Top 10 Online Course Platform: Customised Guide For You

Online Course

E-learning is without a doubt the fastest growing online money-maker in 2020 and beyond.  

Here are some stats. It was projected to reach $325 billion by 2025 in 2019. However, the COVID-19 outbreak has catapulted this growth further, thanks to the lock-downs and learn from home initiatives. It would not be surprising to reach the $325 billion mark before 2023.

I know what you might be thinking; the growth trend will probably slow down after a COVID vaccine is discovered. Well, you might be slightly right. But, don’t forget that e-learning did not start after the COVID-19 outbreak. It had already picked momentum before then with 77% of U.S corporations adopting it as early as 2017.

This is proof enough that with COVID or not, people have already accepted e-learning and are more than willing to pay for online courses. It’s a golden opportunity for everyone who has a passion for teaching.

Enough with the why, let’s delve into the how. How do you develop your online course, and what platforms do you use?

Designing and selling your course online is not as hard as it may sound. There are several established online platforms with millions of subscribers where you can launch your courses in your area of expertise and earn up to 6 figures really fast.

Why Should You Use An Online Course Platform?

There are two options that you can use to design and sell your online course; personal website, or third-party online course platforms.

While designing and marketing your personal website might sound more lucrative in terms of brand recognition and overall control, it requires a lot of hard work since you are developing everything from scratch.

On the other hand, you can opt for third-party platforms that allow you to host your course on their servers, give you a dedicated, tested platform for organizing your course structure, and give you access to an available market. They do all the heavy lifting for you so you can focus more on getting your course right.

Online course platforms are types of learning management software (LMS) that give users access to digital courses. They attempt to capture almost all the features of one-on-one teaching strategy through either recorded or live video sessions, offer tests at the end of every course, track students’ learning progress, and offer certificates upon successful completion of the courses.

However, unlike one-on-one courses, e-learning offers you greater flexibility in terms of the courses you offer. You can start with just a simple one-video course and then scale to multiple courses without having to spend so much money or effort when starting. They give you a chance to make mistakes at almost zero cost.

Online course software provides a dedicated, completely responsive website experience, quick uploads of content, the ability to edit the class’s look and feel, marketing features, certificates of course completion, a sales funnel, and more.

They help you to:

  • Build a website for online courses (or integrate your course within your existing website).
  • Pricing your class and receiving fees (either one-time or in instalments).
  • Build forums and webinars for membership.
  • Upload your videos, add tasks and quizzes, create engaging material, and get engaged with your students.
  • To develop your online presence with your target audience and market your course.

Wondering which online platform is best for you to sell your course online?

Don’t worry! We have done an extensive analysis of the popular online platforms to sort out the best ones for you.

Best 10 Online Course Platforms

These online platforms are ranked according to their features, subscription fee, audience base, popularity, success rate, flexibility, and user-friendly tools.

1.Thinkific

Price – free to $49/month

Thinkific

 It is no doubt that Thinkific is the #1 platform when it comes to online course platforms. You won’t get anything better than the features and tools it offers to its course creators at such a price.

They offer a comprehensive collection of user-friendly features, tools for email marketing, integration of your lessons, membership site, and excellent 24/7 customer service.

For course creators who want to start without investing much, Thinkific’s free version is excellent as you get access to features such as unlimited student support, course upselling opportunities, and you can build three courses for free. There is also a built-in payment gateway.

If you want to switch to the basic plan which offers advanced features such as accessing sales pages with discounts and deals, email integration and marketing, as well as drip content, it will cost you $49 a month.

2.Learnworlds

Price – $24/month

Learnworlds

Learnworlds is the next popular choice among the course creators because of its amazing page builder and marketing tool. Best of all, it costs only a mere $24/month.

Learnworlds is making it cheap for course creators to launch their courses and at the same time delivering efficient quality services to creators.

If you want to offer your students interactive lessons then Learnworlds is the best for you. It encompasses features that allow conducting tests, questionnaires, and other engaging elements within the lessons, among other incredible features.

You get the freedom to choose from a collection of customized templates to build your course page along with about us, pricing, contact pages.

Another amazing benefit of using Learnworlds is that while building your courses you can use catalogues with advanced features. These advanced features include online tests, video players, interactive e-books, downloadable study materials format, etc.

Don’t worry if you get stuck anytime during building your courses as they have 24/7 awesome customer support.

3. Kajabi

Price: $119/month to $319/month

Kajabi

For a single website and unrestricted access to e-mail marketing, Kajabi starts at $119 per month for the basic package. This is the top online course platform for you if you are looking to offer an outstanding learning experience with a great checkout and access to digital products. Though, we find Kajabi a little expensive compared to other platforms.

We also love that inside Kajabi itself, you can handle all of your e-mail marketing campaigns, meaning you don’t have to subscribe to another email marketing platform. It kind of gives you everything you need in a single package, which partly explains the high subscription cost.

It is best suited for speakers, solopreneurs, coaches, writers, and almost everyone who wants to create a sleek looking website to advertise and sell their online course.

4. Teachable

Price- $29 -$299/month

Teachable

My choice for an e-learning platform is Teachable. You join along with 22,000 other teachers by creating an account to provide excellent teaching opportunities for your students.

