5 Best Online Course Creation Platforms [2024 Update] • Scottmax.com (2024)

Quick links for the Best Online Course Platforms

1) Best Overall 🏆

Skool

An educational platform, transforming learning with interactive tools and engaging resources for students.

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2) Top E-Learning🥈

Udemy

An online learning platform empowering learners with a wide array of expert-led education.

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3) Elite Education 🥉

Coursera

An online learning platform providing access to top-quality courses from renowned universities and institutions.

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So, you are in the market for an online course creation platform.

Ideal, because in this article we have our compilation list for our top picks, and we compare the features and pricing for you.

If you just want the best choice, we’ve added that right at the top of the article as this was what is most requested by our customers. So, that’ll be the “can’t go wrong” option.

Otherwise, feel free to explore all the options we’ve reviewed on the market to find something that might fit you a little better.

Enjoy the list!

The Best Online Course Creation Platform Specifically

Online course creation platforms allow coaches and teachers to sell digitally downloadable lessons and conduct virtual classes. However, you need more than just a course creator to increase sales. An online course creation platform that offers email marketing, analytics, course progress, and a landing page builder will be the perfect fit for this category. Have a look at the products below to choose the best online course creation platform specifically:

1. Kajabi

Kajabi is an all-in-one business platform and online course creation tool for knowledge entrepreneurs who sell information products based on their expertise. You can use Kajabi’s tools to turn your knowledge into a sellable digital product, offer it to your audience and earn revenue. Kajabi provides an easy way to build, market and sell online courses, membership sites, coaching programs, public or private podcasts and more.

The best part is you can forget complicated tech hassles like coding, plug-ins or broken integrations. In addition to hosting your knowledge products, you get an elegant website builder, a secure payment gateway, email marketing, powerful analytics, automation and sales funnels. Kajabi offers robust support and a community second to none.

Kajabi Features

Here are some exclusive features of Kajabi:

Online Course Creation: From meditation to personal finance, Kajabi has you covered with online course creation, no matter your passions or skillset. With Kajabi, you can create, market, and sell online courses all in one dashboard, turning knowledge into revenue in record time. Kajabis custom templates and user-friendly design tools make creating a mini-course, or even an entire signature course, fast and easy.

Payment Integrations: Kajabi offers a fast and painless setup for the integration of your choice. Kajabi only partners with the world premiere and most trusted online payment gateway to secure your transactions and process them swiftly. Additionally, unlike other popular platforms for creators, Kajabi never takes a percentage cut of your revenue.

Contact Management: Kajabi offers an inbuilt CRM that deepens your customer relationships with less effort. You can automate critical interactions so your prospects get better and faster service, creating a win-win situation for everyone. Kajabi’s CRM gives you the freedom to trigger emails and coupons. With Kajabi, you can tag, segment, and filter your customers using any criteria. Moreover, you can use what you learn from customer metrics, behaviour tagging, product engagements, and assessments to improve your marketing, automation and products.

Analytics: Kajabi gives you the best right metrics, organized in web analytics Dashboards you’ll use. With Kajabi, you can go straight to the most crucial data from every touchpoint. It enables you to track revenue, offers sold and subscription metrics without comparing numbers from one tab to the next. Additionally, with Kajabi’s in-depth reports, you can see student progress, subscription churn rate, and more to identify areas of improvement.

Funnels: You don’t need to be a funnel expert to use Kajabi, as it offers templates and ready-to-use playbooks that remove all the guesswork. You can customize and launch Kajabi’s pre-built frameworks for lead generation, product launches, or webinar funnels. You can connect several other sales and marketing channels into seamless multi-channel funnels. Moreover, each funnel features pre-written copy developed from the highest-converting sales funnels across the Kajabi platform.

Kajabi Pricing

Kajabi offers 3 Pricing options for its online course creation and marketing platform.

The “Basic” plan is priced at $149/month and offers 3-course creations, 3 Funnels, unlimited landing pages, 1 Website and 10,000 contacts.

The “Growth” plan is priced at $199/month and offers 15-course creations, 15 Funnels, 25,000 contacts and 10 Admin users.

The “Pro” plan is priced at $399/month and offers 100-course creations, 100 Funnels, 3 Websites, 20,000 customers, 100,000 contacts and 25 Admin users.

Skillshare is an online course platform that offers video classes for several creative topics. With unlimited access to a vast array of online lectures, SkillShare provides the perfect balance between concrete skill-building and aspirational learning, helping students flourish in the real world.

