Best Platforms for Selling Online Courses

Online learning has taken interactive turns over the years. With advanced methods, tools, and platforms e-learning as an industry is growing at an annual CAGR of 23.7%.

If you are thinking to sell courses online, this is the BEST time to start. 

But the question is, which are the best platforms to sell courses online?

There are mainly two ways to sell your courses:

• Marketplace platforms
• Course creation platforms

Both, Marketplace and creation platforms have their individual perks. 

For example Marketplaces like Udemy and Skillshare allow you to upload your course for free and take a share of the sale. It is also best for tutors who have no online presence yet.

On the other hand, course creation platforms have much more freedom when it comes to marketing, building a brand and special features one can offer to the students (and get as a tutor).

Here are a few things that you must keep in mind while choosing the platform to sell your online courses:

• How does the monetization model of the platform work?
• What kind of file format does the platform allow you to share (videos, pdfs, Sheets, images, live workshops, etc.)
• Is it easy to manage one or multiple courses on the platform?
• Is the platform secure and well-encrypted from piracy?
• Does it offer good support in case you hit a roadblock?
• Is there any marketing support for selling more courses?
• Once uploaded, can the course be updated?

As the e-learning industry continues to thrive, now is the perfect time to sell courses online. When choosing the right platform, consider the benefits of both marketplace and course creation platforms, provide certificates to the learners. With certificate templates, you can add value to your courses by offering personalized and professional certificates of completion, giving your students a tangible recognition of their achievements. Before you go ahead to make certificate make sure to take guidance from certificate size guide Choose a platform that supports secure file formats, offers good support, and allows for easy course management and updates.

This article will help you explore the 11 best platforms to sell courses online; including both ways we discussed.

Keep notes of all the perks that each platform offers as this will help you choose the best fit according to your requirements. 

Without taking any more of your time, let’s get started.

• Udemy
• FreshLearn
• SkillShare
• Teachable
• Thinkfic
• Podia
• Kajabi
• Mighty Network
• Xperiencify
• Pathwright
• LearnWorlds

11 Best Platforms For Selling Courses Online

Udemy

Udemy is probably one of the biggest online learning marketplaces. It has over 185,000+ courses on the platform and is often the go-to stop for learning any kind of skill.

For most instructors, it is regarded as the first and the best platform for selling courses online. The reason is a huge ready-to-sell market.

Because Udemy already has over 49+ million learners, finding students for your courses is relevantly easy compared to hosting your own course separately.

In addition to that, Udemy also offers paid marketing services, where you can opt to share your course in the Udemy newsletter to reach already subscribed students.

They also have affiliate programs and a dedicated SEO team that ensures their website—which includes your course—reaches customers looking for it on Google and other websites.

And just like Google Analytics, you get all the insights regarding the course, top competitors, their revenue, traffic keyword and more. Have an eye on the data and keep updating your page to drive results.

Udemy Pricing: Selling premium courses on Udemy is free. However, the instructor (who is selling the course) will receive a 97% fee if sales occur through their referral link or code. On the other hand, if sales occur organically (without a specific link or referral), the instructor receives 37%.

FreshLearn

FreshLearn is an all-in-one online course-selling platform. A platform that gives you everything that you need to create a course, market it and build your brand around it.

One of the best things about Freshlearn is the ease of setting up the business in one place. 

Let’s start by creating a course. The platform gives you the option to add any form of media; be it video, text, pdf, images, quizzes or assignments. You can embed your videos from YouTube if you have already published them.

Next comes setting up the landing page, where people will learn more about the course and then purchase it. For many platforms, you’ll need a separate tool and hosting to create a landing page—but with FreshLearn you can do it right where your course is.

And not just a landing page. You can even publish blogs, to attract organic traffic and build an authoritative site to promote your courses.

Lastly, it’s time to set up your marketing process. And being an all-in-one online course-selling platform, everything you need for marketing is again right within Freshlearn.

Now be it affiliate marketing, email marketing, coupon codes, gamification and more.

With all this, FreshLearn allows you to just focus on building your course while ensuring a smooth and engaging learning opportunity for the learners.

FreshLearn Pricing: Free plan is available for new creators. If you are looking to use advanced features, the annual base plan starts at just $25/month.

