The 15 Best Free Tools for Course Creators

The best free tools for course creators are the ones you'd actually open every week: OBS to film, Loom to explain, Google Postmaster and MailGenius to keep your emails out of spam, remove.bg and Media Modifier to make a digital product look real, and a free hook generator to write the first three seconds. Here are all 15.

The two rules every tool on this list had to pass

I've spent well over half a million dollars on paid software and tools. That's how I know which free ones are worth your attention, and it's why I gave myself two rules before I made this list.

Rule one: I have to use it weekly or daily. Not a nifty thing I open once in a blue moon. If it isn't part of my week, it didn't make the cut. Rule two: you probably haven't heard of it. This isn't ChatGPT and it isn't Canva. Half of these I only found after years of selling online, and a couple of them I found by paying someone a lot of money to tell me.

The free tools that give me back hours every week

OBS Studio is the one I ignored the longest and now can't work without. I did the math on it: OBS saves me between four and a half and six hours a week. Every video I make gets filmed in it, including the one at the top of this page. My old workflow was three files. Camera to the SD card, microphone into GarageBand, screen into the Apple recorder, then all of it dragged into Premiere to be synced. Fifteen minutes per video, sometimes thirty on a long one, before anybody had edited a single frame.

Now I hit stop and one file lands in one folder and goes straight to my editor. It costs nothing, at obsproject.com.

Loom is the single most used tool I own. When I filmed this list I had 2,987 Looms recorded in about a year and a half, which is five and a half videos a day. Team training, customer service, SOPs, feedback on a page somebody built. It has replaced more meetings than any calendar rule ever did. The free tier is real, and I pay only because of how hard I lean on it.

Video Speed Controller is a Chrome extension I hit 15 to 20 times a day. It puts speed control on any video on the internet, not just YouTube. D speeds up, S slows down, G skips most ads. Podcasts, course lessons and Looms all run at 1.5x to 2x now.

Unhook deletes the YouTube recommended feed. My biggest time sink used to be opening YouTube for one thing and losing twenty minutes to the algorithm. With Unhook the home screen is empty, so you search what you came for and leave.

The free tools that keep your emails out of the spam folder

Emails are a money printing machine. Our Black Friday week does over half a million dollars in sales, and almost all of it comes off an email blast. So the question of which inbox you land in isn't a technical detail, it's revenue.

Google Postmaster Tools is the one I only found after paying $115,000 for an email marketing consultant. It's free, it's from Google, and once your domain is verified it tells you your domain reputation and your spam complaint rate. I sort by the last 120 days and check it most weeks. High reputation means your emails have the best possible shot at the primary inbox. Anything over a 3% spam rate is too high. If the charts are empty, that's good news, it means you aren't sending enough for Google to have an opinion yet. It lives at postmaster.google.com.

MailGenius is the spam tester I use before a big send. You send a message to the address it gives you, and it grades you: blacklists, DKIM, DMARC, the stuff most creators have never heard of. In February 2024 Gmail started requiring those DNS records from anyone sending real volume. Miss them and you are writing emails nobody reads.

whatismydns.net answers the next question, which is whether the record you think you added is actually live. Type your domain, switch the record type to TXT, search, and look for green check marks around the world.

Here's the honest part: this is the most tedious 30 minutes in the whole business, and most people never do it. That's exactly why we do it for you. On Premium and Elite, the onboarding call sets up your domain, your DNS and your email deliverability while you watch, in about half an hour, and then you go send emails instead of reading Google documentation. Both plans include that call (prices checked September 2026).

The free tools that make a digital product look real

A course has no box. Nobody can pick it up. The picture next to your buy button is doing a job a physical product does for free, which is why mockups matter more here than almost anywhere else.

Media Modifier makes them without Photoshop, which I hate, and without paying somebody $30 to $100 on Fiverr to drop your logo into an iPhone frame. Free tier, upload the design, pick the device, done. remove.bg is the other half: drag in a photo, it finds the subject and hands back a transparent PNG for your sales page or your mockup.

Those images then go on a page, and the page is where most creators stall for a month. It's why we ship the funnel and website templates already built, so you swap your headline and your photo into a page that has already sold something instead of starting at a blank canvas. The template library comes with the trial.

compressjpeg.com before any image goes into an email, because Gmail, Yahoo and Outlook all punish heavy files. Handbrake does the same job for video, and it is not subtle: I've taken a 100 GB file down to two or three gigs with a quality difference I genuinely cannot see. If you send footage to editors, clients or students, it changes your week.

GoFullPage captures an entire web page in one screenshot instead of sixteen, which is how I save a design I like and hand it to whoever is building mine. Elfsight is the mixed one, part free and part paid, and it's where I grab countdown timers, an Instagram feed or a review widget for a page when I don't want to write code.

