11 Best Online Course Platforms 2023

Selling an online course is both exciting and nerve-racking. It’s a way to reach a new dedicated audience online and create a source of passive income. At this stage, there is one important question that many tutors come across.

The online teaching industry is growing at a year-over-year growth of 92% and is expected to reach $840.11 billion by 2030. That just means, 2023 is going to be a great time to create a course and sell it online.

Here, I am sharing with you the 11 best online course-selling platforms and helping you pick the one that is best for you.

Let’s get started.

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11 Best Online Course Platforms 2023

Freshlearn

Freshlearn is an all-in-one course-selling platform for tutors. It is a platform that can help you create, sell and market a course online.

As a tutor, you get every single tool at your bay, and even if you are just getting started, you have access to tools that will help you scale quickly and efficiently.

The platform allows you to host your domain, build landing pages, publish blogs and overall create a dedicated website where you engage readers—and your students—with every type of content.

Curating and selling your course is easy. And the best part is, you get the option to create your community that you manage and control.

While creating a course, you can use any file type or media, giving you complete freedom on how the course will be for your students.

Overall, Freshlearn is the best online course-selling platform as it is the only tool that has given access to every single tool and feature that you need. Something that many others lack. 

Why choose Freshlearn?

• All-in-one platform: From building a website to creating marketing channels and building a community—Freshlearn as a platform has every tool that you need as a course creator to build a brand and sell your courses.
• Offers high scalability: Since all your courses are under your brand, on your platform—it’s you who determines the marketing, pricing, and modules of your courses. That means there are no regulations that limit your growth and hence sky’s the limit for you.
• Ease of marketing: Be it with help of blogs or through email and coupon marketing. You get every tool at your ease to market your course and get a high return on investment from the tool and your course.

Pricing plan

Plan	Annual Pricing
Free	0
Pro	$25/month
No Brainer	$45/month

Thinkfic

Thinkfic is among the top online course-building platforms. A platform best for creators who are going to have an ongoing course-building model.

A model where tutors keep on adding new content to the course over and over again.

Step-by-step, as you keep creating content, you can add it to your course library and keep upgrading the value of your course.

Due to this “DIY theme” of the platform, this has been the top choice for many new tutors as well.

To further assist you in creating your online course, Thinkfic offers starter templates that you can use and edit. These are templates that give you an idea of how to curate a course. Surely you can edit the templates or follow them as it is.

Whatever you choose, you end up with the type of course you wanted.

These assists in curating a cohesive course can be great for tutors who want to sell courses online but are struggling to find how to do the same.

Why choose Thinkfic?

• Starter templates: Not just to present your courses, but to build your course. Thinkfic gives you a template to add videos, pdf, etc to create courses. This can be very useful for tutors who are looking to curate a course but have no idea where to start.
• 12+ course theme: To stand out and create a more unique environment, you have access to more than 12 themes. You can use them to present your course in a way that helps you stand out and be memorable.
• Ongoing course building: Unlike other platforms where you first have to build a complete course and then upload it all together at once before you start selling it, Thinkfic allows you to build an ongoing course. A great way to curate foundation courses, sell them, and keep on adding additional content as you keep creating them.

Pricing plan

Plan	Annual Pricing
Free	$0
Basic	$36/month
Start	$74/month
Grow	$149/month

Teachable

Teachable in an online course selling platform, best if you have multiple courses to host and sell. Unlike other platforms which are like eCommerce for courses, Teachable allows you to create a marketplace.

If you have multiple courses, you can host each one of them individually and create a complete system to sell them.

The platform allows you to easily market your courses through various useful tools such as a coupon, affiliation, email marketing, etc.

Even to help you get started, Teachable helps you build a landing page using easy-to-edit LMS themes or coding it if you have skills.

Why choose Teachable?

• Building a brand: The ability to host courses under your brand name and create a whole website to sell the courses makes you stand out. Teachable gives you that option and assists you in building your brand as well.
• Creating a custom website: If you have your technical skills or can hire someone, you can easily edit the way your course-selling website looks. If not, you can use templates that you can edit and get started with selling courses online.
• Marketing Channels: With the help of affiliate marketing, and email marketing coupons you can easily set up various marketing channels and track the source of sales. Once you have collected the data regarding the best sales channel, you can double down on it to get much better results.

