7 BEST UDEMY ALTERNATIVES FOR YOUR ONLINE COURSES IN 2023

When it comes to upskilling one’s knowledge, skillset, and career plans, Udemy as an online learning platform is famous among worldwide learners. Because of this very reason many aspire to teach at Udemy. But due to high competition, getting one’s course approved by its Quality Review Team is not easy for many online teachers and coaches. This is why online class educators search for Udemy Alternatives.

In this article, we are going to reveal top Udemy alternatives with superior features than Udemy. But before that, let’s have a look at some of the reasons why people switch to Udemy’s alternatives.

7 REASONS TO CHOOSE UDEMY ALTERNATIVES:

Following are the reasons you should try finding Udemy alternatives for your online coaching business:

1. Presence of high competition and a highly saturated market.
2. As a new entrant, you might make a brilliantly-crafted course, but still, students might give preference to already-established course creators. Yes, this is an entry barrier and a survival issue. 
3. You can not sell your Udemy courses commercially at a lower price even if you are getting a bigger customer base anywhere else.
4. Udemy handles the marketing side of uploaded courses. So, popular and already high-rated educator courses are promoted more for enrollment. 
5. In every sale made out of the instructor’s promo code, Udemy takes a 3 percent transaction fee. 
6. Then if you make a sale through Udemy’s organic traffic, you get only 50 percent of sales revenue. The other half is taken by Udemy. 
7. Next, If your course gets sold through Udemy-promoted ads, you get only 37 percent of sales.

All this will not happen when you choose not to make and sell your online courses/classes on Udemy. This is where you will find the need to search Udemy Alternatives for yourself.

LIST OF BEST 7 UDEMY ALTERNATIVES PLATFORMS FOR SELLING ONLINE COURSES IN 2023

1. FlexiFunnels

1.1 FOR ONLINE COURSE CREATION  

Teaching at Udemy requires an instructor to strictly create a minimum of 5 video lectures and a minimum course length of 30 minutes. Like this, there are so many do’s and don’ts for using Udemy. For instance:

• You are required to edit out all ‘umm(s)’ and other such verbal mistakes in your video course. This is to make it sound more professional. 
• You are expected to speak with an enthusiastic voice tone. Whether or not your voice tone is enthusiastic, Udemy’s quality review team will decide.
• Your course image has to be inlined with Udemy’s Image Standards.
• If your audio quality doesn’t match their quality standards, your course would be denied to be published.

Though these things are meant to create a quality experience, their quality review team can easily deny approving your course for upload at their discretion. Due to one silly mistake, course content that you made by putting in hours of hard work can be denied for the upload.

And even if you manage to keep up with their course protocols, that is not a win-win situation for you. As ultimately, after all the hard work the majority revenue share goes into Udemy’s pockets.

Let’s flip to see what makes FlexiFunnels a good alternative for Udemy.

With FlexiFunnels, you get full 100 percent ownership of your course content and sales. There are no minimum or maximum rules for you to follow, for uploading courses here. Because you can make your own rules as an online course creator.

You can upload as much video course content as you want. That too of any length, even 5 minutes, 5 hours, 50 hours, or 500 hours of the course content will do.

We also provide complete OTT-level anti-piracy protection. that will make your course videos non-downloadable. As another security layer, the right click has also been disabled so that your courses become extra secure. These features are nowhere to be found inside Udemy.

Thus, with FlexiFunnels, it is like you have your place, your account, your course, and your sales. It is all yours. This is why we logically call ourselves one of the best Udemy alternatives.

1.2 FOR SELLING ONLINE COURSES

Udemy will never teach its instructors the art of selling online courses. They have their own marketing team, who prefers to promote instructors selectively. 

Yes, the one with positive reviews already gets more preference from Udemy. Then when you are just starting out, you have to compete with many already established and ranking-high educators.

But with FlexiFunnels, you will literally become an online business-minded person. We give you total control of the marketing and sale of your online course/class.

How does this happen?

There are over 100+ hours of content inside the Funnel Growth System of FlexiFunnels. You get literally everything you need to know to make a massively successful online coaching business.

