It’s no secret that online courses are more popular than ever. Data shows the eLearning market is projected to grow to $325 billion. This presents a massive opportunity to publish your own course, with so many people eager to learn new skills.
But to succeed, you’ll need the right tools to create and sell an online course. This guide explores the best platforms available, so you can make an informed decision and dive in.
Choosing the Right Online Course Platform
There’s something important to understand upfront: most traditional e-learning tools are not designed specifically for selling or marketing your online course to a broad audience.
Instead, many online course websites are built for corporate and internal training. These Learning Management Systems (LMS) can be highly customizable and often come with a hefty price tag.
However, if your goal is to sell and market your online course, the process is much simpler. There are generally only four distinct types of platforms for creating online courses.
Extensive research into every platform and its features can be overwhelming. To avoid this, focusing on the appropriate category makes finding the best online course platform straightforward. This article categorizes platforms by type:
| If you want to… | You’ll need a… |
| Create and host your online course. | Online Course Platform |
| Manage your course, website, and marketing all from one platform. | All-in-One Course Platform |
| Host your courses on your own WordPress site. (for those with technical expertise) | WordPress LMS Plugin |
| List your course on a website that helps sell it for you. (also known as online learning marketplaces) | Course Marketplace |
After many hours of research, only a few course platforms truly stand out as excellent options, provided you choose the right type first. Once you identify the type that suits your needs, you’ll often find yourself with just one or two top choices.
All online course platforms listed here are strong contenders, as echoed by reviews from both new and experienced users. When it comes to course creation, don’t get stuck in platform selection paralysis – just start. Getting started is often the hardest part.
Depending on your preferences, any of these tools could be your ideal solution.
This guide offers insights derived from thorough testing and evaluation of these platforms, even for beginners with no prior experience in online course tools. Now, let’s explore the online course platforms available!
What is an Online Course Platform, and How Can It Help You Succeed?
An online course platform is a tool that assists you in creating, hosting, and marketing your digital course to your audience.
A virtual course can mirror an offline course in many ways:
- Students get excited about a new course they’ve heard about and enroll.
- The instructor delivers an inspiring lesson using video, slides, presentations, text, and downloadable course materials.
- Students progress through the course via the Learning Management System (LMS) software. They can take notes, watch videos, complete exercises, and test their knowledge with quizzes and assessments.
An online course platform provides a streamlined tool for these steps, allowing you to focus on your course content without getting bogged down by technical details.
An online course platform grants students access to digital classes. The best platforms offer everything necessary to create, market, and successfully sell an online course.
You might be surprised by the number of features these tools include: web hosting, custom domain, landing page builder, video and content hosting, quizzes and surveys, shopping cart or payment gateway, email marketing—the list goes on.
Everyone has something to teach, but you’ll need the right tools to create and market your e-courses.
The Best Online Course Platforms
Here’s an overview of leading online course platforms, including their pros, cons, costs, and ease of use for creating and selling your course. This list is the result of extensive research, designed to help you quickly choose the perfect online course platform.
1. Thinkific Review – Online Course Platform
Thinkific is one of the most popular online course platforms. It helps you create and sell your digital courses with user-friendly features, email marketing tools, affiliate site integration, and 24/7 5-star customer support.
It’s an all-in-one online course system, but you can also integrate it with your existing website and marketing tools.
Highlight Features of Thinkific:
Thinkific is an excellent choice for a comprehensive platform to build and promote your courses.
- Supports all types of media and external resources: file types like video, PDF, audio, HTML, quizzes, surveys. It also integrates with external sources like Typeform, Articulate, and Storyline to enhance your course for an incredible learning experience.
- Offers full e-commerce functionality and student enrollment/tracking. It includes reports to monitor your sales and student progress.
- Integrates with tools like Segment.io, making it easy to connect data with other systems.
- A fully white-labeled course platform, so no one sees Thinkific behind the scenes.
- The knowledge base is excellent, providing quick answers to any questions you may have.
Getting Started and Creating Your Online Course
Thinkific provides robust support to help you get started and launch your courses through its Thinkific Fast Track program.