SkillShare is the largest online creative education platform, featuring thousands of courses and classes created by professionals from various fields to help budding creators learn new skills. SkillShare classes are curated to work with real-life situations, so you can find inspiration that fits into your schedule and keep moving forward with your creative journey without putting life on hold.

SkillShare Features

Here are some exclusive features of SkillShare:

Classroom Projects: Maximum SkillShare courses involve classroom projects for students to work on while learning a specific subject or skill. Their workshops are a collection of guided classes and allow skills to be learned: according to the designated program established by the SkillShare team or an instructor. SkillShare is a place for learners and teachers to hone their skills and share experiences since SkillShare provides opportunities to learn and network.

Shared Learning Experience: SkillShare does not offer individual classes, as skillshare is all about a shared learning experience. SkillShare lessons are composed of single lectures, whereas projects combine several related lesson sets curated by either SkillShare or other teachers and users.

Switch Classes at Ease: One of the advantages of unlimited Classes on SkillShare is if you sign up for one class and do not like it, you can find another course/teacher to study that subject with. Additionally, the quality of lectures and the learning experience are generally top-tier.

Class Creation: Becoming a teacher on SkillShare is simple. In case educators want to spread their passion and skills to learners all over the world, they can do so by creating a lesson, providing a description, and publishing it. With SkillShare’s Class Creation System guide, educators can create classes without much effort. The platform offers step-by-step instructions, from designing and posting the lecture; to advertising it by creating a channel.

Monetization: SkillShare helps Makers, Professionals, and Business-Inspired Individuals make money. It pays instructors when students sign up for classes and watch their video lessons. In addition, they may earn revenue from every referred student that chooses to subscribe to the Premium Edition. On the other hand, premium users get unlimited access to a catalogue of premium classes.

SkillShare Pricing

SkillShare offers region-based membership options for its online course platform. You must start with a free trial spanning 7 Days and choose the pricing option in the “Payments” section.

3. Teachable

With Teachable’s online course platform, you can easily create lessons, upload videos or audio files as course materials, and sell your courses using an easy check-out process. Overall, Teachable offers plenty of templates and themes, making it easy to build a nice-looking website quickly. Still, more experienced users can customize their sites to have even greater control over their appearance.

Teachable is undoubtedly one of the most popular online learning platforms today, offering users all they need to build, market, and sell their courses. Teachable now has over 20,000 active courses, over five million students, and over 10,000 instructors online. Teachable may not be as flashy or beautiful as some newer platforms, but with so many students navigating its marketplace, its network is second to none in online course creation.

Teachable Features

Here are some exclusive features of Teachable:

Student Feedback and Educational tools: Teachable’s online course platform offers rudimentary quizzes to help instructors measure students learning progress with multiple-choice questions. The system grades quiz automatically, which is a neat feature that spares instructors from having to score them manually. Teachable also helps you gather student feedback and discover insights into your courses using Google Forms and surveys.

Course Creation: Whether running a self-paced, cohort-based, or live-coaching class, you can do all that here at Teachable. You can build your courses or coaching services fast with their intuitive drag-and-drop creator, plus sell instantly with a built-in custom sales page builder. Moreover, Teachable offers exclusive eCommerce features to help you expand your reach in the marketplace.

Teachable Pay: With TeachablePay, you can get paid fast, at the time of your choosing. Additionally, you can use ad-hoc, student-facing features such as comments, quizzes, and certifications for completion to promote student learning outcomes and satisfaction. You can use the affiliate marketing tools to sign up partners to promote your business on Teachable. Then, automate payments to collaborators using the BackOffice, which is only available with Teachable Pay.

Scale with Teachable: Create as many courses as you like with Teachable. Repurpose the content and lectures easily so that you can grow faster. Plus, their bulk download functionality allows you to transfer student data and courses from another platform seamlessly. Take your business to greater heights by growing your audience or finding new ways to drive revenue.

Business Management: Do business wherever you want without worrying about the tax headache. Whether remittances or tax forms, you can use Teachable’s learnable taxes to avoid collecting them manually. Understand the productivity of your business and actively adapt strategies with Teachable’s Advanced Data Reporting. They offer user-friendly reports of sales volumes and student engagement that can help you make data-informed decisions.

Teachable Pricing

Teachable offers four subscription plans for its online course creation platform:

The “Free” plan is priced at $0 and allows you to create 1 Course. Additionally, it offers an integrated website builder and charges $1 + 10% transaction fees on sales.

