10 Best LMS for Selling Courses in 2026, Ranked by a Course Creator

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I sold my own online courses before I worked in this industry. The harsh reality is that the platform never made a single one of those sales. My audience did.
Social posts, an email list and a lot of unglamorous follow-up did.
What the platform decided was how much of each payment reached my bank account, and how many steps sat between an interested follower and a finished purchase.

I ranked these ten platforms on four things:

• The marketing: What the platform gives you to bring in sales: email, coupons, affiliates, upsells and a sales page. This is the part that grows revenue, so it is weighted heaviest.
• The cut: What the platform takes per sale, and what it costs to remove that fee.
• The checkout: Whether buyers can actually pay you: card and wallet options, currencies, the countries you can collect from, and who handles the tax.
• The audience: Whether your buyers are yours, and whether they come with you if you leave.

A note on selling internationally, because it catches people out. Taking money from a buyer in another country is harder than the pricing pages suggest, and a platform that only really works for US sellers will cost you sales you never see. I have flagged the reach of each one below.

The best LMS for selling online courses, compared

Thinkific says its customers have earned USD 4.23 billion on the platform across 214 million learners. Teachable claims USD 10 billion earned, though that figure covers Teachable and its parent Hotmart together rather than Teachable alone. Those totals do not tell you what you will make, but they do tell you these are proven places to run a paid course rather than experiments.

I put checkout friction near the top because we see it in our own funnel. In the Coursebox data used here, 634 checkouts were started and 183 completed. That observation is about this cohort, not a benchmark for every course business; I would inspect where buyers leave before assuming a different platform will fix the gap.

1. Teachable

Best for: creators outside the United States selling to buyers in several countries.

Teachable is a hosted platform for selling courses, coaching and digital products. You get a course player, a sales page builder, a checkout and a back office that handles affiliate and author payouts. It is the closest thing here to a business in a box, and it is a big one: Teachable says 150,000 creators and businesses use it, serving more than 100 million students across 180 countries.

• The marketing: A drag-and-drop sales page builder, coupons, order bumps, upsells and abandoned-cart emails, all on every plan including the cheapest. That combination is rare down here: most platforms make you upgrade before you can recover an abandoned cart. The affiliate program is the exception and starts at Builder.
• The cut: Starter is $39 a month ($29 billed annually) and takes 7.5% of every sale. Builder is $89 ($69 annually) and takes nothing. Card processing is separate at 2.9% + $0.30 in the US and 3.9% + $0.30 on international cards.
• The checkout: Teachable’s native gateways handle applicable taxes, including eligible digital-course VAT, with eligibility and coverage conditions. A custom payment gateway leaves tax obligations with the creator. Check seller country, product type, payout timing and any optional BackOffice fee before treating tax as fully outsourced.
• The audience: Users and transaction reports export to CSV. Students opt in to your emails at enrolment and can opt out themselves.

I would compare Teachable when the native payment and tax workflow fits the countries you sell from and to. Starter’s 7.5% platform fee means the US$50 monthly difference to Builder breaks even at about US$667 in gross sales, before other fees and plan features. Also check the September 2026 usage policy: students added outside a paid native or custom gateway transaction can incur US$0.50/month above an allowance of 100, with different transition dates for older schools.

Thoughts after trying it out: When I set up payment options like pay-in-full versus payment plans, I found Teachable requires separate checkout URLs for each. You can't display multiple price points on a single checkout page, so you need to create buttons on your sales page linking to different checkout URLs. Something to keep in mind.

2. Thinkific

Best for: sellers who want a complete selling stack and will use the platform's own payment processor.

Thinkific is a hosted course platform built around commerce. Checkout, coupons, order bumps, gifting, bundles, memberships, communities and B2B group orders with invoicing are all first-party. It is one of the more complete selling toolkits on this list, and the one with the clearest track record. Thinkific is publicly listed and says its 35,000 customers have earned USD 4.23 billion from 214 million learners.

