14 Best Online Course Platforms For 2026 (Pros And Cons)

Planning to sell online courses? You’ll love our roundup of the best online course platforms.

Online course platforms provide the infrastructure you need to create online courses, take payments, and deliver them to students. 

There are lots of different platforms out there, ranging from basic eLearning marketplaces to LMS plugins and all-in-one, fully-hosted platforms. The hard part is figuring out which one is the right choice for your business.

To help you explore your options, we’ve compared all the best online course platforms on the market this year in detail below. We’ll cover everything you need to know about each of them, including their key features, pros and cons, and pricing.

What is the best online course platform?

#1 – Thinkific

Thinkific is my favorite online course platform on the market right now. It offers the best balance of features and affordability of any of its competitors. Plus, it’s super easy to use and comes with some advanced tools that enable you to deliver superb learning experiences.

Thinkific is a dedicated course platform, rather than an all-in-one tool. That means its 100% focused on helping you to build and sell online courses.

It’s designed to be as beginner friendly as possible so that anyone can create digital learning products without coding or technical knowledge. 

All you have to do is pick a template, create your course content, publish your course site and start selling. There’s a website builder that you can use to build your entire site (sales pages, home pages, instructor bio pages, etc.) and a course builder that you can use to create the course itself. Both utilize an intuitive drag-and-drop interface.

Everything is customizable. You can change the look and feel of your course pages to match your brand, and even customize student dashboards. Plus, you have full control over pricing, course data, etc.

Thinkific supports various delivery options. You can drip content out, set up scheduled classes where students learn on a schedule alongside their peers or let them choose their own schedule with self-paced classes. 

You can even offer live lessons, as well as other live events like Q&As, office hours, workshops, etc.

But one of my favorite things about Thinkific is the breadth of assessment options it offers. You can incorporate all kinds of assessments into your online courses, from quizzes with randomized questions to prevent cheating, to exams and assignments. 

These kinds of assessments are a great way to gauge student progress. And you can reward students that perform well with completion certificates to keep them motivated.

Another cool thing about Thinkific is that you can use it to build and host communities around your online course for an all-in-one student experience. 

You can use the communities tool to create flexible spaces for your students to interact with their peers and discuss different topics. Each student gets their own learner profile and can connect in a communal learning environment with comments and @ mentions.

Key features

• App Store
• Multimedia lessons
• Learning communities
• Live lessons
• Built-in assessments & completion certificates
• Customizable templates & website themes
• Student data analytics
• Drag-and-drop builder
• Integrates with other tools

Pros and cons

Pros	Cons
Beginner-friendly	No free plan
Good balance of features	The checkout process could be improved
Customizable websites & sales pages
Create communities
Very affordable (& zero transaction fees)

Pricing

Paid plans start at $54/month (annual discounts available). There’s a 14 day free trial so you can check it out for yourself.

There are no additional transaction fees on any Thinkific plan.

Read our Thinkific review.

#2 – Payhip

Payhip is a powerful ecommerce platform that you can use to build and sell online courses, as well as other products like digital downloads, memberships, physical products, etc.

Like Thinkific, it offers a generous free forever plan with all features and no limits on students or revenue, but you’ll pay a small 5% transaction fee on each sale you make as a free user.

One thing I particularly like about Payhip is how easy it is to use. Specifically, the intuitive course builder is super simple and beginner-friendly.

You can add all types of content to your lessons: videos, text, assessments & assignments, downloadable files… you name it. And you can structure your course by grouping lessons together into individual sections.

It’s up to you how you price your courses, but Payhip is pretty flexible. You can charge one-off payments, offer subscription memberships and payment plans, distribute coupon codes, offer free previews, and even take pre-orders before your course is ready to launch.

And get this: Payhip will automatically collect, report, and pay digital EU/UK VAT for you to the relevant tax authorities, which makes staying tax-compliant a whole lot easier.

Students have an account and work through content in Payhip’s branded course player, which is pretty good. I like that it allows you and your students to leave questions and comments on each lesson from the player.

Payhip comes with lots of other useful features aside from the above that we don’t have time to cover here, including some pretty great built-in marketing tools. But overall, I was definitely impressed.

Key features

• Course builder
• Site builder
• Course certificates
• Drip content
• Course player
• Commenting system
• Email marketing
• Upsells and cross-sells
• Affiliate marketing
• EU/UK tax & VAT
• Digital downloads
• Physical products
• Memberships
• Coaching

Pros and cons

Pros	Cons
No-limits free plan	Limited community features
Sell all types of products	Store builder could be better
Flexible & easy to use	Only provides basic analytics
Powerful online course functionality
Flexible pricing options
Automated EU/UK tax & VAT
Great value for money

Pricing

All Payhip plans come with all features, unlimited products, and unlimited revenue.

There’s a free forever plan but you’ll pay 5% transaction fees on sales. Which is actually not that bad considering some other platforms.

The Plus plan costs $29/month with reduced 2% transaction fees, and the Pro plan costs $99/month with no transaction fees.

#3 – LearnWorlds

LearnWorlds is the best online course platform for anyone that wants to offer high-quality learning experiences. It’s not quite as easy to use as Thinkific, but it has the most advanced learning management and engagement features of any platform. And it’s the best choice for online schools, company training, and professional educators.

