Table of Contents
If you have been on the online learning platform hunt for a while now, you probably already realize that there are a handful of options to choose from.
Online learning platforms come in different types, features, and sizes, but your goal is to choose the best one for your individual or company needs.
To help you out, we have prepared a thorough comparison list of the most popular and top-performing online learning platforms in the eLearning market.
This is a comparison between LearnWorlds, Teachable, Thinkific, and Kajabi.
Spoilers ahead: LearnWorlds gets the most positive reviews from review sites. More on this below. You can get a free 30-day trial of LearnWorlds to test the platform out yourself!
All platforms in a nutshell
To help you get an idea of what each platform offers, we decided to analyze some of the most important selection criteria that you will need to take into consideration when choosing one:
Course Creation – the ease with which the platform allows you to create online courses and the ability to incorporate the material you want to include in them, focusing on the educational features it comes with and the learning experience it can offer.
Website Building – the ability to build a dedicated eLearning website from which you can sell your online courses calculating the degree of design customization it allows.
White-labeling – the ability to remove the online learning platform’s branding from your website to make it your own.
Sales & Marketing – the features that allow you to market, promote, and sell your online courses to your target audience.
School Administration – the features that regulate the degree to which you can view and manage the progress of your students or customize their learning experience.
Scalability – the capacity to support a growing amount of traffic and simultaneous users as you grow your business or the ability to support enterprise accounts.
Pricing – the price of each online learning platform compared to its offerings.
Here’s how each platform scores in each category in a nutshell:
Overall, as the table shows, Teachable and Kajabi are the weakest when it comes to course creation, while LearnWorlds and Kajabi are the most powerful in website building.
LearnWorlds is the only platform that offersa fully white-label option for your elearning website.
All platforms offer a high level of administration capabilities with slight differences in implementation and what they offer.
Lastly, Kajabi is the most expensive option by far compared to the other three learning platforms.
💡Ready to find the perfect platform for your online courses? Discover how to choose the right elearning solution in this FREE expert webinar.
Who uses which?
LearnWorlds
LearnWorlds aims to improve the way educators, online instructors, creators, professional trainers, and companies teach or train online.
LearnWorlds’ customers are entrepreneurs, educators, coaches, and small to mid-sized businesses that value education and want to offer the best learning experiences to their learners, customers, partners, and employees.
Teachable
Teachable supports the idea that ‘Everything is Teachable’ and encourages everyone to create online courses.
Teachable’s customers are solopreneurs, creators, bloggers, YouTubers, coaches, and artists who are interested in starting a course business, adding a side income, or looking for ways to make money online.
Thinkific
Thinkific aims to enable professional course creators and midsized businesses.
Thinkific customers range from entrepreneurs to mid-sized businesses looking to grow their companies with education for their audiences.
Kajabi
Kajabi aims to make all processes of every online business easy, helping entrepreneurs sell their products.
Kajabi’s customers are non-techy online course creators, digital entrepreneurs, small businesses, freelancers, creators, and individual instructors who want to sell simple=format courses and downloadables.
LearnWorlds, Teachable, Thinkific & Kajabi Reviews Comparison
To present an objective view of all four platforms, we examined what independent review sites aresaying about all four platforms. In doing so, we ooked at reputable review sites that have a learning platform or LMS category, and more specifically, the following:
While all platforms retain an averagely high remark, LearnWorlds appears to have the highest overall. This makes it clear that users (admins) have a better experience using LearnWorlds over Teachable, Thinkific, and Kajabi, especially in the Elearning Industry, which is a specialized website with reviews from users experienced in online courses and training.
All reviews point to LearnWorlds as being the best platform to create, manage, and sell online courses. A better all-around platform to host your business and responsive support/customer care that values its customers has earned high marks and recognition across all major review sites.
You can also read the side-by-side comparisons of:
Course Creation
First and foremost, when it comes to course creation, all platforms – LearnWorlds, Teachable, Thinkific, and Kajabi offer basic features such as:
But there are also some differences between the platforms that are worth pointing out:
Kajabi offers the least educational capabilities, with only basic support for video and quizzes. No course completion checks or, as you will see below, certificate issuing is not available, making it not suitable for real educational content.
LearnWorlds, on the other hand, has developed a comprehensive set of features to support SCORM files, making it a more ideal alternative for an expensive LMS while also protecting your online content.
This makes LearnWorlds the only course platform offering such built-in copyright protection functionality, meaning you don’t have to spend time and money on third-party products to get a similar result.
Interactivity in Learning
LearnWorlds goes a step beyond traditional course platforms with the addition of interactive features on top of the learning activities it already offers.