• The marketing: Thinkific includes selling tools such as bundles, upsells, memberships and payment plans. The current entry plan is Start; Grow adds B2B invoicing and other capabilities. Match the current feature grid to the actual product and audience rather than use a retired Basic plan.
• The cut: Start is US$109/month or US$82/month equivalent billed annually; Grow is US$219 or US$164 annually, and Expand US$499 or US$374 annually. Thinkific Payments and third-party gateways have different fee conditions. Compare processor, subscription, international-card and tax-service charges for your country.
• The checkout: Thinkific Payments is open to creators in 36 countries. It remits US and Canadian sales tax under its own registration, but hands UK and EU VAT back to you, and the tax service costs 0.5% of every taxable transaction even when the rate works out at zero.
• The audience: Users and orders export to CSV. The catch is subscriptions. Student subscriptions taken on Thinkific Payments do not move to Stripe automatically when you switch, and switching also turns the gateway fee back on and takes the tax service with it.

Read a 0% platform-fee headline alongside the processor and billing terms. For memberships, test subscription migration before switching: exporting customer details is different from transferring payment authorisations. Ask for the actual route and support needed for your current gateway.

Thoughts after trying it out: When I tested Thinkific's order bumps, I found each upsell has to be created as a full product first, even a simple PDF template or coaching link. This means building throwaway course entries to set up what should be a quick upsell, which clutters your product library unnecessarily.

3. Podia

Best for: sellers who want every payment to land in their own account with nothing held back.

Podia combines a storefront with courses, downloads, coaching, community, events and email. Its current pricing lists three paid plans and a 14-day trial. Compare catalogue, video and email-subscriber allowances as well as the sales fee.

• The marketing: Built-in email with broadcasts and campaigns, metered by subscriber count. Mover includes 100 subscribers, Shaker 500 and Earthquaker 1,000. Beyond the allowance, sending stops until you pay for a bigger email tier, which starts at $7 a month. Affiliates and upsells begin at Shaker.
• The cut: The annual selector lists Mover at US$42/month equivalent with a 5% platform fee, Shaker at US$84 and Earthquaker at US$150 with no Podia platform fee. Monthly billing costs more. Payment processing is separate, and the email allowance also affects the bill.
• The checkout: Stripe on every plan, PayPal only from Shaker up, and more than 20 currencies. Podia calculates and collects sales tax on the buyer's location across the US, Canada and Europe, then files and remits none of it.
• The audience: Podia documents contact exports to CSV, including filtered audience selections. Download the file before closing the account, and check subscription and payment migration separately.

Podia is appealing when you want the storefront and email in one place without assembling WordPress plugins. Model the email list as well as the sales: the included subscriber allowance is 100 on Mover, 500 on Shaker and 1,000 on Earthquaker. The annual Mover-to-Shaker difference of US$42/month is offset by 5% fees at about US$840/month of sales, before other plan differences.

Thoughts after trying it out: I set up payment plans on a $150 course, splitting it into $50 monthly charges. Several customers had cards decline, and Podia stopped retrying after a few attempts. I had to manually chase each customer and negotiate another payment method, which felt awkward and scattered a few sales.

4. Kajabi

Best for: sellers whose actual bottleneck is marketing.

Kajabi is a marketing platform that also hosts courses. Every plan includes unlimited marketing emails, landing pages, sales funnels, a community and an affiliate program, with behaviour-based automation behind them. Course delivery is the smaller half of the product.

• The marketing: Kajabi combines email, landing pages, funnels and checkout offers, with automation and audience limits to compare by plan. I would try a complete lead-to-purchase sequence rather than judge it only on the course player.
• The cut: The pricing page headline reads "No hidden fees. No revenue sharing." Further down the same page, any third-party payment provider costs 2% on Basic, 1% on Growth and 0.5% on Pro, with PayPal and Kajabi Payments excluded. Plans are $179, $249 and $499 a month, or $143, $199 and $399 annually.
• The checkout: Kajabi calculates and collects sales tax and VAT through a Quaderno partnership, then states plainly that it does not file or remit. You are the merchant of record and the paperwork stays with you.
• The audience: Contacts export to CSV, but the audience is capped by plan at 2,500, 25,000 and 100,000. Kajabi documents how to migrate Stripe subscriptions in and publishes no route for taking them out.

I would pay for Kajabi when its email and funnels replace work or subscriptions I would otherwise buy. Basic is currently US$179 monthly or US$143/month equivalent annually. Processing, subscriptions, currency conversion and a third-party provider can add different charges; calculate them for the actual country and payment route instead of applying every surcharge to every sale.

