7 Best Online Course Platforms in 2023

The top online course platforms for you to launch your online course business include:

1. EzyCourse
2. Thinkific
3. Teachable
4. Kajabi
5. Podia
6. LearnWorlds
7. Udemy

EzyCourse —

Get paid for your courses and your time with our powerful communities, group chat, or private chat! Make your website completely branded from 250+ amazing pre-made designs or create your own from our powerful drag and drop site builder.

EzyCourse is my top choice for the best online course platform in 2023 to create, host, deliver and sell courses online.

Let’s take a look at the features that sets EzyCourse apart from all other available online course creator platforms.

Course creation

One feature that all online course platforms offer, but EzyCourse brings to you what no other platform does. EzyCourse features an intuitive, easy-to-use course builder, with a wide range of delivery options supported. Drag-and-drop to organise your content into chapters and lessons.

EzyCourse gives you complete control on how you’d want to deliver your content. Choose to bundle courses and sell, or sell courses singly.

You can also choose to drip feed your lessons, in this way making the learning process actively engaging.

EzyCourse offers native certificate creation and customisation options. EzyCourse provides you unlimited customisation options, you can choose and customise your landing page, and also choose which page to show up upon successful checkout completion.

Course dashboard gives you an overall view about your courses all at once, with different filtering options.

Built-in advanced, graded quizzing system

EzyCourse has a very dynamic quiz system. It allows loads of customisations. Choose from single-multiple choice questions, set explanations to each question, add time limits per question or to the whole quiz, set the number of possible retakes or leave it unlimited, also choose if you want to show an answer immediately or at the end of the quiz.

Set your quiz in any way you choose to.

View all your students’ submission in one place, and get insights of how your students did easily from the submission menu on the dashboard.

Pricing

With EzyCourse create and sell unlimited courses, set pricing however you like. Give off promotional content for free and or choose from one-time payment plans, to some specific interval basis subscription plans. EzyCourse also offers support to add tiered pricing for volume purchases. You can set tiered pricing also to be either one-time or subscription based.

Partner Revenue Share

EzyCourse provides you with options to manage your revenue shares. Add other instructors and set who gets what percentage of revenue from your products — courses/communities/group chat/private chat/products/upsells.

You can also keep track of transactions with your revenue partners in EzyCourse itself. EzyCourse calculates due payments from the revenue share percentage and lists it for you, when you owe your partner some amount you can make instant payouts through EzyCourse.

Magic checkout

EzyCourse calls its checkout process magic checkout given all that the checkout magically does for you.

EzyCourse makes checkout a smooth, one-click, friction-free process for your customers.

Your users won’t need to move to and fro to login/sign up before proceeding with checkout. As users enter email for checkout EzyCourse’s system automatically detects if an account exists with that email or not. Existing users can login directly from the checkout page on the other hand new users can register themselves right on the checkout page.

Moreover, emails are captured as soon as they’re entered, even if the user successfully completes checkout or leaves off midway, and this data shows on creators dashboard as magic checkout stats. These statistics will help you as an online course creator to visualise your customers characteristics and behaviour. These combined customer interactions are valuable, actionable information for creators, from which you can reach out to potential leads. So no more missing on leads with EzyCourse’s optimised, streamlined checkout flow.

Upsells

EzyCourse features smart upsells — a feature you won’t find on any other online course platform.

Offer truly unlimited products access to attract more leads.

You can add up to 20 add-ons per product. And in each one of those add-ons EzyCourse gives you unlimited item addition options. Upsells show up on checkout.
With EzyCourse’s smart upsells you can sell more by drawing attention of potential customers.

Mobile apps

A good online course platform should make mobile access to your course content and communities possible. With the rise of smartphone usage, students will now anticipate being able to access courses and interact with people around the course using native mobile apps. So, availability of mobile apps on both Android and iOS platforms is a crucial factor to check while picking any online course platform.

EzyCourse offers completely white-label, branded, robust native mobile applications on both the platforms, allowing your students to catch up their course on-the-go, and not miss any updates no matter wherever they are.

Checkout EzyCourse’s Android version on Google Play Store and iOS version on the Apple App Store.

Site Builder

EzyCourse’s site builder isn’t just any site builder, it in itself can be considered a standalone product. EzyCourse offers a fully featured drag and drop website builder, with over 250+ pre-made blocks and templates to get started with.

You can simply drag and drop components and build beautiful websites without requiring any coding knowledge. The builder gives you loads of customisation options so you can very conveniently design to reflect your brand identity without any limitations. The designs are also built-in responsive.

You can also choose to hire external designers who’ll further customise the code according to your needs, by sharing page links with EzyCourse and give permissions to anyone from around the world without requiring any authentication. You’ll have full control and will be able to revoke access anytime.

Ready-made designs to start

Ready-made blocks and templates EzyCourse site builder offers

EzyCourse team is continuously updating their builder’s design library with trendy designs, so you don’t have to worry about design uniqueness, you’ll always stay updated.

