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After self-hosting my online courses for several months, I decided it was time for a more secure and robust solution. So I do what I always do when faced with a big decision - I made a cup of hot tea and fired up a spreadsheet. Then I researched these popular online course platforms to see which one was the best fit in terms of pricing and features:

Here’s what I found:

1. Kajabi isn’t for me.

An amazing platform, but it’s so much more than I need. If you don’t already have a website and you can afford the $119/month for the basic plan it’s worth checking out. Kajabi allows you to blog, have unlimited landing pages, and marketing emails. Since I already have a website, blog, and mailing list, there are other platforms at much lower prices that meet my needs.

2. Podia, Thinkific, and Teachable are all in my pricing and features sweet-spot.

So I started building a course in all three. Here’s what I learned:

The Podia user experience is amazing! You can sign up for their live demo and see it in action. The company has a friendly, customer-centered feel and it comes through in all they do. I loved the process of building a course in Podia. But I didn’t choose it - it’s lacking a major feature I need. Podia doesn’t deal with sales tax, so if you are selling courses in a state where you’d need to charge tax, you’ll have to manage all that on your own.

Thinkific and Teachable are both pretty similar in their course creation process. The user experience isn’t quite as nice as Podia but they both offer excellent support guides. While course creation has essentially the same steps in each platform, I preferred the flexibility that Teachable has on each “lesson” page. However Thinkific wins out in terms of straightforward pricing. Be sure to check out Thinkific’s full feature list and compare it with Teachable’s features. However, Thinkific also doesn’t take care of sales tax for you. Teachable will automatically calculate, collect and remit sales tax depending on the student’s location. One key headache off my plate!

You can check current pricing here:

3. Making a decision.

Doing the math, Teachable is cheaper if I’m making less than $400/month in sales. Once sales surpass $400/month, Thinkific and Podia become the least expensive versions.

I liked the lesson page flexibility of Teachable more than Thinkific, and I loved the Podia interface. Another big factor in my choice was that I like taking courses in Teachable best! Podia has a great interface, but a big miss is that when you start a lesson, Podia marks it as complete. So if you’re interrupted, you may think you’ve completed a lesson when you haven’t. Teachable has three indicators for lessons: not viewed, currently in progress, and completed. This works much better for me as a student!

But what clinched it for me is the sales tax management that Teachable provides. Who wants to keep track of all that on their own?!