Thoughts after trying it out: Testing the enhanced checkout builder, I found order bump tweaks force you to bounce between the checkout editor and offer settings. Change the bump text, go back to preview it. It's tedious when you're iterating fast on your monetisation funnel.

5. Coursebox

Best for: people whose bottleneck is building the course.

Coursebox is ours, so weigh this accordingly. It turns videos, documents and web pages into structured courses, writes quizzes and assessments, builds AI training videos and translates into more than 100 languages, then delivers all of it as a full AI LMS. Selling is a setting inside that product.

• The marketing: A course sales and enrolment page is built in, and it carries the buyer from viewing the course to paying to instant access. The learner emails also work well and include a registration confirmation, a course invitation on enrolment, a certificate on completion and an email when a submitted assessment is marked. Marketing email is the gap. No nurture sequences, no affiliate module and nothing for the top of the funnel is currently built though. Our own help centre tells you to pair Coursebox with Mailchimp, ConvertKit or HubSpot for that part through Zapier.
• The cut: Paid plans advertise no Coursebox platform commission, with payment-processor fees separate. Free-plan commission is listed in the fees policy but the currently accessible page does not establish a universal percentage. Confirm that charge and paid plan capacity before making a sales forecast. Free includes three mini-courses of up to five pages each, unlimited learners, defined AI allowances and a Coursebox watermark. Paid capacity, branded LMS, exports and integrations depend on the plan.
• The checkout: Coursebox offers payment integrations and store connections for selling courses, including Stripe and supported Shopify or WooCommerce workflows. Test the gateway for your seller country, buyer method, currency, subscription and refund. Tax configuration is a separate check; do not assume a manual tax setting handles registration, filing or remittance.
• The audience: Compare branded LMS and store integration scope on the selected plan. Academy Xi and Skills SSC illustrate different delivery and commerce setups. Before launch, test the customer and enrolment export and the migration of any recurring payments.

The trade-off is the work the platform is designed to do. Coursebox connects course creation, assessment, tutoring and delivery with selling. A marketing-led business may still want a separate email and affiliate system. I would compare that whole stack with Kajabi or Teachable rather than judge only the sales commission.

If you already have an audience and need to build the course, Coursebox is a useful comparison. If your bottleneck is customer acquisition, inspect the email, offer and follow-up workflow too. Selling courses with Coursebox explains the current creation-to-delivery route.

Thoughts after trying it out: I will be honest since it is ours. On the selling side, Coursebox keeps the cut simple: 0% on paid plans, and you can start on a free tier, so more of each sale stays with you. The honest trade-off is that our marketing is lighter than a funnel-first tool like Kajabi, so if paid ads and email are your growth engine, pair us with that. Where we win is turning your material into a finished, sellable course fast, then hosting and charging for it in one place.

6. LearnWorlds

Best for: selling into Europe, where buyers expect their own local payment method.

LearnWorlds is a course platform with an unusually strong storefront. Interactive video, a proper assessment builder, more than 50 site templates and a white-label mobile app builder that needs no code. It is built for people who care about how the school looks as much as how it teaches, and it says more than 13,000 learning businesses run on it.

• The marketing: The storefront is the strength: more than 50 site templates, a page builder, order bumps and upsells available low down the range. The gap is everything that reaches a buyer who has not arrived yet. Starter has no mass email and no affiliate management at all, and both only arrive at Pro Trainer.
• The cut: Starter is $29 a month ($24 annually) and charges $5 for every course enrolment. Pro Trainer at $99 ($79) and Learning Center at $299 ($249) charge nothing per sale. LearnWorlds never touches the money, so card fees go to your own gateway.
• The checkout: Stripe, PayPal and Shopify, plus Apple Pay, Google Pay, Klarna, Afterpay, iDEAL, Bancontact, Przelewy24, giropay and Boleto. That is the best local-method coverage in this comparison, and it is the reason to pick it. Tax stays yours, through Quaderno or Stripe Tax, billed separately.
• The audience: Users, sales records, activity logs and affiliate commissions all export to CSV or XLS. Your own Stripe account is the merchant, so the payment relationship is direct.

A flat enrolment fee needs the same scrutiny as a percentage. At US$5, the fee is about 17% of a US$29 course before processing. Compare Starter with the next plan using the same billing period: a US$70 monthly price difference breaks even at fourteen paid enrolments, while the US$55 annual-equivalent difference breaks even at eleven.