SkillShare

SkillShare is another marketplace to sell courses online. But what’s unique about this platform is the niche and the market that it is targeting.

Skillshare is an online learning platform designed for creatives. You’ll find courses related to animation, art, writing, photography etc.

To further make the learning experience more interactive and engaging for creative learners, SkillShare instructors can give projects that they need to complete.

These are projects are related to the courses and motivate learners to share their raw work and the progress that they are making along the way.

Also, you’ll find that SkillShare actually helps you in building an engaging community, where students share their work, and also look at other people’s work.

It is a very unique experience for learners as well as instructors to grow together and keep up with the new students.

If you are creating an online course specifically for creatives, SkillShare is the best online platform for selling it. It will keep the competition in check and the opportunity to find new creative audiences high.

SkillShare Pricing: Creating and selling premium courses on Skillshare is free. Instructors get paid through referral links, which is 90% of each new member they add, as well as minutes watched of their courses.

Teachable

Teachable is an online course-selling platform, designed to give you everything you might need. It is not a marketplace, but a content creation platform that allows you to host and sell your own courses, individually.

From building a website to marketing your courses, Teachable as a platform shares a plethora of tools and options that your team can use.

If you have an online presence—or if you are looking to build one with your course—Teachable gives you full control over your products.

When you wish to get started, it helps you create your own website and landing page that you can edit. Either through templates that it offers or through simple coding if you have technical skills.

Next, it’s time for marketing. You can easily, create coupon codes, start affiliate marketing programs, set up email marketing campaigns, create course bundles and a lot more. All these tactics ensure you can get maximum output by studying your customers.

And lastly, the platform provides you with all the tools and analytics to run and manage your courses. Something common among all online teaching platforms and is also good to have.

Teachable Pricing: With the free plan, you can get started with transaction fees of $1+10%/transaction. Starting paid plan starts at $29/month where you start getting all the important features.

Thinkfic

Thinfic is an online course creation and selling platform. Unlike most other tools that are meant for simply uploading content and punching them together to create a course, Thinkfic focuses on creating the course from scratch.

Understand this platform as create as you go tool. That means the platform allows you to keep uploading, updating, and removing various sections of your course as you go ahead while building your course.

Let’s understand from the start.

As soon as you enter, Thinkfic will offer you various templates to get started. These are loosely packed set of content framework that you can fill with content and edit as you will.

You can add videos, pdfs, resources, texts, etc and move them around the course as you wish.

Along with templates, you also get access to 12+ themes that you can use to present your courses in your desired manner. For developers, you can easily update the theme with HTML and CSS as well.

All the elements you need to create your course, sell it, engage students, and manage it moving ahead—are all at your disposal.

Thinkfic Pricing: For one course, the platform is free and you can get unlimited students. With a paid plan, starting at $74 per month you can create unlimited courses with access to advanced features including customer domain, assignments etc.

Podia

Podia is a simple—less complicated and straightforward tool to sell digital products. Courses, membership sites, eBooks, texts, Pdfs, etc. 

Some tutors and courses might not need a complex ecosystem to keep the course up and running. They just need a platform that they can use to sell and manage various digital resources.

If you are looking for something similar Podia would be the best platform for selling online courses. The best part about using Podia as your platform is the ability to build your very own community—different from Facebook and other social media platforms.

You can reach out to your students, share updates, notify them and keep them engaged with your post. All this without depending on the algorithm that keeps getting updated on another platform.

With Podia, you get a simple template with all the sections that you can fill in to tell the readers about the course. Similarly, all your courses and digital asset have their own landing page to share more information about each one of them.

Podia Pricing: The base plan is free with 8% transaction fees. Paid plan starts at $33/month with no transaction fees.

Kajabi

Kajabi is a platform to sell courses online. But in addition to that, it is a platform that brings true marketing automation to you. Kajabi offers functionalities to create a complete automated marketing funnel and sell courses on autopilot.

Once you set up your course to sell—which is fairly easy—you can set up various triggers and complete a marketing funnel on how will you convert visitors into your paid students.

For example, you can create a whole marketing funnel where visitors download a free pdf, in exchange for their email id. As soon as the download is complete, a mail will be sent on the email thanking them and sharing more insights that they would be interested in (maybe a blog or youtube video).

