Sharing your knowledge to global boundaries is so easy with just a video upload on YouTube. But to showcase your expertise in a particular sector and earning from those teachings is possible through online course platforms. When we talk about platforms, there is the brimming number of platforms available on the internet.
Who will decide which are the best and suited for you?
Well, the solution is right here. We have written this thoughtful content piece just to make our audience aware of the best online course platforms available on the internet and how to evaluate the perfect ones for them for creating and sell an online courses.
These best online course platforms streamline the whole process of course pages designing, course promotion, marketing, course creating, and selling to the target audience.
Wait! Then what the creator has to focus upon?
The answer is Just CONTENT!
So many questions start running in your head when it comes to publishing your first online course. How to begin with the first lessons, what equipments are required to publish the course, how and where can I add assignments and quizzes, and more.
For assistance on how to start creating an online course, we have written a well explanatory guide.
Here’s the link to it-How to create and sell an online course?
Best Online Education Platforms to Create and Sell Online Course
1. Udemy
Earlier the learning was made accessible with MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) but Udemy took it one step further which not just made learning through online courses accessible but also made online teaching possible globally. This automatically means you have a massive student base who is willing you gain knowledge from your expertise.
If you are unsure about the quality of the content then Udemy has a feature to send a sample video to their teach hub and get feedback on it along with equipment suggestions. Also get access to tutorials on planning a course, how to start filming your first video, and tips and tricks related to course creation.
Let’s talk about numbers now!
Today, Udemy claims to have over
- 40 million of active students
- 480 million Enrolments
- Available in 180+ Countries
- Courses available in 65+ languages
- 7000+ Enterprise Customers
Moreover, these are not fixed values. The numbers are rapidly increasing day by day as the demand for online course platforms is at boom worldwide.
How to get started with Udemy?
Firstly, users need to direct on its official website via https://www.udemy.com/ . Then click on Teach on Udemy Option located at the top of the screen. After getting your account approved, the creator needs to follow a series of steps given on screen for their first course creation.
Content Creation Guidelines
- Each course video needs to be of at least 30 minutes.
- Minimum 5 videos should be there in course.
- Course Creators can also add quizzes, assignments, coding exercises, and discussion prompts.
2. upGrad Xpert
Ensure your career growth with world-leading e-learning platform upGrad. With a huge professional base, a upGrad Xpert can share their industry-relevant online course and earn passive income from it. Some renowned institutions of the world such as IIT-Bangalore, BITS-Pilani, ISB, and Cambridge Judge business school and many more have collaborated in upGrad campaign of accelerating career growth with online education.
Why to choose upGrad Xpert Community?
- Recognition in expert industry
- Share your knowledge with similar professionals
- Enhance your knowledge and expertise
- Flexible Working Schedule which means no time commitment
- Earn Passive Income for your work
What are possible ways to work with upGrad?
| How can you work? | Average Monthly Earnings |
| Create Content for Online Program | Rs.60,000 |
| Conduct Online Learning Sessions | Rs.25,000 |
| Mentor Students in their Professional Goals | Rs.20,000 |
| Grade Assignments solve learner Queries | Rs.15,000 |
How to apply?
- Go to upGrad xpert community from the given URL https://community.upgrad.com/
- Click on the Apply Now button.
- A form will be displayed in front of you.
- Now, the creator just needs to fill up the form asking for general information such as your name, contact, email, area of expertise, professional profile of yours and so on with accurate information.
- Once the account gets approved you are all set to share your knowledge to professionals via upGrad platform.
How does the upGrad payment process works?
Course creators will be paid for every engagement that will be chosen by them such as developing content, student mentorship, online learning sessions, and more. A contract will be signed between you and upGrad for each engagement. As an upGrad xpert, you will receive frequent updates on every new requirement in upGrad xpert community.
3. Skillshare
Just like its name implies, whatever skill you have be it photography, painting, cooking, music, doodling, and more, you can share it over the platform having a relevant customer base for each skill. It is a great platform for teaching creative skills specifically.
Earning Opportunities for Creators
- As a creator, it is free to sign up for a new account and share your first course with Skillshare but if you want to get paid for the course then you need to register for Skillshare’s Premium catalog.
- Your course become the part of the Skillshare catalogue and you earn a revenue share of student membership fees as they watch your course.
- $10 per membership referral plan is also active at Skillshare.
How you can contribute at Skillshare?
