Finding the Best Platform to Sell Online Courses

Deciding on the best platform to sell online courses really boils down to your end goal. For a brand new creator who needs to find an audience, a marketplace like Udemy can be a fantastic launchpad.

But if you’re focused on building a brand and keeping more of your revenue, a dedicated platform like Teachable or Kajabi is the way to go.

How To Choose Your Online Course Platform

You’ve got the expertise and you’re ready to build a business around it, but one huge question is probably looming: where should you actually sell your courses? It’s a crowded space, and the “best” choice is different for everyone.

Are you aiming to get something out the door quickly and tap into a ready-made audience? Or are you playing the long game, building a brand where you have total control over the entire student experience?

This guide is here to cut through the noise. We’re going to break down the top contenders, looking at everything from all-in-one powerhouses like Kajabi to bustling marketplaces like Udemy and self-hosted workhorses like Teachable. I’ll focus on what really matters, like fees, marketing tools, customization, and who each platform is truly built for.

Understanding the Main Options

Before we get into the weeds, it helps to see the big picture. Most course platforms fall into a few key categories, each with its own set of strengths. The process of opening an online business involves many decisions, and choosing your tech stack is one of the most important.

My goal is to give you the clarity to pick a platform that fits your vision like a glove, so you can get back to what you do best: creating incredible content.

Let’s start with a high-level look at the different types of platforms you’ll encounter.

A Quick Look at Top Course Platforms

Here is a summary of the main types of platforms and who they are best for. Think of this as your starting point for figuring out which category to explore first.

Platform Type	Best For	Key Feature
Course Marketplaces	Beginners without an audience and those wanting a simple start.	Access to millions of existing students browsing for courses.
All-in-One Platforms	Established creators who want to manage everything in one place.	Combines course hosting with email marketing and sales funnels.
Self-Hosted Platforms	Entrepreneurs focused on brand building and maximum control.	Total control over pricing, student data, and site design.
Website Builder Plugins	Creators with an existing WordPress site who want to add courses.	Integrates course functionality directly into your current website.

Each of these models serves a different kind of course creator. Understanding where you fit in is the first and most crucial step in making the right choice.

Comparing Marketplaces to Self-Hosted Platforms

When you’re figuring out where to sell your online course, you’ll quickly find yourself at a fork in the road. On one side, you have bustling marketplaces. On the other, you have independent, self-hosted platforms.

Think of it like deciding whether to open a booth in a massive, popular mall or to build your own standalone shop on a street corner.

One path isn’t inherently better than the other. They just serve different goals. Let’s break down the real-world differences between them so you can figure out which foundation makes the most sense for your new course business.

The Marketplace Model Explained

First up are the marketplaces like Udemy or Skillshare. These platforms are giant digital shopping centers filled with thousands of courses on every topic imaginable. Their biggest draw is the built-in audience. Millions of people are already there, actively searching for something new to learn.

This makes them a fantastic launchpad for new creators. If you don’t have a big email list or a massive social media following, a marketplace gives you immediate visibility. You can get your course in front of potential students from day one without spending a dime on ads.

The trade-off for all this convenience is control. The marketplace handles the marketing, payment processing, and hosting, but they also set the rules. You’ll face strict limitations on your pricing, often get forced into site-wide sales, and the platform will take a significant cut of your revenue. You also don’t get direct access to your students’ contact info, which makes building a long-term relationship with them nearly impossible.

Take Udemy, a dominant force in this space. As of early 2024, it hosted 210,000 courses for 67 million learners, resulting in over 900 million enrollments. With an average of 1.44 million buyers each month, the platform offers consistent sales opportunities, allowing top instructors to earn six-figure incomes. It’s a powerful testament to the incredible reach a marketplace can provide, especially since the US and Europe represent 70% of the online education market.

The Self-Hosted Platform Model

On the other side of the coin are self-hosted platforms like Teachable, Thinkific, or Kajabi. I like to think of these as building your own online storefront from the ground up. You are in complete charge of everything.

