If you’re in the process of starting an online course, you need to choose the best online course platform to host your course files. The platform you choose should be user friendly, easy to navigate, and easy to learn. Your students should not get bored and turn off from your course halfway. They should find the platform interesting, easy to play with, and above all motivate them to complete the course successfully. In this article, we help you to choose the best online training platform to get started with your online course business.
Thinkific
Thinkific is one of the best online course platforms to create and sell your courses/training programs online. The best part about Thinkific that we love is scalability. You can enroll 10 students or even 10 million students using the Thinkific platform anytime. They allow unlimited students on all their plans, even for the ‘free’ starter plan. Let’s see why Thinkific is a great platform for online course creators.
The highlight feature of Thinkific is the easy to use drag&drop course builder. As a course creator, you can upload your course content so easily according to your lesson plans. The drag&drop features make it easy to add & rearrange lessons, edit titles, text, add images all in order. An easy to use, feature-rich course builder is very essential to make life easy for course creators.
Just like a course builder is very important for the educator, equally important is the course learning interface (virtual classroom) for the students who enroll. The learning interface should be easy to navigate, inform students about the course progress, provide seamless user experience, and above all should encourage students to complete the course. Just think, how disappointing it would be to see your students quitting the course halfway because of the interface! Thinkific has an excellent learning interface that motivates the students to keep going and complete the course successfully.
The next important feature is the rich multimedia content options provided by the platform. As a course creator, these multimedia options gives you tools to make your course as interactive as possible. Ideally, a course creator should arrange the course in such a way as to keep the student engaged & interested in the course. Thinkific gives the course creator multimedia options like Video, Text, Quizzes, Surveys, Discussions, Downloads, Images, Google Docs, and more.
Teachable
Teachable is another great online learning platform used by more than 120K+ course creators. Teachable and Thinkific are equally good in many aspects for a course creator. They do differ in many ways. One of the key differences between Teachable and Thinkific is in the free plan, which is used by some course creators who are just starting out. Thinkific allows the course creator to serve unlimited students even in their free plan, whereas Teachable allows only up to 10 students in their free plan. However, once you reach the 10 students limit, you can easily upgrade to paid plans and continue your course business without any hassle.
As I said above, Teachable and Thinkific are equally good in many aspects. Teachable offers an easy to use, drag&drop course builder for course makers, which is as good as Thinkific. The virtual classroom has a neat UI, which motivates the students to learn and complete the course.
LearnWorlds
LearnWorlds is a great online course platform comparable with Teachable and Thinkific. They provide an excellent course builder, neat & clean virtual classroom, and all other essential aspects like marketing automation, branding using course creators website, etc. I found that LearnWorlds offer much more interactive multimedia tools for course creation like embedding Soundcloud, Slideshare, Youtube, which makes it fun to build courses. You can also set up assignments, embed HTML5, create exams which makes the course more engaging.
Kajabi
Kajabi is the next choice for online course creators to consider as their platform to build, market and sell online courses. Kajabi is more like an all in one business platform that gives facilities for course management, virtual classroom, marketing automation, payments handling and everything in one place. Unlike Thinkific and Teachable, Kajabi is a platform to sell all kinds of digital products.
As you know, Thinkific and Teachable are dedicated online course platforms that are designed specifically to create and sell online courses. Kajabi, on the other hand, can be used to create & sell any type of digital product, say Ebooks, online courses, video tutorials, digital products (like templates, design files, and similar types). In the long run, if you’ve plans to sell digital products other than courses to your audience, Kajabi is the best platform you can bank on.
LearnDash
If you already have a popular WordPress based blog and you want to build courses as part of your WordPress, Learndash is your best choice. Learndash is currently the best LMS (learning management system) for WordPress. Unlike the cloud based course platforms (Thinkific, Teachable and other two we discussed above), Learndash is self hosted. You’ve to host all of the course files yourselves in your own server. However, you can host videos separately in platforms like Vimeo to avoid bandwidth limitations.
Podia
Podia is another cloud-based service you should consider as an online course builder platform. Podia is more like Kajabi and is an all in one platform to sell any type of digital goods. You can sell online courses, webinars, digital products, ebooks, and every other type of digital goods in Podia.
Ruzuku
Ruzuku is also a cloud based online course platform, more in the lines of Teachable, Thinkific and LearnWorlds.
