Top Hotmart Alternatives, Competitors, & Similar Software (2023)
Hotmart alternatives, or products like Hotmart, are all over the internet. Some are free, and some are paid. We will be going over the best ones so that you can choose which one suits you.
Hotmart is an online platform that allows you to create and sell digital products. You can generate content for your students, followers, and clients through videos, courses, ebooks, etc.
Hotmart could be a solution if you want basic features to create and sell online courses. But if you want to give your members a full-blown learning community experience, you'll find yourself using many other tools.
Worry not! There are amazing alternatives to Hotmart where you can build your branded online community around your content and sell courses, membership, and digital products all in one place.
First, let's see where Hotmart falls short.
Why should you look for Hotmart Alternatives
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Hotmart has few features to increase student engagement in class. Plus, it's expensive and takes a 10% commission on top. Hotmart is not a very user-friendly platform for beginners.
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It is impossible to provide your students with the ultimate flexibility, i.e., learning on a mobile device. It is useless to sell courses on Hotmart since it is only available on the web.
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Despite Hotmart's ability to sell your online courses, you'll need to use third-party apps, making it all difficult for you and your students.
Top Hotmart alternatives you can try
Graphy Community Platform
Teachable
LearnWorlds
Thinkific
SamCart Courses
Zenler
Simplero
MemberPress
Kajabi
Mighty Networks
Podia
Udemy
Graphy Community Platform
Graphy Community Platform is an ultimate community platform that helps you build a robust community where you can sell your courses and host live events, webinars, and live streams. It offers the best community features through which you can moderate, manage, and monetize your community all in one place - with your brand appearance, under your custom domain. Graphy Community Platform can also generate a whitelabelled mobile app and list it on the Play Store/App Store.
Features
Pros
- Available across in multiple formats & avatars; be it a web app under your domain, a native whitelabeled app on Android and iOS, integrations within your existing app or API-based integrations.
- Auto Scaling across platforms - Scenes uses powerful auto-scaling technology to keep your community blazing fast no matter how many visitors you have across all devices. They scale as you scale.
- The only platform that enables custom CSS for top to bottom granular-level user interface customization. You can make your community look close to your app/website's UI.
- A built-in coin system lets you incentivize your community members to engage more.
- Live audio-video features for your events, webinars and live classes where all your members can get notified and RSVP.
Cons
- You will lose some members during the platform migration process.
Teachable
Teachable is a popular online course platform that allows anyone to create, host and sell their pre-recorded online courses. So if you have your videos recorded & ready, you can create an online course within half an hour without being tech-savvy.
Teachable Features
- Drag and drop builder - Building courses on Teachable can get slightly confusing if you try to do it all yourself. But thankfully, if you follow their tutorials, it becomes easy.
- Quizzes - You can add multiple choice questions alongside (or after) your lectures - this helps your students assess their learning progress.
- Promotional offers - You can create coupon codes. This is a good way to run discounts and increase sales on your courses.
Teachable Pricing
- Paid plan starts at $39/month.
- Teachable has free trial.
Pros
- Teachable is affordable even on the paid plans, making it accessible to everyone.
- Teachable is easy to start with - it best suits beginners to advanced-level users.
- You can sell a variety of add-ons alongside courses like ebooks and services and even set up workshops and conferences.
Cons
- Pay-out options are a problem for customers from outside of the USA.
- Teachable doesn't include email marketing, community management, or landing page software.
- Teachable does not offer gamification or live learning which can make your courses boring and not up to the mark, as per 2023 standards (where cohort-based courses are the norm).
LearnWorlds
LearnWorlds is a learning management system that lets course creators create online courses. Using LearnWorlds, you can create student communities and sell online courses.
LearnWorlds Features
- Offers gamification tools such as badges so that you can acknowledge efforts & promote good behaviour.
- In-built shop for highlighting the details of your courses and selling them all in one place.
- A broad range of assessment tools to help the educator & the students measure the learning progress.
LearnWorlds Pricing
- Paid plan starts at $24/month (billed annually).
- LearnWorlds offers a free 30-day trial.
Pros
- You can create student communities in LearnWorlds so that your members can share their experiences, ideas, and learnings.
- Students can interact with your course content through LearnWorlds' course builder and enjoy a blissful learning experience.
- LearnWorld's live online classes encourage your students to have interactive sessions and discussions among each other.
Cons
- LearnWorld's interface is difficult to understand, and there are no tutorials that can help you get started.
- Regarding email management and funnel-building tools, LearnWorlds does not offer as many options.
- In LearnWorld, users complain that many features do not work when courses are published, making the learning experience less seamless.
- With LearnWorlds, you need too many integrations and more management, distracting you from your business activities.
Thinkific
Thinkific is a digital course creation platform where educators can curate online courses for their students. In addition, they offer competitive LMS features that let their customers run online courses effectively.
Thinkific Features
- Assessments & Certificates - Offers comprehensive quizzes, engagement surveys, assignments, exams and certificates.
- Progress Tracking - In-depth reporting to track student progress.
- Live Lessons - Deliver lessons via live audio/video and let your students engage with you in realtime (via Zoom integration).