The “Basic” plan is priced at $39/month and allows you to create 5 Courses. Additionally, it offers a custom domain, direct integrations and email marketing. It charges 5% transaction fees on sales.

The “Pro” plan is priced at $119/month and allows you to create unlimited courses. Additionally, it offers 5 Admin users, public API and affiliate marketing. There are no transaction fees on sales with this pricing option.

The “Advanced” plan offers an on-demand pricing option and customizable features with plan limits. It does not charge any transaction fees and offers advanced theme customization.

4. Thinkific

Thinkific is a library of powerful, effective apps that help add enhanced capabilities to the course creation and delivery processes. The Thinkific platform makes it easy for the creators to adapt their courses and incorporate unique, complex features. Thinkific has revolutionized how individuals make money and learn online by creating a comprehensive platform for course creators and their audiences.

Thinkific is laser-focused on being the best platform to build online courses and integrates with the best-of-breed tools creators are already using. Thinkific offers a robust suite of tools to help you create an elegant, engaging website where users can come and buy your online class. Thinkific offers the following course templates; Blank, Mini-Course, Flagship Course, Pre-Sell, Digital Download, Membership Resource Library, and Replay Webinar.

Thinkific Features

Here are some exclusive features of Thinkific:

Learning Facilitation: Learning a new skill has increasingly become essential over the past few years. Especially during these uncertain times, finding more avenues of earning and learning is necessary. Thinkific offers every tool you can think of to help you reach a wider audience and easily facilitate authentic progressive learning.

Complete Control: Thinkific lets you decide the content of your online course and its presentation with an extensive range of eye-catching and aesthetic website themes, design and customization tools that will further help you customize your learning courses. Moreover, Thinkific allows you to set up a personal domain with branding, creating a unique platform for your online lesson.

Support System: Thinkific has one of the best customer support teams ready and willing to assist and answer queries immediately and efficiently. With over 50000 creators on the platform, you have a community’s worth of knowledge and assistance to support you. Moreover, with Thinkific, you can further tap into different online courses to enhance your expertise.

Integration: Thinkific offers seamless and stress-free integration with your existing website or CRM system. Thinkific offers 24/7 round-the-clock monitoring, consistent and dependable cloud hosting and advanced security. Thinkific makes it easy to impart your skill and expertise the best way you see fit.

Maximize Profits: Suppose you are already making some profit with your courses. In that case, you are better off giving Thinkific a shot right off the bat, as they will allow you to utilize Drip, coupons, affiliate marketing tools, and email marketing integration. It has a user-friendly experience for creating courses, and you can fully use the software. The Thinkific Platform is not the most sophisticated one on the market, but it is a powerful and easy-to-use solution for aspiring beginners and established course builders.

Site Builder: Site Builder is just a part of Thinkific’s administrative dashboard and enables you to create a compelling homepage for your course. You can create your whole product, from content to landing pages and checkout, within the Thinkific Course Builder. In the Thinkific backend, you can manage the curriculum of your courses using a fully drag-and-drop learning content editor.

Thinkific Pricing

Thinkific offers 4 Pricing options for its online course-hosting platform.

The “Free” plan is priced at $0 and offers a drag-and-drop course builder, website themes, course quizzes and two spaces per community.

The “Basic” plan is priced at $49/month and offers custom domain, affiliate selling, 0 transaction fee and five spaces per community.

The “Start” plan is priced at $99/month and offers fantastic student experience, assignments, live lessons and advanced website code editing.

The “Grow” plan is priced at $199/month and offers unlimited courses, 3 Communities, bulk enrollments, custom branding and 20 spaces per community.

5. Udemy

Udemy is the largest online learning platform, with over 35 million students enrolling in over 1,000,000 courses. It is an established platform offering online courses to students who are studying at top universities. Many other online course providers have caught up with some of the early advantages Udemy had, replicating certain parts of their course offerings. Still, Udemy remains the best learning destination, as they have the most current library of courses, the best pricing as far as value for money goes, and, most importantly, they give students access to the instructors.

Udemy is a part of a growing movement to offer MOOCs outside the traditional university system and is renowned for the diversity of the courses provided. Udemy has received mentions from The New York Times, The China Post, Fast Company, BBC, and TechCrunch. Additionally, Mashable describes it as an experience rivalling a real-world classroom, which can be a valuable tool for teachers and students in various subjects.

