Ever-changing social media and search algorithms make owning your channels more important than ever. Online courses are a great tool for building community and growing your list.

Today, anyone can share knowledge as quickly and easily as you can upload a video to YouTube. But to explore a topic in depth, build a community, earn an income, or grow your business by selling online courses? That takes a more robust setup to help you design course pages, build out a curriculum, and promote your course.

I've been updating this article for several years, and this year, after researching and testing more than 60 apps for creating and selling online courses, these are my picks for the best.

Udemy for launching your first course

Skillshare for teaching creative skills

Teachable for creating an online school with advanced marketing

Podia for selling digital products and memberships

Thinkific for customizable add-ons

Kajabi for marketing a course on autopilot

Mighty Networks for building a paid community

Simplero for managing your business

Our best apps roundups are written by humans who've spent much of their careers using, testing, and writing about software. Unless explicitly stated, we spend dozens of hours researching and testing apps, using each app as it's intended to be used and evaluating it against the criteria we set for the category. We're never paid for placement in our articles from any app or for links to any site鈥攚e value the trust readers put in us to offer authentic evaluations of the categories and apps we review. For more details on our process, read the full rundown of how we select apps to feature on the Zapier blog.

For this piece, I only considered platforms for building and selling an online course, which means I didn't consider learning management systems (LMS). While the terms are often used interchangeably, LMS software is generally used either in a school setting or to help companies train their customers and employees. The platforms to create online courses covered below, on the other hand, are designed for businesses and individual creators to earn money (or build an audience) by selling their courses.

Online course creation platforms can be broadly divided into two categories:

Course marketplaces

Course creation software

In a marketplace, your course is a part of a catalog, and you have the option to customize your course landing page but not much else aside from the course content. Most marketplaces let you publish a course for free but take a share of course sales. The major advantage: course marketplaces provide you with an existing student base, so if you don't have much of an online presence yet, you might want to dabble with these first.

Online course creation software, on the other hand, offers many more customization options. You can create branded landing pages, choose from multiple content formats when building your course, and get the necessary tools to market your course. These usually charge a fixed monthly fee, and some platforms also charge a transaction fee.

Unsurprisingly, there's no one-size-fits-all solution for creating a profitable course. Your ideal course creation platform is unique to your needs and goals. Are online courses your bread and butter? Then you need a platform that helps you reach the maximum number of students. Does teaching and engaging with students excite you? Then a course creator with interactive tools would work well. Are you creating a course to engage your existing audience? Then you'll want a tool with robust marketing features.

While every platform has its own unique selling point, I've judged the online course software below based on certain criteria:

Content formats supported, including video, audio, PDFs, and images

Editing features and customization options

Whether or not they're realistically affordable for small and medium businesses

Support for assessments: quizzes, exams, certifications, etc.

Marketing and payment features

With those criteria in mind, I narrowed it down to 24 apps worth testing, then spent several days exploring them and running through an in-depth testing process. Here's what it looked like:

Signing up for an account and completing any onboarding flows offered

Walking through the core workflow to create a new course, including browsing any course templates, building out the curriculum, and adding course content in varying formats

Testing out other core features like building quizzes and tests, designing course certificates, scheduling live sessions, and setting up drip schedules

Customizing the overall design, colors, fonts, logos, landing pages, and more鈥攖o the extent possible with each app

Finally, looking at payment and marketing features like email broadcasts, pricing structures, community building, and SEO

The eight course creation platforms below are the best I found.

Best for

Standout feature

Pricing

Udemy

Launching your first course

Guided, proscriptive course creation flow

Free; 3% to 63% revenue share on course sales

Skillshare

Teaching creative skills

Quick, easy course setup

Free; royalties for premium class minutes watched

Teachable

Creating an online school with marketing

Wide-ranging AI features in beta

Free for 1 published course and 10 students (plus $1 + 10% per transaction); from $39/month

Podia

Selling digital products and memberships

Simple course outline builder

From $33/month

Thinkific

Customizable add-ons

Course templates, pre-populated with sample content

Free for 1 course and unlimited students; from $36/month

Kajabi

Marketing a course on autopilot

Loads of built-in marketing features

From $119/month

Mighty Networks

Building a paid community

Strong community-building focus

From $99/month for plans that include online courses

Simplero

Managing your business

All-in-one CRM, marketing automation, and online courses

From $59/month

Udemy pros:

Guided, proscriptive course creation flow

Built-in Udemy audience

Minimal editing/design needed

Udemy cons:

Steep revenue share structure

Requires video

Must apply and be accepted to offer paid courses

While the earliest massive open online courses (MOOCs) made learning accessible, Udemy took it a step further: it made teaching online possible. Today, the platform has well over 65 million students enrolled in its courses and an instructor base of over 75,000.

