Are you looking for a platform to host your online courses and achieve massive Student engagement? This is important as the typical online course completion rate is 12.6%!

Look no further!

In this blog post, I’ll review and compare the best online course platforms available.

Unlike other posts, I’ll be discussing the pros and cons of each one and also giving my top recommendations so that you can make an informed decision about which platform is best for course sales, student engagement, assessments, etc.

These reviews are presented based on my 4-5 years of instructional design experience experimenting with different LMS solutions.

So, if you’re ready to take your online courses to the next level, let’s get started!

Best SaaS-based online course platforms

These are the most popular online course platforms and are typically beginner-friendly compared to WordPress-based solutions.

For course creators

Teachable – Specialist in courses

Teachable (review) is a course platform that allows you to create and sell online courses. It is popular among digital marketers and course creators for its straightforward course-creation approach.

When it comes to creating courses, you can create sections and add lectures to each section, which can be in the form of video, audio, PDF, links, or any content type.

Some unique features for student compliance are:

• Enforce video watching – You can set video compliance features so that students must watch 90% of the training course before being able to click the “mark as completed” button.
• ‎Enforce lecture order – You can set lecture order so that students must complete lectures in a specific order.
• Enforce quiz completion – You can set quizzes so that students must complete them before moving on to the next lecture.

You’ll be able to also see the per-student progress level using Teachable’s unique video analytics feature.

These features help ensure that students actually complete the course.

Next comes customization.

You also have really good customization options with the ability to change fonts, colors, button styles, and more. Plus, with the professional plan, you have access to Teachable’s power editor to play with the HTML and CSS of your website to take customization to a whole new level.

You can add testimonials, guarantee boxes, and sales bullet points on the checkout page. Finally, there’s the thank you page. After making a payment, people will be redirected to this page, where you add various blocks and upsell them to other courses.

To advertise your courses, you may use either amount-based or percentage-based coupon codes. Coupon codes may also be configured to have a specified number of coupons and an expiration date. You can consider coupling this up with the affiliate marketing feature to boost your course conversions.

Teachable comes with three premium plans.

• Basic: It comes with all the essential features. But it lacks some features like graded quizzes, advanced theme customization (power editor), advanced reports, etc. A 5% transaction fee for every sale is quite a downside.
• Professional: It comes with all the features of Teachable except for custom user roles, manual student bulk imports, and enrollments.
• Business: It comes with all the features that Teachable has ever got to offer.

Apart from these, Teachable also comes with a free plan.

With a free plan, you need to pay 10% of the transaction fee. There are plenty of limitations like not having custom domains, affiliate integration, email marketing, integrations, drip content, and much more.

In the free plan, considering the transaction fee, they charge they could have offered more features.

One more thing I didn’t like is that they also charge a 5% transaction fee for basic plan holders as well. There are some good Teachable alternatives available that don’t charge any transaction fees.

Pros:

• It supports unlimited courses even in the free plan.
• It allows you to upload multiple content formats in the same lesson thus enhancing the flexibility to add course content.
• It supports custom codes enabling you to add HTML/CSS scripts in the lectures. You can add interactive content inside the lessons.
• It comes with a built-in EU VAT tax calculation. Helpful for people in EU.

Cons:

• The free plan charges 10% transactional fees, while the basic plan charges a 5% fee.
• There are no built-in features to customize the course player. For this, you need to use its power editor (available only in a higher plan)).
• It lacks a drag and drop builder to design the pages and the site. But it has the ability to add simple modules – not like WYSIWYG.

Bottomline: Teachable is a leading course creation platform that offers powerful features to create, market, and sell your courses. It offers upsells, course bundles, coupons, etc., to increase sales. The main strength of Teachable is its course compliance and student-level engagement reports.

Kajabi

Kajabi (review) is a powerful course creation platform with excellent marketing features. It comes with digital product selling, pipelines (funnels), automations, email marketing, mobile app, events, community, memberships, etc.

Kajabi provides course templates (called blueprints) for online courses, mini-courses, drip courses, memberships, etc. You can add text, images, video, audio, assessments, and add downloads to create the course content.

When it comes to customization, you have tons of options. Kajabi provides over 14 themes to customize your course page. You can add course progress, instructor, cross-sales, and custom blocks on the course (product) pages.

