10 Best Online Course Platforms (2026 Pros & Cons)

I have been building and selling online courses since 2013.

In that time I have run my business on Udemy, then Thinkific, then Teachable, on Kajabi for close to a decade and now I combine that with Skool. I have migrated between three of them.

I created this guide because I have also watched a lot of course creators pick the wrong platform, sink four months into building on it, and then discover the fee structure eats their launch.

So this is not a feature roundup scraped off vendor websites. It is what I would tell a friend who called me and asked which one to use.

Two things have changed since I first wrote this guide, and both matter more than any feature comparison.

The first is that the course business has become a community business. Selling a video library on its own is a hard sell in 2026. People can get the information for free or ask an AI for it. What they pay for is access, accountability and other people going through the same thing. That single shift is why Skool went from nowhere to one of the default answers in this category.

The second is that pricing across the whole category went up in 2026, and the headline prices are no longer the real prices. Kajabi restructured in January and added a surcharge on your own Stripe account. Teachable killed its free plan and put a 7.5% transaction fee on its entry tier. Thinkific dropped its free plan too. If you compare monthly subscriptions alone, you will pick the wrong platform. Compare the total cost to your actual revenue.

Quick comparison of online course platforms

Platform	Best for	Entry price (annual billing)	Platform fee	Free option
Kajabi	Marketing and scaling a real business	$143/mo	Surcharge if you use your own Stripe	14-day trial
Skool	Community-led courses and coaching	$9/mo	10% on Hobby, 2.9% on Pro	14-day trial
Thinkific	A clean, focused course platform	$74/mo	0% in the US	30-day trial
Teachable	Getting a first product live fast	$29/mo	7.5% on Starter, 0% above it	7-day trial
LearnWorlds	Serious teaching and accredited training	$24/mo	$5 per enrollment on Starter	30-day trial
Systeme	Starting with no budget at all	$0	0% on every plan	Permanent free plan
Mighty Networks	Membership communities with courses attached	$79/mo	2% down to 0.5%, never zero	14-day trial
GoHighLevel	People who already run an agency or CRM	$81/mo	0% (usage billed separately)	14-day trial
Podia	A community-first storefront for everything you sell	$42/mo	5% on Mover, 0% above it	30-day trial
Udemy	Marketplace exposure, not brand building	$0	63% on marketplace sales	Free to publish

Prices move. Check the vendor page before you commit.

How I picked these online course platforms

I have paid for and run a business on Kajabi, Thinkific, Teachable and Udemy. Those four I can speak about from the inside, including the migrations.

For Skool, Podia, LearnWorlds, Mighty Networks, GoHighLevel and Systeme.io, I have built inside the platform and talked to creators running real revenue on them, but I have not run my primary business there. I will tell you which is which as we go, because a review that hides that distinction is not a review.

What I weighed, in order: what it costs you at $5,000/month in sales rather than at zero, whether it helps you sell or only helps you deliver, whether students actually finish, and how painful it is to leave.

1. Kajabi: Best all-in-one if you are serious about selling

I moved to Kajabi from Thinkific and I am still on it.

The reason was never the course builder. Every platform on this list can host a video and gate it behind a payment. The reason was that Kajabi collapsed my landing pages, email list, automations, tagging, assessments and funnels into one system. Before that I was paying for four tools and spending my weekends making them talk to each other.

Kajabi is run by marketers, and it shows. They solved the problem that actually kills course businesses, which is selling the thing, not building it. Making a course is easy. Getting 200 people to buy it is the hard part, and Kajabi is the only platform here that is genuinely built around that problem.

Now the bad news, and it is real.

In January 2026 Kajabi ran its first major pricing restructure in nearly a decade. Growth went from $159 to $199 a month on annual billing. Pro went from $319 to $399. Existing customers were not grandfathered, which caused a lot of anger in creator communities, and I understand why. They also introduced a surcharge if you process payments through your own Stripe account instead of Kajabi Payments, which was one of the reasons some people chose Kajabi in the first place.

So the sticker price is now $143/month on Basic (annual) and the true cost at $10,000/month in sales is meaningfully higher than that once you add processing and surcharges.

Pricing (annual billing): Basic $143/mo, Growth $199/mo, Pro $399/mo. Monthly billing runs roughly 25% higher. 14-day free trial.

