5 Best Free Online Course Platforms [2024 Update] • Scottmax.com (2024)

Quick links for the Best Online Course Platforms

1) Beste Gesamtleistung 🏆

Skool

An educational platform, transforming learning with interactive tools and engaging resources for students.

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2) Top E-Learning🥈

Udemy

An online learning platform empowering learners with a wide array of expert-led education.

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3) Elite Education 🥉

Coursera

An online learning platform providing access to top-quality courses from renowned universities and institutions.

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So, you are in the market for a free online course platform.

Ideal, because in this article we have our compilation list for our top picks, and we compare the features and pricing for you.

If you just want the best choice, we’ve added that right at the top of the article as this was what is most requested by our customers. So, that’ll be the “can’t go wrong” option.

Otherwise, feel free to explore all the options we’ve reviewed on the market to find something that might fit you a little better.

Enjoy the list!

The Best Free Online Course Platform Specifically

Online Course Platforms have risen tremendously in popularity, with many students preferring virtual learning at their own pace. However, some learners prefer a free online platform that offers flexible courses and progress checking. Have a look at the products below to choose the best free online course platform specifically:

1. Podia

Podia is a learning management system and online course creation platform that helps you create, host, launch, sell and manage your online courses, digital downloads, webinars, and memberships. With Podia, you can get recurring payments from your audience by providing them with continuous services.

Podia gives you everything you need to grow at each stage of your journey. It lets you build a website, host a community and start selling digital products, all for free. Whether you’re just starting out or already have a thriving business, Podia can help you reach the next milestone. Additionally, it enables you to give your website, products, and community a clean, professional look that’s easy to build yourself.

Podia Features

Here are some exclusive features of Podia:

Online Courses: Podia makes it easy to build an online course with a beautiful and clean look that your customers will love. You can customize your entire site in minutes without designing or coding skills. With Podia, you can add media and testimonials to your sales page, customize branding, control all elements on your layout and see real-time previews. Additionally, you can ensure your course students genuinely understand your material with a multiple-choice quiz at the end of your lessons.

Digital Downloads: Podia allows creators to sell digital downloads like eBooks and worksheets. You can build your subscribers by offering some products for free. With Podia, a free digital download product is all it takes to provide a lead magnet. Moreover, when you host your products in Podia, you can automatically use the upsell feature to offer additional recommendations after a sale. With Podia, you can create a clean, professional-looking sales page.

Affiliate Marketing: With Podia, you can build your affiliate program and invite whomever you want. Whether that means past customers who wish to help sell your work, affiliate marketers who promote your launches for commission, or other creators with whom you collaborate and swap marketing. Podia makes it easy to pay people commissions for promoting your product by allowing you to set custom amounts for milestones or use a default site-wide commission structure.

Email Marketing: Podia gives you the power of an email marketing platform without paying extra. You can send broadcast emails, build automated funnels, and get rich email analytics to the exact ROI. Podia allows you to make your email list by adding email signup forms to any page on your Podia site. You can share one-off updates with your entire list or send more targeted updates to specific segments. You can also track and analyze open rates, clicks, conversion rates, and more from your dashboard.

Embeds: With Podia, you can ember product listings for your course, membership, or download. You can create a customized button, product card, or hyperlink to sell your online course. You can copy-and-paste a code snippet into any site, including WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, Unbounce, LeadPages, and more. Embedding ensures your site visitors can buy your products without leaving the page.

Podia Pricing

Podia offers 4 Pricing options for its online course hosting platform.

The “Free” plan is priced at $0 and charges 8% transaction fees. It offers one download and coaching product, email marketing, draft courses, and community.

The “Mover” plan is priced at $39/month and charges no transaction fees. It offers a complete website, unlimited downloads and coaching, draft webinars, and chat support.

The “Shaker” plan is priced at $89/month and offers affiliate marketing, unlimited course and webinar creation, embedded checkout, and link tracking.

The “Earthquaker” plan is priced at $199/month and offers priority support, onboarding calls, custom branding, and unlimited email campaigns.

2. WizIQ

WizIQ is a web-based and completely responsive online course hosting platform, enabling instructors and students to access it anytime there is an Internet connection. Moreover, WizIQ can be updated just as quickly as you create new content. It has various features, like course management, virtual classes, streaming videos, content authoring, tests and assignments, and much more.

WizIQ offers virtual classroom, course production and sale, plus the creation of tests, assignments, and complete reports. WizIQ also provides its proprietary e-commerce platform, where users can sell their packaged courses to users.