For example, you can use LearnWorlds’ Interactive Video Editor to add interactive elements to your videos, transcripts that follow speech, CTA buttons, subtitles, text, questions, and so much more.
As you can see, no other platform offers interactive course content – nor in the form of video or text (ebooks, transcripts, etc.) and LearnWorlds is a clear winner in this category.
Learner Assessments
In an online learning platform, you are looking to assess your learners’ progress. This means that you will need those capabilities that allow you to test and report the results of their progress.
Here is how LearnWorlds, Teachable, Thinkific, and Kajabi compare in this:
As the table shows, LearnWorlds has all the necessary features every course creator needs – including a gradebook. In contrast to the other platforms, it offers grading capabilities and a more advanced assessment system – in fact, it comes with a robust Assessment and Form Builder.
Kajabi comes as the weakest in course creation because it lacks key tools and the process you need to follow to build course content is more complicated compared than others.
Live classes
As a course creator, you will need a webinar functionality that will allow you to deliver your educational content in an engaging way. This can be done through live classes or with the ability to add embeddable webinars to your course material:
While Teachable offers basic features for course creation, it misses out on the ability to integrate with Zoom as the other platforms do.
Social Learning Abilities
An additional capability that is important for every online learning platform to have is social learning, which comes with elements such as the following:
Such features are important to consider before choosing your online learning platform because of the very nature of learning.
Since learning is rarely an activity that happens in a vacuum, it is foremost a social activity, and students need to interact with a teacher, their classmates, and the broader community.
While all platforms have course discussion capabilities, only LearnWorlds ticks off all of the social learning requirements.
As such, it comes with a built-in social and community-building feature that allows you to create a community of learners and communicate with them directly, either 1:1 through the community inbox or through group discussions.
Website Builder & Design
Next up are website building and design capabilities. This is another important feature you must look out for when conducting your platform research.
As a course creator and essentially an edupreneur, you will need an attractive, user-friendly, and functional website that will accommodate your courses. How you decide to present your courses online – and online academy, is crucial to your course sales and overall success.
All platforms offer an easy-to-use system to build, customize, and white-label your elearning website. And, with all platforms, you can:
However, there are a few differentiations when you dig into the details of what is actually offered by each platform:
As you can see, most platforms offer a set of website templates to choose from, helping you build your unique academy site. Unlike Thinkific, which has limited options on page design templates, LearnWorlds comes with a large 50+ template collection that is suitable for every niche and allows you to combine different pages and sections to achieve the desired result for your website.
Also, LearnWorlds’ No-Code Site Builder makes it easier to use and offers more customization options and control over your website.
If you are already using WordPress – like the majority of course creators, LearnWorlds or Kajabi are going to be more suitable solutions as they offer plugins to easily integrate with them, unlike Teachable or Thinkific.
White-Labeling
White labeling gives you the opportunity to customize the look and feel of your website to suit your brand. So instead of featuring your chosenplatform’s logo on your site, you have the ability to show your branding only.
This is possible to some extent on all platforms, but LearnWorlds takes the lead and goes one step beyond what an average online learning platform can offer.
All of LearnWorlds’ white-labeling options come at the Learning Center plan and offer a thorough removal of the LearnWorlds’ brand mention and logo from the learner’s side of your school.
Let’s find out how all four platforms score at the white-labeling option:
That being said, not only LearnWorlds offers a white-label option with social logins and email notifications that have the customer’s brand, but it also offers further customization for checkout pages, terms and conditions pages, and a custom fully white-label mobile app for your online school.
Sales & Marketing features
If you are reading this, then you are looking to sell online courses, and for this, you will need a platform that has eCommerce features as well as powerful marketing tools.
LearnWorlds, Teachable, Thinkific, and Kajabi offer a multitude of sales and marketing tools that are common to all platforms including:
Then, there are some differences:
All platforms are backed up with the essentials for marketing and selling your online courses.
The subtle difference between the platforms here is the course marketplace that is only available from Teachable and Kajabi.
However, using their course marketplaces takes a lot from any white-labeling. This means that you lose any white-labeling they might offer and that your courses are viewed alongside your competitors.
Payment Gateways
While selling online courses, you will need to also be able to get paid. A payment gateway is an integral part of any offering payment processing.
All platforms offer a number of payment gateways, allowing instant access to your funds while they make sure to offer Stripe & PayPal integrations.
However, of all the platforms, only LearnWorlds offers localized payments for specific countries. You can read more about it here. Also, LearnWorlds and Thinkific offer the option to add two or more payment options at the checkout.
💁 For example, your customers will be able to choose to pay with PayPal or a credit card.