You can access Thinkific Fast Track, which includes a free month of the complete online course builder. Fast Track is a complimentary course designed to guide you through creating your course in 3 hours, enabling you to launch in 30 days or less.
How Much Does Thinkific Cost?
Thinkific offers a free trial and a free version of its course creator. The paid plan starts from $99 per month.
The Grow version, priced at $199, includes an affiliate site and more payment and customization options, with no transaction fees.
Thinkific Discounts and Extras
A discount is available when opting for the annual plan, bringing the platform cost down to $74 per month, with no transaction fees.
2. Teachable Review – Online Course Platform
The slogan for Teachable is “Everything is Teachable.” And it’s true!
Teachable is a highly popular online course creation software, boasting over 124,000 instructors and more than 28 million students. That’s a significant number!
The course pages are visually appealing, and the setup is straightforward, requiring no technical expertise.
Teachable is Best for Course Creators
Teachable is ideal for course creators who want to get started quickly. While it may not allow for granular customization of every page detail, it compensates with ease of use and rapid setup. The platform offers benefits such as unlimited courses, unlimited students, and comprehensive course hosting. You can personalize the site to incorporate your personal brand.
Teachable is user-friendly, suitable for creating both smaller courses and more advanced/lengthy online training and membership sites.
Getting Started with the Teachable Online Course Creator
Once you sign up for free, you gain access to the course creation software dashboard.
From there, it’s simple to begin with the online course creator and set up everything, including the payment system, your course materials, landing and sales pages for your course, and all other necessities.
Special Features and Functions of Teachable
Why do users like Teachable? It can be an excellent online course platform due to its ease of use. But don’t underestimate these special features:
- The Teachable course area boasts a professional design, which is a significant advantage.
- Discover Teachable Discover, a marketplace where they help their clients sell courses.
- Video hosting is included, allowing you to upload your course videos directly.
- Teachable enables you to manage an affiliate program, allowing others to sell your course.
- Teachable has its own payment processor. While they might be one of the few to offer this, transaction fees should be considered (similar to other payment processors).
One drawback is that you cannot fully white-label your course platform if desired.
How Much Does Teachable Cost?
Teachable offers a free trial, allowing you to start building your course and test the platform without risk.
The free course creation tool includes unlimited courses, unlimited videos, etc., but comes with a 10% transaction fee. Afterward, the starting price for the Basic plan is $39 per month.
The Teachable Business version is for genuine corporate users, offering advanced quizzes, more customization, and 100 users. The Business plan has no transaction fees and costs $299, but there’s a discount:
Teachable Discounts and Extras:
There’s an annual payment discount of 20%. The Basic plan is only $29 per month, while the Business plan, billed annually, is $249 per month. All plans come with a 30-day money-back guarantee.
3. LearnWorlds Review – Online Course Software and LMS
LearnWorlds is a powerful platform designed to create, sell, and market your online courses. LearnWorlds is almost an all-in-one teaching tool, offering more features for building amazing online courses and training programs than many competitors.
You can add interactive videos with pop-up texts and quizzes, incorporate social learning/community features, and even interactive eBooks (with note-taking capabilities) to enhance your course.
LearnWorlds is Good for Beginners and Advanced Users
LearnWorlds suits both beginners and advanced trainers. Even if you’re creating your first online training course, you can set it up in a few hours.
Instructors can utilize more advanced features after their initial launch.
LearnWorlds stands out from the competition because it allows you to create courses with a high level of interactivity and student engagement.
Getting Started with the Online Course Creator
Once you sign up, you’ll access the course administration area, where all necessary options are visible on a single screen. Within a minute, you’ll know where all the features are (on the left navigation).
You can start adding lessons in the online course creator, add users, videos, and content. Fill in your sales and enrollment pages and all marketing materials, and finally, check the reports.
Special Features and Functions of LearnWorlds
LearnWorlds is on this list of best online course platforms for a reason. Users appreciate it for its unique features that add value to your course (and to your students).
- Interactive eBooks, allowing students to take notes while reading.
- An integrated social network, connecting students without needing external Facebook groups.
- Robust course assessments, including quizzes, assignments, and exams, to test student knowledge.
- An automated newsletter feature, for relevant communication and sharing article headlines, social posts, etc.
