The Best Platform to Host an Online Course in 2026

I've been subscribed to more than 30 course platforms in eight years, and when I say tried, I don't mean I dabbled for a day. I sold seven figures on four of them and I built one of them, so weigh that. The answer: if you sell what you know, Course Creator 360 is the best platform to host an online course in 2026. Eight years of conclusions, so you don't lose months to a platform you end up cancelling anyway.

The six things I score a platform on

Feature lists are useless. Every platform here hosts video and takes payments. Here's what decides whether you make money on one.

1. The real cost, not the advertised one.
2. The cut they take on every sale you make.
3. How many of the twelve slices a course business needs it actually covers.
4. Time to launch. Days from signup to your first sale.
5. Who answers when something breaks at 11pm on a Sunday.
6. The ceiling. What gets capped as you grow, and what that costs to lift.

One thing before the scoring, because it decides more than the scoring does. The tools are about 30% of this. There is nothing about owning a Kajabi subscription that magically produces money. The other 70% is the education, the blueprint, the templates from somebody who has sold the thing, the coaching and the support at 11pm. Almost nobody scores that column, and it's the one I lost the most years to.

Scored against those six, here's where every serious option lands. Kajabi goes first because it comes up in our own customer messages more often than every other platform on this page combined. Prices checked August and September 2026, all on public pages you can go read yourself.

Platform	Price today	Their cut of your sales	What it's genuinely best at	Where it costs you
Kajabi	$179 Basic, $249 Growth, $499 Pro	2.9% + $0.30, plus a 2% surcharge on the entry tier if you use your own Stripe	Polish. The course player and checkout look expensive, and it's the biggest brand here	It raised prices 20 to 25% in January 2026 with no grandfathering, cut the Basic contact cap from 10,000 to 2,500 in the same move, and gave new signups 50% off while loyal customers ate it
Skool	$9 entry, $99 standard	10% on the $9 tier, 2.9% on the $99 tier	Community. It's the fastest thing on earth to start, and people show up	It covers 2 of the 12 slices. The other 10 turn into subscriptions, which is how a $99 tool becomes a $400 month
Teachable	$29 to $39 entry	7.5% on the entry plan, 0% at $69 and up	Course hosting. It's been doing that one job for a decade and it works	Hotmart owns it and it's aiming at corporate training buyers now, not creators. Trustpilot sits at 3.3 on 1,100 reviews, with 41% of them one star
Thinkific	$40 to $54	2.9% on every tier	A clean student experience and a stable player	Its self-serve creator revenue went negative for the first time in Q2 2026 while it moved upmarket. Trustpilot is 1.9 on 864 reviews, the lowest in this set
Systeme.io	Free tier, $17 paid	0%	Price. A real free plan, no fees, and a 4.9 Trustpilot score on 8,387 reviews	Depth. It does just enough of each thing to claim the feature, not enough to let you cancel anything else
GoHighLevel	$97 to $497	None	The engine. The most capable automation, CRM and funnel builder of anything here, and a 4.9 on Trustpilot across more than 14,000 reviews	Nothing is built for you. It's 15,000 templates for dentists and realtors and no idea which one sells a course, which is why it launches slowest here
Course Creator 360	$97, $147, $297 ($81, $119, $239 annual)	None	Time to launch. The GoHighLevel engine, plus funnels, emails and automations already built, deliverability set up for you, 24/7 human chat and the training	The admin looks like a business tool, not a boutique. Your students never see it, they see your pages and your course portal, and that industrial engine underneath is exactly why nothing on your account is capped, however big you get

The advertised price and the price you actually pay

There's the number on the pricing page and there's what leaves your bank account. Two things move it. The first is tier pricing by feature. Kajabi caps courses, contacts, admins, websites and funnels on every plan it sells, including the most expensive one. The more you use it, the more you need, and the only exit is upward. In January 2026 it cut the Basic contact cap from 10,000 to 2,500 while raising the price 20%, roughly a five-fold increase in what you pay per contact.

The second is stacking. I named it software stacking because I had it: a tool does one or two things well, so you subscribe to three, five, sometimes ten others to cover the rest. At my peak I was paying $5,000 a month in software to run one course business. That's the whole reason I built my own platform.

