Last Updated on May 17, 2022
This is a list of the Top Online Course Platforms in 2022.
Online learning hasn’t been this popular since the day the internet was born.
And the pandemic has only acted as a catalyst to the whole situation making online courses not just the present but the future of learning as well.
Online education is not only less cost-intensive but also easily accessible at any time of the day.
The barriers to entry are low and the quality of content is high.
Also, the e-learning industry is riding a rocket ship and according to Forbes, the industry is expected to reach the $325 billion mark by 2025. In fact, in the past year alone, online courses made well over $46 billion.
There’s no reason to not pivot to online teaching if you’re an instructor, coach, teacher, or professional trainer.
The demand for online courses (be it in any niche) is soaring like never before and it’s the best time for you to create your own course on a subject you’re an expert in and share your expertise with not hundreds but thousands of students online.
Look, we know it’s easier said than done as creating a course, course website, uploading content, membership, hosting, distributing, payment collection, and marketing can all be intimidating to even begin.
That’s where these online course platforms shine the brightest. These online course marketplaces do all the heavy lifting for you and take care of all the technical know-how, so you can just focus on delivering high-quality content.
These technologically advanced platforms have made it super easy to create and sell courses online.
In this blog post, we’ll be sharing the best in class online training platforms available in 2022 that are easy to use, provide scalability, and are affordable.
Here’s a list of 17 Best Online Course Platforms in 2022.
1. Teachable
Teachable is a cloud-based online course platform.
It provides a course-builder interface that is user-friendly and largely intended for beginners.
Teachable is by far the largest online course platform in the online learning industry.
The platform has well over 100,000 instructors and has helped the users earn well over $500 million.
Some of the big names like the New York Times, John Lee Dumas, and Pat Flynn make use of this platform, a sign that they really trust it.
To make use of this platform, you only have to insert your content in the templates that are ready-made.
Thereafter, you alter the template as per your unique needs and expectations.
You also have the advantage of setting up everything you need from your personal dashboard.
These include the payments, affiliate center, and sales pages.
An in-house payment processor also exists to handle the payment issues for you.
A recent feature dubbed ‘Discover’ has also been added.
It is basically an online course storefront that is presently undergoing tremendous improvements.
Discover lets you feature your course so that you may make extra cash.
2. Thinkific
Next on the list is Thinkific.
It is also an online hosted platform that empowers you to generate and sell out online courses using your own brand name.
The platform does not however incorporate a sales funnel builder or an email marketing platform.
Instead, it mainly focuses on the provision of core features for the generation and sales of your online courses.
With that said, Thinkific is still great for hosting online courses and engaging scholars.
Among others, it gives you the ability to add numerous contents like surveys, PDFs, tests, quizzes, and videos to your courses.
In this way, you get to deliver your content in ways that are professional by use of the built-in course players.
Other than that, you may also create community forums, drip your course contents, and issue out certificates.
You may also create learning paths along with the prerequisites and the lesson locking.
As pertains to site building, this platform provides you with a bunch of themes and a further powerful site builder that enables you to craft a great-looking website and generate the sales pages simply without having to draft any code.
Over and above this, the platform also confers the essential selling tools like payment processing, 1-click upsells, bundling, and coupons, among others.
Insofar as its pricing is concerned, the platform enables you to use the core features such as content hosting free of charge.
Alternatively, you may also upgrade to the Basic plan at a cost of $49 per month or the PRO Plan at a cost of $99 per month to access extra features.
The best thing concerning its pricing policy is that it is devoid of the transaction fees, a fact that makes it the most reasonably priced of all that be in the market.
3. Kajabi
If you are mainly intent on delivering excellent learning experiences, with a great checkout and unbridled access to digital products at affordable prices, Kajabi might be the leading online course platform to look up to.
Kajabi also performs well when crafting landing pages and sales funnels for your products/courses.
That is given its provisions of the resources and the tools you may need to convert would-be clients to actual full-paying customers.
You will also fall in love with the fact that you can and will indeed handle all of your e-mail marketing campaigns within this platform exclusively.
