5 Best Online Course Hosting Platforms


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.

Read Review

2) Top E-Learning🥈

Udemy

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

Read Review

3) Elite Education 🥉

Coursera

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

Read Review


So, you are in the market for an online course hosting 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 Hosting Platforms Specifically

Online course hosting platforms allow coaches, instructors, and teachers to host lectures and virtual classes on a custom domain. However, that’s the bare minimum for online course hosting. A platform that offers quality lead management, campaign formulation, sales analytics, and periodic progress checks will be the perfect fit for this category. Have a look at the products below to choose the online course hosting platform specifically:

1. 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.

2. LearnWorlds

LearnWorlds is a course content creation platform that claims to be more adaptable and technologically superior to its competitors. LearnWorlds helps you engage learners with interactive videos, group sessions, assessments, or surveys. With its beautifully laid-out interface, you get the most versatile course experience.

LearnWorlds is a user-friendly and robust online learning platform for entrepreneurs, small businesses, and enterprises. It was built in 2014 and has grown with a strong base of passionate users.

LearnWorlds includes features to help you schedule your course content, conduct live classes, and support student engagement. Overall, LearnWorlds is excellent for creating interactive courses for your students, and its enhanced quizzes & community features are excellent at keeping students engaged.

LearnWorlds Features

Here are some exclusive features of LearnWorlds:

Flexible Courses: With LearnWorlds, you are just a few clicks away from creating profoundly engaging content for your digital academy. It turns your online courses into a meaningful and exciting learning experience for your audience. You can leverage the wealthiest learning activity library with, without a doubt, the most customizable lesson players on the market to create a highly flexible training experience that keeps the learners engaged.

Website Builder: LearnWorlds offers a stunning website builder for eLearning that requires no coding. With LearnWorlds, you can point and click through several ready-made, fully customizable elements to build your online academy without the dev time and hassle. Additionally, you can create multiple versions of your website in a flash for promotional offers.

Marketing Tools: LearnWorlds offers a powerful arsenal of marketing tools at your fingertips to maximize your sales. You can upsell and cross-sell with irresistible offers, plus structure products to give your customers more options. Additionally, you can sell the desired number of seats to an organization and give your customers the control they expect while reducing the administrative effort.

Analytics and Reports: LearnWorlds provides in-depth insights on your learning business impact. You can dive deeper into user progress, engagements, financial metrics, and course insights. LearnWorlds helps you delve into your learners’ content consumption data. You can identify bottlenecks and optimize content to improve course quality and performance. Moreover, you can automate report distribution and keep your crucial stakeholders up-to-date.

SCORM: LearnWorlds can play any SCORM or HTML5 package you upload, enabling you to deliver your online courses with greater ease and flexibility. LearnWorlds stores session data and allows users to revisit learning activities without the fear of resuming. Moreover, LearnWorlds helps you reduce the costs of content creation and LMS integration by allowing you to design eLearning content portable between multiple platforms.

LearnWorlds Pricing

LearnWorlds offers 4 Pricing options for its online course creation and hosting platform.

The “Starter” plan is priced at $29/month and charges a $5 fee per course sale. It offers a custom domain, unlimited paid courses, a site builder, assessments, 1-1 sessions, and a built-in community.

The “Pro Trainer” plan is priced at $99/month and does not charge any transaction fee. It offers complete courses and landing pages, customizable course players, live classes via Zoom, and affiliate management.

The “Learning Center” plan is priced at $299/month and does not charge transaction fees. It offers interactive videos, bulk user actions, auto-transcripts, user segments, and course insight reports.

The “High Volume & Corporate” plan offers customizable pricing. It provides custom bulk enrollments, premium cloud servers, flexible invoicing, and tailored pricing options.

3. 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.

4. Podia

Podia is a learning management system and online course creation platform that helps you create, host, launch, sell and manage your online courses, digital downloads, webinars, and memberships. With Podia, you can get recurring payments from your audience by providing them with continuous services.

Podia gives you everything you need to grow at each stage of your journey. It lets you build a website, host a community and start selling digital products, all for free. Whether you’re just starting out or already have a thriving business, Podia can help you reach the next milestone. Additionally, it enables you to give your website, products, and community a clean, professional look that’s easy to build yourself.

Podia Features

Here are some exclusive features of Podia:

Online Courses: Podia makes it easy to build an online course with a beautiful and clean look that your customers will love. You can customize your entire site in minutes without designing or coding skills. With Podia, you can add media and testimonials to your sales page, customize branding, control all elements on your layout and see real-time previews. Additionally, you can ensure your course students genuinely understand your material with a multiple-choice quiz at the end of your lessons.

Digital Downloads: Podia allows creators to sell digital downloads like eBooks and worksheets. You can build your subscribers by offering some products for free. With Podia, a free digital download product is all it takes to provide a lead magnet. Moreover, when you host your products in Podia, you can automatically use the upsell feature to offer additional recommendations after a sale. With Podia, you can create a clean, professional-looking sales page.

