10 Best Places to Sell Online Courses in 2026

Udemy is the largest course marketplace on earth: 70M+ students, free to publish, and built-in demand for nearly every topic. The catch is the revenue model — you keep up to 97% when a student buys through your own link, but only about 37% when Udemy’s promotions bring the buyer (which is most buyers). Udemy also controls pricing, and the platform’s perpetual $10–$15 sales culture trains students to wait for discounts. It’s the easiest place to get your first students and the hardest place to build a premium brand.

Best for: first-time instructors with no audience who want students immediately.

Skillshare runs on a Netflix-style model: students pay a subscription and you earn royalties for every minute they watch — currently around $0.05–$0.10 per premium minute watched, paid monthly from a Teacher Fund, plus a $10 referral bonus for each new member you bring. There’s no per-course price, which means short, bingeable creative courses outperform long lecture-style content. It’s free to publish, and the audience skews creative — design, illustration, photography, crafts.

Best for: first-time instructors who want passive, royalty-style income from a built-in audience.

Teachable is the classic hosted course platform: your school, your domain, your pricing — and crucially, your student list. The Starter plan ($39/mo) carries a 7.5% transaction fee, while higher tiers drop that to 0%. Teachable handles checkout, VAT/tax, affiliate management, and course delivery, and its affiliate ecosystem means other creators can sell for you. The tradeoff is the obvious one: you bring the traffic. Teachable is for instructors who already have (or plan to build) an audience.

Best for: instructors with an existing audience who want full control and ownership.

Thinkific is Teachable’s closest rival and the purist’s choice: plans start around $54/mo and you keep 100% of revenue with zero transaction fees when you use Thinkific Payments. The course builder is more flexible (drag-and-drop, more site design control), and it supports communities, memberships, and digital downloads alongside courses. Like Teachable, there’s no marketplace — you’re buying infrastructure, not audience.

Best for: established instructors who hate transaction fees and want maximum margin.

Gumroad is the fastest way to sell a course online: no monthly fee, a storefront in minutes, and checkout that just works. The fee is 10% + $0.50 per direct sale (30% flat for sales through Gumroad’s Discover marketplace). It’s less a course platform than a digital-commerce one — the course delivery tools are basic — but for a lean video course, workshop recording, or course-plus-template bundle, it’s unbeatable for getting started today.

Best for: validating your first course with zero upfront investment.

Podia combines courses, digital downloads, memberships, webinars, and email marketing under one roof — it’s the platform for creators who want one login instead of five subscriptions. The Mover plan ($49/mo) carries a 5% transaction fee; higher tiers drop it to 0%. If your business is “courses plus a membership community plus a newsletter,” Podia replaces Teachable + Circle + ConvertKit in one bill.

Best for: creators selling courses alongside memberships and downloads.

Whop is the rising star of digital commerce: a marketplace-meets-hosted-platform for courses, memberships, communities, ebooks, and software. It’s free to start with no monthly fees — you pay just 2.7% + $0.30 per transaction on sales you drive yourself (discovery sales through the Whop marketplace cost more, up to ~30%). Whop acts as merchant of record, handles support infrastructure, and its discovery marketplace gives you something most hosted platforms don’t: actual built-in traffic.

Best for: creators who want near-zero overhead plus a shot at marketplace discovery.

Payhip is Gumroad’s leaner European cousin: sell courses, downloads, memberships, and coaching from a hosted storefront, with EU/UK VAT handled automatically. The Free plan takes 5% per sale with no monthly fee; $29/mo drops that to 2%; $99/mo drops it to 0%. For a creator doing a few hundred dollars a month, the free plan’s 5% beats Gumroad’s 10% — and beats every subscription until volume justifies Teachable or Thinkific.

Best for: budget-conscious creators, especially in the EU/UK.

Domestika is the prestige marketplace for creative courses — illustration, design, photography, crafts — and it works nothing like Udemy. Domestika selects its teachers and produces every course in-house to a broadcast standard, which is why its courses convert and why being featured there is a genuine credential. The tradeoff: you can’t just upload. You apply, they choose you, and production happens on their schedule. Revenue is a share of sales, and courses sell individually (often ~$34, frequently discounted) or via subscription.

Best for: established creative professionals who want prestige and zero production work.

Sellfy flips the pricing model: instead of a percentage per sale, you pay a flat monthly rate — $29/$79/$159 — and keep 100% of every sale (minus standard Stripe/PayPal processing). Each tier has an annual revenue cap ($10k/$50k/$200k), so the math is simple: once your monthly revenue passes ~$300, the flat fee beats percentage-based platforms. It handles courses, downloads, subscriptions, and print-on-demand merch from one storefront with built-in email marketing.

Best for: sellers doing steady volume who want predictable flat-rate pricing.