Nonetheless, if you have already crafted a list with an external email marketing platform, you need to fret not as this solution is still capable of integrating many solutions like the Active Campaign, MailChimp, and Aweber.
Just if you engage the content marketing on a serious note, this platform also provides a pretty robust blogging resource.
It is not really as powerful as that of WordPress but is nonetheless way ahead of those of its competing peers.
On the whole, it is also one of the most complicated solutions that the markets have to offer as of now.
It is mainly intended for speakers, authors, coaches, and solopreneurs.
Just about anyone who would like to create a greatly-looking website to market and sell out their goods will find it awesome.
In spite of the many features it possesses and the functionalities it possesses, this platform is pretty friendly to beginners.
In case you have never created an online course prior to this, you will be pleased to note that this platform provides many handy templates that will help you create membership-based products, evergreen training, comprehensive courses, and mini teaser-style courses.
All you have to do is insert the content in one of the themes, and add or erase any elements you deem necessary or appropriate. It is as simple as that.
The basic plan of Kajabi costs as little as $119 per month for one website.
This plan serves three pipelines and three products while at the same time grants you unlimited access to the marketing emails.
4. Podia
Podia is a popular online course platform that is capable of building an entire storefront.
It gives you the tools and the power to generate all the educational contents you may possibly be in want of.
You may generate multiple online courses, generate digital downloads, put in place the necessary membership sites, and host them all in one place.
Podia is easier to make use of.
It also handles a vast array of tools like VAT and video-hosting, seamlessly.
In addition to all these, it also possesses an extensive range of features that give you the ability to tackle everything within the platform.
Its templates look great to the eyes. They also convert well and are easier to modify.
Its landing page gives you a peek into the course, a table of contents, a breakdown of the contents, the creator’s bio, and the frequently asked questions.
You can also make use of this platform to put in place separate landing pages for your courses, the digital downloads, and the membership alternatives.
This is pretty much the same as possessing many dedicated landing pages that boost the rates of conversion.
After you are through with generating your online course, you have the option of publishing it straightaway or pre-launching it to try and bring in some orders.
Yet again, Podia can aid you in pre-launching by enabling you to put in place lead nurturing campaigns and teaser content.
The built-in email marketing tools are also great for your use too!
They let you send out the newsletters, put in place the drip campaigns, and expand your lists.
Also, they let you dissect your list on the basis of the courses in which they are enrolled not to mention gaining access to the wealth of data concerning the performance of your emails like the click and open rates.
Over and above your courses, you may also sell out digital downloads such as eBooks, cheat sheets, audio files, and assessments uniquely in the forms of digital downloads.
Additionally, you may also put in place your personal private membership site to build and share with the community.
Also, your private membership site may be made accessible via a variety of membership plans.
One last feature worth pointing out is the Live Chat. This is one of the many platforms that bears a seamlessly integrated Live Chat feature that maximizes the lead conversion considerably.
5. WizIQ
WizIQ is intended to provide the teachers and the educators with a simple solution to put in place the virtual classrooms for the live and interactive online classes.
As of now, over 400,000 instructors have made use of the platform to administer well over 4 million students’ virtual classes across 200 countries the world over.
It confers the latest tools necessary for live training like analytics, assessments, mobile options, video streaming, and discussion boards.
In case you are an educator or a corporate leader who wishes to access a wide audience regardless of where the same might be the world over, you may start out with its free 14-day trial.
6. LearnWorlds
Ever aspired to establish your own school?
LearnWorlds gives you the ability to do just that! It enables you to establish an online school site with numerous teachers together with a course catalog.
Moreover, it also lets you add instructors and choose the exact course you would want to teach them.
Whereas the instructors may author courses, they do not have the power to introduce a new course or alter the general settings.
Given that you are the admin of your school, you have the power to offer as many courses as you like along with varied pricing options.
At an additional fee, you may even obtain a branded app for your school!
This platform also possesses many unique tools. These tools for instance let you add content to your courses and upload videos from Vimeo or your computer.
