Are you an online course creator? Do you create and sell online courses? Are you wondering which online course hosting platform would be the best to host your course on? You will have to choose one of the many platforms that let you create an account and upload your course. There are so many options! Where do you start?
In this guide, we review our top 6 choices for 2023 for online course hosting platforms to create and sell online courses, so that you can pick the best one for you.
Most creators juggle with over 10+ tools with a monthly software cost of over $1300. With over 200 online education providers, it’s hard to know where to begin when creating your own course.
Best Overall
Vonza
The all-in-one platform for your – courses, products, website, membership, funnels, and other tools designed to grow your business.
Best for Beginners
Podia
Build websites, sell courses and digital products, and host communities. Podia is free. And when you grow, it has all the tools you’ll need along the way.
Best for Communities
Gurucan
Everything a successful knowledge business needs: online courses, memberships, emails, push-notifications, private label mobile apps & more.
Best for Coaches
Upcoach
The professional coaching platform to help you deliver transformational results for your clients and team members.
The creator economy is exploding with growth. However, for anyone looking to get started with creating their own courses, there are a few different platforms that stand out above the rest as being some of the best for hosting your course.
Keep reading for a breakdown of what makes each of these platforms so great and everything you need to know in order to choose the right one for your needs.
What Are the Best Online Course Hosting Platforms?
1. Vonza
Best Overall Online Course Hosting Platform
Vonza is a powerful all-in-one course creation platform that enables users to create and sell courses, memberships, and digital products.
It is packed with features that make it easy to create and manage your online business. Vonza provides the easiest way for creators to monetize their business.
Key Features of Vonza
- User-friendly interface that makes it easy to create and deliver online courses, trainings and other digital products.
- Powerful drag-and-drop course builder that makes it easy to create and sell online courses.
- A robust membership system to help you create and manage a members-only area.
- Digital products store with built-in shopping cart that lets you sell e-books, software, and other digital products.
- Powerful email marketing tool that lets you send newsletters, announcements, and other emails to your customers to help you promote your courses and products.
- A comprehensive course management system that lets you track progress, manage drip courses, issue certificates, and more.
- Affiliate program that enables you to grow your business by partnering with other businesses and individuals.
- Powerful webinar platform that lets you deliver live and recorded webinars.
- A secure payment gateway that lets you accept payments from major credit cards, Stripe and PayPal.
- Wide range of integrations with popular third-party tools and services.
- Dedicated customer support team that is always available to help you with any questions or issues you may have.
Vonza Pricing
- Basic ($69/month): Unlimited Customers, Instant Payout, No Transaction Fee, 5 Courses & 10 Products, 1 Website, Vonza subdomain, 3 Vonza Funnels, 1 Admin Owner, Vonza Scheduling, Vonza Forms, Payment Gateways (Via Stripe), Access to Vonza University, Chat Support, Drip (Scheduled) Content, Coupons, bundles, Upsells, Third Party Integrations, 2,000 Email Contacts, Email Marketing, Course Completion Certificate, 10 Landing Pages, Affiliate Program.
- Pro ($169/month): Unlimited Customers, Instant Payout, No Transaction Fee, 15 Courses & 25 Products, 3 Website, 5 Custom Domain, 15 Vonza Funnels, 5 Admin Owner, Vonza Scheduling, Vonza Forms, Payment Gateways (Via Stripe), Access to Vonza University, Chat Support, Drip (Scheduled) Content, Coupons, bundles, Upsells, Third Party Integrations, 5,000 Email Contacts, Email Marketing, Course Completion Certificate, Unlimited Landing Pages, Affiliate Program, 3 Vonza Memberships, Graded Quizzes & Exams, Automation, Flexible Payments, Cloud.
- Business ($349/month): Unlimited Customers, Instant Payout, No Transaction Fee, Unlimited Courses & Products, 5 Website, 10 Custom Domain, Unlimited Vonza Funnels, 25 Admin Owner, Vonza Scheduling, Vonza Forms, Payment Gateways (Via Stripe), Access to Vonza University, Chat Support, Drip (Scheduled) Content, Coupons, bundles, Upsells, Third Party Integrations, 10,000 Email Contacts, Email Marketing, Course Completion Certificate, Unlimited Landing Pages, Affiliate Program, 10 Vonza Memberships, Graded Quizzes & Exams, Automation, Flexible Payments, Cloud, Live Webinar (this feature is in development), Support & Onboarding, Advanced Report & Analytics, Remove “Powered by Vonza” link.