With a self-hosted solution, you get total freedom over your business.

• You control your branding: Your course website, sales pages, and student dashboard all look and feel like your brand, not the platform’s.
• You set your own prices: Charge what you want, offer payment plans, create bundles, or run promotions on your own terms. You also keep a much, much larger slice of the revenue.
• You own your student data: This is a huge one. You get direct access to your students’ names and email addresses, allowing you to build an email list and market future products directly to them.

The real power of a self-hosted platform is that you’re not just selling a course, you’re building a sustainable business. You’re creating an asset that you own and control completely.

The main challenge here is traffic. Since you don’t have a built-in audience, you are 100% responsible for all marketing and for driving potential students to your site. This path is ideal for creators who already have an established following, feel comfortable with digital marketing, or are serious about building a long-term brand. While marketplaces can be a great place to start, many successful creators eventually migrate away. If you’re considering that route, you can explore some excellent Udemy alternatives in our detailed guide.

Let’s Compare the Top Platforms Head-to-Head

Alright, time to get into the details. Picking a platform is a big decision, so let’s put four of the most popular options side-by-side: Teachable, Thinkific, Kajabi, and Udemy. We’ll dig into the features that actually matter for your business, giving you a clear picture of where each one really shines.

First, this infographic gives a quick visual breakdown of the two main camps we’re looking at: the all-in-one control of a self-hosted platform versus the built-in audience of a marketplace.

As you can see, the choice really boils down to a trade-off. Do you want immediate access to an audience, or do you want total ownership of your brand for the long haul?

Pricing and Transaction Fees

First thing’s first: let’s talk about the money. How much will these platforms actually cost you, and what cut will they take from your hard-earned sales? The answer varies a lot.

Teachable and Thinkific are quite similar here. Both offer a free plan to get you started, but they come with some serious limitations and higher transaction fees. Once you upgrade to their paid plans (starting around $39-$49 per month), they drop their own transaction fees. You’ll only pay the standard credit card processing fees from Stripe or PayPal.

When you’re just starting out, a free plan can feel like a lifesaver. But keep a close eye on those transaction fees. A 10% fee on every single sale adds up way faster than a flat monthly subscription once you start getting consistent enrollments.

Kajabi plays a different game entirely. It’s an all-in-one platform, and its pricing reflects that, starting at $149 per month. The key thing to understand is that Kajabi bundles in email marketing, landing page builders, and sales funnel automation. This could replace several other software subscriptions you’d otherwise need. Plus, they charge zero transaction fees on all their plans.

Udemy, as a marketplace, has a completely different model. There are no monthly fees to become an instructor. Instead, they make money by taking a big slice of your course sales. If a student finds your course through Udemy’s own marketing, they keep a massive 63% of the sale. If you bring the student in yourself with a special instructor coupon, you get to keep 97%.

Customization and Branding

How much can you make your course site feel like your brand? For creators serious about building a real business, this is a huge deal.

Thinkific is often praised for its customization. Even on its lower-priced plans, it gives you a surprising amount of control over the look and feel of your course website and player. You can really make it your own without needing to touch a line of code.

Teachable also provides solid branding options. You can easily customize your colors, logos, and fonts to match your brand identity. It’s super user-friendly, though maybe a bit less flexible than Thinkific if you want to make deep, structural changes to your site’s layout.

Kajabi gives you a suite of professional-looking, pre-built themes (what they call “blueprints”) for your entire site, from sales pages to the member area. While these are highly polished, they can sometimes feel a bit more templatized than what you can build from scratch with Thinkific.

Udemy offers next to zero branding customization. Your course page will look exactly like every other course page on the platform. Your content is simply plugged into their standard template, putting the Udemy brand front and center.

Marketing and Sales Tools

Creating great content is only half the battle. Getting students in the door is just as important. Let’s see what tools each platform gives you to actually sell your course.

Kajabi is the undisputed king of this category. It was built from the ground up as a marketing machine, and it shows.

