The 5 Best Online Course Platforms for 2024 (+ Pricing & Tips)
The eLearning industry is estimated to be worth $325 million by 2025!
But before you can grab your slice of that pie, you'll need to find the right online course platform to use for your digital education empire.
The only problem?
With so many options to choose from, making the right choice can feel overwhelming.
That's why we've put together a list of the 26 best online course platforms the web has to offer. This detailed, in-depth guide will help you find the platform that's perfect for you.
What is an Online Course Platform?
An online course platform is a set of tools, services, and resources that help educators and entrepreneurs build, manage, and deliver online courses.
Some platforms require more tech-savvy than others. But generally, their goal is to make creating and selling your course easier and more successful.
Engaging a company specializing in educational platform development can provide tailored solutions that enhance the functionality and user experience of these platforms.
Depending on the type and specific eLearning platform you choose, they come with a wide range of features, including:
Content creation (video, audio, pdf, and text) and hosting
Editing features
Ability to create quizzes, course content, and certification
Student-teacher engagement features
Course marketing features (landing page design, email integration)
Ecommerce features (shopping cart/payment gateway)
Types of Online Course Platforms
The first step to selecting the ideal online learning platform is choosing the type of platform that best suits your needs.
There are five different types of platforms you can choose from:
1) Standalone Platforms
A standalone platform is a piece of course creation software you can use to build, host, and sell online courses and course websites. While they offer some features to help you market your courses, you'll have to integrate other tools to execute more advanced marketing tactics.
Standalone platforms are ideal for course creators with an established audience who can generate traffic for their courses.
2) All-in-One Platforms
All-in-one platforms aim to provide course creators with everything they need to run their digital schools.
With these platforms, you can build courses and course websites, run marketing campaigns (email sequences, behavior triggers, webinars), and collect payments all from one platform.
They're ideal for those who have an established audience but are less experienced with course creation and digital marketing.
3) Online Course Marketplaces
Online course marketplaces are platforms that cater both to course creators and students. You can build and host courses on these platforms for free and your courses will be listed among millions of others. Some marketplaces even help you promote your course. In exchange, the platform takes a share of the revenue generated from course sales.
Marketplaces are perfect for new course creators who lack the money, audience, and/or marketing infrastructure to promote their courses.
4) WordPress LMS Plugins
WordPress LMS (Learning Management System) plugins are online course platforms that are hosted on WordPress. They provide the same course creation and promotion features as most other platforms.
They're ideal for people who have an established website they want to host their course on.
5) Academic & Enterprise Learning Management Systems
Academic and Enterprise LMSs are platforms designed for large-scale course creation and management.
This is also eLearning software that is most often custom-made because every organization has unique requirements for their LMS that off-the-shelf software cannot meet in full. Fortunately, custom LMS development is a flourishing market.
They're ideal for schools that need to create and host online courses for their student body. They're also designed for businesses and institutions that need to create and manage courses for upskilling and certifying employees.
So now that we know the different types, let's look at the 24 best online course platform options (in no particular order):
Best Standalone Platforms
1. Thinkific
Thinkific is a popular platform that boasts over 50,000+ course creators and $650 million+ earned on their platform.
They provide course creators with tools to build, market, and sell your course and membership site. They also offer robust support features for course creators and students.
While Thinkific courses and websites are fully mobile-responsive, they, unfortunately, don't offer a mobile app.
Still, all of their plans come with a free 30-day trial. And unlike many other platforms, they never charge a transaction fee on your course sales.
(For more info about Thinkific, check out our list of Thinkific alternatives and real-world Thinkific examples.)
Standout Features
Advanced Customization: Thinkific enables you to completely customize how your course runs using private and hidden courses, drip course content, evergreen and expiring content, and more.
Zapier Integration: Integrate your Thinkific school with over 1,500 apps using Zapier, including your preferred email service provider.
Marketing Tools: Thinkific provides comprehensive support for analytics and ad tracking, including Adwords, Facebook Ads, and retargeting campaigns. They also support affiliate marketing programs and enable you to set custom commissions and track affiliate sales.
Excellent eCommerce Features: With Thinkific, you can get paid immediately, charge in 100+ currencies, offer payment plans and coupons to students, and more.
Pricing
Free Trial: 30 days
Basic: $49/mo.
Pro: $99/mo.
Premier: $499/mo.
(For a comprehensive overview of Thinkific pricing, check it out here.)
Who Should Use Thinkific?
Entrepreneurs, edupreneurs, podcasters, small-medium businesses, and anyone who wants to create a full-featured course/membership site without technical hassle.
2. Teachable
Teachable is an online course creation platform that caters to creative entrepreneurs and coaches.
With over 100,000 creators using their platform to make over $1 billion with individual courses and coaching programs, they're the largest online learning platform on the market. They also boast notable customers like The NY Times, Shopify, and Pat Flynn.
Teachable enables you to create and manage your courses, payment processing, and affiliate programs all through their easy-to-use dashboard.