Skillshare has three major moving parts-
- Video Lessons
- Project
- Community Discussion
Each creative class includes 20-60 minutes of video which is further broken down into 2-5-minute lessons. Skillshare allows students to share their progress, collect feedback and tweak work accordingly.
4. Thinkific
Thinkific is one of the leading online course platforms. It offers ready-to-use templates for making the course creation process extremely easy. The pre-build not just includes video course templates but also gives ready to use set of quizzes, surveys, instructor messages, and more. Below mentioned is the process to create your first online course with Thinkific online courses platform-
- Creator just need to pick one of prebuild templates as per the purpose of the course pre-sell, mini course, membership resource library and more.
- Now with easy to use drag and drop editing features one can structure their course just like as they want.
- Now it’s time to hit PUBLISH.
Thinkific Features
- Live Lessons & Cohorts
- Assessments & Certificates
- In-depth Student Progress Tracking
- Engage your students with Communities
- Website building without using any kind of coding
- 0% Transaction Fees
- Set pricing your way with coupons, monthly payments, or subscriptions.
- Choose your own professional Domain with Thinkific
- Integrate third party tools such as Zapier, Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign and more
- Access to Thinkific academy
- Enterprise Reliability & Security
Thinkific Customer Support
Thinkific has a clock excellent customer support team to resolve query at the earliest. You can access the expert assistance via phone or get in-depth knowledge through their well-explained tutorials.
Thinkific has also catered first-time course creators with the advantage of free Thinkific academy to help them get started with perfection.
Another option is to get access of the Thinkific creator community in which you can communicate with several course creators just like you and ask your queries from them.
Apart from this Thinkific also caters to your every need related to marketing of the course, design, and development of the course, and help in course building by directly getting in touch with their expert team personnel.
Thinkific Pricing Plan
5. Teachable
Share your thriving knowledge base with an audience base who is keen to get knowledge upon. The biggest reason to go for Teachable is that you are joining the community of 100,000 creators with assured sales of over $1 billion from courses.
Now, this is something huge!
Well, this doesn’t end over here. Teachable offers several easy-to-use options for website building with minimum or no coding requirements. You can reflect your brand as you want, create sales pages, and launch your first course with ease. Also, it accepts files from Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive in different content formats.
Teachable Features
- Connect your existing domain to Teachable custom domain
- Create engaging, multimedia lectures, videos, and coaching sessions with power editing
- Third party tools integration is allowed
- Track sales and student insights
- Teachable supports team efforts & pays them
- Unlimited video bandwidth, unlimited courses and unlimited students on all paid plans
- One-on-one live sessions with students
- Issue course completion certificate to students
- Use third-party forms and surveys to easily gather student feedback
Teachable Pricing
6. Spayee
Create and sell online courses with Spayee online education website. Trusted by 2000+ creators presently, Spayee is rapidly gaining its popularity in the online course platform industry. Create audio, video, Quizzes, Pdfs, Assignments, Forums, Files, Surveys, etc.
How to get started?
Choose from the list of mentioned below-paid plans of Spayee. Sign up for a new Spayee account. Once your account gets approved get access to its core and advanced features. Listed below are its amazing features.
Multimedia Course
- Zero tech headaches & seamless learning experience
- Self-Paced or Instructor-Led Courses
- If you have an offline audience that you wish to cater to, launch an online program only for them.
- Award Certificates
- Launch web-only or app-only courses.
Branded Website & Mobile App
- Pre-Build Templates
- Drag and Drop Editing
- Coding Customizations
- Integrate your existing Domain Name
- Numerous Widgets to represent your Brand
- Tailor Made Layout
- Launch native Android & iOS apps
- Highly secured & convenient
Marketing & Growth
- Allows you to SEO Optimise every page
- Discover your traffic source
- Separate Landing Page for Each Course
- Customization in course success page
- Capture More Leads
- Referral marketing
Payment Gateways
- Collect payments directly to your accounts using Stripe & Paypal
- Integrate your local payment gateway
- Fully Customisable Checkout Page
- Multiple Currency Support
- Country-Specific Pricing
- Get them in with a trial offer
- Track Sales, Refunds & Cancellation
Spayee Pricing
7. Edmingle
A one-stop solution for all edupreneurs to create and sell online courses in the simplest way. It is also one of the best online learning platforms in India. With Edmingle, you will come to know that your knowledge can actually gain you a good business.