• Built-in email marketing automation to nurture leads and engage students.
• Advanced sales funnel builders (called Pipelines) to guide customers from discovery to purchase.
• Integrated checkout and upsell pages to maximize revenue from every transaction.

Teachable and Thinkific give you the essential sales tools like coupons, affiliate marketing programs, and basic sales page builders. They lack the sophisticated, built-in email and funnel automation of Kajabi, however. You’ll almost certainly need to integrate a third-party email service like ConvertKit or Mailchimp to handle your marketing. To see how Teachable stacks up against other versatile creator tools, check out our detailed Gumroad vs Teachable comparison to see the differences in their marketing approaches.

Udemy handles most of the marketing for you through its platform promotions and algorithms. Your main tools are creating promotional coupons and sending educational announcements to your existing students. Beyond that, you have very little control over the process.

Student Experience and Engagement

Finally, what’s the learning experience actually like for your students? A great experience leads to higher completion rates, better reviews, and customers who come back for more.

This is where self-hosted platforms truly shine and why they’re dominating the indie creator market. The ability to create a premium, branded student experience is a huge reason the broader e-learning market is projected to be worth $325 billion by 2025. These platforms power a huge portion of the $3.1 billion generated by online course apps, with over 220 million enrollments in 2024 alone. By taking a small fee (around 5%), they let top creators earn seven figures without being dependent on a marketplace.

Thinkific offers a clean, intuitive course player and fantastic community features. You can create dedicated community spaces for your courses where students can interact, ask questions, and share their progress, which is a massive plus for engagement.

Teachable also provides a smooth and professional course player. It supports quizzes and course completion certificates, which students love. Its community features are a bit more basic than Thinkific’s, but it gets the job done for simple discussion forums.

Kajabi excels at creating a cohesive, all-in-one world for your students. They can access courses, community, and coaching all within a single login and a beautifully designed interface. This seamless experience is a major selling point.

Udemy’s student experience is standardized but solid. The course player is reliable and comes with features like Q&A sections, note-taking, and mobile app access for offline viewing. It’s a good experience, but it’s Udemy’s experience, not yours.

Let’s get practical. Choosing the best platform to sell your online course is about finding the one that actually fits you. It should fit your goals, your business, and where you are right now.

To cut through the noise, I’ve broken this down into a few common creator profiles. See which one sounds the most like your current situation. This is the fastest way to narrow down the overwhelming number of options and focus on what will truly move the needle for you.

Are You the Beginner Creator?

Does this sound familiar? You have expertise to share, maybe from your career or a passion you’ve spent years mastering, but your audience is small or maybe doesn’t even exist yet. You’re not a marketing pro, and you’re definitely not ready to drop a ton of cash on a big, complicated system.

Your main goal is simple: validate your course idea and start making some money without a huge upfront investment. You need a platform that’s easy to use, affordable, and ideally, can help you find your first few students.

Your Top Priorities:

• Low Upfront Costs: A free plan or a very low starting price is non-negotiable. High monthly fees are out of the question for now.
• Ease of Use: You don’t have time to learn code. You need a drag-and-drop builder that lets you get your course uploaded and a sales page live in a weekend, not a month.
• Built-in Audience (A big plus): A platform that can put your course in front of potential students is a massive advantage when you’re starting from zero.

A marketplace like Udemy is a strong contender here because it handles the marketing for you. The trade-off is less control and a smaller revenue share, but it completely removes the pressure of finding your own audience. Alternatively, platforms like Teachable or Thinkific are excellent choices because they offer robust free plans. They let you build your own branded home base without the financial risk, though you’ll be on the hook for all your own marketing.

Are You the Established Entrepreneur?

Maybe this is more your speed. You already have a business with a real brand and an audience that knows, likes, and trusts you. This could be an email list, a solid social media following, or a popular blog or YouTube channel. You’re not starting from scratch.

Your goal is to add a new, scalable revenue stream to your existing business. You need a powerful, customizable platform that can handle advanced marketing funnels and integrate smoothly with the tools you already rely on, like your email marketing service or analytics software.

