The best online course platforms, ordered by what you keep

The best online course platforms are not the ones with the longest feature list. They are the ones whose two prices — the subscription and the slice of every sale — add up to the smallest number at the volume you actually trade at. That sum changes the running order, and it changes it more than most people expect.

Six platforms are priced below on both billing cycles, with the platform's cut and the processor's cut kept apart. Processing is quoted at 2.9% plus 30 cents — the rate Kajabi, Podia and Thinkific each publish for their own checkout. On a $500 sale that is $14.80, whatever the platform's own fee says.

How this shortlist is ordered

Not by grade alone. The grade is a judgement about the whole product; the order is a judgement about cost per unit of usefulness, which is why Kajabi sits fifth on a zero-percent fee and Teachable sits fourth on a 7.5% one.

The arithmetic behind the order is simple and worth stating so it can be argued with. Take twelve months of the entry plan, add the platform's cut at three trading levels — a quiet $500 a month, a working $2,000 a month, a healthy $5,000 a month — and read off the total. Then ask what the entry plan refuses to do, because a cheap plan you outgrow in ninety days is not cheap.

Card processing is excluded from that comparison. Every platform here routes you through roughly the same rate, so including it moves all six totals equally and tells you nothing about which to pick. It matters to your margin and not to your choice, which is why it sits in its own column.

1. Thinkific — the default, for arithmetic rather than romance

Thinkific starts at $40 a month billed annually, or $54 billed monthly, and takes no cut of your sales through its own checkout. Unlimited courses on every paid tier. One admin on Basic, two on Start at $82 annually, six on Grow at $164.

It tops this list because its cheapest plan is not crippled in the way cheap plans usually are. You are not rationed to five products, and no transaction fee grows with your success. The pressure to upgrade comes from admin seats and marketing furniture — a slower and more honest kind of pressure.

Two things stop it scoring higher. There is a student ceiling — 10,000 current students on Basic, Start and Grow alike, generous but finite and rarely mentioned. And the zero-percent promise is attached to Thinkific Payments: bring your own Stripe or PayPal and a third-party payment gateway fee applies instead. Thinkific documents that the fee exists, runs on your first million dollars of annual sales and exempts Plus, but the per-plan percentages were not readable from its site on the day we checked, so we will not invent them. Ask before assuming you can keep your processor for free.

Start a Thinkific trial if you want the cheapest credible route to selling a course without handing over a percentage. The full assessment is in the Thinkific review.

2. Sensei Pro — a flat licence and none of your revenue

Sensei is Automattic's learning plugin for WordPress. The free version builds courses; it does not sell them. To take money you need the WooCommerce integration, and that lives in Sensei Pro at $179 a year — $15 a month, billed annually, and the only plan line on this page that does not have a percentage next to it.

That is the entire pitch. No cut, no student cap, no product limit, no contact meter. At $5,000 a month of sales you pay $179 for the year and your card processor, and that is it. Nothing else here comes close on those terms.

What you pay instead is responsibility. Hosting, backups, updates, a WooCommerce payment gateway and the afternoon when something breaks are all yours. There is no support desk that owns the whole stack, because there is no whole stack — there is WordPress, a plugin, a theme and a processor, assembled by you. If that sentence sounds like a chore rather than a Saturday, rank this lower for yourself than we have ranked it.

The honest framing is that Sensei Pro is the cheapest platform on this page and the most expensive in hours. Read the Sensei LMS review before committing to it.

3. Podia — simple, until the email meter starts

Podia's pricing page opens on its annual view: Mover at $42 a month, billed as $504 for the year, carrying a 5% cut. Shaker is $84 a month, $1,008 a year, and drops the cut to nothing. Earthquaker is $150 a month, $1,800 a year. Billed monthly each is higher — Podia would not surrender those figures to us, and we would rather say so than quote a number we have not seen.

It is the least fiddly product here by some distance. Courses, coaching, webinars, community and checkout arrive already connected, and the admin reads like a tidy filing cabinet rather than a cockpit.

The catch is not the transaction fee, which you can buy out by moving to Shaker. It is the email meter. Mover includes 100 email subscribers, Shaker 500, Earthquaker 1,000; beyond those, email is charged separately on a scale that climbs steeply with list size. The platform that looks cheapest for a small operation stops looking cheap exactly when an audience starts growing. Mover also caps you at 50 products, 500 videos and 25 spaces.

The crossover is arithmetic: Shaker costs $42 a month more and removes a 5% fee, so it pays for itself above $840 a month in sales. Below that, Mover plus the fee is cheaper. Podia suits a focused catalogue with a small list; the Podia review works through where it stops suiting one.

4. Teachable — the cheapest door with the most expensive hinge

Teachable Starter is $29 a month billed annually, $39 billed monthly. It is the lowest subscription on this page and it carries a 7.5% transaction fee, which is the highest platform cut of any subscription product here.

Sell $2,000 in a month on Starter and Teachable takes $150 in fees on top of a $29 plan. The fee is five times the subscription. That is not a hidden charge — it is printed plainly on the pricing page — but it is very easy to read the $29 and stop reading.

