Every one of the platforms below solves the same core problem, hosting video, quizzes, and payments so you do not have to stitch that together yourself, but they solve it with very different tradeoffs around cost, ownership, and audience reach. A marketplace like Udemy hands you built-in traffic and takes a large cut in return. A hosted platform like Kajabi or Thinkific charges a monthly fee but leaves pricing and branding entirely in your hands. A self-hosted WordPress option skips the monthly fee and the revenue cut entirely, at the cost of managing your own hosting.

None of those tradeoffs is universally right. The best fit depends on whether you already have an audience, how much you value owning your student data outright, and how much time you want to spend on the technical side versus actually teaching. The rundown below covers ten platforms worth comparing in 2026, with current pricing verified directly against each provider.

What to weigh before committing to a course platform

Who owns the student relationship. Marketplace platforms like Udemy and Skillshare own the customer account. Hosted and self-hosted platforms let you own the email list and the direct relationship, which matters a lot if you plan to sell additional products later.
Total cost at your actual course volume. A flat monthly fee beats a revenue share once your sales pass a certain volume, and a revenue share beats a monthly fee when you are just starting out with uncertain sales. Do the math for your specific numbers rather than assuming one model is always cheaper.
Migration difficulty later. Check how easy it is to export your content and student data if you switch platforms down the line. Some platforms make this straightforward; others make it deliberately painful.
Payment processor fees on top of the platform fee. Almost every platform below charges its own subscription fee plus separate card processing fees. Budget for both, not just the headline platform price.

10 Best Platforms to Create and Sell Online Courses in 2026

1. Teachable

Teachable remains one of the more approachable hosted platforms, with a genuinely simple course-building interface and solid built-in marketing tools including coupons, email campaigns, and an affiliate program. Current plans run Starter at $39 a month (or $29 on annual billing) with a 7.5 percent transaction fee, Builder at $89 a month with no transaction fee, and Growth at $189 a month, plus a custom Enterprise tier above that.

The transaction fee on the entry tier is the thing to watch closely: if you are just starting out on the cheapest plan, that 7.5 percent adds up fast once sales volume grows, and it is worth budgeting to move up a tier once revenue justifies it.

2. Udemy

Udemy trades control for reach. Publishing a course costs nothing upfront, and the platform’s existing user base gives new instructors a shot at discovery they would not get building an audience from zero. The tradeoff is real: Udemy takes a significant share of revenue on sales it drives through its own marketing and search, and instructors keep considerably more on sales they bring themselves through referral links. Udemy revised its instructor revenue share downward in 2024 as part of a broader shift in how it compensates course creators, so check the current instructor revenue share terms directly on Udemy’s site before publishing, since the exact split has changed more than once in recent years.

For someone testing whether a course topic has demand before investing in a dedicated platform, Udemy’s zero upfront cost still makes it a reasonable low-risk starting point.

3. Thinkific

Thinkific pairs a genuinely easy drag-and-drop course builder with strong customization options for your course site’s design and branding. Current pricing runs Basic at $54 a month ($40 annually), Start at $109 a month ($82 annually) and marked as its most popular tier, Grow at $219 a month ($164 annually), and a custom Plus tier for larger operations. Using Thinkific’s own payment processor keeps transaction costs to a standard 2.9 percent card processing fee rather than an additional platform cut, which is a meaningfully better deal than Teachable’s entry-tier fee.

The tradeoff is that some of the more advanced features sit behind the higher tiers, so map your actual feature needs against the plan before assuming the cheapest option covers everything you want to build.

4. Kajabi

Kajabi goes beyond course hosting into a full business-in-a-box: marketing automation, website building, email campaigns, and sales funnels alongside course delivery. Current pricing sits meaningfully higher than most of this list, at $179 a month for Basic, $249 a month for Growth, and $499 a month for Pro, all on monthly billing with lower rates available on annual plans.

That price only makes sense if you are actually using the marketing automation and funnel-building tools, not just the course hosting. If course delivery is the only feature you need, a cheaper platform like Thinkific or a self-hosted WordPress option will save real money without losing anything you would actually use.

5. Podia

Podia keeps things simpler than Kajabi while still covering courses, digital downloads, memberships, and coaching under one roof. Current annual pricing runs Mover at $42 a month with a 5 percent transaction fee, Shaker at $84 a month with no platform fee, and Earthquaker at $150 a month with unlimited resources and no fee.

Like Teachable, the entry tier’s transaction fee is worth planning around. Podia is a solid fit for a creator who wants to bundle a few different product types, courses plus downloads plus a community space, without managing separate tools for each.