WizIQ Features

Here are some exclusive features of WizIQ:

eCommerce: WizIQ offers its free proprietary WizIQ e-commerce platform where you can sell your courses, helping you to avoid 3rd-party software and extra transaction fees. With the cloud-based WizIQ Learning Management Software, you can easily create brand-name training portals for providing education via virtual training or live classes.

Interactive Virtual Classroom: A WizIQ Virtual Classroom comes equipped with real-time collaboration tools such as live chat, two-way audio and video communications, a whiteboard, and content (.doc,.docx,.pdf,.xls,.xlsx,.ppt,.pptx,.pps,.ppsx,.swf,.flv, and YouTube videos). The module allows Moodle users to schedule and conduct online classes through the WizIQ Virtual Classroom.

Administration and Accessibility: Any teacher or administrator of a Moodle classroom can schedule a live class by selecting a WizIQ Live class in the Add activity drop-down in the Moodle classroom. Administrators and teachers can choose WizIQ Live Class to create a new lecture for their courses, just like they would do with any other standard activity.

Seamless Communication: WizIQ supports student-teacher interactions by allowing users to message other users included on the contacts list. This keeps everyone connected, helps build friendships and encourages learning. WizIQ has deployed a knowledgeable team that responds to the client’s queries and concerns; within a short time span. So, if you are ever having problems using the platform, there is someone that you can ask for help.

Ease of Access: WizIQ provides students easy access to courses they have taken before and allows them to share views and ideas on a topic. This gives teachers a sense of how their students are perceiving a course and ways of improving their lectures or even pedagogical strategies.

WizIQ Pricing

WizIQ offers custom pricing quotes for its online course platform’s subscription plans. Additionally, it also offers a free version.

3. Thinkific

Thinkific is a library of powerful, effective apps that help add enhanced capabilities to the course creation and delivery processes. The Thinkific platform makes it easy for the creators to adapt their courses and incorporate unique, complex features. Thinkific has revolutionized how individuals make money and learn online by creating a comprehensive platform for course creators and their audiences.

Thinkific is laser-focused on being the best platform to build online courses and integrates with the best-of-breed tools creators are already using. Thinkific offers a robust suite of tools to help you create an elegant, engaging website where users can come and buy your online class. Thinkific offers the following course templates; Blank, Mini-Course, Flagship Course, Pre-Sell, Digital Download, Membership Resource Library, and Replay Webinar.

Thinkific Features

Here are some exclusive features of Thinkific:

Learning Facilitation: Learning a new skill has increasingly become essential over the past few years. Especially during these uncertain times, finding more avenues of earning and learning is necessary. Thinkific offers every tool you can think of to help you reach a wider audience and easily facilitate authentic progressive learning.

Complete Control: Thinkific lets you decide the content of your online course and its presentation with an extensive range of eye-catching and aesthetic website themes, design and customization tools that will further help you customize your learning courses. Moreover, Thinkific allows you to set up a personal domain with branding, creating a unique platform for your online lesson.

Support System: Thinkific has one of the best customer support teams ready and willing to assist and answer queries immediately and efficiently. With over 50000 creators on the platform, you have a community’s worth of knowledge and assistance to support you. Moreover, with Thinkific, you can further tap into different online courses to enhance your expertise.

Integration: Thinkific offers seamless and stress-free integration with your existing website or CRM system. Thinkific offers 24/7 round-the-clock monitoring, consistent and dependable cloud hosting and advanced security. Thinkific makes it easy to impart your skill and expertise the best way you see fit.

Maximize Profits: Suppose you are already making some profit with your courses. In that case, you are better off giving Thinkific a shot right off the bat, as they will allow you to utilize Drip, coupons, affiliate marketing tools, and email marketing integration. It has a user-friendly experience for creating courses, and you can fully use the software. The Thinkific Platform is not the most sophisticated one on the market, but it is a powerful and easy-to-use solution for aspiring beginners and established course builders.

Site Builder: Site Builder is just a part of Thinkific’s administrative dashboard and enables you to create a compelling homepage for your course. You can create your whole product, from content to landing pages and checkout, within the Thinkific Course Builder. In the Thinkific backend, you can manage the curriculum of your courses using a fully drag-and-drop learning content editor.

Thinkific Pricing

Thinkific offers 4 Pricing options for its online course-hosting platform.

The “Free” plan is priced at $0 and offers a drag-and-drop course builder, website themes, course quizzes and two spaces per community.

