Best Platforms to Sell Online Courses
Looking to sell your online courses? Discover the best platforms to sell online courses and reach a wider audience. Compare features, pricing, and customization options to find the perfect platform for your e-learning business.
The digitalization of the educational and skill industry has made the online course business a booming one. The online course business is expected to reach $1 trillion by 2030, making it a lucrative field.
The competitions are more intense than ever, with many course creators taking advantage of the online space to sell their courses. To many, this has become a full-time business, while to others a passion or extra source of income.
There are a lot of online course platforms which you can utilize. Not many of them are reliable and effective. To ease the stress, I’ve compiled the 9 best platforms to sell online courses.
Below are the 9 best platforms to sell online courses around the globe.
1. Skillshare
If you are creative and need exposure, Skillshare is the best platform to sell online courses and build your brand.
Skillshare is one of the world’s renowned course marketplaces where you can put your courses, and millions of Skillshare members can access them. Here you don’t need to struggle to sell your courses directly. Despite the fact that is great for exposure, you may not make much on the platform.
However, the competition is intense, and the compensation is low.
Key Features
- Provides engagement tools that include project-based courses and a community of experts
- Has a mobile app that offers offline and casting capabilities
- Offers personalized algorithm for each profile to find relevant courses
- It is a great course marketplace that is best for creative seeking exposure
- Allows you to host courses that teach practical skills
2. Udemy
Udemy is the world’s best marketplace for courses. In terms of compensation, Udemy is better than Skillshare, but it lacks some flair that is helpful for users. It has thousands of users that visit the site daily and allows for different fields of educational content. You can create content across various filed and market them on the platform.
No community-building features. Also, it lacks customization – you are limited in terms of the styles and templates you want to use for your course.
Key Features
- Offer a wide marketplace that allows you to build your brand
- It offers better revenue compensation than Skillshare. Udemy allows creators to keep 97% of the revenue. Also, if a student gets a course through Udemy, you get 37% revenue.
- Udemy has an app that can be accessed on all platforms
- Offers access to downloadable resources
3. Teachable
Teachable is a popular platform to sell online courses. It comes with fantastic features that simplify the process of making and selling courses.
Teachable is a great platform with an amazing course-building engine that makes the platform easy to use. In terms of community-centered features, it is lacking.
Key Features
- Offers robust features for course creation and monetization
- Offers activity dashboard and built-in course authoring
- Offers analytics that helps you in marketing your course
- t is only accessible for IOS platforms. It is not compatible with Android.
4. Mighty Networks
Mighty Networks is one of the best platforms to sell online courses. It is a community platform that offers you an all-in-one course that connects community, courses, content, and commerce together. You can add some events and social content to spice up the virtual community.
With Mighty Networks, you can customize a course-building engine for cohort courses or pre-recorded courses. You can simply mix and match the courses.
Key Features
- Offers lots of community-building features such as polls, live event integrations, discussion boards, and more.
- Offers a variety of tools to enable you to run courses in different ways. You can run a course live or in a community.
- This platform is accessible via IOS, web, and Android.
- Offers features to help you combine course and community most suitably.
5. Thinkific
Thinkific is the best course-only platform for selling your online courses. It comes with many design options that allow you to create customized landing pages and content templates.
Thinkific does not offer a mobile app or community features. This means you can access it on your mobile devices.
Key Features
- It offers a good monetization model that allows for creating flexible subscription fees, coupons, discounts, and paid membership
- Offer lots of customization options, including landing pages
6. Kajabi
If you are looking for comprehensive marketing online course platforms, then
Kajabi is a good pick.
Kajabi is one of the best platforms to sell online courses. It allows you to seamlessly market your online courses and earn from them.
This platform is known for its strong marketing tools where you can integrate courses with subscriptions and other digital products from one platform,= without the assistance of external apps.
However, it lacks community-building features.
Key Features
- Offers robust customization that includes a powerful website builder that allows you to create product pages and landing pages with coding knowledge
- Offers complex marketing features
- It is compatible with mobile platforms
- It is an expensive platform to go for
7. Podia
Podia is one of the best platforms to sell online courses. It is super affordable, but it is a limited version of Kajabi. It is super easy to use and a clean platform.
Podia comes with course features that allow you to easily create digital products, such as webinars, integrate downloadables, such as PDFs and audiobooks, and sell memberships.
However, Podia is extremely basic and not suitable for complex courses and functionality. Also, it is not compatible with mobile platforms.
Key Features
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- Built-in marketing options and email
- Allows coaches to seamlessly integrate calendars to book sessions.
- Offers custom landing pages
- Offers affiliate program features
8. LearnDash
This is one of the best WordPress LMS that is best used if you have a WordPress built-in website.
It is simply an all-in-one platform that can seamlessly integrate WordPress as a subdomain. Additionally, LearnDash is an affordable LMS for WordPress that allows you to create an online course the same way you create a blog post. Also, it has features that allow you to drip content and add tests and examinations.
A major disadvantage of this platform is not it is not easy to use. More course creators have to hire developers to set it up. Also, you will need to add a WordPress plugin to add the course checkout. These WordPress plugins require regular updates and are prone to glitches, which increases the complexity and cost of maintaining this platform.
Additionally, customization requires some knowledge of custom coding, for which you need to hire a developer. It has no mobile app currently.
Key Features
- Accepts payments for courses via external payment gates, such as PayPal, Strip, WooCommerce, and others
- Drip and Drop course builder to create beautiful courses without the knowledge of coding
- Offers drip-feed content
- Easy to create and sell courses
9. Memberful
Memberful is the integration of WordPress and LearnDash. Memberful is a plugin that you integrate with LearnDash to have access to additional features for your online courses, such as gating content, selling, and building a community.
Memberful aids LearnDash to become a functional business offering a complete course program with an effective payment process.
A major setback to this platform is that it is complicated to use. You must have some knowledge of coding to navigate through the platform.
Key Features
- Offers optimized checkouts
- Ability to create varied subscription plans for your online courses
- Offers advanced dashboard analytics
- Offers optimum member management feature
Frequently Asked Questions
What Are The Courses That Sell The Most?
The courses that sell the most on online platforms have to do with artificial intelligence, leadership, entrepreneurship computer science, data science, cyber science, and security and communication.
How Can I Sell My Online Courses Fast?
Choosing a suitable online course platform isn’t enough. You must learn the technique to sell your course fast. Below are some of the formulas you can implement to sell your course faster.
- Create helpful marketing content
- Maintain an active social media presence
- Build an email list
- Collaborate with other entrepreneurs.
What To Look For In An Online Course-Selling Platform?
Below are the features you should look out for when choosing an online course-selling platform:
- The easiness to use: Go for platforms that match your capacity. If you don’t have coding knowledge and don’t have money to hire a developer, you can avoid platforms like LearnDash.
- Community: Establishing a community with your courses is highly beneficial to you and your students. Community helps your students to directly connect and learn from each other. You can also integrate a premium membership plan to allow subscribers to get access to additional features in the community, such as direct access to industry experts.
- Flexible monetization features: A good online selling platform isn’t the one that only allows you to educate your students but one that creates a viable business environment. The platform should provide features that allow you to create subscription plans and optimize payment gateways, discounts, and coupons.
- The expansion prospect: A good online course-selling platform should not be limited only to creating and selling courses. It should have features that help you carry out others tasks to maintain a viable business environment. If you are going into this business for a long time, go for more advanced built platforms, and avoid basic platforms because they are limited in features. Also, some platforms allow you to build your brand, while others don’t.