But as the following table shows, the similarities end here:
School Administration & Security
The administration side of your academy is an aspect you can’t ignore when searching for an online learning platform. With it, you have better access to student data and increased control of student management.
💁 For example, you can oversee the progress of your students, download the data and analyze the results as well as customize their learning experience.
Here’s how each platform performs in this category:
Having advanced reporting capabilities allows you to get a greater insight into the performance of your students which can make your job a lot easier. LearnWorlds and Thinkific are both offering this capability.
But what Thinkific is not offering is GDPR compliance which LearnWorlds excels at. LearnWorlds is the only e-learning platform that offers full GDPR capabilities and can disable multiple sessions to increase account protection.
Scalability & Premium Features
When your business is growing, you want to make sure that the platform you’ve chosen can withstand the weather and face just about any obstacle in the way.
This includes the ability to support huge amounts of traffic and simultaneous users as well as meet corporate-level requirements.
While all platforms can do all three and respond well to the high demands, there are differences between the premium services each platform offers, such as flexible invoicing options and DPA.
They also differ in the level of daily backups, which is a very important feature for schools with high traffic. LearnWorlds offers multiple daily backups to high-volume accounts, and Thinkific offers daily backups, but there is no mention of the backup frequency from Teachable and Kajabi.
Pricing & Plans:
Finally, the pricing of each platform is another – if not the most – important factor to look at. If you are working on a budget, you are probably searching for an affordable price, and this is where LearnWorlds comes into play.
As you can see below, LearnWorlds offers the most affordable solution compared to the other options:
Teachable has also added limitations to the number of products you can have that were not included initially. Now, Teachable and Kajabi include product limitations, while LearnWorlds and Thinkific offer unlimited courses per account.
Comparing LearnWorlds, Teachable, Kajabi, and Thinkific’s overall pricing and the features they offer on each plan, it becomes easy to see that LearnWorlds is not only the most cost-efficient but also the best value-for-money option for course creators that are looking for a solution that is affordable and scalable.
What do LearnWorlds Customers Say
Check out some of the testimonials we got from LearnWorlds instructors:
Choosing the best solution
To wrap up, it’s only fitting to say that each platform is offering the best service possible, and for that, we have a big respect for them. Undoubtedly, each has its own strengths and weaknesses, and it’s entirely up to you to choose the one that meets your requirements best, based on the given criteria.
Deciding on any elearning platform is not a straightforward process because it all depends on what you are after. For this reason, the decision doesn’t always come down to capabilities, but instead what you expect the platform can do for you.
LearnWorlds is the choice of top course creators, picky educators, and serious corporate trainers who care about their learners.
At LearnWorlds, we believe that we are doing an excellent job, and one of the many proofs is the success of our very own customers. We are very proud of the platform we offer, and we are committed to constantly getting better every day.
As you can see from the detailed comparison charts, LearnWorlds exceeds expectations in most areas of online learning and can guide you through the exciting journey of creating and selling courses.
Start your own journey with LearnWorlds for free with our 30-day trial, and discover where this can take you!
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
– How much is Teachable per month?
Teachable has the following monthly pricing plans:
– Is the teachable free trial good compared to other options?
Teachable no longer offers a free trial, but it comes with a free plan that is very limited in terms of capabilities. Teachable’s free plan allows only 1 admin user and 1 course to be created. Also, it has a $1 + 10% transaction fee on every sale.
– Does Teachable integrate with Shopify?
Yes, Teachable integrates with Shopify through Zapier.
– What is the best option for video hosting for online courses?
There are many video hosting services available, but using those compatible with your chosen course platform or LMS is always recommended. For example, LearnWorlds has its own video player and library, allowing you to connect your Wistia or Vimeo account.
– What are the pros and cons of Kajabi?
Pros:
Cons:
– What are Kajabi transaction fees?
Kajabi does not have transaction fees, but standard payment processing fees apply.
– Can you remove Kajabi branding?
You can remove Kajabi branding on your custom domain and other parts of your website, but you can not do the same for email notifications, social logins, or the mobile app.
– How can I cancel my Kajabi membership?
Here’s how to cancel your Kajabi subscription:
- Open the Settings tab from the Dashboard.
- Select Billing from the Account Settings section.
- Scroll down to Subscription.
- Click Cancel subscription.
See more comparisons:
Kyriaki is a Content Creator for the LearnWorlds team writing about marketing and e-learning, helping course creators on their journey to create, market, and sell their online courses. Equipped with a degree in Career Guidance, she has a strong background in education management and career success. In her free time, she gets crafty and musical.
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