Thinkific has been a leader in the hosted course platform sector for many years, and the platform is known for its outstanding course creation and learner engagement features.
The platform offers all the important features you’d look for in an online course platform. It’s easy to use, has a flexible course builder, offers quizzes and certificates, supports content dripping, offers mobile apps, and has essential selling tools.
For creating cohort courses, Thinkific offers the following significant features:
On top of these features, Thinkific has an app store with dozens of third-party apps. So if a feature (e.g., gamification) isn’t available natively on the platform, you can find an app for it.
Regarding Thinkific pricing, it offers five subscription plans, including a free one. However, to access the cohort learning features, you’ll need to subscribe to the Start plan, which costs $99/month.
Overall, Thinkific will work in a variety of scenarios. Whether you are running a self-paced or a cohort-based course, this platform has all the tools you need, which is why it’s our top recommendation.
Kajabi is an all-in-one platform that helps you run your entire online course business. This means that in addition to creating courses, you can build a website, a blog, marketing funnels, and email marketing campaigns.
Additionally, Kajabi has a flexible course builder that supports features like quizzes, assignments, certificates, content dripping, prerequisites, and more. What’s more, it even has native AI tools that lift up a big chunk off your work by automating the course creation.
Regarding cohort-based online learning, Kajabi checks all the essential boxes as well:
Finally, Kajabi offers free and branded mobile apps, so your students can join in on your lessons while on the go.
Regarding pricing, Kajabi’s pricing starts from $149/month, and it comes with all the features you’d need for cohort courses.
So, if you’re looking for a platform to host and deliver your cohort courses while taking care of the other aspects of running an online business, Kajabi will work well for you.
Circle is a powerful online community software, but it can also work as an online course platform.
Circle has features for creating online courses, including a drag-and-drop curriculum builder, inbuilt content hosting, and a content drip option, even though it doesn’t let you create quizzes and certificates.
However, Circle truly excels in creating engaged communities around your online courses:
The platform also has mobile apps, both free and branded, so your students can access your course and community on the go.
When it comes to Circle pricing, the lowest tier costs $49/month. However, you’ll need to be on the Professional plan ($99/month) to be able to create courses.
Circle isn’t your typical online course platform, but if you want to build an online community and run cohort-based courses through that, it will be a great option.
LearnDash is a popular WordPress LMS plugin that also supports cohort-based courses. While WordPress requires more technical skills, it can give you much more flexibility than the hosted options.
With LearnDash, you can create your course curriculum, offer quizzes and assignments, issue certificates, drip your content, and much more. Additionally, it has powerful engagement tools, such as engagement triggers and a gamification system.
LearnDash’s homepage
When it comes to cohort-based courses, LearDash has a group management feature from which you can place users into groups and subgroups. You’ll also get detailed reports on enrollment, progress, and performance.
For live classes, you can use the Zoom integration, while you can use Buddyboss to create a community for your students.
As far as pricing is concerned, a single-site license costs $199/year, but keep in mind that this is just the cost of the plugin, and the final expense for setting up a course website will be much higher.
Having said that, if you plan to sell cohort-based courses through your WordPress website, LearnDash will be an excellent option.
Kajabi is a truly all-in-one platform for creating online courses and memberships. It offers powerful course creation tools, a native community builder, coaching products, and free and branded mobile apps. It also lets you build a website, run a blog, create funnels, and do email marketing. While the platform pricing is on the higher side, it’s a great option for running your knowledge business from a single place.
Mighty Networks is similar to Circle in that it’s an online community platform at its core while offering online courses as one of its features.
Its drag-and-drop course builder lets you easily create structured courses with video, text, and quiz lessons.
Mighty Networks’ course landing page
Additionally, each course gets a separate discussion feed, and you can enable features like live events, group chats, and member directories for the course, making it a pretty decent option for delivering cohort-based courses.
Like Circle, Mighty Networks has both free and branded mobile app options, so students can participate in courses and discussions on the go.
Mighty Networks’ pricing starts from $39/month. However, you’ll need to subscribe to the Business Plan ($119/month) to access course-related features.
Overall, Mighty Networks is a good option for community-powered cohort courses and is worth considering if you’re looking for a community platform.
Disco is a specialized cohort-based course platform with a strong focus on creating live course experiences.
Apart from evergreen material, you can add live events to your course. These will be delivered through Zoom, and Disco will send automated reminders to those enrolled.
Moreover, you can break your course cohort into sub-groups for an even more intimate learning experience. For example, when a student submits an assignment, you can allow for it to be seen by the rest of the group to encourage peer review.
Disco’s homepage
Additionally, the platform allows you to create a branded learning community where your students can communicate through channels and direct messaging and learn from each other.
Sadly, Disco misses out on some important course creation tools like quizzes and certificates.
Still, this platform will do the trick if you’re only interested in selling cohort-based courses and don’t plan on experimenting with other types of courses in the future.
Regarding pricing, Disco offers three options: the Pro plan ($99/mo), the Organization plan ($449/mo), and the Max plan ($1,249/mo).
Teachfloor mainly advertises itself as a platform for teaching cohort-based online courses, so it’s not surprising that it has powerful features suitable for this purpose.
With Teachfloor, you get the ability to schedule live sessions and deliver them through Zoom. Plus, it has a unique feature that enables you to schedule live sessions directly from a native calendar.
