Best Online Course Platform

Have you been wanting to create an online course, but you're just not sure which software is best. You're not sure which website or platform to use to upload your course into so that when people pay for it, they can get a login to your course. Well, I got you covered because over the last five years, I grew my online course to $2 million per year. And I still really remember when I was getting started just being so frustrated and overwhelmed at all the different software options. I spent weeks, even probably months trying to figure out which software was best. And the first go around, I picked the wrong software. The second go around. I picked the wrong software. In the end, I picked the right software. I'm going to go through different choices, show you the pros and cons and let you know ultimately which one I picked and which one I believe to be best.

And by the end of this article, my goal is to have it so that you are confident in choosing which software works best for you, so that I can save you a lot of time and money and choose the right software for you from day one. Hey there, if we have not met before, my name is Molly Kaiser. I am an online course expert, helping people, just like you turn their passion into a profitable online course from day one, I put out videos just like this on course related topics every Tuesday. So if you're wanting to learn more about online courses, go ahead, hit that subscribe button to get notified of new videos. And if you like this topic, and you're excited that I am talking about which software is best for courses, go ahead, give this a thumbs up. I would really appreciate it.

All right. So the four different core softwares that I'm going to review are teachable, kajabi, thinkific and click funnels. Now there are a lot of different softwares to choose from. Ultimately, you know, even aside from what I share in this video, aside from what I believe is the best core software, I just want to give you this tip. And that is, you know, don't overthink this too much because you know, if you sit there and waste weeks or even months thinking about what software, it's only going to hold you back from actually getting your course out into the world and actually helping and serving people, which is the ultimate goal. You know, the best case scenario is you pick a core software that is great for you from day one. And it continues to be all throughout you scaling your course.

But the worst case scenario is you pick a software that's still good, but maybe isn't the absolute best right fit for you. And you can move and change softwares down the line. So I just want to give you the freedom to not have too much you know, paralysis analysis over this and to ultimately just go ahead and make that decision on which software go ahead with it and just keep in mind and remember that the ultimate, most important thing with your course is helping people through your course information. Okay. So first let's start out with teachable and if I'm looking this direction, it's because I have all my notes here, everything pros and cons. I researched this, somebody else on my team also researched this, so it's hopefully non-biased as possible. But yeah, obviously, ultimately, I'm going to share with you my personal decision. What I believe is the best course software.

TEACHABLE

So when it comes to teachable the pros are that there is free plan in case you don't have the funds to invest in the premium version right away, or in case you want to try it out. The next pro is that you can use teachable to also upsell products. It allows you to sell extras like eBooks workshops, one-on-one coaching, et cetera. This truly is like an all-inclusive learning management system. So one thing teachable, I think is really good for maybe you are really, really into funnels. And so you want to use ClickFunnels, but you want to have something specifically for courses. So like you want to have two softwares. I think Teachable's good for that because ClickFunnels is really good at funnels, but it lacks in the actual course hosting department.

Whereas teachable is really great at the course hosts, but it lacks in a lot of the other business management departments. The other pro is you can create as many courses as you want. You won't be charged for any additional courses that you create. So some of the cons of teachable are a lot of users have reported that teachable experiences, significant downtime for maintenance purposes, which all softwares experience some downtime. So that's just something to keep in mind in order to integrate teachable with other softwares or other tools you're going to need to use Zapier, which is going to be another $20 a month plus sometimes they charge you based on how many clicks and visits and things like that. Basically if you're going to use teachable, you're going to need other softwares. There's also transaction fees, a $1 plus 10% transaction fees for the free plan and 5% transaction fees for the basic plan.

So I'm assuming that that probably means that you don't have to hook up Stripe or PayPal or something separate. So that's kind of interesting. It's a pro and a con

KAJABI

Okay. So let's talk about Kajabi, an all in one business platform that makes it really simple for you to create online courses, membership sites, coaching. It really has everything all built all in ones that you can scale your online business. So the pros would be that you can do everything you need for your course within this one software. Like, yeah, you can build a multi-million dollar course business just with this software alone. You're not going to necessarily need to hook it up to anything else. Of course you can, if you want or need to. This one, I didn't actually know somebody on my team found this Kajabi actually has a marketplace.

So there is a section with all the Kajabi. I think you can list your Kajabi course on this marketplace. So that offers you a way to get more traffic customers that way as well. So I thought that was pretty cool. They also have an onboarding, a new customer process where they actually help train you on how to use Kajabi. So that's really nice. They also have a really good help desk and very, very good customer support in my opinion. There's also a large section of professionally designed themes that you can select from and use. And they do have a free trial option. I'm actually going to link to that in the show notes and below this video. So the cons to Kajabi is compared to other platforms. It can be more expensive. So let's see it starts at $109 a month. And I think it goes up to 259. But it will save you money in the long run because you're not having to pay for multiple software. So if you were to go pay for, you know, say a funnel software course hosting software you know, a checkout page software a landing page software, a website, because it does all these things. That's going to end up costing you a lot more than what you would pay. So it will ultimately save you in the long run if you're going to use all of these features. Another con is some customers complain that the metrics feature is not advanced enough and therefore it can make it hard to track data. My personal experience is, and I've used the majority of these softwares is I think the data tracking is good.

I agree that every data tracking can become better. But I haven't noticed it to be worse than any other software out there. So that's just me personally. 

