations, support, and more.
Let’s get started:
The top online teaching platforms comparison
Here is my favorite pick of the best online course platforms for online course creation:
1. Thinkific
Thinkific is the top overall platform to create and sell online courses.
There is a reason why Thinkific is # 1 on the list of best online teaching platforms. It is a powerful all-in-one platform that helps you easily create, market, and sell your courses online.
More than 50,000 in-course creators use the Thinkific platform to create and sell their courses and earn a lot of passive income from this platform.
Thinkific offers incredible automation, is extremely easy to set up, gives you complete control over your online courses and you can create all kinds of content including text, videos, audios, quizzes, multimedia, survey, and more.
Key features of Thinkific:
- Unlimited courses, students, and content
- Advanced reporting and tracking
- Drip content
- Quizzes, assignments, video, audio, pdf, survey, etc.
- Student engagement tools
- Course certificate of completion.
- The ability to connect your custom domain
- Free trial options
- Instant payout
Thinkific Pricing:
Although you have the opportunity to run an online course with Thinkific for free, you’ll only get restricted features. If you want to create unlimited courses with more useful features, you should pick their premium plans.
Thinkific offers three premium packages which are listed here along with their features and pricing.
Basic: This basic package costs you $49/month and supplies you with all the tools you need to run your first course. Here are the features of this package.
- Unlimited courses & students
- Coupons & Promotions
- Live Chat support
- Custom domain
- Drip (scheduled) content
- One-to-One Student Email
- Email integrations
- Manual student enrollment & exports
Pro (Most Popular): This popular plan costs you $99/month and is suitable for those who want a full suite of tools to create an incredible student experience with online courses. Here’s what you’ll get with this package:
- All the features from the Basic plan
- 2 Site admin accounts
- Private & hidden courses
- Advanced course building options
- Memberships and bundles
- Live Lessons with Zoom
- Completion Certificates
- Advanced Customization
- Priority Support
- Assignments & Randomized Quiz
- Single Communities
Premier: The premier costs you $499/month and is perfect for those who want to build an education empire without any limits. It offers the following features;
- All the features from their Pro plan
- 5 Site admin accounts
- 30 minutes onboarding call
- 30-minute launch preparedness review
- 15 Group Analysts
- Single sign-on (SSO)
- Unlimited Communities
Overall, I recommend Thinkific Platform as my # 1 choice for course creators and entrepreneurs who are serious about creating, marketing, and selling their courses.
2. Podia
Podia is an online course platform that can be used by 50000+ creators to develop your entire storefront. It permits you to create all the educational materials you may want. You can create multiple online courses, create digital downloads, set up separate membership sites, and host them all in one place.
Podia is easy to use. It handles VAT, and video hosting and has a lot of features which means you can manage almost everything within the platform.
You can use Podia to set up a separate landing page for each of your courses, digital downloads, or membership options. This is great because multiple dedicated landing pages have proven to increase conversions.
Key features of Podia
Podia gives the following features;
- Offers video hosting; Podia covers you with unlimited video bandwidth on all plans.
- Engage the audience to create posts, comments, or likes.
- No limits on content, students, emails, or earnings. Sell as much as you want.
- The ability to create your website along with a custom URL
- Easily add text, images, videos, and testimonials
- Collect email addresses before your online course launches
- Sell eBooks, PDFs, cheat sheets, checklists, video files, audio files, text, or any content.
- Connect easily with Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, etc.
Podia Pricing
Podia has three packages which are listed below.
Mover: This plan costs demand $39/month or $390/yr. (save $78 billed annually) and are perfectly fit for those who’re launching their first digital products or online courses. You’ll get features like;
- Custom Website
- Sell online courses & Digital downloads
- Free Community
- Sell webinars
- Email marketing
- Zero transaction fees
- Free migrations and unlimited everything
Shaker: This Shaker plan costs $89/month or $890/year (save $178 billed annually) and is suitable for those who want to grow their business. You’ll perceive features like;
- Everything in Mover Plan
- Ability to create membership communities
- Affiliate marketing
- 15k Monthly email recipients
- Course certificates
- Zoom integration
Earthquaker: This plan costs $199/month or $1990/year (save $398 billed annually) and is the proper solution who want to establish a big business. You’ll have features like;
- Everything in Shaker Plan
- 100K Community Members
- 50K Monthly email recipients
- Dedicated support agent
- Personalized onboarding call
- Monthly group creator call
- Third-party code
- 5 Team seats
3. Teachable
Teachable is one of the leading online course creation platforms handled by over 100,000 creators who’ve sold over $1 billion in courses and coaching. Using the platform to create the video, audio, and text-based courses, no coding is needed.