Kajabi also supports memberships and communities:

• You can create various membership levels (tiers) and sell them using offers.
• When it comes to communities, it is pretty basic. You can create topics and posts, and add a sidebar message. That’s it.

For emails, it has:

• Broadcasts (send single emails for announcements, notifications, share news, etc.)
• Sequences (series of emails that can be triggered by automation).

Kajabi also has automations. You can automate the course completions, emails, offer purchases, etc. If you are on Kajabi’s higher plan, which costs $199/mo, you will get access to its advanced automations. With this, you can add conditional filters to trigger the automation.

The best thing about Kajabi is its mobile app (for both iOS & Android). Students can access their courses, access the community, and take the quizzes, all with the mobile app, at their pace. You can also send push notifications for more engagement.

When it comes to pricing, Kajabi is very expensive. The pricing starts at $149/mo. You can consider going with annual billing to get 20% OFF. If you think Kajabi is not affordable for you, consider looking at its alternatives.

Pros:

• Kajabi’s automations are very powerful. You can automate the customer’s journey by adding triggers and actions.
• Its affiliate program is feature-rich. You can offer VIP discounts and automate affiliate tasks.
• It has a good mobile app with the ability to send push notifications on-demand.
• Its pipelines (funnels) help you in increasing sales. There are some pre-made templates available to get started easily.
• It provides video stats with heatmaps to analyze the engagement on your videos easily.
• It has built-in assessments, surveys, and quizzes.

Cons:

• It has some learning curve for beginners as it comes with lots of features (especially automation).
• The pricing is very high, and not affordable.
• The community features are pretty basic. There are no groups, channels, private messages, group chats, etc.
• Lacks course compliance features, unlikeTeachable.
• Its lowest plan (even at $199/month) limits to only 3 products and 3 pipelines which is very restrictive.

Bottomline: If you need advanced marketing features with powerful automations, funnels, events, etc. Kajabi would be the best choice. It is great for industry leaders and advanced marketers if pricing is not a concern.

Podia – affordable platform with digital product selling feature

Podia (review) is an affordable and easy-to-use online platform to sell your courses, memberships, and other digital products (like webinars, digital downloads, coachings, etc).

Podia supports text, embeds, quizzes, coachings, and files to create course content. There are features like drip scheduling, course completion certificates, lesson-wide comments, pre-launch the courses (to validate your course idea), etc. Also, when it comes to course compliance features, Podia lags behind Teachable, as it lacks them.

Podia lacks a dedicated memberships feature. But you can use its community as membership and sell your content, creating different pricing tiers.

To boost sales, it has coupons, bundles, and upsells. But it lacks order bumps, cross-sells, and downsells for increasing average cart value. Using its email marketing tool, you can send broadcasts and email campaigns with entry and exit conditions.

The customization is at a bare minimum. You can customize the sales pages, the home page, storefront, and other custom pages. For page building, it just provides only 13 blocks. That’s it. There are no templates/themes available to build your site, unlike Thinkific or Kajabi.

Podia lacks a free plan, unlike tools like Thinkific or Teachable. Its lowest plan starts at $39/mo. The Shaker plan at $89/mo would be ideal for most of the users. You will get a 17% discount if you purchase annual plans.

Pros:

• Podia is very simple to use. Beginners will love using it.
• You can sell various digital products, coachings, webinars, etc., and courses. It’s best for digital product selling.
• It has a pre-launch mode to validate your course idea and collect potential leads before launching the course.

Cons:

• There is no plan available.
• It lacks advanced automations, unlike Kajabi.
• It doesn’t offer any course templates or themes.
• The customization options are very limited. It doesn’t support custom CSS/HTML.

Bottomline: If you want to sell your digital products along with courses, Podia is the best tool you can choose. Its pricing is affordable. Its upsells, bundles, unlimited bandwidth, and integration with Zoom/YouTube Live make it worth buying. If you are more concerned about customization features, you can consider some other Podia alternatives.

LearnDash – WordPress-based flexible solution

LearnDash (review) is a WordPress-based learning management system (LMS) that allows you to create and manage your courses.

However, as with any other WordPress-based solution, LearnDash requires you to have some technical knowledge and skills in order to set it up and manage it effectively.