With the premium course design package at $119/month, I recommend their most famous Pro Plan as it is the first plan with zero transaction fees. It also offers its creators a chance to include in their lessons graded quizzes, personalized certificates of completion, advanced customizations of the website theme, and support for up to 5 admin users.

Teachable is primarily for those who, for a low price, want to get solid features. The monthly rates are the fairest on this list, and it’s quite impressive.

It offers third-party app integrations such as Zapier to align all your programs as well as MailChimp, Ontraport, Infusionsoft, Mixpanel, and other marketing tools.

5. Udemy

Udemy

With over 24 million students, 35,000 teachers, and incredible 80,000+ courses, Udemy is one of the largest internet course network markets. Signing up to be a premium teacher is the first step to designing a course on Udemy.

The first benefit of using Udemy is that you get access to a wide base of users. Udemy’s 24,000 customers are potential free students that you get access to without spending a dime on marketing. However, you need to do some work getting your course ranking high to reap from the free traffic.

Udemy instructors set their course rates and earn income for new users at 100% of the tuition fee and 50 per cent for current users. That is a substantial sales commission and a big profit from using their site.

Udemy additionally provides its members 24/7 customer care service, and they have a large archive of useful posts as well.

6. Podia

Price – $39/month

Podia

Podia allows over 11,000 users to create, host and sell their classes through an easy-to-use platform. There are no transaction charges, and in a quick three-step process, your course website is up in no time.

Where they shine is with membership opportunities. By engaging with members, bundling goods for particular groups, providing tiered plans, and communicating with Facebook Groups and Slack, you can easily grow your online community without having to part with a large marketing budget.

Podia also lets you host live or on-demand webinars as well as sell these webinars or supply them freely to build your customer e-mail list.

Podia’s affiliate program is another cool way to expand the e-learning platform. Based on your personalized commission structure, you can view all your affiliates in one location, view helpful reporting, and make payouts.

Overall, Podia is a special and worthwhile course builder to see if you are looking for strong membership capabilities and the chance to boost sales with the help of affiliates.

7.LearnDash

Price- $13.25/month

Learndash

LearnDash is a leading full-suite tool, complete with access to features that allow you to sell courses as you want, drip out data, and even reward your students as well. Pricing is available on an annual basis, so it might sound expensive when making your first payment.

One of LearnDash’s most exciting feature is that it’s a plugin for WordPress. That means without having to think about creating your course from scratch, you can connect it directly to your existing WordPress account.

This user-friendly solution has access to tools that allow you to create multi-tier courses where, according to the expertise of an individual, you can deliver content.

There are also a host of resources for your content complete with lesson timers to your audience based on a schedule. You can display your student grade books, market courses with shopping carts and memberships, and so much more as well.

8. Ruzuku

Price – $74.75/month

Ruzuku

With their learning platform, PDFs, and a ton of other incredible features, Ruzuku lets you create a step-by-step online course. You can easily create course descriptions, edit and reorganise your steps quickly, launch your course, and quickly generate sales.

Ruzuku combines payment acceptance with tools such as MailChimp, Infusionsoft, and payment gateways such as Stripe and PayPal, and they do not charge transaction fees.

Ruzuku is a nice platform for both streaming and uploading content and depending on course timing, you can build memberships or send out drip content.

Overall, I would suggest that Ruzuku is best for individuals with minimal technical experience. Most of the platform looks identical to the backend of WordPress, so it’s pretty quick to use.

9.Academy of Mine

Price – $9,997/year

Academy Of Mine

Academy of Mine is a high-end platform for eLearning focused on personalized customer success and customization philosophy. It is the most advanced platform in this list, which is why it’s so expensive.

It offers only a single option costing $9,997 per year with unlimited features for successfully running your unlimited courses.

Some of its features include unlimited users and course, quizzes and assignments, integrated eCommerce, SCORM and xAPI compliant, webpage builder, live webinars, integration with marketing site, 24-7 customer support, secure dedicated servers and hosting, free 15 hours of on-boarding help that included training, walkthroughs, data migration help, marketing page creation, among others.

 With such a high subscription cost, this option is best suited for full-scale institutions that want to expand to the e-learning space. However, if you can afford it and want these features all bundled together in a single platform, this is the best choice for you.

10. WizIQ

Price – $27/month

Wiziq

Last but not lease, WizIQ is also a good choice for online course platforms.

WizIQ enables creators to set up virtual classrooms for live and immersive online classes for teachers and educators. It has a community of over 400,000 teachers to teach interactive courses to over 4 million students across 200 countries.

They have amazing features such as the latest live training resources, including message forums, video streaming, mobile options, tests, and analytics.

Get started with a 14-day free trial to connect with your audience all over the world.

Final Thoughts

Online course platforms will help you launch a side hustle, expand your audience, teach the subjects you care about to students, and make money faster online.

When deciding the best platform to go with, remember to consider factors such as time constraints, monthly costs, and marketing features available. Remember that each platform is unique in its own right, which is why they qualified to get into this list. What matters most is your budget and personal preferences such as ease of use, among others.

With that said, I would recommend going with Thinkific. I have personally used it and I can promise you it is the best. It has all the features you need, pocket friendly, and is very easy to get started. Here is complete Thinkific review.

Get started today!