How To Choose An Online Course Platform

TL;DR (Quick Summary)

• Most platform comparisons rank features. Features are the least useful thing to compare, because every major platform has most of them and you'll use about a fifth.
• Compare on these instead: who handles your sales tax, what your checkout can do, whether it also runs your website, how it treats custom code, how well it talks to your email platform, and how hard it is to leave.
• The merchant of record question almost never comes up, and it's the most expensive one to get wrong. If the platform is the merchant of record, it collects and remits your sales tax for you. If it isn't, that's your job, in every jurisdiction you sell into.
• Checkout capability decides your revenue per customer. Order bumps, upsells and a real cart are worth more than any design feature.
• Yes, you can migrate later. It costs real money and a weekend of your life, so choose like you'll stay. The right platform is the one whose defaults match how you actually plan to sell.

How do I choose an online course platform?

Start from how you plan to sell, not from a feature grid.

Almost every comparison article works the same way. It lists eight platforms, gives each one a table of checkmarks, and tells you they're all good for different people. That's true and it's useless, because every major course platform can host video, take payments, issue certificates and drip content. The checkmarks are nearly identical.

What separates them is the stuff that doesn't fit in a table. How the checkout behaves. Who's legally responsible for tax collected. What happens when you want a page to look like a design the template doesn't offer. Whether the integration you're relying on is genuinely reliable or technically present.

So the useful question isn't "which platform is best." It's "which platform's defaults match how I'm actually going to run this." Below is how I'd work that out.

1. Who is the merchant of record?

This is the question I'd ask first, and it's the one most course creators have never even thought of.

A merchant of record is the entity legally selling to your customer. If your platform acts as the merchant of record, it collects payment, charges the correct sales tax for wherever your buyer is, and remits that tax on your behalf. If it doesn't, all of that is yours. Digital products sold internationally attract tax in a genuinely alarming number of jurisdictions, and the rules change in each of them.

For most solo course creators, having the platform act as merchant of record is worth a lot, and it's worth more than a slightly lower transaction fee.

Watch for the tradeoff, though. On most platforms you can connect your own payment processor directly instead, which gives you more control and usually costs more in fees, not less, and hands the tax obligation back to you. Both are valid choices. Just know which one you're making before you launch, because unpicking it afterwards is unpleasant (to say the least).

2. What can the checkout actually do?

Your checkout decides your average order value, and average order value is the number that makes a  business work.

Three capabilities to check for specifically:

1. Order bumps. A second product offered on the checkout screen while your buyer is already paying. They tick a box and it's added to the order. Think of the candy bar at the grocery store checkout. You didn't drive there for the candy bar. You bought it because it was in front of you while you were already loading the belt. You need to be able to increase your average order value at the checkout.
2. Upsells. A separate offer shown after they pay. People use "order bump" and "upsell" interchangeably and they're not the same thing. One happens before payment, one after. Make sure the platform has a way for you to upsell those who've just purchased
3. A real shopping cart. So a buyer can purchase more than one product at a time.

On Thinkific, for example, order bumps need the platform's own commerce enabled rather than a direct payment-processor connection, both products have to be published and public, and you get one bump per primary product. Those are fine limits once you know them. They're irritating to discover the week of launch.

3. Can it run your website too, or do you need a second one?

This decides whether you're maintaining one piece of online real estate - or two.

Some course platforms include a genuine website builder, so your home page, about page and sales pages live on the same site as your courses. Some give you a course-only environment and assume you have a website elsewhere.

Neither is wrong. But if you already have a WordPress site you love, a platform with a strong website builder is a feature you'll pay for and never use. And if you don't have a website, choosing a course-only platform means you've just added a second build, a second bill and a second place for your branding to drift out of sync.

4. How does it handle custom code?

Ask this if you care at all about how your pages look, want to use interactive lessons or need to be able to customize your site.