You also go ahead to choose from a vast array of editing options like the interacting buttons, titles, logos, pointers, images, and texts.
Moreover, you may also add content from SoundCloud and YouTube, to name but a few!
Further to the above, LearnWorlds also makes it possible for you to connect with the students and teachers through an online community that accompanies each school.
Most of the time, the discussion focuses on the review of the course-related materials.
However, this one is mainly focused on social interactions.
Whereas the students have the leeway to post questions that are relevant to coursework, the main idea is to strengthen the direct engagement and the exchange of ideas.
To help the students to achieve this, each one has a public profile that gives off the courses as well as the achievements.
By interconnecting this platform with the Zapier, you may achieve feats like automatic tracking of the new course purchases via the Google Sheets, sending out emails upon the completion of the course, and so on.
7. Pathwright
Using Pathwright, it is possible for you to launch an online course that is wholly actionable for the learners.
The course creator of this app is one of the most fluid and instinctive we tried out. It employs an action-oriented approach to the course curriculum that is really exceptional.
To make use of it, you start by crafting the course outline of your syllabus. You then add specific actions for the students to conclude.
As you add each step, this platform gives you the right to select the specific kind of action that the students have to perform from a drop-down menu.
Examples of these are to-do, listen, attend, submit, take, read, and watch, among others. The end result of all these is to generate a clearer path that guides the learners faithfully through the course material.
As soon as you outline your actions and syllabus, this platform adds a ‘needs content’ note alongside each step. Yet one more bonus is the limited quick design customization.
It gives the CSS-savvy users some unbridled support to code a wholly customized look and feels for their courses.
By connecting this platform with Zapier, you can automatically add new students to your email list, issue out course invitations to potential clients and let your students know of the new grades, among many others.
8. Ruzuku
Ruzuku is yet another online course selling solution that is packed with loads of features. For a start, this course management is quick and easy to make use of.
It lets you support and upload just about any media file to sell the same to your clients. Further, it enables your scholars to keep track of their achievements throughout the course. Also, it prompts them to chat with the other students in the online community.
If you opt for this platform, you will have the freedom to integrate it with MailChimp and gaze as the automated emails notify the others of the upcoming courses.
Alongside the PayPal and Stripe integration, this system also boasts of teleconferencing, daily backups, and extensive support through media like social media, live chats, emails, and phones.
The audio, PDF, and video courses all find support in this platform. Also, it gives you the power to run webinars not to mention engage your clients via live chat.
This is for all practical purposes a nice platform for both downloading and streaming content.
It also lets you generate membership or send out the drip contents on the course timing.
All factors considered Ruzuku is truly great for those persons who have limited technical know-how. The same goes for those who just want to get started out faster. Most of it appears like the WordPress backend and is hence easier to make use of.
Ruzuku commences with the basic plan of around $74.75 per month when billed on an annual basis. You may however upgrade it to $83.08 for a single structure or fork out $125 per month to offer support to many instructors with the course builder.
9. Kartra
Kartra is an interesting solution given that it does not just stop at online courses. Instead, it confers to you many more functionalities such as checkouts, the capability of generating membership sites, and the hosting of affiliate programs.
I have a feeling that this platform is great for those who would want to go beyond merely creating courses and also grow their businesses beyond the simplicity of this course platform.
When you choose to engage this platform, you will have the leeway to make use of advanced tools and functionalities to sell out your courses alongside administering it.
It is great for the individuals who are intent on creating a community around their courses and also possess advanced functionality to grow their businesses in the future.
Just if you are still intent on running a profitable digital product business, one that exceeds the course offerings, this is the solution to look up to.
The platform gives you every tool you need to build a website that looks professional and rich in features without having to hire a professional designer or coder.
Some of the integrated capabilities of Kartra include the calendar to book and manage customer appointments, help desk platforms for your clients, lead capture, tracking, management, video hosting, sales funnels, memberships, and email marketing.
From the perspective of an online course, this platform works best with video content.