Check out this video for instance

Some other benefits of using FlexiFunnels to sell online classes/courses are:

FIRST	Online Course hosting at FlexiFunnels is absolutely free. To avail of this feature, you only have to pay for the software once by choosing any of our yearly plans worth $397 and $697 respectively.
SECOND	You need not depend on third-party online ed-tech platforms anymore.
THIRD	With FlexiFunnels, you can easily create your own website, landing page, checkout page, etc. for branding yourself. Along with creating and owning a course funnel technology yourself, that can help you automate your online coaching biz. All this without hiring any website developers or coders.
FOURTH	You get 100 percent ownership of your uploaded course content. We make no use of it. Whereas Udemy continues to display your course for commercial use even after you leave teaching there.

That is a bit unfair because it is your hard work anyway. Don’t you think so?

1.3 BUILD ONLINE COURSE FUNNELS

As an online educator, you should build a personal brand. This is helpful for the long-run growth of your online coaching business. Yes, your LinkedIn profile is not enough to do so. 

For this, you need your own website and online course funnel. As a no-coding required online website builder, course funnel maker, and course hosting platform, FlexiFunnels is a 3-in-1 tool for you.

POINT TO BE NOTED:

• On one side, Udemy takes 3 to 63 percent of sales revenue. The payment gateway charges are charged extra. FlexiFunnels has only 1 percent as its transaction fee, on the other side.
• With FlexiFunnels, your video course content gets OTT Level protection. This will safeguard it from piracy. We estimate that with this feature alone, you can get two extra sales per month on average.
• Also, one user cannot log in from more than two devices in your FlexiFunnels-hosted course. This feature of ours also protects you from a massive revenue loss due to undue account sharing.

THIS IS NOT IT:

• Membership and subscription credentials get automatically delivered to the inbox of your enrollments. 
• Plus we save your money by protecting you from piracy-caused revenue loss. 
• You can create both membership and subscription-based courses to sell online. For this, you can make bundle courses with FlexiFunnels.

2. Thinkific

2.1 FOR ONLINE CLASS CREATION 

Just like Udemy, Thinkific lets you create and upload countless online courses. 

The reasons behind choosing Thinkific as an alternative to Udemy are as follows:

• You get a hundred percent ownership of your course content and other related data.
• There is a feature to take Live Lessons on the Thinkific platform itself. You can record them and use them for your evergreen webinar funnel. The same thing can be done simply by Zoom also. 
• Its monthly plan is $99. Initially, it looks like an exciting offer, but it is not like that.

Take out your calculators, please.

This means you pay a total of $1188 at a rate of $99 per month.

2.2 FOR ONLINE COURSE SELLING

Thinkific course content does not seem to have anti-piracy protection measures like that of FlexiFunnels. 

Even in Thinkific’s official pricing plans, you will notice that not much has been talked about online course protection measures. 

Now the question is why you can choose to use Thinkific over Udemy:  

• Thinkific has ‘Performance Checkout’ pages with 128-bit TLS encrypted connections. This means your payment details become more secure than before.  
• Seeing this, Thinkfic also provides its own built-in payment platform called ‘Thinkific Payments’. This is where it stores the payment details of returning customers. That again helps in fast checkouts and faster conversions, for subscription-based plans. 
• After selling one can also cancel/pause/resume an enrollment subscription plan at Thinkific. 
• This way, you can easily control access to your courses and can give your students the option of payment flexibility. The same cannot be done with Udemy. 
• In its higher plan, you can also get API access. With Udemy, this is not possible. The same is helpful for enterprise-level businesses.

The only thing is, Thinkifc has no Live Chat Support. You will probably have to contact them via email for any technical help. Even with Udemy Support, the same is the case. 

2.3 FOR BUILDING ONLINE COURSE FUNNELS

To start a full-on online coaching business, we recommend you create course funnels. With it, you can sell multiple courses when someone is already in a buying mode. 

Note that one cannot create funnels with Udemy.

Another Note: Neither Thinkific nor Udemy is a funnel builder. 

Thus, if you want to sell your Thinkific or Udemy-hosted courses individually through funnels, you would have to take the help of an outside funnel builder plus other tools that can cost you anywhere between $100 to $500 per month.

Plus, you will need the help of Zapier to pass the data from one platform to the other. 

The only reason to recommend Thinkific as an alternative similar to Udemy was to save your course sales revenue. Unlike Udemy, Thinkific gives you more freedom and charges you a zero percent transaction fee. The same is not the case with Udemy. 

3. Teachable

3.1 ONLINE CLASS CREATION

Like all others, Teachable is an online teaching platform with different pricing plans. Its paid plan starts from $348 per year, with a 5 percent transaction fee on each sale. 

But pricing cannot be a factor in choosing the best Udemy alternative for self. You have to investigate! 

Investigate what?