You can also add quizzes and assignments to your course and set a deadline, making them time-bound. Moreover, you can incorporate peer review into your assignments so that students can grade each other’s work.
Teachfloor’s homepage
To facilitate student discussions, Teachfloor created a feature called Community Wall which creates a private community space for each cohort course, allowing them to engage with each other.
Teachfloor is a great option for cohort courses, and there is much to like about the platform. However, the cost is absurd, with the $89/month entry-level plan supporting only 50 students and no custom domains. You’ll need to be on the $349/month plan to be able to use your own domain.
Maven is a cohort-based learning platform that hosts hundreds of courses from top instructors in different niches, including business, marketing, finance, technology, productivity, and more.
So, Maven isn’t another course platform software; it doesn’t help you create your online school, and you don’t own the audience.
Instead, you’ll need to apply to become an instructor and list your course on the platform. You can then market them to your audience and also tap into Maven’s existing audience.
Now, Maven does all the heavy lifting to host your cohort courses and community. For every cohort, it creates a specific community where the members can access the course syllabus and engage in discussions.
As an instructor, you can schedule live events for your course, which will automatically appear on the native course calendar, and you can use the Zoom integration to host the live sessions.
Regarding pricing, Maven doesn’t charge you a monthly fee. Rather it takes a 10% cut from all your sales transactions.
Therefore, if you’re not planning to start your online school but want to offer your cohort courses through an existing marketplace, Maven will work well for you.
Xperiencify is a platform designed specifically for gamified learning, and it can be a great option for delivering gamified cohort courses.
It has the most advanced gamification features. From awarding points and badges to celebrating achievements, you can create a fun learning experience for your students.
It also offers native community features, and you can set up separate discussion spaces for each cohort.
Xperiencify’s homepage
Xperiencify’s pricing starts from $49/month but only allows 50 active students. To add more students, you’ll have to upgrade to the $99/month plan.
Overall, it is a good option for delivering gamified cohort-based courses if you don’t mind the limitations mentioned above.
The final platform we’ll cover in this guide is Eduflow, which focuses on delivering cohort-based courses targeted at organizations.
It has a powerful course builder that supports various types of content, including videos, images, text, files, and more. You can also import SCORM content into your course from authoring tools like Adobe Captivate or Articulate Storyline.
For cohort management, Eduflow allows you to add tags to your users to divide them into groups and subgroups.
While the platform doesn’t have a full-fledged community builder, it has a handy in-lesson discussion feature. However, if you want to create a standalone community, you can use its Circle integration.
Talking about live lessons, Eduflow integrates with Zoom for group meetings.
Eduflow’s homepage
In addition, Eduflow offers a couple of unique features for boosting collaboration in your cohort course:
Eduflow’s pricing starts from $0/month with up to 10 active learners. The Lite plan, instead, costs $49/month (up to 50 learners), while the Pro plan costs $649/month (up to 500 learners). You’ll need to get a custom quote from their team if you have more learners.
Eduflow’s approach would be the best suited for organizations looking to train their employees. If that’s your goal, this platform will be the right choice for you.
This article looked at the ten best cohort-based platforms and what each of them has to offer. We hope you were able to pick the best platform for your cohort courses.
However, if you’re still not sure, let’s summarize our top recommendations:
Our top recommendation for teaching cohort-based courses is Thinkific. The platform offers excellent features for cohort learning, but if you expand into regular courses or membership sites, it can accommodate all of that.
On the other hand, if you want an all-in-one platform, you can go with Kajabi. Apart from the powerful course and community tools, it lets you build a website, run a blog, create funnels, and do email marketing.
Finally, if you want to create community-focused cohort courses, we recommend Circle, as it has the best-in-class community engagement tools.
We hope you found this guide helpful. Do you have more questions? Leave them down below, and we’ll be happy to answer.
An online cohort course is a type of online course where students go through it simultaneously as a group, following the syllabus and a schedule. Unlike self-paced courses, cohort courses have a strong focus on collaborative learning.
Cohort-based learning is about social learning and encourages students’ active participation. They go through course content simultaneously, sharing their learning experiences along the way and discussing them in group sessions. Cohort learning doesn’t just lead to better outcomes for students but also results in improved course completion rates.
A cohort-based course platform should allow you to create and deliver learner-centric courses. The platform can either focus exclusively on delivering the latter or support them as a course type.
A community builder is a must-have feature for a cohort-based learning platform, as it supports the collaboration and social aspects of cohort learning. The platform should support the creation of multiple community spaces for different cohorts.
Hey there! I'm Baidhurya, the brains behind SellCoursesOnline. I used to run a digital agency, where I helped course businesses launch their eLearning platforms. I also led the tech and marketing teams at StationX, helping it grow to 500K+ students. In addition, I created the popular supply chain network design course. With 8+ years of experience, I'm here to share my expertise and insights on course creation and platforms with you.
SellCoursesOnline is supported by its audience. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn affiliate commissions. However, this doesn’t influence our reviews or product listings. All opinions are based on our tests and personal experience with a product/service.
Copyright © 2024 by SellCoursesOnline
Hey there! I’m Baidhurya, the brains behind SellCoursesOnline. I used to run a digital agency, where I helped course businesses launch their eLearning platforms. I also led the tech and marketing teams at StationX, helping it grow to 500K+ students. In addition, I created the popular supply chain network design course. With 8+ years of experience, I’m here to share my expertise and insights on course creation and platforms with you.
We respect your privacy and will never spam you.