Thoughts after trying it out: I tested LearnWorlds with multiple courses and noticed the platform automatically filled in checkout pages, sales pages, and course layouts once I entered basic info like title and price. This saves me time because I'm not retyping the same information each time I launch a new course.

7. LearnDash

Best for: people already running a WordPress site who want to own every part of the sale.

LearnDash is a WordPress plugin. It turns a site you already own into a course platform, with a course builder, a quiz builder, certificates and the MemberDash membership tool bundled into every plan for tiers, subscriptions and bundles.

• The marketing: There is none. LearnDash sends learner notifications and nothing else. Email, affiliates, landing pages and cart recovery are all plugins or separate subscriptions, so budget for a stack you assemble and maintain yourself. WordPress means you can build anything; it also means nothing arrives working.
• The cut: LearnDash is sold in Liquid Web’s current WordPress package, listed from US$350 for one site. Confirm licence renewal, hosting and included plugins in the checkout. Direct gateway payments still carry processing costs, and site maintenance belongs in the budget.
• The checkout: Your WordPress site can connect supported gateways directly or through WooCommerce. Choose the gateway for your country and sales model, then test account creation and course access. Tax extensions may help calculate charges; they do not automatically remove your registration and filing obligations.
• The audience: The best on this list. Learner records are WordPress users in your own database, on your own host, alongside your own revenue history.

I would compare LearnDash’s full annual stack with the hosted alternatives at your expected sales volume. A fixed licence can become economical as sales grow, but hosting, maintenance and extra services can reverse a simple fee-only comparison. Test the site owner’s workload as carefully as the checkout.

Thoughts after trying it out: I tested it and found WooCommerce is standard for selling LearnDash courses, but there's a setup gotcha: WooCommerce defaults to guest checkout, which breaks course access since students need accounts to view lessons. You must disable guest checkout and install both WooCommerce and the separate 'WooCommerce for LearnDash' add-on.

8. Arlo

Best for: training providers running scheduled courses and events, especially outside the United States.

Arlo is training management software from New Zealand. It runs course scheduling, registrations, invoicing, a public website and a checkout, and syncs to Xero. Elearning authoring and SCORM delivery are paid add-ons at USD 150 a month each, or USD 225 bundled.

• The marketing: Better than you would expect from an operations tool. Email marketing, newsletters, campaign management and lead management are all included from the entry plan.
• The cut: Not a percentage. Arlo charges USD 2.39 for every paid registration and USD 1.19 for every free one on monthly billing, or USD 2.15 and USD 1.07 annually. Private-event registrations count as free ones and are billable too. Licences are USD 132, 227 and 302 a month per administrator.
• The checkout: Arlo ships its own website, shopping cart and registration forms from the entry plan, with Stripe, Authorize.net, Windcave and PayPal behind them. Windcave and six published currencies tell you this was not built on US assumptions. Multiple regions and tax rates are an Enterprise feature.
• The audience: Contacts, organisations, orders and invoices are yours, and payments settle into your own gateway. But every registration costs money, so your audience is a running expense.

The per-registration fee is regressive, and that is the whole story for anyone selling cheap courses. On a USD 500 seat, USD 2.15 is about 0.4% of the sale and you would never notice it. On a USD 29 self-paced course it is the same USD 2.15, which works out at about 7.4%, plus 50 cents an enrolment if the SCORM add-on is running. Those rates are also not printed in the page copy anywhere. They sit inside the pricing calculator, so get the number on your quote in writing.

9. TalentLMS

Best for: organisations selling training to other businesses.

TalentLMS is a corporate LMS with an ecommerce module attached. You get a course catalogue, bundles, subscriptions, separate portals for employees, partners and customers, plus TalentLibrary with more than 1,000 ready-made courses. It sells training the way a training department buys it.

• The marketing: The weakest here for anyone selling to individuals. No marketing email, no affiliate module and no landing page or sales page builder. Your selling pages have to live on your own site.
• The cut: TalentLMS uses user-band billing rather than a per-sale platform commission. Core’s annual selector currently starts at US$119/month for 1 to 40 users. Standard and Flex count user activity differently, so compare them with how customers actually return.
• The checkout: You connect your own PayPal or Stripe, the buyer is redirected to pay and is auto-enrolled on success. There is no guest checkout, because buying creates a registered account. TalentLMS publishes no VAT or sales tax handling for course sales.
• The audience: User and learning reports can be exported. Check which users count in the selected plan, and how deactivation and retention of records affect billing; deleting every past buyer is not the only billing model.