Thinkific Pricing
- Paid plan starts at $39/month to $399/month.
- The free plan includes access to all the core features of the platform.
Pros
- Easy-to-use UI that makes running courses on Thinkific all the more seamless.
- A very prompt support system responds to customer queries and problems and comes with an active Facebook group filled with Thinkific customers.
- You can design the access portal, the courses, and the payment methods all in one interface without needing third-party integrations.
Cons
- Not built for community engagement - in 2023, an LMS is not enough to successfully run courses. Thinkific lacks critical community features like gamification and incentive systems.
- Cannot manage multiple cohorts under the same roof - this may constrain you as your courses start scaling and diversifying.
- The pricing is slightly more expensive than alternatives and confusing for some.
SamCart Courses
SamCart courses is an e-commerce platform for creators. It allows you to create and sell courses, offers, templates and digital products on a single platform. You have complete control over your pricing, content, and branding.
Samcart Courses Features
- Drag & Drop Builder - You can add anything you want to showcase about your product. No coding experience is required to design pages.
- Pre-Designed Templates - You can easily create an attractive website with customizable templates to help you start selling.
- Conversion Rate Optimization - Optimization can be applied to every page on your site, making it easier to improve conversion rates.
SamCart Courses Pricing
- Pricing starts at $49/month.
- SamCart courses offer free trials.
Pros
- The affiliate management setup is very simple and easy to use. Each product has an affiliates option that can be enabled or disabled.
- Building sales pages and the checkout process for the customer are convenient and easy.
- You can easily add Google Pay and Apple Pay to the check-out flow, making it easier for your customers to pay.
Cons
- Due to SamCart's lack of an autoresponder, you cannot use your lists to send reminders, so the entire email process must be handled manually.
- SamCart's customer service is lacking, leaving customers with unanswered questions.
- Email marketing and website builders will require you to utilize multiple tools, which will take your time and effort.
Zenler
Zenler is a web-based online course platform best suited for creators and educators to create and sell their online courses and memberships. Zenler also helps you design video-based courses and build your video library.
Zenler Features
- Learning tools - Zenler offers tools like quizzes, exams, assignments, certificates, and more. Quizzes are its best feature, with plenty of available customization options. You can create quizzes with multiple-choice answers or single answers, images, and true or false questions.
- Page designer - Zenler allows you to create a page without any coding knowledge. You can use the Page Designer to customize your course website, with the home page, landing pages, funnels or even a blog with SEO settings.
- Community – Zenler lets you build an online community with your members. You can create different groups where you and your members can post anything.
Zenler Pricing
- Paid plans start at $67/mo.
- No free plans are available.
Pros
- Zenler provides many easy-to-use features that save a lot of your time on learning complex things.
- Zenler Integrates well with email, funnels, payments and blogs that make you market your courses better.
- You can host live webinars and classes and stream live with your members, making your sessions more fun and interactive.
Cons
- Because Zenler does not offer mobile app features, users may not open your website regularly, reducing retention and losing interest.
- Zenler is not the place to go if you want to make unique newsletters. It has limited email design options making your newsletters look boring.
- There are no creative templates or designs in Zenler that match your brand. It significantly affects the user experience.
Simplero
Simplero is a learning management system built for online courses and coaching programs. You can sell digital products, build a list, create landing pages & more.
Simplero Features
- Flexible course delivery - In granular detail, you can control who gets what content.
- Sales Funnel - Set up your sales funnels without stress or tech nightmares so you can focus on your customers.
- Badges - You can give badges and community groups on the same membership site. It has worksheets, quizzes and a blog and notifies your members about community activity.
Simplero Pricing
- Paid plan starts from $70.80/month to $298.80/month.
- Simplero offers a free trial.
Pros
- You can deliver your members a great customer experience with easy-to-use courses and products.
- Simplero offers integrations with Stripe, PayPal, and 120+ other gateways.
- You can give people a taste of what you have to offer. Then, if they decide to buy, you can release the rest of your content to them.
Cons
- There are too many options and not enough customization options in design.
- Simplero has a tough learning curve, pricing 50% higher than other platforms.
- To make your website design look professional, you must have CSS knowledge.
MemberPress
MemberPress is the easiest and most powerful WordPress membership plugin available today. It lets you quickly and easily set up a membership website, sell access to premium content or files, charge recurring fees, and so much more. And it's all included right in your WordPress dashboard!
MemberPress Features
- Power of WordPress - MemberPress’ paywall feature is a built-in WordPress capability that gives you extraordinary power over what content or products you wish to make available behind your paywall.
- MemberPress is a wordpress forum plugin that allows you to easily build password protected forums with the same quality software and support as WordPress.
- MemberPress is great at giving you control over what content you’re users can see. You can decide and customize who can access your site based on content restrictions set within MemberPress and fine-tune your WordPress site in so many different ways.
Pros
- The access restrictions is a great feature, wherein you can select any content that you want to block.
- It is flexible in deep integration with WordPress. It makes it very easy to brand and pull into their API to meet your needs.