After sending a few more helpful resources (all this happening on automation), an email related to your course will be sent. If they buy your course, a thank you mail will be sent. If not, a limited-time offer coupon will be sent to entice them to make a purchase.

As you can see, something that will normally require continuous efforts, team, and monitoring to sell a course—Kajabi does all that for you. All you need to do is set up everything once and bring visitors to your site.

Kajabi Pricing: Kajabi offers a free trial, and the base pricing starts at $119/month.

Mighty Network

Mighty Network is a very unique platform for selling online courses. The main focus of Mighty Network is on building a community. Yes, you can sell courses. But what happens after that?

Might Network solves that by building a community of your students. People who share similar interests (your course) can share their learning, and updates with other people in the course.

The pricing is very flexible for students as well. You can create a one-time membership community or a subscription-based community. Similarly, courses can be priced separately or as a part of membership programs.

In the online market where engagement is key to growth, Mighty network can be a game changer if you are looking to build a sustainable community of learners in your niche.

Might Network Pricing: Might Network has a free trial and the base plan starts at $33/month.

Xperiencify

Xperinencify is an online course-selling platform that has gamified the whole learning experience.

Did you know self-paced courses have a completion rate of just about 3.13% on average? That means the majority of the students will never be able to truly grasp the value that you are sharing.

To solve this problem, Xperiencify came up with the best solution. They introduced gaming features, such as reward points on completion of a chapter, leader boards, celebrations, quizzes and various other ways to keep the student engaged.

These features keep the students in check with their progress. As a tutor, you can set rewards for each of your modules, and different elements while building your online course.

With all these stand-apart features, Xperiencify promises as high as a 30% completion rate of the course. In addition, you can set email and SMS alerts as well to remind students of their progress.

Xperiencify Pricing: The base plan starts at $42/month+4.9% transaction fees.

Pathwright

Pathwright is a course-selling platform online that is highly action-oriented. From a student’s perspective, they are meant to take various actions while going through the course, to complete it.

As a tutor, while creating your course, you set up various actions that your students must take to complete the course. What are these actions? Well, they are reading, watching, listing, taking a quiz or survey, or attending a live class.

Pathwright helps you create a step-by-step course with ease that you can manage and students can gain maximum value out of your efforts.

Through your dashboard, you can essentially manage all your course-related business to engage your students, track their progress, reply to emails and schedule live events.

Pathwright Pricing:  The starter plan starts at $89/month.

LearnWorlds

LearnWorlds takes the online course platform to a whole different level. Where other tools and platform focuses on selling courses, LearnWorld helps you in building a whole online school for your students.

As it is your online school, you can have multiple instructors come together to create a course, engage with students and be part of your community. As you are the admin of the school, you can give limited access to instructors on your platform.

For students, you can set up various action roadmaps to complete courses.

But the fun doesn’t end here. Just like in real life, LearnWorlds allows you to create a community on its platform. Students can share their thoughts and keep up and see what others are sharing.

All this engaging environment makes LearnWorlds a great platform to sell courses online, especially if you are looking to join other instructors as well.

LearnWorlds Pricing: The starter plan begins at $24/month+$5 per sale.

Getting Started

Choosing the best platform to sell courses online is just one part of the whole e-learning ecosystem. The real goal is to take advantage of both the marketplace, as well as the course creation platform.

Going ahead, try building a brand around your courses. Connect with your students and know what other areas are they struggling with. This small community of your students will help you create more online courses, specifically something your students want.

Also, building a brand would allow you to sell your courses much more easily, rather than later investing in paid ads and other marketing channels.

Author Bio:

Divya is a marketer, nature lover & startup enthusiast. She has an immaculate experience in GTM strategy & SEO. She is overly obsessed with her Ikigai. She is the founder of Unifiedist.

Acowebs are the developers of the WooCommerce Deposits– Partial Payments  plugin that helps the customers pay a fixed price, percentage, partial payment, or deposits, for the products purchased from your Woocommerce store. It also has developed various other plugins like WooCommerce Currency Switcher, the multi-currency converter plugin that shows prices in the user’s local currency and helps customers connect to desired products faster. It helps customers quickly compare products and make a judgment easily.