If you’re looking to sell your own online course, I’m sure you’ve come across Udemy and thought… is this a good platform to build the course on?
I’ll be honest. There’s no right answer.
Udemy’s strength is also its biggest weakness.
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The platform allows you to upload courses and students on the platform can seek out your course, join it, and you will get paid.
However, because you’re simply uploading your course on their platform and Udemy owns the students (not you), you miss out on a lot building a true community around your brand.
In this list, I’m going to go through some alternatives to Udemy, including platforms that let you host your own course and manage your own students.
Udemy Alternatives for 2022: 10+ Other Platforms to Sell Your Course
Thinkific
Thinkific allows you to create, marketing and sell your own online course on this platform. If you want to be able to manage your own customers and have full control of the course you teach, then it’s essential to build your operations on a stand along platform such as Thinkific than host your course on Udemy.
The platform always has a website builder so you cna build out the front end your yoru website to sell the course, and conveniuently has the payment gateways and marketing tools with 3rd party integrations all included so you can do everything on one platform.
Key features
- Customisable course builder
- Front end website builder
- Payment gateway
- 3rd party integration
Cons
- Premium pricing for beginners.
Pricing
Thinkific starts at $39 a month.
Get Thinkific
Teachable
Teachable is another leading online course platform that is quite similar to Thinkific. The platform is an all in one solution, allowing you to host all your courses, sell through a website built on their website builder and payment gateway and marketing solutions are all included.
Key features
- Customisable course builder
- IOS app
- Quiz build and marketing apps for lead generation
- Front end website builder
- Payment gateway
- 3rd party integration
Cons
- Premium pricing for beginners.
Pricing
Teachable starts at $29 a month for its Basic plan which allows you to host one course.
Get Teachable
Kajabi
Kajabi is another popular online platform that you can use to host your online course. The platform has three main components: website builder, marketing automation and the course builder, covering everything you need to get your business started.
Key features
- Website builder with unlimited hosting
- Email automation
- Payment gateway
Cons
- Quite costly compared to alternatives
Pricing
Kajabi starts at $119 a month.
Podia
Podia is an online course and membership platform with a suite of tools to help you with not just launching an educational product, but the marketing behind it too. They also have the tools to help you set up a membership site, and a downloads site too, so you have everything you need from start to finish.
Key features
- live chat support
- full suite of products from the core set up to the marketing tools
- integration with major marketing tools
- custom URL
- multi-currency and language support
- Set up drip content
- Support for different payment plans
- Can set up downloadable files to use as lead magnets
- Upselling and cross selling built-in
- Manage webinars directly from the course platform (and monetize replays)
Cons
- The advanced features don’t offer as much customization
Pricing
Podia offers a free 14 day trial and start at $39 a month afterwards to access its online storefront, courses and webinar setup.
Coursera
If you’re reading this and you’re not a lone tutor, but you’re from an education center instead, then Coursera is the platform for you. This is a enterprise or larger business solution made for governments, universities and large corporations for their internal training, but if the volumn permits, then there’s no reason why you can’t take advantage of Coursera for yourself too.
Coursera has prebuilt courses too, so you can mix and match the courses you like to host your own training solution.
Key features
- Prebuilt courses
- Online certificates
- Mobile compatible
- Student analytics
Cons
- No front end website hosting or marketing tools included
Pricing
Pricing only available through their sales team.
Coggno
Coggno is a slight alternative to the rest of the solutions on this page, as it provide premade courses for you to bundle into your training program, similar to Coursera, but on a small business level.
Coggno offers a marketplace too for course sellers to sell their programs for businesses to train their students with.
Key features
- Built in marketplace for courses
- LMS system
- Large range of courses available for all industries
Cons
- No front end website hosting or marketing tools included
Pricing
Coggno starts at $15 a month per user.
Edureka
Edureka is an online training program with built in courses for you to teach your students. The platform is currently mostly aimed at individual students looking to upskill themselves for better jobs and opportunities, but they also have a corporate training program that allows you to make your own custom program.
Key features
- Premade courses for you to host
- Technical courses available
- Corporate training program available
Cons
- Not for small businesses
Pricing
Pricing not publicly available
Get Edureka
Learning.ly
Learning.ly is an online marketplace that connects teachers to students. This is a new player to the market, launching not so long ago, so their audience is quite limited. However, their current weakness can be your advantage, if you want to sell your course on a growing platform, then you can take advantage of their future potential growth and host your course there.
Key features
- Premade courses for you to host
- Technical courses available
- Corporate training program available
Cons
- Not for small businesses
Pricing
Learning is currently free to host a course for sale.
Get Learning.ly
Simpliv
Simpliv is another platform that offers courses for users to learn from and course creators to sell there. As a new player to the market, Simpliv is great if you don’t want to set up your own platform to sell your course, and you simply want to sell it to their audience.
Key features
- Favourable rates to authors
- Wide variety of courses to sell
Cons
- Not for small businesses
Pricing
Simpliv takes a cut of 50% from organic sales.
Get Simpliv
Cloud Academy
Cloud Academy is a professional course platform aimed at cloud based training. The platform offers courses such as AWS training and Machine Learning training for those looking to find opportunities in that space.
Key features
- Niche courses
- Professional certification
Cons
- Not for small businesses
- Need to apply to be an instructor
Pricing
Hidden
Get Cloud Academy
Why should you choose a Udemy alternative?
The reason why you should choose a Udemy alternative should be because you want to own your audience and manage your own students. As long as you sell your couse on someone else’s platform, you will always have a risk of losing that stream of income because it’s not in control. If you do want to have an end to end solution, my recommendation is to go for Thinkific or Teachable, both adequately great platforms.
Final Thoughts
To round things up, we covered both types of platforms here today, ones that sell for you and self managed solutions. If you’re just starting out with no audience and just want to get your name out there, there’s no harm in hosting a course on a platform such as Skillshare or Udemy.