In this guide, I’m going to walk you through 17+ best online course platforms, along with our top 5 choices, so you can find the right combo of pricing and features you need.
Who am I and why should you trust these reviews?
My name is and I run Blog Growth Engine, a course that makes about $3 million a year. My course business has over 20 employees from all types of marketing, tech, and software backgrounds.
And, honestly, my income would be a lot lower if it wasn’t for one of these tools.
Online education is the future and if you want to make money selling your own knowledge, you’ve come to the right place.
Let’s get started.
What Are the Best Online Course Platforms?
Here are my top picks for the best online course platforms this year.
1. Thinkific.
Best Overall Online Course Platform (Free or $49/mo)
I love Thinkific and use it for my online business, selling my course Blog Growth Engine. They provide an excellent student experience, easy integrations with Stripe and checkout providers to make collecting payments easy, and they have an expert support team that’s been super helpful. Overall, I recommend Thinkific wholeheartedly as my #1 recommendation for selling online courses
Thinkific is the best overall platform to sell online courses.
It’s my #1 choice because the pricing is precisely in line with other affordable options on this list, and it can deliver a high-end course experience.
Course websites can be customized, and you’d never guess they were Thinkific.
Sales pages are highly optimized and look great.
Student dashboards look nice and are customizable (you can add videos, text, and any downloadable file type to the same page).
You can send your entire course at once or drip it out over time.
Free Wistia video hosting (an immense value).
Here’s another take.
“Thinkific literally has everything you need right out of the box, and the trial experience is probably the easiest I’ve come across,” said Andrew McGuire, President of Income Growth Engine and Former VP of Pipeline at Armorblox. “I was able to upload about five course videos within a few minutes of launching my trial, which is really helpful to beginners.”
Now, even though Thinkific plans start at just $49/month, even huge brands like Fiverr use Thinkific to sell online courses.
I would have never guessed that this massive learning database was a Thinkific site until their team told me:
Their best (and most popular) Pro Plan offers a one-month free trial to get started.
First, this plan gives you the ability to create unlimited courses. It also features memberships and bundles, advanced pricing options, landing pages, certificates, and marketing tools.
Here’s a little preview of the experience of creating a Thinkific course.
All that you do is create and customize your course with their drag-and-drop editor:
Here’s what people are saying about Thinkific:
“You need to get on Thinkific. The team is creative, reliable, and offers unbeatable support. They always make sure all my bases are covered and, as a business owner, that’s invaluable.” – Lewis Howes.
“We’ve grown ours by teaching our audience how to scale and grow their business through online training. We couldn’t have done it without Thinkific.” – John Lee Dumas, Entrepreneurs on Fire.
“I seriously can’t be more impressed with your customer support team. They are the perfect blend of efficient and personable. It’s like having my very own IT department.” – Kim Garnett.
Free ($0/month): Great to test out the features and get a feel for the interface.
Basic ($36/month): Unlimited courses and students, 1 administrator, drip (scheduled) content, custom domain, email integrations, and coupons.
Start ($74/month): Basic features, 1 administrator, plus memberships and bundles, private courses, certificates, advanced HTML and CSS editing, assignments, live lessons via Zoom, and priority support.
Grow ($149/month): Pro features, plus 3 administrators, onboarding package, and unlimited growth package (best for big teams).
Expand ($374/month): Pro features, plus 5 administrators, onboarding package, and unlimited growth package (best for big teams).
What I Like/Dislike About Thinkific:
Like:
Marketing automation and email features.
Simple free plan to get started.
You can fully edit the code of your course site.
Customizable course certificates.
Custom domains.
Affiliate marketing help and reporting.
Dislike:
There’s a slight learning curve to the setup.
Integration with social media networks and CRMs would be a nice touch.
Product Updates:
Thinkific Payments allows you to have a faster performance checkout page, reducing the dropoff rate. This means that you can keep more of your hard-earned money!
Integrated order bumps functionality means that the average order value on your Thinkific site can be increased by offering a small add-on product at checkout.
Overall, I recommend the Thinkific platform as my #1 choice for course creators and entrepreneurs who are serious about creating, marketing, and selling their own course content.
With my link below, you can get started today with a one-month free trial of their Pro Plan.