For those who have some technical knowledge they’ll get even more customisation options, and some revenue generation option too. You can add your own styling code and build custom blocks and templates and choose if you want them to featured in EzyCourse’s gallery. If you choose to do so, each time any other creator uses the blocks or templates built by you, you’ll get a revenue share from it.

Communities

Communities are essential to online businesses these days. If you can’t get the people around your products together you lose the opportunity of keeping up the engagement within.

Especially when talking about a learning platform, it’s necessary to keep your students feel connected throughout the journey. Most common online course platforms either feature a very limited forum like feature which they call communities, or completely miss out on one.

Contrary to the norm, EzyCourse brings you super-powerful, indulging community experiences. You have limitless possibilities with EzyCourse. You or your students will no longer miss Facebook, and no longer feel the need of creating Facebook groups to stay connected.

No more switching to platforms for each little feature when there’s EzyCourse. EzyCourse offers built-in Facebook like communities.

Create channels for specific topics to keep discussions easily trackable and manageable. You and your students can express thoughts with different kinds of posts, choose from creating text posts, attach different supported media formats to your posts, add background colours and attract attention towards your posts, or create and run polls. You can also react and comment on posts.

Access communities from both web and app anytime, with mobile apps installed you’ll never miss any activity again. EzyCourse includes real-time activity notifications.

As creators you can sell communities create and sell unlimited communities, either as standalone products or as upsells to your courses.

You can set the pricing any way you like. Either charge one-time payments or give it off as a subscription based product.

You can customise your communities look in many ways. You also get to choose if you’re to allow community members to be able to chat with each other.

Group chat

Apart from the powerful communities EzyCourse also features group and private chats.

Create and sell group chats. Get the real value of your time. Just like communities you can control group’s pricing however you like. Give in groups for free, or as a standalone one-time/subscription based product, or you add them as upsells to your courses or communities.

You can choose if your group members can chat amongst each other privately, or restrict to group only discussions.

Share various media through chats, reply and react to messages, get notified in real-time and help your students instantly.

Private chat

Like group chats EzyCourse also features direct one-to-one conversations.

Enable and sell private chats, set pricing as you wish, and sell private chats as standalone products or as upsells to you courses/communities/groups.

Own storage and CDN solutions

One growing concern of course creators when uploading their content is that if their content is secure, regarding the ownership of their content.

With EzyCourse your content in n 100% safe place, and even then if you hesitate to host your content on their storage, you can enter your own CDN API credentials, and that’s it, your content will use your storage. So you get full control over your content.

Complete white-label email marketing

EzyCourse offers full white-labelled email solutions. With EzyCourse you get all the options you need to bring in your brand identity into your site. Simply add in your own SendGrid API key into the dashboards site information section and you’ll get branded emails rather than emails from noreply@ezycourse.com

If you are new to course creation or just learning how to sell online courses then this How to Sell Online Courses: The Complete Guide is for you.

Thinkific —

Create and sell online courses, build vibrant communities, and monetize memberships — all on a single, scalable platform.

Pros:

• Features an interactive course builder
• Includes landing page customisation capabilities
• Offers white-label solutions
• Engaging community feature
• Zero transaction costs for all plans.

Cons:

• Misses on native marketing tools
• Limited analytics and reporting tools
• Thinkific boasts many features, but they come at a high cost
• Lacks live chat feature
• Supports only very basic email marketing

Thinkific may be the most popular course platforms given they’ve been around in the market for a long time. It does offer some great features but not all are worth the price. EzyCourse gives you all that Thinkific has to offer but in many ways better. EzyCourse’s builder is one of its kind, EzyCourse rolls out mobile apps support whereas Thinkific lags in this case. EzyCourse provides in depth analytics and real-time reporting tools. EzyCourse has a great support team, with live chat support included, which is there for you all day, any day 24/7.

And all this you get on EzyCourse for only a fraction of the cost. Unless you purchase the most expensive plan, Thinkific only offers restricted access to certain services. On the contrary, EzyCourse offers you the most in the basic plan itself.

For instance, if we compare the most popular plans on Thinkific and EzyCourse, we find that Thinkific charges $199 per month while EzyCourse only charges you $129 per month, saving you $70 in addition to giving you almost all the features, including your own branded Android and iOS mobile apps, which Thinkific has no support for.

Teachable —

Transform your knowledge into a thriving business with the best online course platform for creators everywhere.

Pros:

• Simple, easy to use platform for beginners
• Well-optimised checkout process
• Various marketing options
• Includes a landing page editor

Cons:

• Limited content delivery options
• Misses out on key features like a community function
• No support for Android apps
• Adds transaction fees on sales for free and basic plans
• Limited access to features unless you purchase the most expensive plan
• Offers white-labelling, but limited, login and email white-labelling isn’t supported
• Restricted site customisation options with only 3 templates to choose from
• Problems with storing payment details, and sluggish payouts

Similar to Thinkific, Teachable is another very well known online course platform. Teachable gains its popularity due to its simplicity, how quickly creators can get started with Teachable, but as your business grows Teachable will feel very restrictive, having only limited delivery options out of the vast possibilities, and over all this missing out on key features such as community, and Android app excludes Teachable even though it being quite popular.