Moreover, Teachable is an opportunity if you want a fast and easy course builder. I take into account it is the best for beginners getting their feet wet in the course world as it’s one of the cheapest options.
Smart affiliate marketers like Pat Flynn use Teachable to create, market, and sell their online courses. So, if you’re searching for the BEST platforms as a beginning period to create and sell courses, Teachable is a great selection for you.
You can pick their free plan (with $1 + 10% for all transactions) or select one of their three pro plans varying from just $29/month to $249/month.
I recommend their most popular Pro plan at $ 99 / month as it is the first plan with zero transaction fee.
Key features of Teachable
Teachable gives the following marvelous features;
- Unlimited everything – bandwidth, students, courses, and coaching services.
- Unlimited videos and hosting with every plan
- Live Zoom courses on their pro plan
- International payment plans in 130+ currencies
- Very easy setup.
- Graded quizzes.
- Instant payouts
- The ability to provide coupon codes to your students
- Custom course completion certificates.
- Website theme customization option
Pricing
When comes to the premium plan Teachable offers the following three packages:
Basic Plan: If you want to start your first online course, this is the perfect plan for you it costs you $29 per month (when pay billed annually) and offers the following features.
- 5% per transaction fee
- Members-only community
- Course creator training
- 2 admin-level users
- Integrated email marketing
- Private student community
- Unlimited students
- Unlimited course products
- Unlimited coaching products
- Unlimited video hosting
Pro: If you want to grow your online course business with advanced features designed to boost student engagement., this plan is for you. It requires $99 per month (billed annually) and offers the following features:
- Everything in the Basic plan
- No transaction fees
- 5 admin-level users
- Priority product support
- Graded quizzes
- Course completion certificates
- Live chat support
Business: If you need to scale your online course business to the next level with better features, this plan is fit for you. It needs $249/month (billed annually) and gives you amazing features.
- Everything from the Pro plan
- No transaction fees
- 20 admin-level users
- Bulk student enrollments
- Advanced theme customization
- Custom user roles
- Customer support live chat
- Group coaching calls option
4. LearnDash
LearnDash is a WordPress LMS plugin that helps you easily create and run online courses like Udemy with WordPress. Unlike other platforms that we’ve seen so far, LearnDash is an LMS plugin that integrates with your existing WordPress website. Moreover, you use the Astra Pro theme it offers some exclusive features that will help you to build a luxurious courses website.
It has many features as well as some unique advanced features that set it apart from the crowd. One of these features is LearnDash ‘Focus Mode’, which can be enabled to remove all unnecessary page elements (such as navigation bars and footer elements) for your students to avoid confusion.
Use LearnDash to set up drip courses and use grade book technology to give your students a grade based on their quiz and homework performance. You can award certificates, badges, and course points to your students according to their grades and the activities they have completed.
Pricing
Basic ($159/year): 1 Site License, Unlimited Courses & Users, drip-feed lessons, Advanced Quizzing, Certificates & Badges, Email Notifications, and Free Integrations.
Plus Package ($189/month): Basic features plus Maximum of 10 Site Licenses, ProPanel, Certificates & Badges, Demo Site Template.
Pro Package ($329/month): Plus Package as well as Maximum of 25 Site Licenses.
Finally, I recommend using one of the top suppliers to sell the course.
If you want to sign up for a platform to learn new things, here are my choices for the best online e-learning platforms.
5. Udemy
Udemy is one of the most popular online course platforms on the web. This educational platform has more than 44 million students and 65K instructors and 183K+ special online courses.
You learn Design, Development, Marketing, Programming and IT, Business skills, teaching, productivity, and much more. There are even categories for personal development and lifestyle, which cover life skills and other techniques that need not an academic framework.