Vonza Rating
Quality: 4/5
Features: 5/5
User Interface: 4/5
Pricing: 4/5
Ease of Use: 5/5
Total Score of: 22/25
If you are looking to create and sell e-books, digital products, or online training products, then Vonza is the perfect platform for you. This is an easy-to-use, drag-and-drop course builder which makes it easy for anyone to create and deliver high-quality training materials.
The business-grade features that come with this platform help you grow and manage your business even better than before.
But, there is more to Vonza than just the features. It’s also backed by one of the most supportive customer support teams that you could ever hope to find.
Simply put, if you are looking for a reliable, easy-to-use and affordable online course platform that can help you fulfill your online business goals, then Vonza might be the right solution for you.
Overall, I recommend the Vonza platform as my #1 choice, as it is one of the best platforms for course creators and entrepreneurs who are serious about creating, marketing, and selling their own course content and digital products.
2. Podia
Best for Beginners
Podia is an online course creation platform that lets creators create and sell courses, coaching, e-books, webinars, and workshops. Podia is simple to use and has everything you need to create and sell your content.
You can also use Podia to manage your membership site. Podia memberships include access to Podia’s online courses, workshops, and blog posts.
Key Features of Podia
- Powerful drag and drop course builder to create an online course.
- Host unlimited files and videos, offer payment plans, pre-sell courses, upsells, quizzes, drip content, and student comments.
- No transaction fees on paid plans.
- Offer free trial
- Sell e-books, PDFs, cheat sheets, checklists, video files, audio files, text, or any content you want.
- Get paid faster with instant payouts; there’s no holding or waiting period, so you get your money as quickly as possible.
- Earn recurring subscription income by running an online community and bringing your members, discussions, and products together in one place.
- Charge for one-on-one coaching sessions or one-to-many webinars with our Zoom and YouTube Live integrations.
- High-converting checkout is simple and fast (under 10 seconds!) which means more sales and less drop-off.
- Sell one-to-one coaching. It is one of the best ways to monetize your expertise while directly connecting with your audience.
- With built-in email marketing features like broadcasts and campaigns, you can leave your expensive email platform at the door.
- Get a beautiful, modern, mobile-friendly website for your brand. Use a Podia subdomain, or bring your own custom URL.
- Turn your fans into sales reps by launching your own affiliate program. Set custom commission terms, invite affiliates, and more.
Podia Pricing
- Free Plan ($0/month): 8% transaction fee, full website, email marketing, live chat, community, 1 download, 1 coaching product, draft courses, draft webinars.
- Mover ($33/month): Free features plus, No transaction fee, Unlimited downloads, Unlimited coaching, Unlimited courses.
- Shaker ($75/month): Mover features plus Unlimited Webinars, Affiliate program.
- Earthquaker ($166/month): Shaker features plus Priority Support, On-boarding Calls, Monthly Creator calls.
Podia Rating
Quality: 4/5
Features: 5/5
User Interface: 4/5
Pricing: 4/5
Ease of Use: 4/5
Total Score of: 21/25
Overall, Podia is a unique and great option for beginners. There’s never been an easier way to sell your content. Whether you want to create a simple one-time training course or an ongoing course with strong membership functionality and affiliate program.
You can sign up for a free plan and give it a trial run.
3. Gurucan
Best for Communities
Gurucan is an all-in-one online course platform for creators that enables educators to build and deliver engaging online courses. It has everything a successful knowledge business needs to create a course.
Create online courses, memberships, emails, push-notifications, private label mobile app and more. With Gurucan, you can easily create and deliver engaging, interactive, and effective online courses.
Key Features of Gurucan
- Create stunning online courses, daily challenges and even trainings that match any type of online business.
- Check the progress of your students by running automated quizzes, tests or checking homework manually.
- Build beautiful and converting landing pages with just a few clicks.
- Offer your workshops and courses on the go with an engaging mobile app for Android and iOS.
- Send emails and push notifications based on dozens of filters and triggers or automate routine course management tasks.
- One click in-app purchases.
- Built-in webinars with chats. Ability to run one-to-many webinars with presentation, screen sharing, live chats and promo buttons.
- Analyze view stats and use them for marketing and sales improvements.
- Fort Knox level protection of your content and data with unique video download protection, content sharing protection.
- Insightful and detailed analytics and tags to students and leads, track activity and purchases, grant access.
Gurucan Pricing
- Free Trial ($0 / 7 days): 7 days Free trial. No strings attached.