I’m personally making use of LearnDash in combination with Elementor (review) and Advanced Custom Fields to create an engaging instructional design experience on my online course platform. With this, you can easily design highly customized learning experiences for your students using LearnDash.

As it is a self-hosted LMS plugin, it also doesn’t come with video hosting capabilities built-in, so you will need to use an external video hosting platform like Vimeo or Wistia.

The LearnDash implementation on WordPress costs about $362 each year (LearnDash Plus at $189), Elementor single site, Vimeo Plus, and a free WordPress theme), which turns out to be less than $30 per month.

Pros:

• Video progression support to hold your students accountable!
• It also comes with a membership feature (with the LearnDash group’s feature), so you don’t need to use plugins like Wishlist Member on top of it.
• As it is a WordPress plugin, it allows you to flexibly integrate other plugins like Elementor for better design.
• It allows you to localize your courses for students who do not speak English as their first language.
• It comes with inbuilt drip-feed functionality to prevent students from binge-watching courses.
• It allows you to productively reuse topics and lessons across multiple courses. The topics and lessons are not programmatically tied to specific courses.

Cons:

• It’s not an all-in-one solution, so you need to have the technical knowledge and install several third-party plugins to create a course. You’ll be nervous when you are hitting that update plugins button on WordPress because of possible plugin compatibility issues.
• It doesn’t have direct compliance with the Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) or Experience API (xAPI). However, for most people, it doesn’t matter.
• It doesn’t have a free trial, but it being a WordPress plugin,it’s illogical for you to expect a 30-days trial.

Bottomline: But are the technical hassles and additional flexibility it offers worth the cost? In my opinion, the answer is definitely yes – if you have the time and skills to manage it. So if you are looking for a powerful and flexible online course platform, then I would highly recommend using LearnDash together with Elementor.

Provided you have the technical skills to set it up; it doesn’t come in the way of implementing your creative instructional design and student experiences. Your imagination is the only limit. And the pricing is reasonable compared to other popular course platforms out there.

Thinkific – A good Teachable alternative

Thinkific (review) is a feature-rich and affordable platform for course creators. Compared to Teachable, it has some powerful features like single communities, groups, live lessons (integrates with Zoom), and advanced course building features (like randomized quiz banks, prerequisite lessons, members-only website pages, Brillium exams integration, etc.).

Thinkific supports more content types that Teachable. You can add presentations, add multimedia files, live lessons, assignments, exams, surveys, etc. It also supports Adobe Captivate & Articulate Storyline files. But it doesn’t support SCORM files, unlike LearnWorlds.

Thinkific has excellent customization options. You have full control over the course player customization. To design your site, it provides three themes (Vogue, Vision & Empire), and you can custom code it using HTML/CSS/Liquid templating.

Note that Thinkific doesn’t support digital product selling (its competitors like Podia offer this feature). If you need the ability to sell digital products along with courses, you need to consider looking at Thinkific alternatives.

Its Growth add on (costs $50/mo) provides powerful features like:

• Groups
• Remove Thinkific branding
• Advanced segmentation
• Public API
• Webhooks
• Communities
• Infusionsoft integration
• Zapier actions
• ActiveCampaign integration
• Brillium exams integration
• Import students
• Bulk enroll students
• Bulk emails

Thinkific’s free plan is very limited. You can’t create unlimited courses, unlike Teachable. Thinkific doesn’t charge any transactional fees.

Pros:

• It doesn’t charge any transaction fees, unlike Teachable. This is helpful for people who have high-volume sales.
• It provides advanced course-building features like live lessons, randomized quizzes, exams, private & hidden courses, etc.
• It is a completely white-labeled solution and is suitable for agencies providing instructional design services (on the other hand Teachable also comes with branding in the login URL even when using a custom domain)

Cons:

• It doesn’t provide any course templates, unlike Kajabi.
• The marketing features are pretty basic. There are no funnels and automation features. You may need to hook it up with Zapier.
• It doesn’t handle EU VAT.
• Its free plan limits the number of courses you create, unlike Teachable. But it doesn’t charge any transaction fee.

Bottomline: Thinkific is a highly valued freemium LMS platform. Its free plan is enough for you to get started and is a completely white-labeled solution. If you want more control over your course customization Thinkific is the way to go.