All kind of media content is accepted by Edmingle be it videos, online coding exams, assignments, online quizzes, animated PowerPoint presentations, discussions, HTML content, and more.
Take your course marketing to next level with in-built marketing tools available at this one of the best online course platform Edmingle.
Create Online Course Website & App with Edmingle
Powerful website building options that represent your brand perfectly with extraordinary color coordinations, logo, and image editing. Also, you can integrate your existing website with the Edmingle platform.
- No Coding knowledge required
- Powerful website builder with auto-generated course Landing pages
- Link your domain or subdomain
- Free SSL Certificate
- End to end integration with Payment Gateway
- Fully whitelabelled app in your developer account.
- Teach and sell courses and send unlimited in-app push notifications.
Pricing of Edmingle- Free Plan & Paid Starting from 1999 INR Monthly
List Of Core Features Included in All Plans
8. LearnWorlds
Monetize your greatest assets i.e., knowledge by spreading it to a global audience by the LearnWorlds online course platform. Craft an engaging customer experience with the advanced features of LearnWorld.
Some of them are listed below-
- Show a synchronized transcript
- Detailed insights into how users interact with your videos
- Note-taking and Highlighting options
- Design, develop, and award your own personalized Digital Certificates
- Build a learning community
This is what makes it different from others-School Website Building
Set up an online school website with LearnWorlds with advanced online site-building features. As a creator, you can add teachers to the school website along with the courses they are going to teach. Instructors can edit courses but cannot publish a new course. This tool is the must-need of modern schools these days when the education sector has shifted online due to COVID-19.
Look out for some amazing features offered by LeanWorlds for school website building-
- No coding & web designing requirements
- Fully Customizable templates with drag-and-drop editing options
- Innumerable Templates and Widgets for making an extraordinary school website
- Easy redesigning
- Backup and data organizing is extremely easy with LearnWorlds
- Build an App for the School
Some additional features for School Website with LearnWorlds-
LearnWorlds Pricing
9. Podia
Podia is one of the leading online course platforms which is extremely easy to use. The platform has the availability of the core feature just like the rest of the software have which makes this e-learning platform overwhelming.
Create a custom website with a modern, beautiful, and responsive design using powerful website editor features by Podia. No coding and design experience is required to make an extraordinary website.
With Podia, marketing has become very easy. The live chat widget feature helps in closing deals on every website visit of a person. Launch your affiliate program on your commission terms and turn your fanbase into sales.
What type of content you can sell on Podia?
| Content-Type | Various Forms of Content |
| Online Courses | Files and videos, offer payment plans, upsells, quizzes, drip content, and student comments |
| Digital Downloads | Sell one-off downloads like eBooks, audiobooks, PDFs, cheat sheets, checklists, and presets. |
| Community | One-on-one coaching sessions or one-to-many webinars with our Zoom and YouTube Live integrations. |
| Webinars | Earn recurring income by bringing your members, discussions, and products together in one place. |
Content creators online often expand their customer base by content sharing on different social platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and more. It enables you to build a community where students and teachers can connect and share their views, ideas, and course-related material, ask questions, new product launches, and showcase their achievements. Podia enables you to create your private membership site, with different membership plans, perks, and content for members.
Now sit, relax, and see your business grow with Podia!
Podia Pricing
Get 5+ tools in one with one power pack premium plan of Podia online learning platform. All plans come with a free 14-day trial; no credit card is required.
10. Kajabi
Supercharge your online course creation and selling efforts with Kajabi. Yes, it’s the BEST when it’s about marketing your course on autopilot.
Kajabi Marketing Funnel
Kajabi pipelines help you create a marketing funnel right from landing pages to course checkout page creation with ease. For example, you start catering to your visitor right from the landing page where you collect their mail in exchange for any free content such as an e-book or brochures. This email can be further used to sign up and sell your course online, introduce them with special offers, new course launch notifications, and more. Data is always valuable. If they purchased your course, then they will be taken to a thank-you page. In this way the marketing funnel is complete.
Integrations
Various third-party app integrations are allowed in Kajabi to ensure the smooth working of your marketing funnels. These integrations automatically notify you about new email purchases, new and repeated buyers, and more valuable data.
Choose any of the numerous Kajabi available templates. It has templates for all. The marketing process can easily be shifted to automation with a pipeline structure. Select a pipeline, add your content, and marketing is all set. Kajabi online course platform also offers a native tool that tracks how many persons have opened the email.