Affiliate Marketing: With Podia, you can build your affiliate program and invite whomever you want. Whether that means past customers who wish to help sell your work, affiliate marketers who promote your launches for commission, or other creators with whom you collaborate and swap marketing. Podia makes it easy to pay people commissions for promoting your product by allowing you to set custom amounts for milestones or use a default site-wide commission structure.

Email Marketing: Podia gives you the power of an email marketing platform without paying extra. You can send broadcast emails, build automated funnels, and get rich email analytics to the exact ROI. Podia allows you to make your email list by adding email signup forms to any page on your Podia site. You can share one-off updates with your entire list or send more targeted updates to specific segments. You can also track and analyze open rates, clicks, conversion rates, and more from your dashboard.

Embeds: With Podia, you can ember product listings for your course, membership, or download. You can create a customized button, product card, or hyperlink to sell your online course. You can copy-and-paste a code snippet into any site, including WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, Unbounce, LeadPages, and more. Embedding ensures your site visitors can buy your products without leaving the page.

Podia Pricing

Podia offers 4 Pricing options for its online course hosting platform.

The “Free” plan is priced at $0 and charges 8% transaction fees. It offers one download and coaching product, email marketing, draft courses, and community.

The “Mover” plan is priced at $39/month and charges no transaction fees. It offers a complete website, unlimited downloads and coaching, draft webinars, and chat support.

The “Shaker” plan is priced at $89/month and offers affiliate marketing, unlimited course and webinar creation, embedded checkout, and link tracking.

The “Earthquaker” plan is priced at $199/month and offers priority support, onboarding calls, custom branding, and unlimited email campaigns.

5. Skool

Skool puts your community course and event schedule together in one place and provides a single login with a unified search. Skool uses gamification to make education engaging and fun. Students earn points by adding value to others and leveling up by learning. The top students get shown on the leaderboards.

With Skool, you can post, like, comment, attach files, and organize polls. Skool has rich user profiles with activity charts, contributions, course progress, and bios. You can find posts, comments, course content, and members with one search. Additionally, admins can email and broadcast all their students with a click.

Skool Features

Here are some exclusive features of Skool:

Community and Classroom: Skool offers a dedicated space for group discussions. You can interact with other Skool users in the community section and participate in polls. With Skool’s community, your engagement increases and helps you learn collectively with other students. Moreover, you can put your courses in the same place as your community. Skool enhances your course completion rate by offering progress tracking and searchable transcripts.

Scheduling and Gamification: Skools allows users to schedule group events within the calendar. It ensures more people attend your live sessions by sending reminder emails before the Livestream starts. Moreover, you can make your courses fun by offering rewards and creating a gamified experience. It increases the learner’s motivation and incentivizes engagement by unlocking higher-level courses.

Email Broadcasts: Skool lets you broadcast emails to all members with one click. You don’t need to segment your mailing lists, as Skool automatically sends the broadcasted emails to all members. Additionally, you can chat with members, follow interesting posts, tune your preferences and get email digests of popular posts. With Skool, you can use 1 Profile for all the communities, courses, or groups.

Search and Metrics: Skool offers a single search box to help you find posts, comments, course content, or members. Once you type a keyword in the search box, Skool will automatically pull up all the relevant posts, discussions, or mentions of the keyword. You can also monitor community health with a single dashboard and critical metrics. With Skool, you can track growth, engagement, and progress at the group or member level.

Auto Affiliate: Skool helps you increase student enrollments and monetization by offering a 40% monthly subscription for every one of your members that creates a group. With Skool, you can have an additional income source and generate maximum revenue from your affiliations and courses.

Skool Pricing

Unlike other online course platforms, Skool offers one Subscription plan with everything included. There are no hidden fees, and you can create unlimited courses. You can buy the subscription for $99 per month.

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 hosting platforms?

An online course hosting platform allows building and managing training programs with learning materials that enable live teaching of specific subjects or many different topics. Online education platforms provide high-quality courses built around contemporary video content and interaction within the class.

If you are starting, hosting your course in the marketplace is likely the easiest way to make your first sale and confirm the demand for your course’s subject matter. The most significant benefit to hosting your class on an online course platform is that it drives your sales directly from the marketing efforts. Another advantage is that they provide you with access to an existing large pool of potential students.

Suppose you are willing to create and sell online courses and want to keep all of the revenues to yourself, with complete control of the branding and student experience. In that case, self-hosted online course platforms such as Thinkific should be the first place you look.

You can offer courses individually or as bundles and choose between one-time fees, payment plans, or subscriptions. Many online course hosting platforms provide integrations with third-party platforms so that you can select site builders or marketing suites.

Online course hosting platforms combine features from content management systems (like WordPress) and eCommerce software (like WooCommerce) to enable entrepreneurs and educators to create and publish online courses with ease, monetizing them in the process.

Online Course Hosting Platforms, A Summary

As an instructor, you can set up topics that guide the conversation and incorporate live events into your courses, whether online or in person. They offer more than just a platform for conducting classes. You can build your website, hold webinars, and use inbuilt tools for email marketing.

Teachable allows you to create and host online courses or offer online coaching and make a consistent income, all from a platform used by the best online teachers in the world, reaching millions of students worldwide. It is our suggested pick for the best online course hosting 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 .