- Interactive video with pop-up text, links to more resources, navigation, and in-video quizzes.
- Sell your course with an easy-to-use sales page builder and hundreds of quick-start templates in every plan.
- Your own mobile app. LearnWorlds allows you to create a mobile app for your school, enabling mobile interaction and reaching new leads on Google Play and the Apple App Store.
How Much Does LearnWorlds Cost?
You can try LearnWorlds for free. If you like the platform, the paid version starts at just $29 per month, which includes a custom domain and unlimited paid courses. For $99 per month, you get a complete website builder with unlimited pages, subscription payment options, and no transaction fees.
The larger version, the online learning center, is designed for those who want a complete online school with 20 instructors and thousands of students. It’s truly one of the best online teaching platforms.
LearnWorlds Discounts and Extras
LearnWorlds offers a 30-day free trial. For a full experience on a paid plan, while the usual prices are $29 and $99 per month, you receive a 20% discount on the annual plan. Additionally, you get full access to their LW Teaching Academy for assistance with course creation.
The Best All-in-One Online Course Platforms
Providers like Kajabi and Thinkific can handle everything from course creation to web security, online course hosting, and marketing your online learning products.
If you aim to sell courses and build a business around them, but don’t yet have other tools like a website or email marketing platform, this is the easiest way to begin.
When selling your e-learning courses, choosing the simplest setup to start makes sense. This allows you to focus on creating the course and successfully selling it.
4. Thinkific as an All-in-One Platform
Thinkific also excels as a comprehensive platform for online course hosting + marketing + sales + e-commerce + affiliate tools.
Thinkific is particularly appealing if you want to create a course quickly, offering many pre-built resources and templates for designing sales pages. This makes it easier to validate your course idea and get started. Create a basic offering and see if people are eager to sign up.
You can continue to use your own web hosting and CMS platforms like WordPress, WooCommerce, etc., if you wish. But Thinkific also covers those aspects for you.
- Comprehensive e-commerce functionality and student enrollment/tracking, with reports to monitor sales and student progress.
- Included payment pages and payment gateway integration.
- Website and sales page creation with a CMS offering numerous templates.
- Creation of sales funnels, lead magnet funnels, webinar funnels, etc.
- Complete membership area.
- Integrated email marketing/automation tools.
- Full white-labeling for your course platform, ensuring no one sees Thinkific in the background.
Create Your Online Course Instantly
Thinkific can help you launch your course quickly. You can access the Thinkific Fast Track for free, which includes a month of the online course platform and a complimentary course designed to guide you step-by-step through creating your course. This powerful 3-hour assistance aims to help you launch your course in 30 days or less.
5. Kajabi Review – All-in-One Platform: A Bit Pricier, but Comprehensive.
Kajabi is a comprehensive online teaching platform. It includes an online course creator and all the features needed to sell your course. Create landing pages, sales funnels, or drip campaigns to convert visitors into students for your courses.
You can manage all your email marketing within Kajabi, including drip campaigns and follow-ups through its native email builder. The course platform also integrates with Mailchimp, Aweber, or ActiveCampaign.
Great Aesthetics Out-of-the-Box + Theme Marketplace
Kajabi’s pages and courses look excellent right from the start, offering a good selection of standard templates.
Uniquely, there’s also a theme marketplace if you desire a different look. This is a great idea—an online course creator with pre-made designs and templates (from the community), something you won’t find with Teachable, Thinkific, and other alternatives.
Includes Video Hosting and Streaming
Kajabi integrates Wistia, one of the best video streaming platforms, as standard for your videos. All of this is included in the price; considering Wistia Pro costs $99, it’s a great deal.
Live Events, Virtual Meetups, etc. are Easy to Set Up
Kajabi excels at live events. Organize virtual meetups or conferences. Templates are available for broadcasting classes/events. Launch a webinar on Kajabi and customize your funnel by simply changing text and video links in registration, promotional emails, and post-event follow-ups.
Customer Support and Hero University
Hero University, an online community and training resource, assists users. The support and documentation are excellent, complemented by a vibrant community, partly due to businesses creating custom themes and numerous additional online blogs.