- Expert ($99/month): Zero transaction fees. Free Migration. Unlimited Storage, 5 Products, 1 Admin User, iOS & Android Gurucan App, Custom Domain, Integrations, 1 Onboarding Call, Done-for-you Service. Push-notifications, Unlimited Webinars, Unlimited Support.
- Pro ($149/month): Expert features plus 15 Products, 5 admin users, Priority Support, API integrations.
- Guru (TBD/per request): White Label App for iOS & Android, More admin seats, More Products, Custom Plan.
Gurucan Rating
Quality: 4/5
Features: 5/5
User Interface: 3.5/5
Pricing: 4/5
Ease of Use: 3.5/5
Total Score of: 20/25
Overall, Gurucan offers a wide range of features and capabilities that make it easy to create and deliver engaging online courses. From its built-in course authoring tools to its powerful mobile app features, Gurucan has everything you need to create and sell your courses online.
You can sign up for a free trial and give it a test run.
4. Upcoach
Best for Coaches
The fast-paced world of high performance coaching requires a suite of solutions that are just as nimble.
Coaching is usually a time-consuming process, especially when considering the preparation work necessary for each session.
Upcoach is an online platform designed to simplify your coaching sessions and accelerate results. This means you can focus more on coaching your clients and less on technical logistics.
Key Features of Upcoach
- Robust LMS (learning management system) feature helps you build your course, encourage your clients, organize information and activate transformation.
- Assign to-dos, new habits and worksheets automatically to your clients, so they can easily absorb the information you are sharing.
- Create courses with multiple modules and lessons.
- Assign interactive worksheets automatically.
- Strong Program Builder which is the foal point of Upcoach.
- Simple drag and drop Program Editor.
- Program Layouts and Templates.
- 1-on-1 Programs, Group Programs, Cohort Programs and Masterminds.
- Organize and schedule your Agendas & Meetings in one place. Integrates with Google calendar & Zoom
- Accountability & Encouragement Tools – Habit Tracker, To-dos, Smart Documents (interactive worksheets), Accountability Groups.
- In-built chat & forum feature to build your community in one place. Includes Group chat, 1-on-1 chat and admin chat.
- Easily collect payments with Stripe.
Upcoach Pricing
- Launch ($29/per team member, per month): 14 days refund guarantee. 30 clients. 3 Courses, Course Automation, Interactive Worksheets, 1-on-1 programs, Groups programs, Cohort Programs, Masterminds, Agendas & Meetings, Accountability & Encouragement Tools, Forum and Chats, Client Management, “Powered by Upcoach” badge, upcoach subdomain, Zapier Integration, Support & Templates.
- Grow ($39/per team member, per month): Launch features plus 100 clients, subgroups, Your own brand colors & logo, No “powered by upcoach” badge, Convertkit Integration, Public API.
- Scale ($79/per team member, per month): Grow features plus Unlimited clients, Custom Domains
- Enterprise (TBD/per request): For 10+ Team members.
- Custom Setup Special Offer – $500 (normal price $2000): Upcoach experts will help you set everything up in a matter of 3 days, so you can start coaching your clients in no time. Includes 3 Courses (up to 15 Lessons each), 2 Program Templates, 3 Smart Doc Templates, 1 Agenda Template, Import all your clients into the CRM.
- upAdmin Service ($175/week): Experienced Dedicated Virtual Assistant ready to give you a hand with any admin task you might have.
Upcoach Rating
Quality: 4/5
Features: 4/5
User Interface: 4/5
Pricing: 4/5
Ease of Use: 3.5/5
Total Score of: 19.5/25
Overall, Upcoach offers an impressive amount of features for coaches to deliver and create your courses and mentorship. It provides an exceptional platform for coaches to simplify, organize and automate their coaching services.
You can sign up for a 14-day money-back guarantee and give it a test run.
5. Graphy
Best for Professionals
Graphy is a popular online course platform, course creation software and versatile tool that allows you to create custom courses, build beautiful websites without any coding required, market your course and much more.
With Graphy, you can quickly and easily create professional-quality content without any prior experience or design skills.
Plus, with Graphy’s library of built-in templates and easy-to-use tools, you can create beautiful websites in minutes – no coding required! Over 40,000+ creators that have launched their online teaching businesses using Graphy.
Key Features of Graphy
- Built for every type of course – Live and instructor led, scheduled or drip courses.
- Protect your content and deliver piracy-free, secure content to your learners.
- Conduct live webinars and classes with advanced features.
- Add quizzes, assignments, PDFs, media files and more.
- Launch your white-labelled website and mobile app with customizable, no-code tools to flaunt your brand.
- Custom website with extensive template library.
- Simple website builder with no coding required.