LearnWorlds – For academic courses

LearnWorlds (review) is an online course platform best suitable for academic institutions and educational organizations. It focuses on student engagement and enhances learning with interactive videos, ebooks, assessments, certificates, SCORMs, surveys, and much more.

It has an intuitive drag and drop block-based builder. It gives you enough templates and landing pages to design your school.

For marketing, it supports upsells and cross-sells with promotions, coupons, and payment plans. It also has a branded mobile app that is completely white-labeled. The app supports in-app purchases and push notifications.

LearnWorlds’ lowest pricing starts at $29/mo. If you are a professional trainer, you can go with a $99/mo plan and get more features like memberships, subscriptions, blog, and no transaction fee (for high-volume sales).

Note that, unlike Teachable or Kajabi, LearnWorlds is not oriented towards individual course creators. Its target audience is educational institutions.

Pros:

• It is a completely white-labeled solution (good if you’re serving corporate clients).
• Has iOS and Android apps with in-app purchases and push notifications.
• Supports upsells, cross-sells, course bundles, etc.
• It supports SCORM-compliance, best for universities.
• It has a popup builder for lead generation.

Cons:

• The lowest plan charges a $5 fee per course sale.
• The basic plan lacks powerful features like a customizable course player, question banks, affiliate management, custom certificates, etc.
• To get a completely white-labeled solution, you need to spend $299/mo.

Bottomline: LearnWorlds is the best solution for academic institutions and educators. It provides powerful features to track students’ progress and also to increase their engagement. It even comes with marketing features like upsells, cross-sells, and a popup builder to get leads and convert them.

Akshay recommends:

LearnWorlds vs Kajabi: Which is Best for Course Creators?
LearnWorlds vs Teachable: 13 Aspects Compared in Detail

Passion.io

Passion.io (review) is an online platform that helps people create their own custom-branded apps without having to write any code. You can use it to create apps for your customers, for business purposes, or for teaching.

The app you create with Passion.io will be accessible on many devices, including smartphones, tablets, TVs, and laptops.

You’ll be also provided the option to publish these apps on the App Store and Google Play, where they can be downloaded by anyone.

Pros:

• It is a mobile-centric platform it takes student engagement to a whole new level!
• Comes with a built-in messaging tool that allows for push notifications to be sent to target audiences based on segment groups.
• It has a unique goal tracking feature that helps users check-in and track their progress thus motivating them to achieve more.
• You have the ability to design custom welcome screens and sales pages without having to use any external tools.
• It integrates with popular third-party platforms like Calendly and Typeform for even greater functionality, making it easy to book appointments or collect students’ feedback.
• You can also integrate Passion.io with external analytics tools like Google Analytics for enhanced data analysis.
• Finally, it supports drip scheduling of content to encourage pro-active learning on the part of students.

Cons:

• The platform is limited in terms of customization options, which may make it difficult for some users to achieve the exact look and feel that they want for their apps. More app building blocks are in development though.
• The lowest plan on this platform comes with a transaction fee of 3.9% and is also limited to 100 subscribers, 100 videos, and 1,000 push notifications per month.
• Some of the more advanced features, such as custom branding, drip functionality, and community features, are only available on the most expensive plan, which costs $297/mo.
• Passion.io also lacks certain features like a certificate feature and course compliance features.

Bottomline: Overall, Passion.io is a great platform for those who want to create their own custom-branded app that’s instantly accessible on any platform without having to write any code. While it does have some limitations as of now, it also comes with a number of unique features that make it worth considering. If you’re ultra-serious about student engagement and want to go mobile, go for it.

TutorLMS

TutorLMS is one of the most popular WordPress LMS plugins. It is simple to use and provides a lot of features for creating, managing, and selling online courses.

Some of its key features are:

• Frontend course builder
• Advanced quiz builder
• Automatic emails
• Multi-instructor feature
• Multiple payment gateways
• Learning path management (helps you create a linear or non-linear learning path for the courses)
• Course prerequisite checks
• Gradebooks
• Content drips
• and more…

Although TutorLMS is cheaper than LearnDash, as it is a relatively new plugin there are fewer features, integrations, and 3rd party addons available. All the features available in TutorLMS are also available in LearnDash, plus more (mainly due to integrations being an established player).

But needless to say, TutorLMS feels fresh, and I really liked the UI/UX of the front-end drag and drop builder – it’s one of the cleanest I have seen.