The key for you is control and branding. You’ve worked hard to build your audience, and you need a platform that puts your brand front and center, not its own.

A platform like Thinkific is often a top choice here, known for its strong customization options and deep focus on the student experience. Teachable is another fantastic option, praised for its user-friendly interface and solid marketing tools. Both give you the professional control you need to seamlessly weave a course into your brand ecosystem.

Are You the All-in-One Business Builder?

This profile is for the creator who wants to build an entire digital empire from a single dashboard. You’re not just thinking about a one-off course. You’re dreaming bigger: memberships, recurring revenue, high-ticket coaching, a podcast, and maybe even a paid newsletter.

Your biggest enemy is “tech overwhelm.” The idea of duct-taping ten different software tools together gives you a headache. You want a single, unified system that handles everything. This means your website, courses, email marketing, sales funnels, and community all under one roof.

What You’re Looking For:

• Integrated Marketing Tools: Built-in email automation, landing page builders, and sales funnels are must-haves.
• Multiple Product Types: The platform has to support not just courses but also memberships and other digital downloads.
• A Cohesive Student Experience: You want one single login for your customers to access everything they’ve ever bought from you.

If this is you, an all-in-one platform like Kajabi is probably the best platform to sell online courses and everything else you can dream up. While it comes with a higher price tag, it often replaces three or four other subscriptions, which can simplify your life and even save you money in the long run.

By matching yourself to one of these profiles, you can cut through the confusion. To truly find the best fit, it’s also essential to explore use cases for online course creators to ensure the platform you choose aligns with your specific needs and long-term goals. Once you know who you are, finding the right tool becomes so much easier.

Strategies to Monetize and Grow Your Course

Choosing the right platform is a massive step, but let’s be honest, it’s just the starting line. Now the real work begins. It’s time to shift gears from just creating content to actually building a business around it.

This is where you’ll turn your expertise into a sustainable, growing operation. We’re talking about smart pricing, effective marketing, and building a community that makes students stick around for the long haul.

Nail Your Pricing Strategy

One of the first big questions you’ll wrestle with is, “How much should I charge for this?” Getting your pricing right is a mix of art and science. It needs to reflect the incredible value you’re providing without pricing out your ideal students.

Let’s break down the most common models you’ll see.

• One-Time Payment: This is the simplest path. A student pays a single fee upfront for lifetime access to your course. It’s straightforward and works perfectly for foundational courses that teach a specific, tangible skill.

  
  

• Payment Plans: To make a higher-ticket course feel more manageable, you can split the cost. Instead of a single $500 payment, maybe you offer three monthly payments of $175. This simple shift can dramatically lower the barrier to entry and give your conversion rates a serious boost.

  
  

• Subscriptions and Memberships: If you’re committed to providing ongoing value, a recurring subscription is the way to go. This model is a natural fit when you’re regularly adding new content. Think monthly Q&As, fresh workshops, or an active community. It creates that predictable, stable revenue every business owner dreams of.

  
  

Don’t be afraid to price based on the transformation you deliver, not just the number of videos you’ve uploaded. People are paying for a result, so your price should reflect what that outcome is truly worth in their life or business.

Build an Effective Sales Funnel

You could have the best course on the planet, but without a system to attract and convert students, it’s just going to collect digital dust. A simple sales funnel is the engine that will power your course business day in and day out.

At its core, a funnel is just a guided path that takes a complete stranger and turns them into a happy, paying student.

Creating Your Funnel

1. Lead Magnet: You kick things off by offering something valuable for free in exchange for an email address. This could be a PDF checklist, a mini-workshop, or a short ebook. This is your “top of funnel” content designed to pull in your ideal audience.

   
   

2. Email Sequence: Once they’ve opted in, they land in your automated email sequence. This is a series of pre-written emails designed to build trust, share more value, and introduce the problem your course is built to solve. This is where you nurture that new relationship.