All 15, and what each one saves you

Tool	What I use it for	What it saves
OBS Studio	Filming every video, camera and screen in one file	4.5 to 6 hours a week, and 15 minutes of syncing per video
Loom	Team training, SOPs, customer service, feedback	Meetings. Five and a half of them a day, in my case
Video Speed Controller	Speed control on any video, ad skipping	Hours a week if you learn from video
Unhook	Killing the YouTube recommended feed	The twenty minutes you didn't mean to spend
Productivity Tracker	Where your hours actually went, daily and weekly	The guessing about why the week disappeared
Google Postmaster Tools	Domain reputation and spam rate	A consultant bill. Mine was $115,000 before I found it
MailGenius	Spam test before a big send	The launch email that lands in promotions
whatismydns.net	Checking DMARC, DKIM and SPF are live	Hours of guessing why email is broken
Media Modifier	Product mockups without Photoshop	$30 to $100 per mockup on Fiverr or Upwork
remove.bg	Transparent PNGs of people and products	A designer, for most simple cutouts
compressjpeg.com	Shrinking images before they go in an email	Deliverability you didn't know you were losing
Handbrake	Compressing video for sending and uploading	100 GB down to 2 or 3, with no visible quality loss
GoFullPage	Full page screenshots for design reference	Sixteen screenshots and the stitching
Elfsight	Countdown timers, feeds and review widgets	A developer, for small page add ons
Hook generator prompt	Writing the first three seconds of any video	The video nobody watched past second four

Two of them are freemium rather than free. Loom and Elfsight both have real free tiers, and I pay for Loom because of how many videos a day I run through it. Everything else on that list costs nothing, forever. If you want the longer version of the paid ones I actually think are worth it, that's the must-have tools list, and the filming workflow above gets pulled apart in the workflow that cut my editing time.

The free hook generator I use to write the first three seconds

The last one on the list is ours, and it's the one I'd grab first. A hook is the first three to five seconds of your video, and most creators are genuinely bad at writing them, which is fine because nobody taught them. It has two parts: a prompt you paste into ChatGPT or Claude with your market filled in, and the 50 hook formats I've used to write my own content for years. Paste the prompt, then the formats, and what comes back is not the slop you get from asking for "15 hooks for a course creator." They're copywritten structures with your topic in them.

My favourite move with it is the second pass. Take the 50 it gives you, pick the three you like, and say "I loved number 4, number 25 and number 37, give me 15 more in those formats." That's where the good ones show up. The prompt and all 50 templates are free here. If you want the thinking behind which prompts are worth saving, the AI prompts post covers the ones I use weekly.

The one thing a free tool can't do for you

Every tool above does one job. None of them run your business. The business is the course sitting behind a login, the checkout that takes the money, the emails that go out on Tuesday, the automation that follows up with the people who didn't buy, and the CRM that remembers who they are. That part has never been free, for anyone.

I've sold or helped sell $25 million of online courses, and I did it on Kajabi, ClickFunnels, ActiveCampaign, Mailchimp, WordPress, Samcart and Kartra. Not one of them did everything, so I ended up with a Kajabi subscription and a Mailchimp subscription and a Zapier subscription holding the two together. The bill hit $5,000 a month. I call it software stacking, and it's a disease. About 1 in 25 of the messages customers send us names another platform they are still paying for while they're paying us, usually because moving one last piece feels scary.

So yes, one tool on this page costs money, and it's mine. Course Creator 360 (CC360) is $147 a month on Premium with a 30-day trial, and it holds the courses, the funnels, the website, the emails, the automations, the community and the CRM in one login, with the templates and the automations we've used across those years already built inside it. Buy even two of the things you're currently stacking and it costs more than that. If you'd rather see the swap done on your own account before you touch anything, book a demo and make us prove it.

Where I'd start this week

If you install nothing else, install OBS and record one lesson tonight, then check Postmaster and find out whether your domain reputation is high or whether you've been shouting into the promotions tab. That hour changes what your next launch is worth.

Then add up what leaves your account every month for the tools holding your course, your pages and your list. If that is more than one line item, run a 30-day trial next to it and move one piece: the course, or the funnel, or the emails. Most people who move one piece move the rest within a month, because the second piece is already connected to the first. My incentive is simple and I'll say it out loud: if I can get you launched and making money, you'll stay. Start the trial and put the free tools to work on top of it.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best free software for creating an online course?

For recording it, OBS Studio, which is what I film everything on. For hosting and selling it, there isn't a genuinely free option that also takes payments, sends your emails and hosts your video without limits. Free plans on course platforms usually cap your students, take a cut of sales, or strip out email. Record with the free tools, host with one paid platform.

Do I need to pay for Loom?

No. The free tier records and shares video and it is enough for most creators starting out. I pay for it because I record more than five videos a day for my team and customers, and the free limits on length and library size get in the way at that volume.

What free tool checks if my emails are going to spam?

Two, and they answer different questions. Google Postmaster Tools tells you your domain reputation and spam complaint rate over time, and MailGenius grades a single message on the technical stuff like DKIM and DMARC before you send it to your whole list. Use MailGenius before a launch and Postmaster every week.

Are free tools enough to launch a course?

To make it, yes. Film on OBS, compress with Handbrake, build your mockups in Media Modifier, write hooks with the free prompt. To sell it you still need somewhere for the course to live, a checkout, and an email list, and that is the part worth paying for once instead of four times.

What is software stacking?

It's what happens when no single tool does everything, so you buy a course platform, then an email tool, then a funnel builder, then Zapier to make them talk. Every piece is defensible and the total is not. Mine reached $5,000 a month before I fixed it, and the fix was consolidation, not another subscription.

Which of these tools do I cancel once everything is in one place?

None of the 15, they're free and they stay in the workflow. What you cancel is the stack underneath them: the separate course host, the separate email sender, the separate funnel builder, the automation glue. On CC360 those are one line item with the templates, the onboarding call and 24/7 chat included, and the free tools above sit on top of it doing what they're good at. Try it for 30 days and cancel the rest when you see it working.

Related

• The Tools You Actually Need to Run a Creator Business
• The Content Workflow That Cut My Editing Time by 20X
• The 12 Best AI Prompts for Course Creators