As working online becomes more and more commonplace, online study courses gain popularity as well. But to offer your knowledge to the world, you need a platform to work with. That’s where online course platforms come into play.
There is certainly a wide variety of platforms that have course builders for more universal purposes and specialized builders that would suit your specific niche.
To save you from the headache of figuring out what platform would be perfect for you, here are some of the best options on offer right now.
1. Gurucan
An extremely strong newcomer in the world of online course platforms, Gurucan is a mobile-friendly platform that offers all-in-one solutions for online course building. The fact that Gurucan is extremely mobile-friendly and available for both iOS and Android users is crucial for its effectiveness as many people tend to learn via their phones, be it due to limitations or just to learn on the go.
Creating online courses is easy as Gurucan offers a full range of features so that you can create video lessons, training tasks, and quizzes. Plus, you can always keep in contact with your students through built-in chat and report systems.
Gurucan also has a very useful dashboard using which you can run your blog, set up your students’ tasks, and manage their subscriptions. Gurucan also has a large assortment of integrations from YouTube and Vimeo to PayPal. And if you need some other specific tool, there are even options for independent integration as well.
As far as payment methods are concerned, Gurucan has annual and monthly options. But there are also one-time purchase deals available on AppSumo that are a lot cheaper and more cost-efficient. In these deals, you get a large amount of bandwidth to support your hosted videos and plenty of marketing emails to promote your course.
Finally, let’s not forget that Gurucan supports white-labeling, so you won’t need to worry about watermarks or your students seeing which platform you use.
2. Skillshare
Skillshare is an online course platform dedicated to teaching useful skills. To achieve that, it mainly focuses on hosting video classes that are segmented into smaller bits so that students can pace themselves. And while it is free to use, it also offers teacher partnership programs through which you can earn a profit thanks to enrollment royalties and premium referrals. This becomes available to you after you have 25 students enrolled in your classes.
Unlike other course-building platforms, Skillshare is based on selling the entire experience rather than having individual courses be put up for sale.
3. Kajabi
As far as having a platform that is focused on selling, there probably isn’t a better option than Kajabi. It offers a myriad of tools aimed at creating lovely landing pages and selling points.
Since Kajabi has a large assortment of templates you can use to grow your course, you can easily have your site up and running as soon as possible. And while its prices are a bit high compared to other platforms, Kajabi is packed full of features that more than compensate for those prices.
4. Thinkific
Thinkific stands out amongst its competition by providing its customers with a complete solution without charging transaction fees. It’s more geared towards smaller endeavors, focusing on a streamlined product rather than pandering to complicated details.
Plus, its free plan has a decent amount of features, unlike other platforms that can only be utilized when you go for their premium plans.
5. Udemy
Udemy was one of the first online course platforms that made teaching and marketing courses easily accessible to many people. It did that by offering customers free accounts if they wish to sell premium courses.
Udemy offers helpful marketing tips and tools, so even if your first course isn’t doing that well, Udemy has you covered. Udemy also stands out because it has a minimum amount required when it comes to creating lessons, and all your videos need to be longer than 30 minutes.
A far as prices go, Udemy is free if you are selling a premium course, of which Udemy will charge you various percentages depending on how your course was found, for example, through a search or a referral.
6. Teachable
When it comes to building your course website, other platforms are not as stylish and as flexible as Teachable.
If templates aren’t your style, you can even build your own from scratch.
Teachable is compatible with all the standard Dropbox, OneDrive, and Google Drive formats, so sharing content won’t be a bother at all. Plus, it offers a huge range of options for pricing your courses, as well as an email marketing tool so you can filter your client emails without a hassle.
Teachable’s prices start from $29 a month, with its basic plan offering all the features you would need to start.
7. Podia
Podia, unlike other platforms, is more focused on the marketing aspect of course management and the creation of a perfect storefront for your course.
All of the templates Podia offers are similar in their formatting, so if you find other options overwhelming, Podia has got you covered. You can even use it to pre-launch your site instead of instantly publishing it to garner more attention.
Podia also offers you the ability to create a community page. Pricing starts at around $40 a month.
8. LearnWorlds
The great thing about LearnWorlds is that it can offer your platform the ability to be used by multiple teachers simultaneously (as if you were running an entire school). And while they can write their lectures and courses, the publishing part does remain the admin’s responsibility (yours, for example).
With various tools and integrations to ease the creation of courses, LearnWorlds helps you create the course you want at a reasonably low price of $24 a month.
9. Mighty Networks
If you want to focus on building a strong community, then Mighty Networks is just for you. With it, you can manage your membership prices, from one-time deals to subscriptions. And if you manage multiple courses, you can still separately price them.
As you create your community, Mighty Networks enables your members to actively participate in the course through messages and posts (that support even images and links).
Without online courses, Mighty Networks is free to use, but with online courses included, the prices start at about $80 a month.
Conclusion
All in all, there are plenty of ways for you to create and sell courses online. They range from general all-in-one solutions to specific niche solutions. And while specific niche solutions are great at what they do, an all-in-one solution like Gurucan (especially considering the fact that you can avoid pesky monthly payments with it) might be of more use to you since specialization can also lead to the restriction of features.