The global e-learning market crossed the $315 billion mark in 2021 and kept growing. Online courses help people get skills for a new job, go through corporate onboarding, or just get into a new hobby.
This segment can be profitable for experts with the knowledge to share. The difficulties often appear when it comes to the technical part. If this is your only concern, here is some good news: building a course has never been easier! There are a lot of simple, sophisticated, affordable, and pricey platforms for this purpose. Here are the seven most popular.
Thinkific
One of the most popular platforms for edupreneurs is Thinkific. This service gives a creator every opportunity to make a quality product without coding and other technical skills.
Main features:
- Live, on-demand, and blended classes. You can deliver your course in any way you want and find effective.
- Easy drag and drop course constructor. You can build your product using premade templates and upload videos, presentations with voiceover, and PDF files.
- Handy payment system. You can accept payments per course, by subscription or membership; payments are available in 100+ countries. The platform takes 0% transaction fees. You can offer coupons and discounts to potential clients.
- Interactive tools. You can create a quiz for knowledge checkups and feedback surveys.
- Branding. Use your logo and brand colors in product design. Create a website with an original domain name. Nobody will notice that you made it via constructor!
- Free test drive trial. Before you go all in, you can try all core features for free.
A wide range of features, affordable basic plan, and free trial make Thinkific an equally convenient tool for individual creators, small businesses, and big companies.
Pricing: Basic Plan — $49 ($39 if paid yearly), Pro Plan — $99 ($79), and a Premier Plan $499($399) per month.
Airschool
Beginners will love Airschool. It’s straightforward but has all the functionality to create the first product. Design tools are minimalistic, but enough for starters.
Main features:
- Pay when you sell courses. Airschool doesn’t take any charges upfront. Once a user makes a sale, the platform keeps a commission.
- Choose live or recorded courses, and create webinars to sell your extensive products.
- Live courses are integrated with zoom and have attendance trackers. Use simple, well-known, reliable service and keep an eye on your students’ involvement.
- Multiple payment options. Clients can pay via bank transfer or PayPal. GooglePay or Stripe.
- Built-in email automation.
Airschool, with its flexible commission system, is best for experts at the start of their careers. You can launch your course without significant financial investment and test your product potential with attendance and involvement trackers. The platform exists on the web only. So if you want to go bigger and create desktop and mobile apps for your courses, you might choose another platform.
Pricing: There are two commission models. Micropayments (up to $30) consist of 20% of the product’s price. Standard Payments (>$30) is 9.90% of the cost of the product. All models include 3.4% transaction fees.
Teachable
Teachable is for determined creators ready to invest in their product’s quality. It’s not cheap, but its toolkit is absolutely worth it.
Main features:
- Built-in video editor. You don’t need extra software for editing, just upload video in Teachable and use built-in tools to perfect your product.
- Impressive website constructor. Teachable allows building landing pages for every course and collecting them on an expert’s website for easy access and sale. Aesthetics fans will appreciate templates, customization range, and an intuitive drag and drop constructor.
- One-on-one coach sessions. A good option for experts who sell individual classes and consultations.
- Integrations with MailChimp, Zapier, ConvertKit, Google Analytics, Segment. You can use the tools you are used to and improve your product.
- Tax management automation. You don’t need to count your taxes manually; Teachable offers to take care of all forms and calculations.
Teachable charges an extra fee for integrating payment methods other than PayPal. Also, a free trial is not exactly free; you will be charged $1 + 10% commission for every sale. So you better be ready for it.
Pricing: Basic Plan — $39 ($29 if paid yearly) + 5% transaction fee, Pro Plan — $119 ($99), and a Business Plan $299($249) per month.
Kajabi
Kajabi is a multifunctional platform that helps to create not only online courses but also podcasts, communities, mobile apps, and many more. This abundance of options is what makes the platform special.
Main Features:
- Complex service. You can create several products using one platform. For example, create a course and a podcast.
- Built-in CRM. Track your sales, customer journey, and more statistics without extra software.
- Multiplatform constructor. You can quickly build web, desktop, and mobile products.
- Templates and full customization. Use premade templates or create something unique from scratch. There are many options for landing pages, emails, and websites.
- Automated marketing tools. The platform will help you create advertising for your products and launch it.
