Top 6 Online Course Platforms to Look Out for In 2024 (2024)

Web 2.0 saw the emergence of creator-based interactive internet. With the surge of internet based education, the eLearning industry is richer than ever with a staggering 900% growth since 2000, reported by Skill Scouter.

If you have a skill worth sharing to the world, you can easily share it now and also get paid for it. Having an online course uploaded on the internet that anyone can buy is also a great source of passive income.

With a course ready to be published, the only remaining question in the mind of a creator is – which is the best online course creation platform?

No worries! We’re here to answer the question here. This blog will cover the basics of online course platforms and give you plenty of options to choose from to host your next online course!

Let’s get into it.

What is an Online Course Platform?

An online course platform is a software that can host online courses and lets digital creators create, sell, and maintain their online courses within their platform.

For students, online course platforms are online spaces that offer digital learning materials such as course videos, infographics, textbooks, PDFs, and a learning community to interact with other learners and teachers alike.

An online course platform can be members only; meaning, only students who are subscribed members can access it. It can be pay-per-course, or a free open source learning platform where anyone can access any content.

Both teachers and learners can track the student’s progress through the course module in an online course platform.

Top 6 Online Course Platforms in 2024

After the Covid surge in late 2019, the world saw an eLearning boom that’s still in motion. The boom inspired so many online course platforms that today, it’s very difficult to choose just one online course platform for creating online courses.

With that in mind, we picked only 6 of the most prominent online course platforms that excel in every respect so we could narrow down your options and help you choose the one platform that’ll enable you to share your knowledge to the world.

Let’s dive in!

1. EzyCourse

EzyCourseis an all-in-one online course platform that offers a complete set of tools for creating your online courses. You can upload a variety of different types of multimedia such as – video, audio, text, PPT, PDF and make them into assignments and downloadable content for your students.

With EzyCourse, you can create online courses and organize them into modules, chapters, or lessons. You can also bundle courses together and sell them at the pricing of your choice. This also allows you to pre-sell your courses and generate interest and anticipation amongst your students.

Creating drip content is a popular method of getting the students engaged with the course materials, now you can easily disperse your course materials in drip method and keep the learners fully engaged with your online course in EzyCourse.

Along with being an all-in-one online course platform, EzyCourse is also a complete site building platform that lets you create a variety of business sites with the help of its powerful site building tools.

You can do your own branding with EzyCourse, as it offers a completewhite-label branded mobileapp in its elite plan and as a one-time purchase. And if you’re wondering, you can remove its branding from the very basic plan with EzyCourse.

And to top it all, EzyCourse has 17+ add-ons, including advanced analytics, marketing integrations, and ecommerce tools. You can accept payments from a global audience with support for popular payment gateways like PayPal, Stripe, Google Pay, and more.

Notable features:

EzyCourse pricing:

2. Kajabi

Kajabiis an online course creation platform that has a strong focus on marketing and sales features. This is an all inclusive platform that enables you to create, market and sell your online course within the platform.

The most standout feature of Kajabi is its thorough and well defined sales funnel. It lets you create an entire marketing funnel, starting from thelanding pageand onboarding tomarketing emailsand final checkout.

Kajabi does include almost all the features you need for crafting your online course, but it comes with a hefty price tag of $119 per month at minimum! And the Kajabi branding removal will get you to $159/month.

If the pricing is not an issue for you, and you already don’t use any other services like email marketing, CRM and such, Kajabi can get you through for most of the use cases.

Notablefeatures:

Kajabi pricing:

3. Thinkific

Thinkificis an online course platform known for its ease of use. Its landing page builder is one of the simplest ones out there. It offers a free plan consisting of quite a few important features that can be scaled to fit your needs as they grow.

Unlike some online course platforms you don’t begin with a blank canvas in thinkific while creating an online course. Thinkific houses a ton of different templates such as – pre-sell, flagship course, mini-course, membership resource library, webinar replay and more.

Just get your website copies and the course content ready and choose one of the pre-built templates and you're ready to go!

The templates themselves are enriched with features like quizzes, surveys, downloads, and instructor messages that you can place strategically throughout the course materials.

Notablefeatures:

Thinkific pricing:

4. Teachable

Teachableis a no-code online course platform for creators who want tobuild online courses, run online coaching, and offer digital downloads to the learners. They offer a simple drag-and-drop course builder that lets you upload course materials in various ways such as – videos, audio, templates, guides, and more.

You can also build your brand alongside your online course with Teachables customization options without writing a single line of code.

Although it's still in beta Teachablesgenerative AIcan be useful in generating course outlines, some lesson content, and section summaries.

With student centric features like comments, quizzes, and certifications of completion build long-term relationships and retain your audience.

Notablefeatures:

Teachable pricing:

5. Podia

Podiais another all-in-one platform where you can create, manage, and sell your online courses. Like every other all-in-one platform, you canbuild a website, create an online community, host coaching and webinars, and offer digital downloads to your customers.

Building a course on Podia is easy. You can easily upload multiple multimedia content like text, videos, audio, and offer quizzes, coaching sessions, and file downloads to your students.

Once you have your course materials ready, you can make use of Podia's beginner-friendly page builder to design your online course, sales page, or membership website.

The online course platform also offers email marketing tools, lets you run affiliate programs, and communicate with your customers from the dashboard.

Podia supports embedments from 1900+ sources, including YouTube, Google Slides, Vimeo, SoundCloud, GitHub, and Google Forms.