Highlight Features of Kajabi
According to Kajabi users, the most valued features are:
- Creating engaging courses with video, PDF digital products, and a mobile app.
- Memberships, quizzes, and assignments.
- A WordPress-like CMS for your pages and blog.
- Building various funnels: product launch funnels, lead magnet funnels, webinar funnels, etc., even with checkout pages that allow for upsells and cross-sells.
- Included simple checkout cart and integration with Stripe and PayPal.
- Email and automation tools you’ll actively use.
How Much Does Kajabi Cost?
Kajabi’s starting price is considerably higher than other platforms, reflecting the breadth of its features. It offers a 14-day free trial and a 30-day money-back guarantee. The platform begins at $149, but there’s also a discount…
Kajabi Discounts and Extras
Kajabi offers a 20% discount with an annual payment plan.
6. Podia Review – Online Course Software
Podia is a distinctive all-in-one e-learning and marketing platform. Podia provides everything needed to sell online courses, downloads, webinars, and memberships, but it limits your ability to fine-tune customizations. The advantage: no technical headaches.
Its strengths include zero technical hassle, zero transaction fees, and unlimited features. You can set up a storefront in minutes and start selling your digital products.
Both the frontend (storefront) and backend (course player) feature a clean, modern design right out of the box. It’s incredibly easy to use. However, this ease of use comes with almost no customization flexibility. Across all parts of Podia, whether the online course builder or page builder, you’ll find that simplicity is consistently prioritized over customization options.
Podia launched in 2018 (previously named Coach). Its freshness is evident in the sleek, minimalist, and current design of the store and courses. However, there’s only one design/theme, and it doesn’t allow for much customization (have we mentioned that already?).
It has fewer features compared to others, such as creating assignments or automatically grading quizzes. You cannot create mixed-media lessons within a single lesson. So, if you want to include a video and a PDF download, you’ll need to create separate lessons/steps for each.
Who is Podia best for as an online course platform?
Podia is simple and straightforward. If you want to create a membership site or deliver a relatively simple online course, Podia could be a good option. It doesn’t offer the full range of features and customization found in other alternatives.
Email Marketing
For some creators, a simple way to send emails to their customers is exactly what they need, so Podia offers a basic email tool included. Other creators may want more from their email marketing, so Podia integrates with the most popular email service providers on the market, including those reviewed in this guide, such as MailerLite, Sendfox, Convertkit, and similar platforms.
Special Features and Functions of Podia
Podia is on this list of All-in-One platforms. Interestingly, users not only sell courses but also digital products (it’s even popular for crowdfunding, some say!).
- Podia uses Wistia and offers unlimited video hosting as part of your subscription.
- Free migration to move your content from wherever it’s hosted or saved.
- Storefront and sales pages.
- Manages EU VAT/digital taxes.
- Easily accepts payments via Stripe or PayPal.
- Email capture tools and email marketing for a sales funnel.
- Live chat plugin included.
- Sales tools like coupons, upsells, affiliates, and more.
How Much Does Podia Cost?
Podia has two pricing plans: Mover and Shaker. Or rather, simple and comprehensive. The notably important difference for Shaker plan users is the ability to offer memberships.
The starting price is $39, but you can always begin with the 14-day free trial.
There’s a Podia discount of 2 months on an annual plan, equating to a $78 discount, bringing the total to $398 for Podia—not bad at all.
7. Academy of Mine – Online Training Software for Businesses
Academy of Mine is a specialized training platform for businesses.
The platform is the most expensive on this list, starting at $599 per month. It’s an all-in-one online training solution, where the team fully customizes your environment. It provides a complete website and branding for you to launch your brand and start selling online courses.
Academy of Mine can be a good option for larger businesses, with use cases for internal training, HR, your online language or coding school, etc. As a complete course creation and learning management system, it comes at a higher price but offers premium service.
- Create courses at your pace with text, HTML, video, audio, Powerpoint, PDF, SCORM, TinCan, and more.
- Offer live virtual training, including video conferencing, live chat, screen sharing, collaborative whiteboard, and presentations.