TalentLMS may suit high-value business training where assignments, branches and records are more useful than a creator funnel. Model the actual selected user band and activity rather than assume it is always cheaper or more expensive than a percentage fee.

Thoughts after trying it out: I tested selling courses through TalentLMS and the checkout works smoothly, but you'll quickly hit a wall: there's no email marketing or funnel-building built in. You can sell them, but TalentLMS leaves you to handle course promotion separately, which tools like Kajabi do as standard.

10. Udemy

Best for: reaching people who would never have found you, on Udemy's terms.

Udemy is a marketplace. You do not run it. There is no subscription and no hosting fee, so it costs nothing to publish. You choose a price from a fixed ladder running from USD 19.99 to USD 199.99, and while you are enrolled in the Deals Program, which you are by default, Udemy sets the actual selling price and discounts it during promotions.

• The marketing: The marketplace is the marketing, and it is enormous reach you could not buy yourself. That is the whole reason to be here. What you cannot do is own any of it: two promotional emails per course per month through Udemy's own system, no list, no segmentation and no export.
• The cut: You keep 97% when the buyer arrives through your own coupon or referral link, and 37% when they do not. Both are calculated on the amount left after taxes and after Apple's or Google's 30% on mobile. A $100 organic sale on iOS returns $25.90.
• The checkout: The best buying experience in this comparison. Local currency, local payment methods, tax handled and a buyer who probably already has an account. None of it belongs to you.
• The audience: The floor of this whole comparison. The student list you can export carries a username, enrolment date, progress, questions asked and the last lecture viewed. There is no email address column anywhere in it.

Udemy's own pricing makes my argument for me. It takes 3% when you brought the buyer and 63% when it did. That is a company telling you exactly what it thinks an audience is worth, and it is not wrong. Budget for the wait as well, because payment lands in month three and only once your balance clears USD 25. Treat Udemy as a discovery channel if the reach is worth it, and build the list somewhere you own. Our Teachable and Udemy comparison runs the same trade-off side by side.

Thoughts after trying it out: I uploaded a course to Udemy and discovered the revenue split is brutal if you rely on their promotion. Udemy keeps most of the money when they market for you, but you earn far more when you promote it yourself. Without your own marketing engine, you'll struggle to hit meaningful income.

How I would choose

• Start with the honest question: do you have an audience or not? If people already read your emails or watch your videos, almost any platform here will convert them, so buy on fees and pick the cheapest one that takes your money cleanly. If you do not have an audience yet, no amount of 0% will save you, and you should buy the marketing tools instead. That single question separates Kajabi from everything else on this list.
• Check that your gateway supports your seller country and the payment methods your buyers use. Different buyers may prefer cards, wallets or local bank methods. Paystack is one route in supported African markets, not the only way to sell across the continent. Tax handling, local currency and merchant-of-record responsibilities are separate questions.

Then work out what you will actually sell in a year, and do the sums at your own price. A percentage and a flat fee behave nothing alike. $5 an enrolment is trivial on a $2,000 programme and brutal on a $29 one. Ten sales a year and a percentage barely registers. A thousand sales and a fixed annual licence is the cheapest thing here by a mile. Guess your volume before you read a single pricing page, because the right answer flips completely depending on it.

• Read the 0% twice and confirm its conditions: Separate platform commission, processing, international cards, subscriptions and optional services. Then test recurring-payment migration: a list of email addresses is not the same as portable payment authorisations.
• Then be clear about what the platform is for: The platform processes the sale. It does not create it. Our guide to selling online courses covers the part that does, which is the audience.
• Check tax responsibilities before launch, including product type, seller location, buyer location and gateway coverage. A payment platform’s tax feature may cover some calculation or remittance tasks without covering the whole business. My shortlist would then follow the work: marketing automation, course creation, business sales or control of a WordPress site.

The one I would avoid is Udemy, unless you are treating it as advertising. It keeps 63% of a sale it sources, and you never get the buyer's email address, so every course you put there builds Udemy's audience instead of yours.