7+ Best Online Course Platforms (2021)

The online course and e-learning industry is ascending into popularity every passing year.

Experts believe that by 2026, the e-learning industry will be worth over $375 billion with an annual growth rate of at least 8%.

The indispensability of social distancing in the wake of the pandemic has made online learning a necessity and the “new” normal. There is no better time than right now to take advantage of this amazing opportunity and build your online course.

Luckily, there are many amazing online course platform solutions to help you build the perfect online course and showcase your value to the world.

Online course platforms or course builder services are a type of learning management system (LMS) to create virtual courses. Students can easily follow the LMS software, make notes, perform exercises, and complete tests/exams.

The benefits of online course building platforms cannot be overlooked. Instructors can create and integrate courses within their website, upload videos, assignments, or quizzes, and collect payments.

Additionally, creating an online course is an amazing source of passive income. Take the time to create valuable content and once it is published, your earning potential is limitless.

There are a lot of LMS solutions on the market, but this list features the best online learning platforms in the world.

Let’s dive in!

1. Thinkific

Thinkific lets instructors create an education empire.

Using a plethora of course builder services and email marketing tools, instructors can create a brand of their own. With footprints across 70 different countries, Thinkific is an ideal online course platform for businesses and individuals to build, market, and sell courses.

To put it simply, Thinkific has everything you would ever need to create the perfect online course.

Features:

Quick Launch – With Thinkific instructors can launch courses within a few minutes. It’s an easy-to-use course builder platform with robust elements that makes creating even complex courses extremely convenient.

Supports Multimedia Courses – On Thinkific instructors can create courses using various multimedia content types, including text, video, audio, PGF, or HTML formats.

Drag and Drop Feature – Thinkific’s fantastic drag and drop feature makes it extremely easy to import courses.

Record Voice Over – To maximize the course’s impact, Thinkific offers a voice-over slide feature. An instructor can record audio narration or create presentations using PowerPoint or Keynote.

Interactive Dashboard – Thinkific has an incredibly interactive dashboard. Even someone with no technical expertise can create courses.

Retain Rights of Content – By letting people retain content rights, Thinkific allows people to grow their brand value.

Build Courses Conveniently – Thinkific offers in-depth guidance on finding the best course topic, creating engaging course content, and marketing the courses effectively.

Benefits:

• People can create professional online courses easily and launch them quickly using its advanced features.
• Thinkific dashboard offers easy access to student data like name, email ID, and contact number easily.

• Anyone can create any type of online course as no design experience is required to use this platform.
• The website offers 24/7 available, responsive technical support staff.
• Instructors can host videos on the platform.

Thinkific is most suitable for educators looking to build courses in all categories.

Pricing:

As one of the cheapest options on the market, Thinkific is the best solution.

You can test Thinkific by signing up for their FREE package but if you are looking to utilize all of their features you can sign up for their “Basic” package which starts at $ 39 per month or the “Pro” plan at $79 per month.

2. Kajabi

Kajabi is an all-in-one online course platform that lets people create, market, sell, and host online courses. Using its well-designed templates, pipelines, and automation, educators can start teaching quickly with full functionality.

Features:

Powerful Website Builder Tool – Kajabi’s intuitive web building tool lets users customize their websites’ themes. Its innovative click-and-edit layout makes web designing an easy process. Just drag and drop elements, and the site is ready.

Robust Email Marketing Automation – Kajabi outshines all others with its remarkable marketing automation tools. Instructors can list and send branded emails/messages, and utilize advanced triggers, timers. Email sequences and email broadcasts can help tutors expand their customer base.

Upsells & Digital Products – Kajabi’s course builder program offers all the necessary tools and services to content creators for developing their brand. They can create, market, and sell digital courses quickly on Kajabi.

Blogging Functionality–  Blogs are a must-have feature of online courses. Using Kajabi, people can create, edit blog posts, add tags, schedule their publishing, and organize posts easily.

Video Hosting – Kajabi offers a video hosting tool in collaboration with Wistia. It lets instructors provide information about the courses or business, and feature encrypted videos on their websites and membership sites.

One-stop Platform – Kajabi allows all business aspects from website building to courses hosting and automated emailing to run simultaneously.

Course Hosting – Kajabi is ideal for creating/hosting online courses. Its intuitive interface allows course building from scratch.

E-Commerce – It is fully integrated with Stripe and PayPal, so tutors don’t need to redirect students/customers to a third-party website to checkout.