To create a paid course on Udemy, you first have to apply to become a premium instructor. Once approved, you'll see a series of easy-to-follow steps to help you create your first course. As you plan course content, keep in mind that all courses need at least 30 minutes of video and five lectures. You're also welcome to add quizzes, assignments, coding exercises, and discussion prompts.

Why launch your first course on Udemy? Because the platform offers loads of support for creating and marketing a course. For example, if you're not sure if your video lessons are up to snuff, you can submit a sample for review and get feedback on video and audio, along with suggestions for equipment. And for tutorials on planning a course, filming your first video, and related topics, Udemy offers the Teaching Center with tips and tricks.

If you're struggling to make your first few sales, Udemy's tailor-made marketing programs will offer support. Get your course featured in their email blasts, be a part of site-wide discounts, or opt for Udemy's affiliate marketing program. All of these programs are optional, and depending on the promotional channel you choose, Udemy takes a share of course sales.

Finally, Udemy's marketplace insights help you select the perfect course topic and see how it stacks up against other courses on the platform鈥攚hich is important because of the size of the marketplace you're competing with. Similar to Google Analytics, this feature tells you how popular a topic is on Udemy, its search volume, and related keywords. You can also see the number of existing courses for a topic, top-earning courses in the category, monthly revenue earned, and best promotion channels (Udemy discovery, Udemy search, external sources, paid ads).

To put it simply, with Udemy, you're in good hands.

Udemy price: Free to publish free courses with under 2 hours of video; Udemy charges 3% revenue share on course sales made by instructor coupons and 63% revenue share on all other course sales. (Note: Revenue share does not include processing fees charged by PayPal or Payoneer, or mobile platform fees for mobile course sales.)

Skillshare pros:

Quick and easy course setup

Designed for creatives

Free

Skillshare cons:

Requires video

No support for assessments

Minimally customizable

If you're an entrepreneur, designer, writer, photographer, or blogger looking to teach your craft online, Skillshare is great for teaching creative skills. You'll find courses on all kinds of topics, both popular and niche: marketing, photography, cooking, hand painting, doodling, and even wall hanging.

The platform offers a membership plan for students that gives them access to all of its 35,000 premium courses. As for creators, it's a free online course platform if you just want to sign up and publish a course, but if you want to get paid, it must be a part of Skillshare's premium catalog.

Free or premium, Skillshare classes have three major moving parts: video lessons, a project, and community discussion. Each class includes 20-60 minutes of video, broken down into 2-5-minute lessons. The practical project then ensures hands-on experience. For instance, a social media class project might require students to promote their Instagram account, or a writing class might require students to draft a pitch. Finally, the community portion of a class allows students to post their work.

Instead of favoring final outcomes, Skillshare encourages students to share their progress, gather feedback, and tweak their work accordingly鈥攚hich is perfect for the creative topics you'll be teaching.

Skillshare price: Free for creating a premium class. Skillshare pays instructors $10 for premium membership referrals and royalties for minutes watched in a premium class each month.

Teachable pros:

Tons of built-in marketing features

Custom-code course editor

Wide-ranging (beta) AI features

Teachable cons:

Only 3 design templates

Pricing structure is less scalable than some

Teachable helps savvy course creators grow and nurture an online audience. To begin with, the platform offers various options to customize the look and feel of your course. Build a website that reflects your brand, create sales pages for launching your course, and if you happen to know some code, use the Power Editor to tinker with it. If not, edit one of the three templates available. Teachable's course builder accepts files from Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive, among other content formats.

While several of the apps I tested tout new AI features, Teachable's generative AI was the only one I found somewhat useful. The feature is still in beta, but it generated a course outline, lesson content, and section summaries that were good enough to serve as a solid starting point.

There's flexibility when pricing your course too. You can offer courses on their own or in bundles, and choose between a one-time fee, a payment plan, or a subscription. When you're ready to launch, create coupon codes to see a quick boost in course sales. To build a sales team for your course, use the platform's built-in affiliate marketing option: simply add affiliates, and they'll get a percentage of course sales. No third-party integration required.

Teachable's native email marketing tool lets you filter and message students when they enroll in a course, redeem a coupon, or complete a course. The platform also helps you collect student feedback and uncover insights about your course using Google Forms and surveys. If you'd like to keep in touch with students after they've completed your course, add them to your email list with Teachable's integrations. As they say, the money is in the list.