(Editor's Note: Don't miss our list of Teachable alternatives.)
Standout Features
Unlimited Everything: Teachable offers unlimited bandwidth, courses, coaching services, and students on all paid plans.
Excellent eCommerce Features: Teachable offers excellent payment options (coupons, payment plans, subscriptions, and more), affiliate marketing tools, and accepts payment in 130+ currencies as well as Paypal and mobile pay.
Tax Filing: Teachable enables you to collect and file tax forms on your earned income through their platform, including filing and remitting EU VAT.
"Discover" Database: Teachable's course database allows users to discover courses built on their platform, which can help new creators build an audience.
Pricing
Basic: $29/mo.
Pro: $99/mo.
Business: $249/mo.
(For a more deep-dive into Teachable's pricing plans, check it out here.)
Who Should Use Teachable?
Creative entrepreneurs and coaches looking for an easy-to-use platform with comprehensive features.
3. LearnWorlds
LearnWorlds is an online course platform that enables you to create, promote, and sell your courses.
Their user-friendly dashboard enables you to create top-quality courses, marketing materials, and optimized sales pages and payment processing.
One of the best things about LearnWorlds is how their platform helps you engage users. They offer interactive ebooks, an integrated social network, and video tools that automatically generate and synchronize video transcripts.
Standout Features
Engaging Learning Features: Engage students with note-taking features, interactive ebooks, video conferencing, certificates, SCORM, and more.
Automatic, Synchronized Transcripts: LearnWorlds can automatically extract transcripts from videos and sync them with video play to create more accessible video learning.
Zapier Integrations: Integrate your courses and website with thousands of marketing and affiliate tools through Zapier.
Integrated Social Network: LearnWorlds offers an integrated social network you can use to help students connect, discuss course material, learn, and network.
Pricing
Starter: $29/mo.
Pro Trainer: $99/mo.
Learning Center: $299/mo.
Who Should Use LearnWorlds?
Entrepreneurs and small-medium businesses. Their customers have created courses in the categories of fitness, beauty, music, sports, and lifestyle.
4. Xperiencify
Xperiencify is an online course platform that excels in gamification. It competes with the best in the industry with its website/course creation features, third-party integration, marketing, and selling features.
But where they really stand out is their unique value proposition.
Xperiencify is a platform created by course creators for course creators. They understand that students who complete a course are much more likely to become devoted fans and repeat buyers.
And since they know a huge issue with most online learning platforms is keeping students locked in and motivated, Xperiencify has incorporated psychological tools into their platform that are proven to increase user engagement and course completion by up to 3,000%.
Standout Features
"Experiencification Features": Xperiencify's platform incorporates 7 psychological triggers that are proven to increase student engagement and retention by 10-30x. Triggers include variable rewards, constant wins, goals, urgency, social proof, curiosity, and recognition.
Superior Content Control: Xperiencify gives course creators the greatest level of control over their content, student pacing, and how students engage with and experience their content.
Zapier Integrations: Connect your preferred CMS, email provider, payment processor, and more through Zapier.
Customizable Membership Pages: Fully customize membership site pages and translate site content to other supported languages with the click of a button.
Pricing
All plans have unlimited unpublished courses. Different plans have a different number of courses you can publish.
Starter Plan: $49/month. Features: Membership site, 3 published courses.
Growth Plan: $99/month. Features: Cart abandonment, custom domain, 10 published courses.
Pro Plan: $149/month. Features: Live group coaching, affiliate management, 20 published courses.
Platinum Plan: $499/month. Features: Unlimited custom fields, dedicated customer success manager, 50 published courses.
Who Should Use Xperiencify?
Any course creator who wants to increase course completion and customer LTV. If you want to incorporate gamification into learning, look no further.
5. Ruzuku
Ruzuku is an online course platform that caters to brands with unique or niche courses. Their customers, for example, include teachers like Amy Medling (whose course is designed for women living with PCOS), Fabiana Pestorini (a dance instructor), and Jeffrey Davis (who teaches artists how to flourish in challenging times).
They're more affordable than other options, easy to use, and offer excellent design features that enable you to create beautiful, engaging courses and host on a custom domain.
They also offer great features for engaging and connecting students so you can build and empower a strong digital tribe.
Standout Features
Excellent eCommerce Features: Accept payments through Stripe, Paypal, or your own payment system and provide flexible payment options to students.
Great Student Engagement Features: Create discussion questions/prompts for specific activities or content, include a course-wide Q&A forum, and host interactive video broadcasts with slides, group chat, and automatic recording.
Document Hosting and Sharing: Host just about any file for digital downloads, including PDFs, Word, PPT, video, and more. Students can also post files in the same formats.
Pricing
Bootstrapper: $99/mo.
Up-and-Comer: $149/mo.
University: $199/mo.
Who Should Use Ruzuku?
Entrepreneurs who want simple, easy-to-navigate courses for themselves and their students.