How we compare online course platforms
We list 10 online course platforms available to Australian creators, and a published rate card exists for 9 providers. Where a vendor negotiates terms instead of publishing them, we show a quote rather than invent a figure on its behalf.
The calculator is driven by monthly course revenue, active students and how many courses you run, because those are the axes this category is actually priced on. Revenue leads deliberately: it is the input most comparisons leave out, and it is the one that decides the answer. Ranking is arithmetic on each vendor's published rate at the figures you enter. Commission never moves a provider up or down the table, we do not sell placement, and the cheapest row is whatever the arithmetic returns.
Every price was read at the vendor's own pricing page, from an Australian connection. Both halves of that matter. The search results for these platforms are dominated by rival vendors writing about each other's prices, and their figures disagree with the vendors and with each other: at the time of writing one widely ranked comparison put Teachable's entry transaction fee at 5 per cent and another at 7.5 per cent, and one gave Teachable's entry plan a single course. Teachable's own page puts its entry fee at 7.5% (Starter), 0% (Builder and above) and its course caps at 5 (Starter), 10 (Builder), 50 (Growth). And reading from the wrong country is its own trap, because several of these vendors serve a different rate card by location.
Prices are the true monthly rate, undiscounted. Nearly every pricing page in this category opens on an annual view discounted 20 to 25 per cent, so the number a vendor shows you first is usually not what a month-to-month buyer pays. Circle is the exception and publishes annual billing only, which its row states.
Two limits are worth stating plainly rather than burying. LearnWorlds charges a flat fee per paid enrolment rather than a share of revenue, listed as $6.97 per paid enrollment (Starter), none above; that scales with how many people buy rather than with what they pay, and the calculator does not collect new enrolments, so its estimate is a floor rather than a total. GetResponse can only sell courses from its Creator plan upward, so it is listed on that plan rather than on the cheaper email-only tiers, which cannot host a course at all.
The cut an online course platform takes, and the revenue where it flips the answer
This is the number that decides the category, and it is the one most comparisons leave in a footnote.
Several of these platforms charge a percentage of every sale on their cheapest plan and remove it entirely one plan up. That creates a crossover: below some monthly revenue the cheap plan wins comfortably, and above it the same plan becomes the expensive choice. Skool lists 10% (Hobby), 2.9% (Pro) against $13/mo (Hobby) and a Pro plan at $138. Teachable lists 7.5% (Starter), 0% (Builder and above) and Podia 5% (Mover), 0% (Shaker and above), both on the same shape.
You can find any of these crossovers yourself in one step: take the gap between the two plan prices and divide it by the difference between their fee rates. That is the monthly revenue at which the fee has eaten the entire saving. Where the dearer plan charges nothing, the difference is just the cheaper plan's own rate; where it still charges something, as on Skool and Circle, only the gap between the two rates counts. It usually lands far lower than people expect, which is why the cheap plan is so often the wrong recommendation for anyone actually selling. The calculator above does this for every provider at once, so set your real monthly revenue rather than reading down the entry-price column.
Not everyone charges a cut. Thinkific lists 0% (Thinkific Payments; a per-plan gateway fee applies via Stripe or PayPal), Kajabi 0% (Kajabi Payments; 2%, 1% or 0.5% via a third-party gateway) and GetResponse 0% (Creator and above). Circle charges on every plan and lists 2% (Professional), 1% (Business), 0.5% (Circle Plus), so there is no fee-free tier to climb to, only a smaller fee.
Two things get blurred here that are worth separating. A platform's cut is not card processing: every provider in this table still leaves you paying a processor its own percentage plus a fixed amount per transaction, whether the platform takes a cut or not, so 0 per cent means the platform's own cut is zero, not that selling is free. And where a vendor offers 0 per cent only on its own payment rail, routing around it to your own gateway can reintroduce a fee, which is exactly what Kajabi's and Thinkific's own fee lines say.
Every online course platform here bills you in US dollars
This is the part an Australian creator gets wrong most often, and no vendor puts it on the first screen.
No platform in this roster publishes an Australian rate card. Teachable's local pricing row reads No, billed in US dollars, and so does every other priced row in the table. The figures you see here are the vendor's US dollar prices converted, so they are directionally right and they are not what will appear on your statement.