You can do more with Teachable when you connect it to your favorite apps through Zapier's automated workflows. Automatically add your students to your marketing campaign, track them in a Google Sheet, and more. Discover more ways to automate Teachable with Zapier, or try one of these pre-made workflows to get you started.

Teachable price: The Free plan includes 1 published course or product and 10 students, with transaction fees of $1 + 10% per transaction; paid plans start at $39/month for the Basic plan, which includes 5 products and unlimited students, plus a custom domain, email marketing, coupon codes, drip course content, and a 5% transaction fee.

If you're looking for a Teachable alternative, LearnWorlds is another good option with a user-friendly course-building interface and nearly 50 visual themes to choose from.

Podia pros:

Simple, clean course outline builder

Support for multiple kinds of digital products

Affordable

Podia cons:

Email marketing requires additional cost

Podia transaction fees on top of payment processor fees

Podia lets you build an online store for your digital content. Create online courses, digital downloads, coaching sessions, and even membership sites, all as part of one digital storefront.

All Podia storefronts have a similar template, which is helpful if you find too many options overwhelming. Each store's landing page includes an overview, a "What's included" section, a content section, FAQs, and creator bios. And all courses, memberships, and digital downloads have a separate landing page.

Once you create an online course, you can publish it immediately or pre-launch it to collect emails. If you have additional resources to supplement your course鈥攃heat sheets, eBooks, videos, audio, text, checklists鈥攕ell them as a digital download. You can also bundle and sell the two together.

Online content creators often try to nurture an online community on platforms such as Facebook and LinkedIn. This can work, but you're often at the mercy of algorithmic changes and the rules of the platform you choose. Podia allows you to create your own private membership site, with different membership plans, perks, and content for members. Share updates with your community, notify them about new products, and watch your business grow.

Connect Podia to the other apps you use most through Zapier's automated workflows. Automatically add your students to your marketing campaign, enroll new purchasers in your course, and more. Here are some ideas, but you can connect Podia to thousands of other apps with Zapier.

Podia price: Free to build your draft course; from $33/month for the Mover plan to sell your course, with unlimited courses and members and a 5% transaction fee.

Thinkific pros:

Affordable pricing structure

Extensive support for assessments

Course templates

Thinkific cons:

Limited free plan

Putting together your first online course can be daunting. How many lessons should you include? Where should you add assignments and quizzes? What other file types should you include? Thinkific takes the guesswork out of course creation with its simple and ready-to-use templates.

There are two parts to creating a course on Thinkific: course material and landing page. To get started, choose from the following templates: pre-sell, mini-course, flagship course, membership resource library, and webinar replay. Unlike other course builders, where you start with a blank slate, Thinkific templates provide helpful cues and tips to build a valuable course. Apart from video lessons, the templates are pre-populated with sample quizzes, downloads, surveys, and instructor messages, at regular intervals throughout the course. Add or remove content as you see fit, or follow the template as is.

Thinkific's website builder is one of the easiest to use. Choose the pages you want to include, add your copy, pick a theme, and you're done.

Want to include testimonials on your website? Here's a neat trick to collect them on Thinkific: turn on student reviews for your course and add the ones you like directly to your landing page. Plus, Thinkific offers a number of add-ons and integrations that are super easy to get set up鈥攖hey add features like AI chatbot quizzes, collaborative whiteboards, interactivity, gamification, and even test prep simulations.

And by connecting Thinkific with Zapier, you can do things like automatically add your students to your marketing campaign or get an SMS message when a course is purchased. Learn more about automating Thinkific, or get started with one of these pre-made workflows.

Thinkific price: Free for 1 course and unlimited students, full eCommerce, and no transaction fees; from $36/month for the Basic plan, which offers most features, including unlimited courses and students, zero transaction fees, a custom domain, and drip content.

Kajabi pros:

Tons of built-in marketing features

Decent generative AI feature

Native email marketing

Kajabi cons:

Expensive

Less customizable than some

Kajabi gives marketing superpowers to busy course creators. Its marketing blueprints, called funnels, help you create an entire marketing funnel鈥攆rom landing page and opt-ins to emails and course checkout鈥攚ith just a few clicks.

Here's an example: The freebie funnel consists of three touchpoints. The first is a landing page where you collect emails in exchange for a free downloadable, such as an eBook or cheat sheet. When a visitor enters their email, they're subscribed to your freebie email sequence, where you can thank them for signing up and upsell your course. If they choose to purchase, they're taken to a thank-you page. And that's it.

You can also choose what to do with the emails you collect. Add them to an email sequence, remind them about your special offer, or send them a thank-you note after they purchase. Kajabi has templates for all kinds of pages. Select a funnel, add your content, and your marketing machine is all set.