THINKIFIC

Okay. So pros and cons of Thinkific. So Thinkific is also an all in one online course platform that allows you to build and offer courses. So the pros is that Thinkific is the only platform that, that offers phone support. So you can actually like call in and get help. You can use they also have a free option that allows you to sell three courses with free premium features. So that's interesting. And you can use Stripe and PayPal to collect payments. So it's, and yeah. Same thing with Kajabi, but then the first one that we talked about teachable, I, it sounds like it's built in so cons there's no integration with email marketing tools, so you would have to go and get an email marketing tool separate.

So that's interesting that they say it's all in one, because that's not then all in one there's no integrated funnel builder and the platform is not as sleek or pretty looking as other competitors. So those are the pros and cons of that. All right, lastly, we're going to talk about click funnels. So I have personally used Kajabi and ClickFunnels and I have been inside of teachable and Thinkific courses that other people have built. 

CLICKFUNNELS

So, okay. Let's go to the pros and cons of click funnels. So click funnels is a tool that helps you to create high converting websites, AKA sales funnels. So a sales funnel is basically just a series of web pages that leads your customer from point a to point Z, which is the sale, right. It allows you to do upsells downsells additional sales. The whole point is to get people in like a sales funnel typically if you want to get somebody to purchase something at low cost and then keep up selling them.

So that's kind of like what a funnel is. It leads your customer. So the pros is click funnels is one of the leaders in landing pages. And I have personally found that it is really easy to build landing pages. It's very fun. It's drag and drop. I think it's beautifully built. They have hundreds of prebuilt sales funnels that you can literally just click and load right into your account with one click, which is super nice. Click funnels definitely leads in funnels. So if you want to upsell, sell order bumps. Like if you want to get people to make a bunch of little sales, instead of like one big sale, which you can still do in click funnels, but if you really want funnels, ClickFunnels hands down, like it's for funnels. The cons are, it is a bit pricey, so you're going to end up paying probably around.

So I think you can get started for 97, but it's pretty limited. And you're going to end up spending around 297. It is technically all in one, but I have found that their affiliate features are really not that good. I've also found that there let's see here, Oh, their course hosting is not as good as other alternatives. Like all the other alternatives I've mentioned. And I also noticed that their email marketing is not as good. It lacks a lot of features. But like I said, it's really good at landing pages and really goes with drag and drop. I would say ClickFunnels has the best checkout pages in my opinion, because that's really what they do. It's for sales funnels. Right. another con is I have noticed that their customer service isn't as good as others. I wouldn't say it's the worst I've experienced, but it also is not at all the best I've experienced.

I have had quite a few frustrations with their customer service. They can be an all-in-one solution, but like I said, a lot of the solutions lack. So you would probably end up having to, so, like, for example, when we used ClickFunnels, we also used Kajabi to host our course because the course hosting in ClickFunnels just isn't very good. It doesn't allow you to really do pretty much anything and it also isn't locked down very well. It would be very easy. Anyone who hasn't purchased to be able to create a login and kind of yeah. Steal your program. Okay. So, after  going through all of these, after having experienced all of them, having personally used Kajabi and ClickFunnels for many, many years for me, when it comes to courses specifically the winner is hands down Kajabi.

The reason it is the winner for me is because it leads in many ways, many, I would say it leads in all the departments except for checkout pages. Their checkout pages are good enough though, but they're working on improving them. And I'm very excited about that. They do allow order bumps and things like that, but, and upsells, but it just can be a lot better. However, where it lacks in that department, it is so good in all the other departments, you can build sales pages, you can build a website, you can build many, many courses within your course, you can do like, there's so much functionality. You can have quizzes, you can have videos, upload documents. You can have conversations that even have your own forum. Like there's so many things you can do. It truly is an all in one platform.

So you know, if you're just looking for something to host your course, and you're not looking for like a website or a sales page or a checkout page or any like, you know, cause Kajabi does everything, then you might want to go with something that just hosts a course and is less expensive. But ultimately to end up building a multi-million dollar course business, you really need all of the things that could Kajabi has, which is why we ultimately switched from ClickFunnels to Kajabi. And like I said, though, if you are really into funnels and you want to sell a lot of low priced things, then I would recommend click funnels because it's great for, for funnels. But if you want to build a multi-million dollar online course company then hands down, I would recommend Kajabi. I do have a free trial link below this video.

So you can go and click that and sign up. You're going to get the longest free trial available and yes, you'll be able to check it out, try it out for yourself, see if it's a good fit for you. So there you have it. So we just compared all those different four course hosting platforms and declared a winner. But of course, you know, you need to choose which one feels best for you in which one feels right for you and your business. And now that we've covered all this different stuff, about course hosting platforms, you may be thinking, okay, well, how do I get started? You know, selling my course, building a following for my course, how do I even know if my idea's going to be profitable? I got you. So I am hosting a free online workshop where you're going to learn just that.

You're going to learn how to know if your idea is profitable, how to hone in your idea. If you already have an idea, that's great. If you don't, that's okay too, I'm gonna help you with all of that. I'm also going to help you with how you're going to sell it, how you're going to build a following for this course and how you're going to build the curriculum for your program. So I'm going to show you how to register for that. Be sure to click and sign up, just go to profitablecourses.com/class. And here, it's going to take you to a page where you can sign up for the class. The class is called how to turn your passion into an online course. That's profitable from day one. Even if you're unsure what to teach, feel inexperienced, don't have a following or you're short on time.