6. LearnWorlds

LearnWorlds leans into interactivity: quizzes embedded directly in video, detailed engagement analytics, and strong branding customization. Current pricing runs Starter at $24 a month annually with a $5 per-paid-enrollment fee, Pro Trainer at $79 a month annually with no enrollment fees and unlimited courses, Learning Center at $249 a month annually with full white-label branding, and a custom Corporate tier for multi-school operations.

The per-enrollment fee on the Starter tier functions similarly to the transaction fees on Teachable and Podia’s entry plans, worth factoring into your real cost once sales pick up rather than judging purely off the sticker price.

7. Ruzuku

Ruzuku is a smaller, simpler platform, and its current pricing reflects a shift toward transparency: a genuinely free plan for up to five students with unlimited courses and no credit card required, a Core plan at $99 a month with unlimited students, and a Pro plan at $199 a month adding white-label branding, multiple instructor accounts, and 4K video streaming. None of the paid plans charge transaction fees on top of the subscription.

The free tier makes Ruzuku worth testing before committing anywhere else, particularly for a first course where you genuinely do not know if you will have more than five students in the first cohort.

8. Academy of Mine

Academy of Mine targets businesses and organizations running professional training programs rather than individual creators, with heavy customization, white-label branding, and dedicated implementation support. Its Professional plan starts at $999 a month, a different price bracket entirely from the creator-focused tools above, with a custom Enterprise tier above that for larger deployments.

This is not a platform to consider for a first solo course. It makes sense specifically for a company standing up a customer training academy or certification program where the budget and support needs match an enterprise deployment.

9. Skillshare

Skillshare operates as a subscription-based learning community rather than a per-course marketplace: students pay a monthly membership for access to the full catalog, and instructors earn from a royalty pool based on watch time within their classes rather than a fixed price per enrollment. That model rewards engaging, binge-watchable content over one-time high-ticket sales, which is a genuinely different incentive structure than every other platform on this list.

Because the royalty pool mechanics and payout rates have changed over time, check Skillshare’s current teacher terms directly before publishing rather than relying on older estimates, since the exact payout math is not fixed the way a flat platform fee would be.

10. Coursera

Coursera partners with universities, companies, and organizations, currently more than 440 partners across dozens of countries, to publish courses, Specializations, Professional Certificates, and full degree programs. It carries genuine academic and industry credibility that no self-service platform can replicate on its own.

The tradeoff is access: Coursera is not a self-service platform where anyone can upload a course. Publishing requires an institutional or corporate partnership, and revenue arrangements are negotiated per partnership rather than published as a standard rate. This is the right fit for an established institution or company, not an individual creator building a first course.

Building on WordPress instead of a SaaS platform

Every platform above charges either a recurring subscription or a cut of your revenue, and in every case, your student data lives on someone else’s servers under someone else’s terms of service. Learnomy takes a different approach: it is a free WordPress LMS plugin that puts your entire course catalog, student roster, and payment records in your own WordPress database on your own hosting. There is no per-transaction fee and no monthly platform charge for the core plugin.

The free version includes a drag-and-drop course builder, a quiz engine with several question types, certificates, membership and recurring billing support, and a one-click importer if you are migrating from LearnDash, Tutor LMS, or LifterLMS. Learnomy Pro, priced from $149 a year for a single site, adds structured learning paths, cohort-based delivery, and deeper analytics once your academy outgrows the basics. For an educator who wants SaaS-level features without an ongoing platform fee or the risk of losing access to their own student data if a vendor changes terms, this is worth evaluating before signing an annual contract with any of the hosted options above.

How the options compare

Platform	Best for	Starting price
Teachable	Simple hosted course sites	$39/month
Udemy	Testing demand with an existing audience	Free to publish
Thinkific	Customizable branding, low fees	$54/month
Kajabi	Full marketing automation suite	$179/month
Podia	Courses plus downloads plus community	$42/month
LearnWorlds	Interactive video and quizzes	$24/month
Ruzuku	First course, free to start	Free (5 students)
Academy of Mine	Enterprise training programs	$999/month
Skillshare	Subscription-based short classes	Free to publish
Coursera	Institutional and corporate partners	Partnership-based
Learnomy (WordPress)	Full ownership, no platform fee	Free

Common mistakes when choosing a course platform

Picking based on the sticker price alone. Judging a platform purely on its cheapest monthly tier ignores transaction fees, payment processing costs, and the features you will actually need once you have real students, all of which change the real cost significantly from the number on the pricing page.