Benefits:

• Kajabi features a straightforward design to build courses even without any web-design experience.
• The inclusion of Kajabi Assistant is a masterstroke as it answers all the queries.
• An extensive range of tools is available to perform email marketing automation, build courses, design websites, etc.
• Its amazing membership system lets tutors offer students numerous membership levels, including Bronze, Silver, and Gold.
• It is integrated with PayPal and Stripe, so customers don’t have to be redirected.
• Kajabi has collaborated with Cloudflare to ensure maximum security of data and websites.
• Its one-click publishing feature lets instructors publish content quickly.

Pricing:

Kajabi is one of the more expensive platforms on this list with a starting price of $119 per month but all the features included certainly make up for the price.

In addition, you will get a 14-day free trial to experience first-hand all the features and determine if it is the right fit for you.

3. LearnDash

LearnDash is the ideal online course platform for WordPress users offering an impressive line-up of course builder tools.

Features:

Focus Mode – Focus Mode blocks out all distracting elements, while students are taking online classes.

Full-Feature Course Builder – LearnDash features an all-in-one course builder that meshes smoothly with email drip campaigns. Course creators can match their content with an email drip schedule for sharing lessons as per the program.

Innovative GradeBook Feature – LearnDash has taken LMS to the next level with an exemplary grading system. GradeBook tool syncs the assignment and quiz data and assigns grades based on students’ performance.

Certificates & Badges – Educators can award students with official certificates after course completion, which may feature the student’s name, course or quiz name, and overall score. Membership Management- It prevents users from viewing content other than what they have enrolled for. After taking up membership, a user is registered in the course automatically, according to the appropriate access level.

Dynamic Courses – LearnDash offers the most advanced e-learning techniques and innovative course builder tools. Using the drag-and-drop option, creators can build multi-faceted course elements. They can rename and break courses into categories, lessons, topics, advanced or straightforward quizzes.

Benefits:

• LearnDash has an easy monetization system. Tutors can set a price for their course and select a payment schedule, including a one-time payment option.
• Integration with the most reliable service providers like Stripe and PayPal makes it a secure platform for collecting payments.
• Course developers have more control over the content and learners. They can group users, edit data, and revoke users’ access to content.
• The advanced Activate button lets tutors integrate LearnDash across all their networks.
• Tutors can use images, audio/video files, and HTML to create courses.
• Mobile compatibility allows learners to access courses on multiple devices, including desktops, smartphones, and tablets.
• LearnDash has a template override structure that makes it compatible with 99% of WordPress themes/plugins. Its templates work within a theme without disturbing other design elements.

Pricing:

LearnDash is a very affordable solution for anybody looking to create a great online course with WordPress. At an annual rate of just $159 for their basic package, you can get started creating content.

Give LearnDash a try by integrating it with your WordPress site today!

4. Teachable

Teachable is a thriving online course platform with over 3 million learners and 100,000+ instructors. It is a popular course builder tool to deliver amazing courses to anybody around the world. It is ideal for beginner bloggers and entrepreneurs.

Features:

Blogging Feature – Teachable allows people to set up a blog within the website, making it easy to build or grow a brand.

Multimedia Content – Creators can upload videos, images, or HTML and PDF files using the handy drag-and-drop tool. They can import materials from One Drive, Dropbox, or Google Drive too.

Robust Course Builder – Instructors can create checklists, quizzes, and even award certificates to learners. They may also drip feed course content to students.

User-friendly Interface – Using Site area on Administrative panel, creators can quickly adjust key elements of site branding. Adding a logo, upload a background image, and modifying fonts or colors is easier on Teachable.

Customizable Thank You Pages – Teachable by-default incorporates thank-you pages in its websites with a link for accessing the course. Tutors can customize the thank-you page using the Teachable admin area and incorporate useful upsells. They can embed a video to thank their students or add a navigation bar, etc.

In-platform Payments – Teachable offers a built-in payment alternative to members, eliminating the need to pay affiliates or payment processors.

Exclusive Tax Settings – This is another interesting feature of Teachable that lets people select Tax compliance.

Benefits:

• This is an affordable online course platform offering a feature-rich course builder for free (with service charges ranging between $1- $0.10/transaction). Content creators can evade transaction fees by selecting a subscription plan, which ranges between $29/month and $399/month.
• Content uploading and editing are extremely easy on Teachable. Tutors can edit the look of their online school and engage with students conveniently.
• Educators can integrate with third-party software, so there’s no need to start from scratch. Furthermore, its clean interface makes it easy for learners to navigate and access courses.

• Adding new courses, including media and curriculum, recording lessons, and launching courses, take a few minutes on Teachable.
• Teachable supports a range of pricing options, including one-time fees. It accepts Stripe, PayPal, and almost all mainstream credit cards.
• Tutors can customize sales, thank-you, and checkout pages.
• It hosts and stores backups of materials uploaded on the platform, so there’s no risk of losing the data. Additionally, it allows course builders to export student data.

