Best for selling courses

Every tool, in detail

1

Coachful

from $29/mo

Coachful hosts courses with structure and a checkout, on the same client record as the coaching engagement the course is meant to lead to.

On course building alone we rank below Kajabi and Thinkific and would rather state that plainly. What Coachful adds is the part after the sale: seeing which course buyers are worth approaching about coaching.

Best for

Coaches whose course exists to produce coaching clients.

Where it falls down

Kajabi and Thinkific both build courses more deeply than we do.

2

Kajabi

$179–499/mo ($143–399 annual)

Kajabi has the deepest course builder and by far the best funnel and checkout tooling on this page. On the first two parts of this criterion it beats everything here including us.

Coaching programmes are partial and there is no scheduling, so a course buyer who becomes a coaching client is a contact here and a record somewhere else.

Best for

Businesses where course sales are the revenue and coaching is secondary.

Where it falls down

Partial coaching programmes, no scheduling, and the highest price here.

3

Thinkific

$49–199/mo, 0% platform fee

Thinkific is a strong, focused course platform with community attached, at $49 — less funnel depth than Kajabi and considerably more straightforward.

Video and coaching programmes are recorded as partial, so the coaching relationship is not modelled in any real sense.

Best for

Coaches who want focused course delivery without funnel complexity.

Where it falls down

Partial video and coaching programmes, so the coaching half runs elsewhere.

4

Teachable

$39–189/mo + 7.5% on Starter

Teachable is a strong, focused course platform and better than us at course delivery specifically.

It has no coaching layer at all, so a course buyer who becomes a coaching client exists in two systems with nothing connecting them.

Best for

Coaches whose course is the product and who will run coaching separately.

Where it falls down

No coaching layer whatsoever.

5

Systeme.io

Free, then $17–97/mo

Systeme.io puts courses inside a funnel builder at $27, which is the cheapest way here to get a course with a converting sales page in front of it.

Course depth is basic and there is no coaching layer, so it answers the selling half and none of the relationship half.

Best for

Coaches who need a course and a converting funnel at the lowest cost.

Where it falls down

Basic course depth and no coaching relationship.

6

Mighty Networks

$95–215/mo + 1–2% of sales

Mighty Networks does cohort-based courses better than a standard course platform, because the group moving through together is the point rather than an add-on.

Coaching programmes are partial and there is no scheduling, so live one-to-one work is outside it.

Best for

Coaches whose courses work because people go through them together.

Where it falls down

Partial coaching programmes and no scheduling.

Hosting, structure and checkout

Comparison registry, verified May 2026. Course depth is a qualitative judgement rather than a registry count, and it is the one place on this site where we rank below a competitor on the thing being measured.

Two different reasons to build a course

The course is the product. Revenue comes from course sales, coaching is a premium add-on, and the priorities are production quality, funnel depth and checkout conversion. Kajabi is the correct answer and it is not close.

The course is the on-ramp. Revenue comes from coaching, the course exists to produce qualified buyers, and the priority is seeing which buyers to approach. That conversion is the whole point and it requires both halves on one record.

Most coaches are in the second category and buy for the first, which is how a $179 subscription ends up hosting a course that earns less than the subscription does.

The honest commercial case for a coach building a course

It is not passive income. The median coach earns under $5,000 from a course in the first year, after three to six months of production, because building was never the constraint — distribution was.

The case that does hold is the ladder. A $297 course that converts 5% of buyers into a $3,000 coaching package is an excellent business, and the business is the coaching. At a hundred buyers that is five clients, and each one has to be noticed.

Which is why this criterion includes the relationship rather than only the builder. A course platform that cannot tell you which buyers became coaching clients is optimising the part that was never the problem.

What a course actually returns

The median coach earns under $5,000 from a course in year one. Every row above is decided by distribution rather than by production quality.

Common questions