Pricing plan

Plan	Annual Pricing
Free	$1+10% per transition
Basic	$29/month+5%
Pro	$99/month
Advance	Contact Sales

Podia

Podia is a great course-selling platform that is less complicated. It is for tutors that have simple courses with not a lot of complex systems.

It is what you consider the simplest way to sell and manage your course online.

You can use Podia to sell digital products like ebooks, pdfs, courses, etc without getting caught up setting up systems for that.

But what you can do is create your community on your platform. A community that you can reach out to and notify about any update that you want.

If you are on a platform like Facebook or LinkedIn, you’ll have to curate your content as per their guidelines that keep on updating.

On the other hand, if you have your community, it’s you who controls it. This gives you much more control while keeping the goal of your business—selling the course—easy.

Why choose Podia?

• Simple & easy to use the platform: Podio keeps the course selling part of the business easy. This avoids getting overwhelmed with all the features while only focusing on what’s important—that is selling the course.
• Support all content forms: You can sell digital products, eBooks, texts, pdfs, memberships, and more all through this one platform. This is highly advantageous as you don’t have to manage your content on various platforms.
• Building your community: Standing apart from social media channels, you can individually build your community and keep it exclusive for your students. Using the same, you can notify them to update and stay connected with them.

Pricing plan

Plan	Annual Pricing
Free	8% transition fees
Mover	$33/month
Shaker	$75/month
Earthquaker	$166/month

Kajabi

Kajabi is an online course-selling platform built for tutors who are operating with a small or no marketing team.

Its platform brings true marketing automation to your disposal and assists you to sell your courses without getting involved in it regularly.

Once you have set up the course, all you need to do is create triggers. These are action-based triggers that activate a marketing campaign when a visitor takes an action.

This includes setting up a marketing funnel, and lead magnet and building a complete email marketing campaign.

Why choose Kajabi?

• Creating all types of courses: With Kajabi you can start an online course, coaching program, podcast, etc all through one platform. This is great as you have the opportunity to explore all fields right from one platform.
• Marketing automation: You can create various user triggers to set up your marketing automation. Once the setup is complete, the platform would run all marketing steps without your regular involvement.

Pricing plan

Plan	Annual Pricing
Basic	$199/month
Growth	$159/month
Pro	$319/month

Mighty Network

Mighty Network is a course-selling platform that focuses on helping you build a community of your own.

Once the course is sold, many tutors find it difficult to network with students and learn about their progress and the problems that they are facing.

Similarly, many students look for people with the same interest who are at the same stage of understanding as they are.

Might Network solves all these problems. Surely you can easily sell your course, while also creating a community of your students where they can interact with each other and you.

Why choose Mighty Network?

• Build a community: While the platform helps you sell your courses online, its main USP is to help you create a community of your own. With technical experience and arguably the best UX, you can set up a whole system to scale with a dedicated community of your own.
• Upgrading to your own branded app: If you believe it is time to take the next step and reach an audience through Apple and Play Store, Mighty Network gives you the option to upgrade to the pro level with your own brand app.

Pricing plan

Plan	Annual Pricing
The Community Plan	$33/month
The Business Plan	$99/month
Mighty Pro	Contact

Xperiencify

Xperiencify is a course-selling platform that solves a very important problem. The course completion rate of the student.

Only 15% of students complete a self-paced course. Because of this many students are not able to gain maximum return out of your teachings.

Xperiencify makes the whole learning roadmap gamified. Through features like a leaderboard, celebration, quizzes, and more it keeps the customer hooked during the whole process.

Due to this, Xperiencify shares that more than 30% of students complete their course, which as you can see is a huge raise from the industry average.

Why choose Xperiencify?

• Gamification of course: In order to make sure more and more students complete your course, Xperiencify creates a whole gaming and competing experience. This is trackable for tutors and fun for students.
• Makes the learning experience memorable: All this gamification makes the whole learning experience more memorable for students. When they complete a section you can motivate them to share their success, hence acquiring more students organically.