Since each class is created and taught separately, they are also priced separately: lifetime access to a single course can range from cheap (about $ 11 to $ 15) to expensive (about $ 200 or more).
Udemy makes it possible to create open courses for everyone with the potential to acquire new skills. By doing this, it provides many more online learning materials, including PDF documents, PowerPoint, text, and video content.
It is open to trainers to join the academy and start teaching online, but it takes a huge chunk out of the revenue and controls the pricing and discounting of the course.
6. Coursera
Coursera is a free online learning platform with over 4 thousand courses created in collaboration with 200+ leading universities and companies.
Depending on what you need, you can choose from three options at the top right of Coursera’s official website: For Enterprise, For students, and Join for free, which is for individuals.
Coursera is similar to other learning platforms in many ways, but the main difference is that the courses you complete here will earn you an approved degree and certificate (not applicable free version). So, a course library of 4K + is a huge size when you realize that it leads to official certification. People are seeing the benefits of this, which is why there are now over 82 million users of the course.
Famous universities like Stanford, Yale, University of Pennsylvania, Imperial College London, and companies like IBM and Google have approved courses on this platform. This makes the course perfect for both students and professionals, including the company as a whole. You can work here for more than 13 professional certifications as well as 20 Degree and Master Track certifications.
Famous universities like Stanford, Yale, University of Pennsylvania, Imperial College London, and companies like IBM and Google have approved courses on this platform. This makes the course ideal for both students and professionals, including the company as a whole. You can work here for more than 13 professional certifications as well as 20 Degree and MasterTrack certifications.
Coursera allows five different learning options: individual courses, specialization, MasterTrack certificate, professional certificate, and degree. Each option is different and varies in difficulty, length, and cost. In general, Coursera is free, as many registered members can use the course, but the better the options, the higher the cost.
7. Skillshare
Skillshare is a huge online learning community with 27K + classes on a variety of subjects.
It’s perfect for artists and creative genres, but with such a huge database of classes, most people and businesses can find Skillshare incredibly useful. The great thing about Skillshare is that it has a huge community and always adds new classes. You will need to take a monthly subscription to access everything the site has to offer.
All Skillshare classes are divided into four broad categories: business, technology, creative, and lifestyle. None of the classes are recognized, so there is no certificate of earnings. However, Skillshare is not about being certified, it is about gaining practical knowledge that you can use professionally later.
Skillshare is a community, so classes are primarily created by its members, which can be both good and bad. I believe it is mostly good, because I have used it for a long time, and to choose from such a large pool of classes, it is difficult to find a class that is incredibly useful for you.
Despite having a large number of classes, all are designed in the same format. Each class lasts about 30 minutes to an hour and is divided into logical sections for easy observation and use. You can start and stop a class and continue it whenever it suits you. Also, you can try the things you learned after attending a certain part of the class.
What is an online course platform?
An online course platform is a type of learning management system (LMS) that provides students with access to a digital classroom. These virtual courses are much like the offline classes: an instructor provides an exciting learning experience through video, image, text, audio, and PDF files.
Students follow the LMS software to test their knowledge, take notes and assignments, exercise, and complete the test or quiz.
Tools like Teachable, Thinkific, and Podia set a powerful feature for course makers.
Course software includes features such as a fully responsive website experience, easy content uploads, the ability to edit class looks and feel, marketing features, course completion certificates, a sales funnel, and much more.
They give you everything you need to sell an online course. Some allow you to create your course for free.
Now for the student’s perspective.
With social distance becoming the norm and many colleges moving to online classes, there are plenty of ways to educate yourself from home.
Usually called massive open online courses (MOOCs), they are a bit different than paid programs. Instead of hosting the files yourself, the courses are offered on a platform where students pay for them directly or through a subscription.
The advantage for course developers is that you can use these websites to reach new visitors and the disadvantage is that you can’t make as much money per sale and there is hard competition in the market.
Summary of Top Online course Platforms
While there is a wide range of e-learning platforms available, it is good to find an online course platform everywhere such as Teachable, Thinkific, etc. that helps you create, market, and sell your courses from one place.
When picking between the best online teaching platforms, be sure to do your research: consider student experience, marketing features, and price list.