- Custom domain functionality.
- Integrated payment gateway with Stripe, Paypal and local payment providers. Offer dynamic pricing.
- In-built marketing and sales tools to grow your audience with offers, promo codes and discounts.
- Blogging functionality to drive traffic to your course site.
- Create and niche based, private community.
- Engage your audience with SMS, email and push notifications.
- Course completion with Certificate to your students.
- In-built affiliate marketing program.
Graphy Pricing
- Get the complete Graphy exprience from launch to scale with simple straightforward pricing: $999 onboarding fee, 10% per sale.
Graphy Rating
Quality: 4/5
Features: 4/5
User Interface: 3.5/5
Pricing: 2/5
Ease of Use: 3.5/5
Total Score of: 17.5/25
Overall, Graphy is a complete online course platform for building your business. The real game changer is that you can do all this with just one account and have access to an extensive library of templates, marketing and sales tools, and more.
It’s time to start building your online teaching business on Graphy!
6. Samcart
Best for Marketing
Samcart is a powerful shopping cart software that enables businesses to sell digital products and services online. Samcart makes it easy to create beautiful, professional-looking checkout pages, and offers a variety of features to help you maximize your sales.
Samcart is a great solution for selling online courses, ebooks, membership sites, coaching, consulting and much more.
Key Features of Samcart
- Easily customize beautiful pages with intuitive drag & drop builder to showcase your product, without ever touching a line of code.
- Pre-designed templates to make your sales page building easy. Just plug in your product, and start selling.
- Sell unlimited products, whenever you want without any limitations that slows you down.
- Sell in any language or currency you need.
- Speed up your checkout flow by adding “one touch” purchases with Apple Pay, Google Pay, and more.
- Add your own custom domain to every sales page you create, and keep your branding front and center.
- Pre-Purchase Order Bumps, One-click Upsells, A/B Testing, Pixels Tracking and Donations features.
- Build a private army of promotional partners that will sell your products for you with in-built affiliate center.
- Cart abandonment feature. Recover lost sales by engaging with prospects who left without purchasing.
- Ability to offer Coupons and Discounts.
- Powerful integration engine to seamlessly sync up with your favorite tools plus 750+ more with Zapier to make running your business a breeze.
Samcart Pricing
- Launch ($29/per month): 7 Day Free Trial. 1 Admin User, Standard integrations, Standard email support, Virtual onboarding webinars, Flexible customer billing options, Dashboard and sales reports, Weekly webinars, Free Preview of CreatorU.
- Grow ($79/per month): All Launch features plus 3 Admin Users, Enhanced integrations, 1-day email support, Virtual onboarding webinars, 1:1 launch support call with SamCart expert (annual plans only), Order bump collections, Post-purchase upsells, UTM tracking and marketing reports, Built-in SEO engine, Multiple customer payment options, Custom checkout fields, On-demand executive reports.
- Scale ($159/per month): All Grow features plus 10 Admin Users, Custom CRM and API integrations, Priority email support, Virtual onboarding webinars, Dedicated SamCart Expert (annual plans only), Cart abandonment conversion, Subscription Saver (dunning), Affiliate center, Built-in A/B testing, Automated/scheduled executive insight reports.
Samcart Rating
Quality: 4/5
Features: 4/5
User Interface: 4/5
Pricing: 3.5/5
Ease of Use: 4/5
Total Score of: 19.5/25
Overall, Samcart is a great choice for creators looking to sell their courses, ebooks or other digital products and services online. Samcart focuses more on the marketing and sales of your product which is (to me) a huge plus because the more sales and customers you get, the more income you make. And that would help you to creator more products for your customers.
You can sign up for a 7-day free trial and take it for a test run!
Summary and Top Picks
Making your own course is an investment, so choosing the right course hosting platform and tools has to be a major consideration.
No two platforms are the same, so you’ll want to choose a platform that lets you create the course exactly how you want it to look and function.
You want an online course hosting platform that offers the most flexibility and marketing tools possible when it comes to creating a course with their unique features and capabilities.
It has to be easy to use for students and instructors, have a wide selection of templates and resources, and have good marketing capabilities.
- Vonza: Best Overall Online Course Hosting Platform
- Podia: Best for Beginners
- Gurucan: Best for Creating Communities
- Upcoach: Best for Coaches
- Graphy: Best for Professionals
- Samcart: Best for Marketing
With all of the amazing features you need at the most affordable price, Vonza is the clear overall winner.
If you’re ready to start creating, promoting and selling online courses, I recommend you go with Vonza.