Builder at $69 a month annually ($89 monthly) removes the fee entirely. The crossover sits at $533 a month in sales: below it, Starter plus 7.5% is cheaper; above it, Builder is, and the gap widens fast. Growth at $139 annually ($189 monthly) buys 50 products and five admin seats.

Starter also limits you to five products and one admin seat, so the fee is not the only thing you will eventually pay to escape. Teachable is a good product sold on a number that flatters it. If you are certain your first year is quiet, Teachable Starter is genuinely the cheapest way to open a shop; if you are not certain, budget for Builder from the start. The Teachable review has the full working.

5. Kajabi — everything included, priced for someone already earning

Kajabi Basic is $143 a month billed annually, $179 billed monthly. There is nothing below it on the pricing page. Growth is $199 annually, $249 monthly; Pro is $399 annually, $499 monthly.

For that you get a genuine all-in-one: courses, email, funnels, a site builder, communities and checkout under one login, with no platform cut at all through Kajabi Payments. If your alternative is four subscriptions stitched together, Kajabi's total is not the outlier it looks.

The deductions are real, though. Basic gives you five products, 2,500 contacts and two admin users — modest limits at a price four times Thinkific's entry plan. Kajabi Payments carries its own processing rate of 2.9% plus 30 cents on Basic, improving slightly on higher tiers. And if you want to keep your own Stripe, Kajabi adds a surcharge of 2% on Basic, 1% on Growth and 0.5% on Pro, with PayPal exempt — so "0% transaction fees" is a statement about Kajabi's own checkout, not about Kajabi.

Widely-circulated comparisons still quote an $89 entry tier. Whatever its history, it is not on the page we read on 21 September 2026. Treat any article quoting it as out of date, including the ones that are otherwise good. Kajabi earns its price above roughly $5,000 a month of trading and struggles to justify it below that, which is the argument of the Kajabi review.

6. Gumroad — no subscription, the biggest cut, one unanswered question

Gumroad charges no monthly fee at all. It takes 10% plus 50 cents on sales you bring yourself, and 30% on sales its Discover marketplace originates.

For a first course, or for anyone whose sales arrive in bursts, owing nothing in a month with no sales is a real advantage no subscription platform here offers.

It stops being an advantage quickly. At $2,000 a month you are handing over roughly $200 plus the per-sale 50 cents, against $29 for Teachable Starter or $40 for Thinkific Basic. And there is a question Gumroad does not answer on its pricing page: whether card processing sits inside the 10% or on top of it. Independent calculators say on top for direct sales and inside the 30% Discover rate. Gumroad's own page is silent, so our take-home column carries a range — $434.70 to $449.50 on a $500 sale — rather than a figure we would be guessing at.

Gumroad is also the weakest here as a course product: the learning experience is thin next to Thinkific or Kajabi. Use Gumroad to validate an idea, not to run a school. The reasoning is in selling courses on Gumroad.

What the subscription actually buys at each tier

Every entry plan on this page is gated on something, and the gate is rarely the one the marketing emphasises.

• Products. Teachable Starter allows five. Kajabi Basic allows five. Podia Mover allows fifty. Thinkific allows unlimited courses on every paid tier. Sensei has no product concept to limit.
• Admin seats. One on Teachable Starter and Builder, one on Thinkific Basic, two on Kajabi Basic and Thinkific Start, five on Teachable Growth, six on Thinkific Grow. A co-instructor or a contractor is frequently the thing that forces an upgrade, not volume.
• Contacts and subscribers. Kajabi Basic includes 2,500 contacts. Podia Mover includes 100 email subscribers and charges beyond it. Thinkific caps current students at 10,000 across Basic, Start and Grow.
• Transaction fees. Teachable Starter 7.5%, Podia Mover 5%, everything else nominally zero — conditional, in Kajabi and Thinkific's case, on using the platform's own checkout.

Those four lines explain almost every upgrade anyone is ever pushed into. A breakdown by plan is in what each plan actually gates.

The two numbers that decide this, and where they cross

For every platform with a transaction fee there is a monthly sales figure above which the fee-free plan is cheaper. It is worth knowing yours.

The formula is the extra subscription cost divided by the fee you are removing. Teachable: $40 more a month for Builder, removing 7.5%, crosses at $533 a month in sales. Podia: $42 more for Shaker, removing 5%, crosses at $840 a month. Below those lines the cheap plan wins; above them it quietly becomes the expensive one, and it keeps getting more expensive the better you do.

This is the single most useful calculation in the category and almost nobody publishes it. The long version, with the annual-billing wrinkle folded in, is in how course-platform transaction fees really work.

Where each platform stops being the right answer

Thinkific stops when you need serious marketing automation in the same product, or when 10,000 current students is a real ceiling. Sensei Pro stops the moment you do not want to be the person who fixes the site. Podia stops when your list outgrows the allowance and the meter starts. Teachable Starter stops at $533 a month of sales. Kajabi stops being defensible below roughly $5,000 a month, because you are paying for a suite you are not using. Gumroad stops when you need a course to feel like a course.

None of those is a flaw. They are the edges of products designed for particular people. The mistake is not picking the wrong one — it is picking on the subscription alone and meeting the other number at the end of your first good month.