On an onboarding call a while back I sat with a new member and went through his logins one at a time: $500 a month for ActiveCampaign, $100 for ClickFunnels, $200 for WordPress, $200 for Teachable. We cancelled about $1,200 of subscriptions inside that one phone call, and every job those four were doing was already in the account he'd just paid $147 for. Moving everything onto one platform and cancelling the rest is the fastest raise most course creators ever give themselves.

Course Creator 360 caps nothing: funnels, courses, products, contacts, domains, admins, customers. Premium includes a second account for a separate business. Not because we're generous. Because a cap is a bill you haven't received yet.

In 2026 they charge you rent and a commission

This is the biggest change in the category since I made the video above. Between 2024 and 2026 the industry moved to take-rate pricing: you pay the subscription, then a percentage of everything you sell.

Skool's $9 plan takes 10%. Teachable's entry plan takes 7.5%. Podia and Kartra take 5%, Thinkific takes 2.9% on every tier. Kajabi charges 2.9% plus 30 cents, then adds up to 2% more if you'd rather run payments through your own Stripe. Sell $10,000 a month on Skool's $9 plan and it costs you $1,009.

We take nothing. You connect your own Stripe or PayPal and every dollar your students pay lands in your account, on all three of our plans. It's the line that gets more valuable the better you do.

Twelve slices, and how many each platform hands you

Think of your business as a pizza. Twelve slices, and you need all of them to get past $10,000 a month: funnel building, website building, a CRM, email sending, text sending, automations, course hosting, community, forms, surveys, calendar booking and tracking.

Skool handles two: course hosting and community. Both are good. The other ten become ClickFunnels for pages, Mailchimp for email, ManyChat for Instagram, Zapier to tape it together, Calendly for calls. One of Skool's most visible leaderboard members runs that exact stack in public, turning a $99 subscription into $300 to $500 a month across six logins. The longer version of that math is here.

Kajabi covers maybe eight of the twelve, and I've sold or helped sell millions on it. What it never covered was email and CRM with any depth, appointment booking, DM automation, or automations I could actually build, so Mailchimp, Calendly and Zapier stayed on the card the whole time. Course Creator 360 covers all twelve, on the same engine as the row above it, and we're the only one that hands them to you already built for selling a course. Here's exactly what we add to it. The only honest way to check a claim that big is to open a trial account and count them yourself.

Time to launch is the score that pays you

This is the category I care about most and nobody advertises. Building a website is not launching a course. Making a course is not launching a course. The only question that matters is how many days pass between signing up and someone paying you.

A bare account on the engine underneath is slowest, and not because the software is bad. It's the opposite problem: a box of hammers and good luck building your house. Course creators leave that setup for us constantly, and the reason never changes: all the right tools, no structure, nothing built to sell a course. That's exactly why our build time goes into the layer above the tools, so week one starts at a funnel, an email sequence and a course portal.

Kajabi is next, because everything that would speed you up costs extra. Templates cost money, the mobile app costs money, the community costs money. Kajabi once quoted me $350 to migrate a 20-video course. We were doing the same job for $35 at the time.

Skool is fast at first, then slows down: the day you need the other ten slices you're running an integration project instead of a launch. We're fastest because your funnels, emails, automations and course portal come from templates on day one, and the onboarding call on Premium and Elite sets up your domain and email while you watch.

The other half of time to launch is who picks up when you're stuck. A question nobody answers stops a launch as dead as a missing feature. I didn't want to give my own software too much credit here, so I ran Kajabi's free trial myself and submitted a simple ticket. No live chat on the plan I was on, and a full 24 hours to get an email back. Ours is 24/7 chat at about a 50 second response and 98% satisfaction, plus a coaching call with me every other Friday that I haven't missed in three years, the private community, and every new template and course at no extra charge. If you'd rather have someone look at your setup first, book a demo and bring your current stack to it.

What these platforms do better than we do

This is worth more if I'm honest about the parts we lose. Kajabi's checkout and course player look better out of the box than a template you haven't customized yet. Skool is genuinely simpler, and if community is the whole product they built the best room for it. Systeme.io is free, and free is a real feature when you have $0 and an idea. All of it is a head start you can buy once, and that's exactly why our templates come inside the account: your funnels, emails and course portal look finished on day one, with no design bill and no fifth subscription.

Every one of those is true, and none of them survives month six. Pretty checkouts don't send email. Simple platforms cap what you can build. Free plans stay free until you need the ten things they don't do, and then you're paying five companies instead of one. Those strengths are all front-loaded, which is exactly why people move to the platform that still holds up in month twelve: one login, no caps, no cut of your sales, and a human on chat when something breaks.