That in how much price, you will get how many features. And out of those features, how many can be of use in business. 

• You can add sub-users or sub-admin to your account. The benefit of this, later you can build your own online coaching team. 
• Teachable also provides a ‘Launch Accelerator Program’, to help you launch an online course in less than 30 days after the purchase of their paid plans. 
• Its various specialized course design templates are something that can help you do A/B testing. Whereas, Udemy has nothing to offer like this. It has standard page templates for all.

3.2 SELLING COURSES ONLINE

• Teachable gives a sleek checkout process with one-click upsells which is not doable with Udemy. 
• In terms of transaction fees, they take $1 + 10 percent of every sale you make in their free plan. The transaction fee goes down to 5 percent in their $348 annual plan. 
• While in their $1,188/year and $2,988/year plans, they charge no transaction fee.
• Udemy, like we said in the beginning, takes between 3 to 63 percent of sales revenue.

3.3 COURSE FUNNEL SALES PAGE TEMPLATE

• You can add ‘Upsell’ and ‘Bump Offers’ to your course sales page. Apart from this, teachable also helps in building proper course funnels. For example, They provide an Automated ‘Free Trial’ Funnel template.

Course funnels are more profitable when you have multiple courses to offer. When you have multiple courses of different price range, the number of people consuming your courses go up.

Though it has some good features, teachable does not provide live chat support to its basic plan members paying $348 per year.

4. Podia

4.1 PLATFORM FOR ONLINE CLASSES

• With Podia, you can do membership management better as compared with Udemy. Membership management means management of your enrollments with:
  • Bulk Emails 
  • Creating different Pricing Tiers 
  • Custom Billing Options etc. 
• You can create e-commerce-like storefront functions on your website. Udemy is not designed like this. 
• While Podia is not really a funnel builder but a proper Learning Management System (LMS).

4.2 ON SELLING ONLINE COURSES

Podia lets you create unlimited courses and everything. No restriction on the number of students you want to enroll. The same is with Udemy. But, Podia takes a zero percent transaction fee. This is why in place of Udemy, Podia can be your alternative. Its price is $396 per year.

In addition to this, you get:

• Podia In-Built Chat Widgets 
• Free migration to Podia. 
• You can embed the ‘Podia Check-out button on your website. That means in any non-Podia webpage, you can embed your Podia Checkout button. You cannot get all this with Udemy. 
• At the same time, you get to change your currency as an international podia customer. 

4.3 USE ONLINE COURSE FUNNELS OR (LMS)

Podia is well-established as an online learning management system (LMS). Udemy is also one kind of LMS. But you neither get your own branded website in Udemy nor do students get to book one-on-one coaching sessions there. That has been made possible in Podia.

But if you have multiple types of complementary courses, do choose a funnel builder as your course hosting platform. Here it becomes important to know that Podia is not a funnel-building platform. Still, as an LMS, it is better than Udemy due to the above terms.

5. Kajabi

5.1 ONLINE TEACHING PLATFORMS

Kajabi has been one of the most popular platforms for course building. Here is a quick pointer where Kajabi beats Udemy as an alternative.

• One gets to create content, email campaigns, and course funnel with Kajabi which is not possible in Udemy.
• Kajabi gives you a real-time analytics dashboard. Another amazing feature that Udemy doesn’t have as of now.
• In terms of educating its users with helpful digital marketing and sales insights, Kajabi has something called ‘Kajabi University. Nothing like this exists in Udemy.
• They also offer CRM (Customer Relationship Management) as a community management tool. Wherein you can give tags to your audience based on their behavior. This is yet another feature where Udemy lags behind.
• With such behavior-based marketing options, personalization and customization of newsletters can be done effectively with Kajabi.  Udemy? Not possible.

5.2 SELL ONLINE CLASSES AND COURSES 

• You can run an affiliate program for your course using Kajabi itself. With Udemy, you cannot do so. 
• You can also make course funnels out of it. 
• A mobile app can be one common ground of similarity between Kajabi (where it is just you) and Udemy (where it is you and everyone) teaching one course. 
• Because of the Kajabi App, your enrollments will be able to access your online course more conveniently. This can be a good buying motivation, i.e. Learning mobility. 
• Still, Kajabi is quite pricey. As with it, you have to pay more to get more.