Systeme – ClickFunnels alternative with an LMS

Systeme.io (review) is an all-in-one SaaS platform that comes with sales funnels, email marketing, a website builder, LMS, automation, webinars, and an affiliate program. This makes it an affordable alternative to ClickFunnels, Kartra, and Kajabi for course creators. If ClickFunnels had LMS features, it would be Systeme.

Our main interest here is LMS or course creation features.

Systeme.io has a two-level structure for designing the course curriculum; modules, and lectures inside them. It also allows you to drip schedule the lectures but not modules.

Course creators can even create course bundles to sell more.

Systeme.io, on the other hand, does not include many features such as communities, certificates, tests, and course compliance options that Teachable or Thinkific come with.

Although the LMS features are limited, when you combine it with other features like email marketing, sales funnels, webinars, ability to set up your own affiliate program, it leads to the emergence of interesting new use cases to create and sell your online courses.

Thrive Learn – Offers lifetime deal

ThriveCart (review) has recently introduced an LMS tool called, Thrive Learn to create the courses right inside the platform. There is a premium version Learn+, which costs an additional fee to unlock extra powerful features.

Both Learn and Learn+ allow everything unlimited (like unlimited courses, unlimited modules, unlimited lessons, and unlimited students).

ThriveCart has something called behavioral rules that helps automate the course tasks. (Refer to the screenshot above to know all the rules available).

The premium features you get with Learn+ include:

• Advanced sequences
• Bundles
• Team access
• Student import
• Featured content
• CName functionality

ThriveCart’s unique selling proposition is its lifetime deal costing $495. Pay once, use for a lifetime.

Akshay recommends:

ThriveCart vs SamCart: Why Is Everyone Switching Away?

Teachery

Teachery is a dedicated course platform that is popular for its simplicity. You can get started with it easily in no time.

You can add video, audio, or text as lessons or sub lessons. Like Thinkific, you can completely customize the course player to match your brand.

For marketing, it supports custom domains, affiliates, coupons, upsells, course bundles, etc.

The pricing starts at $49/mo. It doesn’t charge any transactional fees.

LifterLMS

LifterLMS is one of the feature-rich WordPress LMS plugins that offers powerful features. These include – multi instructor, course export, discussion areas, course reviews, quizzes, quiz timers, content dripping, etc.

For marketing, it supports upsells, coupons, bundles, pre-selling, affiliates, and much more.

For student engagement, it supports:

• Achievement badges
• Certificates
• Personalized email
• Social learning
• Private coaching
• Text messaging
• Etc.

It also supports memberships for you to earn recurring revenue. The membership features include –

• Sitewide memberships
• Course bundles
• Automatic enrollment
• Content restrictions
• Members-only pricing
• Private group discussion
• Members-only forums
• Bulk course enrollment

If you compare LifterLMS with LearnDash, LifterLMS is more expensive but it offers a free plugin to get started. Unlike LearnDash, it lacks focus mode, lesson reuse functionalities, and default payment gateways.

Ruzuku

Ruzuku is a decent course creation platform that comes with limited features and is not feature-rich as Teachable.

It provides course templates for you to create the courses quickly. It allows multiple instructors and managers for each course (best if you are hosting courses with partners). All its plans support unlimited courses, students, storage, and data.

If you compare Ruzuku with tools like Kajabi, Ruzuku excels for its student engagement features. I liked the features it offers for student engagement. These include –

• Live (scheduled calendar-based) courses with automatic email notifications.
• It hosts video broadcasts with slides, group chats, and automatic recording.
• It hosts teleconferences with slides, group chats, and automatic recording.
• General course-wide Q&A and forum.
• Discussion questions/prompts for specific activities/content.

Kartra

Kartra (review) is an all-in-one marketing solution best for selling your digital and physical products. It is not suitable for courses as it is not a dedicated course creation tool. But it gets the job done with its Kartra Videos tool.

With Kartra Videos, you can sell your individual videos or training (series of videos). The best thing about Kartra Videos is its video engagement features. You can add social shares, call to action, show controls, show the payback speed, tag the leads based on video watch duration (which you can automate further), and much more.

Kartra provides unlimited hosting eliminating the need for external tools like Vimeo or Wistia.