Every platform's templates run out eventually. The question is what happens then. Can you add custom CSS or HTML? Where does it go, and does it survive an update? Are there page types where custom code behaves differently from other page types?

On most platforms the marketing pages and the in-course pages are built on different systems with different rules, so code that works on one doesn't work the same on the other. It's rarely documented clearly. It's most of what I get called in to untangle.

If you have no intention of touching code, this criterion still matters, because it determines whether anyone else can help you when the template won't do what you need.

5. Does it integrate with your email platform properly?

"Integrates with" covers a wide range of quality.

The questions worth asking: does it tag a subscriber when they enrol, when they complete, when they buy a specific product? Does that tag fire immediately or on a delay? Can it pass the data you need to segment on?

Delays are the common surprise. A tag that arrives 45 to 60 minutes breaks trust with someone who just signed up for your lead magnet or enrolled in your course. Find out the timing before you build a sequence that depends on it.

6. What does it do about community?

Course completion rates go up when students aren't alone, and in this disconnected world your students need access to their peers - and to you.

Some course platforms include a community feature. Some don't, and you'll have to run a separate community tool alongside. The included ones are usually simpler than a dedicated community platform, which is sometimes exactly what you want and sometimes not enough.

What to check is where your students end up hanging out. If your course is on one platform and your community is on another, that's two logins, and a meaningful number of students will only ever use one of them, however if the community feature on your course platform is not sufficient, there are many other community platforms that include gamification and other interactive elements to keep your students engaged (like Skool and Circle).

7. How hard is it to leave?

Ask this before you join, not when you're unhappy.

Can you export your student list with their enrolment data? Can you get your video files back out, or only stream them? Can you export your course structure in a form another platform can read?

Migrating is genuinely doable. I do migrations regularly and they go fine. But a migration costs real money or a solid chunk of your own time, and every student has to be re-enrolled and told. So choose as though you're staying, and treat portability as insurance rather than a plan.

8. What does it default to?

This is the one I'd weight highest after tax and checkout.

Every platform has an opinion baked into it about how a course business works. Some are built around a big catalogue of small products. Some assume one flagship program. Some are built for cohorts with start dates, others for evergreen self-paced content. Some assume you're selling to individuals, others handle organizations buying seats in bulk.

When your model matches the platform's assumptions, everything is easy and the defaults are already right. When it doesn't, you spend the rest of your time on that platform working around them.

So write down in one sentence how you intend to sell. "One flagship course, evergreen, with a paid community" is a different intention than "twelve small products with regular bundle promotions" or "cohort programs sold to corporate teams." Then check which platform's defaults already fit that sentence.

What do beginners get wrong when choosing a course platform?

Three things, consistently.

1. They choose on price and pay for it later. The cheapest plan usually excludes the checkout features that determine your revenue per customer. Saving a monthly fee and losing the ability to increase AOV is a bad trade the moment you have any volume.
2. They choose on how the templates look. Design is the easiest thing on this list to change and the one newbies weight highest. Tax handling and checkout capability are close to impossible to change and get weighted at zero by most.
3. They start building before the back end is set up. Payment settings, tax settings, legal pages, domain, email integration. Getting those right first takes an afternoon. Fixing them after students are enrolled takes considerably longer, and some of it can't be fixed retroactively at all.

So which one should I use?

Whichever one's defaults match your sentence from criterion 8, and whose merchant of record arrangement you're happy with.

I build on Thinkific and have since 2015. It fits how the course creators I work with sell, it handles the tax question well through its own commerce, and its checkout has the revenue mechanics I care about. That's a genuine recommendation and it's also obviously a biased one, which is why the eight criteria above are written so you can run them yourself against any platform on your list.

If you're already on a platform and it's mostly working, the answer is usually to stay and fix the setup rather than move. Most of the "my platform is terrible" problems I get called into turn out to be configuration.

Where to go next

If you're setting up a course platform and want the walkthrough that doesn't leave the awkward parts out, the full series and the resources that go with it live in the community. It's free to join.