Kajabi is a platform for confident expert creators. It offers many tools to create and promote several products. Here you can experiment and find a toolkit that is best for your business. All you need is enough expertise to launch a course, podcast, and community all at once. And, of course, financial abilities for all these pricey features.
Pricing: Basic plan is $129 ($119 if paid annually) per month, Growth — is $199($159), Pro plan — is $399 ($319).
Simplero
One feature that makes Simplero unique is the way they organize communities. This platform is the best for creators whose vital spot is communication with the audience. It’s suitable for influencers, bloggers, and experts.
Main features:
- Multiple options for community management. Connect with your audience via blog, comments, forum section, groups, or worksheets.
- Interactive tools for students. Quizzes and progress bars help to engage students in learning.
- Affiliate program. Track your student’s payment, analyze sales, and make individual payment conditions for every customer and group.
- Built-in email automation. Send your advertising emails, track their effectiveness, and resend letters to those who didn’t open the first one. You can make the best of your email marketing with this toolkit.
- Websites and landing pages drag and drop constructor.
- Multiple payment options for your customers. You can offer to pay for purchase, subscription, or give a free trial.
Pricing: Starter plan is $70 ($59 if paid annually) per month, Scale — $178($149), Skyrocket plan — $298 ($249).
Podia
Podia combines good marketing and design tools with an impressive range of payment options. And it’s also affordable. Whether you are a beginner or a mature expert, you will find all the right tools here.
Main Features:
- Pre-selling courses. This tool works as crowdfunding for your product. Collect all the pre-sell payments and reinvest them in your next big thing—no need to wait till the end of the ongoing course.
- Pre-launch courses. You can show your raw material to a limited audience, collect the feedback, check the engagement, and make your product perfect before launch.
- Payment plans. Allow your clients to separate the payment instead of paying all at once. This option will raise your product’s conversion for sure.
- Various content options. Add to your course any content you like: text, images, videos, audio files, MP3, links, PDF, PSD, quizzes, and more.
- Flexible layout and live previews. You can control all the elements of your future website and see how it looks before publishing.
- Lead magnets. Collect your customers’ emails in exchange for free content. Then set up an email funnel to nurture new leads and sell your course.
Podia is suitable for experts who need to experiment and test ideas.
Pricing: Free plan (8 % transaction fee), Mover for $39 ($33 if paid annually), Shaker for $89 (;75), and Earthquaker for $199 ($166) per month.
Teachery
Teachery is all about simplicity and minimalism. There are no pricing variations, only two course templates, and no content hosting. But also no limits for creators, no extra fees for every feature. You pay a fixed price, get only necessities, and do whatever you want.
- Unlimited courses, lessons, and students for a fixed price. You can launch 1000 courses and engage over 10 000 students with no extra payment.
- Two customizable course templates. Too many options can be exhausting. Teachery offers an easy solution–minimal and sidebar templates are enough to make a good course website. You can use your brand logo and colors.
- Embedded content. Teachery is not hosting your video, but you can embed it from other sources such as YouTube, Vimeo, Soundcloud, Canva, and Google Slides. This way, your course will be lightweight and will download faster.
- Marketing tools: sales pages, landing pages, email capture pages, integration with MailChimp and ConvertKit. All you need to promote your product is here.
Pricing: $49 monthly or $470 annually, no extra fees, 14-day free trial.
WordPress plugins
When it comes to building a website, WordPress is a top-of-mind brand. It offers the opportunity to create any site for your purposes, implementing your brand design elements. Basically, it’s a clean canvas for you to paint on. But with its many possibilities, WordPress can be complicated to work with. To make it easy for you, use these plugins, built specially to work with educational content.
You can add the free native WordPress plugin Learn Press to your toolkit, get extra interactive and community tools with LifterLMS ($120-1200 per year), or focus on good service integration and marketing features with LearnDash ($159-329).
The review of the LifterLMS plugin is here.
Final thoughts
It’s your expertise that makes your product unique. Remember that when you are going to choose the right platform to launch an online course. What is your budget now? Is your content ready and polished? Or, maybe, you need to test it and get feedback? How will you promote your course, and what tools do you need? Ask yourself these questions to make the best choice feature–and moneywise.
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