How to sell an online course — platforms compared

If you know something people want to learn, an online course is one of the most straightforward ways to sell that knowledge. You record it once, and the same course can be sold again and again. The hard part is not the recording — it is choosing where the course lives. Three paths exist: hosted course platforms, self-hosted setups, and marketplaces.

What a hosted course platform actually is

A hosted platform is a service built for selling courses: you upload your videos, write your lessons, set a price, and the platform handles payments, student accounts, and video hosting. Well-known examples include Teachable, Thinkific, and Podia.

What you typically get:

• A ready-made school: lessons, progress tracking, quizzes, and certificates, without building anything.
• Payments handled for you, including receipts and refunds.
• A checkout page and a sales page you can customise, so you can start selling quickly.

What it costs you:

• A monthly subscription, or a share of each sale on cheaper plans — check the current terms on the platform's site, because the balance between the two changes often.
• Your school lives on their system. Moving a whole school, with students and progress, to another platform is real work.

Course platform homepage

What a self-hosted course setup actually is

Self-hosted means you run the course on your own website — usually WordPress with a course plugin — on hosting you rent yourself. You build the school from parts instead of renting one ready-made.

What you typically get:

• Full control: your design, your checkout, your student data, your rules.
• No monthly platform fee beyond hosting, and no per-sale share taken by a course platform. Payment processing still has its own fees — that is true everywhere, so compare the full picture.
• The freedom to connect anything: your email tool, your analytics, your own community.

What it asks of you:

• You build and maintain it. The plugin, the payment setup, the video hosting, and the updates are your job, or someone you pay.
• The first version takes longer. A hosted platform can be live in a weekend; a self-hosted school usually takes several weeks to get right.
• When something breaks, the fix is yours, with the plugin's support as a backup.

Self-hosted suits you if you already have a website and an audience, you care about owning your student list, and you are comfortable with a slower start in exchange for control.

What a marketplace actually is

A marketplace is a big catalogue of courses where students browse and buy — the platform brings the audience, and you bring the course. That audience is the whole appeal, and it is also the whole trade-off.

What you typically get:

• Traffic you did not have to earn yourself. Students arrive looking for courses.
• No monthly fee in most cases, and no need to build a school at all.

What it costs you:

• The marketplace takes a share of each sale, and the share is usually large — check the current terms on the platform's site before you publish anything there.
• You do not control pricing, discounts, or how your course is presented. The marketplace can discount your course without asking you.
• You do not own the student relationship. Students belong to the marketplace, so you cannot easily email them or sell them your next course.

A marketplace suits you as an extra channel, not as your only home.

What actually matters when you compare

Your student list. Whoever owns the student emails owns the business. A platform that lets you export your students and email them yourself is worth more than one that keeps them behind a wall.

The student experience. Watch a course as a student before you choose. Is it easy to resume where you left off? Do videos play well on a phone? A clumsy student experience quietly kills completion rates.

The true cost. Add up the subscription, the per-sale share, and the payment processing fees for a realistic number of students. A "free" plan with a large per-sale share can cost more than a monthly plan once you start selling.

The mistakes beginners usually make

1. Recording the whole course before selling anything. Record one module, sell it to a small group, and finish the rest with their feedback. A perfect course nobody buys is worse than a good course ten people finished.
2. Choosing by the lowest headline price. A cheap plan with a large per-sale share is expensive once sales grow. Do the maths for a hundred students, not for zero.
3. Forgetting the email list. A course buyer who never hears from you again is a lost customer. Connect the platform to your email tool on day one, so every buyer joins your list.

A decision checklist

Answer these honestly, and the choice usually makes itself:

• Do I want to start selling in weeks, with minimal setup? → Hosted platform.
• Do I already have a website and an audience, and want full control? → Self-hosted.
• Do I need an audience I do not have yet? → Marketplace as a second channel, not the only one.
• Is owning the student list non-negotiable for me? → Hosted or self-hosted, never marketplace-only.
• Am I comfortable maintaining software, or paying someone to? → If not, avoid self-hosted.

The bottom line

There is no single best home for a course — there is the home that matches your audience, your patience, and your tolerance for technical work. Hosted platforms buy you speed. Self-hosted buys you ownership. Marketplaces buy you discovery, and charge for it in the share they take. Start with one module and a small group of real students.

Next: once students start arriving, the admin piles up — read Automation tools that save a small business hours every week and let the tools do the repetitive parts for you.