Three things follow, and they compound.
The amount changes month to month even when the vendor never touches its price, because the exchange rate moves. Your card or PayPal account will usually add an international transaction fee on top, commonly around 2 to 3 per cent, which sits outside every figure in this table. And a plan that looks a few dollars apart from a rival here can swap places on a bad month, because a percentage move in the rate is worth more on a dearer plan than a cheap one.
This is also why we do not simply take a vendor's other-currency page at face value when one exists. A genuine local rate card carries its own rounding, so its ratio to the US price drifts from rung to rung; a page that is really just a conversion holds a constant ratio all the way down the ladder. Thinkific publishes a real pound rate card for the United Kingdom and still serves Australia its US dollar list, and LearnWorlds shows Australian visitors the same numerals its American ones see. Checking that difference is the only way to avoid publishing a price no merchant is ever actually quoted.
The practical advice is short. Compare on the ranking rather than on the last dollar, since every row here moves together with the rate. If your shortlist is within a few dollars either way, the exchange rate is not the tiebreaker, the caps and the transaction fee are. And if you intend to pay annually, a card with no international fee is worth more here than on almost anything else you buy.
Student and course caps, the online course platform bill that arrives as an upgrade
The second bill nobody quotes is a limit rather than a price.
Most of these platforms cap how many active students and how many published courses an entry plan allows, and crossing either forces an upgrade regardless of what you earn.
- Teachable audience: 100 (Starter), 1,000 (Builder), 5,000 (Growth). Courses: 5 (Starter), 10 (Builder), 50 (Growth).
- Kajabi audience: 2,500 contacts (Basic), 25,000 (Growth), 100,000 (Pro). Courses: 5 (Basic), 50 (Growth), Unlimited (Pro).
- GetResponse audience: 500 students (Creator).
- LearnWorlds audience: 1,000 active learners (Starter), 2,000 (Pro Trainer and above).
That is a different kind of cost from a transaction fee, and it behaves differently. A fee scales with sales, so it only bites when the business is working. A cap can be crossed by a free lead magnet, a launch that filled a waitlist, or a second course that has not sold anything yet. Read each vendor's wording closely, because several count enrolled students rather than paying ones, which means free students consume the allowance you are paying for.
Some platforms do not price this way at all. Thinkific's student cap is 10,000 on every paid plan, and its course cap Unlimited on every plan. Podia's is Unlimited customers on every plan, and Skool's Unlimited members on both plans. On those, plans differ by feature rather than by capacity, so growth in your audience does not by itself change the bill.
That distinction is worth being honest about, including where it flatters a platform in our own table. Because Thinkific's paid plans share a single student allowance and it takes no cut of sales, its estimated cost holds steady as you move the inputs, which can make it look like a permanent cheapest answer. What actually separates its plans is live cohorts, certificates, communities, branding and video bandwidth, and the calculator does not collect any of those. If you need what its higher plans carry, price the plan you would really buy rather than the one the caps allow.
Marketplace or your own audience: two different things an online course platform sells
Two rows in this table are not platforms you host on at all, and reading them like the others gets the answer badly wrong.
Udemy and Coursera are marketplaces. You list on their site, they bring the students, and they keep a share of each sale instead of charging a subscription. Udemy is Free to publish, and the share it keeps is 63% on sales Udemy sources, 3% on sales you bring through your own coupon or referral link. Coursera's share is Not published; partnership terms are negotiated, which is why its cost cell shows a quote rather than a figure.
We rank both on the same arithmetic as everything else, which produces a result worth understanding rather than dismissing. At very low revenue a marketplace genuinely is the cheapest row in this table, because a share of very little is less than any subscription. At real revenue it becomes the most expensive by a wide margin. Both are true, and the crossover between them is the whole decision.
The trade is not really about money, though. It is about who owns the student. On a marketplace the learner belongs to the platform: it sets the discounting, it holds the email address, and it decides what else to show them next. Their email rows say it plainly. Udemy: Limited announcements only, Udemy owns the student relationship. Coursera: No, Coursera owns the learner relationship. On your own platform you pay up front, you do your own marketing, and the audience you build is yours to sell to again.