Although Kartra lacks the level of course creativity, assessment capabilities, or student management that those more course-focused platforms under this review have.
If video is your thing and you desire tons of marketing muscles, this is the platform to look up to.
10. iSpring Market
You have probably not heard much about this iSpring Market yet, have you? That is understandable because it is a brand-new site.
On the contrary, you must be familiar with the brand, iSpring.
In a nutshell, iSpring is a leader in the provision of digital learning solutions. To date, it has built and sold out a whole range of software solutions for many kinds of learners, corporate trainers, and edupreneurs.
The company’s latest offering is iSpring Market which is also relatively new having been launched as recently as September 2020.
It is often exciting to note a veteran in the industry launching a new software solution. They normally attempt to outshine their competitors by blending the past and present technologies.
Turns out that this iSpring has not been disappointed in this regard. Its learning management system has been developed to provide tutors with a simple and systematic manner of hosting, selling, and marketing their online courses.
Do not mistake me though. iSpring is not that platform that you set up a full-fledged online school in the form of an expansive site. It is more of a system that confers a simplified set of tools for generating a basic online course storefront.
The courses themselves are placed on individual pages with each displaying unique details like the user reviews, descriptions, and the course program outlines.
Speaking about that, iSpring Market allows you to deliver your courses through ordinary documents like PDF, DOC, XLS, PPT presentations, FLV, JPG, and the MP4. Moreover, it also lets you host and sell the webinars within its platform.
Adding to all these, the platform also grants you the ability to run the tests and the assessments, gamify the online courses, engage your students one-on-one via dialog simulations, and so on.
The system is also designed to automatically issue the certificates to the students who pass the tests. You may, if you so wish, also want to set your iSpring Market System to award the graduating students the course completion certificates alongside the badges and some points as well.
Pause for a minute. Where do you obtain the learners to sign up first? Put differently: where does this platform hunt for the prospects?
Quite a number of digital marketing platforms exist from whence you may derive the prospects. You may think of sharing the Google search traffic.
Under this method, iSpring grants Google access to your course pages, which implies that you will appear on the search engine results pages of Google.
You may also take clever advantage of the existing learners. Simply provide them with discount coupons for sharing the same with their friends.
The amount of the discount depends on the rate you personally pick in the course of defining the parameters of the discounts.
In the end, the new students will start rolling in. The payments for their courses are subsequently processed via Stripe, PayPal, and Authorize.net.
Add all these to the flexibility of the currency system and you obtain a learning management system that is able to accept all the major debit and credit cards in around 30 currencies.
11. Systeme.io
Systeme.io is an all-in-one marketing software that contains every resource that an entrepreneur requires to set up and run their online courses and businesses.
It was launched in the year 2018 and has since grown to around 5,000 users who make use of its many features to run their online businesses seamlessly.
On its dashboard, you will find the funnel builder a set of automation rules, and an email marketing tool, to name but a few!
12. Teachery
Teachery is one of the latest platforms and is hence worth belaboring.
This is a great choice for starters as it deliberately puts a limitation on many of the confusing designs and functionalities to grant you exactly what you need. Also, it does not impose transaction fees, which is a plus!
Teachery sets itself apart from the others in the sense of using some guided tutorials that help new instructors to start out and run quickly.
Its most significant difference from the other platforms is it is really simple for beginners and also aids the novices to create the courses to sell to their audiences.
A few more nice things about this platform are that it imposes no monthly fee. Moreover, the platform is also simple and intuitive to make use of. And, it lets you upload unlimited numbers of files to your courses.
In all, it mainly favors the instructors who have never attempted online business stuff of this kind. In this manner, it aids them to start out a bit too fast and levies no transaction fees.
13. LearnDash
LearnDash does not help you to build your own course as others we have already belabored do. Instead, it integrates the WordPress LMS to your existing WordPress website.
Upon adding this LearnDash plugin, you may conveniently set up and commence selling your courses directly via the WordPress dashboard.