Udemy Features

Here are some exclusive features of Udemy:

Self-paced Learning: Udemy Business Self-paced learning modules extend student learning opportunities, improve employee career development, and provide a medium for instructors to augment course content. You can get the app to explore the vast Udemy library of 3,400+ topics with advanced online video courses on Coding, Development, Python, Java, Business, Marketing, SEO, SEM, Design, Drawing, Photography, and more.

Complete Course Guide: Udemy offers tips, instructions and data about the types of courses students are looking for, according to keywords and subject searches. Udemy’s best areas are personal development and career advancement, offering excellent leadership training, software training, programming courses, and much more. It provides over 200,000 online courses ranging from beginners to advanced levels, covering fields like IT & Software, Office Productivity, Business, Finance and Accounting, Design, Marketing, and much more.

Unique Model: Udemy operates under a unique model in which any expert in the subject area can record their course and share it in the site’s marketplace. Udemy has enabled online education by allowing experts and instructors worldwide to post their classes to the site. Udemy has more than 100000 courses, with 24 million students registered worldwide.

Course Creation: Using the course design tools on Udemy, instructors can upload videos, PowerPoint presentations, PDFs, audio, ZIP files, and live classes to build courses. Udemy welcomes instructors who wish to create courses and sell them. When an instructor joins Udemy to make and sell courses, Udemy provides guidelines for the appropriate pricing depending on content and duration. An instructor’s payout on Udemy depends on how many people purchase or view their courses and how they learn about a class.

Complete Transparency: While no universities accredit Udemy, nor do courses count towards degrees, classes can help amateur learners better understand topics in professional or academic settings. For most courses on Udemy, it will list instructors’ biographies and credentials on course descriptions for reference. If you have a question about the lesson you are taking, you can look up answers to your questions under Q&A or ask the instructor.

Udemy Pricing

Udemy’s pricing options start from $42.99, depending on your region and the course you’re taking.

Businesses can opt for a “Team” plan to elevate their workforce’s skills. The “Team” plan also offers a custom pricing quote.

Why use an Online Course Platform at all?

Whether you are passionate about teaching, looking to build your audience, or simply looking to profit from your courses, Online course platforms will help you reach your goals. It enables you to check students’ course progress and add relevant tests to analyze their skill level.

You can also create a website, build and manage a course, see analytics, formulate email marketing campaigns, connect with customers, and process payments from one dashboard. With platforms like these, you can build virtual classes and run webinars, email sequences for developers, and much more.

Why should you use Online Course Creation Platforms?

Online classes enable simultaneous learning for individuals studying from various geographic locations, and then these courses can be used with new groups of learners. All course or learning materials are available online, creating a paperless teaching environment that is more cost-effective and good for the environment.

Online courses also provide more flexible scheduling options, which may help students who struggle with attending classes regularly. Online courses typically let students choose the terms on their assignments, which can further enhance a feeling of control over one’s learning experience. When professionals design online courses, this also helps students eager to learn a particular skill enroll in these online courses.

If you are putting in constant effort and following the correct methods of designing, creating, selling, and marketing your online courses, you, too, can be a successful online course creator. With an online course creation platform, you can build several online courses, build digital downloads, create individual subscription sites, and have all of them hosted in one place.

If you want to create a virtual class that will grow into a profitable online business, you should begin your journey today. The pros to creating an online course are that it can be a great way to share your knowledge with a broader audience, can be more flexible than traditional courses, and can take less time than conventional courses.

Online Course Creation Platforms, A Summary

There are many options for creating and selling courses online, such as Teachable, Thinkific, Udemy, Kajabi, Skillshare, Podia (formerly known as Coach), and others. The platforms are usually supported by a powerful content management system that suggests relevant courses. Online course creation tools can profit businesses and institutions through online course sales via e-commerce, which can be managed and automated within the platform, and paid for with a credit card or wire transfer.

Kajabi offers course templates for different skill sets so anyone can sell virtual classes and pass on knowledge about various niches. It is our suggested pick for the best online course creation platform. Visit the website to get started.

What Online Course Platform would you recommend?

In short, It’s Skool.com

It’s a cutting-edge educational platform revolutionizing learning through immersive experiences. Empowering students with personalized lessons, innovative tools, and expert guidance. Skool transforms education, fostering curiosity, creativity, and excellence. Join the future of learning today.

“🚀Try Skool.com For Free, It’s my favorite webinar software to use and recommend.” -Scott Max

Skool.com offers immersive, personalized learning experiences through interactive courses, expert guidance, and hands-on projects. Unleash your potential, nurture curiosity, and build skills that matter. Join a vibrant community shaping the future of learning at Skool.

For more details, read our Skool.com Review .