Good:

• The best marketing automation of any platform on this list, by a wide margin
• Landing pages, email, funnels, assessments and webinars in one system
• Well-designed out of the box, so your sales pages do not look homemade

Bad:

• The most expensive option here, and it got more expensive in January
• The surcharge on your own payment processor is a genuinely unpopular change
• Setting up the automation properly takes weeks, and if you never do that, you are paying for a course platform at four times the price

Get it if: you have an audience, you are selling something above $300, and your bottleneck is marketing rather than budget.

2. Skool: best for community-led courses

Skool is the biggest change to this category since I first wrote this guide, and if you had asked me in 2023 I would not have had it on the list.

The pitch is simple. A private community feed, courses attached to it, gamification, events, and native mobile apps. That is close to the entire product. There are no quizzes, no certificates, no email automation, no funnels.

What Skool understood before anyone else is that people finish courses when other people are watching. The leaderboards and levels sound like a gimmick until you watch completion rates. My own view is that a $49/month community with a decent course inside it now outperforms a $997 course sold once, and Skool is built for exactly that model.

The pricing is where you need to pay attention. There are two plans and the features are identical on both. The only difference is the fee. Hobby is $9/month with a 10% cut of every payment. Pro is $99/month with a 2.9% cut. That 10% is unusually steep for 2026, and it means the cheap plan stops being cheap fast. If your community is doing more than about $1,200/month, Pro is the cheaper option, and plenty of people sit on Hobby without ever running that math.

I have built inside Skool but my main business is not there. What I can tell you is that almost every coach I know who launched something new in the last 18 months launched it on Skool.

Pricing: Hobby $9/mo (10% transaction fee), Pro $99/mo (2.9% fee). 14-day trial, no annual discount.

Good:

• The best completion and engagement rates I have seen anywhere
• Flat pricing with no member or course limits
• Dead simple, so you launch in a weekend instead of a quarter

Bad:

• No quizzes, certificates or reporting, so it is a poor fit for accredited training
• No email marketing or automation, so you will still need a separate tool
• The 10% fee on the entry plan is a trap if you are actually selling

Get it if: your offer is coaching, accountability, or a cohort, and the content is the supporting cast rather than the product.

3. Thinkific: the best pure course platform

Thinkific is where I hosted my first self-hosted course, after Udemy and before Kajabi. I know the founder, Greg Smith, from the Launch Academy incubator in Vancouver back in 2013.

It is still the cleanest course-first platform out there. The video player is good, the course builder is fast, there are more third-party integrations than anywhere else, and the support team answers.

Two things changed for 2026 and they cut in opposite directions.

The good change: Thinkific removed its platform transaction fee in primary markets like the US. Every plan now has unlimited students and 0% platform fees. If you were burned by the old surcharge on connecting your own Stripe, that is gone.

The less good change: the free plan is gone. Entry is now $74/month on annual billing, which is no longer the beginner option it used to be. Feature gating is also aggressive, and API access does not appear until $149/month.

Pricing (annual billing): Start $74/mo, Grow $149/mo, Expand $374/mo, Plus custom. Monthly billing is $99, $199 and $499. 30-day trial, no free plan.

Good:

• 0% platform fees on every plan in the US
• Unlimited students on every tier
• The best integration library in the category

Bad:

• No free plan any more, and the entry price is not beginner-friendly
• Marketing tools are thin, so budget for an email platform on top
• Each site is a separate subscription, so a second brand means paying twice

Get it if: you want a course platform that does courses properly and you already have an email tool you like.

4. Teachable: fastest way to get a first product live

Teachable was the third platform I used. I came to it because of the one-click Udemy course importer, which saved me a lot of re-uploading.

It is still one of the easiest ways to get a paid product live in a weekend. Student management and progress tracking are strong. Sales tax and global VAT are handled on every plan, which nobody talks about but which becomes a real headache the moment you sell internationally.

The thing you have to understand before you sign up is the transaction fee.

Teachable retired its old plans in 2025. The free plan is gone. The entry tier, Starter, is $29/month on annual billing and it takes 7.5% of every sale on top of standard Stripe processing. Sell $3,000 in a month and Teachable takes $225 in platform fees. The Builder plan at $69/month has 0% platform fees. The break-even is somewhere around $500 to $650/month in revenue, which means almost anyone actually selling should be on Builder, and Starter is a trap that looks cheap.