The “Basic” plan is priced at $49/month and offers custom domain, affiliate selling, 0 transaction fee and five spaces per community.

The “Start” plan is priced at $99/month and offers fantastic student experience, assignments, live lessons and advanced website code editing.

The “Grow” plan is priced at $199/month and offers unlimited courses, 3 Communities, bulk enrollments, custom branding and 20 spaces per community.

4. Teachable

With Teachable’s online course platform, you can easily create lessons, upload videos or audio files as course materials, and sell your courses using an easy check-out process. Overall, Teachable offers plenty of templates and themes, making it easy to build a nice-looking website quickly. Still, more experienced users can customize their sites to have even greater control over their appearance.

Teachable is undoubtedly one of the most popular online learning platforms today, offering users all they need to build, market, and sell their courses. Teachable now has over 20,000 active courses, over five million students, and over 10,000 instructors online. Teachable may not be as flashy or beautiful as some newer platforms, but with so many students navigating its marketplace, its network is second to none in online course creation.

Teachable Features

Here are some exclusive features of Teachable:

Student Feedback and Educational tools: Teachable’s online course platform offers rudimentary quizzes to help instructors measure students learning progress with multiple-choice questions. The system grades quiz automatically, which is a neat feature that spares instructors from having to score them manually. Teachable also helps you gather student feedback and discover insights into your courses using Google Forms and surveys.

Course Creation: Whether running a self-paced, cohort-based, or live-coaching class, you can do all that here at Teachable. You can build your courses or coaching services fast with their intuitive drag-and-drop creator, plus sell instantly with a built-in custom sales page builder. Moreover, Teachable offers exclusive eCommerce features to help you expand your reach in the marketplace.

Teachable Pay: With TeachablePay, you can get paid fast, at the time of your choosing. Additionally, you can use ad-hoc, student-facing features such as comments, quizzes, and certifications for completion to promote student learning outcomes and satisfaction. You can use the affiliate marketing tools to sign up partners to promote your business on Teachable. Then, automate payments to collaborators using the BackOffice, which is only available with Teachable Pay.

Scale with Teachable: Create as many courses as you like with Teachable. Repurpose the content and lectures easily so that you can grow faster. Plus, their bulk download functionality allows you to transfer student data and courses from another platform seamlessly. Take your business to greater heights by growing your audience or finding new ways to drive revenue.

Business Management: Do business wherever you want without worrying about the tax headache. Whether remittances or tax forms, you can use Teachable’s learnable taxes to avoid collecting them manually. Understand the productivity of your business and actively adapt strategies with Teachable’s Advanced Data Reporting. They offer user-friendly reports of sales volumes and student engagement that can help you make data-informed decisions.

Teachable Pricing

Teachable offers four subscription plans for its online course creation platform:

The “Free” plan is priced at $0 and allows you to create 1 Course. Additionally, it offers an integrated website builder and charges $1 + 10% transaction fees on sales.

The “Basic” plan is priced at $39/month and allows you to create 5 Courses. Additionally, it offers a custom domain, direct integrations and email marketing. It charges 5% transaction fees on sales.

The “Pro” plan is priced at $119/month and allows you to create unlimited courses. Additionally, it offers 5 Admin users, public API and affiliate marketing. There are no transaction fees on sales with this pricing option.

The “Advanced” plan offers an on-demand pricing option and customizable features with plan limits. It does not charge any transaction fees and offers advanced theme customization.

5. Coursera

Coursera is a super-popular open online education platform. Launched in 2012 and partnered with major universities and companies, Coursera offers all types of accredited courses. With Coursera, you can surpass the learning limitations and advance or switch your career by completing professional courses.

Moreover, Coursera assists governments in providing sought-after skills and learning paths on a national scale. With Coursera, governments can develop regionally relevant career pathways and upskill the workforce.

Coursera has partnerships with over 200 institutions worldwide and offers more than 3,000 courses, certificates, projects, and specializations to millions of learners. In March 2020, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Coursera, along with partners, sponsored more than 115 certification courses for students, stakeholders, and individuals that could have been affected by the global pandemic.

Coursera Features

Here are some exclusive features of Coursera:

Premium Education Provider: Coursera is the premier provider of online education, giving you the power to create positive changes in your career progression. Coursera’s educational offerings span the spectrum, from personally developed courses, like “The Science of Well-Being at Yale” program to workforce-upskilling programs by companies such as Google and IBM.