Though Teachable has iOS app, it’s also reported to sluggish in terms of usage. Also there’s no way to replace and remove Teachable branding from the certain places, and there’s only little site customisation option, so most of Teachable sites end up to look and feel the same. You have no option get your custom branding.

Teachable’s pricing plans are quite a lot similar to EzyCourse’s but if we look at what each of the online course creator platform has to offer, EzyCourse is a clear win win choice.

Kajabi —

The best way to turn your knowledge into income.

Pros:

• SEO-optimised courses
• Excellent sales and marketing features
• Android and iOS mobile apps are available
• 0% transaction fees on any plan

Cons:

• Most expensive platform in the market
• Doesn’t include any free plan
• Restrictive landing page builder makes it hard to customise to fit your brand
• Limited course reporting tools
• No native certificate creation supported
• The community is only an extremely limited forum like feature
• Has a learning curve — difficult to set up

Kajabi — now being around for over a decade, is the most costly online course platforms in the market. That beign said, is the main downside on Kajabi. Even when offering no free plans at all, and featuring 3 high priced plans, starting with $149 monthly, Kajabi places limits on everything it can.

No doubt Kajabi is one of the best marketing course platform as it solely focuses on creating complex marketing systems, while missing out on other engaging course platform features.

In contrast to Kajabi, EzyCourse not only focuses on creating extensive marketing capabilities, but also on creators and learners experience. With EzyCourse for $149 you’ll get almost all of the features Kajabi offers plus more, with unlimited products supported. So it’s very evident that with EzyCourse you get the true value of your money.

Podia —

Build a website, sell courses and digital products, & host communities.

Pros:

• Simple intuitive interface
• Gives membership subscription options
• Allows selling premium communities
• Charges no transaction fees

Cons:

• No support for native mobile apps
• Offers only basic analytics and reporting
• No graded assessment supported
• Adds an 8% transaction fees on the free plan
• Lacks customisation options

Podia being a modern platform is most known for its ease of use. Podia does have some good marketing and sales features and also features a zero-code website builder. But the builder lacks advanced customisation options, unlike EzyCourse’s robust, state-of-the-art site builder.

Lack of graded assessment support, and no native mobile apps are what puts EzyCourse behind. Any good online course platform should give you the power to build, sell and manage your courses altogether.

LearnWorlds —

Create and sell online courses from your own website.

Pros:

• Flexible courses
• Site builder
• Offers white-label mobile apps on both Android and iOS
• Easy content monetization and marketing

Cons:

• Offers no free plan
• Charges a $5 fee per course sale on the starter plan which already costs $29/month
• Checkout process isn’t optimised for sales conversions
• Lack on centralised site-wide themes
• No live-chat/phone support
• Bugs have been reported in the website builder’s typing feature
• Higher learning curve

LearnWorlds is one rising online course platform, with a bunch of great features, including white-label mobile mobile apps support, but only at higher priced plans(from $299/month) also with an add-on price, only to give course access. LearnWorlds mobile apps don’t support communities, so you’re limited in terms of app functionality.

EzyCourse covers these cons for you, offering a free plan, with no transaction fees on any plan, an optimised, smart checkout process, full site branding and customisation capabilities, all in an easy to pickup, intuitive interface with dedicated support 24/7.

Udemy —

Udemy is an online learning and teaching marketplace with over 204000 courses and 54 million students.

Pros:

• Great option for newcomers who want instant student access
• Features quick, easy promotion
• Has support for offering course completion certificates

Cons:

• No personal branding options
• Profit share of 50/50
• Limited course delivery options
• No access to student emails, making lead generation tough
• Lacks true community features

Udemy is a course marketplace, offering instant sales options. Udemy is less of an overall course platform, as it is very restrictive in terms of a complete solution. Udemy mainly only supports video lessons, documents in resources section and only basic quiz. Udemy supports no real interactive community options. Udemy is great for those who want to just get started and reach out to students instantly. But in the long run Udemy isn’t really beneficial, as it doesn’t share students data, so you’ve no information about your potential prospects, and while it doesn’t cost any monthly fee it keeps a lot of the revenue generated.

Moreover your’e content will always have Udemy’s name plastered over, there’s no way Udemy allow you to brand yourself making it hard to build a community of students who’ll stick to your content identifying your brand.

Conclusion

Having discussed about the pros and cons of several different widely used online course platforms, you see how you can deliver your knowledge and generate income from it. With the growing demand on e-learning, creators hold a huge potential of revenue generation, if invested in wisely.

With EzyCourse you won’t regret your investments, you’ll get the actual return of your investments and build and nurture a healthy network around your brand, while leaving people wonder that these experiences were totally custom built from scratch.

So, what are you waiting for, get started by creating your free account now, and check out yourself.