Teachable is now owned by Hotmart. Support was historically their weak point and I have seen it improve, but I would not put it in the same conversation as Thinkific’s.

Pricing (annual billing): Starter $29/mo with a 7.5% transaction fee, Builder $69/mo with 0% fees, Growth $139/mo, Custom on request. 7-day trial, no free plan.

Good:

• Very fast to launch, with a genuinely good course builder
• Global sales tax and VAT handled on every plan
• Certificates included even on the cheapest tier

Bad:

• The 7.5% Starter fee turns a $29 plan into a $250 plan the moment you sell
• Design and sales page customization is limited
• Fewer integrations than Thinkific

Get it if: you want to validate an idea fast and you will move to Builder the day you cross a few hundred dollars a month.

5. LearnWorlds: best for people who take teaching seriously

LearnWorlds is the platform I would pick if the quality of the learning experience mattered more to me than the marketing.

Its interactive video is the one feature on this list that nobody else really has. You can drop quizzes, hotspots, annotations and branching paths directly inside a video, which changes what a lesson can be. It also has full SCORM and xAPI support, real assessments, and proper certification, which makes it one of the only options here for accredited or corporate training.

The pricing has one detail that catches people. The Starter plan is $24/month on annual billing, which looks like the cheapest serious option on this list. It also charges $5 per enrollment. Sell 50 courses in a month and that is $250 in fees on top of the $24 plan, which is more than the $79/month Pro Trainer tier that has no transaction fee at all. Free courses as lead magnets also require Pro Trainer. If you are selling anything at volume, Starter is the wrong plan.

I have built inside LearnWorlds but have not run my business on it.

Pricing (annual billing): Starter $24/mo plus $5 per enrollment, Pro Trainer $79/mo with no fees, Learning Center $249/mo, High Volume custom. 30-day trial.

Good:

• Interactive video that no competitor matches
• SCORM, xAPI and real assessment tools
• Strong white-label and school-building options

Bad:

• The $5 per enrollment fee on Starter makes it the most expensive plan at any real volume
• Heavier and slower to learn than Thinkific or Skool
• Marketing tools are basic

Get it if: you are running training that has to be assessed, certified, or sold to organizations.

6. Systeme: the best free option, and it is not close

If you have no money and you want to sell something this month, use Systeme.

The free plan is permanent, needs no credit card, and includes 2,000 contacts, unlimited emails, three sales funnels, a blog and one course. Not a trial. An actual working business on a free plan. Paid plans start at $17/month and there are 0% transaction fees on every tier, including the free one.

The catch is exactly what you would expect at that price. The templates look dated. The automation is nowhere near ActiveCampaign. Course delivery is basic, and if the learning experience is your differentiator this is not your platform. Support gets middling reviews and the platform has a reputation for shipping updates that break things.

None of that matters if your alternative is not launching at all. I would rather see someone validate an idea on a free Systeme funnel than spend $143/month on Kajabi for eight months while they “get ready.”

Pricing: Free forever, Startup $17/mo, Webinar $47/mo, Unlimited $97/mo. 0% transaction fees on every plan.

Good:

• The most generous free plan in the category, by a distance
• Zero transaction fees at every tier
• Funnels, email, courses, blog and affiliate management in one tool

Bad:

• Course delivery is functional and nothing more
• Templates and design quality are well behind Kajabi
• Support response times are a common complaint

Get it if: you are validating an idea and every dollar counts.

7. Mighty Networks: for building a membership brand

Mighty Networks is a community platform that hosts courses, rather than a course platform with a forum bolted on. If your business is a paid membership and the courses are one of several reasons to join, it is a strong pick.

I have not run a business on it. What I would want you to know before signing up is the fee structure, which is unusual.

Every plan charges a transaction fee, and unlike almost every competitor, it never drops to zero. Launch is around $79/month on annual billing with a 2% fee. Scale is around $179/month with 1%. Growth is around $354/month with 0.5%. On $20,000/month in revenue, that top plan still takes $100 a month off the top on top of the $354 you already paid.

Branded native apps are the real reason people pay for Mighty Pro, and that starts around $2,000/month with a multi-year commitment.