- Sell wholesale and onboard courses for companies and groups; as Academy of Mine targets schools and larger clients, it has specific features for wholesale selling directly to companies and businesses. A Group Onboarding feature allows selling course seats in bulk and delegating student management to company representatives.
- Advanced functionality includes in-person bookings, calendars, eBooks, downloadable products, and, for example, user features with personal audit logs (no joke, they are serious).
The Best WordPress LMS Plugins
A WordPress Learning Management System (LMS) is course software that you install on your WordPress website. This, obviously, only works if you already have a WordPress site and domain name.
Generally, this is appealing if you are a bit more tech-savvy and desire significant additional control over everything.
8. LearnDash Review – Best WordPress LMS Plugin
LearnDash is a powerful plugin that transforms your WordPress website into a self-hosted learning environment. LearnDash is also the most popular WordPress LMS plugin today, offering an online course builder and a wealth of features.
One of LearnDash’s features since version 3.0 is its “Focus Mode.” Students will be free from distractions when taking your course (because all other elements are hidden on your member pages).
LearnDash LMS comes with a drag-and-drop online course builder. You can create simple courses with lessons, videos, quizzes, and more. Email drip campaigns are included. Of course, you can offer all lessons at once, but you can also create your online lessons and then deliver content in stages via drip email.
As a WordPress plugin, this learning management system works well with bbPress, MemberPress, and other WordPress e-commerce and membership plugins.
LearnDash allows you to sell individual courses, offer subscriptions, memberships, or use the shopping cart to sell access to your online training courses. It integrates with payment gateways like PayPal or Stripe. Once a student purchases your course, a member profile is automatically created in WordPress.
Automatically generated Certificates and Badges (with, for example, their own name and score) are a nice touch. This allows you to reward your students with official certificates based on their quiz performance and upon completing a full course.
How Much Does LearnDash WordPress LMS Cost?
You can start today with a $40 discount and a 15-day money-back guarantee on their annual plans. You will still need a solution for hosting your online course videos, as uploading them directly to your WordPress environment is not recommended.
9. Lifter LMS: WordPress Course Software
LifterLMS is a robust and flexible LMS plugin for WordPress. You can easily create and sell online courses on your own WordPress site.
You can extend its basic features by integrating extensions like Stripe, PayPal, Authorize.net, etc. Of course, you can also integrate it with your preferred email marketing or marketing automation platform.
Like LearnDash, LifterLMS offers features to engage your students, such as certificates, badges, and social interaction. It can be combined with 1:1 coaching. The LMS platform can be used to sell individual courses, but you can also create and sell bundles or offer a membership site (with discounts).
Get the plan for $120, or the universe bundle for $360.
10. Masterstudy – WordPress LMS Plugin and Theme for Online Courses
Masterstudy is a modern learning management system plugin and online education theme for WordPress. The pages boast a sleek design and are highly responsive, thanks to being built entirely with Vue.js. The template creators at StylemixThemes developed both the plugin and the WordPress themes.
MasterStudy LMS features a user-friendly course administration panel, a messaging system, quizzes, and course announcements.
As an online course creator, you can create three types of lessons: text lessons, video lessons, and slideshow lessons. You can add additional elements, use templates, and add text blocks by type.
The MasterStudy WordPress LMS Pro version includes additional features such as a Udemy Course Importer, Prerequisites, Online Tests and Assignments, Drip Content, a Gradebook, Live Streaming of Lessons, Group Courses, and WooCommerce integration. The complete educational WordPress theme comes with even more features, including extensive customization options.
The Best Online Learning Marketplaces
Online course marketplaces like Skillshare and Udemy invest heavily in attracting students (and course creators). They will handle part of the selling process for you and alleviate many design and hosting headaches. Here’s a list of leading online learning marketplaces.
Keep in mind that courses don’t sell themselves. Even on one of the best online teaching platforms/marketplaces like Udemy, there’s competition among course creators.
Udemy – Best Learning Platform for General Knowledge and Business
Udemy is one of the most popular online learning platforms today, and certainly the most visited for purchasing online courses, with over 40 million students. Students on this educational platform can use ratings and reviews to filter for higher-quality courses. But is it a good place to create and sell your course?