It gives you the power to administer quizzes, issue out student certificates, manage enrolments, view reports, and just about anything you need to run your e-learning businesses.
This platform is on the whole great for the universities, training organizations, and entrepreneurs who are already on the web platforms.
Among these are the many features we have already belabored over and above some uniquely advanced set of features that make it stand out from the rest.
One of these is the LearnDash Focus Mode that upon being activated, may eliminate all unnecessary page elements like the footer elements and the navigation bars in order to stave off distractions for the students.
You may also make use of this platform to put in place the drip courses and leverage the Gradebook technology to administer to your students a grade that is based on their performances in homework and quizzes.
Also, you may award certificates, badges, and course points on the basis of the grades and the activities they partake in.
14. Academy of Mine
Next on the list is the Academy of Mine. Using it you can create your very own customized e-learning platform with little effort.
Be it professional development, online education, certifications, or B2B training, this platform can do it all with ease.
You can white-label all your courses in order to match your brand using this all-in-one online course solution.
Academy of Mine provides you with all the tools to create a fully-fledged website from which you can host and market all your digital training material and share your expertise and knowledge with students.
The platform is not just highly customizable and scalable but also boasts a user-friendly interface that is ideal for beginners as well as experts.
This online course platform is a sure-shot solution for businesses, individuals, coaches, and educators to market their courses effortlessly with an e-learning platform that is custom-built.
So if you’re into education, healthcare, law, safety training, or corporate training, you can consider going with the Academy of Mine.
15. Zippy Courses
Zippy Courses comes as a complete package of tools and features that are designed to help educators to create, launch, sell, and teach their online courses seamlessly.
This online course creation tool bridges the gap between platforms that are either optimized for course creation or focuses more on course marketing and sales.
This online course-building platform simplifies the process of course building and marketing and does the heavy lifting for you.
You can also easily customize your course material and even sales pages to match your brand identity.
Talking about the user interface of Zippy Courses, it’s simple, sleek, and professional-looking and comes with an intuitive dashboard which makes it easy to navigate.
Zippy Courses are a no-brainer for a course creator and an educator looking for a simple-to-use yet effective course creation and marketing platform that doesn’t charge a transaction fee every time a course sells.
16. Click4Course
Last on our list is Click4Course. It’s a relatively new online course platform that compares well to the likes of big players like Teachable and Thinkific.
Not only does it seem strong in testing, surveys, and certificate capabilities but also comes with some advanced features.
One such feature is the ability to configure your site either for internal training (which displays a login screen) or selling courses (which displays a course catalog)
Talking about the pricing, Click4Course comes with a 30-day free trial (no credit card required) and a $79 per month ($65, if paid annually) plan. There’s an additional 10% processing fee per course sold.
17. ProProfs Online Course Builder
ProProfs is the world’s easiest course builder software hosted in the cloud. You can easily create online courses, lessons, and tests using this intuitive eLearning authoring tool.
ProProfs offers a premium library of 100+ professionally designed and ready-to-use courses that you can use to get employee training up and running in minutes.
Or else, you can also create courses from scratch by importing the existing content that you may have in the form of Documents, PDFs, PPTs, videos, images, etc.
Another option ProProfs provides to course developers is its beautifully crafted course templates. These templates have been designed based on the latest trends in aesthetic design and typography.
You can easily customize these templates by replacing the dummy content in the placeholders with your content.
You can design the look and feel of the courses and templates by choosing from themes, cover images, color schemes, fonts, and more.
They also support the personalization of your company logo and brand messaging so course participants can easily identify and recognize you.
Add images, audio files, videos, presentations, and other media to the courses to deliver an engaging learning experience.
Quizzes for learner assessment and surveys for course feedback are other tools that you can launch from within a course itself.
The best part is that the courses you create using ProProfs work on any modern device, including smartphones, laptops, and tablets. This enables you to train a worldwide audience anytime, anywhere, on any device.
While your learners take ProProfs courses, you will be able to see their real-time learning progress and information like who all have taken the course, who are yet to, their passing score, and more. You can in fact set reminders for your learners for them to get automated emails.