Pricing: roughly $79 to $354/mo depending on tier, plus a 0.5% to 2% platform fee that never reaches zero. 14-day trial. Check their pricing page, since they have renamed and repriced their plans twice recently.

Good:

• Excellent community and member experience
• Branded mobile apps at the higher tiers
• Courses, events, chat and memberships in one place

Bad:

• A transaction fee on every plan with no way out of it
• Expensive relative to Skool for a similar core job
• Plan names and prices keep changing, which makes budgeting annoying

Get it if: you are building a membership brand and you want your own app.

8. GoHighLevel: only if you already live in it

GoHighLevel is a CRM, funnel builder and marketing automation platform that happens to include a course and membership module. The course builder has quizzes, certificates and drip content, which is more than some dedicated platforms.

I am including it because a lot of coaches and agency owners already pay for it, and if that is you, adding courses costs you nothing extra. That is a real advantage and it is worth knowing about.

If you do not already use it, I would not start here. The mobile experience for students is poor. Setup takes weeks, not days. And the $97/month headline hides the fact that email, SMS and AI features are billed separately through Twilio and Mailgun, which is commonly another $30 to $200 a month.

Pricing: Starter $97/mo ($81 annual), Unlimited $297/mo ($248 annual), Agency Pro $497/mo ($414 annual). Usage costs billed separately. 14-day trial.

Good:

• The course module is included in every plan at no extra cost
• Full CRM, funnels, SMS, email and booking in one system
• Cheaper than stacking Kajabi plus a CRM if you need both

Bad:

• The student experience on mobile is bad
• Steep setup, typically two to four weeks before you go live
• The real monthly cost is well above the headline once usage is added

Get it if: you already run your business on GoHighLevel. Otherwise skip it.

9. Podia: the storefront that rebuilt itself around community

Podia is a different product than it was a year ago, and most of the reviews you will read about it are describing a platform that no longer exists.

On June 1, 2026, Podia relaunched. It stopped being an all-in-one course tool and became a community-first platform where the courses, downloads, coaching and events all hang off a shared member home feed. When someone buys anything from you, they land in one place that shows their products, your announcements, the discussion spaces and everyone else who bought. Founder Spencer Fry’s argument for the rebuild was that AI made content cheap, so what people now pay for is the relationship.

I think he is right, and I think that call is the most interesting strategic decision any platform on this list has made in the last two years. It puts Podia in direct competition with Skool, from the opposite direction. Skool started as a community and bolted on courses. Podia started as a storefront and rebuilt itself around the community.

The practical difference between the two is that Podia gives you things Skool flatly does not have: a real website with a blog, email marketing built in, digital downloads, memberships, affiliate management, certificates, and now in-person and virtual events with automatic time zone handling. If your business is a community plus five different things you sell, Podia does that in one subscription. Skool does not.

What Podia is not is a marketing machine. There are no funnels in the Kajabi sense, no visual automation builder, no tagging and behavioural triggers. The email tool is fine for broadcasts and simple segmentation and it stops there. If your growth depends on a multi-step sales sequence, you will feel the ceiling quickly.

There is also a real complaint worth knowing about. The relaunch turned community on by default and reorganized the member experience around it. Creators selling corporate or professional development content, where students want to log in, watch, and leave without joining a social feed, pushed back on this in Podia’s own forums before launch. If that describes your buyer, test the new interface during the trial rather than assuming it fits.

Pricing changed with the relaunch too. Mover is the entry plan and it carries a 5% transaction fee on every sale. Shaker drops that fee to 0%. The break-even sits at roughly $840/month in revenue, which means most people actually selling should be on Shaker and a lot of them are sitting on Mover paying more than they need to. Earthquaker is the new top tier. There is no free plan; it was retired in October 2024.

Pricing: Mover $49/mo ($42 annual) with a 5% transaction fee, Shaker $99/mo ($84 annual) with 0%, Earthquaker $179/mo ($150 annual) with 0%. 30-day free trial, no credit card, which is the most generous trial in this guide.

Good:

• Community, courses, downloads, coaching, events, memberships and email in one subscription
• The cleanest product design here after Kajabi, and much cheaper
• A 30-day trial with no card, so you can actually build something before deciding

Bad:

• The 5% fee on Mover costs you more than the Shaker upgrade past about $840/month
• No funnels or serious marketing automation
• The June 2026 community-first redesign does not suit buyers who want a quiet, private, corporate-style course

Get it if: you sell several different things to one audience and you want them all under one roof, without paying Kajabi money for automation you will not use.