So the honest version of this question is not which is cheaper, it is whether you already have an audience. If you do, switch on the "Use my own audience" filter above and the marketplaces drop out of the table. If you do not, the share a marketplace keeps is buying distribution you would otherwise have to fund yourself. Udemy prices that distinction explicitly, and the difference between its two shares above is the price of the traffic. Our estimate uses the marketplace rate rather than the referral rate, because a creator who already brings the buyer is usually better served by one of the platforms above.
There is an Australian wrinkle worth knowing. A marketplace sets its own pricing and runs its own discounting worldwide, so you have little say over what an Australian student pays, and course prices on those sites are frequently far below what the same material sells for on your own site. That is part of what the share is buying, and it is a reason the two models rarely compete for the same course.
Community, email and the subscriptions an online course platform replaces
Comparing plan prices alone flatters whichever platform does least, so it is worth asking what each one removes from the rest of your stack.
The clearest split is between platforms built around courses and platforms built around a community that happens to contain courses.
- Skool community: Native, and the core of the product.
- Circle community: Native, and the core of the product.
- Teachable community: Yes, student discussions and comments.
- Thinkific community: Yes, 1 community (Basic and Start), 3 (Grow).
If a recurring membership is what you are really selling, that difference matters more than the entry price does.
Email is the other subscription in play, and it is metered separately from students on several of these. Kajabi's email row reads Native, unlimited marketing emails on every plan. GetResponse's reads Native, and the core product, with unlimited monthly sends, which is this category approached from the opposite direction, an email platform that added courses. Podia's reads Native, with email contacts metered separately from students. Circle's reads Paid add-on, Email Hub priced separately by contacts, so there the email tooling is a separate bill stacked on the plan you are comparing.
Two smaller rows separate the list more than their prominence suggests. Affiliate tooling, which lets other people sell your course for a commission, is gated on most of them. Skool: Yes (Pro only). Teachable: Yes (Builder+). Podia: Yes (Shaker+). And AI features are now everywhere, but the ability to drive the platform from an AI assistant is not. Kajabi: Native MCP, run Kajabi from an AI assistant. Circle: Native MCP (Business+). Most of the table has none.
Price the stack, not the platform. A dearer plan that removes an email subscription and a community subscription is frequently the cheaper answer once all three bills are on the table, and on a US dollar bill it also removes one more currency conversion.
What you commit to before an online course platform has earned anything
The last thing to check is how much you have to pay before you know whether any of this works, and it is where the cheap-looking options separate again.
Free plans are rare here, and what each vendor offers instead is a trial on its own terms.
- Teachable: No, 7-day trial and a 30-day money-back guarantee.
- Podia: No, 30-day trial with no card required.
- Circle: No, 14-day trial with no card required.
- Kajabi: No, free trial only.
- GetResponse: Free plan for email tools only, courses need Creator or above.
- Udemy: Yes, no fee to create, host or publish.
Udemy is the genuine exception there, and it is the marketplace trade again in another form: nothing to pay until something sells, and a large share taken when it does.
Then there is the billing basis, which is where a lot of comparisons quietly cheat. The figures in our table are true monthly rates you can cancel any month, and most of this roster supports that. Teachable's billing basis: True monthly. Kajabi's: True monthly. Circle's: Annual only, publishing no monthly option on any plan, so its row is the monthly equivalent of a year paid up front and is labelled that way.
Annual billing is often the right choice and the saving is real, but it is a different question from which platform is cheapest, and answering both at once is how people end up comparing a committed annual rate against a cancel-anytime rate. Decide the platform on the monthly figures in this table, then take the annual discount on whichever one you picked. Paying a year of a US dollar subscription up front also fixes one exchange rate for twelve months, which cuts both ways.
One practical note on the exit, since a course is not a quick thing to move. Whether your students and your domain come with you differs sharply across this table. The self-hosted platforms put the school on a domain you control, which is what the "Use my own audience" filter selects for. The marketplaces do not. Udemy: No, courses live on udemy.com. Coursera: No, courses live on coursera.org. That is the difference between changing a supplier later and starting the audience again.