Building lots of online courses means I get to keep up with the latest features of some of the most popular online course platforms. I'm always learning new pros and cons about each system I work with, and here I share what I've picked up, and what I recommend for you, depending on where you're at in your business, what tools you already have and what you want to achieve.
For: Those who already have a WordPress site, and want a completely unique and customizable course.
If you want your membership site built on WordPress as opposed to something like Thinkific, Teachable or Kajabi, you can have the content look and behave exactly how you want it to - and you can have it under the same domain as your existing website.
If you want to go this route, I would highly recommend WishList Member (plugin), which costs $147 for 1 site per year and is a tool used to protect your pages for members, drip content and process payments.
There is a bit of a learning curve, but once you know how WishList's settings are structured, it's very easy to maintain the platform yourself if you wanted to do things like add people to membership levels manually, or revoke access, or change a page's status from unprotected to protected.
WishList provides payment processing as standard, so you will need Stripe or Business PayPal to process payments.
And WishList integrates with multiple popular email marketing softwares so that when someone becomes a member of a particular membership, they are automatically sent a welcome email relevant to the list they are in, and from there you can add them to automations, etc.
So it's great value for $147 a YEAR.
You do have some considerations...
1. WishList isn't a page builder, it's only a page protector. If you already have a WordPress website, it's likely that you already use a theme builder. If you are new to WordPress or don't yet have a theme builder, it's recommended you invest in one (such as Elementor, Thrive, or Divi to name a few) in order to create an attractive and user-friendly course experience. Therefore, this is an additional cost of around $50-$100/year.
2. If you plan on including a lot of video content in your protected pages, this might take up space on your WordPress storage allowance, so you'd need a third party storage facility, like Vimeo.
Pros of WishList on WordPress:
Cons of WishList on WordPress:
Price for everything - WishList
Wishlist: $147 per year for 1 site
External video storage - recommend Vimeo: approx $120 per year
Payment Fees - Wishlist: None, although PayPal and Stripe each charge approx 2.9% processing fee
Elementor WordPress Builder - $49 per year
Total: Approx $320 per year
For: Those who don't want to spend too much time on design, and who want their students to have a seamless, distraction-free experience.
If you want something housed separately, I would recommend something like Thinkific, which again is very reasonably priced, and you could even use the free account if you only want to have 1 product and one membership level.
All of the content is housed on Thinkific so no external storage required. And Thinkific is a standard 'plug your content in and go', so it's very templatized with minimal branding options, but it's clean and it does everything you would want to do with an online program, including payment processing (with no additional fee!)
I'll outline the two paid plans below.
For $49 per month:
Basically everything you would need, in one place for a total of $468 if paid yearly. Plus if you want a custom domain, that would be $15 a year or there-abouts.
If you want to pay $99 per month (or $948 per year) for the higher tier, this also includes:
For: Those who want their tool to do it all! As well as adding a high quality, premium feel to their course.
If you want to pay a bit more for an all-in-one system, Kajabi is a brilliant and powerful tool. Built like an LMS, but with lots of different templates, Kajabi is both easy to get started AND very customizable.
Even on the basic plan, you can connect a custom domain and have an unlimited amount of "pages", which means you can host your website on Kajabi, as well as landing pages, opt-in forms, email marketing, a community, sales pages, and order forms.
Although Kajabi is on the more expensive side, starting at $149 per month, when you think about what you might save not having to pay monthly for:
Kajabi pretty much pays for itself!
It also offers pre-built templates for things like your website and landing/sales pages, so if you're not too skilled in the design department, simply choose a template you like best, change the colors and images if you want to, hook up the buttons to your order form, and you have a fully-functioning website or sales page ready to go within the hour.
The email marketing feature does a good job too. You can do things like collect opt-ins on a Kajabi-built landing page, have the contacts automatically tagged accordingly, and entered into an email sequence. Then when someone purchases your course, you could tag them as a client, which means they won't receive future marketing emails. For a built in tool, it has all of the main functions you would need to run your email marketing.
Kajabi really is a one-stop-shop and a great consideration for someone who wants to combine their email marketing tool, website, landing page builder and course portal.
OTHER PROVIDERS TO CONSIDER
Here I compare the pricing and main features of my three favorite Learning Management Systems.
This table is kept up to date periodically. It may not reflect the latest details if the company has updated their pricing or features recently.
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