- Its 2-in-1 feature of Course and Membership plugin for WordPress is convenient for setting up course sites.
Cons
- Expensive, no Lifetime Option.
- Interface is not the friendliest.
- Integrations should be built inside the plugin.
Kajabi
Kajabi is a platform that enables educators to run their online courses and manage their students in one place. Moreover, Kajabi also offers a mobile app to allow your users to access courses on the go (however, it is not a native white-label app)
Kajabi Features
- No bandwidth or storage restrictions - Upload all of your videos, photos, and other files without worrying about space or bandwidth limitations.
- Fully-fledged LMS capabilities let you run your courses and manage your students seamlessly.
- Integrated checkout - Accept payments from anywhere in the world using Stripe or PayPal and give instant access to your content behind a paywall.
Kajabi Pricing
- Starting Price is $119/month.
- Kajabi offers a 14-Day free trial.
Pros
- Kajabi has rich-text and media features that let you upload all kinds of content into your online content library.
- You can track lesson progress, view grades, and get detailed analytics on how well students digest your content.
- Kajabi offers your prospective students free trials to taste your content before rolling them over to become paid customers.
Cons
- Kajabi is one of the most expensive solutions out there when it comes to LMS + community platforms.
- It lacks good customer support and offers minimal options to customize your course community.
- You have no native branded mobile app; your students will have to download the Kajabi app to access your content.
Mighty Networks
Mighty Networks allows businesses of any size to create online courses, mobile apps, and communities. In addition, one can create membership sites to offer paid courses, paid groups, or bundles of courses and groups.
Mighty Networks Features
- It offers platform capabilities that scale as your community scales, allowing a seamless experience for you and your community members.
- White-label and customize your community under your domain and replicate your brand aesthetics.
- It has many LMS features that let educators and course-creators manage and run their online courses in one place.
Mighty Networks Pricing
- Starts at $39/mo.
- A 14-day free trial is available.
Pros
- It offers good social engagement features like live audio/video and chat that lets your members engage with each other.
- It comes with a native mobile app that is fully Whitelabeled (available when you buy the Mighty Pro plan)
- It has a very user-friendly UI on the web that replicates Facebook groups on some level.
Cons
- Not very customizable when it comes to their user-interface. Community owners have to work within a relatively rigid set of constraints.
- At $30,000, the native mobile app is the most expensive compared to other alternatives.
- The course creation experience has been said to be 'cumbersome' by many of their paid customers.
Podia
Podia is a platform that lets you build a free, no-code website and sell your online courses. With Podia, you can create a business from anywhere in the world with zero fees or start-up costs.
Podia Features
- Connect your audience and your content – You can host an online community in the same place that your audience uses your digital products.
- Community – In Podia, you can create a community that works like a forum or Slack. The design is clean, and the workflow is simple.
- Course Features – Using Podia, you can quickly create lessons and quizzes.
Podia Pricing
- Paid Plans start at $39/month.
- It has a free version.
Pros
- You can offer your audience webinars using YouTube Live and Zoom with Podia.
- If you want your website to look professional and run smoothly, you do not need to be tech-savvy or have coding knowledge.
- You can connect your payments, scheduling, and sales pages all in one place in minutes with Podia.
Cons
- Podia does not have a mobile app if you want to build courses that will be accessible on mobile for your members.
- Podia doesn't offer in-depth lesson reports if you're interested in knowing how impressive your course is. Only some basic information about student progress is provided.
- To assess your students more effectively, Podia lacks open-ended questions. The use of multiple choice questions is not suitable for all courses.
Udemy
Udemy enables businesses to adapt to changing workplace demands by delivering fresh, on-demand training content through a powerful marketplace. Through Udemy, corporations provide their employees easy access to training courses led by independent authorities in a variety of topics.
Udemy Features
- You can learn at your own pace with lectures provided by Udemy in video, audio, and text formats.
- The courses can also include additional resources.
- The course instructors are available for one-on-one chat with students.
Pros
- A huge selection of courses - Udemy offers a wide selection of courses, which makes it possible for teams to find pretty much any course they might be interested in.
- With Udemy for Business' apps across several platforms, my reports can learn in the way that suits them best, at a time convenient to them.
- Data and metrics provide me with insight into how my employees are engaging with their learning with Udemy for Business.
Cons
- Navigation can be confusing. Your own learning paths can be difficult to get to from home page.
- Lack of gamification elements and motivating factors makes Udemy some-what outdated platform. There is no external tools to push the user to stay on track with their course.
- There are no direct support from Udemy. There is no number provided or any other medium to contact them which can create a hassle when in need of serious questioning.
Disclaimer: To curate the pros, cons and reviews - we mine the internet for customer references regarding the said software. Some of our sources include Reddit, Product Hunt, Twitter & Quora (and sites like G2 & Capterra).
What you should do now
Whenever you’re ready…here are 3 ways we can help:
If you’d like to turn your business into a community-led business, book a call with us. One of our community experts will understand your current situation, and suggest how a community can work for you.
If you’d like to learn the exact community-building formula we’ve used to help build 2000+ communities, watch this masterclass or read this guide.
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