Underestimating how hard migration gets later. Moving hundreds of students, their progress data, and years of video content off a platform is far harder after the fact than choosing carefully upfront. If there is any chance you will want more ownership later, weigh that risk before building a large catalog on a platform that makes exporting difficult.

Ignoring the audience-reach tradeoff. A brand-new instructor with zero existing audience will likely sell more total courses on a marketplace like Udemy, even at a lower per-sale cut, than on a hosted platform where they have to drive every visitor themselves. Match the platform to where you actually are in building an audience, not where you hope to be in a year.

Frequently asked questions

Can I sell the same course on more than one platform at once?

Yes, and many successful course creators do exactly that: a marketplace listing on Udemy for discovery and testing demand, alongside a hosted or self-hosted version on their own site where they keep the full price and the student relationship. The tradeoff is added maintenance, since course updates need to happen in more than one place, but the reach and revenue upside often justifies it once a course has proven demand.

Do I need my own website before starting a course platform?

Not for a marketplace platform like Udemy or Skillshare, both of which handle the entire student-facing experience for you. For a hosted platform like Teachable, Thinkific, or Kajabi, you typically build your course site within their tools rather than needing a separate WordPress site first. A self-hosted option like Learnomy is the one path here that assumes you already have, or are willing to set up, your own WordPress site.

How much does payment processing actually cost on top of the platform fee?

Expect roughly 2.9 percent plus a small fixed fee per transaction for standard credit card processing through providers like Stripe, regardless of which course platform you use, since nearly all of them route payments through the same handful of processors. Some platforms add their own transaction fee on top of that on lower-tier plans, which is the cost worth checking closely rather than assuming the subscription price is the whole story.

Is a free plan ever good enough for a real business, or just for testing?

It depends entirely on your student volume and revenue goals. Ruzuku’s free plan capped at five students works fine for validating a course idea but will not support a growing business. Learnomy’s free WordPress plugin has no student cap at all, which makes it a genuinely viable long-term option rather than just a trial tier, provided you are comfortable managing your own WordPress hosting.

What happens to my course if the platform I chose shuts down or gets acquired?

This is a real risk worth planning for rather than dismissing. Course platforms get acquired, pivot their business model, or shut down entirely more often than most creators assume, and when that happens, hosted-platform creators are at the mercy of whatever migration window the new owner offers, if any. A self-hosted option built on WordPress does not eliminate risk entirely, your hosting provider or plugin developer could still stop supporting their product, but it does mean your actual course content and student database live in a standard, exportable format on infrastructure you control directly, rather than locked inside a proprietary system you have no access to if the company disappears.

Should I worry about video hosting costs separately from the platform fee?

On hosted platforms like Teachable, Thinkific, Kajabi, and Podia, video hosting and streaming bandwidth are bundled into the subscription price, so you do not need to think about it separately. On a self-hosted WordPress setup, video delivery is worth planning for specifically, since serving video directly from your own hosting can get expensive or slow at scale. Most serious self-hosted course builders route video through a dedicated service designed for streaming, rather than uploading raw video files to their own server, and a platform like Learnomy is built to integrate with that kind of external video delivery rather than forcing everything through your web host’s default file storage.

Matching the platform to where you actually are

A useful way to cut through ten options is to sort by starting point rather than by feature list. If you have no existing audience and want to validate whether a topic sells at all, Udemy or Skillshare cost nothing upfront and put your course in front of people actively browsing for something to learn, even though the revenue share is real. If you already have an audience, through an email list, a social following, or an existing customer base, a hosted platform like Teachable, Thinkific, or Podia lets you keep the majority of each sale while still avoiding the technical overhead of running your own site.

If you are building a long-term education business and expect meaningful, recurring revenue over several years, the math shifts toward either a full-featured platform like Kajabi, if you genuinely need the built-in marketing automation, or a self-hosted WordPress setup like Learnomy, if you want to avoid an indefinitely recurring platform fee once your course catalog grows large enough that a flat annual license costs less than a percentage of a steadily growing revenue stream. And if the goal is specifically training your own team, customers, or partners rather than selling to the public, Academy of Mine’s enterprise focus or a private WordPress installation both make more sense than a public marketplace built for individual consumer sales.

Choosing the right platform matters less than actually finishing and launching the course sitting in your drafts folder. Pick a reasonable option from this list, publish something, and let real student feedback tell you whether a different platform is worth the switch later, rather than spending months comparing pricing pages before you have a single paying student.