Course creators who want to monetize their work can do so with the help of ProProfs eCommerce LMS. You can sell courses on ProProfs Store or your own website. Reach out to millions of potential customers. Get access to advanced sales reports. Leverage secure payment gateways for your online transactions.
What Are Online Course Platforms?
An Online Course Platform is a website built around the concept of a learning management system (LMS) that is primarily targeted to deliver online courses, coaching, and classes either in real-time or recorded sessions.
Although there isn’t much of a difference between an offline course and an online one, except the fact that information is being shared via. Videos, images, texts, audio, and PDF files.
The best part about an online course platform is that students (learners) can easily follow along with the course at their learning pace, jot down important notes, take course exercises, and finally take the exam to test their knowledge and earn certificates.
Online course marketplaces like Teachable, Thinkific, Kajabi, Podia, and Ruzuku all feature a robust feature set for course creators.
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All these training platforms provide a fully-responsive website experience, seamless content upload, high-end customizability to adjust the look and feel of the class, powerful marketing tools, course completion certificates, sales funnel creator, and more.
Post covid era has seen an exponential surge in the popularity of these online teaching platforms as more and more institutions are incorporating them to deliver education and training.
Types of Online Course Platforms
The choice of a platform that’s best for your needs can only happen when you understand the different types of online course platforms that are created for specific purposes. Some of the most common ones are;
- Standalone Hosted Platforms
These kinds of platforms are focused on the creation of professionally-looking courses and hence only provide course creation features, hosting, and essential e-commerce capabilities. You can use such platforms directly from your website but have to manage the marketing all by yourself. Platforms like Teachable, and Thinkific fall under this category.
- All-in-One Platforms
As the name suggests, these kinds of course platforms include a website, marketing, course creation tools, email tools, and much more. This includes platforms like Kajabi and Kantra. All-in-one Platforms help you to easily manage your online course, but there are a number of restrictions.
- WordPress Plugins
If you already own a WordPress site and want to add your courses to it, you can easily do it with the help of plugins like Learndash, Lifter LMS, and LearnPress. Using these plugins you get the functionality to create and host online courses and they also give you complete control and ownership over your courses. On the contrary, the learning curve is steep, especially for beginners.
- Online Learning Marketplaces
Online Learning Marketplaces list thousands of different courses of various course creators on their platform and sell them to their website audience. Platforms like Skillshare, Udemy, and Coursera, let you create and upload your courses for free. People can search for courses they like to take and purchase them directly from the marketplace. These online marketplaces then give a predefined cut to the creators of the course. The downside is you don’t have control over the platform and marketing of your course.
- Video Platforms
These platforms are primarily dedicated to hosting video-based content. Platforms like Uscreen and Muvi help you create your very own video subscription channel. So if you’re solely into providing video content and building memberships for your courses, Video Platforms are the way to go.
- Live Event Platforms
There are numerous Live event platforms like reach.live, sutra.fit, lu.ma, joinhologram.com which lets you host live video presentations and events. You can make use of these platforms to deliver courses or content in real-time or you can also integrate live sessions alongside an existing online course. Being a virtual event platform there are certain limitations to the type of content that you can deliver through these platforms but they provide a means to interact with your audience, live.
Conclusion
These were some of the best online courses and coaching platforms available today.
You can easily get started with a free plan or a trial version (if available) of these online marketplaces and then choose the right platform.
No doubt there’s an ever-growing demand for online content as the internet reaches more people every day.
Now be it entertainment or infotainment content, choosing the right platform from the very beginning can make or break your efforts.
While choosing between course platforms, you should always consider its storage, and hosting capabilities, a suite of marketing tools for course promotion, ease of use, backend support, user interface, affordability, and multimedia support.
I hope you found our list of the best online course platforms in 2022, useful.
And if you did, don’t forget to share it with your friends and family, and also do subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay updated on all our latest resources on digital marketing, growing business online, startups, small businesses, and entrepreneurship.