Templates can be handy, but if you want to create your own automations, Kajabi offers a number of if-then scenarios to choose from. When a student completes an assessment, fills a form, cancels a subscription, or has been inactive for a while, you can send them an email, register them for an event, or unsubscribe them from an email list. Given that email is at the core of all its features, Kajabi also has a native email provider that helps you track how many of your emails are opened.

You can do more with Kajabi when you connect it to your favorite apps through Zapier's automated workflows. Automatically get email notifications for new purchases, give new purchasers access to your product, and more. Start with one of the pre-made workflows below, or learn more about how to automate Kajabi.

Kajabi price: From $119/month for the Basic plan for one site, 3 products, 3 funnels, 1,000 active customers, and unlimited marketing emails and landing pages.

Deciding between Kajabi and another platform? Read our comparisons: Kajabi vs. Teachable and Kajabi vs. Thinkific.

Mighty Networks pros:

Strong community-building focus

AI-generated course outlines

Modern, user-friendly interface

Mighty Networks cons:

High starting price

Not a ton of native marketing features

Mighty Networks helps you build a vibrant, active paid community around your online course. The app focuses broadly on community-building, which includes paid groups, events, and鈥攜ou guessed it鈥攐nline courses.

Users can sell individual courses, community membership, or bundle a combination of the two. Memberships can be priced as a one-time payment or subscription, and pricing is 100% custom. Each course can be priced separately or offered for free to paying members.

Every course comes with a built-in Activity Feed that works to foster engagement and conversation as members complete your course. Members can share all kinds of content, too鈥攆rom quick text posts to images and links. As the instructor, you can set topics to drive the conversation and build live events (both online and IRL) into your courses. Add icebreaker questions to get the ball rolling, and create polls to engage your audience and gather feedback.

Uniquely, the app offers a small but mighty feature (pun intended) that enables instructors to change the verbiage used in their community. For example, your table of contents can alternatively be called syllabus, course material, or any custom label you choose. Instructors can be professor, TA, teacher, or another custom name.

Mighty Networks also now offers one of the most useful generative AI features (called "Mighty Co-Host"), which can generate an extensive course outline based on your provided topic. It worked really well for me in my testing.

You can do more with Mighty Networks when you connect your favorite apps using the Zapier integration. Bring conversations across channels, automate new member invitations, sync events to your calendar, and more with these (and other) pre-made workflows.

Mighty Networks price: Plans that include online courses start at $99/month for cohort courses and Zapier integration.

Simplero pros:

All-in-one CRM, marketing automation, and online course platform

Native payments

Customizable settings

Simplero cons:

Not-so-scalable pricing structure

If you're looking for a capable, customizable online course builder, you can't go wrong with Simplero. Creating and outlining your course curriculum is super quick: click the Create a new course button, and a few screens later, you're ready to build out your curriculum and add your learning content.

But Simplero isn't just a course creation app鈥攊t's more like a CRM, marketing automation, and online course tool in one package. That's reflected in the robust automation and list management features included in the app. You can build, publish, and market courses, track sales and financials, and maintain your customer list all in one app.

Head over to Marketing > Done-For-You Campaigns, for example, to install the Course Launch Challenge, a 21-day automated sequence. All you need to do is customize the emails and choose when the automation flow should run. It's a perfect all-in-one solution for when your online course is your business.

And with Simplero's Zapier integrations, you can do even more with the platform, like adding new students to your email list automatically or creating new Simplero subscribers from form submissions.

Simplero pricing: The Starter plan starts at $59/month and includes 1 product, 1 course, and unlimited landing pages; upgrade to the Scale plan at $149/month for 1,000 contacts, unlimited courses and products, affiliate marketing features, automations, and more.

Whether you're passionate about teaching, want to grow your audience, or are just looking to earn an income from your courses, there's an online course creation platform to help you achieve your goals.

When picking a tool to launch your course, consider your budget, time constraints, current online following, and earning potential. If you're simply testing the waters, start with a course marketplace. Once you've validated your course topic and content, only then proceed to launch your own course website. Don't worry about migrating content from one platform to another. Most platforms support this, whether for free or for an added fee.

In the end, software for online courses should allow you to focus your efforts on the course content, not the process of getting it out to your audience.

Related reading:

How to use social proof to promote your online course

5 types of drip email campaigns to help you sell your online courses

How to create a course for your business in one day

ClickFunnels vs. Kajabi: Which is right for you?

This article was originally published in September 2018 by Farheen Gani. The most recent update was in December 2023.