5.3 ONLINE COURSE TEACHING FUNNEL BUILDER

• Kajabi has three price plans. For many Kajabi can be expensive as it gives:
  • 3 funnels for 3 products ($149 per month)
  • 5 funnels for 5 products ($199 per month)
  • 100 funnels for 100 products ($399 per month) 

• You can make unlimited landing pages there, not unlimited funnels though. This can be disappointing for sales funnel strategists. 

The reason is you cannot freely do A/B Split testing with it. You would feel restricted in finding the best fit for your marketing campaign. 

• Not just in terms of funnels but also in terms of email marketing sequence Kajabi has certain disadvantages. With Kajabi, you can only send one email per day. 
• The above point is a big con if you run any sort of sales funnel.
• Kajabi does not speak anything about course protection on its official course page. This creates a concern for the course creators.
• To conclude, not everything pricey can be premium. How? Read FlexiFunnels versus Kajabi to know this,

6. Learndash

6.1 CREATING ONLINE COURSES

Learndash is a Learning Management System (LMS) for WordPress. One can use it as a plugin in WordPress.

For using it with 1 site, the plugin costs $199 per year. To use 10 sites with it, you will have to pay $399 for its annual usage. And for unlimited usage with unlimited sites, the Learndash plugin costs $799 annually. 

Still, you will have to pay $29 per month to get a separate Learndash-based website. With this, the world of other paid WordPress plugins will become accessible too.

Our reasons for choosing Learndash as of the Udemy alternatives are not its price, but its certain features. They are as follows:

• Firstly, you get a good number of integrations with online software. For example- Gamipress, for gamification of learning. This is a good USP to boost your course sales. Still, to use hundreds of integrations you will have to spend money on its paid plans. 

• Learndash offers at least eight types of learning engagements. With it, you can create multiple-choice quizzes, essay question banks, match-the-column questions, and other fill-in-the-blank, etc. 
• A leader dashboard and dynamic assignment result display will also be visible to all your enrollments. This creates a sense of healthy competition as well.

6.2 MAKING AND SELLING ONLINE COURSES 

As a course hosting platform, Learndash has the feature of rewarding learners with in-built engagement triggers. For example, You can add forums to your LMS. 

This is a well-thought positive psychological reinforcement for students to help them learn more and more. 

But for creators, when it comes to selling more and more courses: 

• Learndash gives a free email marketing and automation platform named Bento. 
• With it, you can also send broadcast messages as per the purchases made. And then make some upsells and downsells.
• Bento is not just for marketing purposes. It also sends automated messages to students who fail a quiz or any other learning assignment.

Learndash’ Bento also sends automated messages to learners who have not logged in for a while. 

All this will create your goodwill as a course creator, as student retention becomes easy then. Plus it creates a win-win situation for both the instructor and the enrollment. 

• Otherwise, Bento is itself a separate paid product, but with Learndash you get it for free. All this cannot be done with Udemy. 
• Next, Learndash provides payment integration with WooCommerce. This is suitable for those who have multiple courses and want to create an eCommerce-like marketplace for their courses. 

6.3 FUNNEL OF LEARNING MANAGEMENT SYSTEM (LMS)

Those who are not used to using WordPress in its full strength. For them, Learndash can be difficult. Since it is a WordPress plugin only. As a creator, you should be first aware of this.

• So, Learndash cannot create course funnels. For bump offers and upsells support, you will need to integrate it with Thrivecart. And Thrivecart is another paid tool, whose price starts from $450. 
• The default payment options are also limited inside Learndash
• Next, affiliate marketing of Learndash-hosted courses can only be done with a separate paid plugin.

So many plugins within one plugin can cause technical lags. Not necessarily, but the chances are high. As every plugin has a different set-up and configuration settings. In case you face any technical issues, you will not know which plugin is causing you trouble. 

Also, if anything goes wrong, you would have to seek support in10 different support channels.

This is why Learndash should be used by those whose technical know-how is decent. 

7. Ruzuku

7.1 CREATING ONLINE COURSES 

One good thing about Ruzuku is that they provide its users with ready-made course templates. This means you can select whether you want to create a mini-course, a six-week, or a complete coaching course. 

Next: 

• There are no restrictions on the number of courses you can create and upload/embed. 
• You can choose an ‘Individual Release Date’. For example, You can release a course 7 days after a student signs up. 
• Another kind of drip course feature is making a course online on a specific date on the calendar. With this, you can easily create student batches. Such release will be done as per a student’s local time zone. 
• You can also give ‘Assignments’ to students. So whenever a student submits their finished assignments, you get notified by email. These are some online course selling factors. All of these do play a role when a student wants a responsible instructor. 
• Such thoughtful features are not in Udemy. So yes, Ruzuku qualifies as an alternative here. 