Like Thinkific, LearnWorlds provides all the tools you need to build your online school and create online courses and sell them. There’s an intuitive course builder, customizable templates, marketing tools, etc.

But on top of all that, LearnWorlds also offers a number of unique features that other platforms don’t offer, including a best-in-class interactive course player, SCORM support, and a 100% white-label mobile app.

No other platform comes close to LearnWorlds when it comes to interactivity. Thanks to the interactive course player, your students don’t have to just passively learn—they can actively participate in the lesson.

You can add interactive elements like content tables, quizzes, video hotspots, overlays, and links to your video courses that students can click to interact as they learn. This helps to boost engagement.

There’s even an interactive note-taking feature that lets students highlight text in the course player and add their own notes to come back to later. This allows students to personalize their learning experience, aids revision, and improves learning outcomes.

And thanks to the white label mobile app, students can even learn on the go. You can create your own branded app for iOS and Android, and utilize in-app purchases and push notifications to boost engagement and sales.

LearnWorlds is also one of the few platforms that are fully SCORM compliant. SCORM is a set of technical standards for eLearning courses. 

So this basically means that courses that you build on LearnWorlds will work well on other SCORM-compliant learning management systems, and vice versa). As such, it’s simpler to switch platforms at a later date without having to build your course content from scratch.

Key features

• SCORM compliant
• White label mobile app
• Interactive video player
• Note-taking feature
• Marketing and sales tools
• Advanced pricing options
• Adaptive school website content

Pros and cons

Pros	Cons
Advanced learning management features	High learning curve
Interactive course player	No free plan
SCORM compliant
Mobile app

Pricing

The Starter plan costs $29/month (or $24/month when billed annually) but you’ll be charged a $5 fee per course sale.

Higher-priced plans with no transaction fees start from $99/month ($79/month when billed annually).

You can get started with a 30-day free trial.

Read our LearnWorlds review.

#4 – Teachable

Teachable is one of the most popular online course solutions on the market. Over 100,000 course creators use it to power their knowledge business. It stands out for its ease of use and excellent value-for-money plans.

Teachable offers all the course features you need to run your business. You can use the flexible page builder to create and customize high-converting sales pages that turn visitors into leads and customers. And creating your course couldn’t be easier with the drag-and-drop builder.

When it comes to pricing your course, you have plenty of options. You can choose to sell online courses individually or in product bundles, and choose between subscriptions, payment plans, and one-time purchases. 

There’s even a native coupon code builder you can use to create custom discounts for your leads, and features like order bumps and upsells to help you increase average order values.

To drive more sales, you can use Teachable’s built-in affiliate marketing system. Just onboard new affiliates and encourage them to promote your course; they get a percentage-based cut of sales they refer.

There’s also a built-in email marketing system that you can use to message your students and nurture leads. 

Teachable doesn’t disappoint when it comes to learning management features either. There are lots of features that can help to keep students engaged and motivated, like certificates, quizzes, and other interactive elements. 

All that said, Teachable is missing a couple of features that other platforms offer. The one thing we would have liked to see is some kind of community feature. If you use Teachable, you can’t use the platform to host your community so you’ll have to rely on integrations with third-party platforms like Circle.so, or use Facebook Groups.

Key features

• Excellent course builder
• Customizable sales pages
• Graded quizzes
• One-click checkouts
• Integrated email and affiliate marketing
• Direct integrations with lots of popular tools
• Student-side engagement feature
• Support for selling other digital products
• Tax management
• Intuitive reporting

Pros and cons

Pros	Cons
Good value for money	Transaction fees on certain plans
Easy to use	No community feature
Flexible payment options	No live streaming
Great course builder

Pricing

The Starter plan costs $29/month plus 7.5% transaction fees (billed annually). Plans with zero transaction fees start at $69/month (billed annually).

#5 – Podia

Podia is a solid all-in-one course platform. It’s a good choice if you want to sell digital products in addition to online courses, like digital downloads, webinars, and coaching products.

As an all-in-one solution, Podia offers a ton of features right out of the box, including a website builder, course builder, video hosting, high-converting checkout, affiliate & email marketing tools, chat widget, and a powerful community feature.

The community feature is particularly impressive. You can create both free and/or paid communities and bundle them up with your online courses to give your members a place to talk about their lessons and share their work and ideas with their peers.

You have full control over your community and can run it any way you like. For example, you can set up forum-like topics to keep discussions organized, or use your community as a private feed to provide important updates to your students. You can share all kinds of media in your communities, from text comments to images, videos, embeds, etc.

Another thing we really like about Podia is their automatic tax collection feature. Once you enable it, Podia automatically calculates and charges customers the correct amount of tax for their location when they make a purchase. 

We also can’t fault Podia’s course builder. It’s incredibly easy to use and the pre-made templates are great. All types of media are supported, including images, audio, PDF files, video, etc. And you can add multiple-choice quiz assessments at the end of your lessons.

Podia even offers unlimited video hosting, so you can upload your course videos directly to the platform rather than embedding them from third-party sites.

Key features

• Chat widget
• Assessments
• Reward certificates
• Video hosting
• Automatic tax collection
• Community feature
• Affiliate marketing
• Email marketing

Pros and cons

Pros	Cons
Full-featured solution	Not very flexible page builder
Unlimited students & online courses	No open API
No transaction fees on paid plans
Sell all types of digital products