7 Best Online Course Platforms in 2023 | Teachable vs. Thinkific vs. Kajabi vs. Podia

if you're thinking about creating and selling online courses your online course platform is one of the most important tools you'll need but there are quite a few options out there and a lot of them are very different from each other so today i'm going to talk about my favorite online course creation platforms and help you choose which one is right for you hey i'm melissa and welcome back to whit and wire where we help creators turn their skills and passions into profitable online businesses one of the most important distinctions we have to start with is the difference between a course marketplace and a course creation platform on the marketplace side we have sites like skillshare udemy and coursera so the way it works is that students actually go to those websites to find courses and can purchase a course and take it on that website as a creator what you would be doing is almost like contributing a course to udemy or to skillshare and i have a fairly successful skillshare course with a few thousand students and that course is great for exposure it's put me in front of a lot of people but i don't earn very much money from that course at all the biggest downside in fact to course marketplaces is the fact that it really puts a cap on your profitability so of those nearly 6 000 students i earn like 100 to 200 per month at max and some of that money comes from me referring people to skillshare for udemy you may earn a little bit of money per course but udemy controls your course pricing and they can discount it at any time on top of that for any of those course marketplaces ultimately you're building up that company's business and you don't have access to the customers so those students are skillshare students they are udemy students and you cannot market to them you do not have their email addresses and as a business owner i think that is a huge downside on the other hand if you've heard of teachable thinkific kajabi or podia these are online course creation platforms and when you use one of these tools you are creating an online course but then when a student makes a purchase they are paying you directly the way i usually describe it is that you can use a tool like wordpress or squarespace to build a website but you don't go to squarespace.com to see other people's websites in that same way you don't go to teachable.com to explore a marketplace of courses instead somebody may find my course because they discover whit and wire and then they go to my website they see that i have a course they make a purchase from me and then they're going through that course that i happened to build using teachable overall the course creation platform is a white label solution that lets you create your own product and to me that's the big difference is it your product or does it belong to a marketplace technically if you upload content to one of those sites like udemy skillshare or coursera you still own your own content but for the sake of our discussion i almost always recommend using the online course creation platforms and those are the tools we're going to be focusing on because they are much more profitable for business owners the first platform is teachable full disclosure i used to work a teachable full time for four years but i wouldn't have worked there if i didn't believe in the product and i was actually a teachable user before i was a teachable employee so here are a few reasons why i love teachable first it's super customizable you can create any type of experience inside each individual lesson so for example you can add a video and then put text below it with your recommended resources or you can list an action item now obvious as that sounds not all course creation platforms do that there are other options where you can only have a video or only have a download per lesson and i think that makes for a worse student experience because sometimes you need more than a video to really accomplish the goal of one lesson i also love the flexibility of the curriculum builder this is where i spend most of my time as a creator either building courses or updating or adding curriculum so the fact that you can easily publish or unpublish lessons as you're working on them you can make certain parts downloadable you can customize what goes into the lessons you can do all kinds of cool stuff with embedding forms to create pulse checks i just think there's so much that you can do with teachable because of the flexibility that it offers i also think that the student experience is nice it's easy to go through and it makes for a clean easy to follow experience another area where teachable really shines is the checkout you can add benefits testimonials and a guarantee along the side and all of those increase the conversion potential of your checkout page it's also a single page checkout experience i'll talk about a two-step checkout for some of the other tools but basically what this means is that there is no step one create a login and then step two check out and the more steps you have the more chances that you have for students to say no and to decide not to buy from you so overall teachable's done a lot of work to optimize this checkout process to increase your odds of making the sale there are also tons of integrations and zap options in zapier so you can make anything possible between teachable and most tools that you're probably using for your business i also forgot to mention that when you're creating curriculum you can use a cloud importer so if your videos are in dropbox or google drive you can connect to it directly instead of downloading videos and then uploading them which i think is really nice and not something most of the platforms use now no tool is perfect and teachable is no exception this is not a flaw but i think an important consideration when it comes to pricing teachable is comparable to the others on this list it's not more expensive or less expensive and they do have a free plan to get you started but i do think it's noteworthy that on the free and basic plans there is a small transaction fee so at a certain point when you start to sell a couple thousand dollars in course sales per year which i know you will then you may want to upgrade to the pro plan to avoid those fees but when you're just getting started overall they don't add up to too much where i think that those are still the right options and honestly i recommend the basic plan for most teachable creators until you start to scale the other area of improvement for teachable are the sales pages so i'm talking about the sales page for your own course they have definitely improved the editor over the last few years but what i actually do instead is i use my wordpress site and i build my sales pages there and then on the button on those pages when you click it you go to a teachable