Pricing:

The basic plan of Teachable starts at $29 per month and includes all the features you need to get started. Host unlimited students and offer drip content with the basic plan.

The “Pro” plan is the recommended package to go with because there are no transaction fees and you can offer graded quizzes to boost interaction level with your students.

5. Podia

The name Podia is derived from Podium. With over 11,000 members, it’s an ideal platform for hosting webinars and offering digital downloads. It’s an easy three-step course builder tool, and an amazing no-transaction-fee offer makes it an attractive online course platform for content creators.

Features:

Full-feature Digital Platform – Podia is a feature-rich digital storefront where members can create and sell online courses, memberships, and downloads.

Extensive Membership Options – Podia offers a wide range of membership options. Users can grow their own online community by bundling products for certain groups, enabling extended member interaction, and devising tiered plans. Reaching out to members via Slack and Facebook Groups is also possible.

User-friendly Interface – Creating or selling digital products via Podia is extremely easy, especially for people with no technical background. Creators can have maximum control over their storefront’s layout and look. Podia helps tutors organize content; add new sections, text, links, files, and quizzes within minutes.

Webinar Hosting – Podia allows members to host both on-demand and live webinars. They can sell webinars or offer them for free for building customer email lists.

Leveraging Drip Courses – Creators can help their students access specific sections of a course to understand its correct structure. They can drip course content gradually to prevent students from getting confused.

Easy Uploads – Educators can add memberships, coupons, sales pages, and prelaunch courses using Podia’s one-click uploads feature.

Affiliate Programs – Podia members can run their own affiliate programs from within the platform. They can view all their affiliates on a single page, access useful reporting data, and make customized payouts structure.

Flawless Email Marketing – All members can benefit from Podia’s advanced email marketing tool. They can collect current and prospective customers’ email addresses through a storefront or prelaunch pages for email marketing.

Benefits:

• At Podia, everything is unlimited. It doesn’t put caps on the number of courses, bandwidth, digital downloads, number of students, sales, hosted clients, or memberships.
• It is an easy-to-navigate online course platform, where creators can perform almost every task from the dashboard. They can add new products like digital downloads or courses in the same environment.
• Podia make content creation, marketing, and selling an effortless process even for beginners with no prior experience.
• It is one of the best course builder platforms for affiliate and email marketing. Podia distribute special links on the members’ behalf so that their affiliate customers link back to their products. It also helps in keeping track of affiliate sales.
• There aren’t any excess fees or hidden costs for using Podia. Unlike other course building services, Podia don’t charge an additional 5% transaction fee as well.

Pricing:

There are two pricing packages with Podia with the “Mover” package starting at $39 per month and the more advanced “Shaker” package starting at $70 per month.

Much like Kajabi, Podia’s premium package offers a multitude of features that acts as an all-in-one product. Overall, Podia is a cheap option that is certainly worth trying out.

Podia offers a 14-day free trial for you to try all of their features.

6. Learnworlds

LearnWorlds offers interactive learning experience at just $24/month. With its advanced features, tutors can add versatile teaching elements, quizzes, and questionnaires to offer a superior learning experience.

Features:

Unlimited courses – LearnWorlds is one of the few platforms where creators can enjoy the freedom to create as many courses or sell as many digital products as they want to.

Landing and sales pages – Members can quickly and conveniently customize sales and landing pages to maximize their offerings.

Course builder – LearnWorlds easy-to-use course building tool takes the load off the developer’s mind. Educators can easily create, edit, or modify courses without needing any technical expertise.

Digital downloads – Members can access an extensive library of the latest plugins, tools, and add-ons to extend their functionality further. LearnWorlds’ plugins ecosystem is incredibly vast to help creators make their WordPress website more interactive.

Extended Compatibility – Exclusively designed add-ons allow integration with trusted applications like Slack, MailChimp, and Zapier.

Interactive Video Player – Using LearnWorld, tutors can easily add versatile visual, verbal, kinetic, and auditory elements in the course. They can pause videos automatically and incorporate pop-up text, questionnaires, navigation buttons, external links, etc.

Interactive E-books – Educators can add interactive verbal or kinetic e-books. Learners can make annotations and highlight critical areas of interest directly while reading.

Built-in Social Networking Tool – LearnWorlds offers superior functionality by eliminating the need to add third-party plugins or applications. Students can engage in meaningful discussions using the platforms built-in social networking features.

WordPress Compatibility – WordPress is undoubtedly the most user-friendly CMS is running 30% of all websites on the internet. Hence, compatibility with WordPress is among the key features of LearnWorlds. Beginner developers can use its powerful toolkit for publishing their content with unlimited control over design and functionality.