Kajabi Pricing
11. LearnDash
LearnDash is one of the leading LMS WordPress plugins. It is a preferred choice for all who want to run and operate everything from the WordPress dashboard. Users can complete control over the creation and customizations of the course with LearnDash’s easy-to-use interface. LearnDash is extremely rich in extraordinary features which one can easily get in one-time payment starting at $159 for basic and $329 for the pro version.
Once you have subscribed to its paid plan, you are all set to access LearnDash integrations and add-ons such as WooCommerce, Stripe, bbPress, Zapier and so many more – for free. Also, there is several premium add-ons such as including a connection to the GrassBlade LRS.
So if you want full control over course insights, course business, branding, and other valuable information then LearnDash is recommended and just made for you. It has introduced many add-on plugins as well such as the Instructor Role plugin in which you can add multiple instructors for your website and create online school/courses.
LearnDash Pricing
Some Alternative Suggestions for the Best Online Course Platform
| Online Course Platform | Features | Pricing |
| Ruzuku | Accept payments through Stripe, PayPal Integrate with 3rd Party Software Global Content Delivery Network (CDN) Daily Backups | Free Trial-14 Days 30 Days Money-Back Guarantee Paid Plans Starting at $74.75/month |
| Teachery | Zero additional fees Easy tech Everything unlimited Clear and simple to use | Free Trial-14 Days Paid Plans Starting at $49/month Save 20% with annual plan |
| Uscreen | Launch your own mobile & TV app No coding skills required Marketing & Analytics High level of security Seamless payments, Globally | The basic plan starts from $99 per month 20% discount on purchasing annual plans which means a $70 per month plan |
| Pathwright | Pure cloud software Affordable All-in-one software | Starter Plan-$99/month Essentials Plan-$199/month Complete Plan-$499/month |
| Kartra | $94 for 100 Learners $199 for 500 Learners $299 for 1000 Leaners $999 for 5000 Leaners | $99/month $199/month $299/month $499/month |
| Click4Course | Unlimited Course Content Excellent custom branding features Issue certificates Track your learners | $94 for 100 Learners $199 for 500 Learners $299 for 1000 Learners $999 for 5000 Learners |
| AccessAlly | Flexible WordPress LMS Recurring Payments with Stripe & PayPal Affiliate Tracking | AccessAlly Essentials- $82/month AccessAlly Pro-$108/month AccessAlly In-House Training- $208/month |
| OpenSesame | Offers team-level monitoring system Single sign-in compatibility Provide personalized course recommendation Build In LMS | PLUS 25-active courses – upto 25 PLUS 100-active courses – up to 100 PLUS COMPLETE-active courses – upto 15000+ |
| New Zenler | Live Classes, Live Interactive Webinars & Live Stream User–Friendly Interface Inbuilt funnel building tools Ability to offer live classes Flexible course builder | PRO Plan — $647/year Premium plan – $1447/year |
| Course Cats | Simple setup No technical skills required In build Ecommerce stores | $30 per month (30 Days free trial available with no strings attached) |
| Might Networks | Activity tracking Interactive Learning Engagement Tracking Customizable Branding | $23.00/month |
| Simplero | Auto-Responders Asynchronous Learning Billing Portal | Starter: Starting at $70.80 /monthly Launch: Starting at $118.80 /monthly Most Popular: Starting at $178.80 /monthly |
Summary & Top Recommendations
From this in-depth guide on the best online courses platform, you must have got a clear idea about the features and pricing of all platforms. All the above-listed platforms are best but based on the business objectives of the creator and the type of knowledge that they want to spread they can choose their very own PERFECT platform.
Narrow down your teaching needs, features of individual platforms, and the amount of passive income you want to earn through your valuable assets which are of course knowledge.
However, in my personal opinion after doing in-depth research of each platform and going through the customer review, I would recommend some platforms as per different creator needs-
| Puporse | Recommended Platform |
| When you want to build course from scratch | Thinkific |
| Power website editing features for a stunning website | LearnWorlds |
| Want to gain access over 40 million active user base. | Udemy |
| When it’s all about earning BIG. | upGrad |
| Access to Uncountable features with nominal charges | Spayee |
| Want to start from free online course platform | Teachable |
\Well, this is all about online course platforms from where you can consider choosing one. If you are still unsure about creating your own domain then you can consider referring online course marketplaces and then shift to online course platforms.