checkout page or another checkout so you don't need a fancy integration to do that i just wanted to share that that is the tech stack that i recommend for creators whether it's a wordpress site a squarespace site whatever you used to build your website you can use that to build your sales pages one more thing about teachable that's really noteworthy is the fact that they automatically calculate eu vat tax and they can pay out affiliates if you turn on a feature called back office teachable has done a lot to really create a comprehensive checkout experience and to handle a lot of the finances for you on the admin side so teachable is definitely the clear winner when it comes to checkout and conversion optimization on the front end for your buyers platform number two is thinkific teachable and thinkific are very similar and even though i use and love teachable i know a lot of people are very happy with thinkific and it could absolutely be right for you i will say that their checkout i think pales in comparison to teachable because they have a two-step checkout students have to create a login first then they go to a second page where they can check out and that adds friction in the buying process which will lower your conversion rate i also personally prefer the student experience of a teachable course because i've been students in courses on all of these platforms but that's just a minor preference thinkific has a free plan if you want to check it out and they do have a cap of three courses on that free plan but it should be enough for you to see what you think i will say that one area where thinkific does shine is their ability to collect assignments and there are slightly more enhanced grading and quizzing features compared to teachable so if that's important to you then think if it could be the right choice overall though with both platforms but definitely with teachable you can embed a lot of other tools into your lessons so i just want you to know that even if there's not a native option in teachable thinkific or the tool that you choose there are a lot of external tools like surveys that you can embed that will still create what looks like a native experience for your students that's a bit of an intermediate tip if you know what that means that's for you and if not don't even worry about it platform number three is podia podia markets themselves as your all-in-one digital storefront and although i think it could be the right fit if your primary goal is simplicity the other side of simple means that you can't customize as much and it's not quite as functional for example to me one of the biggest drawbacks is the fact that you can only have one content type per lesson so let's say that you had a video but you also wanted a pdf to go with that video you have to make those two separate lessons and not only is that confusing because now your student has to know to go to two different places it also runs the risk of making your course appear much longer than it needs to be as an example in my podcasting course i have a lesson on creating a podcast intro for your show and below it i have a pdf downloadable of a lot of example scripts so i would have to split that into two lessons and if i had to do that every single time i wanted to have a video with a resource my course would have many more lessons than it already does so i'm not a huge fan of that also podia has kind of a pop-up checkout process where it's two-step like thinkific first you enter an email and then you enter your credit card info but there's no room for things like testimonials guarantees or benefits and i think that the pop-up nature is not optimized for conversion i don't have proof what i do know for sure is that every marketing study i've ever seen shows that a single page checkout experience will out-convert a two-step process just because the more pages there are the more changes there are for people to fall out platform number four is kajabi kajabi is a really popular choice for course creators and business owners because they are an all-in-one solution kajabi is a little bit different from the first three tools on the list i would say that teachable thinkific and podia are course creation platforms sure you can also sell memberships and other types of digital products but for the most part that is the purpose you are selling digital products kajabi expands that a little bit it is an all-in-one tool where you can create your website you can sell courses you can have a blog you can have a podcast rss feed you can send emails you can create pipelines there's so much that you can do in kajabi and i think kajabi is the right fit for someone who values simplicity and having one tool over the ability to customize because its greatest strength the fact that it's an all-in-one tool is also its biggest downfall because if you're like me let's say you may want to do more advanced email automations and kajabi can't do things like that so it wouldn't be the right tool for me but i definitely think kajabi could be the right fit for somebody who wants everything in one place i also know that kajabi's sales pages and website builder cannot really be compared to the first three options they are definitely more customizable you can do a ton with them so i think if you're looking for an all-in-one solution kajabi could be a great fit for you once again though i have to talk about the student experience i still think that the kajabi interface which shows a video with a little bit of text below but then shows downloads off on the side is not as user friendly as teachables where you create a series of blocks and you can do whatever you'd like but it's very linear i know that's just my personal preference talking but as a student i prefer taking courses in teachable than i do taking courses in kajabi also the price point is frankly higher it's going to start at 149 a month and go up from there so if you're choosing kajabi i would just make sure that you're using not only the course creation capabilities but that you're also interested in some of the other tools to have an all-in-one home for your business platform number five is learn worlds i'll be honest this is the platform on my list that i'm least familiar with but i'm mentioning it because on one of their higher tiers they have interactive video functionality students can highlight text in their own version of the course and i think if interaction is what's most important to you then this could be a really interesting option for you to explore if those are not some of your top criteria then i think the first options on this list are going to be a little bit more affordable but overall i'm super fascinated by learn world and excited to see how people might continue to use it in the coming years platform number six is member fault i think a lot of people choose member vault because they have a pretty robust