The online course industry is soaring rapidly.
With coronavirus hindering people’s activities, more and more are turning to online learning to gain new knowledge and skills. If you want to sell online courses, now is the perfect time to do it. Start looking for the best online course platforms to create and publish your online courses.
You can make money online fast when you create online courses that are valuable to your customers. With e-learning projected to climb to $325 billion by 2025, there’s a huge opportunity to earn six figures from selling courses alone.
But to make it possible, you have to put in lots of work and pick the best online course software.
What are online course platforms?
Online course platforms are designed specifically for teaching and learning courses via the Internet. They are types of learning management systems (LMS) that users access to learn virtually.
The instructors provide educational content like PDF, text, audio, image, and video files through LMS. And the students take notes and complete exercises and exams within the platform.
The right online course platform can automate your sales processes to give you more time to focus on teaching your students. It enables you to generate, organize, and distribute your course content efficiently.
Dozens of online learning platforms exist – and they offer something different. Figuring out the best online course platform for your needs would not be easy.
To help you save time and pick the most suitable tool for your needs, we prepared this guide for you. Keep reading to know the best online course platforms in the market based on pricing and suitability.
Best online course platforms
1. Thinkific – Best online course platform overall
Thinkific is the only platform you need to create and sell online courses. It has robust features that are easy to use. With the help of its drag and drop editor, you can build your course site using their high-quality templates.
Not only that, their advanced business tools let you market and sell your courses with coupons and promotional offers. Thinkific features include:
- Supports various multimedia course content
- Specially-designed themes for selling education
- Options to create a Thinkific course site or link to your existing website
- Ability to package courses for flexible pricing options
- Integrates with over 1000 business tools
- Secure cloud hosting & daily backups
- Instant access to updates
- 99.9% uptime & 24/7 monitoring
- Built-in security and SSL
- 24/7 customer support
- Free web hosting
Thinkific offers a 30-day free trial for the Pro plan ($79/month). But if you only want the basic features and tools to launch your first course, the Basic Plan is only $39/month.
This online course tool is best for anyone who wants to make a course site with free web hosting and excellent round-the-clock customer support.
2. Teachable – Best online course software for beginners
One of the best online course tools today, Teachable has over 100,000 users already. It is a course builder that focused on uniqueness and branding. If you already have a website, you can easily link it to the platform under a custom domain.
Teachable allows you to use other tools that you like from their long list of partners. Through the Zapier app, you can integrate marketing apps like Infusionsoft, MailChimp, and Ontraport to increase your traffic and sales. It supports affiliate programs and international payments.
Just like Thinkific, Teachable allows you to create coupons and flexible pricing options for memberships, subscriptions, one-time payments, and more. Here are other key features you can get:
- Seamless hosting
- A secure 2048-bit SSL certificate
- 24/7 monitoring
- Instant upgrades
- Payment providers that are PCI level-1 compliant
- Multi-language support 24/7
You can test-drive Teachable for 14 days. Just enroll by clicking the “Get started” button to access the Pro plan free trial. It’s their most popular plan that costs $99/month.
If you’re looking for the best online course software with a low price and powerful features, Teachable is a solid choice.
3. Learnworlds – Best online course tool for teaching professionals
When it comes to large-scale selling of courses, Learnworlds offer everything to enable smooth connections between teachers and students. With this platform, you can add multiple teachers to teach your course. You can even choose what modules or topics you want them to teach within the tool.
With Teachable, you can offer all the online courses that you want using different earning opportunities. It provides the best interactive course experience to keep the students engaged. You can easily convert your videos into extraordinary experiences with automatically extracted transcripts, table of contents, and quizzes.
Learnworlds let you create a beautiful school using the intuitive drag and drop block-based builder. With hundreds of templates to choose from, building an SEO-optimized, branded school is super easy.
To increase your ROI, upsell, and cross-sell with promotions, coupons, and payment plans. You can also seamlessly connect top marketing tools that course sellers use.
Learnworlds is an ideal option for course creators who like a sophisticated online learning platform that boosts student engagement.
Take Learnworlds for a spin by signing up for the 30-day free trial. Their paid plans start at $24/month.
4. Kajabi – Best all-in-one platform for course creators
One of the high-end online course platforms out there, Kajabi is a powerful course builder for in-depth courses. It excels in marketing automation tools and creating sales funnels and landing pages. It provides everything you need to convert your traffic into customers.
You don’t need to sign-up with third-party tools to manage your email marketing campaigns. If you already have an email list built with MailChimp, Aweber, or ActiveCampaign, you can integrate them seamlessly with Kajabi.
This all-in-one solution allows you to build, market, and sell your online courses, membership sites, and coaching programs at the lowest plan of $119/month. Kajabi lets you earn money by teaching people in your niche, be it blogging, freelancing, affiliate marketing, consulting services, digital marketing agency, or eCommerce.
Kajabi is a top pick when you want a sophisticated online course platform to create and sell your online course.
5. LearnDash – best online learning platform for WordPress users
LearnDash is an impressive online course platform because of its speed, stunning online course materials, and features. It’s a WordPress plugin that allows you to sell courses in your terms, drip information, and track your students’ progress. You only add it straight to your WordPress site to start creating courses.
One of the best online course platforms today, LearnDash has a set of tools to let you drip-feed your course content to your students based on a schedule. The Focus Mode feature blocks out all distractions allowing students to focus on their lessons. If you like grading systems similar to traditional college curriculums, LearnDash is the best online course software for you.
LearnDash integrates with many business tools, from payment processors to marketing tools. However, to get access to its amazing features, an annual payment of at least $159 is required. They don’t offer a free trial. But if you’re not satisfied with the tool within 30 days of your initial purchase, you can get a refund.
Final thoughts
The online courses and e-learning market continue to rise. If you are looking for a side hustle that brings in lots of money, start selling courses. The amount of topics is limitless. And a huge audience is out there waiting to learn from you.
When choosing between the best platforms to sell your online courses, you must decide on the features that are best for your business. Of course, the success of your online course depends on the quality of your content and how you market yourself. But the right online course software could give you everything you need to acquire students and deliver your course content.
If you’re ready to sell online courses, I recommend you try any of the five best online course platforms on this guide. But if you’re still researching for the best online business to make money fast, check out our 4 Hour Agency course. We also have other money-making ideas on our blog to help you pick the perfect online business for 2021.