The one person I'd tell to buy something else

You want to sell the software itself under your own brand, your logo on the login screen, your clients billed by you. That's a white-label agency business, GoHighLevel's SaaS Pro plan is built for it, and we don't compete there. Fair warning from someone who runs one: it costs about ten times what people expect, because you become the support desk. That's exactly why selling what you know pays better for almost everyone here: our team answers the 11pm chat, and your hours go into the thing you actually sell.

That's the whole list. If you sell what you know, and especially if you're not launched yet, you're on the wrong side of this comparison everywhere else on the page.

Stop deciding. Start building.

The worst outcome isn't picking the second-best platform. It's spending three months on comparison videos and having nothing built. I've watched that cost people a year, and the software was never the reason.

So do this. Take the 30-day trial, twice as long as almost anything else on this page is willing to give you. Book the onboarding call in week one and let us connect your domain and set up your email. Build one funnel from a template, load one course, send one email to whoever you already have. Coming from somewhere else, our team handles the migration off Kajabi, Teachable, Thinkific, ClickFunnels or Skool, usually inside a week. I've been through that move four times myself, one carrying more than 25,000 paying students onto a new platform without anyone losing access, so your library size is not what should scare you. Here's how a Kajabi move actually goes. If you'd rather someone build it alongside you, our vetted experts do exactly that.

And here's my incentive, plainly. What I needed when I started was a business in a box, and I couldn't buy it on Kajabi, Teachable, Thinkific or ClickFunnels. Where it existed at all it was a $1,000 or $2,000 package sold on top of the software. So every template, funnel, lead magnet, email sequence and course we've built comes with the subscription, and the new ones don't cost extra. If I can get you launched and making money, you stay. That's how I win, and it's how you win.

Then judge it on the only score that pays: how many days it took to get a stranger to give you money. Don't spend months deciding which platform to join. Get going on one. You're the secret, not the software, and the software only decides how long it takes you.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best platform to host an online course in 2026?

For someone selling their own knowledge, Course Creator 360, because it covers all twelve pieces a course business needs, takes no cut of your sales, and hands you the funnels, emails and automations already built. Kajabi is the best-looking, Skool the simplest, Systeme.io the cheapest.

Kajabi or Course Creator 360?

Course Creator 360, on price and on what you get. Kajabi Basic is $179 a month for 2,500 contacts, caps features on every tier, charges 2.9% plus 30 cents a sale, and adds 2% to use your own Stripe. Ours is $147 with no caps, no cut, unlimited email and 24/7 chat answering in about 50 seconds. I've sold or helped sell millions on Kajabi, so this isn't a grudge, it's arithmetic.

Is Skool better than Course Creator 360 for a community?

Skool's community room is excellent and simpler than ours. It also covers 2 of the 12 things you need, so funnels, email, CRM, calendars and automations become five more bills. You get the community next to all of that here, one login, no revenue share.

What is the cheapest way to host an online course?

Systeme.io's free plan, honestly, and it works until you need depth. The cheapest way to run the business is one platform that covers everything, because the money is never in the first subscription, it's in the four you add over the next six months. That's exactly why $147 covering all twelve slices beats free plus four bills by about month three.

Does Course Creator 360 take a percentage of my sales?

No. You connect your own Stripe or PayPal and keep 100% of what your students pay, on every plan. Phone calls and SMS are usage based, same as anywhere that offers them, and that's exactly why a $10,000 month costs the same $147 here as a $1,000 month.

Can I move my course off Kajabi, Teachable or Thinkific?

Yes, and our team does the work. Course content, funnels, websites and contacts come across, usually inside a week. I've made that move four times myself, including one that carried more than 25,000 paying students across without anyone losing access, so the part people dread is the part we plan first, and that's exactly why your renewals restart on your own Stripe with nobody taking a cut.

Are Udemy, Skillshare and Coursera worth it?

Not if you want a business. They're marketplaces, they take a large cut of every sale and they don't market your course, so buyers have to trip over you among hundreds of thousands of others. I've never seen anyone clear $30,000 on one, and I've coached hundreds of creators who've done six, seven and eight figures selling their own.

Related

• Course Creator 360 vs GoHighLevel (2026): The Complete, Honest Comparison
• Why Skool Fails Course Creators (And What To Use)
• How to move your Kajabi course into Course Creator 360