Advantages of the Udemy Learning Platform:
Udemy enables anyone to create courses. You can use training materials like PDF documents, Powerpoint, text, and video content.
- No setup or platform costs.
- Handles online course hosting.
- Self-paced learning and video courses.
- Requires no technical skills whatsoever.
- A large built-in audience that might purchase your courses.
The platform tends to promote courses that are already selling well, so success also depends on your marketing. Udemy has control over your course’s price and often sells it at a discount (beneficial for students).
Udemy is recommended for teachers, instructors, educators, and freelancers who are just starting with their online courses.
Pricing: You can start for free; the Udemy learning platform charges a 3% administration fee on courses you sell through your links.
Commissions on sales that Udemy generates for you are quite high, ranging between 50% and 75%.
Skillshare – Best Learning Platform for Creative Learning
Skillshare is one of the best online learning platforms, with over 4 million students and 24,000 lessons in its course marketplace.
Course lessons typically last between 20 and 60 minutes, and courses are structured as a series of short videos. There are class projects and a member community that participates through a class discussion forum.
The online training platform offers courses in “Create, Build, and Thrive” categories, which are actually divided into four main course categories:
- Creative Topics: This constitutes the largest part of the training platform, covering subjects from Music classes to graphic design, cooking, and more.
- Business Courses: Including marketing, freelancing, and business analytics.
- Web & Technology: Such as web development, UX/UI design, and e-commerce.
- Lifestyle: Learn languages, wellness, interior design, and much more.
The advantage of Skillshare is that, in addition to being online course creation software, it has a discussion forum where students can interact and provide feedback. It offers a complete package: if a student becomes a Premium member, they can access over 20,000 classes for a single fee. Some might compare Skillshare’s functionality to Teachable, the key difference being that Teachable primarily serves as an online course hosting platform for your classes, not a marketplace.
Skillshare is beneficial for teachers looking to earn a little extra income. Instructors can earn royalties from their courses and participate in the Skillshare referral program.
Coursera – Best Learning Platform for Academics
Coursera is an online learning platform founded in 2012 by two former Stanford professors. Coursera instructors teach at top universities and major companies, offering MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). It’s an interesting platform for online learning, but unless you teach at a prestigious institution, you cannot create a course and host your online content on Coursera.
It offers core courses, as well as specializations and online degrees in a variety of subjects such as engineering, data science, machine learning, mathematics, business, computer science, digital marketing, humanities, medicine, biology, social sciences, etc. Enrollment in Coursera is free, and training on the platform typically lasts between 4 to 6 weeks with 2 sessions per week. Certification and degree prices are displayed after login and range from $29-99 per month and more for specializations.
Code Academy
Code Academy is a learning platform that offers specialized MOOCs for the computer science and programming audience. Code Academy is designed for you to start regardless of your experience level, from basic HTML, JavaScript, or Python. In terms of online education platforms, coding is somewhat different because you also have to actively engage with and write code.
Classes progressively advance, allowing you to create websites, applications, and many types of advanced programming.
The free plan includes 180 hours of learning, and the Pro subscription also offers a free week trial.
Other top online learning platforms include Linkedin Learning, edX, and Treehouse.
How to Create and Sell an Online Course
There isn’t one fixed way to create your course, but here are the steps to quickly build your first one.
1. Let Experts Guide You Through Course Creation
The easiest way to learn how to create your course is to have an expert guide you step-by-step.
Fortunately, the platforms in this guide genuinely want you to launch a successful course, as it’s the only way for you to become and remain a customer.
These experts often offer free training on how to launch your first course, typically ready to help you release your online course step-by-step.
An added benefit is that you also learn about course creation by taking courses. You can review lessons and experience what you like to have in your training.
Here are some recommended free training programs to launch your online course:
Thinkific Fast Track (free)
LearnWorlds Teaching Academy (free)
Taking a paid course elsewhere might cost $500 and not be as effective!
2. Choose a Course Topic That Interests Your Audience
Choosing a course topic is as simple as knowing what people would like to learn. Everyone can teach something—something you know a little more about than your students.
There’s no need to overthink it. If this is your first course or training, it’s recommended to create a short course first.
The sole objective is to learn about course creation and get a feel for the course platform you’re working with.
