The marking scheme

A score out of ten is worthless unless you can see what produced it. This page is the marking scheme every graded review on this site is run through, unchanged since the site opened. Where a platform scores badly, this is the criterion it failed.

The five criteria

Each platform is marked out of ten on five things, and the five are weighted unequally because they do not matter equally.

• Cost at realistic volume — 35%. Twelve months of the entry plan plus the platform's cut at $500, $2,000 and $5,000 a month in sales. Both billing cycles are priced. A platform that is cheap at one volume and punitive at another is marked down for the punitive end, because that is the end you are heading towards.
• What the entry plan gates — 25%. Products, admin seats, contacts, students, storage. The question is how quickly the cheapest plan stops being a real plan. Limits that force an upgrade in the first quarter cost more marks than limits that bite in year two.
• Fee honesty — 20%. Whether the pricing page tells you what the platform takes, what the processor takes, and which of those a "0%" claim refers to. Silence is marked. Gumroad loses marks here for not saying whether card processing sits inside its 10%; Podia gains them for stating outright that processors charge 2.9% plus 30 cents on top of its own fee.
• The course itself — 15%. Lessons, quizzes, drip scheduling, completion tracking, certificates, the student's side of the experience. This is assessed from documented capability, not from a stopwatch.
• Exit cost — 5%. What you can take with you and what you leave behind. Video files, yes. Student progress, payment plans, active subscriptions — usually not.

The letter boundaries

The letter is mechanical. It is derived from the number, not chosen alongside it, so the same score always earns the same letter across the site: 9.0 and above is an A, 8.5 an A−, 8.0 a B+, 7.5 a B, 7.0 a B−, 6.5 a C+, 6.0 a C, 5.0 a C−, and below that a D.

In practice almost everything in this category lands between 6.5 and 8.5. That is not fence-sitting. These are competent products built by competent teams; the differences that matter are pricing structures, not quality gaps, and a scheme that spat out 3s and 10s would be lying to look decisive.

What we refuse to mark

There are things we could put a number on and do not, because the number would be invented.

Speed. We have not sat with a stopwatch in front of anyone's course player on a bad connection, so there are no load times on this site and no claims about video buffering. Anyone quoting a precise page-speed figure for a course platform's student experience is describing one account, on one day, on one connection.

Support quality. Response times differ by plan tier, by hour, by queue and by luck. A single experience is an anecdote and a hundred reviews from strangers are unweighted anecdotes.

Revenue outcomes. Platforms publish impressive totals about what creators earn on them. None of it is independently checkable and none of it predicts what you will earn.

Anything a vendor will not publish. Where a figure is missing, the review says it is missing. Thinkific's third-party payment-gateway percentages and Podia's monthly-billed prices are both named as gaps on this site rather than filled with something plausible.

How the numbers get checked

Every price, fee and limit is read from the vendor's own pricing page and written into an internal ledger with the source URL and the date beside it. Anything that did not come from the vendor is labelled as such in the copy, and the desk will correct anything that turns out to be wrong.

The whole set was last read on 21 September 2026. Where a platform re-prices, the affected pages are corrected and the old figure is kept visible next to the new one, because a silent edit is indistinguishable from never having been wrong.

Where commission sits in all of this

It sits outside. The scheme above has no criterion for what a platform pays us and no thumb on any scale.

The clearest evidence is the running order itself: the platform we rank second on the best online course platforms shortlist is a $179-a-year WordPress plugin licence, which is close to the least commercially attractive recommendation available to us, and the most expensive subscription on the page — the one a commission-led site would push hardest — sits fifth. The affiliate disclosure sets out the rules in full.

Disagreeing with the weightings

If you weight things differently, the order changes, and that is a legitimate result rather than a failure of the scheme.

Care more about the course experience than about cost and Kajabi climbs. Care only about never paying a percentage and Sensei Pro wins outright. Run a business where admin seats matter more than fees and Thinkific's Grow tier looks different from Thinkific's Basic. The weightings above are ours, published so you can substitute your own — which is the entire reason for printing them.