free plan and i do think that it's a budget friendly option i still prefer teachables free plan but i think where member vault does shine is their gamification where you can earn points as you complete different lessons and they really like to talk about the fact that you can have multiple courses and send people to the hub where they can see all these sales pages and they can click in and they can make a purchase but the reason why i'm not sold on that idea is because the member vault sales pages and checkout experience does not seem optimized for conversion to me so even if i were using member vault i would probably still be using my wordpress sales pages so overall i'm not the biggest fan of the member vault experience either as a creator i think it's a lot more technical than the other options or as a student i find myself getting lost in the experience but if you're looking for a budget option i did want to include it on the list where you can choose this or check out teachable and thinkifics free plans but mostly teachable i mean you all knew i was going to recommend teachable right platform number seven is thrivecart this is a little bit of a left field recommendation because at the end of 2021 thrivecart which was formerly a checkout solution announced that they had a new feature called learn where they were basically trying to compete with teachable and all the other course creation platforms to say look we already know people are using our checkout experience let's just give the people what they want and instead of integrating with teachable what if they had the option to use our own tool since it's new i will say that thrivecart's learn feature is still in pretty early stages but you can create a very simple course and the thing that you need to know about creating with thrivecartlearn is the fact that they do not have video hosting let's say you choose teachable what you can do is create your video drag and drop it in and then teachable hosts that video for you online with thrivecart that's not the case you'll need to purchase a different tool like hosting your videos on vimeo or on youtube which i don't recommend even if you unlist them because it's not private and can be shared but let's say you did vimeo or loom you still have to pay for a different video solution so it's not the end of the world that could run you anywhere from seven or eight dollars a month to twenty dollars per month but it's definitely a cost worth considering that said i do use and love thrive cart as a checkout experience because now that my business has grown a little bit there are some additional features that teachable can't do like the ability to have more than one payment plan on a single checkout page so if you're interested in exploring thrivecart you can find a link below this video or visit whittnwire.com thrivecard before i share my final recommendations i did want to give an honorable mention to the world of wordpress plugins there are tools like memberpress and learndash you can use those to create courses that are actually part of your wordpress site i think those work really well for a lot of business owners and you'll find links to both of those below i personally find them to be a little bit more technically challenging than the course creation platforms but if what's most important to you is keeping everything housed under your wordpress site then i think then those could be a great solution for the right business owner overall i do have an important tip about choosing your course creation platform when you visit all of these websites you're going to see tons of features like graded quizzes certificates dripped content where new content unlocks every week course compliance there are so many features the problem is if none of those features apply to your needs for your business then making a buying decision based on those features is not going to be useful so what i would recommend doing right now is that you make a list of all the features that are important to you what do you want your course experience to feel like make notes and then once you have that list you can go to the different websites maybe do some free trials and you can see what feels right to you but also it meets your needs you do not need to pay for features just because they sound fancy and i don't use a lot of the features that are on upper tiers in any of these platforms that's my business owner tip for you i also want to share that i think there are two very important parties when it comes to which tool you choose the first is of course you the way that the tool feels to you if it's intuitive or not if you enjoy using it if it makes sense obviously there may be a small learning curve to some of these course creation platforms especially if you aren't very tech savvy but you may have kind of like a gut feeling that some feel better to you than others i think that's really important the other important person is your student the student experience feels very different in each of these platforms so for you a major consideration could be how that ux that user experience feels to a student how the branding of it looks i think that's a major criteria as well and that's totally a personal option one of you may prefer thinkific another podia another teachable that's not something that has a universal answer and overall one of the tips that i always give business owners is that there is no such thing as a perfect tool just the right tools for different people there are plenty of very happy customers on every single platform that i listed so the worst mistake that you could make is not choosing any at all or letting paralysis prevent you from launching your online course so if you are looking for all of the curriculum building tools that i use for my courses you'll find my complete online course toolkit in the description below or at whittenwire.com coursetoolkit otherwise if this video has been helpful i hope you'll give it a thumbs up and subscribe to wittenwire for more online business tips since you're interested in online course creation i would recommend this next video on how to create and sell your online course even if you aren't very tech savvy and don't know where to find students uh

Channel: Wit & Wire | Course Creation Tips ✨

Views: 77,895

Keywords: best online course platform, best online course platforms, online course platforms comparison, teachable, thinkific, kajabi, podia, learnworlds, membervault, learndash, thrivecart, Online course platform, kajabi review, online course creation tools, kajabi vs teachable, thinkific vs teachable, thinkific review, podia review, kajabi review 2021, online courses ideas, online course software or platform, best online course software, best online course platform 2020, online course platforms

Id: pSAL-vjnDuw

Length: 18min 20sec (1100 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 17 2022