Notablefeatures:

Podia pricing:

6. LearnWorlds

LearnWorldsis an all-in-one platform that offers online course building and enables you to create engaging elearning content with ease. The online course platform helps you create interactive courses through tons of different multimedia uploading options.

LearnWorlds’ most standout feature is the interactivity it offers. They feature a fully interactive video player. Video hotspots can be added alongside overlay images, quizzes, tables of content, links, and more so the learners can interact with the learning materials while taking up the lesson.

Their community building tools help establish smooth communication between you and your user-base. These interaction based education prompts learners to take it a bit further and be a brand advocate for the business.

Notablefeatures:

LearnWorld pricing:

Types of Online Course Platforms

There are different types of online course Online courses can be created using different types of online course platform. You may choose to build your own online course platform or opt for any of the existing online course platforms based on your goals and preferences.

Let us know about the different kinds of online course platforms that you can choose your online course to be built upon –

Dedicated online course platform

These online course platforms are designed and built specifically for hosting, building and selling online courses. The sole purpose of these platforms is helping online course creators market and sell their courses.

Platforms dedicatedly built for online courses often offer features particularly helpful for creating online courses, but they might not serve any other use cases other than online course creation.

All-in-one platforms: All-in-one platforms offer a complete solution for many other use cases other than just creating courses.

Their service includes course creation, hosting, and tools for marketing your courses, and an array of different payment gateways so you can collect the payments.

Enterprise level Learning Management Systems (LMS): Standalone LMS platforms are built for large scale learning management operations like online colleges and universities.

These LMS’ are often custom made and tailored in a way that fits the needs of the specific institution. With an enterprise level LMS, educational institutions and companies can initiate a smooth learning experience for the learners.

Online course marketplace: Online course marketplaces are platforms where you can upload your online course and the platform will get your course to the students in an existing platform.

You can choose to host courses on these marketplaces without any prior investments and get your course listed amongst others. These marketplaces often have the option to market your courses within the platform.

Although you can get your course listed for free, they do charge you a percentage of revenue generated from your course in return. Online course marketplaces are great for individual creators who are just starting out and need some help to grow an audience.

WordPress LMS plugins: If you already have a WordPress site, you don’t need to migrate from it to host your online courses. Rather, you can use a WordPress LMS plugin to host your online course in WordPress.

You can make use of WordPress plugins such as – Tutor LMS, LearnDash, and LifterLMS. These plugins can be integrated with your WordPress site and let you create, market and sell your courses from your WordPress site.

How to Choose the best Online Course Platform?

Now that you know about the basics on online course platforms, it’s time to get to know about the process we followed in choosing the best online course platforms listed below.

We also insist that you do your own research on this and to help you with your research, here’s how to choose the best online course platform –

Define Your Goals And Requirements

Like every new venture, you should start by defining your goals and where you want to end up with your career. As an online course creator, you should determine these things –

Once you’ve defined these factors, you can start looking for the online course platform that can –

The User Experience

When it comes to online course platforms, both the teachers and learners alike need a smooth user experience. If the online course platform you chose is hard to navigate through, it’ll hinder both your and your students, harming the overall productivity.

The absolute must haves in an online course platform are –

Choosing an online course platform that offers agood UI and provides a good UXcan be the reason students will choose your courses over other creators.

Feature Set and Customization

There are so many online course platforms to choose from and everyone’s offering their own feature sets and customization options at different price points. Now, you may need some specific features for your online course site depending on your preferences.

But there are some must-have features that make an online course platform what it is. Here are some of the must-have features you should look for in an online course platform –

Although we’ve talked about other features before and will talk about them more, these features are also absolute necessities when building your online course.

Marketing And Sales Tools

You’ve created the best content and learning materials for your students, but all of it will go in vain if you can’t get your awesome course to the learners.

How do you make your online course reach the right audience?

Through the right marketing tools.

You need to attract your audience first in order to engage them with your online course. And you can make use of certain marketing tools to market your online course and in turn attract the learners. Some of the marketing and sales tools that can be your saving grace are –

Customer Support And Community

Before considering any tech tools for your business, the best practice is to inquire if the tool has a dedicated and responsive support team. Even tech giants like Facebook and Youtube have their occasional hiccups and service downtimes and when an online tool faces a calamity like this, the users need some reassurance at the very least.

The support team communicates with your customers voluntarily or as per requirement and resolves if any issue arises or the customer faces a challenge using the product or service.

Having a sturdy and helpful support team helps you in critical situations through all of the communication channels including email, live chat, or phone.

Another nice bonus in an online course platform is a community base. An online community can help you throughout your course creation journey through discussion and mutual problem-solving.

Pricing And Scalability

Different online course platforms have different pricing plans and structure. Some platforms offer tiered pricing based on features, number of courses, or student enrollment, others may charge you a flat rate or a transaction fee per sale.

The scalability of an online course platform is also another important factor in the online course creation. The online course creation platform should be able to help you throughout your business run no matter how big your business or user-base grows.

You should look for an online course platform that can support you at your full growth with a sustainable pricing, without breaking your bank!

Final Thoughts

These were some of our handpicked choices for the best online course platform. Our goal was to lay in front of you, the best contenders for the tools that can help you launch your next online course platform.

We hope we were able to do our part in helping you in your course creation journey. Now it’s your turn to try out, deeply assess and make the final decision.