   
   

3. Sales Page: The final step is sending them to your sales page. This page has one job and one job only: to convince the reader that your course is the exact solution they’ve been searching for. It needs to clearly spell out the benefits, showcase student success stories, and have a can’t-miss call to action to enroll.

   
   

This simple three-step process is the bedrock of nearly every successful online course business. It works because it builds genuine trust and showcases your expertise before you ever ask for the sale.

Increase Student Value with Upsells and Bundles

Once you have students enrolling, you can increase your revenue without having to constantly find new customers. The key is to maximize the value of each person who enters your world.

Two of the most powerful ways to do this are with upsells and bundles.

An upsell is an offer you make immediately after the initial purchase. For example, right after someone buys your main course, you could offer them a package of one-on-one coaching calls at a special price. Because they’re already in a buying mindset, the conversion rates on these offers can be incredibly high.

Course bundles are about packaging two or more of your courses together and selling them at a discount. This is a total win-win. Your student gets more value for their money, and you increase your average order value. This tactic works especially well once you’ve built up a small library of related courses.

Cultivate a Thriving Community

Finally, one of the most powerful growth strategies has nothing to do with funnels or pricing. It’s all about building a real community around your course and your brand.

A thriving community accomplishes two incredible things. First, it dramatically improves student results. When students can connect, ask questions, and celebrate their wins together, they are far more likely to finish the course and get the transformation they paid for.

Second, it creates true fans. A strong community turns one-time customers into loyal advocates for your brand. These are the people who will not only buy your next course but will tell all their friends about the amazing experience they had. That kind of word-of-mouth marketing is absolutely priceless, and it’s the key to long-term, sustainable growth.

Common Questions About Selling Courses

We’ve covered a lot of ground, but there are always a few lingering questions that pop up. Let’s tackle some of the most common ones I hear from creators just starting out. Answering these should clear up any final hesitations and give you the confidence to move forward.

How Much Does It Really Cost to Sell Online Courses?

This is probably the number one question I get, and the honest answer is: it depends entirely on the path you choose. There’s no single price tag.

On a marketplace like Udemy, you can get started for free. There are no monthly fees, but they take a huge bite out of any sale they bring in for you. That cut can be as high as 63%, which is a massive chunk of your revenue.

For self-hosted platforms like Teachable or Thinkific, you’re looking at a monthly subscription. These typically run anywhere from $30 to over $400 a month, plus you’ll have the standard payment processing fees from Stripe or PayPal on top of that.

Then you have the all-in-one platforms like Kajabi. Their plans start at a higher price point, usually around $149 per month. But that cost bundles in tools you’d otherwise pay for separately, like email marketing and funnel builders, which can actually save you money in the long run.

Do I Need My Own Website to Sell a Course?

Not necessarily, which is fantastic news if you’re not a tech person. You have options here.

If you go with a marketplace like Udemy, you absolutely do not need your own site. They handle all the tech, hosting, and sales pages. You just upload your content and you’re off to the races.

The great thing about modern course platforms is that they are designed to be your website. You get the tools to build your entire course business without needing to be a web developer.

When you choose a dedicated platform like Teachable or Kajabi, they actually provide everything you need to build your own course website from scratch. This includes your sales pages, checkout process, and the student learning area. You’ll want to buy a custom domain name to look professional, but you don’t need a separate website built on something like WordPress unless you really want one.

Can I Switch Platforms Later if I Change My Mind?

Yes, you can definitely migrate your courses to a new platform down the road. But I’ll be honest with you, it can be a pretty big project. It’s not as simple as flipping a switch.

Moving your content means re-uploading every single video, PDF, and resource. You’ll also have to completely rebuild your sales pages using the new platform’s editor, which can be time-consuming.

The biggest headache, by far, is moving your students and their data.

• You can usually export your student list with their names and emails.
• However, you will almost certainly lose their course progress and completion history.
• This means your students might have to start over from scratch, which is far from an ideal experience for them.

So, while it’s completely possible to switch platforms as your business evolves, it’s worth putting in the effort now to choose the right one from the start. It will save you a world of frustration later on.