Pricing plan

Plan	Annual Pricing
Launch	$42/month
Growth	$125/month
Enterprise	$500/month+

Pathwright

Pathwright is an online course-selling platform that essentially helps you create a complete roadmap to deliver maximum value to your students.

In order to complete the course, students have to complete various tasks such as reading an article, watching a video, completing a course, and much more.

As a student, this step-by-step curation helps in getting a complete understanding and keeps the learning material interesting.

Why choose Pathwright?

• Creating a diversified course roadmap: In order to complete your course, you can ask readers to take various actions. This keeps the ball rolling and shares every medium through which students can learn from.
• Easy to manage dashboard: While you are adding various types of content, and marketing channels the dashboard is easy to learn and use.

Pricing plan

Plan	Annual Pricing
Starter	$89/month
Essentials	$179/month
Complete	$499/month
Enterprise	Custom

Learnworld

Learnworld is an online course-selling platform that aims to help you create a complete online school/institute.

Due to this obvious reason, the app is great for creators that come together and seek to create various types of courses.

Just like any institute, you can have various types of accounts each with its individual role and access to the features.

For students, Learworld helps you create a community where all the tutors and students can easily interact with each other and keep up with each other’s experience and learning.

Why choose Learnworld?

• Build a complete institute: Learnworld is a platform that helps you create a complete online institute where you can have multiple tutors with various courses and tutor accounts.
• Growing your brand: Since the platform helps you create your own experience with a web design and setup, it helps you grow your brand exponentially.

Pricing plan

Plan	Annual Pricing
Starter	$24/month
Pro Trainer	$74.25/month
Learning Center	$211.65/month
Learning Center & Mobile Apps	$410.65/month

Udemy

Udemy has been one of the most popular platforms for online learning which attracts a lot of tutors as well. This is a great platform as it helps new tutors get an already established market that people trust.

At the same time, the platform provides you with all the tools and features to help you curate your course, and sell it using multiple channels.

While the courses can’t be hosted individually under your brand, Udemy does give you the option to reach a lot of customers that are looking for a course like yours sooner.

Why choose Udemy?

• Huge marketplace: Udemy is among the top online marketplace for courses. This helps you reach new audiences much more easily, without putting in the effort to set up a system and operate and manage every aspect of it.
• Faster reach: Since you are selling on a marketplace, you don’t have to start from scratch to build an audience. The platform has already built it for you. And the best part is they trust the platform and hence it’s easy to make a sale.
• Various marketing channels:  To help you sell more and more courses, Udemy has set various methods to sell your course using multi-marketing channels like an email list, affiliate marketing, SEO, and more. If done personally, it would take a lot of time, whereas on Udemy it happens organically or at a very small cost.

Pricing plan

Plan	Annual Pricing
Free	$0

Skillshare

Skillshare is an online course-selling platform that is just like Udemy, but specifically for creative fields. The platform has been actively helping creators and students scale their creativity and has gained a large audience that many new tutors are looking for.

In addition to the simple course creation and selling it online, the platform promotes community interaction. Here, students share their work progress and learn to create a community that keeps on growing with time.

Overall, all this gives a unique learning experience for students, and as a teacher an easy way to reach a large audience and interact with them.

Why choose Skillshare?

• Highly creative audience: Skillshare gives you access to a large audience looking to learn creative skills. Since the platform is popular you don’t have to start from scratch and hence it is easy to reach your audience.
• Engaging with the community: Along with selling the courses, SkillShare also motivates its tutors and students to engage with the course community. If used wisely, this can be a great way to build a long-term brand for future growth.

Pricing plan

Plan	Annual Pricing
Free	$0

Conclusion

In conclusion, choosing the right platform and building a brand around your online courses are key factors for success in the e-learning ecosystem.

By connecting with your students and using their feedback to create relevant courses, you can build a strong community and more easily sell your courses without relying on paid advertising. 

To truly take advantage of both the marketplace and course creation platform, focus on building a strong brand that resonates with your students.

Author Bio:

Divya is a marketer, nature lover & startup enthusiast. Founder of Unifiedist. She has an immaculate experience in GTM strategy & SEO. She always follows her instinct and travels with her Ikigai.