7.2 SELLING COURSES ONLINE

Course content delivery can be done using multimedia files in Ruzuku. Not just video but even audio files can be uploaded in Ruzuku. 

The only thing is video files larger than 2GB cannot be uploaded there. This means you will have to compress video files, especially HD ones. Rest:

• You can also add downloadable content in Ruzuku. That will serve as a lead magnet.
• You can make use of their pre-made sample/free demo course template, to boost sales. 
• With its global content delivery, you can timely deliver your multimedia course content to students all over the world. All this without making any compromise on speed. 
• The only thing is Ruzuku does not support debit card payments right now. You can only make payments using credit cards.

7.3 COURSE SALES FUNNELS

So why is Ruzuku one of the Udemy Alternatives? Ruzuku is student-oriented. As not just you but even your enrollments get access to Ruzuku Support Channels. 

Its annual price plan starts from $997. In monthly price, the plan starts from $99 per month ( $1188 for a year) you pay then.

But if we talk about scaling your online coaching business with Ruzuku, there are a few things you might want to know:

• In Ruzuku, you cannot upsell, downsell, cross-sell, etc. There is no option to add order bumps on checkout pages as well. So you cannot build a course funnel in Ruzuku. Order-bumps lets you add complimentary products in the billing section. This helps the total sales increase.
• There is no option to do affiliate and referral marketing of your course with Ruzuku. 
• Ruzuku only has two payment integrations, ie PayPal and Stripe. We count it as one of its cons because PayPal & Stripe are good for international payments but when it comes to receiving payments nationally, they’re not the best fit as they don’t accept local payment methods.

Inside FlexiFunnels we have four payment gateway integrations(PayPal, Stripe, Cashfree, and RazorPay) that allow you to receive payments nationally and internationally. Having this simple thing creates so much difference in your revenue in the long run.

WHY CHOOSE FLEXIFUNNELS FOR ONLINE COURSE HOSTING?

You need to have step by step ladder instead of “How-to-tutorials” in order to get successful in the online world.

Except for FlexiFunnels and Kajabi, the rest do not offer any practical guide on marketing and selling courses online. This is something that is most important to know.  

A go-to solution for this common problem is the Funnel Growth System of FlexiFunnels. We have nicknamed it ‘FGS’. The same is available for free inside our software. 

There we will tell important things like:

• How to increase the show-up rate of your webinar
• How you can sell more with words, through copywriting hacks
• How you can retain old customers, and gain new customers  
• How to generate a massive number of leads for your coaching business
• Massive growth hacks to skyrocket your landing page conversion etc.

Apart from this, there are so many things provided by FlexiFunnels that are nowhere to be found inside Udemy and all the other Udemy alternatives.

Consider Checking out all FlexiFunnels Online Course Hosting Features.

Is Udemy Worth It?

Upskilling never stops. It is a continuous process instead. As an online teaching platform, Udemy has its own drawbacks for its creators cum instructors. We have highlighted all of that at the beginning of this article in 7 Reasons to Choose Udemy Alternatives.

No doubt Udemy will attract many who want to take classes online. The reason is that it charges no extra fee to anyone who wants to join it for teaching. 

But you cannot do proper coaching business with Udemy. As Udemy will take away up to 63 percent of your sales revenue, through its powered ads.

Imagine doing all the hard work in creating the course materials, assignments, and workflows and getting just a small chunk of the pie when it comes to getting the ROI of your hard work!

Apart from this, the course protocols inside Udemy are also quite strict and violation of these protocols may end up denial of your course hosting request too. 

Even if you pass across the above, you are exposed to a marketplace where there are 100s of courses on similar subjects as you in one place. Getting ahead of a marketplace with such massive competition is more challenging than working in a market with high demand and less supply. This is why searching for Udemy alternatives is a wise choice for those teaching online.

Which ones of the Udemy Alternatives is good for you?

We would always encourage you to do the research and take an informed call. Also, we would recommend you to try out FlexiFunnels and take advantage of our all-in-one utility-based online business tool. Our online course hosting platform with strong walls of anti-piracy protections, option to upload unlimited courses, and negligible transaction fees makes us one of the preferably top Udemy alternatives too.

We are sure you will not regret it.

Connect with our executives to enquire about how FlexiFunnels can help you in your online business journey or you can read more about us here.