While creating your first course, you will learn a great deal for your “real” second course. Later, you can repurpose this short course to build your email list or even as an introduction to your main course.
3 Great Ideas for Your First Micro-Course:
Idea 1: Choose a smaller sub-topic and create a three-lesson course from it.
If your topic is weightlifting, create the first class on proper posture.
If your topic is email marketing, create initial training on how to write a great subject line.
The structure of a lesson can be:
- Why it’s important and what you’ll learn.
- Some dos and don’ts.
- A few examples and an exercise.
Idea 2: Discuss the four most important trends in [your topic]. Each trend becomes a lesson.
Idea 3: Find a great blog article about [your topic] and turn it into a few lessons.
Starting with a micro-course/training is a great idea because now is the perfect time to make your online course a reality.
3. Calculate the Cost of Creating Your Online Training
Some reports suggest that creating an online course is very expensive, averaging $3,000, but that can be overstated. You can manage costs carefully or operate with a large budget.
You can create your online course on a very modest budget.
If you have PowerPoint, a laptop, a webcam, and a positive attitude, you have everything you need to get started with course creation.
You can create a decent online course for under $250. Budget between $100 and $500 for course creation. Your biggest cost will be the time you invest.
Hosting, marketing, and selling your new course can all be done through the course platforms reviewed. Here’s a summary of the prices for four top online course platforms:
You might wonder, are there free online course platforms? All offer some form of free access, either a free trial or a way to start your first course for free. This allows you to begin without upfront cost. Afterward, while a completely free online course platform seems appealing, realize that the biggest investment is usually time, not the platform itself.
4. The Best Equipment for Creating an Online Course
You don’t need the most impressive setup to create a well-selling online course, but you do need some essential equipment. Let’s look at the main equipment options for a course.
Microphone: ($30 – 99)
Even if your content is amazing, poor audio quality significantly detracts from the learning experience. Audio matters more than video.
- You can try the Samson Go Mic – a small USB microphone with excellent sound capture, costing around $30.
- The Blue Yeti USB desktop microphone is also a great option. It’s a bit pricier but offers high quality and is popular among podcasters and course creators. It’s one of the most favored microphones for webinars, courses, and podcasts.
Webcam / Camera ($0 – 60)
Most laptops and computers come with a built-in camera, so you might not need an extra one. But if you need a webcam – or want to upgrade to a higher-quality one – check out the Logitech BRIO Ultra HD. Mount it on your monitor and record 4K video. For some training courses, you might want to showcase your skills on camera or outdoors. Fortunately, your smartphone has an incredibly high-quality camera built-in.
Screen Capture Software ($0 – 20)
Screen capture, mixed with your video, is a format often used for online courses and blended learning. Popular options include Zoom.us (for live meetings and online training) and Loom for screen and video capture. Both offer free options. Be sure to download all your videos and inform attendees if they will be recorded, respecting their privacy.
Lighting Kit ($0 – 50)
Proper lighting for your video course recording is crucial. Natural light is often the best (and free) option; simply sit near a window facing it for even illumination. A ring light or a desktop lighting kit will ensure your training videos are well-lit at night.
Coffee Mug for Top Course Creators (You know you want it!) $10.
As you can see, top course creators don’t need extensive gear to make a great course. If your video course is in an informal presentation style, it’s similar to what you’d need for a conference call or webinar!
How to Choose the Best Online Course Platform for Your Business
As you may have gathered, the best online course platform will depend entirely on your specific needs.
Here are some recommendations based on what you might require:
- If you want the best tool to create your online course with engaging content and experience:
– Check out LearnWorlds or Thinkific.
- If you need an all-in-one tool for online courses, email marketing, a website, memberships, and sales funnels:
– Kajabi is for you.
- If you’re primarily looking for a quality e-learning tool, but still want comprehensive email marketing and drip campaigns:
– Choose Teachable.
- If your online course software must have a robust membership and login section:
– Thinkific and LearnWorlds are the platforms to explore.
- If your goal is to get started quickly and receive assistance with setting up your training:
– LearnWorlds (with its Academy), Teachable, and Thinkific will be very helpful.