10. Udemy: exposure, not a business

I launched my first course on Udemy in 2013 and made decent money from people finding it in the marketplace. I would not build a business there today.

The math tells you why. If a student finds your course through Udemy’s search or ads, you keep 37%. If you send them yourself with your own coupon link, you keep 97%, which means Udemy is charging you 3% for hosting and 60% for the traffic. Meanwhile Udemy runs sitewide sales that drop your $199 course to $9.99 and you cannot opt out. Your cut of that is about $3.70. Udemy Business subscription payouts have also been cut every year since 2023 and sit at 15% as of January 2026.

You also do not own the student. No email addresses, no list, no ability to take your audience with you.

The bigger news is that Coursera agreed to acquire Udemy in December 2025 in an all-stock deal, shareholders of both companies approved it in April 2026, and it is expected to close in the second half of this year. Nobody knows yet what the combined company does to instructor terms. If you were considering building your primary income on Udemy, that uncertainty alone should give you pause.

Use Udemy the way I use it now: as a top of funnel. Put a cheap introductory course there, accept that you will earn little from it, and drive the people who like you back to your own platform where you own the relationship.

Pricing: free to publish. You keep 97% on your own coupon links, 37% on marketplace sales, and 15% of the pool on Udemy Business subscriptions.

Which one should you actually pick

If you have an audience and your problem is selling, use Kajabi.

If you are selling coaching, accountability or a cohort, use Skool.

If you want a clean course platform and you already have an email tool, use Thinkific.

If you have no money, use Systeme.io and start today.

If you are running training that needs certificates, assessment or SCORM, use LearnWorlds.

If you already pay for GoHighLevel, use its course module and stop shopping.

If you sell several different things to one audience and want a community, a website and email in one place, take a look at Podia.

What I would not use

WordPress LMS plugins. I have tried this with several paid plugins over the years and I got nothing but headaches: broken updates, plugin conflicts, checkout failures at the worst possible time. Unless you have a developer on retainer, the money you save on subscriptions goes straight back out as your time.

There are well over a hundred platforms in this category. I left out the ones I have not built anything on, because ranking software you have never opened is how this entire genre of article got a bad reputation.

Frequently asked questions

What is the cheapest online course platform? Systeme.io. It has a permanent free plan with 2,000 contacts, three funnels and one course, and it charges 0% transaction fees. Paid plans start at $17/month.

Which platform is best for beginners? Skool if you are selling coaching or community, Systeme.io if budget is your constraint, Teachable if you want a traditional course live this weekend. All three get you to a paid product in days rather than months.

Do I need my own website? No. Kajabi, Thinkific, LearnWorlds and Systeme.io all include a website builder and a custom domain. Skool does not, and pairs best with a simple landing page elsewhere.

Which platforms have no transaction fees? Systeme.io and Thinkific charge 0% on every plan in the US. Teachable, Podia and LearnWorlds are 0% once you move above their entry tier. Skool, Mighty Networks and Kajabi take a cut on every plan, though the percentages vary.

Podia or Skool? Skool if the community is the product and you want people posting every day. Podia if you also need a website, a blog, email marketing, digital downloads and events, and you would rather run all of it on one subscription. Podia rebuilt itself around community in June 2026, so the two are closer competitors than they were a year ago.

Is Kajabi worth it in 2026? Only if you use the marketing automation. If you are just hosting videos, you are paying four times what Thinkific charges for the same job. If you are running funnels, email sequences and a real sales cycle, it pays for itself.

Should I still use Udemy? As a lead source, yes. As your business, no. You keep 37% of marketplace sales, you cannot opt out of $9.99 sitewide discounts, and you never get your students’ email addresses. The pending Coursera acquisition adds more uncertainty on top of that.

The part that matters more than the platform

I have watched people spend three months choosing a platform and then never launch.

Every tool on this list can take a payment and deliver a video. None of them will make anyone want what you are selling. What separates the course creators making real money from the ones who are not is that they built a teaching framework worth paying for, they pre-sold it before they built it, and they showed up for the students who bought.

Pick one this week. Pre-sell before you record anything. Then go build the thing.