Team Empowerment: Coursera offers businesses the transformative skill development solution for empowering teams with high-impact skills that drive information, competitiveness and growth. With Coursera, you can enable hands-on learning to drive rapid skill acquisition. Additionally, Coursera allows you to monitor skill development and benchmark proficiency against industrial peers.

Coursera For Students: With Coursera, educational institutions can promote student employability by teaching in-demand skills for high-growth fields. It helps students master job-ready skills with guided projects, programming assignments and in-course assessments. Coursera empowers every university to offer job-relevant, credit-ready online education; to students and faculty.

Quality Learning: Coursera offers access to top-rated online degree programs from top universities. Now, you do not need to leave your job or relocate to a new city in order to get your bachelor’s degree from a leading university. Coursera has partnerships with leading universities. So that you get the same degree, follow the same course, and learn from the same experts in the field of top-tier professors that students do on campus.

Interactive and Engaging: Online degrees at Coursera are powered: by technology to help you form meaningful connections with faculty and peers. From live, online lectures to asynchronous, self-paced classes, you choose what works for you. At each stage of your learning journey, you will have access to an online student support team, a class facilitator, and a peer network.

Coursera Pricing

Coursera offers solutions for Teams, Universities and Governments to upskill their workforce, students and citizens.

The “Team” plan is priced at $399 for upto 125 users and offers a catalogue of 5000+ courses from top universities. You can opt for the “Enterprise” plan if you have more than 125 users in your organization.

Coursera offers 3 Subscription plans for Universities.

The “Basic” plan is free and offers access to guided projects, assessments, and quizzes. Additionally, students get verified certificates upon course completion.

The “Career Academy” plan offers an on-demand pricing quote and provides industry micro-credentials, plagiarism tracking and role-based career exploration.

The “Full Catalog” plan offers an on-demand pricing quote and provides private authorizing tools, skill configuration, online proctoring and plagiarism flagging.

Coursera offers an on-demand pricing quote for its government solution. It helps you empower citizens and upskill public officials.

Why use an Online Course Platform at all?

Whether you are passionate about teaching, looking to build your audience, or simply looking to profit from your courses, Online course platforms will help you reach your goals. It enables you to check students’ course progress and add relevant tests to analyze their skill level.

You can also create a website, build and manage a course, see analytics, formulate email marketing campaigns, connect with customers, and process payments from one dashboard. With platforms like these, you can build virtual classes and run webinars, email sequences for developers, and much more.

Why should you use Free Online Course Platforms?

No matter why you decide to go with an online degree, earning a degree online can help you prepare for professional growth and show potential employers critical skills. While the benefits of inherently online education are available to everyone, online education has unique advantages for students looking to gain college credits or even a full-fledged bachelor’s degree.

With online education, students can study from instructors in any time zone, potentially any time of the day. Since one can attend online courses from a home or chosen location, students are less likely to miss classes.

Online classes and degree programs are tremendously valuable if you enroll in a quality program and are committed to maximized learning. By taking classes online, you can concentrate on a subject that interests you and choose among the many online courses and programs available.

Whether your interest is in starting your own business or more traditional roles as a salaried employee, taking an online course for free can take your skills to the next level.

Virtual education exposes students to classmates worldwide, providing networking opportunities not available with on-campus programs. Just like courses taken in a traditional classroom environment, virtual learning has a variety of options for professional development.

Among the many benefits of free online education, you will find that virtual learning allows for more flexible scheduling, can lower the cost of completing a degree, and can make it easier for you to build a career while continuing to pursue an education.

Free Online Course Platforms, A Summary

For those who must still juggle working and going back to college, the flexibility of online programs provides individuals with an opportunity to learn while still working and growing professionally. Online courses allow students to learn at their own pace rather than having mandatory class times.

Podia offers a free subscription for its online course platform with several advanced features like email and affiliate marketing, website builder, and premium chat support. It is our suggested pick for the best free online course platform. Visit the website to get started.

What Online Course Platform would you recommend?

Kurz gesagt, Es ist Skool.com

It’s a cutting-edge educational platform revolutionizing learning through immersive experiences. Empowering students with personalized lessons, innovative tools, and expert guidance. Skool transforms education, fostering curiosity, creativity, and excellence. Join the future of learning today.

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Skool.com offers immersive, personalized learning experiences through interactive courses, expert guidance, and hands-on projects. Unleash your potential, nurture curiosity, and build skills that matter. Join a vibrant community shaping the future of learning at Skool.

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