Self-hosted LMS – LearnWorlds is a self-hosted LMS giving educators complete control over website architecture and content.

Benefits:

• It is SCORM compliant platform, which means creators can offer content according to the industry’s most reliable e-learning standard.
• LearnWorlds allows effective SEO (search engine optimization) with clean codes, easy-to-manage metatags, and keywords.
• Instructors can create a dedicated mobile application for their online school to reach out to millions of potential customers on Apple App Store or Google Play.
• LearnWorlds is a mobile responsive online course platform so that students can access the course via smartphones, tablets, or iPads.
• For someone not familiar with CSS and HTML, LearnWorlds offers tablet and mobile-ready design templates.
• Tutors can create their school in a simple 2-step process. They only have to provide time zone, name, language, and currency to create a school. Creating online courses is even more comfortable.
• LearnWorlds offers a world-class, 24/7 customer support service.
• Its User Activity feature offers unprecedented control over student activities, all integrated on a single page for easy viewing.

Pricing:

There are three pricing packages from Learnworlds beginning with the “Starter” package at just $24 per month. Although there is no free option, the starter package will get any beginning course creator off to a great start.

If you plan on scaling up and selling many courses in the future, I highly recommend the “Pro Trainer” plan because there is no transaction fee. With the starter package, Learnworlds will take $5 per course.

Learnworlds offers a 30-day free trial.

7. Udemy

Udemy offers a democratized educational environment. It is an impressive online course platform offering a pool of over 20000 subject matter experts and 12 million students. Instructors can use Udemy for free, but it takes 50% of the course’s revenues per sale.

Features:

Extensive Course Offerings – Udemy’s ecosystem is different from others. It offers 15 categories of courses, from music to software development, with over 15 subcategories. For instance, in the Music category, the Instruments subcategory has around 30 different courses only for Piano learners and guitar players.

Lifetime Access to Courses – It is possible to access full or portions of a course; retake or review them unlimited times without any extra charges. Hence, students can access content as per their desired pace and schedule.

Wider Compatibility – Students can view courses on portable PCs, desktops, smartphones, and tablets.

Money-Back Guarantee – Udemy offers an exclusive 30-day money-back guarantee to students who don’t want to pursue a course. This offer, however, is applicable within the first thirty days after enrollment.

Proprietary Technology – Educators can use its exclusive proprietary technology to create, organize, promote, and publish courses. With its advanced course builder software, tutors can produce a series of videos offering step-by-step guidelines for learners. They can create guides for any subject and utilize Udemy’s 24/7 available library of helpful resources.

Marketing Promotions – Udemy regularly runs promotional campaigns to attract new customers, and instructors can participate in them.

Powerful Instructor Revenue Sharing – Educators can receive revenues from different sources. They can sell courses to Udemy affiliates, earn revenues via its deal programs, promotional schemes, or rely on organic traffic.

Benefits:

• Students can enroll in any course as there’s no prequalification required at Udemy. Hence, instructors enjoy greater exposure.
• Versatile content types can be collated together and published.
• It is the perfect platform for producing educational how-to videos. Its course builder offers 20,000 free-access video instruction courses in various categories.
• It is available in over ten different languages and 190 countries. With around 1,000 courses, new courses, and 10,000 instructors globally, Udemy is an ideal platform for instructors.

• Udemy is famous for its affordable tuition costs. Around 10% of the courses are free, and the remaining cost under $200. Therefore, creating a new course is relatively inexpensive.
• It is possible to provide prerecorded or digitally available PDFs, guidelines, financial templates, and checklists to students soon after enrollment.
• Instructors can offer video lectures up to 15 minutes long and pause or replay videos during lectures.
• Creators can enjoy maximum pricing control for their courses. Udemy suggests up to $30/hour of content so that a four-hour course may sell between $40 and $120.
• Courses can be used for promoting/selling other products or services to maximize brand value.
• Udemy has over four million users, so selling courses is far higher than any other online course platform.

Pricing:

Udemy is completely free to get started and upload courses. The only caveat is that they take about 50% of revenue from course creators. Additionally, when uploading on Udemy you are giving up ownership of your content.

At the end of the day, Udemy is a great solution if you want to upload your content for free but the long-term payoff may not be as desirable as the other options on this list.

Conclusion:

Creating courses using online course building platforms is an amazing way to showcase the value you can bring while being a great source of income.

Setting up courses undoubtedly takes a lot of effort but once you officially get launched, the earning potential is limitless.

Any of the solutions listed will help with the creation process. All you have to do is plan out your course content and get started.